 Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage here. On location, I'm your host, John Furrier of theCUBE. We're here for AWS annual user conference reinvent. It's our 11th year covering every single time it gets bigger and better, faster. The pace of play in this tech game with Generative AI is at an all-time high, and it's putting pressure points all around the industry to push the envelope on innovation, because if you're not moving fast with your data and security, you're going to be left behind, certainly the Generative AI sets the table. And the next guest here is the general manager of the end-user computing group of AWS Manier, Merza. Thanks for coming on, really appreciate you coming on because you were the most popular story on SiliconANGLE. And the first one coming out of the gate at Reinvent. My pleasure. Your products, congratulations. Thank you. Let's get into it right here. Thank you, John. So end-user computing, that's like Amazon Workspaces. Yeah, it's a little bit more than Workspaces. Explain what you do. Absolutely, so I run three products primarily, Amazon Workspaces, which is our virtual desktops. We offer a bunch of different virtual desktops, both with Windows Server and the desktop flavor, Amazon Linux and Ubuntu as well. Amazon AppStream, that's our streaming application service, as the name would suggest. And we also have a secure browser service, Amazon Workspaces web. This is for customers to exclusively access fully managed Chrome. Why have a desktop when you spend all day in the browser? That's what that product's all about. Really, really stoked to work with SiliconANGLE to meet with you guys and talk about the Amazon Workspaces thin client. As you said, innovation is key. We're always looking forward and this is one of those things that we started by listening to customers and working backwards from that. So this is, you're debuting Amazon Workspaces thin client device for virtual desktop access. And what's interesting about this, what got my attention was, not only did Adam drop it in my exclusive with him, and he also mentioned the price point. And it's also based on the Firestick TV Cube, which is a very low-cost device that we know on TV. So it's leveraging some of the work that's been done, but in a market, which by the way is expensive and it's also hard, complex. You touched on all the different points, right? And so we started by taking a look at price, right? We want it to be really, really innovative and get people thinking about these very expensive laptops that they're buying and securing for their end users. In many cases, those run from 600 to 1200 bucks. So we said, okay, if we're going to innovate in this space, we're going to think critically about hardware. We've got to absolutely compete on price. We've got to give something that totally lowers the prices for endpoints. So what we did is we started with the Fire TV Cube, the Amazon Fire TV Cube, and we said, all right, what if we could take that and repurpose it without having to do any manufacturing? So what we did was we took it, we built a custom operating system, custom firmware, custom software, and we're able to take those cost avoidances for manufacturing and pass that exclusively as cost savings to customers. So this 195 to start, you could also buy an extension USB hub that also enables multi-monitor support too. So we use the word thin client. That's right. I know what that means. For the people who may not be in the industry that long, there used to be a fat client, which was a derogatory term. That's not, it was an official word, but the PCs that sometimes people are familiar with at big companies is that it's bloated with all this boot up time, you got software on there, and then you got to reload stuff, and then they went to centralized operations to say, hey, we want to manage the experience, the security, all the kind of things that enterprise worry about. And so next thing you know, you got this fat client with all this bloated software at the edge. Exactly, and it's expensive, right? And there's a lot to think about with that. First of all, you actually have to get it there, right? And so not only did we think critically about the price point, we thought about like, well, how are all these end users actually going to get this device? So included in that price point is the logistics to ship this thing. And then we were like exactly, like these sort of thicker clients, maybe that's a better way for it, these thicker clients, they have an operating system you have to secure, they have software, and so we have none of that. With the purpose-built software for this thing, users cannot install software on this. There's no streaming media, so you're not going to be watching Prime Video, you're not going to be doing the types of things that you're doing when you're using this for at home entertainment. This is purpose-built for a corporate worker. And so let's get into some of the cloud benefits. I can almost imagine just thinking about working backwards from the solution. If you've got the thin client, it's probably taking advantage of the goodness in the cloud. So if you wrote custom firmware, you lock down the edge, the buy chain, you got a custom OS, you're probably talking to the cloud and leveraging probably Lambda, serverless. What's going on with the cloud interaction? How is this all working seamlessly to get the performance that's required from the user? Absolutely, so it starts with our Amazon workspaces today and we think very, very critically, not just about how to provide people with a high-fidelity desktop so that it looks really, really nice, but we think a lot about performance as well. So we need a very secure and very high-performance protocol. We have our workspaces streaming protocol and we're evolving that constantly, iterating on it. From there, it goes to all the different ways that we use the cloud, like our edge services, to be able to actually get pixels streamed from the cloud to the end users. Now in many cases, what we see is, especially in cases where users are gonna be using this, it's gonna be remote workers, so we have to think not only about long-haul transport within the United States and then to other countries as well, but we also have to think about things in the last mile and we have to think about what's going on in the user's home network. So all of this sort of science is baked into it, both from the protocol, but then also from the hardware itself. That's one of the cool things about leveraging a device that Amazon has been working for a while. Our Amazon devices colleagues have spent a lot of time thinking about how to build a high-fidelity system for the home and we've been able to take advantage of that. It is an endpoint. It is. It's point-managed. Absolutely. So what about the user experience? I mentioned the Fat Client or Thick Client. When you have a lot of software, one of the complaints we've seen in big companies like you're in theCUBE, they say is that the boot up time and productivity, things slowing down, a lot of stuff overhead involved. I got all these agents loaded on my machine. It could be burdensome. Well, you know what customers tell us really suck? Is that very, very first unboxing experience, right? Like you take it out of the box, you plug it in, you spend a whole bunch of time updating the operating system, updating the firmware. Before you realize it, several hours have gone by and you're incentive to really get going into whether it's a new job or start using a new computer. It's very, very low. With this, we've been very fortunate to tackle that problem as well. It's about ease of access. A lot of our customers who've been using it through our beta program have been reporting back that it takes under five minutes from unboxed to actually being productive. And that's what you would expect, I think, from an Amazon product. We're really cool to deliver that. I remember during the server days, back in the heyday when it cost the ownership it was a big problem. Swapping out boxes, Google had so many servers. If one fail, they just took it out, put in a new one, top-swappable devices. This is so low priced, you can just swap a new one in. That's it. If you need new firmware. That's probably a good feature. What about custom firmware? What about the needs of the enterprise? What kind of customization can an enterprise do with workspaces and this new thin client? Yeah, so on the end point itself, we thought very, very critically about how to secure this thing. That is the first set of customizations that we want to give people. So customers are going to be able to configure when this thing updates. It does update over the air. So there's not going to be this really complex update process. And you're not going to have to tell your users, like, hey, between this time and this time, you're not allowed to log in. None of that's the case. That was the first thing that we thought about when we thought about customization. From there, it's going to be able to access all sorts of different cloud endpoints. We started with the three that we support today, the workspaces app stream and workspaces web. And we are hoping that we're going to continue to expand this to all of our workspaces partners as well. So people who use a service called workspaces core, today we have VMware horizon that's on it. We have WorkSpot. We have LeoStream also as partners with workspaces. And we're working on launching with Citrix as well. And so in the fullness of time, I think you'll start to see this rolled out and be more customizable and configurable across the gamut. So for the people that might be misunderstood around what this is, sounds like an ecosystem developing with that marketplace kind of concept. Well, it's not so much a marketplace as taking advantage of the fact that people have been running these sort of VDI solutions on-prem for several years. And what they tell us with this workspaces core feature that I was alluding to is that they want an easy way from taking the licenses, taking the user experience and taking the admin experience and replacing their on-prem infrastructure with cloud-based infrastructure with workspaces. And so now imagine you can add an endpoint to an easy way of moving your, say for instance, horizon-aid deployment on-prem to the cloud, add an endpoint to it. We think it's going to increase the security posture. We know it's going to be lower cost for your end users. We know it's going to be easy to set up. How are you onboarding new partners in terms of like, is there a certification process? Is it like, if I wanted to say, I want to put the cube on there, video streaming service. I'm just making it up. They have an application. Totally. Do I have to go through you guys? Is there a verification process? Does the enterprise have to, do they onboard the solution? Yeah. How does that work? The beauty of working at AWS is that we believe very, very strongly in these sort of public APIs. So it starts there. You can start to build a solution that's fully customizable just based on public workspaces APIs that we have from there. Absolutely, we would want to work with you to make sure that this is going to meet the right quality bar that we've thought through support and we've thought through other sorts of logistics. For example, if a customer says, hey, I want to ship these products directly to my end user, great. Or if I want to ship hundreds of these to a fulfillment center where they get to manage it, we enable that too. And so we think very critically about how to enable our partners. Well, I'm super excited for you guys. I was super excited that Adam dropped the dime to us when I had my interview with them for preview, the preview post, and I want to get your reaction to the quote I'll read it here directly. Today it's complex to deploy the clients that folks like customer service agents or other people using our workspaces service use. It's not as secure as customers want it to be, meaning end user environment. A lot of times they find those devices walk out the door when the employees walk out the door. Adam's actually told John Furrier in an interview. Is that like a core thing, is that the high order bit, is it the walking out the door, is it the asset, the security, what's the unpack that quote? Yeah, well it really covers on all of the value propositions of it. So security is the first place that we wanted to raise the bar. The neat thing about this is that there's no data at rest. There's nothing that gets stored on this device. And I was mentioning you can't install applications as an end user. There's no streaming media and the like. The next thing was cost. And so we thought about that in two ways, right? We thought about not just low price, but we thought about logistics and those have to be built into it as well. Now the interesting point that Adam made about these devices walking out the door. You know when I've spoke to customers I learned that up to 70% of the laptops that they share with their employees never actually return home. And it puts people in a really, really tough spot. Like what do I do? Do I go chase this employee to get it back? Or do I just accept that it's not coming back? And there's not only a cost, like a write down of that, but then there's the cost of acquiring new ones. What's up, what's IP is out there? And then there's the security element of that of like hey, that IP might be gone forever with this. With the Amazon Workspace's thin client. We're super keen on the idea that the security posture increases from anything that we've delivered before. The cost is the lowest and by taking care of that logistics and that ease of use we make it super simple. I do like the AppStream name. Quick question on the traffic. Is it encrypted between? Always. Okay. Always encrypted, rotating keys. We make sure that we take security very, very seriously across our protocols and across our stack. Okay, final question. What was the coolest feedback you got from customers in the beta program? What were some of the cool, name a few cool things that were said to you? Yeah. Totally. So a couple of things. This thing is small and it's lightweight, right? Like and so it's about palm size and that's really, really neat. That was one of the coolest thing. The second thing is that it takes just about five minutes to get up and running. You know, and that was perhaps the most sort of happy piece of feedback that we got. Like I said, we expect people to unbox this second Amazon product and it's been just that. And then the last thing, people love the price. The price is right for this. Great leverage on an existing cool technology like Firestick and bringing that into the workspace. That was smart. Love the size, love the cube, of course. I got to ask you honestly, because end user computing has been around for a while. You mentioned Citrix, it's an older brand, it's kind of older guard kind of companies. VM, we're just couple up by Broadcom. We were talking before we came on camera that we've reported on SiliconANGLE that end user computers, computing divisions being shopped around, maybe already sold, who knows. But it's clear Broadcom is probably not going to keep that around. And I know you're not going to ask the questions I won't ask if you guys are going to buy it because you're not going to tell me. But the bigger question is, what's changing in end user computing? Because just the concept of end user computing, maybe we should call end user inference after this conference. Because you've got Genevieve i's coming, I've got more application clouds becoming more dominant. I'm sure AppStream is going to continue to grow. You have a modern ecosystem, you're going to probably develop. But the concept's evolving very rapidly. With the GEM, you have to have that 20 mile stare. What's changing now that's happening that the old way of doing it's changing? What's the radical things that going on? What's the acceleration points? Absolutely, well it's always tough to get the crystal ball out and say this is exactly what the future is going to be like. But you've absolutely touched on some things that are super critical. One is there's a lot of movement towards software as a service. And so that's where AppStream is super critical. In the future we expect more and more people to continue to use the browser. And the cost equation is really going to make people think hard about like, hey, if I'm securing SaaS, you're using things like AppFabric and AWS and you're using our secure browser services. But down the road I think there's a few more things that we're excited about. One is thinking about the user end to end, right? So you want that employee to be as productive as they could possibly be as quickly as possible and for the lowest possible cost. And then of course you need all your corporate data to be secure. And so there's a tremendous amount of tension there and products like the Amazon Workspace's Dinkline is meant to sort of fit in the middle. I think if I take a look even further out, Generative AI has changed the landscape entirely and so what we expect is through some of these devices to be able to do a lot more interactivity with the end user, think about all the data that's going to be going back and forth. And so we need these high fidelity networks. We need protocols that are able to support them and we need a user interface that's going to be super, super simple. And so we're excited to deliver on all of those things. A lot of latency activity. You got it. Coming in to end the encryption is a big part. Well, congratulations on the new thing. Just jumping out of the top of my head. I wanted to ask is just flew into my head and last point there. As you look at the security piece and that becomes important, what's next for you as you take this to the next level? What are some of the things you have on your KPIs for next year to knock down from the business standpoint? Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing is making sure that we get it rolled out across the globe. That is going to be really, really critical because what we're seeing is interest from users and students as well in, you know, institutions all across the world. So that is going to be something that we're laser focused on. As we think about the security bar, as we think about the security model from here, our goal is going to be to figure out how can we make it a lot more flexible in all the different ways that people are going to want to fit this in their enterprise. Final question, browser support, Chrome, people download Chrome extensions. What's the browser strategy? What do you guys do? Is it you guys off the shelf? Do you customize your own browser? It's fully managed Chrome and no extensions. You know, there are things that we can configure. There are things that we can work on with you, but it's one of those things where we've said, hey, you know, like if you want to kind of get out of the business of knowing which version of Chrome is on the endpoint, we've got you. We've got something for you. So the experience for the user is Chrome, normal Chrome. Correct. No incompatibility stuff happens. Correct. Save your passwords, save your bookmarks. All that stuff is the same. Congratulations on a great launch and love the product. Thank you, John. Thank you so much for having us. No problem. Love the story right out of the gate. News breaking every time here. Tons of news happening at re-invent. Of course, we got it. Go to SiliconANGLE.com. We have a special program going on called Battle for AI Supremacy Special Edition. We've got news, we've got analysis opinion. Of course, we've got SuperCloud 5 going on in Palo Alto, streaming live. All the coverage from this location as well as in-studio panels, experts breaking down, generative AI, all the final, what's all the big trends? What's hype? What's reality? We're breaking it down for you here in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier, host. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back from Las Vegas.