Virtual Application Delivery and ChromeOS – Robb Henshaw, Cameyo

This is Textron tv. Hey guys, thanks for the throw. We're talking with Rob Henshaw, who's the C M O for Cmeo, and we're talking about a new relationship that they created with Google to drive virtual application delivery.

And we're gonna jump into what all that means in a minute. Rob, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks a lot, Mike.

Good to be here. Take a couple of minutes and describe for us what you guys are doing with Google, how this whole virtual application delivery thing works. 'cause of course, everybody knows about virtual desktop infrastructure from back in the day, but now we live in the age of the cloud.

So what's changing? That's, that's exactly right, Mike. So, virtual desktops has been around for, you know, decades.

It's pre-cloud technology. Um, and, you know, virtual desktop v d I has evolved over time to become dass. Uh, but all virtualizations typically take the similar approach of first presenting you with the full Windows desktop in order to give you access to your applications.

Uh, so K'S approach has always been focused on virtual op delivery, which is removing the desktop from the equation altogether, and just giving your people super streamlined access to their applications from any device. So what we were doing with Google, uh, C'S been a, a Chrome Enterprise recommended partner and a Google Cloud partner for years. Uh, but what we're, what we, what we've launched now is, uh, something called ChromeOS Virtual App Delivery, which is a new service that has integrated C'S CSS technology into ChromeOS, giving people the ability to take advantage of all the benefits that Chrome OSS brings to an organization.

You know, uh, more cost effective, far easier to manage, way more secure, taking advantage of Chrome OSS in the enterprise while making sure that all of your people have seamless access to all the business critical apps that they need to be productive, uh, without having to put them through the, the pane of going into a virtual desktop every nine, every time they need to access an application. Those applications, does it matter what they're originally written in? I mean, does everything have to be CMOs and end, or can they be Windows or whatever else is floating around?

No, that's, that's exactly the magic is that, uh, with virtual app delivery, you can deliver any application, whether that be, you know, legacy apps, windows apps, uh, Linux apps, your, your SaaS apps in internally developed web apps. Anything can be delivered as a P W A on Chrome oss, so, or any device for that matter. But with the Chrome OS virtual app delivery, um, service, the, the combination of Chrome oss and C, it makes it really simple to deliver all of your applications regardless of, uh, you know, what they are.

The underlying, uh, you know, application is being able to deliver all those side by side in your task bar on Chrome oss, so that from an end user perspective, virtualization really becomes kind of invisible. They just click on their apps, the apps open up in their own windows, just like they, they normally would, uh, just as if they were installed locally on the device. So the end user doesn't even technically have to know that they're using a virtual app.

They're just using the full desktop version of the apps that that, that have been delivered to them. Do you think that we're, just because of the current economic climate, that more people are reevaluating how they think about the delivery of applications and accessing that? Because we've been talking about some of this stuff for a while, but, um, is it sort of countercyclical every time there's a downturn everybody kind of looks up and says, maybe we should rethink the total cost of it?

Yeah, I mean, I think that the, the current economic situation definitely has, uh, definitely plays a part in that. I think that we started to see, especially during the pandemic, a lot of organizations start to rethink the way that they deliver applications and give people access to everything that they need. And then obviously now that, you know, people are either, you know, committed to remote full, you know, full-time or going hi, you know, uh, committed to, to staying hybrid or even bringing people back to the office, everybody's gotta, everybody has the same situation of being, uh, having a deep need to give people access to all their applications regardless of where they happen to be that day.

And so the current economic situation, I think in any climate, you're, see, you, it needs to always figure out ways to reduce the cost of their overall environment. But right now, in this economic climate, I think that that is definitely accelerating that it's, it's, it's putting it to the, to the head of things and helping people realize that, okay, well maybe the way that we've been doing it for 20 years isn't always the most efficient way. And that I definitely think is getting people to rethink the, the idea of the desktop in general.

And if you look at the, the V D I and DAS space, you're starting to see a lot of the, that turmoil kind of play out is that, you know, you've seen Citrix was acquired by private equity, VMware is getting acquired by Broadcom, which leaves, you know, their, uh, das service kind of in question. Um, Nutanix recently divested itself of its dass uh, business. Uh, NetApp had shut down its DASS business, um, earlier this year.

So the traditional way of doing things of virtual desktops, it's, it's really complex. It's very costly, um, and it's just hard to manage over time. So there's not just, it's not just the upfront cost of virtual desktops, it's how much it costs to manage those deployments long term.

And that's one of the things that virtual app delivery helps with is that, and we actually just finished a, a, a new, uh, study that's been released recently with the analysts over at Enterprise Strategy Group, and they did a three month long economic validation study of what the total cost of ownership is compared, uh, comparing virtual desktops to virtual app delivery. And virtual app delivery, uh, typically reduces the total cost of ownership by 54% compared to virtual desktops, because you're, you're not having to manage all that infrastructure yourself. You're not having to deliver and manage the entire desktop.

You're just publishing the apps and giving people secure access to those. So I do think that this, the, the, while cost is always important to every IT organization, the current economic climate is accelerating those conversations. And where does security fit into this conversation?

'cause I feel like a lot of the things that we're trying to protect are maybe, uh, a little long in the tooth and they're kind of harder to protect. So maybe, you know, it is newer or better from a security perspective. Yeah, I mean, I, I don't think that newer is always better in this case.

