December 19, 2024 • 24 mins
Welcome to Episode 391 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Scott sits down with Kamal Srinivasan from Parallels to talk how you can think about delivering applications and desktops to your users in post-Citrix world. As the traditional “Citrix” model faces disruption, we explore how remote work, hybrid scenarios, and cloud-based computing are redefining how organizations deliver applications and desktops to end users.
Key topics include:
The shift away from static, on-prem desktops to dynamic, cloud-based compute.
How to optimize app delivery by building on top of Microsoft’s Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) platform.
Bridging the gap between legacy systems and cloud-based solutions, enabling businesses to roll out remote desktop solutions like AVD and Parallels RAS gradually while scaling down on-prem infrastructure.
The changing role of IT admins in supporting a workforce that operates anywhere, anytime.
Listen in and learn how your organization can streamline operations and empower your workforce with flexible, efficient application and desktop delivery.
Like what you hear and want to support the show? Check out our membership options.
Show Notes
Parallels
Parallels RAS
Parallels RAS Resources
Parallels Secure Workspace
Enhance your Azure Virtual Desktop experience with Parallels RAS
Windows 365 Link
Episode 390: Microsoft Ignite 2024: Windows 365 Link
About the sponsors
Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:03):
Welcome to episode
391 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast,
recorded live from Microsoft Ignite 2024.
This is a show about Microsoft 365 and
Azure from the perspective of IT pros and
end users, where we discuss a topic or
recent news and how it relates to you.
In this episode, it's time for Scott to
(00:24):
do an interview as he sits down with
Kamal from Parallels
to discuss how you can think about delivering
applications and desktops to your users
as the traditional Citrix model faces disruption.
In the interview, we explore remote work, hybrid
scenarios, and cloud based computing.
So let's sit down and listen to the
interview.
(00:46):
I'm at Ignite with Kamal Srinivasan.
He is from Parallels, and we're gonna have
a conversation about
all things virtual desktops and client delivery
and remote apps and,
generally, how to think of things in
context of some of the new announcements that
we've had at Ignite this week, potentially with
(01:06):
Windows 365
link and Cloud PCs, and hopefully help everybody
out there figure out the best path forward
and and how to how to rationalize,
how to move through things. So, Kamal, thanks
for joining us. Why don't you quickly introduce
yourself, and then we'll go ahead and get
into it. Super excited. Thanks for having me
on the podcast.
This is definitely an exciting time. I mean,
(01:26):
like, we're gonna talk something which is not
AI agent and Copilot.
Thank you. Thank you.
But the real problems that customers and the
administrators are facing today. Right? I'm Kamal. I'm
based in Seattle. I've been running I'm head
of product for Palos,
and, definitely
been around this industry for quite some time,
(01:47):
ex Microsoft, ex Oracle Cloud. Super excited to
be here. Awesome.
So maybe we can start with
Windows 365 Links. So Windows 365 Link was
announced earlier this week.
A very
different take on a thin client,
locked down with a custom OS.
Don't have to maintain an OS. Don't really
(02:08):
need to maintain a client, but I need
to log in specifically to a cloud PC
and
a Windows 365 desktop.
From what I know, not even Azure Virtual
Desktop or or some of the other things
that are out there today. So how should
customers think about
virtual desktops and thin clients today and ultimately
(02:29):
delivering
potentially desktops and
applications back. I think Microsoft's kind of put
a foot down and said, we have some
opinions about this, and we potentially drive OEMs
this way. But I wonder based on your
experience in the market, how do folks generally
think about things, and how should they maybe
be thinking about things in their considerations
with
Citrix out there? You're on the parallel side.
(02:51):
RAS does both application delivery and virtual desktop
delivery. We've got Lync, and, you know, we
still have the Windows app that's hanging out
there and connect to this whole ecosystem as
well. And and it is a big push.
So how should customers
think about that and and approach that? And
especially
administrators who kinda have to sit down and
(03:11):
think about not just, hey, my organization has
to go out and buy this, but then
I need to love and care and feed
it and grow it and maintain it. Yeah.
Definitely. I think, like, look, the first thing
first is we live in a post Citrix
world. Right? Citrix was there in the last
20 years, 30 years, dealing how applications and
desktops were delivered, and the industry was following
(03:35):
in the same paths. And if not anything,
everything that you said means that like, hey,
we are getting disrupted
in how desktops and applications, right? In general,
the end user computing
industry is getting disrupted for this new world,
which is like in a post cloud world
where developers,
knowledge workers,
office workers, contractors are all working differently. It
(03:57):
is not the same assumptions that you made
in the last 20 years, where people came
in, they logged in at certain times, they
logged off at certain times. You're even like
network bandwidth. You could like map out and
say like, for many years,
I used to work in networking where you
could map out and see the cycles of
productivity
mapping to network bandwidth.
(04:18):
So that maps to corporate network, right, like
usage
over a period of a day. And those
assumptions are getting disrupted because of the fact
that, like, how people have started working. So
which means naturally, the applications they are accessing
and the desktops they are accessing has changed.
