Showing posts with label VDI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label VDI. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 09, 2021

Work from Anywhere: The Secret to Unlocking Once-Hidden Productivity and Creativity Gems


Transcript of a discussion on
how a bellwether UK accounting services firm has shown how consistent, secure, and efficient digital work experiences lead to heightened team collaboration and creative new workflows.

 

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Citrix.

 

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Now that hybrid work models have been the norm for a year, what’s the long-term impact on worker productivity? Will the pandemic-induced shift to work from anywhere agility translate into increased employee benefits -- and better business outcomes -- over time?

 

Stay with us now as we explore how a bellwether UK accounting services firm has shown how consistent, secure, and efficient digital work experiences lead to heightened team collaboration and creative new workflows.

 

To learn more about the ways that distributed work models fuel innovation, we’re now joined by our guests, Chris Madden, Director of IT and Operations for Kreston Reeves, LLP in the UK. Welcome, Chris.

 

Chris Madden: Thank you.

 


Gardner:
We’re also here with Tim Minahan, Executive Vice President of Business Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer at Citrix. Welcome back, Tim.

 

Tim Minahan: Hey, Dana, thanks for having me.

 

Gardner: Tim, we’ve been in a work-from-anywhere mode for a year. Is this panning out as so productive and creative that people are considering making it a permanent feature of their businesses?

 

Businesses work from anywhere

Minahan: Dana, if there’s one small iota of a silver lining in this global crisis we’ve all been going through together it’s that it has shone a light on the importance of flexible and remote work models.

 

Minahan
Companies are now rethinking their workforce strategies and work models -- as well as the role the office will play in this new world of work. And employees are, too. They’re voting with their feet, moving out of high-cost, high-rent districts like San Francisco and New York because they realize they can not only do their work effectively remotely, but they can also be more productive and have a better work life.

 

A few data points that are important: This isn’t a temporary shift. The pandemic has opened folks’ eyes to what’s possible with remote work. In fact, in a recent Gartner study, 82 percent of executives surveyed plan to make remote work and flexible work a more permanent part of their workforce and cost-management strategies -- and it’s for very good business reasons.

 

As the pandemic has proven, this distributed work model can significantly lower real estate and IT costs. But more importantly, the companies that we talk to, the most forward-looking ones, are realizing that flexible work models make them more attractive as an employer. And that prompts them to rethink their staffing strategies because they have access to new pools of talent and in-demand skills of workers that live well beyond commuting distance to one of their work hubs.

 

Such flexible work models can also advance other key corporate initiatives like sustainability and diversity, which are increasingly becoming board-level priorities at most companies. Those companies that remain laggards -- that are still somewhat reluctant to embrace remote work or flexible work as a more permanent part of their strategies -- may soon be forced to change as their employees look for more flexible work approaches.

 

We’ve heard about the mass exodus from some of those large metropolitan areas to more suburban – and even rural locales. At Citrix, our own research of thousands of workers and IT and business executives finds that more than three-quarters of workers now prefer to shift to a more remote and flexible work model -- even if it means taking a pay cut. And 80 percent of workers say that flexible work arrangements will be a top selection criterion when evaluating employers in the future.

 

Gardner: Chris, based on your experience at Kreston Reeves, do you agree that these changes to a more flexible and hybrid work location model are here to stay?

Companies Support Hybrid Work Models
Madden: I would. At Kreston Reeves, we are expecting to move permanently to a three- or two-days a week in an office with the remaining time working from home and away from the office. That’s for many of the reasons already covered, such as reduced commuter time, reduced commuting cost, more time at home with family, best work-life balance, and a lot better for the environment as well because of people travelling less and all those greenhouse gases not going up into the atmosphere.

 

Gardner: We certainly hear how there are benefits to the organization. But how about the end users, the customers? Have your experiences at Kreston Reeves led you to believe that you can maintain the quality of service to your customers and consumers?

 

Madden: It’s probably ultimately going to be a balance. I don’t think it will shift totally one way or go back to how it was. I think for our customers and clients, there are distinct advantages, depending on the type of work. There isn’t always a need to go and have a face-to-face meeting that can take a lot of time for people, time that they could spend elsewhere in their business.

Depending on the nature of the interactions, quite a lot will shift to video calling, which has become the norm overt the last year even as in the past people may have thought it impersonal.

Depending on the nature of the interactions, quite a lot will shift to video calling, which has become the norm over the last year even as in the past people may have thought it impersonal. So I think that will become a lot more accepted, and face-to-face meetings will be then kept for those meetings that really require everybody to sit down together.

 

Gardner: It sounds like we’re into a more fit-for-purpose approach. If it’s really necessary, that’s fine, we can do it. But if it’s not necessary, there are benefits to alleviating the pressure on people.

 

Tell us, Chris, about how your organization operates and how you reacted to the pandemic.

 

Madden: Yes, we began best part of 10 years ago, when we moved on to Citrix as the platform to distribute computer services to our users. Over the years, we have upgraded that and added on the remote-access solutions. And so, when it came to early 2020 and the pandemic, we were ready to take off. We could see where we were heading in terms of lockdowns and the pandemic, so we closed two or three of our offices -- just to see how the system coped.

 

Madden
It was designed to do that, but would it really work when we actually closed the offices and everybody worked from home? Well, it worked brilliantly, and was very easy to deal with. And then a few days after that, the UK government announced the first national lockdown and everybody had to work from home within a day.

 

From our point of view, it worked really well. The only wrinkles in the whole process were to get everybody the appropriate apps on their phones to make sure they could have remote access using multifactor authentication. But otherwise, it was very seamless; the system was designed to cope with everybody working from anywhere -- and it did.

