 Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host for the event is Keith Townsend, and Keith and I are excited to talk to one of the Citrix Innovation Award nominees, Indiana University, we have a couple of folks from Indiana University joining us, Stephanie Cox, manager of virtual platform services, and Matt Link, associate vice president of research technologies. Guys, thanks so much for joining Keith and me. Thank you, Lisa, thank you. Thank you. And congratulations on Indiana University being nominated for an innovation award. I was talking with Tim Minahan, their CMO yesterday, saying there was over a thousand nominations. So to even get down to being in the top three is pretty exciting stuff. Yeah. Awesome. So talk to us a little bit about Indiana University. You guys, this is a big, big, big organization. Lots of folks accessing the network through lots of devices. Matt, let's start with you. Give us that picture of what's going on there. Yeah, so IU is about 130,000 students across seven campuses. We've got about 20,000 faculty and staff across those seven campuses. One of the things that makes us a little unique is we're a consolidated IT shop. So there are 1,200 of us at IU that support the entire university at all the campuses. And at any one point in time, there could be 200,000 devices touching the network and using those services. Big, that's big. Wow, that is big. Stephanie, talk to us about your virtual footprint. How big is the location? How many data centers? What's the footprint? Well, we have two data centers. One of them is in Indianapolis, which is my home. It's one of our larger campuses. We call it Indiana University, Purdue University. Affectionately, IUPUI. There is a data center there, but our large data center is at the Flagship campus, which is in Bloomington, Indiana. And to support 100,000 plus people and 200, you said at any given second, 200,000 devices, how have you designed that virtual infrastructure to enable access to students, faculty, et cetera, and employees? So from the network perspective, we have several network master plans that have rolled and we're in our second 10-year network master plan. And the network master plan is designed to continually upgrade the network, both the physical network, the infrastructure and the wireless network. And our last 10-year budget for that was around $170 million of investment, just to support the network infrastructure. And then Stephanie rides on top of that as the virtual platform with Citrix to deliver the images anywhere on campus, whether it's wirelessly or whether it's connected via network connection. So seven campuses is already a bit. If you ever look at the map, Indiana sits right smack dab in the middle of the country. It's a big space. Right before we hit record, we're just talking about that drive of I-65 from Indianapolis to Chicago. It's just a lot of rural area. And I'm sure part of your mission is to make sure technology and education is accessible to everyone in Indiana. Talk to us about the challenges of getting connectivity and getting material virtual classrooms to those remote areas. Yeah, that's really one of the major strengths of our partnership with Citrix. They are really the premier remote solution connectivity offering at Indiana University. So we built our Citrix environment to encompass everyone. We wanted to make sure we could have enough licenses and capacity for all of our 130,000 faculty, staff, and students to use the service. Now, do they all show up at the same time? No, thank goodness. Thank you. But we do offer it to everyone, which is I found in the education arena very unique to Indiana University. Another thing to have the consolidated IT and then to be able to offer a service like ours to everyone and not just restricted to the different pockets of the university. With that, we've been able to then extend offering of any application or something that you might need for a class to any of our other remote locations. So if you're a student who is working in or lives in rural Indiana and you want to get an Indiana University degree, you can do that without having to travel to one of our campus sites or locations. We have a very nice online program and just a lot of other options that we really try to offer for remote access. So Citrix has really enabled this. I think you call it the IU Anywhere Indiana University Anywhere program. Tell us about opening up this access to everyone. Over the time that you've been a Citrix customer, how many more people can you estimate have access now that didn't, but not too long ago? Yeah, I think initially, and Matt would probably know more of you for me, but before I even came on the scene, I believe that the original use case was really just trying to extend what we were already doing on premise in what we call just our Indiana University lab supported areas, right? So just your small, like the old days when you would go to your college campus and you go into your computer lab, we just really wanted to virtualize or expand the access to just those specific types of apps and computers, and that was an early design. Since then over the years, we've really kind of just really expanded, really we use the Citrix platform to redesign and