In this, all of this, when you said
about Windows 3 65, the most interesting thing
about this is I'm a developer. I used
(04:40):
to be a developer. I'm like, then went
into product. One of the big things was,
if you remember,
we all used to have a developer box
sitting there, right? I still have a dev
box. We still have a dev box. We
still end up having a dev box in
all honesty. But like, there is a period
of time, maybe 5 years, 10 years from
now, maybe that assumption may not exist with
this Windows 3 65 leg. You have a
(05:03):
simple kind of a box that sits on
my desk, very clean,
looks super empty,
but my developer box sits in the cloud,
right, with all this powerful capability that I
can, whether I need GPUs, I need accessibility,
Who knows, liquid cooled GPUs. Like everything that,
like, you need as a developer
to build, test, deploy
(05:23):
might not come from under your desk, but
actually from somewhere else. And what is more
interesting is that, like, that means that, like,
your ability to go from what you need
this week versus next week. I don't need
to wait for somebody to approve, somebody to
go through this supply chain painful
process. Somebody's handled all that. As an administrator,
that means, hey, I've simplified, right? Because admins
(05:46):
and developers never were friends for many, many
years.
So, like, this means the administrator is becoming
actually like a friend of this
developer population by saying that, like, hey, you
want this? You've got it. Right? And I've
got an ability to manage it. So that
to me is super empowering on both sides
of the aisle. If you look at how
Windows 3 65 link is going to probably
(06:07):
head in that direction. It's a disruption for
this end user computing industry. Right? Because I'm
not giving static
desktops
with a VDI session
back to this end user, but instead making
this more dynamic as the need arises for
the day or the week. I think it's
very interesting where it's gone with connectivity
and authentication.
(06:28):
So, like, when I said I have a
DevBox,
my Dev Box is virtual.
So I certainly have my laptop that I
walk around and things just like that. But
my day to day job laptop has 16
gigs of RAM, and it's not necessarily doing
the things that I need it to do.
So I usually log into that, and then
I log in to
my mini core 128 gig of RAM dev
(06:49):
box, and that's where I spend most of
my day. And it's been interesting to watch
the
evolution
of optimizations
on the stacks. So we've had kind of
RDP out there for a long time. Video
delivery has often been, like, my bottleneck. So
I'm a product manager. I spend a lot
of time on calls with customers and, you
know, various members of my team, and that
(07:10):
means teams, camera, and I'm a remote employee.
Audio and video are important to me.
And, you know, optimizations with MMR and some
of those things, MMR, MRR, I always get
my acronyms screwed up. You know, those have
been super disruptive for, like, me just as
an individual and an information worker that's that's
out there in the workforce.
(07:31):
Yeah. Like, one of the things that you
see in the what is very empowering the
ZUC industry is for a while, you see
was end user computing was definitely, like, a
capped set of time. Right? Which is, like,
you had, like, a certain amount of pie
of what this looks like, and you were
every vendor was trying to operate within that.
What with the disruptions that's happening has changed
(07:54):
is that like now the pie looks much
bigger. The reason has become the fact that
like now you've got greenfield opportunities to deploy
for new use cases and new ways of
for the
developer,
administrator to knowledge maker,
administrator to a contractor, right? We have this
customer who is right moving off Citrix,
(08:14):
and they're dispersing their workload to the edge,
and they're dispersing their workload to the server
and to the cloud. So there's ability
to take an existing workload from a Citrix
environment and be able to say, hey, I'm
actually gonna give a population of the use
case to run on the laptops.
But I'm managing that workload. I'm managing that
application on the desktop,
(08:35):
and I've got ability to do golden image,
batch management,
VM controls, everything. And then I can do
the same thing on the server for certain
other use cases and population, and I can
do the same thing from the cloud for
certain other use cases and population. So this
ability to span this
desktop server cloud is becoming real. I have
another customer who has come because of the
(08:57):
simple reason that, like, hey, GPUs are shot.
Everybody's fighting for GPUs in the cloud. My
supply chain, I cannot get GPUs to deploy
in my data center. What do I do?
I have all these M series machines that
these user population is sitting with. Let me
go give them and enable them these VMs
there. I can manage it, and let me
do it. Right? Mhmm. So that's been a
(09:20):
now this administrator can really look at the
constraints they have. Don't have to force artificially
the user
to come to an environment, although there were
these constraints, but instead do, hey, you want
these things? I can really deliver it there.
I think that's what is very empowering, and
that's why, like, I'm super interested in seeing
how Windows 365
(09:40):
link is taken by the rest of the
thin client industry or in general hardware OEMs,
right? And seeing, oh, maybe there's a new
market and a new way to look at
this entire spectrum of EOC.
Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage
your Office 365 environment? Are you facing unexpected
(10:01):
issues that disrupt your company's productivity?
Intelligink is here to help. Much like you
take your car to the mechanic that has
specialized knowledge on how to best keep your
car running, Intelligink helps you with your Microsoft
cloud environment because that's their expertise.
Intelligink keeps up with the latest updates in
the Microsoft cloud to help keep your business
running smoothly and ahead of the curve. Whether
(10:22):
you are a small organization with just a
few users up to an organization of several
1000 employees, they want to partner with you
to implement and administer your Microsoft cloud technology.
Visit them at inteliginc.com/podcast.
That's intelligink.com/podcast
(10:44):
for more information or to schedule a 30
minute call to get started with them today.
Remember, IntelliJunk focuses on the Microsoft cloud, so
you can focus on your business.
