Gotham partnered with Nerdio last year as we saw an increase in our customer base, both existing and new, looking at alternative EUC solutions specifically for Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) and Windows 365 Cloud PC. Nerdio makes the administration of those workloads much easier as compared to the native tools (PowerShell scripts, etc.) that Microsoft provides. With Nerdio, administrators can take advantage of the various auto-scaling features, image management, and overall easy to use GUI. Nerdio is really intended to simplify management of AVD and W365 workloads. From an end-user standpoint there is no difference, users would still access their AVD or W365 the same as they do today.
I recently attended NerdioCon, which was my first post-pandemic conference. This was much smaller compared to the conferences I have attended in the past with 1,000's of attendees at large convention centers. On the flip side, this was at a hotel in Cancun, Mexico, and I believe there were 300 or so attendees, which was double the number of attendees the prior year.
NerdioCon had two tracks, Nerdio Manager for Enterprise and Nerdio Manager for MSP. While Gotham is a MSP (Managed Service Provider), we specifically work with our customers using Nerdio Manager for Enterprise (NME). During the conference, I focused on sessions dealing with NME, where two major features were announced:
Unified App Management
Unified app catalog:
- Linked public repositories: package manage community, Microsoft app store, Chocolatey; all read only
- Linked private repositories: Intune apps, Configuration Manager (SCCM), VMApps (Azure Compute Gallery); all read only
- Managed private repositories: Winget, MSIX App Attach, VMApps (read/write)
Nerdio Advisor
Model -> Deploy -> Optimize
- Unoptimized and optimized costs estimate
- Auto-deployment with a click
- Continuous optimization
- Auto-recommendation of Nerdio features
One observation during the conference is the large support from Microsoft, which was a premier sponsor of the conference. Many of the speakers were from Microsoft as well. One session that Scott Manchester (Director of Product Management Azure Virtual Desktops and Windows 365) presented was very insightful in reviewing not only the partnership between Microsoft and Nerdio, but also how much AVD/Windows 365 has advanced in the last two years. Scott mentioned in the past when customers would provide feedback on an OS, for example Windows XP, the turnaround time for those features was 3-5 years. Now with AVD/Windows 365 it is more like months.
In summary, I can only expect NerdioCon to grow even more, just like Nerdio is growing rapidly given the adoption of AVD/W365. For any customers (new or existing) that are starting to explore or are already using native AVD/W365 and would like more information on Nerdio, please reach out to your account manager.