distribute how we deliver the applications and the virtual desktops. So now not only do we service those students who would normally come onto the campus just to use your traditional computer lab, we do a lot of specialty programs for other schools. Like we deliver a virtual desktop for our dentistry students. They actually use that whole platform in the dental clinic to see real patients. Our third year doctors do that. We also replicated that same thing and do it in our speech and hearing sciences for our future audiologist. We have certain professors that have wanted to take a particular course that they're teaching and extend it to different pockets all over the world. So we might host a class from Budapest or Africa, somewhere else, wherever that faculty and staff has resources that they need to get to in their content already virtualized. We work to make that happen all the time. That's a lot of what you just said. As first of all, initially, maybe before Citrix, being able to provide support in the computer labs for your maybe seven core campuses, now you're giving 130,000 plus individuals anywhere, anytime access. That is, the X multiplier on that is massive, but you're also gone global. It's not just online. You're able to enable professors to teach in other parts of the world where it was before, it was just people that were in Indiana. That's massive. And you're just limited by the network. So that's the only drawback. When you go to the rural areas way out, you're just limited by the network. The initial program was really thought of as a cost saving measure. We were going to put thin clients out. We wouldn't have to do life cycle replacements for desktop machines that were getting more expensive and more expensive 10 years ago. And now, the way that we look at it is, IU wants to provide services across the breadth of the organization, and make those services at no additional cost. And open to everybody, open access to everybody. The AT desktop, for example, is one of, Stephanie is the brainchild behind the AT desktop, took three years of dedicated hard work to create an environment to support the visually impaired. Talk to us more about that, because that was part of the video and that captured my attention immediately. What is AT? Accessibility. Technology. Accessibility, technology. Is it accessible technology? Accessible technology. And I always get that wrong. So I'm just, you know, hundreds of thousands and not just those that are sight and hearing. Yeah, so one of the things that I think it's just a wonderful thing about working at a university, we're able to buy software licenses in a big quantity, large quantity, right? Because we have that kind of buying power. Software that I normally never would see or get access to, even in my private sector, I've been as a tricks engineer for a long time. But when you come to a university and then you're selling or you're getting licenses for 50, 60, 70, 80,000, you get to see some of these products that you don't normally, as a regular consumer, you like it, but you know you can't really afford it. So with that, when we started looking at all of the different applications that they could buy in a large quantity, site license, you know, we thought, oh my goodness, let's virtualize these and make sure everybody gets access to them. And the ones that were really attractive to us were the ones for the visually impaired. Sure, they're a niche and they're very, very expensive, but we thought, let's just try it. We'll see how well they perform in a virtual environment. And with our Citrix infrastructure underneath, they performed quite well. Plus the gaps have evolved a great deal over just the last four years. So we were really proud to offer our virtual desktop to our blind students. We had to work really hard to make sure that the speech recognition software was fast enough for them. It turns out that blind people listen to speech really, really, really, really, really fast. And so we had to make sure that we kept our platform or we're working on it to keep it sped and updated so that it's usable to them, right? Seems functional to me, but it really needed to be like 10 times faster after I found that out after even shooting the award video and spending even more time with them. I thought, why don't you guys tell me what was slow to you? But yeah, it's been an honor really to be up for that award, but to work with those students, to learn more about their needs, to learn more about the different applications that people write for people with all disabilities. I hope we can do more in that space. So the young man in IUPUI, I don't remember his name. Chris Avila. Chris, so share just quickly about Chris's story. If he watches theCUBE, I hope he's listening because I think he's kind of remarkable. I think this will really put some, a little bit of icing on that cake because you're taking an environment and you're an empowering student to do what they want to do versus what they are able or not able to do. So Chris's story is pretty cool of where he wants to go with his college career. Yeah, I won't say he's a big proponent user of the virtual desktop because he's just so advanced. He's like way beyond everything. We're learning from him, but