I think the intent to OEM that device
is very interesting. It kinda follows the model
that Microsoft has done in other things like
Surface to compute and Copilot Plus PCs. You
(11:06):
know, they tend to lead the way with
maybe
designs around Surface and things like that. But
then the architectures are open and and the
rest of the ecosystem that's out there with
partners and vendors can can adopt it and
and push it through. I think it's also
a a great observation
that
from an administrator side, we can kind of
chase the functionality that our users need versus
(11:29):
making our users chase it. So I go
from having to say, oh, I've got Scott
over there, and he's complaining that his laptop
is too slow. And Yeah. You know, I
better get go buy him a laptop with
64 gigs of RAM. And then 2 months
later, I'm back complaining again. And, well, now
I gotta get you a desktop, and I've
just had this proliferation of hardware in my
depot
(11:50):
that then I've gotta hand back out. But
if I can chase the compute around the
world, and that's acceptable within my org, and
there's always gonna be geo boundaries and constraints
there. But it does give you some fungibility
and flexibility
to figure out what's the kind of best
delivery method for the compute, and then what's
the best method to deliver that to on
(12:10):
the end user side. Right. And look, this
application, this is where the application part of
it comes to. Right? Like, which is like
the administrator
earlier, like desktop. Hey, give a desktop, be
done. Right? Let me manage the desktop. And
that way I don't have to deal with
what the user is trying to do within
that, like, because I'm managing the box around
that. But I think more and more, the
(12:31):
users have become much more savvy. They pick
applications,
not like desktops.
So which means now this box, hey, where
is this box? It's not at the desktop
because now my application might come from the
cloud. My application might come from a different
geo. Now what? Like the box gets very
hard for the administrators to put. I think
this is where application delivery gets very interesting.
(12:53):
Right? Like I've spent like time, like healthcare
happens to be a big market and focus
for parallels.
Oh, I I think things like Windows 365
link you're going to take off in
That's right. That's the canonical use case. Because
if you look at it, for the many,
many years, like, this was a very on
premise,
(13:13):
sitting off, like, a certain desktop. The application
we know, like, 1 or 2 vendors in
this space, right, who take on. And they
were always delivered in a certain way. But
now with this all these disruptions of application
delivery, not desktop, means that, like, hey, you
can go into an environment.
You want this application to be delivered the
(13:33):
point we're talking about desktop versus server versus
cloud, you've got the flexibility within a hospital
network
to go deliver the application in certain ways
to certain population of users, a different way
to a different population of users,
and be able to manage all that. Right?
That platform concept where, like, now the security
and the postures, platform concept
where, like, now the security and the postures
(13:53):
that you have, the identity and the management
that you have, the integrations with, like, a
number of these devices, peripheral devices that you
have, are all now spanning this platform,
not a certain solution delivered from a certain
place. Right? Yeah. I think that's also
super interesting. One of the things that was
always hard for me to rationalize, like, back
(14:15):
when I lived this life, was things like
single user versus multi user sessions in some
of the pools. And when I think about,
like, the things that customers are doing, they
tend to be more and more application specific.
Like, you know, we have video editors out
there who are gonna wanna be in a
certain editing workflow. So if I'm working for
(14:35):
Disney and Pixar, I've got a whole bunch
of folks out there who are just sitting
around waiting for rendering engines. Yeah. So give
me access to GPU and rendering engine. Well,
maybe in some cases, that's a single session
or I can do, like, multi session for
delivering, like, Word as a client down or
or things like that. Do you see it
(14:56):
kind of application delivery continuing
to
play a part here. I I I think
it was very interesting. And I I can't
tell if it's early days with things like
Microsoft leaning into Lync and saying, well, it's
desktops today. Maybe it's applications tomorrow. But when
I look out there and I think about,
like, remote app, remote app's been kicking around
for For a while. A long time now.
(15:17):
For a while. But there's other vendors out
there that can do remote app delivery better
than Microsoft can do with remote app. So
I don't I don't think it's an area
that they've necessarily, like, invested heavily in. Like,
it's a product in the portfolio.
But do you see it being more desktop
delivery,
application delivery,
or is it really gonna be like a
blended world of both where, you know, I
(15:37):
can have my cake and eat it too
as a user? Sure. Look. I mean, like,
Microsoft is great in building platforms.
Right? Like, we all know I've been part
of Microsoft and, like, the it's not news
to any of your listeners that, like, hey.
They're great in building platforms.
They leave room for partners,
vendors,
ecosystem to innovate on top. The same thing
applies here too. They're like, when we look
(16:00):
at it, like as an example, within parallels,
we work very well on top of ABD.
We have a solution
that is offering similar to ABD. You might
look on that and say like, hey, you
guys offer a solution at ABD. That's not
true. And they act like, we work on
AVD because we see customers coming off Citrix,
coming to AVD. How can we add value
on top of AVDs? We are very good
(16:20):
at application delivery. We sit on top of
AVD, optimize the heck out of application delivery.
AVD is very good at delivering these multi
session desktops. It's a great compute host. Team
So you leverage it as a compute host.
We leverage as this host, and like on
top of it, we are able to optimize
for printing, optimize for file access, optimize for
accessibility for networking, for certain things, accessibility for
(16:42):
peripheral devices, right? Like some of these things
that certain applications that we've optimized to deliver
from a server, we've done that same thing
for ABD. And the other thing is the
hybrid, right? Not everything is going to run
on the cloud. So if we think about
AVD or Windows 3 65,
one of the things is that like today,
if I'm delivering, let's say, a desktop, I
can move a desktop, maybe, right? But there's
(17:05):
also the hybrid scenario where like, how do
I get something running on premise to go?
I can't just shut off my data center
in 1 week, 1 month, 1 year. It
takes time. Right? You've got, like, the tile
space. You're paying for the tile space. It
goes for a certain depreciation.
So you need to move this over time.
