The Shiproom - Episode 2 - Assess your estate before you migrate: Nerdio Compass Demo

Every migration of traditional VDI solution starts the same way. Nobody actually knows what they have anymore. Years of policies, images, knowledge locked in one IT admin's hat. Today we're shipping a new service that scans it all in minutes and tells you exactly where you stand before you move a single desktop to the Windows cloud. It's called Nerdio Compass, and the team, Aaron and Ken, are here to tell you everything about it. Welcome at the Shiproom. Let's get started. Hi, folks. Welcome to The Shiproom, the show for people who build, manage, and rethink modern computing. I'm Christian Brinkhoff. And if you're watching this on YouTube, hit subscribe now. And today, we're actually shipping something. Today, Nerdio Compass moves in public preview. I'm excited to jump deeper into this product with our team that is joining me right now. So hi, Ken, Aaron. Welcome to the ship room. Hey. Hey. Hey, Aaron. Great to have you here. Can you I, of course, know you very well, but can you tell a little bit more about your history in EUC and what you're doing here at at Nerdio? Yeah. Well, I'm Aaron. You might know me as Stealth Puppy around the place. I've been in the EUC space for a long time. Think I think it's fair to say I was in EUC before it was called EUC. I think my first job was actually NetWare three one one, and even Windows three one one, so it's going back a long way. But during my career, it's sort of been spent in the consulting space. So talking to customers about VDI endpoint solutions, and then a lot of migrations from, say, an older solution to something new. So, yeah, when it comes to Compass, I think I'm sort of bringing a lot of that consulting and enterprise experiences and building that into what we've created in Compass. Yeah. I think your expertise and knowledge really helps to, yeah, kind of simplify the solution, Nerdio Combat, and all the other things that we're building here in our r and d team to all bring that together in the Nerdio suite, and I'm very excited to have you have you here. We had a episode last episode with Mark Templeton, which you know very well, and he talked as well about the story of community and, of course, Citrix at the time, and you've been pivotal at the time too. So I'd date you a little bit maybe, but it's all good. That's we need that knowledge here as well. Hey, Ken. Glad to have you on the on the episode as well. I know you have a long standing history at Microsoft and as well in, like, Intune, Windows Autopatch and such. But can you tell the audience, like, your past and and your role in in our r and d team? Sure. Yeah. Hi. My name is Ken. I'm based in Belgium. I go twenty plus years back in endpoint management, started from SMS, SCCM, transitioned into Intune. I did that as a consultant, a freelancer before I moved into a role at Microsoft where I've been working on Windows Autopatch as you just said. And now super excited to be here at Nerio where I'm a product manager on the Nerio Compass product, currently helping the team on the platform tenant configuration, workload profiling, and the termination flow. Now besides, obviously, Compass, I'm also involved into other r and d projects, so I'm very excited about that opportunity. Thank you for having me. Yeah. I cannot be more excited to have you joining our team here at r and d. And, of course, we cannot talk about everything that we're cooking, but that's room for another Shiproom episode. And Aaron, you as the Darsh tech helping us getting through that journey together as a team. You have been kind of pivotal in the beginning as well of building that kind of foundation of of Neurio Compass. And let's just switch gears here and tell a little bit to the audience and say, why did we build Neurio Compass? I, of course, know the reason being an EUC, but EUC, it's it's harder and harder to maintain that expertise and it's harder and harder to bring that complexity and legacy into like Intune modern experiences, Windows Cloud, Windows three sixty five, Azure Virtual Desktop. So can you shed some light on that, like, on the why and why it matters so much when the migration starts to have a tool like Neurio Compass in place? Yeah. I liked you mentioned that about EUC. I think EUC is one of the most complex areas within IT, just touches everything. So, yeah, when when it does touch everything, it becomes difficult to know where things are and what have we got. So, yeah, thinking about Compass, I think it's really about two questions. One, what have you got? And two, how is it being used? So the first question on what have you got? Typically, a customer might run around with an Excel spreadsheet or jump into a number of different tools, and manually gather data and put into a spreadsheet, crash the numbers, and so on. And I've seen this countless times. A number of times I've gone in with a customer to understand how what they've got and try and modernize their, you know, an old environment and upgrade it to something new, or migrate from one platform to another. You sort of ask this question, okay, what have you got? And often the answer is, okay, well, we need to go away and think about that, or we've we've got this, this, and this, but I don't understand what that is. So we might