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Welcome to 'The Citrix Session,' where we bring you the latest in Citrix technologies and solutions. Hosted by XenTegra, this podcast dives deep into the world of Citrix digital workspace solutions, exploring everything from virtual apps and desktops to networking and security. Join us each episode as we discuss best practices, new features, and expert strategies to optimize your Citrix environment and enhance your user experience. Whether you're an IT professional seeking to expand your Citrix knowledge or a business leader looking to improve operational efficiency, 'The Citrix Session' is your essential resource for staying ahead in the ever-evolving tech landscape. Tune in to transform the way you work with the power of Citrix and XenTegra."
The Citrix Session
CVAD 2503: What’s New in Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops
In Episode 178, the Citrix Session team dives into the latest on-premises release—Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops 2503. Join Bill Sutton, Geremy Meyers, and Todd Smith as they break down the top new features, including auto-scale insights, a redesigned Web Studio, enhanced storage load balancing, dynamic display rendering with Build-to-Lossless, and expanded integration of UberAgent with Director. Whether you're an admin optimizing cloud costs or an IT leader tracking app usage, this update brings serious power to your Citrix toolkit.
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Bill Sutton: Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 178 of the Citrix session. I'm your host, Bill Sutton. Today. We're going to go over a blog article like we do every week, and with me, like most weeks, are a couple of
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Bill Sutton: astute gentleman from
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Bill Sutton: from Citrix, Jeremy Myers, and Todd Smith. Jeremy, you want to say hello to our listeners.
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Geremy Meyers: Bill, I feel like you're buttering me up calling me astute, but I'll take it. Bill Todd.
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Geremy Meyers: certainly good to see you is also.
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Bill Sutton: See you, too. Yeah.
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Bill Sutton: Good to see. You been a few weeks.
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Geremy Meyers: That's.
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Bill Sutton: We've done this.
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Geremy Meyers: It has been a few weeks. And I was thinking about this earlier today. So we're on 1 78. We've got to do something for our bicentennial by.
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Geremy Meyers: you know, number 2 number 200
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Geremy Meyers: podcasts which we might get, get to by the end of the year for.
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Bill Sutton: We might get to that by the end. We could get to that. That's 32 more, so we could get to that if we did them every week, which we all know.
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Geremy Meyers: Okay.
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Bill Sutton: Doesn't always happen. So by the end of the year. Yeah.
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Geremy Meyers: Oh!
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Bill Sutton: One of our one of my colleagues that we have a. We have a colleague.
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Todd Smith: 22 more bill.
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Bill Sutton: 22. Yes, it would be 20. It's that new math. I'm sorry
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Bill Sutton: we definitely get it to 200.
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Bill Sutton: Yeah, we should do something for our 200th
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Bill Sutton: we have an I have a colleague that
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Bill Sutton: that does. The nutanix weekly, podcast because nutanix is obviously one of our partners, and very complimentary to Citrix, and vice versa. They just hit 100, I think, last week. So they're they're catching on us. They're they're catching up. But.
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Geremy Meyers: Keep going!
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Geremy Meyers: The name.
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Bill Sutton: Say, you know, 78 ahead is
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Bill Sutton: is is right. Maybe I think I did that math right? Right? Todd. So
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Bill Sutton: Todd Smith, thank you. He's also on with us. That's the voice you heard in the background. Todd, you want to say hello to our listeners.
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Todd Smith: Sure. Thanks. Everyone thanks, Bill, you know, kind of like, Jeremy said. He's never been called astute. I'm usually called stout
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Todd Smith: about.
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Geremy Meyers: Yeah.
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Bill Sutton: I get that Todd, I get that about you. You know a guy with a nickname Tiny, you know. That's kind of a kind of a tongue in cheek type thing, I guess.
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Todd Smith: Oh, yeah.
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Bill Sutton: Yeah.
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Geremy Meyers: Well, you know, he's gonna.
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Todd Smith: Please.
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Geremy Meyers: He does have another name that we like to use, because Todd
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Geremy Meyers: Todd just knows things. In fact, he knows things that you think
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Geremy Meyers: no one knows. He just plucks them out of the air. And it's amazing. So we also call him big data because he is just
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Geremy Meyers: through a of information. Yeah.
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Bill Sutton: Now is that information like useless information, or really good information.
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Todd Smith: It's totally it's it can be any. It can be any combination of that bill.
