Citrix VDA for macOS: Revolutionizing Remote Access for Developers and Creatives

In this episode of The Citrix Session (Episode 170), host Bill Sutton is joined by Andy Whiteside, CEO of XenTegra, Citrix experts Jeremy Myers and Todd Smith, to discuss the exciting new capabilities of Citrix Virtual Delivery Agent (VDA) for macOS. Dive into how this game-changing feature enables Mac environments to be remotely accessed with the same efficiency as other platforms, perfect for developers, video professionals, and education institutions.

Tune in to learn:

• How Citrix VDA for macOS brings Macs into the fold of remote desktop solutions
• Key use cases, including developer environments, multimedia professionals, and education
• Integration with platforms like MacStadium and Amazon EC2 Mac instances
• Licensing models and platform compatibility
• How this innovation highlights Citrix's continued investment in cutting-edge technology

Explore how Citrix is meeting customer demands while setting the standard for the future of remote access!

Transcript

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Bill Sutton: Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 170 of the Citrix session. I'm Bill Sutton, your host for this session

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Bill Sutton: have with me as is typical Andy Whiteside, CEO of Zentegra, Jeremy Myers, and Todd Smith, both of

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Bill Sutton: of Citrix Andy. You want to say Hello, or.

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Andy Whiteside: Yeah, I wanna hit the hit, the commercial and the tagline. So the commercial is you know, if you're working with a citrix partner, or you don't have one. Or you, you have one that doesn't do podcasts and doesn't do other value. Add things. You know, bring you to conferences. We're gonna Microsoft. Ignite what bill in about

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Andy Whiteside: about 40 days or so.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah, something like that middle of November. Yep.

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Andy Whiteside: If you're listening to this, you do Citrix. Therefore you do. Microsoft, are you going?

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Andy Whiteside: Is your current partner. Did your current partner get you a pass to Microsoft ignite? If not, maybe you work with us, going forward.

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Bill Sutton: Let us know you're going. We've got some events we can invite you to potentially.

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Andy Whiteside: And the way we kinda sum all this up in this podcast. Is you know, content with context.

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Andy Whiteside: That's why we do this because it's 1 thing to read a blog. It's another thing to talk about with a bunch of friends. And you know, most people maybe don't have a bunch of friends. We got us right here. There's 4 of us. Just consider yourself as a listener. One of us.

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Bill Sutton: Exactly

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Bill Sutton: Todd. You wanna say Hello!

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Todd Smith: Yeah, I'm I'm honored to be part of the 3 best friends here. Me and my 3 best friends. So yeah, thanks for? Thanks for having us again. You know, it's always one of the highlights of my week is

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Todd Smith: spending Monday afternoon recording this with you guys. And then I, typically spend Saturday morning on my drive

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Todd Smith: to me kind of listening to this, podcast and a couple of other ones. But this is the this is the 1st one out of the gate. When it comes to this, because it is, you know, even for someone who works at Citrix who thinks they know a lot about it. The conversation really brings out a lot of the

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Todd Smith: a lot of the things that I really didn't know or wanted to know more about.

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Todd Smith: Thanks for thanks for having us all.

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Bill Sutton: Of course, Todd, we love having you on, Jeremy.

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Bill Sutton: Mute man.

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Geremy Meyers: Of course. You know the back of my head. I always think of Wolf of Wall Street, one of us, one of us alright

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Geremy Meyers: that could go in a that could go in a terrible direction. But I will say this right, but.

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Bill Sutton: Good.

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Geremy Meyers: You know. So we we brief on this, and you know we go through just a little peek behind the curtain. Here

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Geremy Meyers: is, you know we. We go through the blogs, and we kind of think about which ones to hit on. And you know, we actually just flirted with the idea of redoing one

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Geremy Meyers: that we did 6 months ago. So we might do that here in a week or 2, where we talked about the platform license.

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Geremy Meyers: and it was, you know, at least for me and Todd pretty fresh for us.