miss a few things. So Compass is really about reducing that time and effort required to pull that information in, know, get get faster to where we need to be thinking about the solution and how we're going to get there and so on. So, yeah, Compass specifically, I think, is about automating that journey and getting rid of those manual steps, so how can we automate that process and get to that point faster? Get to the stuff that matters real quick. Yeah. I think you raise a good point here. Like, EUC has been around for, twenty, thirty ish years, and it's harder and harder. More. More even as well. And I I I think that Citrix, like, virtual apps and desktops and and Zen app kind of that has been around, like, twenty twenty years, but the real core of EUC, like, MetaFrame and other parts of that have been around, thirty, forty. For the year, the the Windows NT source code, I think Mark Templeton talked about it. That was really where it started, where where the ICA protocol kind of evolved into the, yeah, let's say, EUC industry pretty much. And it's a risk as well. I should point it out, like, right now, there are not many people that understand the technology. So modernizing it to Intune is top of mind and having that tool in the middle to take out that the complexity and guide you through to that Intune, Windows Cloud, Autopilot, all the different components there from Microsoft is is very important. And can you give a practical kind of example there of of a customer in this journey that you talked with, Aaron, in the in the last couple, let's say, months when we went in in a in a preview with a handful of customers before we went public preview today? Yeah. I think I think a good number of those customers are sort of on this journey of of getting away from an old VDI solution or a different vendor. They wanna move to the Microsoft stack. Their journey might be lifting and shifting VDI, it might be lifting virtual desktops to cloud platform, it might be staying on prem. Certainly Intune is a big part of that, or it might even be shifting VDI into physical tops in Intune, or even vice versa. So we're seeing this recently with what's going on with hardware prices, we want to understand how physical devices will be used, and what's a candidate for moving off a physical device into a cloud PC. So it's been pretty varied. So I would say that most of those customers, particularly on prem, but using a third party vendor, that maybe almost fifty percent of them are in the cloud already, but ninety, even to a hundred percent of them are all hybrid. And they're really about understanding, okay, what I need to know this question of what I've got, and then how do I take that workload and then translate it into the Microsoft cloud or the Windows cloud, whatever we're targeting. And so that is definitely a mix of AVD, Windows three six five, and Intune and mixing all these together. Yeah. The hardware raising of RAM prices and things like is one, but, like, the whole area of agentic AI, computer using agents, Windows three sixty five for agents is another one. Like, that transformation is is already happening, but requires a similar tool. And I'm excited to to work with you and team here to see how Compass can evolve to help with that element of the journey as as well. But recently introduced some some new elements in Nerdio Compass as well, like the policy setting, sizing recommendations, and things like that. Can you shed some light on on that, Aaron? Like, what what that means to the end to end migration here? For example, the policy settings kind of assessment we we built into the platform. Yeah. There's actually two components that I think are they're but fairly impactful. So the first one is the policy one that you've mentioned. So let's take Citrix policies, and there's a large set of policies that a customer might have, and they've had them around for a number of years. But when they're going from that platform to Azure Virtual Desktop or Windows three sixty five, they wanted to understand is, if I'm doing these policy settings inside here, how does that translate to the Microsoft world? And not everything translates, but we pick out the specific things that do, and we provide the actual settings, okay, this setting here translates exactly to this setting over here, or these sets of settings under direct translation, but these are the equivalents in the Microsoft world. The second one is, which is really simple. It's just I've got Citrix published applications over here. I want to get them into Azure Virtual Desktop remote apps. So Compass does the discovery. It pulls out exactly what you've got in published applications, gives us a file that we then go to Nerdier Manager, click import, and I've got all my remote apps imported in in like thirty seconds. Now, doesn't move the actual applications or workloads themselves. We still need Nerdier Manager to migrate the images and the apps for us. But just that act of simplifying the interaction with the console, removing all those manual steps, point and click and we're done. So I'm pretty happy with that. Yeah. That's pretty cool. Like, our mission of of Nerio is, of course, making the lives of IT professionals as easy as it can be with the tools and orchestration that we built. So this is a perfect example of that. And, Ken, back to you. So Nerio Compass, is that a one stop shop kind of migration solution, or is this like an ongoing tool that you can check-in and check out with to see how things are going and evolve to the, yeah, let's say Microsoft Windows cloud environments? Well, Christian, you know, migration is where the value shows up first. Right? You connect a tenant, Compass profiles are workload, models are spent, and gives you then a grounded migration and cost picture in hours instead of weeks. So but the architecture was never put in time. So the same assessment engine that tells you what to migrate keeps running afterwards, configuration drifts, spend again forecast, optimization opportunities. So the honest answer is actually today, migration is the sharpest use case, but the product is built for ongoing management. And that is exactly the direction that the road map leans to, policies, continuous cost analyzation. And these are really the first proof points of of that exercise that we're doing. Yeah. That's amazing. And I think Neurio Compass is a perfect example of how we work back from from the customer. So we talk with various customers, and then we learn, and we gain feedback from customers what the tool should look like. And then we we build that into the product and it could change even the road map last minute because we had roughly like three months from Nerdio Compass was released in private preview and we collected various amount of feedback from customers. But what's can the the kind of maintain that changed the product in that life cycle of, like, the last three months up to the public preview today? What like, feature requests from customers that were explicitly asked that we moved into the product? Yeah. So the one thing that changed is that we stopped treating it as an assessment, as an event, and started then treating it as really a living creature, a living picture. We went into private preview thinking the job was, connect the tenant, profile the workloads, model the spends, hand over the answers. What three months of real environment showed us is that customers never treated it as one and done. Yeah? They kept coming back, rerunning assessments to see if reality still matched the plan. And pushing our cost picture beyond compute into everything that actually shows up on their bill, well, that's seeing a relationship two things. First of all, policies, because if customers are manually rechecking whether their environment still looks the way it should, the product ought to hold that expectation for them and flag Drift continuously. And then secondly, there is the cost analysis add on Because a cost picture that is eighty percent complete isn't the real picture. It's homework. Customers were exporting our numbers. They were finishing them in Excel, and that's actually the loudest product signal that there is. So the honest summary here is real environments told us that the value isn't in the snapshot. It's keeping the snapshot true, and that's really the direction I believe that the whole product is, is leaning to. Yeah. I love that. And especially, like, the cost analysis coming together here, I think was one of the requirements coming from one of our largest health care as well. And going from private preview to public preview, use a PM, you know kind of how quality is important here at Nerdio and r and d and and core engineering group as well. So what does ready for public preview actually means maybe to the audience that are not like product managers per se? What has to be like, that core set of criteria before we, yeah, we move to that to that milestone? So, yeah, first of all, you need to write down some exit criteria before you start. Right? So Ready wasn't a real feeling. It was more like a checklist of what could fail. Three things had to be true. First, correctness of real environments, assessment and cost numbers validated against generally messy production tenants, not clean demo data, obviously, because a wrong number in a cost product isn't a bug. It's a trust failure. Second, hardening a structured internal bug measure across a dozen testers, severity triage with p zero, p one class fixes, including the unglamorous stuff like session handling, import at edge cases. And then third is operational readiness. Could we support strangers using it? Logging, auditable, add or surfacing, not just friendly design partners we could call on teams. Right? Private preview is learning with the people who forgive you. Public preview means earning trust from the people who want. Right? So that's that's the most important thing here. Yeah. I know. Ken, it's it's great to have you part of the team on that journey with with Aaron and the rest of the group as well. So I think the audience knows enough about Nerdio Compass and why we build it and what the value is for customers. I think they now wanna see it in action. So, Ken, did you prepare some demos for today to walk through Nerdio Compass? Yes. Let's jump into it. When you go to up dot get nerdio dot com, the first thing you see is the landing page of Nerdio Compass where you can assess, plan, and accelerate your Windows cloud journey. You need to sign in with an Entra ID. Provide your credentials, and you're signed in to Nerdio Compass. First thing you need to do is allow Entra ID permissions. Basically, we're gonna create an enterprise app in Entra with the required permission to run the tool. Here, you see all the permissions that is requested. You can scan and click on accept. We now see that we have connection completed with Entra ID. The second step is providing access to your Azure subscription. So connect to a subscription, provide the required permissions. You will now be able to select the subscription and grant reader access. You will see now that it is actually collecting and fetching the data from Microsoft. Once the fetching completed, you will be able to see your Microsoft environment. Hey. Thanks, Ken, for explaining so comprehensively how you can start your journey with Nerdio Compass into, yeah, the Windows Cloud and Intune. Now I wanna kind of do a double click there on how the data is being captured from, for example, Citrix environment. So, Aaron, can you shed some light on how we do that and how you can use that tool? Yeah. So when it comes to Citrix specifically, what we're doing is using supported methods. So Citrix provides an SDK to extract some some data out of virtual apps and desktops or Citrix DaaS. They've also got an API that we can connect directly to. So an important thing to understand with Compass is that we are using all of the supported methods to to make a read only connection to that data source and pull information out of it. Now when we think of Citrix Cloud, we can support online and offline connection to extract that data. And right now with virtual apps and desktops, because that's on premises and disconnected, we need an offline method to extract that data. So I've written this tool, which I think is actually pretty cool. And I'm gonna give you a look at the way this works right now, and I'll talk through as it's running. But essentially, what I've written is this is a PowerShell script, the reason for that is it's all clear text. It's nice and open. It uses the SDK, uses all the supported methods. And so when you run that script, you can read it and see what it's actually doing. So when you connect, you're going to get an authentication, say, to Citrix DaaS. If it's virtual apps and desktops, it should just pass straight through. So you wouldn't see this. It'll just start collecting the data. So for Citrix DaaS, you can see this authentication pop up has come up. I've got multi factor authentication using my credentials. And if you wanna be safe, you can use a specific account that has absolutely read only administrator access to Citrix DaaS. And then it will pull all of the infrastructure information out of Citrix DaaS using the PowerShell SDK. So it reads and discovers all of your Citrix infrastructure and writes that to a file that then is compressed into a zip file, and then you upload that into Compass. Now we can also go a step further. I've got this little anonymized sensitive data button on there, and you can click that button before you upload it. But if that information is anonymized, then we kinda need to think about how we replay that information when once you've extracted the data. The last thing I'll just highlight, which I haven't done in the video here, is I'm I'm pretty proud of light mode and dark mode. I thought that was pretty cool as well. Thanks, Aaron. Great to see the feature that you just highlighted on dark and light mode. Hey. How do we use that information that's being pulled from this Citrix environment in Compass? And can we compare snapshots, for example, if you're like moving to the Windows cloud and you wanna see as a decision maker or like IT manager how your team is doing in the migration. Can you can you shed some light on that? Yeah. Of course. So as we jump into this console, we've imported our snapshot. And keep in mind that we can import multiple snapshots. So we'll we'll come back to that in a second. So if I have a look at my overview here, I've got an idea of my environment. So I have a quick look at I can understand the obsession hosts. I can see delivery groups and machine catalogs. I can see my enabled applications and my published applications specifically. So I can see some idea of utilization and even health status. So when it comes to migration, if I know that my source environment is unhealthy, maybe there are some things that I need to do before I start my migration. This is just a quick look at what's actually inside there. But if I go back a little bit and I go into, say, migration readiness, this is where we're starting to get some of this information being actionable. And this is an initial view of, okay. I have my source environment, and I need to know what it's going to take, what it's gonna look like, and what is compatible potentially with migrating to Windows three six five or Azure Virtual Desktop. So here on this first tab, we've got Azure Virtual Desktop, and I've got my delivery groups. So, essentially, what I'm doing is I'm taking each of these delivery groups and might deliver a remote desktop or set of published applications, and I'm scoring these based on that workload. We'll we'll talk about the score in a sec. But I'm providing a high level view of here's my delivery groups and what is the readiness to migrate to Azure Virtual Desktop. And we see something very similar with Windows three six five as well. Workload's a little bit different, so the score looks a little bit different. So I've got one, two, three, four, five delivery groups in this snapshot. If I drop down here and I pick another snapshot, it might look a little bit different, But I've got two snapshots out of the same environment. And essentially, what I'm saying is, okay. For Azure Virtual Desktop, based on this workload, this workload might be a particular operating system, multi session, single session, how it's provisioned, what platform it's sitting on. Is that ready for a direct migration of that workload or do we need to do some level of transformation? So how much can we uplift and shift with an earlier manager? How much do we essentially need to rethink that workload? So different scores based on translation of that workload source to destination. Next one then is let's have a look at remote apps and cloud apps. And this is important for an administrator who has a a number of published apps. I think the largest one I saw out of private preview is something like two hundred and fifty published applications. So this is where this is directly actionable. I touched on this previously. I wanna export this to a JSON file, and now I can go over to the Nerdia manager console, click import, and it just completes the process of creating the ABD RemoteApps for me. And then we'll we could also do that if that is that destination is Windows three six five cloud apps. We get the same type of thing. Also, if I jump down into policies, here I can see these are my Citrix policies. We're actually listing everything that we've captured out of that source environment, so all of the Citrix policies so we can see those. We can export them to CSV if we wanna have a look at them a little bit more deeply. But this tab is probably the most important one. Here are my translated policies that translate Citrix policy settings and the applicable ones to Azure Virtual Desktop or Windows three six five. Don't pay any attention to the name. This is actually the name of the policy, not specifically Azure Virtual Desktop, but you get recommendations here for Azure Virtual Desktop or Windows three six five. And the actions you should take and the administrator can take those recommendations and implement them via Nerdy Manager into AVD Windows three six five. And a a future release of Compass may be out of ActionList directly so that we take all of that administrator action manual action directly out of it. Finally, we do have a full inventory. I think this will be important for administrators or even project managers who need a snapshot of exactly what's in that source environment so they can use that for the migration plan. And then we can also compare snapshots. So I'm going to pick my first snapshot. Let's pick our second snapshot and click compare. And we can see the differences between those. Now, this is not necessary utilization of the environment, but over a migration project, that source environment may change. So as I'm moving workloads out of the source environment into the target, I want to understand how that source environment is changing. So I'll take multiple snapshots. I can compare those two snapshots, and I can see a direct view of exactly what's changing in that source environment. Thanks, Aaron, for, you know, showcasing that Citrix remote app as well AVD import option. I think it's a great way of how Neurio Compass and Neurio Manager for Enterprise really, yeah, work better together and more to come there in the future, of course, as well. Now I wanna kind of talk a little bit, like, what's coming next because this is a SaaS product. It evolves and we ship features, like, rapidly. And there are a couple things that are, like, high on the list from customer requests. So, Ken, can you shed some light on maybe the first couple things that we have in in in mind for adding into Nario Compass soon? Yeah. Of course. I'm trying to think about some intelligent assistant experience, an AI assistant experience. I'm very excited about that personally. Think about what Compass is already doing. It's building a deep measured picture of your environment, your configurations, your workloads, your users, your spend, and that's actually the foundation of an intelligent assistant that's required to be actually useful instead of generically clever. Right? So what's coming is an assistant that works only from your own assessment data. Ask it, which of my workloads are the best Windows three sixty five candidates, and what would the cost be? And it will then answer with your real environment, and every claim shows its receipt, its recommendations, because it comes from your data, from your tenant. Right? So two principles that I'm trying to hold here is it never does the math itself. So cost figures always come from the same deterministic engine as the rest of Compass. That is super important, and it never gives you an answer it can't source. Because an intelligent assistant, you have to double check, is actually slower than having no assistant. Right? So we need to do it right from the beginning. And, yeah, I'm very excited about that. Yeah. The the AI integrated experiences to come are are just amazing with the data that we collect as well as the connection we make to Microsoft and everything in between there to help customers in that journey. And I I know that you have been prepping more stuff, but we prepare or keep that for the next the next episode to come here. Are we are we adding more support for other providers as well, like like, on Neza or Amazon WorkSpaces? Yeah. We do. And and I think that's that's also key. Right? We want to serve every Windows user in the world, depending the platform that they today use to manage their devices. So, absolutely, Workis is underway. We want to support Omnicell. We want to support Workspace or Amazon Workspaces. And, yeah, the the sky is the limit, so so stay tuned. And that's amazing. And, Aaron, what are we doing more with the data coming out of these environments? Like, are we double clicking on those and actually gonna do something with the usage of the environments as well? Yeah. Yeah. There's there's a lot of data that comes out of that we can think about how we present and surface interesting metrics and insights in in the data that we're already collecting. But the one that's I'm really thinking about upcoming soon is is from a Citrix perspective, what I've just shown you is is about taking a snapshot of your existing environments and pretty much taking that workload and largely doing a direct translation. But I wanna take that a step further. So for example, let's say you're a customer with Windows Server multi session desktops on prem, and you're thinking about translating that workload into Windows three six five Flex. That's a that's a big change. It's not just let's take those users and give them the same apps on Windows three six five Flex, but there's all sorts of things we need to think about. So we get a lot of rich information that comes out of these APIs and and a bit the same for, say, Citrix, and Aminsta, and Amazon. But from a Citrix perspective, I wanna be able to have the administrator ask the question, here's my workload. How is it being used? So who are the users who are logging on to that system? When do they log on? How long are they on for? How long are they active versus disconnected for, active or not active? Which applications do they use? So then I can use that information to translate one workload of the to a disparate destination, and the Windows server to Windows three six five Flex is a is a great example. And then that information also feeds directly into the cost model so that that cost model is accurate. Yeah. That's really cool. I would love to see even more than that in the future, like, hey. What if you can do that for physical PCs to, like, agenda workloads and such too? So I think you set the stage here that we continuously kind of evolve a compass to become that guidance, that navigator through your existing kind of traditional environments to like the modern desktop or that kind of age of AI with agenda workloads as well. Is there anything else, Aaron, like from a specific kind of output perspective or tips and tricks or things you with as part of this episode? I think really the what Compass can do is that rapid data collection. So taking away all that guesswork and giving you an immediate output is this is what you've got. So it can give you great insights as soon as you're onboarded. You know, if it's a direct online connection to, say, the Microsoft or Citrix data source, you're gonna be seeing that output almost immediately. And then you'll be able to share that information. Say, if your partner is showing that with your customer or even a customer doing that yourselves. And the way I'm thinking about Compass is who the audience is, and I see that as the administrator, but I also see that as the project manager as well. So who who is actually managing maybe they're nontechnical, but they're actually managing that migration project. So all of that rich reporting data, we I'm hoping to make it, you know, ready and consumable by those different audiences. Yeah. And the same for partners as well that can kind of overlook the environment due to kind of allocation of profiling and how to look at that migration before they take on the, yeah, the the customer work as well. I'm I'm excited about unfolding this chapter together further. And before we we wrap up here, how can people stay in touch with you, Aaron? Is there like do you have like LinkedIn or something else? Yeah. LinkedIn. I think it's it's actually Aaron Edward Parker on LinkedIn. Or you can get me at stealth puppy on blue sky. Okay. Great. Ken, how can people stay in touch with you? Get Modern on LinkedIn and Gooseken on Twitter, you know, or x nowadays. So Well, that's a very nice looking nickname there for the work that you're driving here at Nerdio as well. Hey. Thank you. Very happy to to have you on this second episode of The Shiproom already after having Mark Templeton as the first guest. I definitely wanna get you back and tell more about the evolution of Compass, let's say, in the next couple episodes as it is a SaaS solution, and it will evolve based on your customer feedback. We will put links underneath to follow-up with more information that you can find on the Internet, and we cannot wait to hear more from from all of you to, yeah, to build a better product over time. So thanks, Ken, Aaron, for being on the on the Shiproom. This one goes in the archive, and thank you all for watching, and looking forward to see you in the next episode. Thank you.