Transcript
Hi, welcome to Small World Big Data. I'm Mike Matchett and today we are going to be talking about how you can squeeze the most out of your application investments over time. The thing is, applications grow old, operating systems get replaced, and you have to keep up with all that. Or do you? Can you bring your applications along into your new world as you grow and work into clouds and desktops and all sorts of stuff? How do you keep from losing your previous investment in applications? We've got Numecent today to talk to us about some of the things they do with cloud paging. So hold on just a second. We'll dive right into it. Hey, welcome to our show. Arthur, welcome. Thank you. Mike. Uh, so Numecent is focused on this idea of, of containerization, of applications. I'll just put that out there. Application containerization. Uh, and it's a little different idea than when we talk about Docker containers, but it's in the same realm. But before we get into that, I just want to ask you a little bit about how you got involved in you personally, how you got involved in working in applications, and particularly this idea of of making applications last longer. Yeah, that's a great question. Well, actually, believe it or not, it started in my, uh, as a grad student in my, um, my PhD days or did my doctorate at UC Irvine. And one of the big challenges that we had was is that, you know, there was a lot of research going over the on the internet. So a lot of the, the HTTP work and the foundations that was actually invented by the group of people I was working with and, and, you know, and what you see today is, of course, you know, the, you know, the SaaS applications and things like that. But there was also discussions of, well, what about richer applications? You know, kind of the the applications that you might physically run on your local computer or having to run that application somewhere else. Um, the idea of trying to get that to work and run over the internet reliably is kind of what started my career. On what turned out to be a fairly challenging task, right? In today's environments, especially Windows enterprise environments. I mean, we had APIs and Powershell and RCP and all that stuff, but to actually get an application to do that is a big trick. I think you got to figure out how to get its state and its data and everything else, uh, to, to run, run anywhere you've got. Um, so what are what are people just step back and look at sort of your target audience here today. What problems are people facing, uh, in enterprises when it comes to keeping their application footprint running? What what what are they what are they struggling with mainly? Yeah. I mean, there's two, two pieces. The most biggest one is just simply the compatibility of that application across the different, you know, platforms that you might deploy to. And of course, even though every platform is supposed to be similar and compatible with the older one, it very rarely is the case. So one is the improving the compatibility. And we do that using our container. And you know what's interesting about the container is the container actually is to some extent a in a somewhat of a copy or a reimplementation of, of the operating system itself, you know. So whenever the application runs it, it kind of first sees the, the operating environment within container. And if you can kind of make that container for the most part handle what the application needs and you can move that container around, then that means the application is going to be a lot more reliable because it's going to consistently see the same environment. And typically this is the big thing is that anytime application goes to a different environment, you know, not only maybe the APIs you mentioned, because that might change, the behavior might change, but also to what it might see could change, and therefore the application may behave a bit differently. And so containerization is is not just a technology to help, you know, with regards to making sure those APIs and things are consistent. But it's also a management technique, right? So you can basically try to get, you know, these applications similar to a virtual machine, you know, kind of all self-contained and then just move that entire thing around efficiently. So that that way, you know, you can get a better consistent experience. And in some cases, even the probability of having those applications. So that's one. The other piece of it too is, is that what's special about cloud paging is when you do these things over the net. And that was another thing I covered on grad school days. The speed of the delivery. Right. The latencies of the internet and those even today, you know, are still practical problems. So anything that you can get to to help improve the delivery or techniques to help speed up the delivery that, um, that can greatly enhance or in some cases improve the success of getting those applications to those target points that they need to run. So those two things, you know, if you do well, um, then you can have an environment where you can take that application and then reliably point and then have that application run wherever you want it and not have the headache of support calls. All right. So when you wrap the container you build this container. Right. And I don't know if you call these cloud page containers or or new containers, but it's your your container, your application containerization. Um, you make the application, uh, sort of like fluidly deployable, like, like. Yeah. And, and, uh, optimally delivered because you can deliver the parts of the application that are that need to be there to run without having to deliver all the fluff and things that could trail behind if needed. It's, it's there's a there's a kind of double edged sword you're wielding here of making applications run anywhere, but also making them run in a lot of places efficiently that they weren't efficiently running before. I think there's some other there's some other benefits here, too, it sounds like, because then you're it's like, if I've got a container and I've, I now can talk about the idea that I don't have a thousand versions of that installed on a thousand desktops to update, I can update, I don't know, do you call it a master image or golden image or container? How how should I think about that? That is that's an excellent point. So, um, what's very it always surprises me even today, right? A lot of people still focus on taking applications and then just flat out installing it onto the system, whether it's a VDI server or cloud hosted environment such as Windows O365 AVD, they're not even necessarily even using any tools. They're just running scripts and installing it. Um, there are challenges with that approach. I mean, one is, is that, you know, a lot of these installers that you may they become less predictable, right? And out there in the wild and then you run