Transcript
They have legacy investments and they're looking for a change. And AVD, when we launched it in market was that change. And now we're unlocking additional capabilities with AVD hybrid. That's really driving interest from those customers looking for alternatives to their hypervisors. Hi, Sal, thank you for joining us here at Nutanix.next. It's great to be here. Why don't we start off and tell us a little bit, you know, what's your role at Microsoft and how does Nutanix fit into the things you guys are doing with AVD? So I'm a group product manager within the Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop team. And what we do is we engage with our most strategic customers to help them understand what their requirements are. And that's really what led us to working with Nutanix is listening to our customers and understanding what they needed. And we wanted to reach out to Nutanix as a result of that, along with a set of partners in building AVD hybrid. So AVD has obviously been around for a while as a cloud native service. So why AVD hybrid now? What's changed in the market? We looked at what customers were asking us for, and we discovered that we would have customers where we'd go in and we talk about Windows 365. And in fact, I had one customer that actually said, I'm all in on moving my DAS to Windows 365. Within their group, CIO stopped the meeting and said, but I've got on prem. What do I do with my on prem environment? And because of that announcement at Ignite for AVD hybrid, I was able to say, we have a solution for you. Let's go talk to our partners like Nutanix about the options that are available there. So what is some advice for customers? Hey, how do I choose? Do I run this on premises? Do I run this in a public cloud? What are some guidance that you can provide to customers and our viewers here of, you know, how do they decide? I think from from a Microsoft point of view, we would always like customers to start with the Microsoft Cloud first and understand what those capabilities are and evaluate there. But then look at their workloads and their business requirements that keep them on prem and look at AVD hybrid in that environment and leverage that environment. There are at least some customers that just aren't ready for that path and will take AVD hybrid as a stepping stone to Windows 365. And that's great. We want those customers to move to our capabilities with our partners like Nutanix. I've been looking at the market. ABD is just taking off exponentially. Why are customers consistently choosing saying, you know what, my next EUC VDI deployment is going to be on ABD? A lot of that comes from customer frustration from legacy environments. They have legacy investments and they're looking for a change. And AVD, when we launched it in market, was that change. And it's just continued forward with our other solutions. And now we're unlocking additional capabilities with AVD hybrid. That's really driving interest from those customers looking for alternatives to their hypervisors. And we're fortunate to have those partnerships with folks like Nutanix and Nerdio that enable those capabilities so that we can say to the customer, hey, we've got paths for you. Now, why AVD hybrid specifically? Well, because AVD hybrid leverages all of the investments that customers have made in securing Microsoft 365 with things like Entra ID. And so all of that security value prop that customers have configured in their environment, all of that. Becomes capable in AVD to protect their EUC environments as well. They get conditional access. They get risky sign in detections, passwordless off. All of those capabilities are there in a native modern capability that powers everything across the board. And then the final thing I'll say is just in the same way that Nutanix talks about end user experience and having that unified admin experience on the Microsoft side, we want to focus on the end user experience. And we say we want to have a unique and consistent end user experience, regardless of platform. So customers get the Windows app for Windows 365. They get the Windows app for AVD native. They get the Windows app for hybrid AVD and AVD hybrid, and they get it for direct PC connections. Kind of great features there. Give the viewers a little bit of a kind of what's next. How do they get maybe started with this? We are actively working on our public review right now with all of our partners, and we hope to have an announcement soon on that. And by the end of the year, we hope to have a solution in market based on the feedback that we hear from our customers from the public preview. So when the public preview hits, please go out and try it so that we can get that feedback in and GA with all of our partners.
