Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / 🎙️ Reality Bytes #61 VDI Experience is HERE! 🚀 with Andy Philp

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🎙️ Reality Bytes #61 VDI Experience is HERE! 🚀 with Andy Philp · The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome it, change Makers to the Deck Show with Tim
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: Flower and Tom McGraw. Let's get into it.
• 0:09
  Speaker 2: Hello, change Makers. You know what it is. It's the
• 0:11
  Speaker 2: Deck Show, show within a show within a show, which is,
• 0:15
  Speaker 2: as you well know by now, those episodes of Reality
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: Bites where a selection of a Reality Bites panel and
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: myself get to interview fascinating Next Thinker's fellow colleagues who
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: are making a difference in our industry. And today we
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: have a very special guest, and it's a very special
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: occasion because we are marking the recent release of Next
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: Think VDI Experience and who better talk about it than
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: our friend and former guest on the show, Andy Philp.
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: How you doing, Andy?
• 0:44
  Speaker 3: Very good?
• 0:44
  Speaker 4: Thank you? Yeah, thank you for letting me join. Yeah.
• 0:48
  Speaker 4: Well what was raining earlier today here in sunny englynder
• 0:51
  Speaker 4: and what it's like for you? But yes, exciting day.
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: It's glorious out of this window, Andy, believe it or not, beautiful,
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: a beautiful January day and London. You know, I came
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: up with a really good question to kick things off,
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: you know, and I'm genuinely curious to know before we
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: get into VDI Experience and your role in it and
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: all of that good stuff. I want to know, Andy,
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: looking back on your career journey, what was the wildest
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: or most unexpected job you had before before joining product
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: marketing at next Lots.
• 1:20
  Speaker 4: Of that's good question. Lots of jobs over the year. Well,
• 1:25
  Speaker 4: I've been in it for like twenty years, over twenty
• 1:27
  Speaker 4: years aging myself. But my first thought is actually going
• 1:30
  Speaker 4: back before my IT journey. So back in my late
• 1:33
  Speaker 4: teenage years, I used to work at a zoo kind
• 1:36
  Speaker 4: of theme nice and I was the train driver, so
• 1:39
  Speaker 4: I would take it. So yeah, I would take families
• 1:42
  Speaker 4: and their kids so they could wave around, wave at
• 1:43
  Speaker 4: the animals. It was a great job because everyone else was,
• 1:46
  Speaker 4: you know, picking up litter and working in the restaurant
• 1:49
  Speaker 4: and so I got a really good deal in that one.
• 1:51
  Speaker 4: But so that was kind of the most unexpected, and
• 1:54
  Speaker 4: I think while there's still most challenging, I think back
• 1:57
  Speaker 4: in my IT career, back in the early and mid tans,
• 2:01
  Speaker 4: I was in a consulting role for quite a big vendor.
• 2:04
  Speaker 4: Back then, a lot of the work around them was
• 2:07
  Speaker 4: around migration operating system migrations, So being responsible for the
• 2:13
  Speaker 4: design and architecture of a fully automated XP migration project
• 2:18
  Speaker 4: for you know, place to thirty thousand devices in about
• 2:21
  Speaker 4: one hundred countries fully automated. So back in those days,
• 2:25
  Speaker 4: you could reboot the PC. Remember this team whole control
• 2:28
  Speaker 4: ut down pixie boot, and it would REBUILDIXI boo, architecting
• 2:33
  Speaker 4: that or doing it automatically for you know, thousands of people.
• 2:37
  Speaker 4: The classic thing with that, that was like an eighteen
• 2:39
  Speaker 4: month project. And the reason it comes to mind is
• 2:43
  Speaker 4: when we finished that aspect, they'd started like rolling it out,
• 2:47
  Speaker 4: they'd already started planning for the next migration.
• 2:50
  Speaker 3: Mm hmm.
• 2:51
  Speaker 4: Interestingly we're going to talk about video that kind of
• 2:55
  Speaker 4: it's just not really relevant anymore. That kind of treadmill
• 2:58
  Speaker 4: of operating system migration as much easier in a VDI
• 3:01
  Speaker 4: world to manage that. But that was probably the most
• 3:03
  Speaker 4: challenging in my early career, at least before moving on
• 3:07
  Speaker 4: to other things.