Gardner: Chris, we often hear that there is a three-legged stool when it comes to supporting business process -- as in people, technology, and process. Did you find that any of those three was primary? What led you to succeed in making such as rapid transition when it comes to the three pillars?

 

A new world of flexible work

Madden: I think it’s all three of those things. The technology is the enabler, but the people need to be taken with you, and the processes have to adapt for new ways of working. I don’t think any one of those three would lead. You have to do all three together.

 

Gardner: Tim, how does Citrix enable organizations to keep all three of those plates in the air spinning, if you will, especially on that point about the right applications on the right device at the right time?

Employee Work Environments
Minahan: What’s clear in our research -- and what we’re seeing from our customers -- is that we’re accelerating to a new world of work. And it’s a more hybrid and flexible world where that employee experience become a key differentiator.

 

To the point Chris was making, success is going to go to those organizations that can deliver a consistent and secure work experience across any and all work channels -- all the Slacks, all of the apps, all the Teams, and in any work location.

 

Whether work needs to be done in the office, on the road, or at home, delivering that consistent and secure work experience -- so employees have secure and reliable access to all their work resources – needs to come together to service end customers regardless of where they’re at.

 

Kreston Reeves is not alone in what they have experienced. We’re seeing this across every industry. In addition to the change in work models, we are also seeing a rapid acceleration of their digitization efforts, whether it is in the financial services sector, or other areas such as retail and healthcare. They may have had plans to digitize their business, but over the past year they’ve out of necessity had to digitize their business.

Kreston Reeves is not alone in what they have experienced. We're seeing this across every industry. In addition to the change in work models, we are also seeing a rapid acceleration of digitization efforts. Over the past year out of necessity they have had to digitize their businesses.

For example, there’s the healthcare provider in your neck of the woods, up in the Boston area, Dana, that has seen a 27-times increase in monthly telemedicine visits. During the COVID crisis, they went from 9,000 virtual visits per month to over 250,000 per month -- and they don’t think they’re ever going to go back.

 

In the financial services sector, we hear consistently customers hiring thousands of new advisors and loan officers in order to handle the demand – all in a remote and digital environment. What’s so exciting, as I said earlier, is as companies begin to use these approaches as key enablers, it becomes a liberator for them to rethink their workforce strategies and reach for new skills and new talent that’s well beyond commuting distance to one of their work hubs.

 

It’s not just about, “Should Sam or Suzy come back and work in the office full time?” That’s a component of the equation. It’s not even about, “Do Sam and Suzy perform at their best even when they’re working at home?” It’s about, “Hey, what should our workforce look like? Can we now reach skills and talent that were previously inaccessible to us because we can empower them with a consistent work experience through a digital workspace strategy?”

 

Gardner: How about that, Chris? Have you been simply repaving work-in-the-office paths with a different type of work from home? Or are you reinventing and exploring new business processes and workflows as a result of the flexibility?

 

Remote work retains trust, security

Madden: There is much more willingness amongst businesses and the people working in businesses to move quickly with technology. We’re past being cautious. With the pandemic, and the pressure that that brings, people are more willing to move faster -- and be less concerned about understanding everything that they may want to know before embracing technology.

 

The other thing is with relationships with clients. There is a balance, to not go as far as some industries. Some never see their clients any longer because everything is done remotely, and everything is automated through apps and technology.

 


And the correct balance that we will be mindful of as we embrace remote working -- and as we have more virtual meetings with clients -- is that we still need to maintain the relationship of being a trusted advisor to the client -- rather than commoditizing our product.

 

Gardner: I suppose one of the benefits to the way the technology is designed is that you can turn the knobs. You can experiment with those relationships. Perhaps one client will require a certain value toward in-person and face-to-face engagements. Another might not. But the fact is the technology can accommodate that dynamic shift. It gives us, I think, some powerful tools.

 

Madden: Absolutely. The key is that for those clients who really want to embrace the modern world and do everything digitally, there is a solution. If a client would still like to be very traditional and have lots of invoices and things on paper and send those into their accountant, that, too, can be accommodated.

 

But it is about moving the industry forward over time. And so, gradually I can see that technology will become a bigger contributor to the overall service that we provide and will probably do the basic accountancy work, producing an end result that a human then looks at provides the answer back to the client.

 


Gardner:
Now, of course, the materials that you’re dealing with are often quite sensitive and there are business regulations. How did the reaction of your workforce and your customer base come down on the issues of privacy, control, and security?

 

Madden: The clients trust that we will get it right and therefore look to us to provide the secure solution for them. So, for example, there are clients who have an awful lot of information to send us and cannot come into an office to hand over whatever that is.

 

We can get them new technologies that they haven’t used in the past such as Citrix ShareFile to share those documents with us securely and efficiently, but in a way that allow us to bring those documents into our systems and into the software we need to use to produce the accounts and the audits for the clients.

 

Gardner: Tim, you mentioned earlier that sometimes when people are forced into a shift in behavior, it’s liberating. Has that been the case with people’s perceptions around privacy and security as well?

Companies Support Hybrid Work Models

Minahan: If you’re going to provide a consistent and secure work experience, the other thing folks are beginning to see as they embrace hybrid and more distributed work models is that their security posture needs to evolve too. People aren’t all coming into the office every day to sit at their desk on the corporate network, which had much better-defined parameters and arguably was easier to secure.

 

Now, in a truly distributed work environment, you need to not only provide a digital workspace that gives employees access to all the work resources they need -- and that is not just their virtual desktops, but all of their software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps or web apps or mobile apps – it needs to be all in one unified experience that’s accessible across any location.

That is another dynamic we're seeing. Companies are accelerating their embrace of new more contextual zero trust access security models as they look forward to a post-pandemic world.

It also needs to be secure. It needs to be wrapped in a holistic and contextual security model that fosters not just zero trust access into that workspace, but ongoing monitoring and app protection to detect and proactively remediate any access anomalies, whether initiated by a user, a bot, or another app.

