Case studies

What changes when the desktop moves

Three teams, three different constraints — onboarding speed, data residency and idle GPU spend.

Northsketch Labs
Software engineering · 40 engineers
Onboarding a contract engineer in 9 minutes, not 3 days

A distributed engineering team replaced laptop shipping and manual toolchain setup with a template workspace that boots in under a minute.

The constraint

Every contractor needed a provisioned laptop, a VPN profile and a day of toolchain installs before their first commit. Source code left the perimeter on unmanaged devices.

What they did

Northsketch published a Developer template with their toolchain baked in, shared it with the engineering team, and granted contractors browser-only access. Sessions are metered per minute so short engagements cost proportionally.

9 min

Time to first commit

0

Devices shipped

-38%

Monthly compute spend

The workspace is the onboarding. We send a link, they work, and nothing lands on a laptop we do not control.
Head of Platform, Northsketch Labs
Meridian Actuarial
Financial services · regulated data
Analyst workstations that keep regulated data inside one region

A pinned-region workspace let analysts run heavy models on managed capacity while data never crossed the tenant boundary.

The constraint

Modelling datasets could not leave the EU, but analysts needed compute far beyond their laptops during quarter close.

What they did

Region-pinned Data templates with per-tenant isolation. Any indexing or intelligence runs inside the tenant boundary; the control plane only sees metering and lifecycle events.

None

Data egress from region

-61%

Quarter-close model runtime

Per-minute ledger

Audit evidence

Our auditors asked where the data lives and where the compute runs. For the first time both answers were one line long.
Director of Risk Analytics, Meridian Actuarial
Halcyon Post
Creative production · 12 artists
GPU seats only for the hours the suite is actually rendering

A post-production studio dropped fixed GPU workstation leases for on-demand creative workspaces billed by the minute.

The constraint

Six leased GPU workstations sat idle most of the month but were saturated during delivery weeks.

What they did

Creative GPU templates launched on demand, with recordings used for client review instead of exporting proxies. Session clips carry bookmarks so a supervisor can jump straight to a note.

-84%

Idle GPU hours billed

Same day

Client review turnaround

6

Workstations retired

We stopped paying for machines to sit in a rack looking busy.
Studio Operations Lead, Halcyon Post

Names are anonymised pilot engagements from the SisiDesk alpha programme. Figures are drawn from the participants' own before-and-after measurements.