It certainly is. Um, I think that one of the things that we saw over the last several years, especially as more people, uh, went remote and hybrid, is that legacy virtual desktops, legacy, you know, remote access technologies, which rely heavily on R D P alone, uh, became a, a serious problem. Um, so R D P became the, the largest, um, attack vector for ransomware.

Over 50% of all ransomware attacks, uh, utilized R D P as the primary attack vector. And so, going through the process of taking, you know, something that was a pre-cloud technology like V D I and evolving it over the over time to try to kind of fit it, the square peg into the round hole of this cloud first world that we now live in, clearly hasn't worked that well. And so, services like virtual app delivery, like with c uh, we're designed as you know, first as a cloud first technology.

We've always been, um, you know, based in the cloud, uh, we can be, uh, fully hosted. There's a fully hosted version of cmeo that runs in Google Cloud or in, uh, Microsoft Azure. Um, there's also a self hosted version of C that could be run in any cloud of your choice or on premise, hybrid, whatever you want.

Um, so the, the fact that we've designed this as a, you know, a CloudFirst system, but also with a zero trust model baked in at the, at the core, we separate your applications from your device. No applications are actually delivered or installed on your devices locally. Uh, so we separate the apps from the device, we separate the devices from the network, from the corporate network, uh, we have segmentation, we eliminate, um, lateral movement.

So all the traditional zero trust, um, security measures are taken with C and with virtual app delivery. And then through this combination of OSS and coo, you get this kind of dual benefit of Chrome moss's deep security benefits and their zero trust model, which is, you know, Chrome OSS is still, uh, you know, an operating system that has, you know, never had a reported ransomware attack. You take advantage of all the security benefits of Chrome oss, and you just layer on the additional zero trust benefits of C for a really, you know, super secure way of giving people access to all their apps.

I think a lot of people have it in their heads, and maybe it's a generational thing that, you know, it's either Windows or Mac and they don't really think too hard about Google Chrome oss. So is that changing with the, you know, the kids are coming outta school, a lot of them had exposure to it. So is something fundamentally going on here?

Yeah, absolutely. We've seen a, a massive shift over the last three years in terms of enterprise adoption of, of Chrome oss, and I think that's just gonna continue to, to pick up steam, um, not just because of, of, uh, students who have grown up with it coming into the workforce, which definitely plays a part. But also just the idea that, um, organizations being able to take a look at devices nowadays and, and make a choice based on what is gonna be the most secure, what's gonna be easy to manage, and what's gonna give their people the experience that they expect to have.

And I think that traditionally there was this inertia around, you know, okay, well, we're gonna use, you know, windows devices because our organization relies on these, you know, 15 legacy Windows applications. And that's just the easiest way to do it nowadays, if you, if you strip away the need for that OSS and say you can, you can take advantage of all those applications with the same experience that your people have always had, but you can do it on a more secure, more cost effective, you know, more sustainable device, it makes that decision easier and it frees up people to make those, those decisions and, and the flexibility to kind of use the, the devices that they want. There's also huge benefits with something called chromos Flex.

Uh, Chromos Flex is a, uh, system that lets you repurpose your existing PCs and Macs and turn them into Chrome OSS devices, so that if your organization is, is, you know, is, you know, bought in and, and is looking forward to, to migrating to Chrome OSS for all the security and cost benefits, but you don't want to waste your investment in these existing devices, or it's not turn, it's not time for you to, um, to refresh those devices yet you can go ahead and make the move to, to Chrome, you know, convert those devices into chromos now and then on your existing, um, uh, refresh cycle, start to, you know, refresh with, with new Chromebook or new ChromeOS devices. Um, Ultimately, do you think the application experience might get better with this approach because, you know, we are starting to see, uh, more bandwidth out there and maybe we can streamline the delivery of the code as well, because maybe we're not pushing as many bits over the wire. I'm just speculating, but what's your thought?

Yeah, I mean, I think that, um, when you get to a place where, you know, you can, where the device, um, you know, where, where the device doesn't matter as much where you can, you know, still access any di device, any app that you need, where every app essentially becomes a SaaS app, um, I do think that overall the application experience gets better. Right now, a majority of us spent, you know, do most of our work, probably 75 to 80% of our work in a SaaS based environment, right? Most of the, the, the tools that we use are SaaS based, but then a lot of us have these select applications that, that we rely on, whether it's our, you know, e r p systems or, you know, E H R for the, the healthcare industry or, you know, uh, legacy C R M systems, where even though there may be a SaaS version of that, you've, you've, your company's invested, you know, decades of time and money in, in, in customizing that, that c r M solution.

So you still need the full legacy desktop version. All of those solutions now become available to you just as if they were a SaaS, a SaaS based solution. But, you know, still giving you all the, the, the traditional, uh, benefits you've had of the full desktop version.

So I do think that the application experience, and that's really the focus of this partnership with the, with the go with Google and the Chrome OSS team, is providing people with a completely seamless cloud first, um, you know, experience regardless of the application and making it really, really simple for users to access whatever they need to be productive. All right folks. Well, you heard it here.

Just because it's called a desktop doesn't mean it has to be running on a machine and it's sitting on your lap. It can be anywhere. Rob, thanks for being on the show.

Absolutely. Thank you, Mike. Take care.

Back to you guys in the studio.