When you move this over time, you can't,
like, come at the time of renewal
(17:26):
and say that, like, hey, I'm going to
evaluate, do a POC, turn on AVD or
Windows 3 60 5 in a month. It's
it's hard to snap your fingers and go
from capex to opex and So it's very
hard for different, like, product,
application,
user, security, finance perspective, right? It's very hard
for an admin, CSO,
CFO to CI to I and turn this
(17:46):
on. But what you can do is, you
can do this over time. This is where,
like, a hybrid solution,
and that's what
people like parallels. Like, we do this very
well. We have, like, large customers spanning from
Europe to America where, like, even here at
Ignite, they come, hey, I wanna go to
AVD. Great, you're on top of AVD. Give
me a way today that I can start
using it. We optimize costs on top of
(18:07):
AVD. We do manageability on top of AVD.
Guess what? The licensing is the same mechanism.
All you gotta do is Azure subscription,
no change in licensing,
and you're now running on top. This is
great, right? Because this kind of a hybrid
pathway means that, like, Windows
365, AVD
adoption will increase over time, but I can
keep reducing the footprint on premise, right? I
(18:29):
think this is where like vendors and like
customers need to look and evaluate as to,
like, how do I do this transition over
time? How do I look for application delivery
when I come here and not just a
raw infrastructure and expect like, oh, it's not
a binary thing that like, hey, Windows 3
65 works or not. Right? Of course, it
(18:50):
may not work because you had deployed this
for 10, 15, 5 years. And if you
come here, like, maybe you don't find like
50%,
Maybe you don't find 80%. Maybe you don't
find 20%. But the last 20% is also
very hard because it's very custom to your
environment. Now we don't find it. It's not
like it's not gonna work. It's because, like,
you need to work to make that fit
(19:10):
in. It's always the devil's in the details.
It's not like, can we do it? It's
how long is it gonna take us to
do it and how much money is it
gonna take us to get there? So I
think there's kinda 2 interesting
things there to kind of maybe close this
out. So you mentioned
value add capabilities on top, and and I
think that's important to consider. So things like
(19:30):
universal print
and how do I consider, like, print in
a remote app delivery world versus Yeah. The
desktop world become important. So so there's those
kinds of things. And then you also mentioned,
and and I think it's important. Like, not
a lot of customers think about it, but
they probably should, especially enterprise customers on commitments.
The ability to leverage their existing commitments with
(19:53):
Microsoft, like, as a platform provider. So, you
know, Microsoft for years years has had enterprise
agreements. Now we're all on Macs for Azure
and, you know, these commitments to consume and
things like that. So I think the ability
to
have solutions both from Microsoft and, like you
said, from partners who can help, I was
I think it's 4. I would say, like,
fill in the gaps. I think it is
(20:14):
value add and and augmentation really at the
end of the day. But being able to
kinda consume from those same buckets
is also super empowering for customers. That's right.
You you know, it's one thing to go
to your CFO and say, hey. We need
to cut a new cut a new invoice
here and and get a new PO out
the door with a new vendor, or I'm
in the same ecosystem.
(20:34):
It's the same billing model.
It can be cost optimized in similar ways
to the tools I'm already using today. I
think the Azure transactable marketplace is like a
great thing for this. Right? It's cool, but
I wish more people went in there. There's
there's so much stuff. Customers come to me
and they say, how do I do this?
Yeah. And I look sometimes and I go,
you know, there's there's there's the path and
(20:55):
I can put you on a path, but
I'll give you the smorgasbord of options.
And sometimes it's the easy way. And so
It's not just customers. Even for partners. Right?
Like, that is, like, the three way capability
of transaction
and, like, how service providers can actually transact
through this is super empowering because we've now
lit up on Azure Marketplace.
That's been, like, the best thing because, like,
(21:16):
they can to your point on the map
consumption,
the partner offers can go out. We can
set up certain things for these service providers
or even resellers, and they can, like, transact
directly
with the customer. So which means the customer,
to your point, can go to the CFO
and say, hey. We're already on Microsoft ecosystem.
Here's all I'm doing. Right? So when I
switch from Citrix to this solution, whether it
(21:37):
is AVD, Windows 365, with Parallels, it's an
easy sell. For the CFO, yeah, it's part
of the Microsoft consumption. I'm right here. I
haven't changed the partner, Right? The service provider
or the reseller. I haven't changed the Microsoft
set of, like, consumption credits, and it makes
it easy. Yeah. And you still have supportability
as well. You still have supportability. Both sides
of the stack. So, yeah, I think I
(21:57):
think it is an interesting kind of virtuous
ecosystem that can Agree. That can build it
self out there. So closing thoughts, you've been
here at Ignite all week. What's kind of
your most exciting thing in this space? I
think like, look, we started with this joking
thing on AI agent Copilot,
but
one of the things that I see very
empowering with some of this AI is like,
(22:19):
not necessarily the, the earlier version used to
be like automation by API contracts. Right? What
is super interesting is to see is like,
what is the agent contracts
between different tasks look like? Right? If I
can, like, today codify,
tomorrow maybe there's learning tasks that may evolve
as the agent frameworks and AI itself evolve.
(22:41):
But as I look at a fast forwarded
nature,
administrators need to take a look at how
can I leverage
these frameworks
in a way that is going to be
more productive for me, right? They should not
be afraid to embrace.
So within these frameworks, one of the things
like Microsoft is doing well is this Copilot
as a user interface.
(23:01):
It's yet to be proven. Like, there's lots
of things to be there. Definitely early days.
Early days. Maybe early innings. But it's worth
looking from the aspect that, like, hey, how
can me as an administrator, me as a
vendor, plug into this Copilot ecosystem
to give this codified
task list that can talk to each other,
right? Even if these are simple tasks,
(23:24):
finding networking
and finding EUC
VDI issues and making sure, like, hey, this
goes into a unified place for me to
do one. It's a simple thing. Yeah. But
but that's my, takeaway
that, hey, we need to go do some
of these codified tasks.
