The Cost Estimator, which addresses the problem that Azure itself makes it difficult for MSPs to easily estimate costs because it is consumption-based, joins white-labelling as recent enhancements to the Nerdio offering.

Nerdio, which makes IT-as-a-Service platforms for MSPs, has made two significant enhancements to their Nerdio for Azure offering. Earlier this month, they announced the general availability of a white-listing capability. Now they have announced the availability of Nerdio for Azure Cost Estimator, which allows MSPs to arrive at a clear cost of what components will cost, so that they will know how to price it for their customers.

Nerdio began as a brand of Adar, which started as an MSP in 2005,  with an exclusive focus on hosted virtual desktop services, first with terminal services, then RDS, then VDI with VMware View.

“We got requests a couple of years ago to package this as a platform so that other MSPs can use it,” said Vadim Vladimirskiy, Nerdio’s CEO. “That became Nerdio, at the beginning of 2016, and resulted in a solution that’s available to the MSP channel. As we started building out this channel, MSPs said they also wanted to provide this capability in the public cloud. So we took the same model from the VMware stack, and designed it for the Microsoft stack in Azure.”

Nerdio for Azure became available early in 2017.

“Azure is the only public cloud we presently support,” Vladimirskiy said. “Most of our partners are very Microsoft-centric, so Azure was a natural first choice for us. Extending support to other clouds is something to consider for some time in the future.”

While there are multiple IaaS options out there, Vladimirskiy said that Nerdio for Azure differentiates itself in three ways.

“A managed services offering has five core components – desktop, servers, productivity and collaboration, security, and backup and DR,” Vladimirskiy stated. “An MSP can build this core in many ways, with the challenge being putting it all together in a standardized and consistent way from client to client. All five of these pieces live in Azure. With Nerdio, we have created a software management layer and created the core IT stack and managed and optimized it in a cost-effective way. This management platform provisions these services within two hours with zero engineering time, letting MSPs easily do customer deployments. That’s Part One.”

The second part, Vladimirskiy said, is single pane of glass management.

“It does all the management across the entire stack, handling things like onboarding, and making it easy for MSPs to do Level 1 and 2 Help Desk support,” he indicated.

The third element of differentiation is Nerdio’s optimization of user costs in Azure.

“The public cloud isn’t cost effective compared to our own private cloud, or even on-prem,” Vladimirskiy said. “So we created a technology that is designed for compute-intensive desktops that are only used intensively for parts of the day. It can predict what the user load will be and scale it up or down, such as deprovisioning on weekends.”

Nerdio goes to market exclusively through MSPs.

“Nerdio is not an ITaaS provider,” Vladimirskiy said. “We make the software that enables others to be the provider. We don’t manage the servers, or provide the help desk.”

Their channel is dominated by a couple types of partners.

“One is larger MSPs, with whom we work directly, that understand ITaaS well,” Vladimirskiy said. “The other is hosting providers like SherWeb who acts as distributors, with large channels of partners of their own. We do have some little guys as partners as well, but generally they are a bit larger.

Nerdio both exhibited and presented at SherWeb’s first-ever Cloud Summit, Accelerate 2017, last week in Toronto. In addition to demonstrating their value proposition in the Microsoft cloud, they highlighted the two most recent enhancements of Nerdio for Azure.

“We introduced a white labelling capability earlier this month, which in a couple of clicks lets partners rebrand portals with their own brands,” Vladimirskiy said. “That was one of the most requested enhancements.”

The other enhancement, a Cost Estimator for Nerdio for Azure, addressed what Vladimirskiy said was a problem for MSPs.

“All the other things that an MSP needs – Office 365, Microsoft MDS license, and Nerdio – are all priced on per user per month basis,” he said. “But Azure is consumption-based. For a non-expert, it’s difficult to visualize that.”

The Cost Estimator addresses this by asking simple business level questions, which will provide a price breakdown for MSPs, so they see what all the components will cost and know how to price it for their customers.

“We launched this a week ago, and our customers have been blown away,” Vladimirskiy said.