Transcript
Alan Conboy, the Field Chief Technology Officer over at Scale Computing. And I'm going to be joining Alan for some Q&A, so keep those questions coming in hot. But otherwise, Alan, go ahead and take it away. Hey, thanks. And always glad to be back with Actual Tech. You guys are a fantastic guy to work with. There's no two ways about it. So my name is Alan Conboy. I am the Field CTO here at Scale Computing. What I'm here to talk with you about today is, well, it's pretty simple. We spent most, and by we, I mean all of us in IT, spent most of the 2000s and most of the 2010s waiting for the year of VDI to happen. Boy, did it happen. We're four years out from when it really started in earnest. We've learned a lot. All of us have. And a lot's changed very, very quickly. High level, what's changed? What's different? Well, Horizon's being sold off to private equity. We still see that, yet it's still dependent on Broadcom. Citrix is going all cloud as fast as they possibly can. And following Broadcom's playbook, they're focusing on the very large enterprise. There is a massive need for trustworthy on-prem based alternatives for those legacy VDI approaches. Well, let's talk about that. Legacy VDI vendors, they, the reason we all waited so long for the year of VDI to happen is because they were always complex. They were always expensive. But now they're no longer stable. There has been something of a seismic shift in the last 10 months in the end user computing space. Mr. VDI himself, Brian, refers to it as a world shift in end user computing. Yeah. Legacy VDI infrastructure, we discovered, struggled to handle really rapid change. And the move to a cloud first approach and the lift and shift of end user computing and data, well, it followed the same kind of path that folks initially approached cloud computing with. Not native, very easy to get into and very difficult and incredibly expensive to get out of. It very much is a finger trap. Now, flexible, easily scalable infrastructure is what is needed to make both in-office and work from home VDI function well. But it needs to be better than the legacy. Now, HCI, as you saw from the previous presentation, works hand in glove with VDI as an absolutely natural fit to make scalable end user computing just happen seamlessly no matter where. Now, one of the biggest things that was learned over the course of the last three and a half years, four years, was exactly how bad of an idea it was to leverage VPN and extend your corporate network, your secure environment, into the least secure environments on planet Earth, namely the home network. Properly built VDI can help fix this. So let's take a deeper dive on exactly what has changed. Horizon, there's not a person on this call that hasn't followed the absolute craziness in our industry that has been Broadcom VMware. As I put on the slide here, Horizon as in sailing off into the, well, Horizon has been sold to the folks that the movie Barbarians at the Gates was literally written about. Its future is questionable, to say the least. We've seen this story before. We've seen what's happened with Broadcom partners and the fact that they love to focus on just the biggest of the big. This is not new. What is new is simply this. The very same executive that formulated and started the Broadcom acquisition of VMware in motion that cut ties to Horizon is the same guy that left, joined Citrix, actually not even Citrix, joined TIBCO Software, renamed it to the Cloud Solutions Group, acquired Citrix, and is actively running from the same playbook. In just the last 10 months now, Citrix has gone from 800 plus sales team members to around 50. They've also actively discontinued multiple Citrix integrations with multiple vendors. And here comes the licensing hit. We need alternatives in the space. Cloud-based VDI, well, it's fine for some. Cloud-based end user computing is fine for some folks. There's a whole litany of folks. It doesn't work for from cost, complexity, physics, so on and so forth. Yeah, people have largely noticed the cost at this point of staying in an all-cloud environment. And it's not pretty. There's been a pile of very publicly followed cloud exits for these exact same reasons. Can you imagine trying to run a AVD implementation on a ship at sea, anywhere that there's questionable bandwidth? Well, here at scale, we chose to, much like we have with every single other thing in the infrastructure world, we chose to cut a different path. You see, the legacy of complex, expensive, hard to configure, difficult to maintain end user computing solutions, all of those things needed to be fixed. So we chose to partner with very different companies that inarguably solved the end user computing problem. But do it in a way that addresses the complexity. But do it in a way that addresses the expense. That do it in such a way that makes end user computing affordable, approachable. On-prem, you own your data. You own your infrastructure. And done in such a way that, well, anybody can implement. From our partnership, Deep Ties with LeoStream, the original connection broker, our partnership with Parallels RAS, the ability to easily and quickly spin up the brokered infrastructures with either, whether it's Linux, Windows, x86 desktoping, partnerships with endpoint device providers, Tenzig, Google, Chrome OS, and so very many more. But done in such a way that it becomes affordable, approachable, easy to use, easy to manage. Yeah, on fact, when the world closed down on all of us just a few years ago, just a handful of years ago, folks that had already implemented a scale end user computing solution, both based on LeoStream and based on Parallels running on scale, were in a matter of minutes able to shift their workforce's compute needs to fully remote. I had folks send me captures, pictures of accessing their work desktop from their smart bridge. But that soaked all the way in. Secure, without