• 3:08
  Speaker 3: So heither you and I have something in common. Then
• 3:10
  Speaker 3: in my late teens early twenties, I drove a school bus,
• 3:13
  Speaker 3: which was very much like working at the zoo.
• 3:15
  Speaker 4: A character on The Simpsons, the cool rocket guy.
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: He was definitely But what brought you specifically to your
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: role at next being Canady.
• 3:23
  Speaker 4: Oh, so I think of I've been in AWS computing
• 3:26
  Speaker 4: now for well since the early two thousands, and if
• 3:29
  Speaker 4: I think about it, like, over the years, there's been
• 3:32
  Speaker 4: all these terms and you'll probably not there's like systems
• 3:36
  Speaker 4: resource management, PC, life cycle management, patch management, asset management,
• 3:41
  Speaker 4: unified endpoint management, enterprise mobility management. Right, these are all
• 3:46
  Speaker 4: different names for effectively the same thing, and these are
• 3:50
  Speaker 4: always focused inwards on it. And what attracted me to
• 3:53
  Speaker 4: the Next Ink and also to DECKX in particular, was
• 3:57
  Speaker 4: that basic premise of reframing everything around themployee right, rather
• 4:01
  Speaker 4: than thinking about the it inwards, and that being very
• 4:04
  Speaker 4: transformative from a technology perspective in terms of what next
• 4:08
  Speaker 4: thing can offer, but also in terms of the way
• 4:10
  Speaker 4: it can deliver back to their business as well. So
• 4:14
  Speaker 4: it was an adjacency to EU see very attractive and
• 4:16
  Speaker 4: if it was the future and it, as it turns out,
• 4:19
  Speaker 4: it has been. So it's been a wild four years.
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and we're of course announcing on the podcast today.
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: We're announcing it's been out for a few days, but
• 4:29
  Speaker 2: VDI Experience so maybe in a nutshell, tell us what
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: it is, why it matters and what your role is
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: in relation to its development and launch.
• 4:37
  Speaker 4: Yeah, so, VIDA Experience is the latest product in our family,
• 4:41
  Speaker 4: and it's built specifically to addressed the needs of vd
• 4:43
  Speaker 4: IT teams. And we'll probably dig into this in the conversation,
• 4:48
  Speaker 4: but when we think of just getting down to the
• 4:51
  Speaker 4: most basic elements, when an employee has any kind of
• 4:53
  Speaker 4: issue when they're using VDI, regardless of what the source is,
• 4:58
  Speaker 4: and we can get into detail later, but the client,
• 5:01
  Speaker 4: the network, the infrastructure, the VDI solution, whatever it is,
• 5:05
  Speaker 4: it manifests itself as a VDI problem, and it's the
• 5:10
  Speaker 4: VDI teams that are blamed and expected to fix it.
• 5:14
  Speaker 4: The employees don't really have a sense of what's going on,
• 5:17
  Speaker 4: their desktop is somewhere else, the rest of it, don't
• 5:20
  Speaker 4: necessarily understand the VDI solution. So really what happens is
• 5:25
  Speaker 4: those teams are running up with the expectation to fix
• 5:28
  Speaker 4: all of these problems, and we know that a lot
• 5:31
  Speaker 4: of the time the problem has sometimes nothing to do
• 5:33
  Speaker 4: with the VDI but sometimes slightly linked to VDI. So
• 5:38
  Speaker 4: we're really seeing that key pain of VDI teams, which
• 5:42
  Speaker 4: I'm sure we'll talk about addressing that with this product
• 5:44
  Speaker 4: and sort of really focusing very deeply on it. So
• 5:47
  Speaker 4: I'm part of the product marketing team here and next thing,
• 5:50
  Speaker 4: so for me and my team, our job is to
• 5:53
  Speaker 4: work with the rest of the organization, so product management
• 5:57
  Speaker 4: people that design and sort of build the products, with engineering,
• 6:00
  Speaker 4: marketing sales to really drive that vision and message around
• 6:05
  Speaker 4: what our offerings do and how they help customers, and
• 6:07
  Speaker 4: then working with customers and partners to really spread the message.
• 6:11
  Speaker 4: So blessed to work and such a great team and
• 6:13
  Speaker 4: for such a great company. So it's as I said,
• 6:15
  Speaker 4: it's been a fantastic four years so far, nearly four.
• 6:18
  Speaker 3: Years, and then I lived much of that blame games.
