Welcome to episode 390 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 the topic or recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, Ben sits down for a chat with Melissa Grand, head of product marketing for Windows 11 Enterprise, Windows 365, and Azure Virtual Desktop at Microsoft.
They discussed Microsoft offerings, specifically around Windows 365 and Microsoft's new endpoint device, Windows 365 link. This is Ben. I am here at Ignite again with Melissa Grant. Right? And make sure I get your right last name right. And do you wanna go ahead and give a quick introduction, who you are, how long you've been at Microsoft, what do you do at Microsoft? Sure. Anything like that? Great. Well, great to meet you. Thank you for having me.
So I head up product marketing for Windows 11 Enterprise, Windows 365, and Azure Virtual Desktop. I've been at Microsoft for about 14 years. Most of that time in and around the Windows world. Okay. So it's been a great experience most recently to bring Windows to the cloud. We kind of think of it as the last great workload to the cloud following Office and Azure. So that's been a lot of my focus the past couple of years. Okay. Very cool. And I've enjoyed it. So I did not
tell you this. I'm a Mac guy. So I I like my Macs. I just switched over to the new Surface Arm Plus Copilot device. Excellent. Welcome. Thanks. But because of that, I've used Windows 365 and Mac for a while. Yeah. I actually have customers that use ABD a lot. So it it'll be interesting to talk about some of the history because it sounds like you've been with it for a while now, like, from the launch of, I guess, ABD and then put it into Windows 365? That's right. Yeah. So we launched ABD
actually 5 years ago at Ignite. Is my math right? Yeah. 5 years ago at Ignite 2019. So our last really big Ignite in Orlando, that was the launch for ABD. And we're super excited. Cloud VDI, you know, great product with a lot of precision for Azure infra professionals, you know, great fidelity, great optionality to be able to have things like multi session. And with a great show, great launch, and then we all went home.
And ABD took off as you could imagine because there was just such high demand for virtual machines between the supply chain issues for PCs and just literally the complexity of getting people set up for work from home Yep. When the pandemic hit. And so the team started thinking about how can we scale?
And one of the pieces of feedback that we got from our customers was we love what this does and the quality of the Windows experience it delivers, but we literally don't have enough Azure infra IT people to stand up all these virtual machines. Okay. Can you please make a SaaSified version of this for endpoint managers and just make it work at Intune? So I can literally just go into Intune, set up a Cloud PC, put the image on it, push down the apps, and get it
out to, like, whoever needs it. And I need it to be fast and I need it to be really easy. And so the team set to work and we literally built this great hybrid work tool, hybridly, because the engineering team was pretty scattered. The dev teams in China, you know, the PM and product marketing teams were kind of all home, some in Redmond, some in Utah, and we built this, you you know, SaaS version of Windows really to respond to the moment.
And customers really liked it because it gave them what they asked for, which is just really turnkey Windows experiences that looked and felt and acted just like Windows, but like yourself, could be used on any device, including, you know, a Mac or, you know, an older PC if but still use the latest OS. So that's kind of the history of it, and now we're 3 years on and have really seen it take off and especially in a number of areas. And today announcing our first purpose built endpoint
for it. Yes. That was so I did wanna talk about that because that was exciting. I saw that Satya had went up on stage. Mhmm. And I was like, oh, I can't get one till April. Mhmm. But I am excited about them. So what how does this endpoint work? Because I know traditionally, like, a lot of people maybe use some other third party thin clients. Like you said, you could use Mac, you could use Windows, but this is like a dedicated Windows 365 and the AVD device? I was curious about that too because
I saw all the Windows 365. But Yeah. What is this new device? Yeah. Well, the name kind of says what it is. It links you to the Cloud PC. That's what it does. And so this is another thing that we built really in response to customer request. So we launched Windows 365 boot a couple of years ago. So the ability to have an admin setting that says, when I log in, it's gonna take me directly to my Cloud PC.
And customers wanted this because they had some scenarios where, like, they don't have people using local apps, they don't wanna have to manage the image locally, just take me to the Cloud. Really easy. And they said, hey, could you build an endpoint that just does this? Okay. Just make it as simple as that. Just that. We just want a link to the cloud, and we want it to be low cost. We want it to be super
secure. Security was actually the big driver for this because we have certain use cases where we just need people to be able to log in to their cloud PC. And so, like, that was the challenge we took on. How simple and secure can we make this thing? Okay. And then we discovered a couple other affordances along the way. You know, we were able to design something that's very sustainable. It's very durable.
