We explore what it takes to add true location flexibility for AEC teams
It’s been nearly three years since the pandemic closed offices around the world, and most staff have yet to return to their desks full time. The global pandemic accelerated adoption of hybrid work models. This incredible shift in the way we work is here to stay, due in part to the many benefits it has introduced, such as fewer commutes, greater work-life balance and the ability to hire diverse talent from almost anywhere. It’s not surprising that the majority of employees prefer a hybrid model. But along with the benefits, companies have seen some challenges that affect employee productivity, the ability to collaborate effectively, and employee satisfaction.
To understand the state of hybrid work and the challenges firms are facing, the HP Anyware team surveyed more than 270 IT leaders across a range of industries, including from AEC organizations. The report shows that businesses are already investing in digital workspaces technology. More than three quarters of respondents reported staff were actively using remote desktops. A further 13% were either looking into implementation, or already trialing it. Only 9% reported no interest in the technology.
But the report also found that hybrid businesses are facing significant challenges, many of which hold true for AEC businesses. For instance, 29% of respondents felt remote desktop performance is their biggest hybrid technological challenge, followed by the potential negative impact on company culture (23%), decline in collaboration (20%), potential decrease in productivity (19%), and data security risks (17%).
As a result, IT teams are busier than ever trying to meet a variety of employee needs in the office, remotely, and a combination of both. Company policies are also evolving, and ensuring employees are productive no matter where they’re working has become a top priority for businesses in the AEC space.
AEC collaboration in a hybrid world
Architects and clients aren’t just working in offices and at home in the same city. Many are working from different cities, job sites, or even separate parts of the country. Yet, they still need to collaborate to complete their best work, on time, no matter where they are working from.
Typically, working on a project using multiple applications requires exporting and importing from one format to another, often causing creators to lose information and compatibility along the way. Adding more people into a workflow can create challenges in file merges and maintaining a single source of truth. NVIDIA Omniverse™ Enterprise1 resolves these challenges, enabling true real-time collaboration for teams, seamlessly syncing file changes between creative tools, maintaining their integrity throughout the pipeline.
With the Omniverse platform, design teams can easily publish content on a server, then access it to simultaneously collaborate with each other in real time. Omniverse allows multiple users to collaborate while concurrently using design and visualization software like Autodesk Revit and 3ds Max, McNeel Rhino/Grasshopper, and Unreal Engine 4.
Enabling this kind of real-time collaboration from wherever designers are, without losing visual performance or compromising data security has tremendous value for firms in AEC. Collaborative design iteration can speed up decision making, and time to project completion. Designers can create compelling, high-fidelity visualizations of complex scenes for clients and see modifications come to life in real-time. Maintaining project data in a central location improves security of valuable information too, especially when used with the digital workspaces solution, HP Anyware2.
No matter where AEC designers are based, or what type of device they use, with HP Anyware and a network connection, designers can access company data and applications securely and easily.
HP Anyware is built on industry-leading PC-over-IP (PCoIP®) technology, which delivers a rich and lossless user experience securely across all network conditions, on a variety of desktop and mobile endpoint devices. HP Anyware is designed for colour-accuracy, text clarity, and interactive responsiveness, and the solution builds to lossless, so the moment the user stops interacting with the image, it displays the exact image as it appears on the host workstation. Additionally, AEC data remains secure in the data center since only AES 256-encrypted image pixels are transmitted to client endpoints.
Watch how AEC collaboration works with HP Anyware and NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise in this video with Robert Cervellione, AECO Design Specialist at NVIDIA. Cervellione designs with connected data from different applications, such as McNeel Rhino, Autodesk Revit and 3ds Max, and Unreal Engine with NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise and HP Anyware. Based on Universal Scene Description (USD), Omniverse Enterprise enables teams to connect and customize 3D pipelines and simulate large-scale, physically accurate virtual worlds. With over 1.5 billion polygons and 2000 lights, the scene below requires a great deal of computing power. Working from a laptop, Cervellione is able to remotely access his NVIDIA RTX-powered workstation via HP Anyware software. Since Anyware offers low latency and GPU-accelerated connections, Cervellione can achieve the same user experience as if he was working at a deskside workstation.
For companies that need to support greater creativity, collaboration and productivity across teams, it’s time to take a closer look at NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise. This scalable, end-to-end platform unites teams, their assets, and software tools in a shared virtual space, enabling diverse workgroups to collaborate on a single project file simultaneously. Using HP Anyware in conjunction with Omniverse, team members working from different locations can securely work with the colour-accurate, lossless, and distortion-free user experience needed to create and iterate together efficiently.
HP Anyware also supports the peripherals that AEC professionals are accustomed to, including Wacom pens and tablets, 3D input devices like 3DConnexion Spacemouse®, 4K multi-monitor set-ups, with VR headset support coming soon.
Together, HP Anyware and NVIDIA Omniverse offer a solution that delivers an outstanding user experience for collaborating across AEC applications from anywhere.
Request access to a free 30-day NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise software trial and free 30-day HP Anyware trial by clicking here.
- NVIDIA Omniverse™ Enterprise is sold separately.
- Network access required HP Anyware supports Windows®, Linux® and MacOS® host environments and Window, Linux, MacOS, iOS®, Android®, and Chrome OS® end-user devices. For more on the system requirements for installing HP Anyware, refer to the Admin Guides here. HP Anyware is based on the Teradici CAS software and licensing platform and is available through a 1- and 3-year subscription. HP Anyware subscriptions are based on the number of concurrent PCoIP connections used (pay for the number of host connections, not the software) with a minimum order quantity of 5. HP Anyware subscriptions gives you a licence key to activate a connection to a hosted desktop as well as support and updates to the PCoIP Agents, PCoIP Clients and the Anyware Manager available for download here. For a limited time, an HP Anyware subscription also includes access and support for ZCentral Remote Boost and ZCentral Connect and is available for purchase through an HP Teradici seller or by contacting sales here.
