Press release

Solar Meets Cloud: Exactus, a Leader in Power Efficiency, Leverages itopia, a Leader in Cloud Computing Efficiency

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Leading professional services firm Exactus Energy has harnessed itopia’s Cloud Automation Stack to enable its remote engineers around the world to power their own devices with cloud-based GPUs. The Canadian firm, which specializes in solar engineering, needed a way to deliver graphics-intensive, power-demanding CAD applications to its engineers with low latency while they work from anywhere amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The company had initially tried equipping their distributed workforce with a legacy VDI solution, but it was cost-prohibitive, too restrictive to customization, and exhibiting performance issues. By switching to itopia, Exactus Energy employees can now access mission-critical CAD and productivity applications hosted on Google Cloud’s high-speed network, all while saving on computing costs.

“itopia definitely has improved our business,” said Dylan Khudr, Systems Architect and EIT at Exactus Energy. “While the tool we were previously using was an effective ‘Band-Aid’ solution when the pandemic first struck, it did tend to get a bit costly when you start scaling. It didn’t offer itopia’s flexibility of being able to say ‘Hey, this user is not online at this time, so somebody else can use these computing resources.’ ”

Using itopia enables Exactus Energy to scale its usage of computing resources from Google Cloud as needed, as opposed to paying an excessively high rate for resources that often went unused. With itopia, Exactus Energy employees can access corporate apps and data from their own personal devices (in line with a common policy typically known as “bring your own device,” or “BYOD”). This allows Exactus Energy to reduce spending on hardware and avoid the logistical issue of buying, provisioning, and shipping devices to globally distributed workers.

“It’s great to see companies like Exactus Energy take the initiative to implement a secure BYOD policy and gain the control to customize their Windows workloads with scalable resources on Google Cloud,” said Jon Lieberman, CEO at itopia.

Now that Exactus Energy has implemented itopia, the business has scaled its distributed workforce with ease. The ability to manage this workforce from itopia’s centralized, browser-based console has made a significant improvement to IT admin operations.

“Supporting remote, distributed teams is more important than ever. We’re proud to work alongside itopia to support Exactus Energy as they modernize their VDI and provide high-performance computing experiences to their employees,” said Manvinder Singh, Director, Partnerships at Google Cloud.

Exactus Energy continues to facilitate efficient engineering solutions for the solar industry, no longer encumbered by the inability to scale resources efficiently and manage its growing team. As the pandemic draws to a hopeful conclusion, itopia provides businesses the versatility to enable employees to work from home, the office, and anywhere in-between.

About itopia

itopia is a comprehensive cloud orchestration and automation solution for Google Cloud Platform, simplifying IT management for desktops, apps, compute, storage, networking, and security. Enterprises use the itopia platform to facilitate increased productivity and efficiently manage distributed teams of employees. Current customers include some of the leading companies in healthcare, education, Call Center/BPO, telco, and manufacturing.

About Exactus Energy

Exactus Energy is a professional services firm specializing in solar engineering. The company was founded in Toronto, Canada by Matthew Jaglowitz and Eddie Obeliunas, engineers wanting to harness the power of drone technology to provide accurate engineering solutions safely, and with rapid turnaround times. What started as a small grass-roots company has now grown to an experienced team of engineers, technicians, and client service professionals who specialize in solar.