• 6:22
  Speaker 3: It's VDI, it's Citrix, and I think it's an indication
• 6:25
  Speaker 3: of how complicated those environments are. Right their server technology,
• 6:29
  Speaker 3: there's storage array technology, there's a network involved corporate and
• 6:33
  Speaker 3: last mile. There's application latency, there's all of the things
• 6:36
  Speaker 3: that come with the end user compute on top of
• 6:39
  Speaker 3: the VDI complexity, and it's all looked at as one
• 6:42
  Speaker 3: black box that the VDI team has to fix, so
• 6:45
  Speaker 3: that the back end complexity and the cost that goes
• 6:47
  Speaker 3: along with it is not trivial, right, and when you
• 6:52
  Speaker 3: joined next think almost four years ago, we were still
• 6:55
  Speaker 3: getting the Infinity platform up and running. We were working
• 6:58
  Speaker 3: on other plugins like Application Experience and eventually with Flow
• 7:03
  Speaker 3: and Amplify, and weren't really focused on VDI other than
• 7:08
  Speaker 3: what we could kind of natively capture from the session.
• 7:11
  Speaker 3: It was still kind of a novel idea. Did you
• 7:14
  Speaker 3: feel when you joined a little bit like that voice
• 7:16
  Speaker 3: in the wilderness? How were you feeling trying to get
• 7:19
  Speaker 3: people to pay attention in.
• 7:21
  Speaker 4: Some respects, I think you're right. I think you've summarized
• 7:24
  Speaker 4: in a good way. The reality is, you know, VDI
• 7:27
  Speaker 4: is a black art, and he said, we've supported for
• 7:29
  Speaker 4: many years. But the reality is it isn't quite just
• 7:33
  Speaker 4: like having another desktop. In some cases, it can be.
• 7:36
  Speaker 4: And the real challenge with VDI is, you know, when
• 7:40
  Speaker 4: you scratch the surface just a little bit, it can
• 7:43
  Speaker 4: get complicated very very quickly, and that can be off
• 7:46
  Speaker 4: putting to a lot of people and frustrating. So when
• 7:50
  Speaker 4: you know, someone asks a basic question like how do
• 7:54
  Speaker 4: I update an application? After the answers normally, well, it depends.
• 7:59
  Speaker 4: There's no one size fits all approach to VDI, and
• 8:02
  Speaker 4: that can be kind of off putting and sort of
• 8:05
  Speaker 4: frustrating for a lot of people who aren't deeply familiar
• 8:09
  Speaker 4: with the technology. Obviously, I've come from that background which
• 8:12
  Speaker 4: kind of helped. So yeah, I think maybe a voice
• 8:16
  Speaker 4: in the world, and this is an interesting terminology, but
• 8:20
  Speaker 4: I think it was. It is a complicated topic if
• 8:23
  Speaker 4: you let it get complicated.
• 8:25
  Speaker 3: So while we were kind of i'll call it ramping
• 8:28
  Speaker 3: up the focus on VDI coming out with this product,
• 8:32
  Speaker 3: others in the market, the VDI vendors kind of got
• 8:35
  Speaker 3: their attention on Dex primarily because of the progress that
• 8:39
  Speaker 3: we've made. So maybe a bit of a softball for you,
• 8:42
  Speaker 3: or not a softball, a curveball. Maybe, why do you
• 8:45
  Speaker 3: think it's easier or better to handle VDI in a
• 8:50
  Speaker 3: DEX platform holistically then the other way around? Then for
• 8:54
  Speaker 3: a VDI vendor to try to tackle all of the
• 8:57
  Speaker 3: complexities of the end user compute in the physical world.
• 8:59
  Speaker 4: Yeah, well, I think DEX is its own that's an
• 9:03
  Speaker 4: interesting question. Yeah, So DEX is its own kind of
• 9:05
  Speaker 4: category in approach. It's very different traditional kind of it approaches.
• 9:11
  Speaker 4: And that's where we live and we've breathed, and we've
• 9:14
  Speaker 4: i would say we've created that category and really driven
• 9:18
  Speaker 4: the market in that direction. And the way that, as
• 9:21
  Speaker 4: you said, we've built the Infinity platform means that we
• 9:24
  Speaker 4: can bring all not just monitoring VDI, but that all
• 9:28
  Speaker 4: of those capabilities to bear in that world. It's a
• 9:31
  Speaker 4: lot harder to go the other way, especially you know,
• 9:33
  Speaker 4: the different disciplines. So I think we've been very deliberate
• 9:37
  Speaker 4: in our certainly our product strategy and our go to
• 9:40
  Speaker 4: market strategy to say, let's build this first. I would
• 9:44
  Speaker 4: argue world's first purpose built cloud native platform for des
• 9:50
  Speaker 4: as that underlying foundation, and then bring VDI on top
• 9:53
  Speaker 4: of that. I think that's a much more sensible approach
• 9:56
  Speaker 4: than trying to add, you know, add a DEX score
• 10:00
  Speaker 4: to monitoring product isn't necessarily the same thing. A lot
• 10:04
  Speaker 4: of the way that goes into DEX is the correlation work.
• 10:07
  Speaker 4: A lot of the intellectual property and value was built
• 10:10
  Speaker 4: and baked into the platform, and that takes years and
• 10:12
  Speaker 4: years of probably decades really of engineering and understanding and expertise.
• 10:17
  Speaker 4: So that's where I think where we're uniquely placed in
• 10:19
  Speaker 4: the market to really make a big difference. Sure we'll
• 10:22
  Speaker 4: talk about some examples later.
• 10:24
  Speaker 3: Yeah, And as a similar to you a former enterprise
• 10:28
  Speaker 3: IT technologist, we looked at and used lots of analytics
• 10:33
  Speaker 3: tools in that VDI environment because it was so complicated, right,
• 10:37
  Speaker 3: and those tools tend to be very technically focused, not
• 10:41
  Speaker 3: employee focused. So I look at the dex platform, like
• 10:44
  Speaker 3: you said, bringing in all of the other pieces of
• 10:47
  Speaker 3: the puzzle into in addition to the technico metrics, but
• 10:51
  Speaker 3: also how the platforms are architected. We're architected for an
• 10:55
  Speaker 3: environment that's not all in the same room, right. VDI
• 10:58
  Speaker 3: tools are very much focused on that are all in
• 11:00
  Speaker 3: the data center. So I think we've got we've got
• 11:03
  Speaker 3: better flexibility there. What was the kind of the as
• 11:05
  Speaker 3: you've been here and gone through the evolution coming up
• 11:08
  Speaker 3: to the release now, what was do you have a
• 11:11
  Speaker 3: point in that next Thing journey where you felt it
• 11:13
  Speaker 3: was the turning point where somebody was really starting to say, yeah,
• 11:17
  Speaker 3: we get it, you know. Was it a conversation with
• 11:20
  Speaker 3: Sam or something the pagro might have said, what was
• 11:22
  Speaker 3: your what was your kind of turning point to say
• 11:24
  Speaker 3: this is going to happen?
• 11:26
  Speaker 4: I think yeah, there's been a lot of like I
• 11:29
  Speaker 4: would say, you know, increasingly seeing there's increased interest and
• 11:33
  Speaker 4: adoption use the term VDI broadly, but especially in cloud.
• 11:37
  Speaker 4: I think more and more customers trying it, especially with Cloud,
• 11:41
  Speaker 4: you know, looking at is this right and coming to
• 11:43
  Speaker 4: next thing and asking us, you know, for help. And
• 11:46
  Speaker 4: also i'd say customers, customers, customers, you know, hearing despite
• 11:52
  Speaker 4: all the tools they're having, the pressure that these teams
• 11:55
  Speaker 4: are under, and some of these are a very large organizations,
• 12:00
  Speaker 4: mature VDI systems, and they're using, as you said, Tim,
• 12:04
  Speaker 4: a combination of kind of vendor tools here, home grown tools,
• 12:08
  Speaker 4: open source, and they're trying to piece it all together
• 12:11
  Speaker 4: and it's not working very well. So I think there's
• 12:13
  Speaker 4: just been this kind of continued interest and focus and
• 12:18
  Speaker 4: request from our customers to really bring the world of decks,
• 12:22
  Speaker 4: as you said, to the VDI space end to end,
• 12:25
  Speaker 4: and that's really what we're building with the video products.
• 12:28
  Speaker 4: So lots of customer feedback, you know, I'm thinking of
• 12:30
  Speaker 4: when I think about what we're doing, a lot of
• 12:32
  Speaker 4: customers saying, look, just give us the information we need
• 12:36
  Speaker 4: to prove it's not VD right.
• 12:39
  Speaker 3: It's like the network team, right, they troublesh you to
• 12:41
  Speaker 3: prove it's not their fault.
• 12:42
  Speaker 4: Right, and you know, maybe we'll explore that later as well,
• 12:45
  Speaker 4: but it's it's not just about you know, you know
• 12:48
  Speaker 4: that term meantime to innocence or passing blame around. You know,
• 12:52
  Speaker 4: you need that end to end visibility in order not
• 12:54
  Speaker 4: just to work out where the problem is, but who
• 12:56
  Speaker 4: do work with and who to fix it. So I
• 12:58
  Speaker 4: think that's gonna be a big part of what doing
• 13:00
  Speaker 4: here with the products. I'm very excited about that.
• 13:02
  Speaker 3: Many of the crisis calls that I was on at
• 13:04
  Speaker 3: two am about an offshore app developer team who couldn't
• 13:09
  Speaker 3: work because of a ved high problem, it's not the
• 13:11
  Speaker 3: vd I team on that call, it's every single discipline
• 13:14
  Speaker 3: because nobody knows where the problem is. Yeah, and those
• 13:17
  Speaker 3: are those are always fun calls. So we've got a
• 13:19
  Speaker 3: fairly diverse audience, right, We've got technologists, we've got thought leaders,
• 13:23
  Speaker 3: we have leadership for those who maybe aren't as technically
• 13:27
  Speaker 3: minded or don't work in a VDI environment. They're saying
• 13:32
  Speaker 3: kind of who cares? Right, why does this? In layman's terms,
• 13:35
  Speaker 3: we explain to the audience why this matters so well.
• 13:39
  Speaker 4: As I said before, and I'll say again, you know
• 13:42
  Speaker 4: the purpose of the product video experience is to focus
• 13:45
  Speaker 4: on those VDI teams. Right, I've said that, But it's
• 13:50
  Speaker 4: tempting to dismiss VDI as just some you know, sever
• 13:54
  Speaker 4: or piece of infrastructure over there. It doesn't really matter.
• 13:56
  Speaker 4: And it's kind of almost a lift and shift approach
• 13:59
  Speaker 4: that we hear sometimes, Oh it's just physical, but it's
• 14:02
  Speaker 4: in the cloud or it's in a data center somewhere.
• 14:04
  Speaker 4: When we think about VDI, there's typically a strategic reason
• 14:08
  Speaker 4: to do it. Now there's clear benefits, like to do
• 14:12
  Speaker 4: with security and flexibility that those are obvious, and they
• 14:15
  Speaker 4: tend to be around specific use cases for specific people.
• 14:19
  Speaker 4: And if the idea is to make life easier for it,
• 14:22
  Speaker 4: which is I would argue the main purpose of VDI.
• 14:25
  Speaker 4: It's not built for end users. It's built for I
• 14:27
  Speaker 4: T and to make it more cost effective. But if
• 14:30
  Speaker 4: in the end it ends up, especially operationally costing more,
• 14:35
  Speaker 4: frustrating users and giving a nightmare to it, that's the
• 14:39
  Speaker 4: kind of trifecta of kind of pain that you're introducing
• 14:42
  Speaker 4: into your environment. So I use the term, you know,
• 14:46
  Speaker 4: is the juice worth the squeetze? So from a business respective,
• 14:50
  Speaker 4: you have to think about is this the right way
• 14:52
  Speaker 4: is this going to allow people to work. But as
• 14:54
  Speaker 4: you said, if you're an application owner and people are
• 14:57
  Speaker 4: accessing your application from VDI, you need to be interested
• 15:01
  Speaker 4: and something I think I would add to that, And
• 15:03
  Speaker 4: you talk about this a lot, tim, which is a
• 15:05
  Speaker 4: strategic approach to dens. You know, we talk about reactive
• 15:09
  Speaker 4: to proactive, preventative. A strategic approach has to encompass everyone
• 15:14
  Speaker 4: has to encompass all models of compute. So it's very
• 15:18
  Speaker 4: important from a dex's perspective strategically. But the foundation for
• 15:22
  Speaker 4: that is to get the information into to service those
• 15:25
  Speaker 4: teams that are dealing with VDI day to day, so
• 15:29
  Speaker 4: we can unlock those other objectives as well. So I
• 15:32
  Speaker 4: think it's super important and becoming more and more relevant
• 15:35
  Speaker 4: now as especially as we're seeing more and more organizations
• 15:39
  Speaker 4: adopt VDI and desktop as a service technologies.
