May 9, 2023 - James Graham, Field CTO (UK) at Rimo3
Hello everyone, it is incredible to be able to join Rimo3 at this pivotal time of growth and to be a part of the momentum of this team. Thank you for the warm welcome and proper roasting, I feel at home already. During my five-and-a-half-year tenure at Microsoft, I have witnessed the birth of many products and features such as Windows Autopilot, Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), MSIX, Windows 365, and Microsoft Sentinel. As well as the AI revolution and the multitude of renamings and rebrandings! I fondly recall the times when I could enlighten Financial Service Industry customers about the power of Cloud Management.
However, this was sometimes an incredibly challenging conversation as it required a complete mindset change for clients that have followed tried and tested processes for many years. As you all know, the concept of the Modern Desktop such as Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Defender, and providing a desktop that is always up to date, is not a common language. Making this a topic that most nonspecialized professionals do not have an abundance of experience with. Yet, these interactions allowed me to share the expertise I have acquired on cloud technology and explain these new systems helpfully and effectively. I am delighted to share that the feedback from customers once they understand the advantages of Cloud Management, is phenomenal!
In addition to this is the revolution of VDI, an area that greatly stands out to me because of the work that Microsoft has spearheaded by bringing AVD (and now Windows 365) to the market. With AVD, Microsoft shifted the control plane from being a complex and costly infrastructure to a simplified, powerful, and scalable platform. There has been so much advancement in this area with Nerdio being one of those stand-out partners who added value on top of the service. Further to this is FSLogix, which has played a huge part in enabling the Microsoft vision for Windows Multisession and Remote App features.
Further to this, in August 2021, Microsoft went one step further and turned VDI into a complete software-as-service (SaaS) solution that securely streams the personalized Windows experience to any device. With this added benefit, it is becoming clear that Windows 365 is the future of Windows, where the OS layer is abstracted from the hardware and can be accessed 24/7 on any device. The result is personal, persistent and always up-to-date, a win for everyone. This is the reason why I have thoroughly enjoyed spending the last two years building the UK partner community for Windows 365.
However, in all the above scenarios there has always been one common denominator – the Applications. Users need apps to get their work done, and whilst many off-the-shelf apps are now available as SaaS, there are still thousands of custom critical line-of-business apps that exist within customer environments. These apps are mostly still being managed, maintained, and deployed by Configuration Manager. Understandably when it comes to critical applications, many customers are simply not able to risk any change in their environment without having a level of certainty that these critical applications will continue to function post-change. It is this process that kills innovation due to the time taken to provide this level of assurance – and we all know, time is money.
This leads me to the best part, why I chose Rimo3. I was first introduced to Rimo3 in 2022, just before Rimo3 launched its ability to inject modernized apps into Intune. When I looked at the end-to-end Rimo3 solution it was intuitively obvious to me that Rimo3 would provide the most value to customers with complex application estates. Rimo3 can ingest the applications from Configuration Manager, modernize the applications into MSIX, intunewin, or VMware App Volumes, and export directly into Intune and/or Nerdio.
The most essential part of the Rimo3 solution is the Automation of the entire application lifecycle process, especially their fully automated Discovery and Intelligent Smoke Test. Clients can fully understand their application estate and thus accelerate remediation with the rich Discovery process. Customers can also take their apps as-is and use the Intelligent Smoke Test to evaluate them against their desired state (multisession, Windows 11, Windows 365), or choose to modernize their apps with MSIX, intunewin, or VMware App Volumes.
To add to this, customers are now looking to fully migrate to AVD or are looking to remove their reliance on on-prem technologies, such as Configuration Manager. Causing people to move to Intune and light up fully cloud-native Windows Autopilot, Windows Autopatch, and Windows 365. Fortunately, Rimo3 is perfectly positioned to be the platform of choice as Rimo3 accelerates the customer's journey to the cloud. This is completed by removing app blockers and being an ongoing change management platform for customers, thus taking the pain and unknown out of any environmental change. This is great for Services Partners too, as Rimo3 can enrich existing Desktop Managed Services.
This is why joining the Rimo3 family was an easy decision for me. It feels amazing to be joining Rimo3 at such a pivotal and exciting time. Rimo3 does not just have an industry-leading solution, it has great people, and it is the people that make a company great. I feel honored to stand shoulder to shoulder with like-minded customer-obsessed colleagues all pushing in the same direction.
Exciting times ahead…