The Shiproom - Episode 3 - Why VDI isn't dead: Tarkan Maner on AI agents and the future of EUC

Today, we're sitting down with Tarkin, who recently took on the role of leading the board of the Silicon Valley Group after a remarkable career. Good to see you, Christian. We will talk about what's next for VDI in 2030, whether AI agents need their own managed desktops, and how IT admins stay relevant in this age of AI. So, Tarkan, welcome to 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 Rinkov, your host today. And if you're watching this, please follow us on YouTube as well. Today, we have long term EUC veteran on the show, Tarkin Manor. Hey. Welcome to the Shiproom, Tarkin. Glad to have you here. Christian, great to see you. It's way overdue. We have been in various meetings, at conferences, seeing each other, and we always were like, let's jump on a podcast together. So happily, it's finally, yeah, happening to, today. You had a remarkable career. I know you very well, but can you, share to the audience, like, who you are, what you did, and, things like that? So first of all, thank you for the opportunity. Great to be here. Love you. Love Nerdio, the team, and everything is... You guys are doing as a partner, and as a big lover of the company and what you guys are doing. So it's incredible. So look, Christian, you know me well. I've been in the industry for a long time now. And as my wife says, it's time to retire. You're too old, but I keep going. I love this thing. I've been around almost for thirty five years now. I started my career with that background in industrial engineering. I got MBA, got into business from automotive industry, and moved into basically a tech space, worked for a few public companies, IPO ed a few, then started investing in small start ups over the past thirty years. Invested more than 40 companies. Some of them IPO ed, some of them, exited, some of them are still growing. As part of that, I joined a couple of, startups, then also invested in a few companies which were going through their continuum, invested in a company called Wise, turned this company around as the CEO, then, you know, started... Exited the company of Dell. Dell acquired us back in 2012, with our, you know, new vision around cloud client computing, zero client computing concepts. I ended up, you know, working with a company called Nutanix, became the president of Nutanix. Now I'm just the senior adviser to Nutanix. I'm advising the management team and the board, as we move forward. And in the meantime, as you mentioned, I become the chair Silicon Valley Leadership Group, which is a... One of the big tech associations with 400 top technology companies as members, more than $25,000,000,000,000 with a t, in market cap. And our goal is to make sure that we help technology industry, with all its initiatives from AI to cyber to infrastructure to end user compute. Our goal to make sure public private partnerships help the communities, the citizens, and and advance the technology industry for the benefit of the societal change. And I love specifically about Nerdio, so super psyched to be here with you. One of the things I wanna quickly highlight is the great partnership we had with, like, the Nutanix and Nerdio, yeah, enhancements on AVD, Azure Virtual Desktop Hybrid. That's gaining great traction and all because of your support, of course, establishing that with the team. And we can see the value with customers that we're talking with, getting getting their kind of Citrix estate or other environments from, like, traditional virtualization up and running. But one of the things I think what is also extremely valuable is how that moves towards the future, like to agents and how, like, that traditional VDI layer eventually moves more to agentic AI, autonomous management and such. So how do you foresee people watching should be prepared for that journey? Awesome. Very good question. And first time in our industry, information technology and operational technology is merging. The boundaries, what companies do to run their businesses versus how they use IT from the desktop to the data center to the cloud is changing. On top of that, there are cyber and security issues. On top of that, obviously, there are issues relating to the things that the CIOs deal today. Some of the most basic table stake issues that sometimes people don't pay attention. Look. Microsoft just changed their operating system from, you know, to Windows 11. That's a big transformation. There is a huge transformation going on around VMware, which got acquired by Broadcom, and now they're changing their platforms and their pricing and packaging, go to market strategy, and hundreds of millions of cores in the back end and data center is shifting hands to other platforms like Nutanix, like Red Hat, and other open source systems. And now I have customers, enterprises, boards, CIOs I talk to. They are building and running agents everywhere to replace some of their old packaged ERP applications to manage the data because they think they own the data. They don't wanna spend all that money on a GUI for an enterprise app. But one thing never changes. We still need end users. We still need to have devices. We need to still have access to information and that will never change. That's why I cringe when people come in and said, oh, this is the end of the end user compute. AI is gonna change everything. It is end of VDI. Doesn't matter where we are in the technology continuum. End users always will exist, and, obviously, the systems we use, both hardware and software, will always exist. So I've been in this for thirty five years, and this is maybe the the thirty fifth time people are telling me VDI is that. Look. You know what? VDI is another technology. And, different end users, different user profiles, different applications, different network storage and compute infrastructures, different businesses in different vertical industries and geographies need different type of needs. And those needs will deliver always a hardware, software, and service centric environment to deliver best outcomes for roof spaces that those end users use. So from a nerdier perspective, I'm gonna tie that back to you. I am super excited on what you guys are doing, how you're changing the narrative. Your technology is easy to use. Your technology is secure, and people need something secure, something manageable, something available, something reliable, something obviously scalable, and given to them with the best total cost of ownership so they can reach their business outcome. So from that perspective, I believe regardless what change we have, end user compute will prevail, and these type of technologies continue to deliver value for everybody involved. Yeah. I know. I think you're spot on there. Like, technology happens and innovation and disruption has happened, like, from, like, two thousand years ago. You keep innovating and changing the way how things work and improve, and VDI technology, I think, is even more important than ever before as it gets more kind of commodity from the tag. But the way how a desktop and an application is presented is still very important to the end user as you said. And I think that's just fascinating with all your expertise to see these patterns in that several kind of, like, let's say decades of innovation. Right? 100%. A lot of focus goes into all these other layers of the compute and infrastructure and technology, then you realize end user compute is one standard will never change. Because at the end of the day, we we... It's like going going back to the same message I gave you in the opening. We still need devices. We need access. We need, basically, end users to create content, to deliver content, to communicate without workspaces, without end user compute platforms, this is not gonna happen. And at the end of the day, end users are critically important. As you all know, 99.9 of the security breaches happen through the endpoints, through the end users. It's a fact. And cyber is gonna be even more important as we move forward regardless where these things play out, end user compute. And and as part of it, VDI as a technology is gonna continue as a massive opportunity and risk if you don't do them right. So from my perspective, regardless of the vertical industry... And by the way, there are 57 vertical industries according to Dun and Bradstreet, SIC codes, all these subsegments with thousand plus, you know, subsegments. In every industry, there's one constant. There are end users and end user platforms that you need to manage, secure, and make sure they're scalable. And, obviously, take advantage of the... All the new AI technologies to deliver better value for the end users and then for the companies and organizations those end users represent. Yeah. I think you're spot on. And you just highlighted how Nerdio kind of jumps into this area of simplifying tag and doing the AI governance and all these other layers that is more and more important. I'm curious, Tarkin, what do you think the... In the workspace, like, should should things be where, like, IT leaders should focus on right now? Like, would it be computer using agents or more like straight agent building towards, the database of the application? Or what's what's your view there? So look, I have very strong views on this. And usually, if at my age, it comes that you never have a strong view on anything. Everything can change. But, this is a point I'm gonna make, and I share this with all my customers and partners and investors and other companies that I work with. I believe, as we go through this revolution and this new era of AI and superintelligence... And look. The next phase is gonna be quantum and quantum computing, which ties back to this in the next, you know, three, five, seven years. The way I see this is at the end of the day, security and cyber and privacy and governance is gonna be the top topic. I truly believe that. And and I also say that because I hear this from every single public sector, nonpublic sector, private sector, investor, customer, partner, executive I talk to, employees I talk to, and that's the focus area. And and and and and the reason being, all other problems can be somehow solved managed through. Like, at some point, one of the big issues were in the last six months, the tokens and pricing and life cycle management of tokens. Guess what? Those things are manageable. It was a big pain, big problem. It was ignored, and all of sudden, all the vendors and systems kinda find a way and start managing this in a in a in a reasonable way for customers and partners. As you know, the big debate is on AI. How are we gonna guardrail ourselves? How are we gonna secure ourselves? Making sure that we slow these things down or, you know, keep going fast but with guardrails. There's always some kind of a control security aspect that as human beings that we wanna apply to make sure things are safe, sound, and governed. Guess what? The bad actors don't have those guardrails. They don't care about the guardrails and slowing down. They keep going with every tool available to them. So there is a mismatch in this war between the bad actors and good actors are trying to create value. So this is the reason I believe there is a unfair competition between the, you know, good and evil, and that creates, in my view, massive risk, which creates massive opportunities. That is the reason I believe industry, specifically desktop industry, end user compute industry, if you will, has a huge opportunity. And I believe Nerdio has a huge opportunity because you can do a lot of guardrailing security, manageable, available, reliable, give all the tools to the end users and companies to do better, but at the same time, fight them intrinsically by definition as a secure platform. So I truly believe as we move forward, security, governance, privacy, and overall control is gonna be main mission. By the way, one last point when VDI was becoming hot back in 2004, 2005 when I was starting Wise, I remember people were always talking to me about you know, for VDI to become a cost cutter, and I made it very clear to them. VDI wasn't about cost cutting. It was all about control and security and manageability and reliability. This was not about cost. It was overall security control. That will help you in the long term cut costs so you don't have to manage and, you know, with issues that data leaks and privacy issues, which is gonna cost you even more. Definitely, will come in as a as a topic, but the main issue was, again, security, manageability, and availability, making sure you give a sound platform to your end users. Otherwise, you lose everything. And I believe in this thing, the last point I wanna make, when you listen to these CEOs, when you listen to the CIOs, investors, when you deep... Have a deep technology discussion and you move the conversation, it always goes back to the same security and control topic. All other things are manageable, but that piece is hard to, you know, finish, hard to manage because there is an uneven competition between the bad actors and good actors, and I think that's gonna create huge oppositions for companies like Nerdio. One of the things I think is a funny thing as well to share. Like, see all these agents when... Whether it's like the Hermes agent or Open Claw or another agent being the... They have like limits right now on physical PCs as well because the PC needs to be opened up and kind of unblocked in order to kind of go in and the agent to do the work. So you see some of these fun, like, three d printed, like like, claws to open up the lid of a laptop to ensure that somebody can remote to log in, the agent, to do the work if somebody's not in front of the screen. I think virtualization is the perfect example of it runs in the cloud, it's secure, you can manage it all centralized via an audio console or another experience that you wanna wanna use to kind of use APIs as part of that. But then, like, that security layer in between is so important. You don't wanna be kind of spread out or have the distribution of these agents being tied up to a physical desktop. Right? So it kind of lives on. It feels like VDI lives on in this age of AI. You're spot on. I... Sorry. I'm interrupting you. This this important piece. Everything you talked about goes back to, at the end the day, to make things frictionless and make it easy for the user while intrinsically, by definition, you're secure and you're controlled and you're managed. And I I love the way you guys look at this as Nerdio, and I think the market needs to go the same way. As you know, full disclosure, I'm also the chairman at an IGEL, one of the other technology companies in the space. We, you know, work with you guys a lot as you know. I'm a strategic adviser investor for a robotics company, Bedrock Robotics. We're turning excavators and these multimillion dollar machinery into robots with, you know, one node GPU systems and cameras sit on a typical Caterpillar, John Deere, Komatsu gear. That gear might be a tractor, and all of a sudden, you don't need a driver anymore. Every single one of them is an endpoint. Every single one of them has to be secured. Every single one of them is autonomous. Every single one of them has to be managed. And and and our number one concern... We... By the way, we we crack the code on everything. The piece we are most sick... You know, scared about is security and privacy. If these things taken over by a bad actor, they can be turned into a weapon. To me, that's your next version of VDI. They are virtualized machinery now, and and they have to be end pointed. Guess what, Christian? There are gonna be billions of devices like this robotified. Don't don't only assume humanoids. All these devices are becoming basically end points from a, you know, EV car, autonomous car to an autonomous caterpillar excavator. And I believe as Nerdio, you have a huge opportunity as a company to lead the industry with that kind of a messaging because intrinsically, you're secured. Intrinsically, you're managed. Intrinsically, you're available and and reliable. Intrinsically, you're simple. And everything delivered smooth to the end user so you don't have to worry about it as an end user as you're running on your business. Yeah. Know. I love that. And I personally see... I just described that adapter for, like, tractors to kinda make it autonomous. I see the same thing happening right now with all these legacy applications out there, like these old SAP or old, like, CRM apps or apps that have been written in nineteen eighties and just keep going over time with, like shims in between to make it work with AppV and MSIX and all these technologies to kind of now move towards like at the age of like AI with computer using agents having model kind of interacting as a UBERT with computer use as keyword and mouse mimicking kind of how an agent would do it if it goes straight over an MCP connection to the back end kind of database. Right? It's kind of the same thing what happens now in this EUC space VDI. What you're building with that robotics company for kind of creating an an old school kind of tractor or car to make that all of a sudden autonomous, kind of paving that way towards today and tomorrow for these these customers to, yeah, to their next investment probably will be a full electric autonomous tractor. But the stepping stone towards that is to create a a framework and adapter in between to make it work. Right? 100%. Bottom line, and they're going back to this is just like you said, we have to think as the leaders... Industry leaders and user compute is... Bottom line is gonna be there. In my view, it's gonna be there even bigger ways. That's the simple message I'm trying to deliver here. And for those who think VDI is dead, end user copy is dead, it's actually gonna get much bigger than it is now because it's all about, you know, robotifying things, AIifying things. At the end of the day, I think we're gonna have a huge opportunity in the industry. Again, going back to the basic thinking, secure the data, secure the people, secure the systems, make sure that they're all manageable, and this is not an option. You have to do this, and this is the number one topic. But when you peeled onion, ultimately, the oppression is so massive. This is game changing. I'm gonna tie back one more thing. As I mentioned earlier, but I don't think it was clear. This is the first time in our, you know, 250 continuum as the fourth industrial revolution. Companies are focusing on their operational technologies and become basically businesses. They can take advantage of technology to create revenue. Technologies always has been, even if the company is changing narrative and the market differently, has been a cost center. That's why you have the CIOs, the investment, the control. You know, no matter how we put the lipstick on the pig, IT is seen as a narrative, Hey. Make sure you control things and cut cost. First time companies in every single vertical industry in geo are thinking using agents and AI and overall new trends coming with AI beyond agents. As we move into quantum, with the speed and velocity we have from an innovation perspective, how can I turn my own operations and the technology behind that into revenue generating platforms? I talked to one of the top logistics companies, one of the top logistics companies. I know you're in Europe right now. Logistics is a big deal in Europe as well as in Asia and US. One of the global leaders, chairman, not the CIO, not the CFO, not the CEO. The chairman is telling me how we're gonna become a tech company, a logistics company, and use our operational technology we're building around AI and agents sell to our supply chain customers and partners. We've been partnering for the past fifty years. So they see 50,000 potential new customers around the world, their logistics partners for them to sell their technology to become their application vendor with the agents they're building. This is a different model than ever before. Guess what? A big piece of that is all in user compute. A big piece of that, all the things that they thought about around VDI now being extrapolated for the entire ecosystem and supply chain. The game is changing more differently than ever before. And I think, again, going back to this, it creates huge opportunities for companies like Nerdio and the ecosystem. I'm curious, like, how will you foresee... You said quantum computing being extremely important for the next wave of adoption. Do you see that quantum is really bringing AI to, like, everyone at a larger scale, or do you see that quantum brings even more than lowering the cost of AI eventually to to everyone, like, whether you're a consumer or a business? I think in simple terms, it's a it's a much, you know, deeper topic. Obviously, quantum is in the early stages. I think there's still an issue and and and challenge to commercialize quantum platforms over the next, I will say, five to ten years. Quantum vendors, a few of them are doing great. There's one public, as you know, INQ. They're doing phenomenal job. A lot of my friends there at the company. Commercialization of the use cases and applications using quantum is gonna take still time. But what it does is basically gives a superpower to AI, makes things even much faster. So which means you're gonna have more and more users gonna take advantage of AI and superintelligence at a level, which is gonna create more opportunities for every single industry. The opportunity is now you're gonna have more use cases, more applications available, which means more end users, more user types are gonna take advantage more value, of value of AI that AI brings, which creates even more risk from a security perspective. And at the same time, more opportunities for the tech community and companies like Nerdio. So having said all this, I would go step by step from a, you know, end user perspective, customer perspective. I always give advice, focus on today's challenge now. That's the problem you have. And the problem, my opinion today... In my opinion is regulation, security, and privacy. Rather than, you know, focusing on the next big shiny object, make sure your table stakes are clear and obviously spend some money on things that you can impact. There is this acronym I use called time. You know, applications you're gonna, tolerate. That's the t. Applications you're gonna, you know, invest further. That's the I. Applications, basically, you're gonna migrate. That's the m. And applications you're gonna eliminate. And think about time, t I m e. You know, you need to focus on this now. Give your board, give your management team a pathway, what happens next fiscal year and the next three fiscal years, what's the plan, but at the same time, keep an eye on super intelligence, what agents are taken and going to, and what quantum place. I... Some of my large customers, I'm advising them to learn more about quantum as we speak. I think there's gonna be massive opportunities to take advantage of those opportunities because it's... Quantum is taking AI to next level very fast. There are some applications, use cases already very doable with quantum, like in banking finance insurance, in health care, in some of the manufacturing, in some of the retail, and goes back to all deep data analytics and analysis and data management. And guess what? Those are the industries are highly regulated, and those are industries where there's a huge opportunity for companies like Nardia. There's a tie in at some point, but obviously focus now on your time, on the applications you tolerate, invest, migrate, and eliminate, and all the infrastructure you need to take a look at and make sure that infrastructure is viable for today and viable for tomorrow and work with only those vendors who will help you leverage your current investment. What does that mean, Christian? Make sure those vendors with an open, system, open network flexible infrastructure that takes advantage for partner relationships from GPU, CPUs to server network compute, storage to middleware software to security software, making sure work with those vendors partner well. And guess what? This is the reason I love you guys, Christian. You guys building a phenomenal business, very partner ecosystem oriented because you help vendors as they move in their continuum, leverage their past, current, and future investments. One thing I think specifically was very important there to highlight is the time part. Like, really focus your time on the things that move the needle forward. So I think time... I I didn't know that analogy or the the words how you explain it. That was such a good. I'm gonna steal that one probably from you. I will not charge you royalties for that. Hey, Tarkin. A couple more things. Like, before we wrap up here, like, if you could predict 2030 to come and things as part of the revolution, where do you think we would be in 2030? What would be your your glass bowl kind of kind of vision there? My view is I think the AI revolution is gonna create more opportunities. We just need to make sure, as I go back to the first thing we said, and I I apologize. I don't wanna brainwash your audience with this. Again, security, manageability, available reliability, scale with simplicity and with the best total cost of ownership. I have to think about all those pieces in an integrated way to make the right choices and wanna work with those vendors, those technology players who are gonna help me do that. Having settled this, tying to all of these to enable this, Christian, I think a company and an organization, any organization, but especially a tech vendor has to focus on customer partner experience and intimacy, Make sure we all stay close to our customers and partners, understand their businesses, understand their industry, geography, and their needs. Nothing gonna happen unless you do that well. That's number one. Number two, making sure the offering you provide, whatever service you provide is differentiated. It's at hardware, software, services, whatever you're selling, it's differentiated. Because one of the biggest problems in this world is sameness, the boring sameness. And I'll be honest, only those companies, only those organizations who excel are different. They find a differentiated way to tell their story, and the story... Beyond the story, the actual offering is differentiated. It is a better outcome for the user. So that is very clearly important for me and for the organization to deliver that message from the CEO and the board and the management team all the way, every single person in a company. And third one is operational excellence. You can do everything great. Phenomenal customer partner intimacy, phenomenal offering, everything differentiated, best price in packaging, competitively, you're phenomenal. All check, check, check, check, but you are not doing things well in your HR, in your people. You're not doing things well from a legal perspective. You're over negotiating things. You're self serving. You have a bad organization with politics. You have horrible leadership which creates, you know, issues within the organization. And by the way, bad leadership trickles down to the entire organization. Again, customer partner intimacy, offering differentiation, end to end operational excellence with the best team retained and hired and and and nurtured, you will win. And I believe the next four, five years gonna create tons of opportunities, tons of opportunities. And, again, going back to the first thing I said, Christian, as Nerdio, you guys are so well positioned, and that's why I'm a big friend. And I'm gonna be, you know, staying focused on you guys and partner with you like there is no tomorrow. Yeah. I love that. Whether it's like Nutanix, Nerdio, or some other partners that you might have, you need to revisit those and see, hey, which is the most durable one that joins you on that journey, that knows the customer, that knows the partners, that know the whole ecosystem, and is curious to stay on top and keep learning and reinventing. And I think that's the high note we probably wanna wanna end the episode with. Hey, Tarkin. It was phenomenal to have you here finally. How can people stay in touch with you if they wanna, I don't know, connect... Get connected, maybe connect with you on, I don't know, LinkedIn or stay up to date on all the great stuff you share there? LinkedIn is easiest way. I love LinkedIn. As you know, you're active as well on LinkedIn. My LinkedIn profile is very simple, Tarkan Maynard. And I encourage everyone, all your audience members to listen to this amazing podcast and reach out to us anytime they want to. I'm available and look forward to staying in touch. Thanks, Tarkin, for being on this episode. Definitely wanna get you back at some point, see, let's say, two years how the world looks like at that time in relationship to this one. And thank you all for watching as well, and hope to see you at the next episode. Thank you. Thank you.