 

And so, that is another dynamic we’re seeing. Companies are accelerating their embrace of new more contextual zero trust access security models as they look forward to preparing themselves for how they’re going to operate in a post-pandemic world.

 

Gardner: Chris, I suppose another challenge has been the heterogeneity of the various apps and data across the platforms and sources that you’re managing. How has working with a digital Workspace environment helped you provide a singular view for your employees and end customers? How do workspace environments help mitigate what had been a long-term integration issue for IT consumption?

 

Madden: For us, whether we are working from home remotely or are in an office, we are consuming the same desktop with the same software and apps as if we were sitting in an office. It’s really exactly the same. From a colleague’s point of view, whether they are working from home in a pandemic or sitting in their office in Central London, they are getting exactly the same experience with exactly the same tools.

 

And so for them, it’s been a very easy transition. They’re not having to learn the technology and different ways to access things. They can focus instead on doing the client work and making sure that their home arrangement is sorted out.

 

Gardner: Tim, regardless of whether it’s a SaaS app, cloud app, on-premises data -- as long as that workspace is mobile and flexible -- the complexity is hidden?

 

Workspace unifies and simplifies tasks

Minahan: Well, there is another challenge that the pandemic has shone a light on, which is this dirty little secret of the business world. And that is our work environment is too complex. For the past 30 years, we’ve been giving employees access to new applications and devices. And more recently, chat and collaboration tools -- all with the intent to help get work done.

 

While on an independent basis, each of these tools adds value and efficiency, collectively they’ve created a highly fragmented and complex work environment that oftentimes interrupts, distracts, and stresses out employees. It keeps them possibly from getting their actual work done.

 

Just to give you a sense, with some real statistics: On any given workday, the typical employee uses more than 30 critical apps to get their work done, oftentimes needing to navigate four or more just to complete a single business process. They spend more than 20 percent of their time searching across all of these apps and all of these collaboration channels to find the information they need to make decisions to do their jobs.

Employee Work Environments

To make matters worse, now we’ve empowered these apps and these communication and collaboration channels. They’re all vying for our attention throughout the day, shouting at us about things we need to get done, and oftentimes distracting us from our core work. By some estimates, all of these notifications, chats, texts, and other disruptions interrupt us from our core work about every two minutes. That means the typical employee gets interrupted and forced to switch context between apps, emails, and other chat channels more than 350 times each day. Not surprisingly, what we are seeing is a huge productivity gap -- and it is turning our top talent into task rabbits.

 

As companies think through this next phase of work, how do they provide a consistent and secure work experience and a digital workspace environment for employees no matter where they’re working? It not only be needs to be unified -- giving them access to everything they need and security, ensuring that corporate information, applications, and networks remain secure no matter where employees are doing the work -- but it also needs to be intelligent.

 


Leveraging intelligent capabilities such as machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI) assistance, bots, and micro apps personalize and simplify work execution. It’s what I call adding an experience layer between an employee and their work resources. This simplifies their interactions and work execution across all of the enterprise apps, content, and other resources so employees are not overwhelmed and can perform at their best no matter where work needs to get done.

 

Gardner: Chris, are you interested in elevating people from task rabbits to a higher order of value to the business and their end users and customers? And is the digital environment and workplace a part of that?

 

Madden: Absolutely. There are lots of processes, many firms, and across multiple campuses. They have grown up over the years and they’ve always been done that way. This is a perfect time to reappraise how we do those things smarter digitally using some robotic process automation (RPA) tools and AI to take a lot of the rework and data from one system into another to produce the end result for the client.

We want to free up our people to do more value-added work -- and it would be more interesting work for those people. It will give a better quality role for people, which will help us to attract better talent.

There is a lot of that on our radar for the coming year or two. We want to free our people up to do more value-added work -- and it would be more interesting work for those people. It will give a better quality of role for people, which will help us to attract better talent. And given the fact that people now have a taste of a different work-life balance, there will be a lot of pressure on new recruits to our business to continue with that.

 

Gardner: Chris, now that your organization has been at this for a year -- really thrust into much more remote flexible work habits -- were there any unexpected and positive spins? Things that you didn’t anticipate, but you could only find out with 20-20 hindsight?

 

Virtual increases overall efficiency

Madden: Yes. One is the speed at which our clients were happy to switch to video meetings and virtual audits. Previously, on audits, we would send a team of people to a client’s premises and they would look through the paperwork, look at the stock in a warehouse, et cetera, and perform the audit physically. We were able to move quickly to doing that virtually.

 

For example, if we’re looking in a warehouse to check that a certain amount of stock is actually present, we can now do that by a video call and walk around the warehouse and explain what we’re looking for and see that on the screen and say, “Yes, okay, we know that that stock is actually available.” It was a really big shift in mindset for our regulators, for ourselves, and for our clients, which is a great positive because it means that we can become much more efficient going forward.

 

The other one that sticks out in my mind is the efficiency of our people. When you’re at home, focusing on the work and without the distractions of an office, the noise, and the conversations, people are generally more efficient. There is still the need for a balance because we don’t want everybody just sitting at home in silence staring at a screen. We miss out on some of the richness of business relationships and conversations with colleagues, but it was interesting how productivity generally increased during the lockdown.

 

Gardner: Tim, is that what you’re finding more generally around the globe among the Citrix installed base, that productivity has been on the uptick even after a 20- or 30-year period where, in many respects and measurements, productivity has been flat?

 

Minahan: Yes, that is a trend we have been seeing for decades. Despite the introduction of more technology, employee productivity continued to trend down, ironically, until the pandemic. We talked with employees, executives, and through our own research and it shows that more than 80 percent of employees feel that they’re as, if not more, productive when working from home -- for a lot of the reasons that Chris mentions. What they’ve seen at Kreston Reeves has continued to be sustained.

 

It’s introduced the need for more collaborative work management tools in the work environment in order to foster and facilitate that higher level of engagement and that more efficient execution that we mentioned earlier. But overall, whether it’s the capability to avoid the lengthy commute or the ability to avoid distractions, employees are indeed seeing themselves as more productive.

 

In fact, we’re seeing a lot of customers now talk about how they need to rethink the very role of the office. Where it’s not just a place where people come to punch their virtual time cards, but is a place that’s more purpose-built for when you need to get together with a client or with other teammates to foster collaboration. You still keep the flexibility to work remotely to focus on innovation, creativity, and work execution that oftentimes, as Chris indicated, can be distracting or difficult to achieve strictly in an office environment.

 

Gardner: Chris, what’s interesting to me about your business is you’re in a relationship with so many client companies. And you were forced to go digital very rapidly -- but so were they. Is there a digital transformation accelerant at work here? Because they all had to go digital at the same is there a network effect?

 

Because your customers have gone digital, Chris, could you then be better digital providers in your relationships together?

 

Collaborative communication

Madden: To an extent. It depends on the type of client industry that they’re in. In the UK, certain industries have been shut for a long time and therefore, they are not moving digitally. They are just stuck waiting until they are able to reopen. In the meantime, there’s probably very little going on in those businesses.

 

Those businesses that are open and working are very much embracing modern technology. So, one of the things that we’ve done for our audit clients, particularly, is providing different ways in which they can communicate with us. Previously, we probably had a straightforward, one-way approach. Now, we are giving clients three or four different ways they can communicate and collaborate with us, which helps everybody and moves things along a lot more quickly.

 

It is going to be interesting post-pandemic. Will people intrinsically go back to what they were always doing? Will what drove us forward keep us creating and becoming more digital or will the instinct be to go back to how it was because that’s how people are more comfortable?

 

Gardner: Yes, it will be interesting to see if there’s an advantage for those who embrace digital methods more and whether that causes a competitive advantage that the other organizations will have to react to. So we’re in for an interesting ride for a few more years yet.

 

I’m afraid well we have to leave it there. You’ve been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect discussion on how work from anywhere agility translates into often increased employee benefits as well as better business outcomes.

 

And we’ve learned how a bellwether UK accounting services firm delivers consistent, secure, and efficient digital work experiences for heightened team collaboration and improved work.

 

Please join me in thanking our guests, Chris Madden, Director of IT and Operations for Kreston Reeves, LLP. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences, Chris.

 

Madden: Thank you. It was my pleasure.

 

Gardner: And we’ve been here as well with Tim Minahan, Executive Vice President of Business Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer at Citrix. Thank you so much, Tim.

 

Minahan: Thanks, Dana, a great conversation.

 

Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining this special BriefingsDirect remote work innovation discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Citrix-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.

 

Thanks again for listening, please pass this along to your business associates, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Citrix.

Transcript of a discussion on how a bellwether UK accounting services firm has shown how consistent, secure, and efficient digital work experiences lead to heightened team collaboration and creative new workflows. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2021. All rights reserved.

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Monday, December 21, 2020

The Future of Work is Happening Now Thanks to Digital Workplace Services

A transcript of a discussion on how Unisys, Dell Technologies, and their partners provide the time-proof means to secure applications intelligently regardless of location, device, or network.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Unisys and Dell Technologies.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Businesses, schools, and governments have all had to rethink the proper balance between in-person and remote work. And because that balance is a shifting variable -- and may well continue to be for years after the pandemic -- it remains essential that the underlying technology be especially agile.

Stay with us now as we explore how a partnership behind a digital workplace services solution delivers a sliding scale of sorts for blended work scenarios. We’ll learn how Unisys, Dell, and their partners provide the time-proof means to secure applications intelligently -- regardless of location.

We’ll also hear how an increasingly powerful automation capability makes the digital workplace easier to attain and support.

To learn more about the latest in cloud-delivered desktop modernization, please join me in welcoming our guests. We’re here with Weston Morris, Global Strategy, Digital Workplace Services, Enterprise Services, at Unisys. Welcome, Weston.

Weston Morris: It’s great to be here, Dana. I look forward to the conversation.


Gardner:
We’re also here with Araceli Lewis, Global Alliance Lead for Unisys at Dell Technologies. Welcome, Araceli.

Araceli Lewis: Thank you, Dana. I’m so excited to be here with you all.

Gardner: Weston, what are the trends, catalysts, and requirements transforming how desktops and apps are delivered these days?

Morris: We’ve all lived through the hype of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Every year for the last eight or nine years has supposedly been the year of VDI. And this is the year it’s going to happen, right? It had been a slow burn. And VDI has certainly been an important part of the “bag of tricks” that IT brings to bear to provide workers with what they need to be productive.

COVID sends enterprises to cloud

But since the beginning of 2020, we’ve all seen -- because of the COVID-19 pandemic – VDI brought to the forefront in the importance of having an alternative way of delivering a digital workplace to workers. This has been especially important in environments where enterprises had not invested in mobility, the cloud, or had not thought about making it possible for user data to reside outside of their desktop PCs.

Morris

Those enterprises had a very difficult time moving to a work-from-home (WFH) model -- and they struggled with that. Their first instinct was, “Oh, I need to buy a bunch of laptops.” Well, everybody wanted laptops at the beginning of the pandemic, and secondly, they were being made in China mostly -- and those factories were shut down. It was impossible to buy a laptop unless you had the foresight to do that ahead of time.

