By Insight Editor / 31 Aug 2021
Accelerating the future of work, enabling secure access to company apps and data to allow users to do their best work, all without compromise has always been the focus of Citrix and Microsoft’s longstanding partnership. In this TechTalk, Chris McCoy, Product Manager with Insight and Sam Carrero, Sr. Sales Engineer with Citrix discuss how the Citrix and Microsoft partnership has advanced cloud based VDI solutions and tools that enable migration of virtual desktops and application resources to the cloud.
To experience this week’s episode, listen on the player above, watch the conversation below, or scroll down to read a complete transcript. You can also subscribe to Insight TechTalk on Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Audio transcript:
Chris
Hello and thanks for joining us for another Insight Tech Talk. I'm Chris McCoy, a product manager with Insight's Connected Workforce Organization. And today I'm joined by Sam Carrero with Citrix. How are you, Sam?
Sam
I'm doing great, thanks for having me.
Chris
Awesome! Well, as you all may know, based on the title, right today's discussion is on VDI and the modernization of VDI workflows to the cloud. So, as I'm sure everybody in this audience knows VDI technology has been around for quite some time for the last 20 years or so organizations have used VDI, otherwise known as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, to securely deliver virtual desktops and applications to their end users. In most cases, the traditional approach to VDI required investment and costly on premises infrastructure, such as servers, storage and networking, as well as licensing. And from a support perspective, it's always been very difficult to find and retain these experienced and trained and qualified support resources. So in addition to the rather high upfront costs of implementing an on premises VDI solution, there's also some administrative challenges as well, such as trying to balance application and desktop requirements with the available infrastructure resources, which is not properly configured, as many of our audience knows, can lead to some performance issues and inconsistencies for end users with latency and other problems like that application is not performing feeling like the applications are boxed into the environment.
In some cases, this cost of administration and the complexity, and some of these difficulties can really outweigh some of the benefits, making VDI kind of a questionable long-term strategy. So again, today I'm here with Sam Carrero from Citrix, to discuss how Citrix is working together with Microsoft to develop an advanced cloud based VDI solutions and tools that enable migration of virtual desktops and application resources to the cloud. So as many of our listeners know, modernizing and migrating VDI workflows to the power reduces the required upfront investment and costly hardware and infrastructure, and provides a flexible and dynamic environment to scale workloads and users. So, it's a win win. Additionally, these modern Microsoft and Citrix tools and platforms help optimize the VDI environment and the overall performance. So, a very good topic for us to talk about today. I think lots of good stuff we'll hear from Sam. In addition to that, I'd like to touch a little bit on how Insight is partnering with Citrix and Microsoft to deliver a comprehensive managed service offering, to provide administration and support of the Azure Virtual Desktop environments for our customers. So, Sam let's kick it off. Let's talk about Windows Virtual Desktop now known as Azure Virtual Desktop, right? So, Microsoft changing the name again
Sam
Yep
Chris
As many folks know, Azure Virtual Desktop has become a very attractive to many enterprise customers. It offers licensing entitlements and multisession capabilities, which significantly reduced the cost making this a very attractive solution for VDI. So, Sam can maybe you talk a little bit about Citrix's partnership with Microsoft and possibly bring us up to speed with how Citrix is working with Microsoft to enhance their Azure Virtual Desktop Solution.
Sam
Yes, absolutely and thanks again for having me. So our Citrix and Microsoft partnership goes back 30 plus years. At the core our long-standing partnership has always focused on accelerating the future of work. This includes a caring, with remote access to company assets, data, files, and a lot of them to be productive all without compromise. And that has not changed in our 30 plus years, working closely with you guys. And we've introduced a lot more, of course, over the many years, everything from contextual access, a much more granular policy engine, allowing our customers to adhere to regulatory requirements and then just having increased scalability and performance optimizations. Most notably our highly regarded Citrix HDX protocol stack. Some of you may know that as ITA, but it's much more than that now. And this was, this is what allows our customers to really receive that high-definition user experience from anywhere on any device. And this holds especially true for healthcare education, government and financial services.
Chris
That's great. Thanks for that, Sam. It really sounds like Citrix offers some significant features that really help drive the value of the Azure Virtual Desktop platform. Can you give us some examples of when a customer might look to go with the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop Solution and potentially workspace solution that we've all heard about as opposed to just the standard Azure Virtual Desktop Environment?
Sam
Yep, absolutely. And that's a great question. So, in addition to some of those earlier examples, that many customers leverage today, you know, we're in a different time now, right? So, the proliferation of, of remote work sales has accelerated cloud adoption, has introduced new challenges that many organizations were just not prepared for. And COVID only accelerated that journey. So together with Citrix, Microsoft and their ABD offering were able to extend all these best-in-class capabilities to give you greater control visibility, which many organizations require even more now than they ever have before. So, it's no longer, you know, just a conversation of, you know, the latest and greatest shiny features you may hear from other vendors. Instead, we should be talking about, you know, Citrix advanced monitoring capabilities, analytics to diagnose incidents before they become issues. Being proactive, right? And then our Citrix Autoscale, which is a must have for anyone that is hosting VDI workloads in the public cloud. This guarantees, you know, that we're making the best use of resources to skill adoptively based on schedule or load and this is all done intelligently on the backend as a service. Other notable, you know, features are things like Citrix app protection and watermarking to protect against accidental or malicious data leaks. In Citrix Workspace Environment Manager to intelligently optimize the user experience and really maximize investments. That's just to name a few, Chris, I'm just scratching the surface of what we can do together, you know, with this joint offering.
Chris
Yeah, that's great, I mean, it definitely sounds like the partnership with Microsoft has led to some real feature enhancements for the platform for Azure Virtual Desktop Platform itself. So, any questions for me?
Actually, I do. So, now that I've discussed how Citrix enhances Azure Virtual Desktop Environments, and some of the value that Citrix can deliver to your customers. Can you chat a little bit about your managed VDI solution, to support Citrix with Azure Virtual Desktops?
Chris
Absolutely, yeah, I'm happy to talk a little bit more about our managed VDI offering that we launched earlier this year. So, Sam, as you know, despite the clear advantages of modern VDI environment, many of which you just discussed, many organizations still continue to struggle with the common challenges of how best to deploy or administer their Azure Virtual Desktop Solution. So, you know, these are things how best to migrate and plan and migrate their existing on premises VDI environment to Azure, how best to ensure optimization of an increasingly complex modern VDI tool set and platform, as well as recruiting and maintaining those, you know, hard to find and knowledgeable and certified staff to administer and support the environment. So, Insight's advantage VDI offering really offers a modern and cost effective, it's really a turnkey approach to the administrative and then administration and support of the customers new or existing Azure Virtual Desktop Environment with Citrix Workspace and Virtual Apps and Desktops for a monthly subscription fee. So, Insight's managed VDI, their offering includes winning of itself, you know, evaluation of the customer's existing environment, you know, we can help level them up and in terms of any kind of features or profiles or anything that needs modification to bring them up to optimization, but we can also offer a full-scale deployment Azure Virtual Desktop within their Azure Environments in conjunction with the Citrix platform.
So, we can bring it all together. And our certified and trained personnel provide 24/7 administration and support of the Azure Virtual Desktop and Citrix Environment ensuring proper configuration of all again, the policies and tools, the management and images and application, the deployment of BMs and tools, as well as performance monitoring, which may be, you know, the most key thing, right? So, performance monitoring in terms of resource management, application performance, and do dynamic resource allocation within Azure for the customer to make sure that the end user is getting the best and absolute performance they can out of the solution. So, like all of our managed services managed VDI allows these organizations, to refocus on their internal strategic initiatives while we take care of the administration of the environment, which really speaks volumes for what Insight does, providing that value for the customer and in conjunction with Citrix and Microsoft delivering a really elegant solution to help them do what they need to do to enable their end users. So, that's kind of the highlights of the solution.
Sam
No, I love it. That sounds great, actually.
Chris
So, I think we're out of time, but I wanted to thank our audience again, you know, thank you very much for joining our Tech Talks. We like to, you know, bring our solutions to you so we can get some collective feedback and obviously continue the dialogue with customers who are living it day-to-day and hopefully this solution and this message brings value to what you're thinking of strategizing as you look into your organization and try to define strategies for, to approach these different issues and common problems that we see. So once again, thanks for joining us. If you like, what you see, and you'd like to learn more about Citrix and Insight, as well as our managed VDI solution, we'll publish the link below and again have a great day and thanks for joining us.
Sr. Sales Engineer, Citrix
Sam Carrero is an experienced Sales Engineer focused on the strategic growth, enablement, and success of our Citrix Partners to enable them to deliver scalable best-in-class Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops, Microapps, Analytics and Gateway Services, leveraging Citrix Workspace with intelligence powered by Citrix Cloud. He works closely with partners to provide the knowledge, technical insight, resources, and tools necessary to create and deliver scalable, highly-available multi-tenant HMC deployments and offerings to deliver a complete Citrix Secure Digital Workspace for the future of work.
Product Manager, Services, Connected Workforce, Insight
Chris McCoy is a product manager with Insight’s Connected Workforce team, where he works to design and build specific service offerings to enable and deliver mobility and endpoint management technologies to Insight’s clients. Chris has more than 20 years of technical solution sales and product management experience working for companies such as Dell Technologies, Lenovo, Parallels and Insight. Although Chris has a broad knowledge of many areas of technology, he has specific expertise in end-user computing, client virtualization and VDI.
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