‘Being able to listen to customers that are really focused in on that [MSP] space lets us just be closer to the customer than the Microsoft machine could be. Being able to move faster, get that feedback and turn it around really quickly creates an advantageous situation for our customers and partners,’ Nerdio CEO Vadim Vladimirskiy tells CRN in an interview.
Executives with Chicago-based Nerdio unveiled a host of available and upcoming updates for its products plus a new pricing plan for Nerdio Manager for Enterprise—giving Windows 365 users the option of paying $3 per user, per month—during the vendor’s annual NerdioCon conference, which runs through Wednesday in La Quinta, Calif.
Nerdio CEO Vadim Vladimirskiy told CRN in an interview that he wants MSPs to see the company’s platform as a means to have “total control over the entire Microsoft Cloud estate for all of their customers.”
“Virtualization in the MSP space, that covers a certain percentage of use cases for most MSPs,” Vladimirskiy said. “We want them to think, ‘Microsoft Cloud, Nerdio is going to make it better for me. And I should be attaching all of my Microsoft Cloud customers, which is probably all of their customers, to Nerdio Manager.’”
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Nerdio Windows 365 Advancements
Wah Lee, Azure senior product manager for Nerdio partner RapidScale—No. 142 on CRN’s 2024 Solution Provider 500—told CRN in an interview that Nerdio has helped his business with Azure quoting and pricing. Nerdio tools for Windows 365 will also help as the product grows in use.
“Even though we’re an infrastructure-as-a-code shop, it does take a little bit of time to configure everything,” Lee said. “With Nerdio, it’s pretty easy. I would say we cut down our implementation time pretty dramatically.”
Nerdio’s existence as a company separate from Microsoft but focused on the hyperscaler’s cloud products has allowed it to build more specific use cases and innovate faster around Microsoft products, Vladimirskiy said.
“Being able to listen to customers that are really focused in on that [MSP] space lets us just be closer to the customer than the Microsoft machine could be,” he said. “Being able to move faster, get that feedback and turn it around really quickly creates an advantageous situation for our customers and partners. … There’s a lot of value to add in management optimization, whether it’s Intune, whether it’s AVD [Azure Virtual Desktop], Windows 365, or any other future technology that may come on the scene, including all of the AI hype, there’s always going to be room to abstract complexity and make the lives of IT pros easier.”
Nerdio CRO Joseph Landes told CRN in an interview that it’s too early to tell whether a potential economic downturn over global tariffs and trade could change or empower customer behavior around cloud migrations and investing in efficiency tools, but “our story of efficiency plays very well in uncertain times.”
“When things are uncertain, people do want to save money,” he said. “They do want to put away money for a rainy day. They don’t want to hire more people, necessarily. They want to use the existing folks they have to be more efficient. So I think our story does play very well.”
Landes also said the migration from legacy vendors over price changes is not a short-term bump for Nerdio, with more activity expected as those users hit renewal dates on one-year, three-year and five-year contracts. Nerdio is also looking to take share in the health-care industry, where Citrix has a strong footing.
But Microsoft continues to make strides in interoperability with health-care-focused technology vendors, which is good news for Nerdio and solution providers, he said.
“Health care is a vertical that Citrix does quite well in, but most of the customers want to leave,” he said. “A lot of the migration, the movement is very dependent on other ISVs, like Epic, for example, and Imprivata and others having products that work well with AVD. And once that happens, we think there’s going to be a domino effect of customers that are just running to the doors to get out. And we’re going to be perfectly positioned to help them. … We’ve certainly seen over and over and over again that migrations are not quite as long or hard as folks think.”
Nerdio’s number of MSP partners has grown 120 percent year over year, and the vendor’s number of enterprise systems integrator partners is more than 300, up from passing a 250 milestone last year.
As Nerdio disclosed in March when it revealed that it secured a $500 million Series C round of funding—bringing the vendor to a $1 billion-plus valuation—it influences more than $350 million of Microsoft revenue and has more than 5 million users across 15,000 customers and 50 countries. Plus, the company is profitable and saw 85 percent annual recurring revenue growth year over year.
Vladimirskiy told CRN that innovation with Nerdio products will likely continue to come from within, with the Series C money pointed more toward geographical expansion rather than acquiring other companies.
Nerdio’s Manager For MSP Updates
Vladimirskiy used this year’s keynote to call out advancements in the latest versions of Nerdio’s Manager for MSP (NMM) and Manager for Enterprise (NME) products. Despite the names, Nerdio solution providers have been known to leverage both to work with customers depending on the use case, according to the vendor.
NMM version 6.0 added new integration with ConnectWise, AutoTask, HaloPSA and other professional services automation tools.
Version 6.0 also added a dark mode, new support for Azure for government entities and a “console connect toolbox” that allows MSPs to take control of a user’s session without disrupting the use, leveraging background tools such as Windows Task Manager, remote PowerShell and Windows Device Manager, Vladimirskiy said during his keynote.
