 Hey guys and girls, welcome back to theCUBE, live at VMware Explorer 2023, our 13th consecutive VMware customer event. But you know, because you've been watching theCUBE since its inception. I'm Lisa Martin with Rob's TouchA. We're going to be having a great conversation, deep diving into some Azure technology. We've got two guests joining us. Brett Tanzer is here. The VP Product Management at Azure and Microsoft. And Scott Manchester, great to have you. Scott Manchester joins us as well for Microsoft. Director of Product, Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop. Guys, great to have you. Thank you so much for having us. We're excited. We're going to double click on Azure VMware solution or AVS you might hear us refer to it. First with Brent, then we're going to double click into Azure Virtual Desktop or AVD with Scott and Windows 365. So, Brett, talk to us about what's unique about the VMware, Microsoft partnership with respect to Azure Virtual Solutions? I mean, Microsoft and VMware have been working for over three years to bring solutions for mission critical customers to Azure. And it's really been a long journey, but we are super excited. Like the reception for customers has been amazing. We learned that AVS is the fastest growing VMware service in the public cloud. So we're really proud of that. And the work that we've done with VMware to really make it possible for customers running SQL Server to bring their solution to Azure VMware Solutions is really important. 70% of the world SQL Server run on VMware on premise. So enabling that for customers in the cloud is awesome. And if you think about the incentives that Microsoft and VMware are able to offer to the customers together, it really can't be matched in the public cloud. I was going to say that seems like a big thing, right? Because there's always a push to bring that there just even from a licensing simplicity thing. There has to be some of that as well. Yeah, I mean, we've done a lot of work across VMware to make it easy for customers to buy, easy for customers to consume. We announced not that long ago that AVS was included in VMware cloud universal. So customers who are using that to buy their offerings can use it on AVS. And we've worked really hard to take the friction out of how you buy and what it takes to get the best cost. Prakha open, what Azure VMware solution AVS, what is it, how does it help customers really extract benefits from the cloud as they're living in cloud? You know, I mean, AVS, it really is the VCF, the VMware cloud foundation product that people are using on premises today. We've just taken it in conjunction with VMware and we brought it into Azure data centers. We've connected it to the network. And so now you get the best of both worlds. You get the VMware experience that you're familiar with. You get the tools that you use. Your solutions natively can run on top of AVS in Azure, but it's connected to the network. So if you need to use Azure services, if you need to connect to our AI services, if you need to use Microsoft 365 in conjunction with AVS, all of that is possible because you're in the same environment. It's connected natively and so everything flows. Yeah, and it's a fully supported first party. Absolutely, you know, Microsoft engineers have spent a lot of time learning on how to support the VMware product with the same level of depth that VMware can. And it's worked out really well for our customers. Help us with an example of an industry or customers or who's really taking advantage of AVS? So I mean, you know, we're just really pleased we have customers across the financial services, industry customers in manufacturing, customers in all sorts of vertical industries who've brought their solutions to AVS. And what they love is our global data center footprint. They love the compliance that we bring to every solution and they love how easy it is for them to really grow and scale in the cloud as their solutions grow. And that's what they're looking for is that help, that simplicity so that they can scale so that they can develop new products and services and get to market faster and be more competitive than their competition. You know, I mean, Microsoft is really serious about meeting their customers where we are. We don't want you to have to redo anything. We want to meet you where you are and help you transform moving forward but, you know, no need to take a step back. What do you think is unique about the partnership that you and VMware have? So, I think the way that we've built the offering so that it's a Microsoft first-party offering built around VMware attack gives customers the best of both worlds and that's a little bit unique about the way that we bring the offering to market. I think some of the licensing programs are really unique and I think the work that we've done to just integrate the solutions with ARM and make it possible for the customer to manage all of that through a single portal is really great for the Azure center customer. But you know what? We've also preserved all that vSphere goodness that customers have grown accustomed to on-premise so it makes it easy for their customers to be productive without having to do much. Right, and from a cultural perspective, I imagine, that's a big advantage because customers going through cultural transformation, learning new technologies, that's hard. Sure, I mean like there's enough to learn as you think about moving from on-premise to the cloud, let alone having to relearn the whole technology stack so we make it easier for people to kind of go at a slower pace and get there on the pace that they need to. Yeah, on their pace. Anything, here we are, this is only day, well this, I think this is technically day two of VMware Explorer. This is our first day of coverage, but I mean any exciting announcements coming that we should