Alright. That's that's excellent. Well, thank you very
much for the conversation today. I do appreciate
it. Thank you. Thanks for having me on
(23:44):
the podcast. I'm looking forward to Gary.
If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us
a 5 star rating in iTunes. It helps
to get the word out so more IT
pros can learn about Office 365 and Azure.
If you have any questions you want us
to address on the show, or feedback about
the show,
feel free to reach out via our website,
(24:05):
Twitter, or Facebook. Thanks again for listening, and
have a great day.
Welcome to episode
391 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast,
recorded live from Microsoft Ignite 2024.
This is a show about Microsoft 365 and
Azure from the perspective of IT pros and
end users, where we discuss a topic or
recent news and how it relates to you.
In this episode, it's time for Scott to
(00:24):
do an interview as he sits down with
Kamal from Parallels
to discuss how you can think about delivering
applications and desktops to your users
as the traditional Citrix model faces disruption.
In the interview, we explore remote work, hybrid
scenarios, and cloud based computing.
So let's sit down and listen to the
interview.
(00:46):
I'm at Ignite with Kamal Srinivasan.
He is from Parallels, and we're gonna have
a conversation about
all things virtual desktops and client delivery
and remote apps and,
generally, how to think of things in
context of some of the new announcements that
we've had at Ignite this week, potentially with
(01:06):
Windows 365
link and Cloud PCs, and hopefully help everybody
out there figure out the best path forward
and and how to how to rationalize,
how to move through things. So, Kamal, thanks
for joining us. Why don't you quickly introduce
yourself, and then we'll go ahead and get
into it. Super excited. Thanks for having me
on the podcast.
This is definitely an exciting time. I mean,
(01:26):
like, we're gonna talk something which is not
AI agent and Copilot.
Thank you. Thank you.
But the real problems that customers and the
administrators are facing today. Right? I'm Kamal. I'm
based in Seattle. I've been running I'm head
of product for Palos,
and, definitely
been around this industry for quite some time,
(01:47):
ex Microsoft, ex Oracle Cloud. Super excited to
be here. Awesome.
So maybe we can start with
Windows 365 Links. So Windows 365 Link was
announced earlier this week.
A very
different take on a thin client,
locked down with a custom OS.
Don't have to maintain an OS. Don't really
(02:08):
need to maintain a client, but I need
to log in specifically to a cloud PC
and
a Windows 365 desktop.
From what I know, not even Azure Virtual
Desktop or or some of the other things
that are out there today. So how should
customers think about
virtual desktops and thin clients today and ultimately
(02:29):
delivering
potentially desktops and
applications back. I think Microsoft's kind of put
a foot down and said, we have some
opinions about this, and we potentially drive OEMs
this way. But I wonder based on your
experience in the market, how do folks generally
think about things, and how should they maybe
be thinking about things in their considerations
with
Citrix out there? You're on the parallel side.
(02:51):
RAS does both application delivery and virtual desktop
delivery. We've got Lync, and, you know, we
still have the Windows app that's hanging out
there and connect to this whole ecosystem as
well. And and it is a big push.
So how should customers
think about that and and approach that? And
especially
administrators who kinda have to sit down and
(03:11):
think about not just, hey, my organization has
to go out and buy this, but then
I need to love and care and feed
it and grow it and maintain it. Yeah.
Definitely. I think, like, look, the first thing
first is we live in a post Citrix
world. Right? Citrix was there in the last
20 years, 30 years, dealing how applications and
desktops were delivered, and the industry was following
(03:35):
in the same paths. And if not anything,
everything that you said means that like, hey,
we are getting disrupted
in how desktops and applications, right? In general,
the end user computing
industry is getting disrupted for this new world,
which is like in a post cloud world
where developers,
knowledge workers,
office workers, contractors are all working differently. It
(03:57):
is not the same assumptions that you made
in the last 20 years, where people came
in, they logged in at certain times, they
logged off at certain times. You're even like
network bandwidth. You could like map out and
say like, for many years,
I used to work in networking where you
could map out and see the cycles of
productivity
mapping to network bandwidth.
(04:18):
So that maps to corporate network, right, like
usage
over a period of a day. And those
assumptions are getting disrupted because of the fact
that, like, how people have started working. So
which means naturally, the applications they are accessing
and the desktops they are accessing has changed.
In this, all of this, when you said
about Windows 3 65, the most interesting thing
about this is I'm a developer. I used
(04:40):
to be a developer. I'm like, then went
into product. One of the big things was,
if you remember,
we all used to have a developer box
sitting there, right? I still have a dev
box. We still have a dev box. We
still end up having a dev box in
all honesty. But like, there is a period
of time, maybe 5 years, 10 years from
now, maybe that assumption may not exist with
this Windows 3 65 leg. You have a
(05:03):
simple kind of a box that sits on
my desk, very clean,
looks super empty,
but my developer box sits in the cloud,
right, with all this powerful capability that I
can, whether I need GPUs, I need accessibility,
Who knows, liquid cooled GPUs. Like everything that,
like, you need as a developer
to build, test, deploy
(05:23):
might not come from under your desk, but
actually from somewhere else. And what is more
interesting is that, like, that means that, like,
your ability to go from what you need
this week versus next week. I don't need
to wait for somebody to approve, somebody to
go through this supply chain painful
process. Somebody's handled all that. As an administrator,
that means, hey, I've simplified, right? Because admins
(05:46):
and developers never were friends for many, many
years.