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Geremy Meyers: And so, you know, this might be one

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Geremy Meyers: that we redo in a week or so, which I'm pretty fired up about because there's a lot going on. But the reason I point that out is tomorrow Bill and I are actually leading a virtual webinar, which is all about platform updates. So again, and yet another commercial I think

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Geremy Meyers: maybe go get this out. If you haven't been to the website. Go to integra.com forward slash events

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Geremy Meyers: in October the 8.th we've got an update we'll talk through all these things as well, so

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Geremy Meyers: pretty excited about that. That's tomorrow.

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Andy Whiteside: Listen. You can get it on the recording on our Youtube channel.

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Bill Sutton: That's right. But if you're available, go to Zinteg like Jeremy, said zentegra.com slash events and find it for October 8th and click on, learn more

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Bill Sutton: and register, and you can join tomorrow at one Pm. And Jeremy and I will be talking about a lot of this stuff. So so.

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Andy Whiteside: Guys, you know the number one reason why I was so adamant that we should revisit the platform. Thing is 2 things, one, I just came out of the Executive briefing 2 weeks ago at the Citrix Hq. In Florida.

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Andy Whiteside: and it was clear to me that all the customers that were there with us.

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Andy Whiteside: This they're not getting all this. It's not landing, and there's things that are changing. For example, like the secure private access. Citrix is really bringing the enterprise browser technology as a forward thinking part of that platform going forward. And maybe that wasn't the case in March when we did that as a podcast I think the thing about platforms for companies that are doing it. The right way is, it is gonna, be changing. And we should probably revisit the platform. Conversation quarterly.

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Geremy Meyers: I think you're right. Actually, so.

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Geremy Meyers: without sealing too much thunder, there were some things that weren't in the platform that weren't in, even in Hmc.

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Geremy Meyers: That are now in the platform. So there's a tease for you. But you know, I think the one thing I've learned about this company is it's it's constantly shifting and tweaking and ever forward as well say so. That's probably not a terrible idea, Andy.

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Andy Whiteside: And I think, as companies like Citrix and others move to like these platform type complete bundles

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Andy Whiteside: as they add technology, it's gonna change a lot. It's not like they. They float something out there. It's a separate thing. And then it ends up in the bundle. In the modern technology platform concept. It ends up in the platform day one, and we're gonna have to call it out in order to make sure people don't miss it.

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Geremy Meyers: Nailed it.

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Todd Smith: Yeah. And I think that I think to add on to that, it's the constantly understanding that we need to continue to provide value to customers.

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Todd Smith: and what we think is

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Todd Smith: valuable to a customer may not be

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Todd Smith: may not be accurate, but at the same time, you know, if a customer comes back and says, Hey, we, we want this product. We want this platform because of this feature.

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Todd Smith: They have now decided the value statement on that as opposed to us, having to go. Tell them

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Todd Smith: there's some value there. So you know, definitely, definitely, the messaging does change a little bit, but it's all messaging, based on what the customer needs.

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Todd Smith: Yep.

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Bill Sutton: Thanks, Todd, alright. So the blog we're gonna cover today. Is entitled announcing Citrix Vda for Mac OS. It's by our friend Sridar Mullah Hoodie, who's the? I believe he's the general manager of the Citrix business unit, or the Citrix product management. What is what is his title, Jeremy? Do you? Do you know, off the top of your head.

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Geremy Meyers: He is the general manager for the Citrix bu.

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Bill Sutton: Okay, okay, great.

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Bill Sutton: So this article and we'll get into it a little bit deeper. Here, really, this comes down to now we can deliver the Mac OS as a desktop session from Mac OS to any device.

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Bill Sutton: Number of years ago I sat in a in a you know what I'm gonna say. I sat in a I do.

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Andy Whiteside: You know.

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Bill Sutton: Energy keynote, and this was demonstrated as a virtual instance. You know. Newsflash, this is not a virtual instance. But, Jeremy, why don't you give us a high level overview?

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Geremy Meyers: Well, listen, let's take a step back real quick. That announcement felt a lot like. And maybe this is unfair comparison.

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Geremy Meyers: right? Like the time Steve Jobs got on stage and said, Hey, I've got this thing. That is a messaging device, a cell phone and an Internet communicator

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Geremy Meyers: all in the same thing. That's when he introduced iphone and people went bananas. I remember that synergy where we talked about virtualizing the Mac OS and treating that like a Vm, you could do remote access, and the whole 9 yards

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Geremy Meyers: and people went nuts. And I will tell you that even as recent as maybe 2 or 3 years ago I was still getting asked if we could do a demo for that. And I'm like, well.

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Geremy Meyers: the answer is, no, that was never a thing. It was always an issue with the Eula from Apple, meaning you couldn't virtualize the Mac OS unless it was on apple hardware.

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Geremy Meyers: And oh, by the way. I think Apple stopped making the what do they call their hardware back? They had rack mount servers that you could virtualize on.

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Bill Sutton: Okay.

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Geremy Meyers: Not forget. But either way, long story short,

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Geremy Meyers: we still can't do that. You can't virtualize the Mac OS. You probably could do it, maybe on Mac hardware, and it'd be supported. But that's not what we're talking about here. What we are talking about at a high level is, think of remote PC.

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Geremy Meyers: For Mac OS. So now we can install the Va. Software onto a Mac OS

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Geremy Meyers: and broker connections to it with Hdx policies, analytics all the things you would expect

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Geremy Meyers: out of a Citrix session. But we can do that brokering through

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Geremy Meyers: broken through Citrix. So I log into workspace. I see an icon. That is my Mac Desktop. I click it, and it's brokering me into

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Geremy Meyers: a Mac of some kind sitting somewhere much like you know anything see about or does, it could be sitting anywhere. But that's that's what it is. That's what it is in a nutshell.

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Andy Whiteside: Before we started Todd made a comment about helping customers understand what they what they need, what they want, or you know the port, the platform bringing stuff to you that maybe you didn't realize was even possible. I think this one to me lines up exactly with that, because my immediate response was, this doesn't matter to most of our customers.

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Andy Whiteside: But then I started thinking about developer use cases where it's all a lot of it's happening on Max. I'm like, Oh, yeah. Well, how they? How are they gonna do that at scale?

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Geremy Meyers: Oh, a hundred percent, a hundred percent. And so that's my 1st thought, like, I get so caught up in the house sometimes that I forget the why.

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Geremy Meyers: And I'd argue that's probably the first.st

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Geremy Meyers: Probably the 1st use case is just remote development, right? So it hits on here in the in the document itself. So with all the customers that I've talked to about this.

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Geremy Meyers: that's probably the top one. Can I do it with, you know.

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Geremy Meyers: you know, video professionals, multimedia professionals share. In fact, there's an integration with a platform called Max Stadium, which, if you can imagine a data center of Macs of various types and sizes and gpus and things like that. I mean, that's exactly what that is. So.

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Geremy Meyers: yeah, you could do a lot of that remote. And you could have that. You know the the graphics. You know, available to that session to really support that. But I think development is probably the biggest one.

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Todd Smith: If you think back at it. You know some of these remote PC, use cases.

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Todd Smith: you know where you're going back to physical hardware.

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Todd Smith: This is something we've been doing for, you know.

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Todd Smith: 12 to 15 years, I mean, this goes back to like the the Gabe Correo days of

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Todd Smith: evangelizing the value of being able to connect to a physical device that's not in the data center. Always

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Todd Smith: it could be someone, something sitting on someone's desk, you know. Oftentimes it was a snow day scenario where, you know, people can't get to the office, but they don't have

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Todd Smith: they? They need to access a device that was sitting on their on their physical desktop.

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Todd Smith: in their cube someplace. Sometimes it was applications that were only installed on that physical PC.

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Todd Smith: That you need to get to remotely, and it didn't make sense to virtualize them.

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Todd Smith: This is a use case that is really been around for for quite a long time. This is the 1st time we've actually been able to really

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Todd Smith: leverage a infrastructure partner like Max Stadium to help us deliver.

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Todd Smith: you know, once again an additional corner case that customers have been asking for. But we really really have never been able to

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Todd Smith: deliver at scale.

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Bill Sutton: Right? So is there, is there? Just so. So I know. Is there any limitation here doesn't have to be something like Max Stadium? It can be literally

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Bill Sutton: a fleet of Macs that might be sitting on a desk or desks at a corporate office. And it's just very similar like you, said Jeremy to the remote PC case.

