Over summer and winter of 2020 the expert globe faced an unprecedented disruption. Organizations around the world were forced to rapidly adapt to a quickly changing and uncertain scenery as workplaces locked their doorways and pivoted to functioning remotely in order to keep their workers safe and their companies secure.

Since workforces across all industries became familiar with working at home, companies and specialists that relied on collaboration faced a fresh problem: How could they attain exactly the same degrees of productivity and overall performance achieved in an work place when teammates were distribute to far apart?

HKS, the 3rd largest private architectural company in the global planet, faced this problem just.

Historically, HKS managed the majority of their tasks locally. But with 23 offices and 1,400 experts spread around the world, the firm frequently utilized expertise and resources from several offices to attain the best possible designs because of their clients.

“We have plenty of intra-office collaboration and skill posting,” says Michael Smith, vice president of IT functions at HKS. “It’s not unusual to get a dozen or even more people from all over the world all operating with exactly the same project files.”

Utilizing Autodesk Revit along with other power-intensive design programs, HKS routinely considered high-powered laptops to make sure their creative designers and architects could easily collaborate and keep maintaining their mobility. But these workstations had been a lot more than expensive little, heavy “anchors” that required regular replacement.

However when the pandemic strike, HKS realized they had a need to create a noticeable change.

“We could continue steadily to purchase laptops with RAM and newest GPUs every 3 to 5 years for several 1,400 customers,” Smith says. “Or we’re able to shift that expense to your data center and obtain more bang for the buck.”

From there, HKS began a phased rollout, deploying four Cisco UCS C240 servers to aid 50 Citrix Virtual Desktops, each factory installed with 4 NVIDIA T4 NVIDIA and GPUs Quadro Virtual Information Center Workstation licenses. With GPU-accelerated VDI making use of NVIDIA digital GPU (vGPU) technology, HKS could strength probably the most graphics intensive apps without compromising user or even performance experience.

“We’re functioning and investing a lot more intelligently with Cisco UCS-centered VDI,” says Smith, of repeatedly throwing cash at the beefiest laptop computers and pipes “instead.”

The result? Not only could actually empower their recently remote workforce while staying cost-effective HKS, but they furthermore experienced improved efficiency of these bandwidth-intensive workloads through their digital desktop infrastructure.

If you’re thinking about understanding more about how exactly HKS ensured their company remained resilient through the span of the pandemic, we invite one to register for NVIDIA’s upcoming webinar occurring on Wednesday, December 9^th: Connecting a Remote Workforce for Design Collaboration. Professionals from both Cisco and NVIDIA will undoubtedly be seated with Michael Smith of HKS to go over their adoption of Cisco digital workstations driven by NVIDIA GPUs and vGPU technologies.

In the meantime, it is possible to read about the countless benefits and increased performance HKS skilled through their Cisco solution inside our recent research study, available here.