needing VPNs, done in such a way that you could get to it from anything, anywhere. Oh, and less than half the cost or less than those legacy providers, without giving up feature functionality at all. Now, making VDI easy to consume and cost effective, that's paramount. Fully integrated end-to-end end user computing solutions that make switching easy, from being able to pull in existing golden master images, being able to support more than just the handful of protocols that you found with the legacy vendors. Heck, with LeoStream and TenZig, we support, what, 17 different protocols? Scale computing with Parallels and Google is absolutely trivial for Windows RDP and RemoteFX based environments that spin up in seconds. End-to-end, fully integrated, fully tested, fully vetted stacks that clock in at half the cost or less than traditional legacy VDI approaches. Now, with scale, you don't have to trust a word I'm saying. We have thousands of customers that have taken this specific path with scale. Now, this particular one, Harlingen Waterworks, it's the water utility in Harlingen, Texas. Now, it seems small. Why would you bother to put such a emphasis on a small implementation? Well, what made this one interesting for me was not the implementation itself. It just works, and we knew it would going in. It's how he chose to test it that makes this stand out for me. You know, as folks in the IT world, we all know the user that's that guy, the one that's going to complain fastest and loudest about anything they don't like. Literally, no matter how trivial, no matter how small, it's something they don't like. They're going to complain about it loud and long. Well, John chose to make his first test with this system with his most complaint-oriented end user. Turned them loose with it for a week before rolling it out to anybody else. At the end of that week, he hadn't heard from them. They reached out. The response was what John considered to be high praise. Just works. Works fine. Hadn't even really noticed a difference. That's high praise from that crowd. Needless to say, they've been standardized on scale for five, six years now. Parallels. Parallels res in the scale environment. All right, everyone, that might have been a shorter coffee break than you were anticipating, but I believe we've got Alan back here and ready to wrap things up. Do we got you here, Alan? I'm right here. I apologize for that. Apparently, my Bluetooth headset decided that it was a great day to go on vacation. Hey, you know, we all love a vacation. It's just not great timing. You know, that's the way it is. Where I was going with this was simple. This is an infrastructure that is built in such a way that you don't have to think about your infrastructure, that the baseline infrastructure doesn't need a VCP and a CCNE and a SNIA certified storage engineer, okay? Built on top of that from a connection brokering remote access perspective is a connection brokering set of stacks that are equally easy to implement, an order of magnitude more flexible, and quite frankly, answers the call that this crazy world has put us into in the last eight months for an easy-to-use and easy-to-implement cost-effective end-user computing solution that can implement from anywhere and scale as you grow in a truly linear, easy-to-use fashion. Take a look at any of the thousands of reviews of scale out there. You don't have to take my word for it. We're happy to put you in contact with any of the existing scale end-user computing customers, and I think you will be absolutely surprised with what you find. Now, I'm not going to sit here and chew up your entire day for you, but I wanted to kind of give you a heads up on what's actually happened in this space. In this space, and what scale is doing to make it better for you in a right now approachable kind of way. So, with that, I would say a simple thank you. All right. Excellent, Alan. Thank you, and thank you for being here, and we've got quite a few questions that came in. I am going to dive into those with you in just two seconds, but I have thrown up a poll here once again. Lots of polls today. You know, I'm just making sure all the way can be interactive out there, but again, just looking at what additional information you would like from scale computing. Plunk in your answer there, and you'll get exactly what you're looking for after today's ecocast. With that, let's dive into these questions. First one here I have is, what are the potential cost savings and ROI associated with implementing VDI solutions for distributed workforces? Are there any hidden costs to consider? You know, that's a really wide ranging question. We'll start with the simple and then expand. From a baseline costing perspective, we'll start with licensing. As a rule of thumb for the licensing component associated with VDI software stacks and user computing stacks, we come in at half or less what you've gotten used to, unfortunately, with both Citrix and Horizon. From an infrastructure perspective, the on-prem gear that it runs on, again, you'll find half or less than the cost of legacy infrastructure, as well as the cost of other folks that use the HCI nomenclature. From an operational perspective, that's kind of the reason that we built scale in the first place, was to make it so that it was not only affordable, but approachable by anybody. Now, think about this. We built scale, all of the AI and ML that we've layered into it from a systems management perspective, from a self-healing, self-load balancing perspective, to clock in at the cost of less than half of competitive offerings, while simultaneously not needing VCPs and CCNEs and SNIA certified storage engineers, but rather your average IT admin can stand this thing up. I like to say it this way. When it comes to scale, I can take a kid straight out of the local community college, still waving around his A plus cert like he's the first