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Bill Sutton: For example, if they're running a specialized Mac app, which is one of the 3 bullets that are in the actual blog article itself.

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Bill Sutton: It would enable a user to maybe use home care caring for a sick child or something to be able to access their Mac

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Bill Sutton: their high powered Mac from their Home Office.

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Geremy Meyers: Yep, yep. So that's the use case. I mean, I think through maybe an education use case where you've got, you know.

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Geremy Meyers: design labs inside of, you know, maybe a university. You want to provide access to.

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Bill Sutton: Right.

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Geremy Meyers: You know that again. It's not limited to Max Stadium. It could be the Max. It's at native us. So again you can buy Mac

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Geremy Meyers: from Amazon as a platform. You have to have it sitting in. You know your own data center. You could, you know, tee up a few of these in your own data center. Yeah, it's just the Vda is all it is right. There's a workflow for standing it up. I think there's some caveats

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Geremy Meyers: just to be aware of on what is actually supported. So

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Geremy Meyers: the biggest thing. And this really shouldn't be difficult anymore, because it's been out is number one. It only supports apple silicon. Right? So you can't do this on Intel based Macs.

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Geremy Meyers: It's gotta be apple silicon, right? So a different platform. What's nice is, it is supported across every licensing variation we sell. So whether or not you are the platform license, whether you're not, you're the hybrid multi cloud license or even if you're you know, Citrix, private Cloud, which is the on prem version, supports Das supported by Das, supported by

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Geremy Meyers: private cloud as well. So you know essentially

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Geremy Meyers: anything you bring to. It's gonna work

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Geremy Meyers: from a from a work workspace app perspective. You'll probably want the most recent

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Geremy Meyers: version. So at least a 42 version or a 20. Yeah. 24 version of Workspace app of some kind. So something this year.

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Geremy Meyers: But it just went went. Ga, in fact. So it's been tech preview. For would you say, Todd? Maybe a year

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Geremy Meyers: now it's live.

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Todd Smith: Yeah. It's yeah. It's been about a year.

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Bill Sutton: So it's literally just as simple as putting the Vda on the right kind of Mac hardware and connected creating a a machine catalog delivery group within your cloud tenant or your on prem tenant, and

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Bill Sutton: then your users can connect. What about authentication?

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Geremy Meyers: I think this we're getting. It's interesting. So I think the hold up to this has been the fact that it's non domain join support.

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Bill Sutton: Right.

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Geremy Meyers: And so there's some pieces that you'll need to do to prep for that. So I'm looking through the latest documentation right now. The steps are 2

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Geremy Meyers: too heavy, but you do have to turn on some web socket pieces on your your Ddc.

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Geremy Meyers: If you're using the on-prem das.

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Bill Sutton: Right.

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Geremy Meyers: If you're doing or on Prem C event, if you're doing something in Das, I think there's a

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Geremy Meyers: I think there's actually workflow you've got to do. There's like an enrollment token.

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Geremy Meyers: So there's a workflow that's got to be created just to support doing this from a Mac. Because, again, you know most of your Macs are not going to be domain join, which is important to to be aware of.

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Bill Sutton: So there's some hoops to jump through. But they're not. It's nothing significant.

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Geremy Meyers: It's it's nothing significant. Yeah, it's something to be aware of, that's all.

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Bill Sutton: For sure, for sure. So when we move along in the, in the article itself, it it does talk about what we were mentioning earlier, which is the partnership with Mac Stadium as well as Amazon. Ec, 2. Mac. Instances.

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Bill Sutton: There's a diagram in here, either one of you guys wanna kind of take a walkthrough of this real quick

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Bill Sutton: might have already done it.

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Bill Sutton: Oh.

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Geremy Meyers: We? I don't. I don't. I don't know that we necessarily talked about it. But, you know it's pretty straightforward, right? So your Mac desktops are going

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Geremy Meyers: to register. So you have the Vda and the Mac. Of course you've got to point those vdas to a Ddc and it's pretty straightforward if it's on Prem, you're pointing to.

