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:

•  Potentially £1.79 million lost earnings saved. VDI has resulted in a huge reduction in IT downtime equating to approximately 17% of SimpsonHaugh’s 2023 turnover. This is based on 15% gain in hours per week multiplied by 80 architectural staff over the course of a 38-week year using an average hourly rate of £105. Time savings result from less break-fix, fewer hardware and software issues with files and applications opening faster.

•  Annual overall ICT investment maintained through the VDI implementation – no significant spikes in hardware cost, with VDI giving certainty that systems are guaranteed to work.

•  Huge productivity gains for staff, with superior work-life balance realised. Architecture is a vocation. SimpsonHaugh’s employees are passionate about what they do. Citrix enables people to work easily from home– just as if they were in the office – while juggling their personal lives more advantageously.

•  Staff cannot tell if they are working on a physical machine or via VDI – a testament to the quality and ease of use of Citrix and careful management by ebb3.

•  VDI has improved collaboration with trusted third parties such as specialist consultants by opening up part of the environment when required.

•  Potentially £35,000 saved not hiring an additional employee to support VDI by leveraging the ControlUp DEX platform.

•  Problem solving time has drastically reduced using ControlUp information as real-time data about what is happening within the IT environment is provided, thereby pin pointing issues faster. VDI can now be fully optimised to cater for the peaks and troughs of project workflow, without the ‘over spec’ing‘ of IT hardware required which reduces ICT costs.

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:

•  Word AI. This is an expanding area and involves the automation of tasks such as minutes of meetings, site reports and schedules.

•  Image AI. This is a new area and will involve using AI to create detailed images of early-stage design proposals based on sketches and LLM text inputted into an AI system. This will take into account a range of parameters like site orientation, type of cladding material (brick, render, glass etc), with the AI tools generating options in a SimpsonHaugh ‘style’ to facilitate communication of ideas. The practice is reviewing using ComfyUI and Microsoft Copilot as possible solutions.

•  Generative AI. This branch of AI is well established and used to support work such as the production of parametric designs. The planning of space layouts in a building is an excellent example. Using generative AI, you can stretch a grid in any given direction to change the number and types of spaces within a given architectural form.

“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.”