be ready to hear about? Yeah, you know, there's a lot of exciting things that we've talked about. We've announced our partnership with Pure Storage. That's in preview now and so customers can get structured storage from the ecosystem that supplements the support we had with NetApp through ANF, so that's pretty exciting. We announced AV64, which is our first commodity-based system for AVS and so now customers will be able to draw on the same systems that the rest of the Azure fleet does, so we're looking forward to kind of the TCO savings and the scalability that comes with that. We've announced CDS is really available for AVS customers to use within their enterprise, so if your customers got large private clouds and you need to separate it between the divisions or departments inside your organization, we enable you to do that in collaboration with VMware and a whole host of other things, so I really encourage people just go check out the blog that we just posted in the Microsoft Tech community and there's all sorts of information about the stuff that's happening. If I go to the Microsoft booth, can I get my hands on? You can, if you come to the Microsoft booths, you can get your hands on lab, you can get a demo by anybody, from myself or my team, and we're happy to take you through all of it. Awesome, Brett, thank you for giving us that deep dive into Azure VMware Solution or AVS. Scott, let's bring you into the conversation now. You've been sitting here patiently. As I mentioned, you're director of product for Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop or AVD. Talk to us a little bit about what AVD is. How does it help customers really solve some of the challenges that they're facing in this interesting environment? Yeah, sure. So Azure Virtual Desktop is a cloud VDI product. So we took this technology that's been around for decades. We call VDI a virtual desktop infrastructure and we brought that capability to the cloud, leveraging a lot of the same thing that Brett was referring to here in terms of the elasticity that the cloud brings, the reach that we have with Azure, we have data centers all across the world. And we actually released that product, Azure Virtual Desktop, in September of 2019. Interesting timing, right? Because the world changed six months later and many organizations were already moving towards cloud VDI, really taking advantage of this opportunity to have this elastic compute experience delivered from the cloud. And virtualization also provides this security boundary. So when we were talking about verticals that use AVS or use these other solutions like this, oftentimes they're using them because they want to create a security boundary. So that device that you have in front of you, when I'm using it to access corporate resources, when I'm done, their corporate data is left on that device. That's one of the real value props of virtualization brings to bear. So of course, this is also technology that enables hybrid work that allows people to access the corporate resources from home. So launching this product in September of 2019 and it was very mature at that point in time by the time COVID hit, many of the organizations that had already started their migration to the cloud with AVD amplified that and worked fast to try to get everything deployed to support their hybrid work environment. And of course, during that time when people were learning just how long this might continue and the depth of change that this is going to create, that product was ready there, ready for our customers. And it's based on the VMware tech under the hood. Well, we've got a great partnership with VMware, very similar to what we've done with AVS. So AVD has its own native capabilities, but working with VMware for many, many years and understanding where they bring unique value on top of our platform, customers can opt to use VMware Horizon on Azure and get all the benefits of AVD. And to Brett's point earlier, when customers already are using VMware and other environments, that's the portal they're familiar with. It's the tools in front end that they're familiar with. They can continue to have that now inside of Azure with the extensions we provide to AVD. And I would expect because just based on Azure's history and where it is from a cloud perspective being one of the largest, I think that customers must look at it and go part of the reason I want to go with AVD is because of security and the compliance and all of the stuff that goes along with that. Is that really where you're seeing it and industries that are embracing it? Yeah, we did some unique things. Like those are the traditional triggers to use virtualization, right? I want security, I want elasticity, but we have some unique value prop that we bring forward with AVD. One is we've got a Windows multi-user environment. So you can have a Windows client experience and share multiple people on a single instance of a Windows machine. They think about cost management, right? If I can stand up a single VM and allow multiple people to access throughout the day, you benefit from the reality that it's unlikely that everybody needs all of the resources at any one point in time. So you're sharing that resources in a very economical way. And to do that with a full Windows client experience is something very unique that AVD brings to our customers. Do you have a favorite customer story? You talked about launching the product sort of fortuitously within six, you know, eight months of the pandemic. And I imagine there was an acceleration in companies going, help. We now have overnight hybrid, not hybrid, a remote workforce, now we're hybrid. Favorite customer story that you really think shows the value of AVD and what it's delivering to customers that are now in this probably permanent hybrid workforce. I'd say there's a very common theme as