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Geremy Meyers: you know your on Prem. Ddcs. And if you're a das customer and you've got it deployed that way, then you're gonna point it to your your cloud connectors, and which will do the

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Geremy Meyers: the proxy on the back end.

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Geremy Meyers: You know, in the case of like Max Stadium. Again, if you've not seen this, I would say, Go, Google, what Max Stadium data center looks like.

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Geremy Meyers: And it's exactly what you imagine. It's rows and rows of Max is what it is, and so

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Geremy Meyers: you know, the simple version is a Mac, you know, an Imac I mean a you know, Mac Mini but heck! If you want a Mac pro. They got

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Geremy Meyers: got Mac Pros and Mac studios there, too.

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Bill Sutton: Very interesting. Great.

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Bill Sutton: so there's the blog article next talks about getting started, guide and documentation and other elements that are related to this solution. That's that's really the end of the articles. Pretty quick. One. What did we miss guys? Anything else we need to bring? We should bring to light.

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Geremy Meyers: No, it's actually fairly straightforward. And I think what's interesting is a lot of the minutia. Maybe some things that are unique to the Mac Vda version, as opposed to like the regular windows or Linux Vda.

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Bill Sutton: Right.

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Geremy Meyers: Is a lot of the like the tokening, the supports, the you know, the non domain join stuff. I mean, it's all a part of the Wizard.

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Geremy Meyers: That is, the Mac Vda, so takes a little of the guesswork, and I gotta be honest. The documentation is actually fairly straightforward. So

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Andy Whiteside: Guys, and you may not know the answer. I'm literally on the Mac Stadium website right now, requesting somebody call me.

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Andy Whiteside: where do partners like us

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Andy Whiteside: fit in to this equation.

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Geremy Meyers: Man. I don't know the answer to that. I will tell you that we do have a point of contact with Max Stadium

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Geremy Meyers: now, so I'm sure we could broker

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Geremy Meyers: you know, some sort of connection, whatever is needed. But I'm not exactly sure what they're

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Geremy Meyers: your partner. Program looks like.

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Geremy Meyers: I will say this, though, like being on the website. Yeah, you get a, you get a sense of how much a monthly bill is on some of these Macs, though, of course

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Geremy Meyers: I go right straight to the high end.

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Geremy Meyers: And there's a model that's got all of the

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Geremy Meyers: all of the Mac. You can handle graphics wise, and it's a good 6, 2,630 bucks a month.

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Geremy Meyers: Yeah, but that's let's be fair. That's a that's a 30. That's a 24 core, 2 TB. SSD, Mac studios. That's 1 of the big guys.

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Geremy Meyers: Yeah.

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Bill Sutton: 100 and 28 gigs of RAM. So.

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Bill Sutton: and you can also do this through their partnership with it, because you can run these as as aws instances as well. Right?

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Bill Sutton: That's what we saw here.

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Geremy Meyers: You can. Yep, you certainly can

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Geremy Meyers: certainly can.

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Andy Whiteside: I don't know if we covered it. Is this under the

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Andy Whiteside: universal multi hybrid cloud license, or is it in the platform license, or both?

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Geremy Meyers: All of the all of the above, all of the above Andy Yup! Yup! We.

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Bill Sutton: As well as private cloud.

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Geremy Meyers: Cloud on prem universal hybrid multi cloud, regardless of how you deploy. Cpl. As well. Yeah.

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Andy Whiteside: You guys see a use case here in education?

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Andy Whiteside: I do.

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Geremy Meyers: See a use case for that.

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Todd Smith: Yeah, absolutely. There's some use cases for education. This has been one of those things where anything that has specialized Mac software

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Todd Smith: from an application side of it.

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Todd Smith: number one is. It's a, you know.

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Todd Smith: rolling that out to a fleet of students or a fleet of devices can sometimes be a challenge. Very expensive. Challenge. The other piece of it is, it's really geared towards that

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Todd Smith: that non consistent, non persistent user all the time. So

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Todd Smith: You know, education would be a perfect one for this, because it because the thing is, it's it's typically for a specific class or a specific course

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Todd Smith: that. The students taking that needs that. You know that one time specialized software

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Andy Whiteside: Yeah.

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Andy Whiteside: what about the use case where? Let's say, you have a marketing department that has to have brand new Macs every

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Andy Whiteside: year or 2.

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Andy Whiteside: And it's this unsustainable

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Andy Whiteside: and you're giving them a you know, a a decent, thin client and a citrus connection.

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Andy Whiteside: And then you know this, you turn this into an opex versus Capex story.

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Todd Smith: Yeah, it's a good. It's a good use case. I mean, we. We've all been to conferences where you know you have someone that walks up with A with a Mac, and plugs it into the overhead projector and screws up for the next. You know, the next 3 presenters all have problems because they have to swap out hardware. Now, all of a sudden, you can put a thin client device in there. Have them connect to either, you know a Mac based OS

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Todd Smith: vda, or a windows or Linux based? Vda, right? That that endpoint now becomes a a moot point. You don't need to go and say, Hey, I can only use this type of endpoint to do my presentation.

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Todd Smith: yeah.

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Todd Smith: take that and put that into something like a conference room or any of these public

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Todd Smith: access devices you're connecting yet again, you're connecting to a virtual desktop someplace

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Todd Smith: Mac OS 10, or the the Vda for Mac OS that we're talking about, you know, just happens to be on physical

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Todd Smith: physical device back in the data center. So forth.

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Andy Whiteside: Right?

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Andy Whiteside: Yep.

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Andy Whiteside: But it's funny, because, as you just keep talking through, there's there's use cases. And there's a large percentage of companies out there that have some population of Max.

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Andy Whiteside: that whether this is right for them or not, maybe maybe not. But somebody needs to be talking about it.

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Bill Sutton: Well, I think one of the things you know the key thing I mean. When you look at this, it it really kind of demonstrates again the the benefit of leveraging the Citrix model of of having your your workloads under the processing

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Bill Sutton: occur in the data center, or, you know, somewhere secured versus having all of the the multimedia files video, for, like an advertising agency sitting on a bunch of different laptops, centralize them, let require them to connect to the high end, Max, over a thin, you know, thin protocol. And then

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Bill Sutton: that way, that data stays in the data center stays with within the 4 walls, or wherever you or in a cloud.

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Bill Sutton: You're not carrying them around with you and risking getting a laptop stolen or or damaged, or lost.

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Todd Smith: Yeah, Andy, I can tell you, a use case right now is a large ivy Ivy League University

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Todd Smith: here in the northeast, that

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Todd Smith: basically, they have challenge with professors walking in with whatever device, plugging into the projection system

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Todd Smith: and not being able to get it connected, connecting on a regular basis or simple, easy to use basis right? To the point where they actually have staff sitting in each of the buildings. Each of the education instruction buildings

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Todd Smith: that are there to just deal with that connectivity issues. If they could take

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Todd Smith: and put a thin client in each of the podiums and have the professor connect to their

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Todd Smith: virtualized windows desktop virtualized Linux desktop. In this case a Mac

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Todd Smith: desktop

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Todd Smith: that pro that solves that problem.

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Todd Smith: That's a that is a that is a human capital

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Todd Smith: savings right there.

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Bill Sutton: Right.

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Todd Smith: It not only not only

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Todd Smith: not only that, but it also reduces that lost

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Todd Smith: time at learning. Right? So

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Todd Smith: you know, you're you're spending a lot of money to send your kids to a to an Ivy League school to find out that the 1st 15 min of every class and dealt with the Professor trying to connect his laptop.

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Andy Whiteside: You know that that leads me to a whole nother discussion around just, you know.

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Andy Whiteside: device cost in general. I should say this in the intro during the commercial. We've we've got a program where you can for free

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Andy Whiteside: or a paid for version. That's not that expensive. You can have someone come in and do a study to figure out what your actual endpoint devices are costing you.

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Andy Whiteside: Todd. Jeremy. I've been around this business for 15 plus years now as a consultant or a a reseller, or as working for Citrix.

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Andy Whiteside: I found 2 2 customers that entire time they could tell me how much a device cost them

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Andy Whiteside: the actual cost of it. Not just the physical, but, you know, provisioning it, deprovisioning everything lifecycle of it.

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Andy Whiteside: The customers need to know that. How do you?

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Andy Whiteside: You know, if you're spending too much on a PC. Or a Mac, how do you know what the options are financially? If you don't know what you're actually spending today.

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Todd Smith: Well, and and the biggest challenge area is that the the hardware costs have really kind of dropped. It's the management costs associated with that.

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Todd Smith: So several years ago, Gartner came out with a study that basically said it was $3,500 per

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Todd Smith: user per year

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Todd Smith: for an end user.

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Todd Smith: you know, for the end user to get their compute environment. They factored in a whole bunch of things.

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Todd Smith: Probably one of the cheapest things on there was the actual cost of the hardware?

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Todd Smith: it's how do you deal with updates? How do you deal with?

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Todd Smith: You know migrations? How do you deal with the data security components of it.

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Todd Smith: Just that basic operating.

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Todd Smith: you know the care and beating of the device

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Todd Smith: adds up,

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Todd Smith: if you swap it out, make it make it self managed, or make it easier to manage without the amount of investment in the human capital piece of it. It's going to be huge.

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Geremy Meyers: Yeah, I'd be curious to know. You know, we've got customers have a charge back model to like some of their internal

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Geremy Meyers: cost centers. So you know. Listen, you're in Todd. You're in one of the the cost centers, and I give you a PC. Certainly it's the piece of hardware. But there's the agents. There's the processing time. There's the main hours.

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Geremy Meyers: and there's a formula there for sure. Be interesting to catch up with a handful of those different customers, and kind of feel that out.

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Todd Smith: So so if I go back to my way back machine

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Todd Smith: years and years and years ago we used to charge $25 per user per month

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Todd Smith: was the it support costs for

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Todd Smith: us to be able to manage that device

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Todd Smith: right? So you figure out, that's, you know, 300 bucks a year

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Todd Smith: type of thing that didn't include

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Todd Smith: the connectivity that didn't include the server space and the storage space and all that stuff or the endpoint device itself. That was purely on the management layer.

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Todd Smith: You factor in the cost of a a new laptop or a new desktop. Nowadays everyone's got dual monitors. Everyone's got webcams. Everyone's got all the other bells and whistles on there.

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Todd Smith: It adds up very quickly.

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Todd Smith: but that $25 per user per month. Fee

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Todd Smith: was. That was, you know.

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Todd Smith: I will say, 20 plus years ago. But it probably does carry through.

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Andy Whiteside: Hey, Todd, are you factoring in the cost of a ransomware attack in that one these days.

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Todd Smith: not back then. But yes, you have to factor that in. You'd have to factor in the the protection. The security goes on top of there

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Todd Smith: and probably put money aside for in case of ransomware does happen, or you know, the recovery costs

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Todd Smith: would have to get factored in at at some point in time. You need an economics, professor, to come in and actually do the calculations for you.

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Andy Whiteside: And then you factor in the you know the political fallout, the customer exposure fallout

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Andy Whiteside: And it's you know it's it's limitless, priceless.

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Andy Whiteside: Yep, yeah.

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Geremy Meyers: So so one thing I don't think we covered is, how do I get

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Geremy Meyers: the Vda

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Geremy Meyers: onto the Max? I don't. Wanna I don't wanna go too deep in, so you could certainly do it by hand. And you know I'm guessing a lot of people do. But

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Geremy Meyers: a lot of folks have management of these Macs, right? And so it's not uncommon to have a platform like Jamf

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Geremy Meyers: managing your Macs. And so I'll tell you that inside the documentation that's on the website

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Geremy Meyers: is a walkthrough on how to, you know, basically download the Vda and leverage jam to roll that guy out. So

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Geremy Meyers: there's some scripting involved that Jan takes care of. In fact, I think the documentation actually outlines

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Geremy Meyers: what that script looks like. So it's as simple as this is what the command line needs to look like. There might be a couple of runtime, so some pieces that need to be on as prerequisite.

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Geremy Meyers: But

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Geremy Meyers: it's pretty straightforward, actually.