It's very easy to set up. And so just we're able to tick some boxes that customers were really asking for for this kind of endpoint. Okay. And I'm I'm assuming too, and I know Satya talked about it, is one thing that I've had some customers struggle with is you get the endpoints out there and naturally, they have the 1 around Teams. They're doing Teams audio. They're doing video calls. They're doing
all of that. And I know there's been some work there around even the clients and trying to optimize media, but is there other stuff too in the link that then you were able to do to even optimize meeting experiences and some of those ops experiences that I would say maybe with some of the hardware offloading and some of the way those work with thin clients, it can be unpredictable at best. Yeah. We kind of think of it as a as a 2 parter.
So the 2 things obviously that, you know, slow down great video communication is either the connection Yep. Or the actual speed at which the the computing happens once you're there. Right? Yeah. So it's either I can't log on or now I'm here and it's choppy or the video is slow or whatever it is. And so we think of that as the partnership. The links job is to make the connection fast and secure. Okay. And then after that, it hands off everything else to the cloud PC.
So it does its physical job and the cloud does its cloud job. And so all of the affordances that you have for teams and other video communication in the Windows 365 service Uh-huh. Things like, VDI 2 point o, things like, you know, redirection. All of that happens in the cloud, not on the device. So they're not competing for that experience. The the device's job is just to get you there. The cloud takes care of the rest. Got it. Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage your Office 365
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So one question with that device, Going back to, like, thin clients, it's typically thin clients you have to manage them as well. Mhmm. Is there management you have to do on this on the linker because it's literally just a link? It's there's nothing people can do with it? There's nothing you can do with it. Okay. Everything, it's adminless. It's passwordless. All the security cannot be disabled. Okay. So all you do and we'll we'll actually show a demo of this tomorrow in the general session.
So all you do is you plug it in. Okay. You enroll it in Entra. You you go into your Intune console. It pulls down all of your security baselines, your image, and all your configurations. Whatever you've set up in Intune, that's what it's running, and that's it. Got it. So Intune does pull those policies then down to this Windows 365 link device? No. Not to the device. It just ensures To the Windows 365. To the Cloud PC. PC. Yes. Got it. Okay. But there's no way to
do an end run around that. Got it. Yeah. Okay. Right. I'm thinking to customers that I have because I do consulting as well as Mhmm. When they go to Windows 365 versus ABD, is it a little bit more of kinda going along that same theme that you have with Windows 365 where they don't
have the larger teams to manage Yes. All within clients or I don't wanna say necessarily only an SMB play, but a little bit more on that SMB ease of management side, that's where the link fits in with Windows 365 versus, I would say, the enterprises tend to have that bigger IT staff that can handle some of that better. They can, but one of the things that we've heard from our customers is Mhmm. Their IT resources and staffing is is finite. Right?
Like and there's so many new things that people are adopting. You know, copilot, advanced security, all of these things, and they don't get more headcount for it. So, actually, a lot of our larger customers, and Wells Fargo and Johnson and Johnson are 2 customers that are here with us this week. Alright. We'll talk about this on Thursday, is they were like, look.
We only had so many IT resources, and we really wanted to have people spending time on modernizing on prem infra, on adopting Copilot, on Copilot, on moving other workloads to the cloud. This made it really easy for us to not have IT work on that. Okay. So they were like, it's so much easier than on prem VDI. It's so much easier than, you know, the other solutions we had, like, whether it was,
you know, keeping old desktops running. Yeah. They were like, we don't need to worry about that because we're just moving to Windows 365, and that's freeing up IT's time and budget so that we can do other new things. Got it. Focus on the other stuff. I've I've run into that a little I SharePoint background. Mhmm. And that was one of those things even the transition from on prem
to the cloud. It was you don't have to have staff now to worry about SQL Servers and maintain patching servers and installing updates as now we can focus on other stuff. So similar mindset with Windows 365 and Lync is let IT folks on things that enhance the business, bring more business value, simplify Yeah. How we deploy Windows to Exactly. Other people. Yeah. Or And then they were like, and make sure you do that while not sacrificing either security or employee experience.