opposed to picking an individual customer. There was some very common themes and ones you'd probably expect when everybody was forced to go work remote, right? And then of course we had supply chain issues too. So you kind of had this double whammy, right? So now people couldn't get access to their office and physically the machines that they had in their office and they couldn't buy laptops because we had the supply chain issue. So we had great technology available to support bring your own device scenarios. So if you already had a desktop or PC at home, you can enroll that into the, into an endpoint management solution and get secure access to corporate resources using AVD. All you had to do is install the AVD client and boom, I've got access to my secure corporate resources. And we've designed to make both Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 very flexible so you can scale out and scale in as you need to. So obviously, you know, when the pandemic hit there was this huge scaling out. I needed to add thousands of more users in many cases immediately and having that ability to do that where I can go click a couple of buttons and have 10,000 more desktops available for users. That's really the success story. And that's where people really virtualization became something that was just much more mainstream for people that maybe they dabbled in it. Maybe they had a couple of use cases and now we're seeing many organizations where a large percentage of their workforces now are actually getting access to corporate resources through virtual environment. In fact, I'll give you one case study. How's that? Microsoft, internally at Microsoft we had deployed Azure Virtual Desktop and we had thousands and thousands of developers that were getting access to their dev boxes through the resources remotely. And when all the devs got sent home obviously this became a really interesting scenario for our devs to get access to the desktops on their box. So they'd remote into Azure Virtual Desktop and then from there they jump to their local desktops and then be able to keep coding and keep using their same development environment. And then recently within Microsoft just a few weeks ago in fact we made an internal policy change. So new employees joining the company or a PC refresh cycle, you can now opt for a cloud PC versus a physical PC. So if you've got your own laptop whether you prefer a Mac or another brand PC you can bring that device and then get a cloud PC delivered to you and then you can get access to from anywhere anytime on any device. So having that internally at Microsoft kind of sets a tone for other organizations to consider that as an option for them as well. I was going to say time to productivity has to be improved from that as well. Just knowing I had a managed as head of product for a company we had a global workforce and getting them up and running is different time zones, different areas and all over the world, different compliance. That has to be a factor and when people are looking at AVV. Huge factor. In fact, when you think about what virtualization does in terms of opening up your workforce, right? Used to be that you'd hire people that lived within a driving distance to your office and that was your base of people you could choose to hire from. And now that we're all globally connected and we can give people access to secure corporate environments from anywhere in the world and any of our data centers, now my workforce can be anywhere in the world, right? And oftentimes it's actually better to have coverage of different time zones, right? If you're frontline kind of scenarios, you know you got 24 seven call center support all these kinds of conditions now that I can on board and off board them in a matter of minutes and just a couple of clicks and get them secure access. And I don't necessarily have to have any kind of direct handoff. We call it our zero solution, right? So zero touch, zero trust and zero ramp meaning I can get somebody access to this and I don't have to run them through some training of how it behaves or how it works. It just works like regular windows and I don't have to ship them any physical hardware and wait for that cycle of that to be arrived and then getting it back at the end of their term, right? So there's that zero touch and then that zero trust. We deploy things in a very secure manner and that there's protection at every layer of them getting access to the corporate resources. Absolutely critical to have protection at every layer. Scott, any, many announcements with respect to AVD this week at explore? Well, actually we had a pretty big announcement yesterday in relation to our partnership with VMware and Windows 365. So we announced yesterday the public preview of VMware horizon on top of Windows 365. So if you've got familiarity with the horizon client applications or specific needs for the HDX extreme or I'm sorry, the blast extreme protocol all of those are now available on top of Windows 365. And can I go to the booth and see that in action? You can. In fact, I've got a session tomorrow where I'll be giving a live demo of this as well. What time? It is at three, two o'clock tomorrow. Two o'clock tomorrow Pacific time at the Microsoft booth? No, no, it's one of the sessions here. Well, I want to break out. You won't want to miss Scott's session to really dig deep into Windows 365 and AVD. Gentlemen, it's been such a pleasure having you on the program. Thank you for double clicking on AVS and AVD. I think I got that right. You got it. Thank you guys very much. I really appreciate that. Congrats on all the hard work. Thank you. For our guests and for Rob Stricci, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer 23. Don't go away, Rob and I will be back with our next guest. Don't forget, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage.