Nerdio to Capitalize On Desktop Virtualization ‘Chaos’

Nerdio plans to “capitalize on the chaos happening in the desktop virtualization space.”

Nerdio CRO Joesph Landes was speaking to Channel Futures about Nerdio’s growth strategy at last week's NerdioCon 2024 in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic.

Landes doubled down on his comments that partners of "legacy" desktop virtualization vendors should chart a course over to Microsoft.

“Some companies that have maybe led in the past are experiencing a lot of chaos – and their chaos is our opportunity. So we’re going to make sure that we have a very easy glide path for their customers to come to the world of Microsoft desktop virtualization,” he said.

Nerdio’s VP of MSP sales, Will Ominsky, added that partners wouldn’t experience the same turbulence with Microsoft that they are seeing with other vendors.

Nerdio's Will Ominsky

“They’re a big, established, really well-known company. That gives MSPs a little bit of peace of mind. They’re not going anywhere. Yeah, they might change the way they do their partner program. A lot of MSPs were very worried about that at first, but then they realized, ‘Well, this is just Microsoft, we’re just following Microsoft.’ And that ended up being very good for a lot of MSPs. They can walk into contracts now, which they weren’t doing before.”

Building Channel Revenues from Azure Virtual Desktop

Nerdio is building its following among MSPs – and now enterprise partners – by promising to take the complexity out of their customers’ cloud migrations. Over the past year, Nerdio has also grown the number of MSPs it works with by 120% and added 250 enterprise SI partners.

“When we started the company, it was hard to convince people to come work for Nerdio because who knew what we were all about? Now, we’re turning away many, many, many more people and we can be much more selective, which I think is a good place to be,” said Landes.

While not specifying numbers, Nerdio said it has doubled its annual recurring revenue over the past 12 months. Fueling this growth, it said, was organizations recognizing the benefits of transitioning from “traditional VDI solutions” to Microsoft’s Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) and Windows 365.

The company said it now influences $225 million of annual Azure channel revenue.

Nerdio's Joseph Landes

“We’re super proud that we’re influencing a lot of Azure consumption in our system,” said Landes.

“MSPs need help with many surrounding technologies. If an MSP wants to deploy Azure Virtual Desktop, they also need to know about networking and backup and security and storage and many, many things that are hard to figure out. We help abstract the complexity around that.”

AWS Not in the Picture, Says Nerdio

Landes contended that Microsoft faces little competition from other hyperscalers when it comes to winning MSP mindshare.

“Very, very rarely does [an MSP] come up to us and ask us if our solution works with AWS or GCP. I think it’s because most of these partners are already Microsoft partners who are using Microsoft 365. That’s a huge advantage. So if you’re using Microsoft 365, that means your identity is in their cloud. All of a sudden you pick up AWS, you’re going to be managing two different things. It’s not so straightforward. As a result, we don’t see a reason to build anything on those two clouds.”

More Focus On Endpoint Management

Looking to 2024 and beyond, Landes said Nerdio will “open up more countries, we’ll hire more great people and we’ll keep building our capacity.”

It will also demonstrate a renewed focus on endpoint management – something Ominsky suggested was put on the backburner while Nerdio grew its AVD business.

“Nerdio is in the endpoint management game. That’s maybe something we’ve struggled with, as we’ve grown up, where we were very, very virtual desktop focused for so long. I think MSPs eyes are becoming more open to the fact that we can help them, not just with virtual desktops … they need to manage endpoints, phones, tablets, laptops, whatever it is. And we’re coming out with these features to allow them to touch every customer, no matter what they have, or what they need from the single portal across the whole Microsoft ecosystem.”

During NerdioCon, the company announced Console Connect, a remote support capability that lets MSPs connect and support with a remote control session.

“We’ve had so many conversations with MSPs saying, 'I can do remote control for a physical endpoint now’ – that’s game-changing for them. For us to be including it in our product and not making it some tertiary thing, is really big.”