And that’s when the “aha” moment came for a lot of enterprises. They said, “Hey, cloud-based virtual desktops -- that sounds like the answer, that’s the solution.” And it really is. They could set that up very quickly by spinning up essentially the digital workplace in the cloud and then having their apps and data stream down securely from the cloud to their end users anywhere. That’s been the big “aha” moment that we’ve had as we look at our customer base and enterprises across the world. We’ve done it for our own internal use.

Gardner: Araceli, it sounds like some verticals and in certain organizations they may have waited too long to get into the VDI mindset. But when the pandemic hit, they had to move quickly.

What is about the digital workplace services solution that you all are factoring together that makes this something that can be done quickly?

Lewis: It’s absolutely true that the pandemic elevated digital workplace technology from being a nice-to-have, or a luxury, to being an absolute must-have. We realized after the pandemic struck that public sector, education, and more parts of everyday work needed new and secure ways of working remotely. And it had to become instantaneously available for everyone.

You had every C-level executive across every industry in the United States shifting to the remote model within two weeks to 30 days, and it was also needed globally. Who better than Dell on laptops and these other endpoint devices to partner with Unisys globally to securely deliver digital workspaces to our joint customers? Unisys provided the security capabilities and wrapped those services around the delivery, whereas we at Dell have the end-user devices.

You had every C-level executive across every industry in the U.S. shifting to the remote model within two weeks to 30 days, and it was also needed globally. Unisys provided the security capabilities and wrapped those services around delivery, whereas Dell had the end-user devices.

What we’ve seen is that the digitalization of it all can be done in the comfort of everyone’s home. You’re seeing them looking at x-rays, or a nurse looking into someone’s throat via telemedicine, for example. These remote users are also able to troubleshoot something that might be across the world using embedded reality, virtual reality (VR) embedded, and wearables.

We merged and blended all of those technologies into this workspaces environment with the best alliance partners to deliver what the C-level executives wanted immediately.

Gardner: The pandemic has certainly been an accelerant, but many people anticipated more virtual delivery of desktops and apps as inevitable. That’s because when you do it, you get other timely benefits, such as flexible work habits. Millennials tend to prefer location-independence, for example, and there are other benefits during corporate mergers and acquisitions and for dynamic business environments.

So, Weston, what are some of the other drivers that reward people when they make the leap to virtual delivery of apps and desktops?

Take the virtual leap, reap rewards

Morris: I’m thinking back to a conversation I had with you, Araceli, back in March. You were excited and energized around the topic of business continuity, which obviously started with the pandemic.

But, Dana, there are other forces at work that preceded the pandemic and that we know will continue after the pandemic. And mergers and acquisition are a very big one. We see a tremendous amount of activity there in the healthcare space, for example, which was affected in multiple ways by the pandemic. Pharmaceuticals and life sciences as well, there are multiple merger activities going on there.

Lewis

One of the big challenges in a merger or acquisition is how to quickly get the acquired employees working as first-class citizens as quickly as possible. That’s always been difficult. You either give them two laptops, or two desktops, and say, “Here’s how you do the work in the new company, and here’s where you do the work in the old company.” Or you just pull the plug and say, “Now, you have to figure out how to do everything in a new way in web time, including human resources and all of those procedures in a new environment -- and hopefully you will figure it all out.”

But with a cloud-based, virtual desktop capability -- especially with cloud-bursting -- you can quickly spin up as much capacity as you need and build upon the on-premises capabilities you already have, such as on Dell EMC VxRail, and then explode that into the cloud as needed using VMware Horizon to the Microsoft Azure cloud.

That’s an example of providing a virtual desktop for all of the newly acquired employees for them do their new corporate-citizen stuff while they keep their existing environment and continue to be productive by doing the job you hired them to do when you made the acquisition. That’s a very big use case that we’re going to continue to see going forward.

Gardner: Now, there were number of hurdles historically toward everyone adopting VDI. One of the major use cases was, of course, security and being able to control content by having it centrally located on your servers or on your cloud -- rather than stored out on every device. Is that still a driving consideration, Weston? Are people still looking for that added level of security, or has that become passé?

Morris: Security has become even more important throughout the pandemic. In the past, to a large extent, the corporate firewall-as-secure-the-perimeter model has worked fairly well. And we’ve been punching holes in the firewall for several years now.

But with the pandemic -- with almost everyone working from home -- your office network just exploded. It now extends everywhere. Now you have to worry about how well secured any one person’s home network is. Do they have their password changed or default password changed on their home router? Have they updated the firmware on it? And a lot of these things are beyond the average worker to worry about and to be thinking about.

But if we separate out the workload and put it into the cloud -- so that you have the digital workplace sitting in the cloud -- that is much more secure than a device sitting on somebody’s desk connected to a very questionable home network environment.

Gardner: Another challenge in working toward more modern desktop delivery has been cost, because it’s usually been capital-intensive and required upfront investment. But when you modernize via the cloud that can shift.

Araceli, what are some of the challenges that we’re now able to overcome when it comes to the economics of virtual desktop delivery?

Cost benefits of partnering

Lewis: The beautiful thing here is that in our partnership with Unisys and Dell Financial Services (DFS), we’re able to utilize different utility models when it comes to how we consume the technology.

We don’t have to have upfront capital expenditures. We basically look at different ways that we can do server and platform infrastructure. Then we can consume the technology in the most efficient manner, and that works with the books and how we’re going to depreciate. So, that’s extremely flexible.

You don't have to have upfront capital expenditures. We basically look at different ways that we can do server and platform infrastructure. Then we can consume the technology in the most efficient manner, and that works with the books and how we're going to depreciate. It's extremely flexible.

And by partnering with Unisys, they secure those VDI solutions across all of the three core components: The VDI portion within the data center, the endpoint devices, and of course, the software. By partnering with Unisys in our alliance ecosystem, we get the best of DFS, Dell Technology, VMware software, and Unisys security capabilities.

