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 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. 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 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, 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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.
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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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.
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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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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, 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. 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. 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, 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 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, Twitter, or Facebook. Thanks again for listening, and have a great day.