So, like, this means the administrator is becoming
actually like a friend of this
developer population by saying that, like, hey, you
want this? You've got it. Right? And I've
got an ability to manage it. So that
to me is super empowering on both sides
of the aisle. If you look at how
Windows 3 65 link is going to probably
(06:07):
head in that direction. It's a disruption for
this end user computing industry. Right? Because I'm
not giving static
desktops
with a VDI session
back to this end user, but instead making
this more dynamic as the need arises for
the day or the week. I think it's
very interesting where it's gone with connectivity
and authentication.
(06:28):
So, like, when I said I have a
DevBox,
my Dev Box is virtual.
So I certainly have my laptop that I
walk around and things just like that. But
my day to day job laptop has 16
gigs of RAM, and it's not necessarily doing
the things that I need it to do.
So I usually log into that, and then
I log in to
my mini core 128 gig of RAM dev
(06:49):
box, and that's where I spend most of
my day. And it's been interesting to watch
the
evolution
of optimizations
on the stacks. So we've had kind of
RDP out there for a long time. Video
delivery has often been, like, my bottleneck. So
I'm a product manager. I spend a lot
of time on calls with customers and, you
know, various members of my team, and that
(07:10):
means teams, camera, and I'm a remote employee.
Audio and video are important to me.
And, you know, optimizations with MMR and some
of those things, MMR, MRR, I always get
my acronyms screwed up. You know, those have
been super disruptive for, like, me just as
an individual and an information worker that's that's
out there in the workforce.
(07:31):
Yeah. Like, one of the things that you
see in the what is very empowering the
ZUC industry is for a while, you see
was end user computing was definitely, like, a
capped set of time. Right? Which is, like,
you had, like, a certain amount of pie
of what this looks like, and you were
every vendor was trying to operate within that.
What with the disruptions that's happening has changed
(07:54):
is that like now the pie looks much
bigger. The reason has become the fact that
like now you've got greenfield opportunities to deploy
for new use cases and new ways of
for the
developer,
administrator to knowledge maker,
administrator to a contractor, right? We have this
customer who is right moving off Citrix,
(08:14):
and they're dispersing their workload to the edge,
and they're dispersing their workload to the server
and to the cloud. So there's ability
to take an existing workload from a Citrix
environment and be able to say, hey, I'm
actually gonna give a population of the use
case to run on the laptops.
But I'm managing that workload. I'm managing that
application on the desktop,
(08:35):
and I've got ability to do golden image,
batch management,
VM controls, everything. And then I can do
the same thing on the server for certain
other use cases and population, and I can
do the same thing from the cloud for
certain other use cases and population. So this
ability to span this
desktop server cloud is becoming real. I have
another customer who has come because of the
(08:57):
simple reason that, like, hey, GPUs are shot.
Everybody's fighting for GPUs in the cloud. My
supply chain, I cannot get GPUs to deploy
in my data center. What do I do?
I have all these M series machines that
these user population is sitting with. Let me
go give them and enable them these VMs
there. I can manage it, and let me
do it. Right? Mhmm. So that's been a
(09:20):
now this administrator can really look at the
constraints they have. Don't have to force artificially
the user
to come to an environment, although there were
these constraints, but instead do, hey, you want
these things? I can really deliver it there.
I think that's what is very empowering, and
that's why, like, I'm super interested in seeing
how Windows 365
(09:40):
link is taken by the rest of the
thin client industry or in general hardware OEMs,
right? And seeing, oh, maybe there's a new
market and a new way to look at
this entire spectrum of EOC.
Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage
your Office 365 environment? Are you facing unexpected
(10:01):
issues that disrupt your company's productivity?
Intelligink is here to help. Much like you
take your car to the mechanic that has
specialized knowledge on how to best keep your
car running, Intelligink helps you with your Microsoft
cloud environment because that's their expertise.
Intelligink keeps up with the latest updates in
the Microsoft cloud to help keep your business
running smoothly and ahead of the curve. Whether
(10:22):
you are a small organization with just a
few users up to an organization of several
1000 employees, they want to partner with you
to implement and administer your Microsoft cloud technology.
Visit them at inteliginc.com/podcast.
That's intelligink.com/podcast
(10:44):
for more information or to schedule a 30
minute call to get started with them today.
Remember, IntelliJunk focuses on the Microsoft cloud, so
you can focus on your business.
I think the intent to OEM that device
is very interesting. It kinda follows the model
that Microsoft has done in other things like
Surface to compute and Copilot Plus PCs. You
(11:06):
know, they tend to lead the way with
maybe
designs around Surface and things like that. But
then the architectures are open and and the
rest of the ecosystem that's out there with
partners and vendors can can adopt it and
and push it through. I think it's also
a a great observation
that
from an administrator side, we can kind of
chase the functionality that our users need versus
(11:29):
making our users chase it. So I go
from having to say, oh, I've got Scott
over there, and he's complaining that his laptop
is too slow. And Yeah. You know, I
better get go buy him a laptop with
64 gigs of RAM. And then 2 months
later, I'm back complaining again. And, well, now
I gotta get you a desktop, and I've
just had this proliferation of hardware in my
depot
(11:50):
that then I've gotta hand back out. But
if I can chase the compute around the
world, and that's acceptable within my org, and
there's always gonna be geo boundaries and constraints
there. But it does give you some fungibility
and flexibility
to figure out what's the kind of best
delivery method for the compute, and then what's
the best method to deliver that to on
(12:10):
the end user side. Right. And look, this
application, this is where the application part of
it comes to. Right? Like, which is like
the administrator
earlier, like desktop. Hey, give a desktop, be
done. Right? Let me manage the desktop. And
that way I don't have to deal with
what the user is trying to do within
that, like, because I'm managing the box around
that. But I think more and more, the
(12:31):
users have become much more savvy. They pick
applications,
not like desktops.