Gardner: Weston, another issue that’s dogged VDI adoption is complexity for the IT department. When we think about VDI, we can’t only think about end users. What has changed for how the IT department deploys infrastructure, especially for a hybrid approach where VDI is delivered both from on-premises data centers as well as the cloud?

Intelligent virtual agents assist IT

Morris: Araceli and I have had several conversations about this. It’s an interesting topic. There has always been a lot of work to stand up VDI. If you’re starting from scratch, you’re thinking about storage, IOPS, and network capacity. Where are my apps? What’s the connectivity? How are we going to run it at optimal performance? After all, are the end users happy with the experience they’re getting? And how can I even know that what their experience is?

And now, all that’s changed thanks to the evolving technology. One is the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and the use of personal intelligent virtual assistance. At home, we’re used to that, right? We ask Alexa, Siri, or Cortana what’s going on with the weather? What’s happening in the news? We ask our virtual assistants all of these things and we expect to be able to get instant answers and help. Why is that not available in the enterprise for IT? Well, the answer is it is now available.


As you can imagine on the provisioning side, wouldn’t it be great if you were able to talk to a virtual assistant that understood the provisioning process? You simply answer questions posed by the assistant. What is it you need to provision? What is your load that you’re looking at? Do you have engineers that need to access virtual desktops? What types of apps might they need? What is the type of security?

Then the virtual assistant understands the business and IT processes to provision the infrastructure needed virtually in the cloud to make that all happen or to cloud-burst from your on-premises Dell VxRail into the cloud. 

That is a very important game changer. The other aspect of the intelligent virtual agent is it now resides on the virtual desktop as well. I, as an at-home worker, may have never seen a virtual desktop before. And now, the virtual assistant pops up and guides the home worker through the process of connecting, explaining how their apps work, and saying, “I’m always here. I’m ready to give you help whenever possible.” But I think I’ll defer to the expert here.

Araceli, do you want to talk about the power of the hybrid environment and how that simplifies the infrastructure?

Multiple workloads managed

Lewis: Sure, absolutely. At Dell EMC, we are proud of the fact that Gartner rates us number one, as a leader in the category for pretty much all of the products that we’ve included in this VDI solution. When Unisys and my alliances team get the technology, it’s already been tested from a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) perspective. VxRail has been tested, tried-and-true as an automated system in which we combine servers, storage, network, and the software.

That way, Weston and I don’t have to worry about what size are we going to use. We actually have T-shirt sizes already for the number of VDI users that are needed that have been thought out. We have the graphics-intensive portion of it thought out. And we can basically deploy quickly and then put the workloads on them as we need to spin them up or spin them down or to add more.

We can adjust on the fly. That’s a true testament of our HCI being the backbone of the solution. And we don’t have to get into all of the testing, regression testing, and the automation and self-healing of it. Because a lot of that management would have had to be done by enterprise IT or by a managed services provider but it’s done instead via the lifecycle management of the Dell EMC VxRail HCI solution.

That is a huge benefit, the fact that we deliver a solution from the value line and the hypervisor on up. We can then focus on the end users’ services and we don’t have to be swapping out components or troubleshooting because all of the refinement that Dell has done in that technology today.

Morris: Araceli, the first time you and your team showed me the cloud-bursting capability, it just blew me away. I know in the past how hard it was to expand any infrastructure. You showed me where, you know, every industry and every enterprise are going to have a core base of assumptions. So, why not put that under Dell VxRail?


Then, as you need to expand, cloud-burst into, in this case, Horizon running on Azure. And that can all be done now through a single dashboard. I don’t have to be thinking, “Okay, now I have to have the separate workload, it’s in the cloud, this other workload that’s on my on-premises cloud with VxRail.” It’s all done through one, single dashboard that can be automated on the back end through a virtual agent, which is pretty cool.

Gardner: It sure seems in hindsight that the timing here was auspicious. Just as the virus was forcing people to rapidly find a virtual desktop solution, you had put together the intelligence and automation along with software-defined infrastructure like HCI. And then you also gained the ease in hybrid by bursting to the cloud.

And so, it seems that the way that you get to a solution like this has never been easier, just when it was needed to be easy for organizations such as small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and verticals like public sector and education. So, was the alliance and partnering, in fact, a positive confluence of timing?

Greater than sum of parts

Morris: Yes. The perfect storm analogy certainly applies. It was great when I got the phone call from Araceli, saying, “Hey, we have this business continuity capability.” We at Unisys had been thinking about business continuity as well.

We looked at the different components that we each brought. Unisys with its security around Stealth or capability to proactively monitor infrastructure and desktops and see what’s going on and automatically fix them via the intelligent virtual agent and automation. And realizing that this was really a great solution, a much better solution than the individual parts.

We could not make this happen without all of the cool stuff that Dell brings in terms of the HCI, the clients, and, of course, the very powerful VMware-based virtual desktops. And we added to that some things that we have become very good at in our digital workplace transformation. The result is something that can make a real difference for enterprises. You mentioned the public sector and education. Those are great examples of industries that really can benefit from this.

Gardner: Araceli, anything more to offer on how your solution came together, the partners and the constituent parts?

Lewis: Consistent infrastructure, operations, and the help of our partner, Unisys, globally, delivers the services to the end users. This was just a partnership that had to come together.

We were getting so many requests early during the pandemic, an overwhelming amount of demand from every vertical and industry. We had to rely on Unisys as our trusted partner not only in the public sector but in healthcare and banking.

We at Dell couldn’t do it alone. We needed those data center spaces. We needed the capabilities of their architects and teams to deliver for us. We were getting so many requests early during the pandemic, an overwhelming amount of demand from every C-level suite across the country, and from every vertical and industry. We had to rely on Unisys as our trusted partner not only in the public sector but in healthcare and banking. But we knew if we partnered with them, we could give our community what they needed to get through the pandemic.