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: So yeah, I think it's important to highlight that that
• 15:44
  Speaker 3: comment that you made. VDI was developed and deployed to
• 15:48
  Speaker 3: solve an IT problem, not because employees were screaming for
• 15:53
  Speaker 3: a VDI, Right. We had a senior executive that said,
• 15:56
  Speaker 3: we have a VDI environment. We are now going to
• 15:59
  Speaker 3: rep every single desktop in the entire company with VDI,
• 16:03
  Speaker 3: and that was not because the employees wanted VDI sessions.
• 16:07
  Speaker 3: It was because he wanted to simplify his deployment of technology,
• 16:11
  Speaker 3: when in the end it was more expensive, it was
• 16:14
  Speaker 3: more complicated, and it wasn't what the employees needed, so
• 16:17
  Speaker 3: it never got legs. But I think that's important to
• 16:19
  Speaker 3: know that VDI is really a technology solution and not
• 16:23
  Speaker 3: an employee demand.
• 16:24
  Speaker 4: Agreed, And I would say back in previous roles where
• 16:28
  Speaker 4: I went to you know, one of the main VDI vendors,
• 16:33
  Speaker 4: one of the key reasons that VDI projects failed was
• 16:37
  Speaker 4: user acceptance. You do all this work and then you
• 16:43
  Speaker 4: get an experience that's not as good or you know,
• 16:46
  Speaker 4: it's worse than what they had on a physical what's
• 16:48
  Speaker 4: in it for me other than you're just adding pain
• 16:51
  Speaker 4: and complexity to my day job. I just want to
• 16:54
  Speaker 4: be able to work. So I think you know you're right.
• 16:57
  Speaker 4: That's why I say it all the time, forgetting about
• 16:59
  Speaker 4: the end time and just saying, what's a simpler way
• 17:03
  Speaker 4: than managing a fleet of laptops. Let's go to a
• 17:05
  Speaker 4: virtual world. That could be good variety, but in the
• 17:08
  Speaker 4: long run it may not be the best thing if
• 17:10
  Speaker 4: it's not the right people and for the right use cases,
• 17:13
  Speaker 4: which Vidi is fantastic solution for. But it certainly isn't
• 17:16
  Speaker 4: for everyone, and it wouldn't I don't think for anyone.
• 17:19
  Speaker 4: For you, Tim, it would be a terrible solution as
• 17:21
  Speaker 4: your daily driver, based on the amount of traveling you're doing.
• 17:24
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I would not survive. When I was at Hartford,
• 17:27
  Speaker 3: I actually switched over to a published desktop for a
• 17:29
  Speaker 3: couple of years. But I didn't do it because I
• 17:32
  Speaker 3: wanted that experience. I didn't do it because out of
• 17:35
  Speaker 3: a benefit for me. I did it because in a
• 17:37
  Speaker 3: support role, I wanted to see what my customers were
• 17:41
  Speaker 3: experiencing and using. I wanted to be part of their
• 17:44
  Speaker 3: environment so I could be could live it. But it
• 17:47
  Speaker 3: was not It was not ideal, especially when you're when
• 17:50
  Speaker 3: you're mobile remote, like a remote worker working offshore in
• 17:53
  Speaker 3: another time zone, when your database and your applications are
• 17:56
  Speaker 3: over here, it makes some sense to get rid of latency,
• 17:59
  Speaker 3: but certainly not for ease of use.
• 18:02
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and just to pick up on that, we we've
• 18:05
  Speaker 4: done certain events we kind of asked the crowd questions.
• 18:07
  Speaker 4: So when I was presenting with our product, manager Dennis.
• 18:11
  Speaker 4: We actually asked that to a room full of people
• 18:14
  Speaker 4: that support VDI systems and or have VDI in their environments,
• 18:17
  Speaker 4: and we said, how many of you use a VDI
• 18:20
  Speaker 4: desktop as your daily driver right as your daily desktop?
