Nerdio Passes 1M User Marker As Azure Popularity Grows
“It’s really a validation of the idea that we’ve believed in a lot for a long time,” Joseph Landes, chief revenue officer of the Chicago-based company, tells CRN in an interview. “We think it’s just the beginning.”
Microsoft Azure automation provider Nerdio has passed 1 million users under management across its manager products, a company executive told CRN.
Joseph Landes, chief revenue officer of the Chicago-based company, told CRN in an interview that the milestone comes due to the success of Azure plus more companies seeking hosted virtual desktop to enable remote working during the pandemic.
“It’s really a validation of the idea that we’ve believed in a lot for a long time,” Landes said. “We think it’s just the beginning.”
[RELATED: Nerdio Unveils New MSP Solution To Simplify WVD Deployments]
Landes said he still sees room to grow in persuading MSPs to adopt a virtual desktop practice and persuading MSPs with virtual desktop practices to adopt an Azure-native virtual desktop tool.
As Landes sees it, one of the biggest obstacles in getting more MSPs to adopt Nerdio is educating them on changing from a license-based revenue model to a consumption-based revenue model.
Nerdio is also growing its presence in Europe and has doubled its sales and marketing teams since January, now exceeding 50 employees, Landes said.
“If we just keep focusing on delighting our partners and delighting our customers, we will continue to grow and we will continue to be successful,” he said.
The company launched its Nerdio Manager for MSP solution in January with the aim of simplifying Azure Virtual Desktop environments. It released Nerdio Manager for Enterprise in March 2020 shortly after raising an $8 million Series A round of financing. Landes said the company has enough revenue coming in to not require another financing round.
Microsoft reported during its latest quarterly earnings call in July that Azure revenue grew 51 percent year over year, without providing specific figures.
Azure has proven popular among solution providers. CRN recently conducted its inaugural Cloud Barometer survey, which asked partners to rate their satisfaction with the leading Infrastructure-as-a-Service platforms across five key categories. Survey respondents awarded the highest overall rating to Microsoft Azure, followed by AWS at No. 2 and Google Cloud at No. 3.
Azure also received top partner ratings in three of the five categories covered in the survey: product capabilities, profitability and maturity of pricing. AWS won two categories — ease of integration and support for demand generation — while Google Cloud received no first-place finishes.
Jim Brennan, president at Huntingdon Valley, Pa.-based managed services provider Managed Services IT, told CRN in an interview that Nerdio won him over by helping with a deployment for about 100 users in about a week. The product’s scripting capabilities and Nerdio’s support staff have kept Brennan happy with the company.
“We have our own environments, and we just went out looking for an Azure space,” Brennan said. “We were able to deploy. They saved our butt. We got the client.”
His staff of about 15 have about 2,000 users under management, Brennan said. He’s still getting requests from his customers — most of whom are in health care — for virtual desktops because of fears over the delta variant of COVID-19 and to enable more tele-health and tele-work. He is hiring engineers to keep up.
“Right now, we can provision in 27 minutes an entire environment -- it‘s unheard of,” he said. “Everybody, in my experience, in the Philadelphia market is either, ‘How do we do it, or when are we going to do it?’” he said. “So business is good, let’s put it that way.”
He said the biggest obstacle so far to winning new customers over to Azure isn’t cost, but finding the time to demonstrate the cloud platform for them.
“Once you get them to see the demo, nine times out of 10, they’re signing that deal,” he said. “Everybody’s moving, it’s just a matter of when.”