Gardner: And among those constituent parts, how is important part is Horizon? Why is it so important?

Lewis: VMware Horizon is the glue. It streamlines desktop and app delivery in various ways. The first would be by cloud-bursting. It actually gives us the capability to do that in a very simple fashion.

Secondly, it’s a single pane of glass. It delivers all of the business-critical apps to any device, anywhere on a single screen. So that makes it simple and comprehensive for the IT staff.

We can also deliver non-persistent virtual desktops. The advantage here is that it makes software patching and distribution a whole lot easier. We don’t have all the complexity. If there were ever a security concern or issue, we simply blow away that non-persistent virtual desktop and start all over. It gets us to our first phase, square one, and we would otherwise have to spend countless hours of backups and restores to get us to where we are safe again. So, it pulls everything together for us and being a user have a seamless interface for the IT staff who don’t have the complexity, and it gives us the best of our world while we get out to the cloud.

Gardner: Weston, on the intelligent agents and bots, do you have an example of how it works in practice? It’s really fascinating to me that you’re using AI-enabled robotic process collaboration (RPA) tools to help the IT department set this up. And you’re also using it to help the end-user learn how to onboard themselves, get going, and then get ongoing support.

Amelia AI ascertains answers

Morris: It’s an investment we began almost 24 months ago, branded as the Unisys InteliServe platform, which initially was intended to bring AI, automation, and analytics to the service desk. It was designed to improve the service desk experience and make it easier to use, make it scalable, and to learn over time what kinds of problems people needed help solving.

But we realized once we had it in place, “Wow, this intelligent virtual agent can almost be an enterprise personal assistant where it can be trained on anything, on any business process.” So, we’ve been training it on fixing common IT problems … password resets, can’t log in, can’t get to the virtual private network (VPN), Outlook crashes, those types of things. And it does very well at those sorts of activities.

But the core technology is also perfectly suited to be trained for IT processes as well as business processes inside of the enterprise. For example, for this particular scenario of supporting virtual desktops. If a customer has a specific process for provisioning virtual desktops, they may have specific pools of types of virtual desktops, certain capacities, and those can be created ahead of time, ready to go.

Then it’s just a matter of communicating with the intelligent virtual assistant to say, “I need to add more users to this pool,” or, “We need to remove users,” or, “We need to add a whole new pool.” The agent is branded as Amelia. It has a female voice, through it doesn’t have to be, but in most cases, it is.

When we speak with Amelia, she’s able to ask questions that guide the user through the process. They don’t have to know what the process is. They don’t do this very often, right? But she can be trained to be an expert on it.

Amelia collects the information needed, submits it to the RPA that communicates with Horizon, Azure, and the VxRail platforms to provision the virtual desktops as needed. And this can happen very quickly. Whereas in the past, it may have taken days or weeks to spin up a new environment for a new project, or for a merger and acquisition, or in this case, reacting to the pandemic, and getting people able to work from home.

By the same token, when the end users open up their virtual desktops, they connect to the Horizon workspace, and there is Amelia. She’s there ready to respond to totally different types of questions: “How do I use this?” “Where’s my apps?” “This is new to me, what do I do? How do I connect?” “What about working from home?” “What’s my VPN connection working like, and how do I get that connected properly?” “What about security issues?” There, she’s now able to help with the standard end-user types issues as well.

Gardner: Araceli, any examples of where this intelligent process automation has played out in the workplace? Do we have some ways of measuring the impact?

Simplify, then measure the impact

Lewis: We do. It’s given us, in certain use cases, the predictability and the benefit of a pay-as-you-grow linear scale, rather than the pay-by-the-seat type of solution. In the past, if we had a state or a government agency where they need, for example, 10,000 seats, we would measure them by the seat. If there’s a situation like a pandemic, or any other type of environment where we have to adjust quickly, how could we deliver 10,000 instances in the past?

Now, using Dell EMC ready-architectures with the technologies we’ve discussed -- and with Unisys’ capabilities -- we can provide such a rapid and large deployment in a pay-as-you-grow linear scale. We can predict what the pricing is going to be as they need to use it for these public sector agencies and financial firms. In the past, there was a lot of capital expenditures (CapEx). There was a lot of process, a lot of change, and there were just too many unknowns.

These modern platforms have simplified the management of the backends of the software and the delivery of it to create a true platform that we can quantify and measure -- not only just financially, but from a time-to-delivery perspective as well.

Morris: I have an example of a particular customer where they had a manual process for onboarding. Such onboarding includes multiple steps, one of which is, “Give me my digital workplace.”


But there are other things, too. The training around gaining access to email, for example. That was taking almost 40 hours. Can you imagine a person starting their job, and 40 hours later they finally get the stuff they need to be productive? That’s a lot of downtime.

After using our automation, that transition was down to a little over eight hours. What that means is a person starts filling out their paperwork with HR on day one, gets oriented, and then the next day they have everything they need to be productive. What a big difference. And in the offboarding – it’s even more interesting. What happens when a person leaves the company? Maybe under unfavorable circumstances, we might say. 

In the past, the manual processes for this customer took almost 24 hours before everything was turned off. What does that mean? That means that an unhappy, disgruntled employee has 24 hours. They can come in, download content, get access to materials or perhaps be disruptive, or even destructive, with the corporate intellectual property, which is very bad.

Through automation, this offboarding process is now down to six minutes. I mean that person hasn’t even walked out of the room and they’ve been locked out completely from that IT environment. And that can be even be done more quickly if we’re talking about a virtual desktop environment, in which the switch can be thrown immediately and completely. Access is completely and instantly removed from the virtual environment.

Gardner: Araceli, is there a best-of-breed, thin-client hardware approach that you’re using? What about use cases such as graphics-intense or computer-aided design (CAD) applications? What’s the end-point approach for some of these more intense applications?

Viable, virtual, and versatile solutions

Lewis: Being Dell Technologies, that was a perfect question for us, Dana. We understand the persona of the end users. As we roll out this technology, let’s say it’s for an engineering team where they do CAD drawings as an engineering group. If you look at the persona, and we partner with Unisys and look at what each end-user’s needs are, you can determine if they need more memory, more processing power, and if they need a more graphics-intensive device. We can do that. Our Wyse end-clients that can do that, the Wyse 3000s and the 5000s.

But I don’t want to pinpoint one specific type of device per user because we could be talking about a doctor, or we could be talking about a nurse in an intensive care unit. She is going to need something more mobile. We can also provide end-user devices that are ruggedized, maybe in an oil field or in a construction site. So, from an engineering perspective, we can adopt the end-user device to their persona and their needs and we can meet all of those requirements. It’s not a problem.

Gardner: Weston, anything from your vantage point on the diversity and agility of those endpoint devices and why this solution is so versatile?

Morris: There is diversity at both ends. Araceli, you talked about being able to on the backend provision and scale up and down the capacity and capability of a virtual desktop to meet the personas’ needs.

Millennials want choice on how they connect. Am I connecting from home? Do I want to have access to a thin client when I want to go back to work? Do I want to come in through a mobile? And maybe I want to do all three in the same day. They don't want to lose work in between. That all is entirely possible with this infrastructure.

And then on the end-user side, and you mentioned, Dana, Millennials. They may want choice of how they connect. Am I connecting in through my own personal laptop at home? Do I want to have access to a thin client when I want to go back to work? Do I want to come in through a mobile? And maybe I want to do all three in the same day? And they don’t want to lose work in between. That is all entirely possible with this infrastructure.

Gardner: Let’s look to the future. We’ve been talking about what’s possible now. But it seems to me that we’ve focused on the very definition of agility: It scales, it’s fast, and it’s automated. It’s applicable across the globe.

What comes next? What can you do with this technology now that you have it in place? It seems to me that we have an opportunity to do even more.

Morris: We’re not backing down from AI and automation. That is here to stay, and it’s going to continue to expand. People have finally realized the power of cloud-based VDI. That is now a very important tool for IT to have in their bag of tricks. They can respond to very specific use cases in a very fast, scalable, and effective way.

In the future we will see that AI continues to provide guidance, not only in the provisioning that we’ve talked about, not only in startup and use on the end-user side -- but in providing analytics as to how the entire ecosystem is working. That’s not just the virtual desktops, but the apps that are in the cloud as well and the identity protection. There’s a whole security component that AI has to play a role in. It almost sounds like a pipe dream, but it’s just going to make life better. AI absolutely will do that when it’s used appropriately.

Lewis: I’m looking to the future on how we’re going to live and work in the next five to 10 years. It’s going to be tough to go back to what we were used to. And I’m thinking forward to the Internet of Things (IoT). There’s going to be an explosion of edge devices, of wearables, and how we incorporate all of those technologies will be a part of a persona.

Typically, we’re going to be carrying our work everywhere we go. So, how are we going to integrate all of the wearables? How are we going to make voice recognition more adaptable? VR, AI, robotics, drones -- how are we going to tie all of that together?

Nowadays, we tie our home systems and our cooling and heating to all of the things around us to interoperate. I think that’s going to go ahead and continue to grow exponentially. I’m really excited that we’ve partnered with Unisys because we wouldn’t want to do something like this without a partner who is just so deeply entrenched in the solutions. I’m looking forward to that.

Gardner: What advice would give to an organization that hasn’t bitten off the virtual desktop from the cloud and hybrid environment yet? What’s the best way to get started?

Morris: It’s really important to understand your users, your personas. What are they consuming? How do they want to consume it? What is their connectivity like? You need to understand that, if you’re going to make sure that you can deliver the right digital workplace to them and give them an experience that matters.

Lewis: At Dell Technologies, we know how important it is to retain our top and best talent. And because we’ve been one of the top places to work for the past few years, it’s extremely important to make sure that technology and access to technology help to enable our workforce.

I truly feel that any one of our customers or end users that hasn’t looked at VDI, and hasn’t realized the benefits across savings, and keeping a competitive advantage in this fast-paced world, that they also need to retain their talent, too. To do that they need to give their employees the best tools and the best capabilities to be the very best. They have to look at VDI in some way, shape, or form. As soon as we bring it to them -- whether technically, financially, or for competitive factors -- it really makes sense. It’s not a tough sell at all, Dana.

Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. You’ve been listening to sponsored BriefingsDirect discussion on how the partnership behind a virtual digital workplace solution delivers a sliding scale of blended work scenarios. 

And we’ve learned how this joint-solution between Unisys, Dell, and their partners powerfully leverages intelligent automation to deliver securely desktop environments and applications regardless of location. 

Please join me in thanking our guests, Weston Morris, Global Strategy, Digital Workplace Services, Enterprise Services at Unisys. Thanks so much, Weston.

Morris: Thanks for the invitation. I appreciated the conversation.

Gardner: And a big thank you as well to Araceli Lewis, Global Alliance Lead for Unisys at Dell Technologies. Thank you so much, Araceli.

Lewis: Thank you, Dana and Weston. It’s an absolute pleasure.


Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect digital workplace innovation discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Unisys- and Dell Technologies-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.

Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your IT community, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Unisys and Dell Technologies.

A transcript of a discussion on how Unisys, Dell Technologies, and their partners provide the timeproof means to secure applications intelligently regardless of location, device, or network. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2020. All rights reserved.

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