it, you're not quite sure exactly how it will behave. So containerization kind of skipped that part of installing rather than installing onto the machine you're installing into the container. And then you move the container around. And that technique can can certainly not just, you know, and simplify right. The the deployment of those applications. But again it enhances portability. And then you can reuse that container and just move it to other targets without having to reinstall, take a bunch of time. And in the case of cloud staging also, that could take up a lot less space than what would be normally required trying to move these these media installations around, which can be gigabytes. And just to be clear, when we're talking about the containers running on an OS, that OS could be a VDI, could be a cloud hosted PC, could be a physical PC. It's sort of agnostic in some ways, so people can combine those technologies with this application, containerization and even do a better job than what they're doing today. That's exactly right. In fact, you know, one of the key success criteria is can can you take a package, you know, or an application that you put in a container from many years ago, let's just say, you know, go far back as, let's say, a decade ago and still have it run on the latest, you know, offering from Microsoft. And and we do that right. So that that is a goal that we have. And we do it in a way where the end user doesn't even have to touch it. It just simply runs. In fact, our latest offering and support that we released is on the windows ARM device, which is a completely, you know, different implementation of Windows, but we're able still able to take some of these old applications that were packaged with our tooling and then put in our container and without touching that container from long ago, just have it run on the latest version of Windows with with no changes successfully. So you can imagine, you know, from an IT perspective, if you can reduce this idea of migration right between any of these things, and that's just completely eliminated, that can really reduce your workload and really simplify and take your quote unquote, your IT management to the next level. We've just talked about a number of things, any one of which you could put an ROI kind of number on, or TCO kind of number on saving, cost savings. Yeah, I think that could be a whole nother discussion if to really go down through all that. But what are some of the more significant sort of cost optimizations related things that you've seen using New Messenger? That's a great question. I mean, it spans so obviously from a labor perspective. Um, you know, it's hard to calculate. I mean, you know, of course, um, if you have a very large IT organization, I mean, it's not um, let's just say, uh, it's conservatively right. You can save literally millions of dollars is considering the amount of packaging and the labor that's required to to basically manage a fleet of applications across, you know, tens, hundreds of thousands of users. And which, by the way, the cloud does today, we have certainly deployments of that scale. So that's that's a that's a big important piece of it, but also to another aspect of things that people don't realize. In the case of AVD. And we actually have a webinar that that goes over this, we're actually able to reduce the amount of high speed storage costs. And people don't realize, you know, with, you know, these things really add up. Um, you know, if, um, because you know, some of these, in order to successfully deploy these applications, I mean, you need to make sure that they perform really well, right? Which typically means they're going to put them on high speed storage and things like that. Well, then you have to put them across many different hosts and things like that. And and next thing you know, you're talking terabytes of high speed storage that needs to be deployed with with that certainly are some of the largest customers. We've demonstrated that we were significantly able to cut those storage costs down, in some cases by 70, 80%. By using our technology where you can take, you know, only what's required to run those applications and then place those on high speed storage, and then just basically page the rest, even over the internet, and have it run as reliably as if everything were natively installed and running at full speed with high speed storage. Really the goal here, right? To make the make the network work for us, make cloud workforce but have that local performance. Uh, so so we're kind of running to the end of our time slot, but, uh, if, if you had I'm going to double up this question. So if you have one sort of recommendation for people on where they should get started or think about getting started with, uh, containerization, uh, and then, uh, what kinds of information or resources can you provide, maybe on your website or whatever, to help them take the next steps? Great question. The I always recommend, you know, going to a webinar, right? I mean, you know, we release webinars, uh, fairly frequently. So at least a, you know, at least a once a month, you know, you'll see some new content out. And of course, the content is typically relevant to, you know, the current state. So that that is always I feel the best place to to really kind of get involved and really understand what we do. Um, outside of that, uh, you know, we do have quite a few YouTube videos that you can, you can watch to also educate yourself in terms of what we do and play around with it. And then lastly, of course, um, you know, if you have a little more time and, um, and effort, then you can certainly contact and message directly through our website. And then a sales associate can set up a demonstration where they'll be happy to step you through not just what, you know, Cloud Pager can do, but also perhaps, you know, dive into your use case, provide some great recommendations in terms of, you know, what we could add, how we can add value to to where you're at. All right. And last word. Anything you want to tell those people who are stuck on Windows 10. Uh, I recommend getting off of it, uh, because Microsoft will find a way to charge more and more by staying on the old version. So, um, but but hey, don't get me wrong, I like Windows 10. If I could keep running it forever, I would. But but but you can help. You can take their apps. They're running Windows 10 and move them to. Uh, yes, we can move it not just to Windows 10. Windows 11. Uh, you know, the lowest cost hosted environment, windows 365, uh, any anyone anything that Microsoft supports currently and some even not supported, we can still deliver to you. So yeah, please reach out to us if you have any questions. They can definitely help you help you with that migration problem you're facing. Thank you so much for being here, Arthur, today and explaining this to us. Thank you so much for your time.