human that ever got one. And have that kid standing up a scale infrastructure with about 15 minutes worth of training. Now, the cost on operational expense becomes obvious when you view it that way. It's an infrastructure that you literally don't have to think about. Now, like I said, that's a huge question, so we could expand across it for hours. But high level, those are my initial thoughts that I want to answer that question with. No, I think that's great. It gives a good sense of the value there. And again, we can, like I said, dig into all the itty bitty bits, and how do we track this, and how do we track that? But I think that gives a good sense of it. So that's great. I would add one last little piece. I'm actually joining this particular EchoCast. Via a VDI instance running on scale. Say more on this. In my particular case, I'm leveraging LeoStream running on a scale computing cluster. They stood down in my lab. Happily interacting, running Windows 11 as a VDI instance, and joining this particular EchoCast, video, audio, and all via that same infrastructure. I'm a huge believer in use what you sell. Yeah, yeah. Well, actually, so this is a good segue question from Edward here is, what are the customization options available to tailor the VDI to our specific needs? So that's why we have two separate broker partners. Parallels RAS is meant to be simple and easy to implement. Incredibly simple, incredibly easy to implement. It's a very targeted approach to end user computing, specifically, mostly for the Windows environment. But that's not the only partner. The other partner, LeoStream, natively integrated with us, has been for six years now at an API level. It's best to think of LeoStream not just as a wrench or a hammer, but as an entire toolkit that brings everything from location awareness to who's allowed to access what, where, when, why, how, and from where, under what conditions, to all of the security implications that brings to the table. It's already built in there. You can configure LeoStream on scale to get right down to the specific use case that you need. Okay. Perfect. I think we've got a question, sorry, time for a couple more questions here. So this is kind of the hot topic of these days. One is, do VDI platforms leverage AI and automation to personalize the digital work experience for individual employees and enhance overall productivity? So it's an interesting question there. There's a couple of different places that AI and ML play well in the VDI experience. I'm going to start with a place that you're not, generally speaking, thinking of, and that's on the underlying infrastructure on which the golden master images, desktop images, et cetera, TS sessions, RDSH sessions themselves are based on. AI and ML, in scale's case, has been leveraged there since 2010 to specifically automatically remediate all of the issues, all of the load balancing concerns, et cetera, that can come up that historically required a systems administrator to lose his nights and weekends chasing down cable problems, chasing down power supply problems, chasing down, is that a drive issue? Is it a drive controller issue? Is it an integration issue with my specific hypervisor? At an infrastructure level, AI and ML implemented properly with all of the OODA loops, all of the if you see this, do that, built in automatically, makes a massive difference in the end user's experience. Now, from a connection brokering perspective itself, think about where that layer runs. It runs as a software layer at the virtual machine level or containers level, pardon me, and can have its own level of AI that's paying attention to who's logging in, where, when, why, and how, and how frequently, so on and so forth, and helping to optimize that end user's experience remote versus local versus in the office, so on and so forth. And then on top of that, you're seeing the mad rush to generative AI, and, you know, thanks to the thunderstorm that has been chat GPT, right? Well, to leverage those things in a way that is incredibly useful, hardware vendors are out there right now from Intel and AMD and NVIDIA and, and, and, to leverage bringing the ASICs and engines into the processors, which is requiring folks to get proper use out of those things, to suddenly have to either A, replace a whole fleet of desktops that are probably only two or three years old, or B, with a properly built VDI implementation, all of that tooling's already there and already made available to the VDI instances, the desktops, et cetera, and that's simply reflected across the wire, whether local or long-haul, to those endpoint devices. So, the short question of, does AI and ML have a place here? The short answer is, absolutely. The long answer is, at many levels, and you might be really surprised by how cost-effective that can be made to be, compared to what folks are looking at having to do right now. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. Amazing. Well, thank you. I look forward to kind of seeing what AI and ML applications do come into this over the coming months as we see the landscape evolve, but I do think that's all the time we got for today. So, I'm going to let you go, but before you do, any final sign-off, call to action, if anyone is ready to take the next steps with scale or anything you want to leave them with All roads lead to our website. That's the easiest place. But I will do one thing additional for you, and that means I'm going to back up the slide just one. And unfortunately, I took it off of there. If you have questions, comments, thoughts, concerns, things that you wish you'd asked about but didn't, it's okay. I'm here to help you out. Thoughts, concerns, things that you wish you'd asked about but didn't, etc. Let me say simply this, my direct email address, the one I actually pay attention to, is alan at scalecomputing.com. Perfect. Drop me a note. at scalecomputing.com. Awesome.