So which means now this box, hey, where
is this box? It's not at the desktop
because now my application might come from the
cloud. My application might come from a different
geo. Now what? Like the box gets very
hard for the administrators to put. I think
this is where application delivery gets very interesting.
(12:53):
Right? Like I've spent like time, like healthcare
happens to be a big market and focus
for parallels.
Oh, I I think things like Windows 365
link you're going to take off in
That's right. That's the canonical use case. Because
if you look at it, for the many,
many years, like, this was a very on
premise,
(13:13):
sitting off, like, a certain desktop. The application
we know, like, 1 or 2 vendors in
this space, right, who take on. And they
were always delivered in a certain way. But
now with this all these disruptions of application
delivery, not desktop, means that, like, hey, you
can go into an environment.
You want this application to be delivered the
(13:33):
point we're talking about desktop versus server versus
cloud, you've got the flexibility within a hospital
network
to go deliver the application in certain ways
to certain population of users, a different way
to a different population of users,
and be able to manage all that. Right?
That platform concept where, like, now the security
and the postures, platform concept
where, like, now the security and the postures
(13:53):
that you have, the identity and the management
that you have, the integrations with, like, a
number of these devices, peripheral devices that you
have, are all now spanning this platform,
not a certain solution delivered from a certain
place. Right? Yeah. I think that's also
super interesting. One of the things that was
always hard for me to rationalize, like, back
(14:15):
when I lived this life, was things like
single user versus multi user sessions in some
of the pools. And when I think about,
like, the things that customers are doing, they
tend to be more and more application specific.
Like, you know, we have video editors out
there who are gonna wanna be in a
certain editing workflow. So if I'm working for
(14:35):
Disney and Pixar, I've got a whole bunch
of folks out there who are just sitting
around waiting for rendering engines. Yeah. So give
me access to GPU and rendering engine. Well,
maybe in some cases, that's a single session
or I can do, like, multi session for
delivering, like, Word as a client down or
or things like that. Do you see it
(14:56):
kind of application delivery continuing
to
play a part here. I I I think
it was very interesting. And I I can't
tell if it's early days with things like
Microsoft leaning into Lync and saying, well, it's
desktops today. Maybe it's applications tomorrow. But when
I look out there and I think about,
like, remote app, remote app's been kicking around
for For a while. A long time now.
(15:17):
For a while. But there's other vendors out
there that can do remote app delivery better
than Microsoft can do with remote app. So
I don't I don't think it's an area
that they've necessarily, like, invested heavily in. Like,
it's a product in the portfolio.
But do you see it being more desktop
delivery,
application delivery,
or is it really gonna be like a
blended world of both where, you know, I
(15:37):
can have my cake and eat it too
as a user? Sure. Look. I mean, like,
Microsoft is great in building platforms.
Right? Like, we all know I've been part
of Microsoft and, like, the it's not news
to any of your listeners that, like, hey.
They're great in building platforms.
They leave room for partners,
vendors,
ecosystem to innovate on top. The same thing
applies here too. They're like, when we look
(16:00):
at it, like as an example, within parallels,
we work very well on top of ABD.
We have a solution
that is offering similar to ABD. You might
look on that and say like, hey, you
guys offer a solution at ABD. That's not
true. And they act like, we work on
AVD because we see customers coming off Citrix,
coming to AVD. How can we add value
on top of AVDs? We are very good
(16:20):
at application delivery. We sit on top of
AVD, optimize the heck out of application delivery.
AVD is very good at delivering these multi
session desktops. It's a great compute host. Team
So you leverage it as a compute host.
We leverage as this host, and like on
top of it, we are able to optimize
for printing, optimize for file access, optimize for
accessibility for networking, for certain things, accessibility for
(16:42):
peripheral devices, right? Like some of these things
that certain applications that we've optimized to deliver
from a server, we've done that same thing
for ABD. And the other thing is the
hybrid, right? Not everything is going to run
on the cloud. So if we think about
AVD or Windows 3 65,
one of the things is that like today,
if I'm delivering, let's say, a desktop, I
can move a desktop, maybe, right? But there's
(17:05):
also the hybrid scenario where like, how do
I get something running on premise to go?
I can't just shut off my data center
in 1 week, 1 month, 1 year. It
takes time. Right? You've got, like, the tile
space. You're paying for the tile space. It
goes for a certain depreciation.
So you need to move this over time.
When you move this over time, you can't,
like, come at the time of renewal
(17:26):
and say that, like, hey, I'm going to
evaluate, do a POC, turn on AVD or
Windows 3 60 5 in a month. It's
it's hard to snap your fingers and go
from capex to opex and So it's very
hard for different, like, product,
application,
user, security, finance perspective, right? It's very hard
for an admin, CSO,
CFO to CI to I and turn this
(17:46):
on. But what you can do is, you
can do this over time. This is where,
like, a hybrid solution,
and that's what
people like parallels. Like, we do this very
well. We have, like, large customers spanning from
Europe to America where, like, even here at
Ignite, they come, hey, I wanna go to
AVD. Great, you're on top of AVD. Give
me a way today that I can start
using it. We optimize costs on top of
(18:07):
AVD. We do manageability on top of AVD.
Guess what? The licensing is the same mechanism.
