Cameyo Could Be the Future of Desktop Computing

Cameyo is one of a new group of companies rolling out virtual desktops hosted in the cloud. I’m following this company because I believe this cloud approach to desktop computing is not only cheaper, more secure, and vastly easier to manage, but also because it represents the likely future of desktop computing. I spoke with one recent customer, Algorithms Software, to get an idea of how the deployment is going.

Here is my Q&A with Janak Vakharia, founder and CEO of Algorithms Software, an ERP company operating in Europe and Asia.

Baseline: What are your company’s stats? Size in people and revenue, location, distribution of employees (home/hybrid/office), markets you operate in, nature of business.

Vakharia: We are an ERP Software provider for the Engineering and Construction Industry. We are 150+ staff and operate in India, the Middle East, and the UK. Our customers are some of the most recognized names in the markets we operate in and range from 10-15 users to thousands of users.

Baseline: What was the reason you deployed Cameyo? What was the problem to be solved?

Vakharia: Our product Xpedeon is a .NET N-Tier Enterprise Application with a traditional Windows client. We wanted to launch our SAAS offering “OnXpedeon” and were looking at effective ways to deploy our application through the browser for our customers. Our application was completely re-architected for a multi-tenant deployment, and Cameyo was an excellent choice deploying our client application through the browser. The specific problem we were looking to solve was the ability to deploy a Windows Client application through the browser.

Baseline: What was the deployment size, and if there was a delineation by function, what was that? 

Vakharia: We are currently in the launch phase, which was delayed several times due to the Covid pandemic. We have launched now and anticipate that we would cross 500+ users within the next 9 months. Our end users work across multiple departments in their organization, and these could be Accounts, Procurement, Contracts, etc.

Baseline: How did the deployment go?  Unanticipated problems that others can learn from, unexpected benefits you didn’t expect, what were your expectations, and did Cameyo meet them?

Vakharia: We undertook rigorous testing and stress testing exercises lasting over 9 months. We had a number of technical challenges which were more to do with our own application in a multi-tenanted architecture rather than Cameyo, but the few issues we did have, Cameyo were extremely prompt to address. The one thing that we did see as an unexpected outcome was how well our GUI Client worked in terms of Memory and Processor utilization within the context of a Cameyo deployment. That will certainly save us money on GCP in terms of the number of concurrent users we’re considering per Cameyo server at full rollout.

Baseline: If you were to do this over again, would you have done anything differently?

Vakharia: No. We followed a diligent process with a number of stage gates. We are satisfied with the outcome. Considering the scale of what we are proposing to do over the next 2-3 years, we had a very stringent set of evaluation criteria. Cameyo came out tops on all counts, Performance, Price, Scalability and Resiliency.

Baseline: What features did the solution have that you particularly appreciate? What would you like fixed about the offering?

Vakharia: Their mechanism of spinning up and down servers depending on load whilst delivering the Client application was very smooth. We ran a number of scenarios to check how it was performing and were extremely satisfied with the outcome. The insights provided by Cameyo Analytics will enable us to fine tune our costs going ahead by analyzing any excess capacity we may have built based on our original assumptions.

Baseline: How did the different levels of employees react? Executives, line workers, mid-management, sales? Any group stands out resisting or loving this solution?

Vakharia: Employees across a wide cross section of functions and departments from our customer base use our SAAS solution. The one comment we have received is that it is extremely stable and quick. We are still in early days to identify specific user groups who may have a particular liking for the solution.

Baseline: If you were to advise anyone else on Cameyo, who is the ideal customer for this solution?  Who should avoid it?

Vakharia: We believe the Cameyo solution can be deployed by end-user organizations wanting to deploy virtual desktops in a simple and cost-effective manner and would be their ideal customer. We cannot really think of any type of customer who should avoid it.

Baseline: Finally, what other solutions did you look at, and why did you pick Cameyo over them?

Vakharia: Citrix, WVD and iTopia. As a SaaS use case, one of our primary factors was cost and Cameyo gave us the best cost per user proposition. On the basis that it met our technical qualification parameters, Cameyo came out as the obvious choice. During our evaluation phase and thereafter, Cameyo support was great, and we saw excellent turnaround times on issues that we logged.

Conclusion: The Proof is in the Customer

The best way to evaluate a vendor is through its customers. This dialog showcases that the CEO of Algorithms was well versed in this mid-market deployment, was delighted with the result and had a good idea of why Camyo was chosen and how it performed once installed.

I believe desktop virtualization is the future of desktop deployments, and the benefits that Janak Vakaria has, in his own words, articulated further validate that if you want a more affordable cloud desktop solution, particularly in the mid-market where Algorithms Software operates, it is worth considering Cameyo.