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Todd Smith: everything from old technologies that are no longer there to current trends to.
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Todd Smith: as Jeremy knows, boy band trivia.
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Geremy Meyers: Yeah.
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Bill Sutton: Oh, boy!
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Geremy Meyers: Concurred. I've seen I've seen that in action. By the way.
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Bill Sutton: Maybe we do a trivia contest at some point I don't know. So.
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Todd Smith: Maybe that could be the theme of our 200th episode.
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Bill Sutton: Yeah, for sure.
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Todd Smith: We have a quick little 6 degrees of separation for boy bands.
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Bill Sutton: Yeah.
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Bill Sutton: alright. So we are going to do a blog article today. That's entitled What's New with Citrix Citrix, Virtual Apps and Desktops. 25 0. 3 is now generally available. It's by Bill Gray, who, I believe, is a CTO, a field CTO with Citrix.
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Bill Sutton: So I'll start off here. I mean, obviously 25 0, 3 was. I think it was just last week. This was officially dropped and was available for download. And again, this is the
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Bill Sutton: the primarily, the on premises version of the solution. But I believe the vda, 25 0, 3 that comes with this, or is a part of this would obviously be leveraged by anybody running. Das correct, gentlemen.
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Geremy Meyers: Correct gentlemen.
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Bill Sutton: I went from astute to gentleman. So you know.
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Geremy Meyers: Man, man, I'm curious to know what's gonna happen next.
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Bill Sutton: Rare, so that as with any release that Citrix comes out with
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Bill Sutton: like this one there are new features and functionality in the platform. And that's part of what we're gonna cover today, is there? I think there's 4 or 5 in here that that we're gonna cover that at a high level. There's probably a lot more than this, but these are the ones that we've chose, that the blog article is focusing on. So the 1st one. Well, let me stop there. You guys wanna set this up in any way from your perspective before I move into the actual content.
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Geremy Meyers: No, I mean, listen, it's 25 0, 3, typically, that means March 2025. But clearly
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Geremy Meyers: this is May, so the numbering might be a little off. You're not confused. Sometimes sometimes they push a little bit, which is, I think, was what happened here. But this is indeed
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Geremy Meyers: the most recent release, even though it says.
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Geremy Meyers: Oh, 3. But you know what I think. There are some themes
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Geremy Meyers: in this particular blog post, you know. I think of the
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Geremy Meyers: think of the 4 or 5 different things we covered here, 2 of them, 3 of them
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Geremy Meyers: are pieces that were specifically in the Das version of the product that have again made it into the on-prem. So this is a big deal, especially when you consider you know, I think there was a point, I forget how, when this was where the on-prem product did not support
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Geremy Meyers: cloud workloads. Or it did. Actually, I take that back, you had to be on subscription, and you could use Cbad the on premise version of the product to actually connect and deploy
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Geremy Meyers: workloads that sit in a public cloud, such as azure or Gcp. Or
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Geremy Meyers: or or aws. But some of the feature set didn't quite match it. So, for instance, and I think this kind of leads into the 1st one here.
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Geremy Meyers: You know, auto scaling is a pretty big topic for customers who are attempting to manage compute costs
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Geremy Meyers: in these public clouds. Right? So the idea being
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Geremy Meyers: auto scale, is going to feature in the cloud, the das product for some time.
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Geremy Meyers: Listen. We just wanna
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Geremy Meyers: properly power manage and and sort of scale up, scale down, not just power manage, but even burst, if we need to. But auto scale your cloud workloads just to make the best use
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Geremy Meyers: of your money in the cloud, because it can get quite pricey if you leave it on all the time. So
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Geremy Meyers: this was the idea. I think this has gotten just a bit more helpful to the admin in the sense that you know, part of the idea of setting a schedule is really understanding what the schedule needs to be. And I think this is what we've added here.
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Bill Sutton: It's always been one of the challenges. Right? Jeremy, is, what do you set this stuff to without really knowing how it's gonna be used or how it is used, and I I see it. I kind of thought it was interesting when I 1st read this, a new and the 1st sentence, a new auto scale settings tab called quote actionable insights. Is it? Is it any wonder why those in those initials are AI
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Bill Sutton: I think it should a coincidence in this instance.
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Geremy Meyers: I think it's a coincidence, but not wrong.
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Bill Sutton: But nevertheless, I think you know, the importance of this is like Jeremy said, is to help you control costs, and gives you the lets you leverage the intelligence from the system to say, how was it used last week? Let's take that as a baseline, if you will, or last couple of weeks and apply that to
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Bill Sutton: going forward and then continue to monitor it. And that way. We better understand usage patterns and can get get it closer, close, more closely tailored to what we need, and that way keep the cost down.
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Todd Smith: And I think it's I think it's kind of mirroring exactly what's happening in a lot of other subscription services or a lot of other environments that that we're used to on a regular basis of using, and that is, if you have.
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Todd Smith: You know, for instance, every month I get a report
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Todd Smith: from my from like Uber or Lyft, or something like that saying.
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Bill Sutton: Right.
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Todd Smith: Hey? Here's all the trips you took, and if you had chosen these you would have saved this much money, or
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Todd Smith: it's something that I can then change my behavior, which would the over the result would be saving some
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Todd Smith: Some cost is some cost on my part. By being able to do that.
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Todd Smith: it's taking a lot of those same principles, bringing them into the auto scale capabilities. But yes, the the ability to kind of look at what the what your planned usage was, and what your actual usage was, and then be able to then take that next step and kind of adjust as needed is absolutely critical. When you start talking about.
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Todd Smith: you know this is the equivalent of you taking a taxi ride and having the taxi sit out front of your house with the meter running all night long, waiting for you to get ready to take it in the morning.
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Bill Sutton: Right.
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Todd Smith: It's not cost effective.
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Bill Sutton: No, absolutely.
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Geremy Meyers: I mean, I love that this is a weekly feedback loop as well, because, of course, we all know things change over time.
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Geremy Meyers: and my 1st thought was, Do I need to spin up more machines? But I think the other side of this is, am I making too much capacity available on a weekly basis at certain times of the day that I can dial up and dial back. So this is this is pretty clever, actually.
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Bill Sutton: Well, it's always been kind of a black art, if you will, in terms of knowing how many to have stood up, or have actually ready. At, you know, when a log on storm occurs, or when the 1st
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Bill Sutton: the beginning of the day. And and now, with, you know, a lot of folks working from home. It's even more difficult. It's not like, you know. Most people will be in their seats at 8 o'clock or 8 30. It could be 9, it could be 7, 30 and by looking, being able to take, take a look back on a kind of a rolling basis, you know, this week. Look at last week next week. Look at the Pre, you know. So on. Helps you refine it better to more tailor that to the usage patterns right?
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Geremy Meyers: Yeah, absolutely.
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Todd Smith: Kind of adjusting to that rhythm of the business.
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Bill Sutton: Yeah.
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Geremy Meyers: And when you, when you look at the the Graphic here. So you know, we're looking at this on a per delivery group basis. So when you think about that, typically delivery groups map to different user personas, right? So
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Geremy Meyers: you know, this wouldn't be the same across the business. But you might have. I'm just thinking of a bank. You might have loan originators who might need a certain kind of thing. You might have tellers in the bank using Vdi for desktops and depending on times of the year, you know, especially if we're thinking about tax season, which listen. I realize banks aren't necessarily doing taxes. But there could be different times of the year where.
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Geremy Meyers: you know, it's more common to have a loan, or it's it just would change. And it could be based on that user persona which is
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Geremy Meyers: which is pretty clever.
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Bill Sutton: Yeah, it's kind of neat. You can do it by delivery group.
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Bill Sutton: To your point. So
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Bill Sutton: alright. We'll move on then, unless there's any other comments on this one to the next topic, which is homepage for web studio. So I think this goes back to what you said earlier, Jeremy, in terms of, we're bringing a lot of cloud functionality down to
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Bill Sutton: basically web studio, which is typically a
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Bill Sutton: a the management framework, or at least the window into the management framework looks like that. This has changed a lot, and looks a lot more like what the cloud looked like right.
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Todd Smith: Yeah, in, in.
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Geremy Meyers: Yeah.
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Todd Smith: This is a huge step forward, because not only do we change, look, and feel, to make it consistent with what you see in the cloud.
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Todd Smith: But also it's very much driven around
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Todd Smith: business processes, right? So onboarding a new user, making a move added change, being able to see it from the high level and kind of working your way down. Those are saying things that really weren't intuitive when you kind of went back to the old
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Todd Smith: Mmm. Or Mmc. Studio
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Todd Smith: type of approach. That was very much geared towards the hardcore administrators who knew how to work their way through the console. This is much more of a interactive, intuitive experience.
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Bill Sutton: Absolutely.
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Bill Sutton: You know what I.
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Geremy Meyers: I do love. What I love about this is we have started so I don't know about specifically
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Geremy Meyers: this web studio, because I haven't had a chance to dive into it just yet. But I know with with Daz, it's what's nice about it is we've started inserting updates and recommendations and things right in that landing page as well. So, for instance, if you've got a catalog that might, you know, if we get a recommendation on a machine catalog in particular.
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Geremy Meyers: you know. Here we go. I'd love to get started here
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Geremy Meyers: some more of a tie in, I guess, to you know how to get started, how to build, how to start from scratch if you're if you're kind of new to this. But you know, I would imagine
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Geremy Meyers: you know in the future, being able to see things like alerts around. Oh, by the way, this is misconfigured. Or, by the way, there's a new version of this right in this landing page as well. Just a just a better workflow.
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Bill Sutton: Yep.
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Todd Smith: And this is also taking some of the some of the work that we've done with some of our other consoles, like net scalar console as an example, being able to push information out to the administrators
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Todd Smith: right? And think about it from the Cv notification process that's in an SQL. Or console being able to say
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Todd Smith: for these devices or these instances. Here's some recommendations. Or here's some updates that are applicable
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Todd Smith: being much more intuitive. And Bill, you mentioned it earlier around the AI piece of it. This is where
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Todd Smith: AI is going to start helping not only the end users from a tool perspective, but also the Admins from
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Todd Smith: an operational improvement.
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Todd Smith: You know, if we can start
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Todd Smith: gathering some of this information and providing some
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Todd Smith: prescriptive type of activities that need to be taken.
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Todd Smith: It's gonna be some huge improvements around that area.
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Bill Sutton: Be interesting to see how it evolves, for sure.
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Bill Sutton: Alright, our one of our one of my favorite things here is around storage, and this is the next section is titled Optimized Storage load balancing with the least load method. This is interesting to me, because none of us have ever dealt right with slowness. And we. I've run into this, going back pretty much my whole career. There were always occasions where storage was slow or storage was over committed, causing it to be slow.
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Bill Sutton: And there wasn't a whole lot you could do other than expand, you know, add capacity, or get in and do an analysis to
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Bill Sutton: to get data off of there and get workloads moved elsewhere, etc. It sounds like this is
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Bill Sutton: a load balancing algorithm to balance the load between data stores. Which is very interesting. You guys have any thoughts on this.
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Geremy Meyers: I mean much like the network, or it's never the network. It's never. The storage
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Geremy Meyers: is what I have heard. But you know I don't. What's interesting about this is I don't know that we typically as a Citrix admin.
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Geremy Meyers: I don't know that we typically understand or know or have a feel for the status of the storage, right? So we just know in the past when he's a word. It's probably a little bit dated. There's a lot out there. There's a volume out there that's something out there that I can deploy to, and I will just deploy to it. So the idea that it sounds like
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Geremy Meyers: is this, it sounds like, maybe this is for provisioning of new machines. So my 1st thought was, Is this, for when I launch a session, especially if it's pulled. Is it gonna direct me to.
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Geremy Meyers: you know, a storage volume that's
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Geremy Meyers: that that has lease load. But it sounds like when we're provisioning new machines which
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Geremy Meyers: that makes sense actually just taking into consideration where.
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Geremy Meyers: yeah, this available space, the number of powered on machines. And where does it make sense to go
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Geremy Meyers: land this pool of vms. I'm about to provision.
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Todd Smith: You know, it'd be great if it was a little bit more intuitive when you were saying, Hey, I'm gonna spin up. I need a. I need a set of virtual machines or or
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Todd Smith: machines that are going to be able to satisfy the following personas, and maybe the personas are
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Todd Smith: the in-depth knowledge workers, or those what we used to refer to as super users. You know, the folks that are managing engineering workloads as opposed to, you know a frontline bank teller as an example, where you know what their pattern is going to be over the course of time, then it pro then
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Todd Smith: assign them to the appropriate storage options that are out there, you know. Give them
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Todd Smith: solid state drives, or give them access to, you know better performing.
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Todd Smith: and it kind of goes back to. You know this is the old hierarchical storage models that were out there where you put your fastest.
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Todd Smith: You put your you put your data that requires or the data that you need to access. Quickly, you put that into memory. You put the next one is solid. State drives one after that is spinning disk, and the one below that is, you know, pull it off of tape or some type of offline near line storage.
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Bill Sutton: Yep.
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Geremy Meyers: So I wonder how this
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Geremy Meyers: works like, I wonder if this is during the initial like machine creation process when it goes out and says, All right, let me go. Look at all the volumes I have access to. Is it going to make a recommendation, hey? You should really stick it on this particular one based on this feedback.
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Geremy Meyers: because I gotta think you know, once you've provisioned out to A
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Geremy Meyers: to a volume, it probably sits there unless you do something like move the storage later. I'm just. I don't know. I'm just thinking aloud. Here.
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Bill Sutton: Yeah, it looks like provisioning new machines. But to your point, if you, if you provision, if you got a catalog that's going to to lun or storage repository A
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Bill Sutton: and you provision additional machines for that machine catalog? Is it gonna automatically put them on a or is it gonna put them on a different one. And I don't know that that's that's clear in in here, but it looks like it has the ability. And I absolutely. I think if you were to create a new machine catalog this, would it be invoked to figure out what's the best location for it?
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Bill Sutton: You know, based on load of current workloads as well as availability, storage availability or available space.
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Geremy Meyers: There's a double click in here. We gotta go sort out, Bill.
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Bill Sutton: Yep. Yep.
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Geremy Meyers: I love it.
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Bill Sutton: Yup.
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Bill Sutton: All right, we'll move to the next one. This one is improved display, rendering quality with intelligent build, the lossless feature, so that the build, the lossless feature is has been around for a while, right? Guys. And I think what this is is designed to make it more efficient where it doesn't need to be manually configured by the admin. It's just there and turned on by default and applied dynamically. And I think correct me if I'm wrong. But this is the feature where, particularly if you're dealing with high graphics, medical imaging.
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Bill Sutton: Engineering. And you rotate that car that we're showing on this that's in the blog article. You'll see it go kind of grainy while you rotate it, and then, when you stop, it snaps back to to perfect. That's kind of the concept of build to Lossless. But you usually have to configure that via policy, as I recall.
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Bill Sutton: correct.
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Todd Smith: Yeah, it used to be a. It used to be a configuration setting was limited to delivery group. I believe. Right?
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Todd Smith: You couldn't do it on individual individual machines.
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Geremy Meyers: No, no, I think it's based on delivery group. And well, when you think about it, though I think a lot of organizations, there's scenarios where you don't need this, you know, at the end of the day you've got
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Geremy Meyers: land connected users who just need the bandwidth, which is fine, but of course, I think what we've seen the most is, you know, remote users trying to do this, and it's really hard because you don't. Wanna
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Geremy Meyers: you know, anytime you you need to lock a setting in. It usually works for the scenario it's meant to work for, but when it's not needed you're kind of locked into using it. And so what I love about this is it's very dynamic. So
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Geremy Meyers: it's as if you can turn this on this feature on the setting on, and it will dynamically do it, meaning, you know, it'll build to Lossless if you need it. But the minute you don't.
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Geremy Meyers: it dials back again. It's just meant to.
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Geremy Meyers: you know, obviously, leverage the the bandwidth efficiently depending on the load, which is interesting because we're getting a lot more information about the network connection than we did before as well. So I know this is not what this is about, but the fact that we can pull in things like, you know, Wi-fi signal. And you know, network latency and bandwidth and all the things that usually required some other tool. It's just baked into the workspace app, you know. It's bubbled up into monitor now, so you can actually go see it. But
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Geremy Meyers: I love the fact that this is very dynamic.
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Todd Smith: Well, not only is it pulling in network information, it's also pulling in information about what what
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Todd Smith: capabilities the endpoint itself has.
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Todd Smith: And especially critical around things like graphics, processing as well as you know how to what are the other? What are the other environment conditions that could impact. You know that whole graphics experience.
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Bill Sutton: Yep.
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Bill Sutton: Good point. So
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Bill Sutton: alright. Now we're gonna move to the next one director integration with Uber agent, which I know is something. Jeremy was very interested in talking about from the emails we exchanged. So uber agent, of course, I'll set it up is is a product that was added to the universal hybrid multi cloud and citrix platform layer skews 2 years ago. I think that's right.
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Geremy Meyers: Oh!
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Bill Sutton: One year.
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Geremy Meyers: I think a year ago. Yeah, one year ago. Yep.
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Bill Sutton: Yeah. A year ago Citrix bought the company that that developed this and at the time it was, and it still is. You could
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Bill Sutton: standalone install, and you'd have to deploy the agent to your vdas and so forth. But there! But now there's a lot more integration with actually director. And I believe that the Uber agent is going to either currently is part of the oh, it says it, selecting it from the optional software screen during the vda setup or you can install it yourself manually. So, Jeremy, I know you wanted to have talk about this a little bit.
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Geremy Meyers: Yeah, I mean, I think so. There, there have been 2
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Geremy Meyers: bits of objection, as it relates to Uber agent, just based on our experiences and working with customers over the last 12 months. You know, the 1st one is
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Geremy Meyers: yet another piece of software that I have to install, that if I can get out of doing that would be fantastic. So the high level. This is great, because now it's included with the Vda, there's still a standalone component, because, of course, there are scenarios where you want to install this outside of Citrix outside of.
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Geremy Meyers: you know. It's just various places that you'd want to include it. But the fact that it's now included
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Geremy Meyers: by default means without thinking you can have the bids for Uber agent installed along with the Vda.
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Geremy Meyers: And now I can start collecting information that you know I want. I want to bubble up
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Geremy Meyers: and make available.
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Geremy Meyers: Now, the second piece of this is is equally exciting is, you know, I've got customers who want to leverage
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Geremy Meyers: this technology, but they're not a splunk customer. So.
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Bill Sutton: Right.
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Geremy Meyers: Let me start by saying, You know, Uber agent can actually funnel this information into a few different platforms. Right? But you know the best experience right now is splunk because we've already got a lot of the dashboarding built
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Geremy Meyers: to just make the the information usable, right? But of course we have customers who aren't using splunk. What do these guys do? Well.
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Geremy Meyers: we're not funneling everything in director, but you can kind of see that we can bubble some things up and actually make that available into citrix director or monitor.
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Geremy Meyers: If that's the platform you're using. So it's pretty exciting. So out of the gate. I think this 1st iteration will collect information around the applications that users are running
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Geremy Meyers: within their desktop. So, for instance, if you had a Vdi session, and you wanted to get a feel. For listen, what? What are my users doing? What applications are they using? Boom! We can pull that from Uber agent funnel that into director, and that will show up inside of director as applications.
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Geremy Meyers: Just a bit of feedback, you know, just metrics around what's being used. So if I'm trying to rationalize
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Geremy Meyers: either my footprint, or if I'm just trying to get a feel for what's installed or how it's performing.
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Geremy Meyers: we're starting to collect that that is making its way into director directly.
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Geremy Meyers: So it's pretty exciting sort of the trajectory of where the product stack is headed.
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Bill Sutton: Yeah, and it's moved pretty quick, too. I mean to get more data on the director. I didn't expect that when the acquisition happened I figured this would just be a standard
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Bill Sutton: you know, standalone type and interface. And then, when I saw, I think they talked about this a little bit at the connect event I went to last year, and then a couple of briefings that we did as integra did down at at in a at a headquarters in Fort Lauderdale. There's a lot of discussion around bubbling up more data to director I don't know if it's coming directly from Uber agent, or they're just leveraging some of the metrics that they you can get out of it to bubble that up into director and manage it differently.
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Geremy Meyers: You know, headset question recently, I think there's a virtual channel set aside. Don't quote me on that, but I think there's a virtual channel set aside either. I don't think it was a new one created. But either way, that funnels that data in
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Geremy Meyers: when you think about what director is meant to be. I mean, it's not an all encompassing.
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Bill Sutton: No.
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Geremy Meyers: Monitoring tool. I mean, it's meant to. It's going to be a help desk tool, right? So what information could we pluck
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Geremy Meyers: from Uber agent data that would make the help desk more, you know. Just get more insights into what's going on and help troubleshoot a problem. I think that's probably where
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Geremy Meyers: the direction is headed, like.
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Geremy Meyers: you know, Splunk will continue to be, you know, a spot for that. I've actually got someone on my team who's funneling things into azure and building their own dashboards.
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Geremy Meyers: which is pretty exciting, but you know we also, you know, support. You know Kafka and Grafana as well. So you know, there's different areas these things go to. But more importantly, just, the data is being collected.
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Geremy Meyers: It can be used, which is pretty neat.
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Bill Sutton: Yeah. Well, let me ask you a question here, Jeremy, you may or may not know the answer. I I don't know. Do to get this information in director. Do you need to install the Uber agent?
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Bill Sutton: software on the Vda, or is that only needed? If you're doing full uber agent.
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Geremy Meyers: To get any of the bits any of that data that that Uber agent can pull. You'll have to pick. You have to select that from the optional software inside the agent setup. Yep.
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Bill Sutton: Okay.
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Geremy Meyers: By the way, if you want to keep it, Lane, you don't want to do it, you can certainly not select it, but.
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Bill Sutton: Right.
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Geremy Meyers: Let's fill the advantage here.
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Todd Smith: I think I think one critical thing here, Bill, is that we've got a lot of customers. I've got a customer in in British Columbia that's actually built an entire set of dashboards where they're pulling information out of director and running in through some power bi dashboards to to visualize the information. But there are. The key is, they're also because it is power bi based, they're actually able to go pull information from a variety of different sources.
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Bill Sutton: Right.
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Todd Smith: Be able to actually tie it in with things like
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Todd Smith: information out of the Hr. Database to understand where the person's coming in, from, what their, what their address is, what their physical address is, because then they can start correlating things like, is it a local ISP issue? Is it a
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Todd Smith: you know best ways to contact the person, you know, a variety of different
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Todd Smith: pieces of data that actually gives visibility into the help desk to actually be much more
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Todd Smith: successful in their overall ticket management.
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Bill Sutton: That's really.
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Geremy Meyers: When you think about it, Todd, I guess probably not an exact parallel, but kind of like the O data Api, that we've got in direct.
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Geremy Meyers: I mean, it's probably not that much different. It's just the amount of data and the kinds of data it's more expensive with, you know, extensive uber agent, and it sounds like your customers. Just
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Geremy Meyers: they found the info they want, and they've sort of they get an idea of what they're looking for and how they want to correlate. And
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Geremy Meyers: it's pretty interesting, actually.
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Todd Smith: Yeah, the other question that that's come up a couple of times around this integration with Uber agent is around things like sizing.
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Todd Smith: You know how much more data is going to be dumped into the director databases. How do we manage the pruning of that? You know. What else can be? What else can it be used for? So that's 1 question. The other question is, how quickly it's going to be integrated fully with, like the workspace app.
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Todd Smith: so that you don't have to go through the additional, the additional installation process and add another agent right.
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Bill Sutton: Right? Good, point, yeah.
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Geremy Meyers: Well, I think what would be. What's nice about that scenario is now we could capture
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Geremy Meyers: and improve the experience for Byo devices. Right. So, for instance, if I'm on a managed corporate device.
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Geremy Meyers: you know. Listen, I might not want to install another agent. But the fact that it's managed means that's an option, right? But eventually, if it's just baked right into Workspace app, then, you know again, I'm still pushing the same load I had before, but same time.
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Geremy Meyers: you know, I can. Probably I can potentially grab more insights into my Byo devices as well, which.
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Bill Sutton: Yeah, that really takes it to another, to another level, to some degree, to be able to monitor those endpoints and bring them into the estate, you know, as real participants. And
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Bill Sutton: by doing that, just deploying the workspace app. And it's embedded
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Bill Sutton: and like you said, you don't have to worry about another install or another agent.
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Bill Sutton: All right. Good stuff, really. Good stuff.
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Bill Sutton: So that's the end of the blog. So 25 0, 3. See that 25 0, 3 is already available. You can download it from the download site. Obviously, if any of our listeners need help
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Bill Sutton: with any of these topics they can reach out to their integra, salesperson, or and or probably, and their citrix ats if they have one, that they that's assigned, which most most enterprise customers will reach out to either of us or the ats to help go over any of this stuff, or if you need assistance. Or, of course, if you have support issues, call support
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Bill Sutton: any other thoughts, guys. Before we adjourn for the day.
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Geremy Meyers: No, no, I think we're good, Bill. Appreciate it.
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Geremy Meyers: Good, happy Monday!
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Geremy Meyers: Happy Cinco de Mayo! We'll just.
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Bill Sutton: Cinco de Mayo. That's right. We're recording this on Cinco de Mayo. So hope everyone when you hear this had a good Cinco de Mayo and stay safe. Thanks, guys.
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Todd Smith: Thank you.
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Geremy Meyers: Thanks. Bill. Thanks a lot.