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Geremy Meyers: So august out there on the website under installation. So the section on specifically rolling this out with endpoint management and the scripting itself, or just command line arguments that of course you could feed into jamf. But if you've got a different platform

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Geremy Meyers: you know, there's the script to work elsewhere, either. It's just automating the whole process.

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Bill Sutton: Very interesting good information, Jeremy. Thanks

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Bill Sutton: alright. Any other topics on this subject, guys.

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Andy Whiteside: No, I don't think so. I think we've. I think we've covered this specific subject.

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Andy Whiteside: I think. But for I'll add to this whole concept around the subject that this just further proves that Citrix is investing in the technology piece.

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Andy Whiteside: Amazing to hear from. You know, one of our clients the other day one of our own sales people today, and then at the executive briefing of the day, the customers that were there. The impression is, Citrix is not investing in technology, they're actually making a status quo and then charging people more money for that status quo. It's the opposite of that.

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Bill Sutton: Yes.

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Todd Smith: Yeah. And I, I think to that point, Andy, there's there's.

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Todd Smith: you know, you have to look at some of the announcements we've made around. You know the the release cycles and things like that. If you look at the past year and a half.

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Todd Smith: you know, the over 500

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Todd Smith: customer requested. Enhancements have actually been implemented.

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Todd Smith: not on. That's not including all of the technology enhancements that have been done that have been put in place that that

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Todd Smith: didn't have specific customer require requests associated with it.

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Todd Smith: you know, we we hear an awful lot about technical debt.

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Todd Smith: and that being the you know. Hey? I'm I'm on a I'm on an operating system that's

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Todd Smith: 15 years old, that, you know hasn't been patched and hasn't been Updated. And things like that. I mean, that's all that all adds that technical debt.

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Todd Smith: And part of it is because

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Todd Smith: there's been a lot of companies out there that basically just said, Hey, we're just gonna look at the forward in the future as opposed to making sure that what's already there continues to work.

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Todd Smith: So that technical data ratio that we've been doing as well has been huge.

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Geremy Meyers: Yeah, and Todd.

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Andy Whiteside: A lot of lot of companies are just cashing in on what they got, trying to find the next brand new thing out of the out of the blue.

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Geremy Meyers: Here's here's the other thing. I'll say, too. So Todd's right. I mean, I don't know that I've ever seen the pace of

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Geremy Meyers: innovation at Citrix.

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Andy Whiteside: As quickly.

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Geremy Meyers: It is right now, just the engagement that we have with product management around Rfes is incredible right now. So we're taking feedback from

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Geremy Meyers: customers and implementing that in the product in a way I've never seen before. But I think more importantly, listen, there's only one of me. There's only one of every one of my team.

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Geremy Meyers: and you know I cover a huge swath of the Us.

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Geremy Meyers: Listen. If you don't have a partner in Canada that is absolutely right, Todd.

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Geremy Meyers: but if you don't have a partner that is letting you know about this and the way this integra does, then you need to have a conversation with your partner, because there's a lot coming out. Integra is doing a really good job job of making sure customers understand that. And if you're not getting that from your partner.

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Geremy Meyers: I know someone on this call, so

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Geremy Meyers: just make sure that you're holding your partner accountable

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Geremy Meyers: as well. I think that's how we'll maybe we ended here.

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Andy Whiteside: I would sum that up as if that's the case, Jeremy, you ain't got no partner.

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Bill Sutton: Yeah.

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Todd Smith: And and to test to test to that, I think all you have to do is look@thisintegra.com events, page.

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Todd Smith: and see how active does integra is, and then go pick another partner and take a look at their page.

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Todd Smith: See how how much more integra is doing, and it's not just around the Citrix

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Todd Smith: products, right? It's about products across the board.

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Todd Smith: You know, Andy and Andy and the team. It's integra are really doing a phenomenal job, helping and doing what they can to educate consumers

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Todd Smith: as much as possible.

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Todd Smith: Yep.

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Bill Sutton: Alright folks. Thanks for joining today. We will see you again next week.

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Andy Whiteside: And Todd, that for a lot of people that's setting a high bar where that's table stakes for us. Yeah.

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Andy Whiteside: alright, Bill, thanks.

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Bill Sutton: Thank you all.