• 18:23
  Speaker 4: And maybe you know, five percent put their hands up. So,
• 18:28
  Speaker 4: I know it's a bit of a weird thing to say,
• 18:29
  Speaker 4: but there's sometimes a lack of empathy as well when
• 18:31
  Speaker 4: it comes to the IT people and what they're actually
• 18:34
  Speaker 4: giving to the end person. So you doing that as
• 18:37
  Speaker 4: a really good example of what you know. You can
• 18:39
  Speaker 4: have first hand experience of what the end the end customers.
• 18:42
  Speaker 3: Seeing the prevailing the prevailing thought was you think this
• 18:47
  Speaker 3: is bad. This is solving a problem that you wouldn't
• 18:49
  Speaker 3: even be able to live with. Right, this is comparative
• 18:52
  Speaker 3: to the alternative. This is awesome, So stop your complaining.
• 18:55
  Speaker 5: Hey, Andy, this is Sean. I had a question for you.
• 18:59
  Speaker 5: You've probably touched up on already a couple times, but
• 19:01
  Speaker 5: just specifically, what would you say this launch means for
• 19:05
  Speaker 5: BDI teams, like how it will change their work lives.
• 19:08
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I think when we time, I think that'd be
• 19:12
  Speaker 4: really what we're trying to really do with this product
• 19:15
  Speaker 4: is help those teams fix issues faster and reduce those
• 19:18
  Speaker 4: escalations that they're getting. So we hear all the same
• 19:21
  Speaker 4: time whenever we talk to customers that those BDI teams inundated.
• 19:24
  Speaker 4: In fact, we did the Death and Rebirth of the
• 19:28
  Speaker 4: Service Desk report at the end of last year and
• 19:32
  Speaker 4: we found the same in our own research. It was
• 19:34
  Speaker 4: that nine out of ten of the organizations are regularly
• 19:37
  Speaker 4: escalating tickets to Level three VDI teams. And here's the
• 19:41
  Speaker 4: more important one, nearly a third of them are doing
• 19:43
  Speaker 4: it on at least the daily basis. So like at
• 19:46
  Speaker 4: least the daily basis, these highly specialized, more expensive specialist
• 19:51
  Speaker 4: teams are dealing with day to day tickets around VDI
• 19:55
  Speaker 4: and it's a huge burden on them. So we think
• 19:57
  Speaker 4: we can really go a long way to relieve that burden,
• 20:01
  Speaker 4: fixing the issues when they're arising, reducing those escalations, and
• 20:04
  Speaker 4: actually avoiding them all together. So putting them into the
• 20:08
  Speaker 4: driving seat, and as we do with everything, moving from
• 20:11
  Speaker 4: that reactive to a proactive model so that they can
• 20:15
  Speaker 4: fix it if it's in their domain, or fix it
• 20:18
  Speaker 4: with the right team with the right insights to avoid
• 20:20
  Speaker 4: it altogether. So I think there's gonna be a big
• 20:24
  Speaker 4: unburdening we see of quite often a lot of hell
• 20:29
  Speaker 4: that we see when we talk to those vd IT
• 20:31
  Speaker 4: teams that they're having to deal with on a daily basis.
• 20:34
  Speaker 4: So yeah, that's very excited about that.
• 20:36
  Speaker 5: Excellent, And I guess like to touch upon the proactivity
• 20:39
  Speaker 5: that this solution offers to VDI teams. How does that
• 20:42
  Speaker 5: proactivity compare to the proactivity that we offer via just
• 20:46
  Speaker 5: the standard next Thing solutions.
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: Is there any difference or really similar?
• 20:50
  Speaker 4: So I kind of mentioned this before we build all
• 20:52
  Speaker 4: our products on the Infinity platform, so I think the
• 20:56
  Speaker 4: big difference I'll kind of maybe talk about three areas,
• 20:58
  Speaker 4: but in general for VDI, one of the things we're
• 21:00
  Speaker 4: doing with VDI experiences we're really ramping up the granularity
• 21:04
  Speaker 4: of our data and the fidelity of what we're capturing.
• 21:08
  Speaker 4: The reason is those systems tend to be resourced at
• 21:12
  Speaker 4: the sort of upper limit. You don't want a VDI
• 21:14
  Speaker 4: desktop or a bunch of them running like ten percent utilization,
• 21:18
  Speaker 4: you're throwing money away. It means they're more susceptible and
• 21:22
  Speaker 4: sensitive to changes. So we need to be much more expedient,
• 21:27
  Speaker 4: much more granuar with our data, so that's something we're doing,
• 21:29
  Speaker 4: and then it sits on top of those other systems
• 21:32
  Speaker 4: that are baked and built into Infinity. So for example alerting,
• 21:36
  Speaker 4: this is going to be a key thing for proactivity.