“It’s becoming the one platform that can manage everything from Azure to DaaS [Desktop as a Service] to the entire Microsoft 365 suite of products, from endpoint management with Intune security with Defender, identity with Active Directory and Entra—it’s the single MSP portal for the entire Microsoft cloud of every single customer in an MSP’s customer base,” he said. “It helps MSPs diagnose and resolve problems faster across the whole customer base. It helps them improve the security posture and compliance of their customers’ environments. And it boosts the efficiency of the technicians’ day-to-day tasks through automation and new integrations with other tools in the MSP stack.”
Capabilities coming later this year include an AI policy “butler” for automating tasks, improved reporting capabilities and customizable dashboards for various Microsoft 365 and Intune capabilities plus new workflows for user on-boarding and off-boarding.
The company’s major initiatives this year include increasing visibility into health, costs and operation efficiency and insight into Microsoft offers ranging from Azure Virtual Desktop to Windows 365 and Intune.
NME Road Map
Vladimirskiy used his keynote address to outline how Nerdio is innovating on its NME product to continue to support solution providers modernizing customer virtual desktop infrastructure—capitalizing on a flurry of activity by customers of Citrix and VMware to explore alternatives after price changes—and increasing visibility into Microsoft environments.
“With the incumbent VDI vendors doubling the prices, firing their partners, locking customers into multiyear legacy on-prem environments, the VDI market is ready to be moved to the Microsoft Cloud,” Vladimirskiy said on stage. “Nerdio is here to make the process as simple and seamless as possible. … There’s really never been a more exciting time to be in the desktop virtualization space. And Nerdio is building the technology that helps our partners to take advantage of this once-in-a-great-while, maybe once-in-a-lifetime, opportunity of what’s going on in the market.”
Nerdio is investing in more assessment and planning tools for large-scale migrations from on-premises VDI to AVD and Windows 365. The vendor is also working on migration technology to make moving existing VDI workloads to the cloud easier, he said.
Users will also see more capabilities for solution providers whose customers want the AVD control plane but can’t move to the cloud, turning to Microsoft’s Azure Local, he said.
Visibility advancements include putting in one place measuring tools that show available IP addresses on subnets, AVD session host health, Nerdio Manager application service and database performance statistics and more.
Nerdio will introduce a new operational efficiency index with reports and dashboards to help solution providers quantify cost savings in the cloud plus measure time saved by engineers through task automation. A new insight module in the product promises more Windows 365, AVD and Intune usage and configuration data for Nerdio users.
Nerdio introduced a new pricing model for its NME product, giving Windows 365 users the option of paying $3 per, user per month. The option joins pre-existing offers of $10 per user, per month for AVD for premium capabilities, $6 per user, per month for AVD for core capabilities and $1 per user, per month for physical endpoints, according to the vendor.
For users with both AVD and Windows 365 devices, solution providers only need one AVD license, Vladimirskiy said. Users with a Windows 365 cloud PC license and physical endpoints only need one Windows 365 license.
Enhanced Windows 365 Management
Vladimirskiy also told the crowd that Nerdio has an enhanced Windows 365 management offer for Microsoft solution providers. The offer is aimed at organizations new to Windows 365 and desktop virtualization, organizations already using Windows 365 and wanting to grow existing deployments and organizations looking to manage cloud PCs and AVD VDI from one console.
The enhanced manager offer aims to help customers accelerate migration of existing VDI products and physical endpoints, optimize licensing costs and improve user experience, security and compliance, he said.
An updated Nerdio DaaS modeler promises to help users reach optimal Windows 365 cloud PC sizes and achieve the best licensing model based on environments and usage patterns. DaaS modeler will eventually automatically collect existing environment telemetry for recommendations, he said.
The updated Nerdio Advisor will make cloud PC size recommendations if users only leverage part of their capacity and even recommend reclaiming a cloud PC license and reassigning it if a user doesn’t use the assigned cloud PC.
The Nerdio Advisor license suitability capability monitors usage patterns and recommends the best license type and mode to improve customer Microsoft spend, he said.
A new Nerdio DaaS platform total cost of ownership assessment analyzer for AVD personal desktops and Windows 365 enterprise cloud PCs. Nerdio is working to expand the assessment tool to other DaaS and VDI platforms to show how Windows 365 and AVD compare.
To help solution providers with better Windows 365 visibility and management, Nerdio has added more Intune insight for analyzing Intune data and building customizable dashboards and reporting for application metering, application installation failures and more.
Nerdio users can also now make alerts for Windows 365, cloud PCs and Intune deliverable by email, Teams, Slack, ServiceNow and more, Vladimirskiy said.
Nerdio’s Windows 365 enhanced management capabilities include a policy conflict detection to adjust policy configuration, with automatic versioning an option for rollbacks. Users can manage cloud PCs, physical endpoints and AVD session hosts in one portal with customized role-based access control.
Windows 365 app management with Nerdio promises a consolidated, unified catalog of existing application repositories without migrating or repackaging, he said. Users can then deliver apps to any device, endpoint, cloud PC and AVD session. Users can also set up automatic app updating and push out when new versions are published.
NME will also get an option for the Nerdio Console Connect for remote controlling user sessions, even for cloud PCs.
Through its Microsoft partnership, Nerdio is also working on automated migration of existing desktops to Windows 365. Eventually, solution providers can migrate legacy VDI or third-party DaaS environments or physical PCs to Windows 365 and apply an existing provisioning policy.
