FSLogix helps to create high-quality user experiences

This article first appeared in the Autumn 2017 issue of The Record.

Initially founded in 2001 as an enterprise software development firm, Fireminds quickly added cloud solutions to its portfolio and is now an international technology consulting firm with 40 employees located in Bermuda, Canada and Europe. The company develops, delivers and integrates software solutions for financial services institutions, insurance firms, public sector organisations and mid-market businesses in Bermuda, Caribbean, Latin America and North America. In 2017, US-based telecommunications provider ATN International invested heavily in Fireminds to enable it to further expand its operations. Fireminds has won multiple awards for its software development solutions and services, and was named Microsoft Azure Premium Partner in Bermuda for three consecutive years.

“We were fast to embrace the cloud and further evolved our relationship with Microsoft, becoming a Microsoft Azure Premium Partner,” says Michael Branco, Fireminds’ founder and CEO. “We’ve had a chance to work on some very interesting projects and have been recognised for our thought leadership.”

Always looking for new opportunities to deliver value to clients, Fireminds expanded its portfolio by adding a desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) solution to its existing infrastructure-as-a--service offering in 2016.

“The original focus was on small businesses, but we’ve increasingly had a lot of traction in the enterprise space,” Branco explains. “Companies are looking at ways to take systems and processes handled in-house and push those into the cloud. Our DaaS solution gives them the ability to do so while decreasing their total cost of ownership.”

To provide the best possible virtual desktop infrastructure experience for its DaaS customers, Fireminds opted to integrate FSLogix Profile Containers into its desktop management solution in 2016. Fireminds took just a few hours to deploy the solution across the entire company. “It was extremely easy to implement and use,” comments comments Trevor Holm-Laursen, head of technology at Fireminds.

Designed to eliminate the need for legacy profile management in Windows-based virtual desktops, FSLogix Profile Containers have helped Fireminds to automate manual processes associated with managing user profiles and streamlined support delivery.

Now, Fireminds’ DaaS customers can log in to their workspaces more quickly and, unlike in the past, they can update aspects of their profile safe in the knowledge that these changes will remain after they log out. Meanwhile, Fireminds’ support staff no longer have to spend a significant portion of their day trying to remediate issues related to error messages about corrupt or temporary user profiles. This has increased productivity for Fireminds and its customers.

“The product architecture and the way the product manages profiles makes it much easier to prevent profile corruption from occurring,” Branco says.

By eliminating the need for legacy profile management, FSLogix Profile Containers have also reduced the time it takes for Fireminds to roll out DaaS solutions for its customers. “While it depends on the client and environment, we’re shaving around a day from each client deployment, as we no longer need to deal with profiles,” Holm-Laursen says. “We’re able to template much of the deployment now using FSLogix.”

Other capabilities in FSLogix are enabling Fireminds to capture new business. “We have a new client that requires Microsoft Windows 8, specific versions of .NET, different versions of Google Chrome and Google Earth,” says Holm-Laursen. “With FSLogix, we can deliver each of these different application versions via one golden image. Without it, we would need to deploy and manage four, five or six different images.”

Now that its business is supported by FSLogix, Fireminds can easily scale its business according to customer demand so it’s confidently targeting more prospective clients – including both existing and first-time DaaS users.

“A significant number of our DaaS clients came from competitors, and many of these had solutions that simply did not meet their business requirements,” says Branco. “They were attracted to us because we offer a comprehensive solution – virtual desktop, private cloud, two-factor authentication, disaster recovery, and 24/7 managed services.”

Noting that he is “very pleased” with his decision to work with FSLogix, Branco adds: “The FSLogix team is extremely innovative, knows the importance of high customer touch, and is agile and flexible. These attributes align with our business model and are helping us to achieve rapid scale.”