 Hi, this is Stu Miniman with wikibond.org. Here with SiliconANGLE TVs continuous coverage from VMworld 2011. Talking desktop virtualization, joining me today are Andrei Lipovic and Jason Langoni. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, guys. Thank you, sir, you're welcome. Great, so we've been talking about the virtualization adoption and really cloud adoption going on, but desktop virtualization is one of those conversations that's been going on for many years and last year at EMC World and some of the other shows that we've been covering for the last couple of months, we believe we're beyond just talking about it but really doing it. As the theme this year is, you know, own it, you know, do it, and there's new opportunities. So both of you have been involved with desktop virtualization for many years. Jason has happened to have your CEO on our program few months ago, back when we were actually at the same convention center. So back in Vegas again, you know, hopefully some new things. And Andrei, you're with EMC as we can see by your attire, so why don't we just a quick second if you can give us a little bit about your background, you know, professionally as well as your experience with desktop virtualization to bring us to today. So Andrei? Sure, sure. I actually have been doing VDI, even before VDI I was called VDI. And before joining EMC I was working for VMware and professional services where I was the Asia Pacific lead for end user computing. Prior to that I was in Brazil, my country I was born in, and now I've been relocated to US and working for EMC as a senior phase specialist. Great, so maybe before we go to Jason for a second, do you see adoption of VDI desktop virtualization different by geography? I definitely see adoption. I think it's been taken a little while to actually to ramp up the way organizations were expecting to. But I think the organizations that have been through the deployment are really happy with what they're getting. Great, Jason, if you could give us a little bit of your background. People that follow the Wikibon community might remember that you were part of a peer insight that we held towards the beginning of this year. Really felt we got some great information about the journey to going from, you know, traditional desktops to virtual environments. So it gives a little bit of your background and what's been hot with you these days? Sure, so I work for a federally focused bar micro tech service disabled veteran owned 8A small business. And we focus primarily on VMware Citrix delivering it in the federal space. Both here, obviously in the US and then supporting the missions abroad. And much like Andre, I think over the last couple of years we've seen it go from 50 C proof of concepts to 100 C proof of concepts. And now it seems to be like the 500 mark is where people are starting to dip their toes in the pool of VDI. And now we're moving on to four or five figure VDI deployments finally, which is kind of nice because I know people like Andre and myself have been waiting for this to gain a little traction. And I think we're starting to see some really good numbers now. Great, so Jason focused a lot on the government federal especially Andre, do you have a specific vertical that you're focused on when it comes to the desktop deployments? No, not really. I've been working with several different types of companies, government and private companies, banks. I just relocated to US, I'm sort of new to this market, but in Asia Pacific there is definitely a great adoption. One of government in New Zealand doing big rollout with tens of thousands of desktops. They're definitely, I agree with you with that we actually seeing a ramp up on the number of seats. Proof of concepts really ramping up. Now before we had proof of concepts with tens, with hundreds. Now proof of concepts are like 5,000 desktops. So definitely ramping up. Maybe soon we will be on hundreds of thousands. Great, so Jason when we talk about going from a traditional desktop to a more virtual desktop environment, I wonder how many of your clients are thinking about disasters. I mean if we look at what's been happening there's earthquakes happening where they've never happened before. Hurricane Irene just hit. And VMware really has almost a dare out there in the marketplace. Let's do it, it's the cloud, we're going to go there. So I would think that, and government has this mandate to go to clouds. So how do you see that fitting in to the whole desktop environment? A little tricky to be honest with you. You're going back to hurricanes, to earthquakes. I was in Arlington, Virginia a couple miles from the Pentagon when the earthquake happened. 