Because nobody wants to have, like, a mediocre Windows experience Yep. So that they can have, like, a miraculous Copilot experience. Like, those 2 things don't go together. So they were like, give us perfect, personal, high fidelity Windows 11 so all my employees are happy, and then they also have time to start using things like Copilot. Yeah. And the security aspect is big too. Like, when Satya came on stage today, that was really cool to see. Everybody expected Copilot.
Yes. Right? Because Copilot AI, but then to see him Copilot Copilot, there were those 3 Copilot pillars, but then also security. Yes. And I hear you talking about that a lot too with Windows 365 with this linked device is there's been a lot of focus on the security aspect of it as well Absolutely. Which has been really cool. And is, do you see that even as an aspect of why people are going to Windows 365 versus personal devices instead of security?
Yeah. And, you know, VDI or virtualization tools have traditionally had that element. Right? Otherwise, we'd just let you run your apps on your personal PC and, like, cross our fingers. But what this has allowed them to do is maintain consistency in their security posture across endpoints. And so people absolutely choose Windows 365 for security because they're able to keep the same baselines, for example, across their physical PCs and now their cloud PCs.
So it gives them a more secure sir security posture, and then they can also use the same security tools. So we've introduced Hotpatch type today, for example. Yep. Hot patch will work on physical PCs and cloud PCs. You do the same patching, same policies, all the same thing. And then with with the linked device as well, you get the extra layer of, like, hey. You can't even do anything locally. So security is a big driver for our customers for choosing Windows 11 and Windows 365,
for sure. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. And the Windows link device, going to the security, it doesn't even have a hard drive. Right? Did I hear that right? There's, like, not even any physical storage in that device? Yeah. Just enough to make it run and make that connection. Okay. Yep. Just just to perform the linking function. That's
cool. Yeah. And that's one thing I've heard and one thing so from a security perspective, like, I talked to some clients and they're like, well, why don't they just deploy Intune and manage all my devices with Intune where I can remotely wipe them, do all of that? Like, what are some of those security security advantages you've seen over when you would compare managing a physical device with Intune versus something like Windows 365?
If if someone would come to you with that question, why don't I just manage a physical device with Intune versus Windows 365? What are those benefits you see? Well, you manage them both in Intune. So Windows 365 can only be managed by Intune. So a lot of our customers are coming to us and saying and and there was a big momentum to move towards cloud management
over the last couple of years. Again, I think a lot of it was sort of, like, how can we be more in, you know, efficient and and do things remotely. But a lot of customers were saying, hey. I'm sort of living in Intune already. What I would love for you to do is give me more tools to make that easier and to make it more consistent. So if I'm managing all my cloud PCs in Intune, I wanna be managing Windows 365 in Intune.
And I then I want to be able to have those things be consistent in the image, in how we push down apps, how we do updates, how we patch, all of those things. So that's been our orientation, is that it's a first class Windows experience, and it's super easy for IT because it looks, acts, behaves just like Intune with a couple of extra affordances that you can't do on a physical device, like the ability to wipe it, restore it, and hand it off to somebody else, the ability to resize it.
If someone's like, hey, I don't have enough compute. I need a or I have a new dev project I'm kicking off. You can resize that machine to mortgage Okay. More storage. The other security benefit that it has also managed in Intune is what Satya talked about briefly, which is point in time restore.
So the ability to roll it back to up to 10 preset moments in time by IT so that if something were to occur, whether it is I left it on a bus and now I need to log back in and I need that thing that was on the bus to be gone or whether it is an incident occurs. So being able to roll back to an earlier protected state is another thing
we can uniquely do in the cloud. We'll certainly look to bring that type of resiliency to other Windows endpoints, but it's kind of everything good about Intune and Windows PC Management plus some stuff in the cloud. Okay. Yeah. Very cool. Well, we're out of time. Anything else you wanna end with? Anything else you want people to know about Windows 365, Windows 365 link? Yeah. I would just say, like, it was built based on customer feedback and need.
The link was built based on customer requests for, like, this is what we want. And so I would just say keep the feedback coming. Like, the team is super responsive to feedback, loves hearing it, loves talking to customers, and we will build what our customers want. Alright. Awesome. And I'll get links from you if people wanna reach out to you if you're on social media and get those. I'll put all of those in the podcast
notes. So thanks for being here. Thanks for coming on, Melissa, and joining me, and it was a pleasure talking to you and learning a little bit more about it. Yeah. You as well. Great to meet you. Alright. Thanks a lot. Thanks. 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.
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