Enspire: putting desktops in the cloud

Stephen Withers
Monday, 24 October 2011 16:37

Enspire was recognised as Business of the Year at Melbourne's Business3000 awards - but what does the company do?

Enspire has been in the virtual desktop business since 2005, when it shifted direction from being an ISP and systems integrator. Initially serving the accounting and financial services sector, it now has a broader client base.

According to CEO Geoffrey Nicholas, that original market was one of the toughest to serve, largely because those firms need to run multiple versions of popular accounting packages to properly service their clients. So it wasn't unusual for the firms to require as many as 80 different applications to run on one desktop.

In 2008, the owners decided that while the company was profitable, its growth was steady rather than spectacular, and decided it was time to reengineer the business to take advantage of the opportunities presented by cloud computing. In addition to establishing better and more focussed leadership, ensuring the right people were in the right jobs, and emphasising service leadership, technical changes were also required.

The company realised that its original approach to providing virtual desktops didn't scale easily, so it switched to Vblock infrastructure from Cisco, EMC and VMware, which is designed for rapid virtualisation deployment. And having experienced some issues with building services at the original data centre, Enspire shifted its Melbourne operations across the street to a data centre with n+1 redundancy in the Rialto building.

"We've seen an enormous transformation of our business," Mr Nicholas told iTWire.

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