Case Study: Southland Industries achieves anywhere-access and high-performance cloud GPU workstations with Workspot

Leading Design-Build Firm Simplifies IT, Discovers Surprising Performance with Cloud Workstations

Southland Industries, a large U.S. mechanical, engineering and plumbing (MEP) firm, faced growing IT and collaboration problems as its teams produced massive, graphics-intensive building drawings. Physical, water-cooled GPU workstations and multi-terabyte data replication across some 17 locations made remote work difficult, pushed up costs (new branch offices could exceed $150K) and strained revision control; traditional VDI proved too slow, complex and expensive to manage.

Southland deployed Workspot Workstation Cloud on Microsoft Azure with cloud GPUs, moving designers to centrally hosted cloud workstations. A quick pilot turned into 200 users in three months with performance equal to or better than local rigs; the firm eliminated costly data replication and frequent workstation purchases, can spin up job sites in 10 minutes, hire talent remotely, and plans to retire much of its on-premises infrastructure.

Southland Industries

Israel Sumano

Senior Director of Infrastructure Services