Published by Jessica Weisman-Pitts
Posted on October 18, 2024
8 min readLast updated: January 29, 2026
New VDI environment avoids downtime worth £1.79 million, with staff costs totalling £35,000 saved using the ControlUp platform…
New VDI environment avoids downtime worth £1.79 million, with staff costs totalling £35,000 saved using the ControlUp platform…
London, UK. October 18, 2024 — ControlUp, at the forefront of Digital Employee Experience (DEX) management, today announced that SimpsonHaugh Architects, a UK-based, award-winning and respected practice, is utilising the ControlUp DEX platform to monitor and optimise its new VDI environment in real-time.
SimpsonHaugh is making a £1.21 million investment over several years to digitally transform by introducing VDI and AI technology to underpin the future development and operations of the business. Industry leading solutions have been installed including Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop, Citrix NetScaler, VMware vSphere Hypervisor, Dell Servers with vSAN storage, NVIDIA vGPU and ControlUp’s DEX platform which is providing VDI performance analytics and remediation.
Adopting VDI was driven by a strategic decision to centralise IT on-premise at SimpsonHaugh’s headquarters in Manchester, improve remote-working, support a work-life balance for staff and boost project collaboration by not being constrained by physical workstations.
The IT team also wanted to avoid the complexity, time and expense of managing systems over three locations given the practice also has offices in London and Birmingham. Furthermore, many workstations – high end PCs each costing up to £6,500 – were becoming end of life, unreliable, consuming a lot of power and needed to be upgraded.
The new VDI platform supports agile working yet is optimised to run GPU-intensive architectural applications like Revit, Rhino, Enscape and SketchUp – crucial to delivering customer projects on time, in what is an ever-demanding industry.
“Architecture is a heavy user of graphics-based IT. Building Information Modelling is now adopted pervasively, producing large volumes of data and consuming substantial compute. Clients recognise the technology improvements so the expectations about the visuals and data provided are growing,” says Dave Moyes, partner, information and digital systems. “Ten years ago, we might have created 500 drawings for a project. Today, it’s at least double. Projects are increasingly complex and time scales are tight. The pressure to be quick and agile while creating quality design proposals which optimise a client’s brief is therefore considerable. It is no exaggeration to say that ICT to support this is indispensable.”
SimpsonHaugh’s ICT strategy involves keeping technology simple for staff to use. The business is project delivery and ‘time charge’ based. ICT system availability is paramount given downtime has material impact on this.
UK managed service provider and digital workspace consultancy, ebb3, was selected to support with the roll out and have been instrumental in the design, implementation and management of the VDI environment. ebb3 also provides SimpsonHaugh technical 2nd and 3rd line support.
“The transition to VDI is being phased. SimpsonHaugh is running a hybrid environment – both virtual desktops and physical desktops – so as to capitalise on its existing investment in expensive workstations,” explains Jav Fiaz, ebb3’s Technical Architect & Senior Platform Engineer. “A key project goal was to keep the compute and data as close as possible to minimise latency which we’ve delivered.”
Moyes adds, “If virtual desktops aren’t resourced properly – and applications freeze or suffer from latency – staff will blame the “new system”. Guaranteeing the end-user experience is vital. Monitoring in real-time using ControlUp’s DEX platform identifies which applications are hogging resources so that remedies can be considered like adding RAM, GPU or ‘throttling down’ software which is compute intensive.”
SimpsonHaugh is experiencing significant benefits through the combination of VDI and ControlUp’s DEX platform:
Project next steps
SimpsonHaugh is currently working to expand its VDI environment to cover the whole business. This will take 3-5 years to complete. The strategy is to replace workstations as they approach end of life rather than waste perfectly good IT equipment.
In addition, SimpsonHaugh is upgrading its corporate network to a 25 Gigabit Ethernet backbone to further support the end-user experience. The practice is also purchasing higher resolution 2k and 4k screens for staff and introducing Nutanix data storage to manage the virtual server environment.
SimpsonHaugh is also working on other ICT innovation projects such as introducing privately hosted AI using private data across the practice (where powerful networking and compute is paramount) – a key priority given the impact AI is making on the architecture profession.
Private AI is the only option because of client project confidentiality issues – where strict NDAs are signed – with SimpsonHaugh using three types of AI engine:
“The project to introduce VDI and our DEX platform has boosted operational performance at SimpsonHaugh and put in place infrastructure to support the practice’s needs in the future,” says Robert Ellis, UK Sales Director at ControlUp. “End-users cannot tell whether they are using a physical workstation or desktop served by VDI – the implementation has been that well managed – and the speed of roll out was fast and disruption minimal because of extensive pre-implementation design and planning work carried out by ebb3.”
About SimpsonHaugh
SimpsonHaugh Architects is well known for projects which elegantly shape and revitalise urban areas. The practice has a diverse portfolio including commercial offices, hotels, cultural, education, purpose-built student accommodation, residential and mixed-use neighbourhood developments.
Key award-winning schemes include: Deansgate Square, One Blackfriars, The Engineering Innovation Centre (University of Central Lancashire), Circus West Village (Battersea Power Station Phase 1) and 4 Angel Square, part of the 20-acre NOMA area in Manchester.
Founded in 1987, the practice employs 100 staff across studios in Manchester, London and Birmingham – a new office which opened in 2023 demonstrating the ongoing success of the business. For further information, visit https://www.simpsonhaugh.com
About ebb3
ebb3 accelerates business transformation through its expertise in enterprise AI and VDI digital workspaces. Offering award-winning end-to-end services for private AI and VDI platforms, ebb3 delivers secure, high-performance infrastructure tailored to the unique needs of enterprise clients. ebb3 is NVIDIA Preferred Partner certified and has VMware’s Master Services Competency. For more information, visit https://www.ebb3.com
About ControlUp
ControlUp reimagines Digital Employee Experience (DEX) management with true real-time visibility, enabling 20X faster issue resolution on any desktop, any application, anywhere. ControlUp empowers IT to focus on elevation, not escalation, by equipping them with actionable, true AI-driven insights and proactive remediation tools to drive unbounded productivity for IT teams and employees. Nearly 2,000 customers across the globe trust ControlUp, including more than one-third of the Fortune 100. Learn more at https://www.controlup.com
VDI, or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, is a technology that allows users to access their desktop environments hosted on a centralized server, enabling remote work and efficient resource management.
AI, or Artificial Intelligence, refers to the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, particularly computer systems, enabling them to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence.
Digital transformation is the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business, fundamentally changing how it operates and delivers value to customers.
Performance analytics involves the systematic analysis of data to assess and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of business operations.
Remote working is a flexible working arrangement where employees do not commute to a central place of work, allowing them to work from home or other locations.
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