Hopkins Architects

In March 2020, as lockdown came into force, Hopkins Architects became the first company to invest in Inevidesk, although their interest predated this having formed part of our early testing cohort as the initial service was developed. As Director, Thomas Corrie states:

“In mid-2019, we seriously started looking into a suitable VDI solution that could handle our increasingly complex BIM workload and allow our teams to collaborate better from multiple locations. Virtual technology felt like the right approach as it would give us the performance and flexibility we wanted, but also allow us to keep our data and resources centralised and secure. However, most services on offer were overly complex and expensive. Then we were introduced to Inevidesk, who not only offered an industry bespoke, high performance service, but also one which would be simple to adopt and sensibly priced.”

Hopkins purchased three pods initially, then a further five that calendar year, incorporating the hardware into their on premises infrastructure, utilising the vdesks to support remote UK workers:

“We have been able to incorporate team members based in the Middle East into teams located in London without the need to sync data or maintain duplicate systems. In this way we have also identified cost and operational benefits of reducing satellite office equipment and the potential of making better use of our main office space. 

“One of the key improvements has been in IT administration. We can now deploy new machines in minutes rather than hours and better ensure standardisation of software. In respect of both time and security, these are big and easy wins and much appreciated by our IT department and project teams alike.’’

The practice continued the adoption of virtual desktops in 2021, incrementally replacing physical workstations, making the decision to move to a fully virtualised and hosted infrastructure before the end of the year. 

This decision allowed them to free up valuable office space by decommissioning the on premises server room and significantly improve their business resiliency with the support of Inevidesk’s hosted services which are supported by high levels of physical security, environmental management and dual and diverse power and connectivity.

With nearly 150 vdesks supporting work in BIM, GPU and CPU rendering, Hopkins have been able to effectively support their team’s workload wherever they are based and better manage their resources.

Over four years later Hopkins continues to plan its technical strategy around the Inevidesk platform.

“There is a lot of interest in public cloud VDI but we are happier with the Inevidesk model where everything is simpler and predictable”.