• 21:39
  Speaker 4: We can find issues as they're emerging, very very quickly
• 21:43
  Speaker 4: and form the right teams, especially to VDI teams, and say, hey,
• 21:47
  Speaker 4: there is an issue that's affecting a population of people
• 21:50
  Speaker 4: that are in VDI and here's the source before people
• 21:54
  Speaker 4: start complaining. So that's going to be a big part
• 21:57
  Speaker 4: of proactivity. I think another one is AI. We have
• 22:01
  Speaker 4: a lot of AI in the product already and coming
• 22:03
  Speaker 4: in the roadmap and what we're delivering with VDI Experience,
• 22:07
  Speaker 4: so providing insights on the impact and scope. So we
• 22:11
  Speaker 4: do that with alerting, but then diving into all of
• 22:14
  Speaker 4: that VDI session data, finding the patterns and the signals
• 22:17
  Speaker 4: and the noise and benchmarking across customers. I think it's
• 22:21
  Speaker 4: going to really help simplify and really help get to
• 22:25
  Speaker 4: the root of problems much much quicker. On top of
• 22:28
  Speaker 4: the fact, we have this beautiful tool. You know, when
• 22:30
  Speaker 4: you look at VIDI Experience, it's incredible, beautiful visualizations. But
• 22:35
  Speaker 4: the power to kind of look underneath the hood and
• 22:37
  Speaker 4: find patterns that you wouldn't ordinarily find is going to
• 22:40
  Speaker 4: be really key to being proactive and avoiding problems altogether.
• 22:44
  Speaker 4: And I think automation that's the last one, being able
• 22:46
  Speaker 4: to say, Okay, sometimes there are recurring issues that happen
• 22:49
  Speaker 4: all the time. Let's just use technologies like workflows within
• 22:53
  Speaker 4: the Infinity platform to fix problems and fix them for
• 22:57
  Speaker 4: good when they happen again, so we can avoid them altogether.
• 23:01
  Speaker 4: So yeah, there would be the three ways that we're
• 23:03
  Speaker 4: building on top of the Infinity platform. We're just cranking
• 23:07
  Speaker 4: up the granularity and the fidelity for VIDI systems, which
• 23:10
  Speaker 4: is what's needed.
• 23:11
  Speaker 2: Final question for you, n Andy, before we let you go,
• 23:14
  Speaker 2: what's for one thing you'd want every VDI team listening
• 23:18
  Speaker 2: to know about this new product.
• 23:22
  Speaker 4: VDI experience is built for you.
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much, Andy, fascinating insights there. Great to
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: talk to you. Thanks so much for plugging our death
• 23:30
  Speaker 2: and rebuff of the service Desk report as well. Listeners
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: can find that excellent report in the show notes and
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: they can download it free of charge. We will also link,
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: of course to us some more information about VDI experience.
• 23:42
  Speaker 2: And I guess a final question for you, Andy, if
• 23:44
  Speaker 2: they're a customer, if they're not a customer, if they're listening,
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: if they want a demo, if they want some more information,
• 23:49
  Speaker 2: where would you direct them? Where would you have us
• 23:51
  Speaker 2: direct them in those show notes?
• 23:54
  Speaker 4: Well, we have our product page, we have an announcement
• 23:57
  Speaker 4: blog which will be out by the time this goes.
• 23:59
  Speaker 4: Go there find more information. We have showcase videos, demo video,
• 24:04
  Speaker 4: we have lots of other resources and talk to come
• 24:08
  Speaker 4: talk to Next Thing and to learn more.
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: Quite so you will find all of those resources below. Listeners,
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: It just remains for us to say thank you so much, Andy,
• 24:15
  Speaker 2: and thanks for congratulations for driving this fantastic new addition
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: to the next Think product family. And congratulations to everybody
• 24:22
  Speaker 2: else who contributed as well. So their many out there
• 24:25
  Speaker 2: listening appreciate it.
• 24:26
  Speaker 3: Thanks Amy, thank you, thanks a lot.
• 24:28
  Speaker 2: Any.
• 24:30
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