All you gotta do is Azure subscription,
no change in licensing,
and you're now running on top. This is
great, right? Because this kind of a hybrid
pathway means that, like, Windows
365, AVD
adoption will increase over time, but I can
keep reducing the footprint on premise, right? I
(18:29):
think this is where like vendors and like
customers need to look and evaluate as to,
like, how do I do this transition over
time? How do I look for application delivery
when I come here and not just a
raw infrastructure and expect like, oh, it's not
a binary thing that like, hey, Windows 3
65 works or not. Right? Of course, it
(18:50):
may not work because you had deployed this
for 10, 15, 5 years. And if you
come here, like, maybe you don't find like
50%,
Maybe you don't find 80%. Maybe you don't
find 20%. But the last 20% is also
very hard because it's very custom to your
environment. Now we don't find it. It's not
like it's not gonna work. It's because, like,
you need to work to make that fit
(19:10):
in. It's always the devil's in the details.
It's not like, can we do it? It's
how long is it gonna take us to
do it and how much money is it
gonna take us to get there? So I
think there's kinda 2 interesting
things there to kind of maybe close this
out. So you mentioned
value add capabilities on top, and and I
think that's important to consider. So things like
(19:30):
universal print
and how do I consider, like, print in
a remote app delivery world versus Yeah. The
desktop world become important. So so there's those
kinds of things. And then you also mentioned,
and and I think it's important. Like, not
a lot of customers think about it, but
they probably should, especially enterprise customers on commitments.
The ability to leverage their existing commitments with
(19:53):
Microsoft, like, as a platform provider. So, you
know, Microsoft for years years has had enterprise
agreements. Now we're all on Macs for Azure
and, you know, these commitments to consume and
things like that. So I think the ability
to
have solutions both from Microsoft and, like you
said, from partners who can help, I was
I think it's 4. I would say, like,
fill in the gaps. I think it is
(20:14):
value add and and augmentation really at the
end of the day. But being able to
kinda consume from those same buckets
is also super empowering for customers. That's right.
You you know, it's one thing to go
to your CFO and say, hey. We need
to cut a new cut a new invoice
here and and get a new PO out
the door with a new vendor, or I'm
in the same ecosystem.
(20:34):
It's the same billing model.
It can be cost optimized in similar ways
to the tools I'm already using today. I
think the Azure transactable marketplace is like a
great thing for this. Right? It's cool, but
I wish more people went in there. There's
there's so much stuff. Customers come to me
and they say, how do I do this?
Yeah. And I look sometimes and I go,
you know, there's there's there's the path and
(20:55):
I can put you on a path, but
I'll give you the smorgasbord of options.
And sometimes it's the easy way. And so
It's not just customers. Even for partners. Right?
Like, that is, like, the three way capability
of transaction
and, like, how service providers can actually transact
through this is super empowering because we've now
lit up on Azure Marketplace.
That's been, like, the best thing because, like,
(21:16):
they can to your point on the map
consumption,
the partner offers can go out. We can
set up certain things for these service providers
or even resellers, and they can, like, transact
directly
with the customer. So which means the customer,
to your point, can go to the CFO
and say, hey. We're already on Microsoft ecosystem.
Here's all I'm doing. Right? So when I
switch from Citrix to this solution, whether it
(21:37):
is AVD, Windows 365, with Parallels, it's an
easy sell. For the CFO, yeah, it's part
of the Microsoft consumption. I'm right here. I
haven't changed the partner, Right? The service provider
or the reseller. I haven't changed the Microsoft
set of, like, consumption credits, and it makes
it easy. Yeah. And you still have supportability
as well. You still have supportability. Both sides
of the stack. So, yeah, I think I
(21:57):
think it is an interesting kind of virtuous
ecosystem that can Agree. That can build it
self out there. So closing thoughts, you've been
here at Ignite all week. What's kind of
your most exciting thing in this space? I
think like, look, we started with this joking
thing on AI agent Copilot,
but
one of the things that I see very
empowering with some of this AI is like,
(22:19):
not necessarily the, the earlier version used to
be like automation by API contracts. Right? What
is super interesting is to see is like,
what is the agent contracts
between different tasks look like? Right? If I
can, like, today codify,
tomorrow maybe there's learning tasks that may evolve
as the agent frameworks and AI itself evolve.
(22:41):
But as I look at a fast forwarded
nature,
administrators need to take a look at how
can I leverage
these frameworks
in a way that is going to be
more productive for me, right? They should not
be afraid to embrace.
So within these frameworks, one of the things
like Microsoft is doing well is this Copilot
as a user interface.
(23:01):
It's yet to be proven. Like, there's lots
of things to be there. Definitely early days.
Early days. Maybe early innings. But it's worth
looking from the aspect that, like, hey, how
can me as an administrator, me as a
vendor, plug into this Copilot ecosystem
to give this codified
task list that can talk to each other,
right? Even if these are simple tasks,
(23:24):
finding networking
and finding EUC
VDI issues and making sure, like, hey, this
goes into a unified place for me to
do one. It's a simple thing. Yeah. But
but that's my, takeaway
that, hey, we need to go do some
of these codified tasks.
Alright. That's that's excellent. Well, thank you very
much for the conversation today. I do appreciate
it. Thank you. Thanks for having me on
(23:44):
the podcast. I'm looking forward to Gary.
If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us
a 5 star rating in iTunes. It helps
to get the word out so more IT
pros can learn about Office 365 and Azure.
If you have any questions you want us
to address on the show, or feedback about
the show,
feel free to reach out via our website,
(24:05):
Twitter, or Facebook. Thanks again for listening, and
have a great day.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com