15 minutes later I'm getting text messages. We're ready to do our SRM, should we hit the panic button. So I think SRM has been adopted as a proper DR tool by a lot of agencies, a lot of organizations. And now I think a lot of those same folks are looking at view and saying great, this will enable our workforce to actually do something. SRM for the most part is failing over mission critical applications or email, web, whatever these services are. But it's not still allowing people to work from home in the case of an earthquake or something like that. So a lot of those same folks are now making a phone call and saying, hey, we're finally ready for that VDI deployment. We've been kicking around for the last 12 months. That's been good. As far as cloud goes, yes, you know, federal agent, US federal has this cloud-first mentality. I had espresso with Randy Bias earlier. I think him and I are more in the same camp on what cloud is and what it is. So I won't quantificate too much on that, but VDI, what we're here to talk about is, you don't necessarily need the cloud. You don't need a desktop to do it. Desktop makes sense for a lot of folks, but for US federal, everyone's doing it in their own data set. Interesting, if I could just interject there. I happen to have a conversation earlier this year with Brian Madden, who, the interesting thing he said is he said, anybody that needed VDI as a solution actually has it. He said cloud is a big piece of it. Enabling security is a big reason, especially in the government space, as you guys are talking about. So I guess where I wanted to go with this is desktop and cloud. One of the things I've heard from EMC and also from the VCE group is desktop as a service. So Andre, maybe if you can tell us, is this reality? How much is the desktop and the cloud merging? And where do we see this going today from a real customer deployment? I think we're really moving towards as a desktop as a service. If it's going to be in private cloud, if it's going to be a public cloud, I'm not sure about that yet. But what I see is that we're creating containers, so we're providing desktops from a container. We might provide user profile from a different container, and we might provide applications from a different container that can be consumed in different ways. How everything is going to plug together and if it's a public or a private cloud. I'm not sure about that, but definitely we're moving to a consumption-based desktop. Right, so one of the big themes that we see is service providers are obviously a huge piece of the cloud deployment. And I've heard from EMC, I've heard from NetApp, I've heard from HP, that desktop, as a service from these service providers is one of the real ways that we might be able to overcome some of the slowness that we've had in the VDI marketplace. Just kind of rip the cord and go full bore with the cloud and own that technology. Jason, any comments on the service provider market? Is that playing to the government space much? No, I think a lot of people are interested in it, right? It's a very sexy solution. People like the idea of having a Win 7 instance on demand, I think there's a lot of folks that are saying we want to do desktops as a service when in reality they want to do published applications and not a published desktop. So there's some confusion there. And if you look at the two main heavyweights, Citrix and desktop and VMware view, neither of them natively are designed to do multi-tenant from a front end or even a back end, to some degree, multi-tenant solution properly, right? So I've got my VMware view admin console and you're the service provider and Andre and I are tenants. How do we all access it and manage our own little piece of the puzzle? We can't today. So Jason, can I put you on the spot here for a second? So when we talk about desktop virtualization, the big player, we're here at VMworld talking about VMware, Citrix is a big player here. So there's been some rumors going around that potentially we'll have some announcement this week regarding desktop virtualization. Obviously we can't pre-announce anything, but how's VMware doing with the adoption compared to the likes of Citrix? I would say in my primary focus, which is US federal, VMware is very strong from an adoption standpoint. A lot of the federal agencies, the operate both here, Conus and Oconus have been very comfortable and very happy with the way vSphere has performed. Very happy with the way it's been managed from a security perspective with things like Stig and the way it supports PAC from a VMware view perspective. I think a lot of the agents rarely do I get, hey, we really want to do Send Desktop. I'll get the bake-offs, which if it's a LAN scenario is tit for tat normally, but VMware view is nine out of 10 what I'm doing in US federal. Okay, well it's interesting because I guess anecdotally what I've heard is first of all, most vendors. And if you look at EMC, EMC has lots of solutions using vSphere with Zen Desktop as deployment in Zen Desktop still is the market leader out there. So we think VMware is looking to close the gap, but also Citrix isn't sitting still. So we had a lot of coverage at Citrix Synergy. There's definitely a large ecosystem there. So I think it's good for the marketplace that there's some strong competition there, VMware and Citrix there. I didn't want to put you on the spot, Andre, but working for EMC at VMworld. But I mean, maybe I did hear an announcement this morning around VCE. I don't know if you wanted to comment on there. They have a new solution that they're offering for desktop. Yeah, I'm not aware of the con. Okay, fair enough. Maybe I can pivot off that. One of the biggest challenges I think when I talk to Jason in Lakeside Software is tools that help us really understand a desktop environment. How do I get from what I have today to where I need to go? And the problem is it's not standardized and everybody's environment's different and they're users and applications. So you have a tool, I believe, that's very popular out in the blogosphere out on the website. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, I do. By the way, my blog is myvutualcloud.net. I'm also on Twitter and Relay Bovich. So basically I built over time when I was at VMware working as a consultant. I built a calculator, online calculator that helps people and administrators to size their VDI environment. And over the years it's been improving and that calculator has more than a million hits per month today. Wow. So it's myvutualcloud.net. So do you have a sponsor yet for that webpage? Yes, I do have a sponsor there. Okay. One more. Excellent. So here with Jason and Andre talking about the future of desktop virtualization. I guess we've got a couple more minutes to wrap up. Jason, if I could start with you, where do you see the white space in the marketplace? What are your customers asking for today that's really kind of lacking out there? And I just think part of that's probably what your company helps provide. You know, I think one of the things, again, U.S. federal focus has been across domain, you know, like a zipper nipper type solution where you have unsecured networks, secured networks. How do I roll that into a VDI solution? And I think it was last week or the week before at ClearCube, which if you're not in U.S. federal, you may have never even heard of this company. You know, they make zero and thin clients. They now have a certified and approved cross-domain solution, PC over IP zero clients. It's got a secured KBM, a cool little chassis, you pop in your zeros. So I could have unclassed, classed, top secret, secret, all coming into one device, KVM between them all. I've had people asking for that for years. I mean, at the three-letter agencies and some of the other folks, I mean, I do a lot with DoD. We bumped into one of the DoD guys on the way in here. So, you know, from what I do, that's been very much welcomed. I think the other big hole is something Horizon will next year or 2013 or 2052. At some point, Horizon will bridge the other gap that I think we both agree exists. And then one other thing before I forget, EVGA is kind of this newcomer in the zero client space. You know, most people know EVGA from a consumer electronics perspective, you know, motherboards, graphic cards. You know, I look at like, what are all the zero clients available today? What are their price points? So like wise, we're talking about some of the great examples there. So I'm probably not going to make any wise friends here in a minute, but you got the wise P20, zero client, which in theory is the same thing functionally as an EVGA PDO2, there's a pretty significant price delta. You know, if all the zero clients roughly do the same, more or less they're all copper, they all do this. You know, why would I pay a price delta? So it's interesting to see a consumer electronic company like EVGA come out of nowhere and start to ramp up and get market share. So I guess Andre, that's kind of a similar point, but from a vendor standpoint, you know, just a new vendor that I heard from Jason. One of the biggest challenges I've seen in this marketplace is it's highly fragmented. There's so many pieces, and to put together a full end to end solution, it's not just, you know, even a flex pod or a V block, there's more that you need because you need the clients, you need this, its services are a huge piece of that. So, you know, where do you see, you know, the ecosystem maturing and how are you guys trying to help that? Let me focus on what we provide at EMC. So most VDI deployments where I go in, even before I was EMC, the problem, the bottleneck is most often the storage, but it's not because the storage is the problem, it's because it was not properly architected for a VDI solution. And we at EMC now have been trying to help customers, not only to, we're not only selling the storage arrays, and we're not selling solution, but we're trying to educate them on how they should size and adjust the storage for performance in where VDI has very specific performance requirements. And, you know, we're trying to help customers, we're trying to help customers deploying VM review, deploying Zendesk top, and it's been great. I've been enjoying it. I think VDI is really a great solution for companies who have adopted. I have a very interesting example from an American company, a call center who started deploying VDI and for remote workforce. As soon as they realized they completely changed their hiring process because they're hiring part-time workers, moms they had their kids at home in the morning, they could work during the morning and disabled people. It's great. I think it's been very good and I'm very happy in the industry that I'm working on. Yeah, it's interesting because we've seen a number of startups come into this space and there's that balance between, okay, how do I take this environment and really make it fit into it? And there's some companies that are trying to come in and say, I have, you know, flash-based technology that really takes care of all of those desktop virtualizations. Obviously EMC plays heavily in the flash space and it's been moving there and it's good to see some startups moving into the space to help, just build for virtualization and even for desktop virtualization to help fix that space. All right, so gentlemen, I really appreciate you coming on the program, especially on some short notice here. Expect to see more desktop virtualization. So Andre Leibovich and Jason Langoni, both of them, you can find, Jason is Langoni J on Twitter and Andres Andre Leibovich on Twitter. When these videos are posted, you'll be able to see how to spell all those names and everything there. So this is Stu Miniman with continuous coverage from VMworld2011.