 is going to be there. So first of all can you give us a little bit of background about yourself and your company and how you fit into the desktop virtualization picture? Absolutely. Got involved initially I was with the government and retired from the government but primarily I was in the military so I retired from the army, went to work in the space and saw some real needs particularly around some of the issues that have now become very big issues today for the IT industry. I started my company Microtech in 2000 actually 2004 and in the last seven years have really kind of grown around some of the trends but had our eye on those trends probably as long ago as five years particularly around the data centers and what was happening in the data centers virtualization and particularly around VDI even though it wasn't called VDI way back then but it's really been on fire. So did you start out partnering with like the likes of Citrix or? We started off partnering with EMC. EMC was one of our first partners as VMware started to kind of gain momentum. We were here in Vegas about three or four years ago at the VMware conference and realized we needed to be a part of that. We've been now today are a signature EMC Velocity partner we're also a Cisco Gold partner we're also an enterprise VMware partner so we've we've hit the right partners and really focused in on their solutions and hired people around those. Tony if I know correctly that's like the highest level for both VMware Cisco and EMC there can't be too many partners that have all three of those pieces. Absolutely and that's what we're so proud of is that we we actually have a pretty good crystal ball and we anticipated movement in the right direction and we are very fortunate to now be there with our partners. Okay so if you're working with the V the C and the E are you're also working with the coalition the VCE company? Well and obviously you have to for for the simple reason that that's where innovation looks like it's going to be coming from. This collaboration in this space is critically important because no one company has got all the solutions so the smart companies are the ones that are collaborating with other smart companies to come up with cutting-edge solutions. Excellent so the Wikibon community actually had a call one of what we call our peer insights back in February and Jason Langone of your company came on and what we found out of that it's not that you know desktop virtualization is going to be everywhere and it's not ready really for prime time in every environment but there were certain use cases that really were critical everybody knew call centers initially were one of the low-hanging fruits and more recently government and healthcare are two of the big areas and I believe that's something that you guys are tied into. Absolutely we have a very big footprint in the healthcare space and a lot of the focus that we've gotten the federal government around VA and their medical community around social security around health and human services around CDC center for disease control and we've been very focused in on helping them with their solutions particularly around telework solutions and particularly around VDI. So when we look at VDI but when we looked at server virtualization it was always about I could reduce cost we look at desktop virtualization it's usually about transformation because cost is not necessarily cheaper hopefully it will make the overall solution and management cheaper but it has to be transformational something that makes things better than it was before so when I look at you know government and healthcare is it the simplest saying that it's a more secure solution or is there more more nuance and more to it than that. I think there's a lot of analogies that you can put together I mean obviously you know we see it in something that we all deal with daily and that's the price of gas. If you can affect the price of gas what you can do is affect the ability to get more miles per gallon and that's what we're essentially doing in our space is we understand there's certain things we can't impact but what we can impact is we can help our government we can help our government customer in particular our public sector customers and even our commercial customers get more bang for the buck so essentially what we're doing is increasing their efficiency increasing their ability to do more with less which is an old term but in fact we're actually showing on paper ROI for how a customer can do more by using the solutions we put in place to our partners like EMC. So is that the using more of the infrastructure using more of your people combination of the two? It's really a combination of the three it's not just the people it's not just the infrastructure it's ensuring that the customer walks away from that relationship feeling 100% satisfied with what they've got for what they pay. Okay excellent so when you look at the the ultimate consumer of the desktop virtualization environment it has to be an interface that people like so you know what do you see these days I've heard people here at the show talking about the transition to Windows 7 you know a bunch of us walking around with iPads you know how does desktop virtualization you know make the ultimate end user experience better? Well I think it really depends on the the solution like you said if it's an iPad an iPod if it's a Windows 7 and people like what people like and if they like Windows 7 I don't care how hard you beat them over the head with an iPod they're not going to be happy with it if they're not comfortable with it. The user experience has to be a friendly user experience because we're talking about change and ultimately when you've got somebody used to Windows 7 and you kind of pull the carpet off from underneath them and give them a new solution that looks and feels different even though it might be better it's not better for them. So what we're doing is we're trying to make absolutely sure that we keep our customer the end user in mind as we start to develop these to ensure that that user is happy with what they've got and that it's user friendly and that it's intuitive enough to be able to that when the changes are made they can get it and adapt to it quickly. Okay so I wonder if we can poke over second at kind of the ecosystem that you're looking at so at the hypervisor layer you know VMware is you know the leader when you talk about enterprise data centers but at the desktop client you know Citrix has you know traditionally been the leader there so how do how is that kind of baking out in the environments that you're seeing today at the client level? Yeah well it I think the essential thing is is that you've got to have a good relationship with Citrix you've got to have a good relationship with VMware and you've got to have a good relationship with Microsoft and there's a number other solutions like CA now coming into play where people like what they like and sometimes you just can't confuse them with the facts they want what they want not what they need and so if you're not helping to make that relationship better by working with each of the industry leaders to ensure a successful transition to a new maybe initially less intuitive but eventually more intuitive space then you're not staying ahead of the curve you've got to be looking at what you need to do to make that experience better and if they've got Citrix you've got to be looking at Citrix if they've got Hyper-V or they've got VMware it's got to be good and easy for them to be able to use and easy for them to make that transition and we've worked very hard to have those relationships in place and to make those relationships good for the benefit of our customer. Okay great so if we look beyond kind of the server to the network and the storage Cisco has a VXI initiative that they're trying the virtual VXI I'm trying to remember what the term means even but it's like virtual experience interface and on the storage side you know every storage vendor has their own solution can you tell us I know you're working closely with Cisco and EMC you know how were they succeeding in the marketplace and what are customers really you know liking from them or what deficiencies do we need to work on. In our particular space the big focus is and always has been security I mean the federal government public sector state local governments even big companies that rely on that on their information technology and their enterprise for their day-to-day ability to service their customers need security in place and what we like is VDI is a very secure solution and it allows our customer federal customer in this particular instance to do so much more because the data resides in the data center so what we're actually doing is giving them access to a lot more data in a security model that makes it a lot easier to use and makes them feel comfortable that we've got their first and most important initiative in place and that's security. Okay so you say that it's inside the data center are you seeing desktop virtualization in the service providers for cloud service providers I know from federal government has the you know cloud first model so how do service providers in cloud fit into the whole VDI environment. Well and I think it really depends on the customer in some particular instances some customers are a little bit more comfortable with the cloud solution others are a little more hesitant they're not really sure what it is they hear people talking about the cloud the first thing that comes to mind when you start talking to a government customer about cloud solutions is outsourcing which it is not but sometimes it's just a little bit hard because it is a very new it's an old practice that's a new initiative it's it's something that we've been doing for years that's kind of changed names picked up a little bit of momentum and it's got some real uniqueness is built into it now that allow it to be used in a number of different scenarios so we're finding that our customers starting to get a little bit more comfortable we built some private cloud solutions that are micro tech homegrown solutions that we're very proud of and that we work hand in hand with Cisco and with EMC and with VMware to ensure that what we're building makes their products just that much better. Okay so is it fair to say that today for the customers that really want a secure environment that they're leaning towards the data center and that cloud is you know a little bit down the road for them? I think some of them it's a little closer than others some it's it's they're still you know very concerned about it want to know more about it want to make absolutely sure that all the kinks have been worked out before they put it into play and they want to make absolutely sure that they can actually measure the ROI because it's an investment for them and you know there have been a lot of instances where people have invested in solutions that we're going to save money and we're going to have huge ROIs and they just never panned out so we want to make absolutely sure that in these instances that we can show them why it's a better solution for them and how to measure ROI in a different way and that's through efficiency. Okay great so so before we started you you're telling me a little bit about how how explosive the growth has been I'm wondering if you can share with our users you know how that you know VDI how real is it and how how much growth are we seeing in the marketplace today? Oh we we are absolutely I mean amazed at at the amount of of growth that's available in VDI particularly because there are so many variables outside of IT that are impacting one the price of gas to the ability to leverage the information that your people need to be able to do the job they're doing and to be able to provide that access to the government in our particular instance or to our customer regardless of whether they're government or not and allow them to be able to have that data regardless of where they're sitting or what they're doing and to be able to give themselves a very full robust view of the information that they need in order to to do the jobs that they need to do while at the same time keeping security in mind. So a final question I have for you is the Wikibon community we're always looking for you know what best practices or tips would you give practitioners so you know when looking at you know betaing doing beta and moving out into production you know what does micro tech if you have some best practices that you might be able to share as to you know what do you look for in a solution provider what do you look for for your infrastructure partners and you know what should be expectation as to how that rollout looks. I think probably the one thing we look for is we look for the kind of partners that we've got with EMC the kind of partners we've got with VMware and with Cisco and a number of our other great partners but in this particular instance we're looking at ways of staying relevant because if you're not on top of what's going on if you're not part of the move to make the system better more efficient cheaper and and to be able to have access to that data structured data in a way that makes it easy to find when you need it and makes it easy to use when you need to use it those are the things that we're focused on so we hire good people we look really hard at the new technologies we're spending for a small company an exorbitant amount on R&D and ensuring that we're staying cutting edge right along with our partners like EMC and that we've got the kind of solutions that they want to leverage when they're building out great so this is Stu Miniman with Wikibon here in the Cube from EMC World in Las Vegas with Tony Jimenez CEO of MicroTech Tony thank you so much for joining us thank you sharing your stories about