he is Indiana universities. I believe I'm saying this right. Very first biomedical chemical engineer who is blind and is completely blind. Yes. And he's quite a brilliant young man. And we're lucky to have him be our, he will test anything for me. And Mary Stores who's featured in the video. Chris Meyer, he's also featured in the video. I got to remember their names. I mean, it's a whole, I'm lucky to have a whole community of people that will, yeah, they know where we want to be there for them. We don't always get it right, but we're going to listen and keep trying to move forward. So. But if you kind of think of even what a year or two ago, not being able to give any of this virtualized desktop access to this, the visually impaired and how many people are now using it? Well, we open it up to everyone. We have hundreds and hundreds of users, but we know not everyone who uses it is blind. You can use it if you want it or not. We don't really understand why some people prefer to use that one over the other, but it does have some advantages. I mean, there are different levels of site impairment too as I've just been educated, right? There are some people who are just at the very beginning of that journey of just, of losing their site. So we, if that happens to be someone that we can extend our environment to, it's probably better to use it now and get really familiar with that as you transition to losing your site later in life. I've been told so. So you ask a little bit about the scope of the AT desktop. So I'll layer on a little bit of the scope of IU Anywhere. Last year, around 65,000 individual unique users, over, well over a million logins and. 1.4 million different sessions. And the average session time was around 41 minutes. So our instructors teach with it. Our clinicians treat people with it. We've built it to house electronic protected health data. So HIPAA compliance, gotta be critical, right? It meets the HIPAA standard. Because you can't say compliance anymore because you can't be compliant with a standard. They've changed that wording several times in the course of the year. Yeah, we know that fine. We know this. We are very familiar with meeting the HIPAA standard. We've been doing that for about 12 years now with where I came from was the high performance computing area of the university. So that's my background at IU. So one thing we didn't get a chance to touch on. 200,000 devices. We're at Citrix, Citrix is a Microsoft partner. Typically when those companies think of 200,000 users, they think for profit, there's, this is a niche use case for 200,000 users. Obviously you guys have gotten some great pricing as part of being a educational environment. What I would love to hear is kind of the research stories because the ability to shrink the world, so to speak, high HPC, you're giving access to specialized equipment to people who can't get there. Normally, you normally have to be physically in front of GPUs, CPUs, et cetera. What other cool things have been coming out of the research side of the house because of the Citrix enablement? So this is cool. You got it, you got it. So one of our groups, Research Software and Solutions stole the idea from Stephanie to provide a research desktop bar. Imitation highest form of fly is Stephanie. Absolutely. What we've done is we always continually to try to reduce the barriers of entry and access. Supercomputing, before you had to be this tall to ride this ride. Well, now we're down to here and with the hopes that we'll go down even farther. So what we've done is we've taken a virtualized desktop, put it in front of the supercomputers and now you can be wherever you want to be and have access to HPC at IU. And that's all the systems. So we have four supercomputers and we have 40 petabytes of spinning disk, 160 petabytes of archival tape library. So we're a large shop and we couldn't have done it without looking at what Stephanie has done and really looking at that model differently, right? Because to use HPC before, you'd have to use a terminal and shell in. And now looking at IU Anywhere, that gives you just the different opportunity to catch a different and more broad customer base. And I call them customers because we try to treat them as customers and helps the diversity of what you're doing. So last year alone, our group, Research Technologies, supported 151 different departments. We were on 937 different grants and we support over 330 different disciplines at IU. And so it's deep, but it's also very broad for as large a campus we are and as a large organization as we are. We're fairly nimble, even at 1200 people. Wow, from what I've heard, it's no wonder that what you've done at Indiana University has garnered you the Innovation Award nominee. I can't imagine what is next with all that you have accomplished. Stephanie, Matt, thank you so much for joining Keith and me. We wish you the best of luck. You can go to citrix.com, search Innovation Awards where you can vote for the three finalists. We wish you the very best of luck. We'll be waiting with bated breath tomorrow to see who wins. Thank you very much. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Keith. Our pleasure. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching.