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Industry Vet, Christian Reilly, Shares on the State of EUC

February 14, 2023

Earlier this month, Login VSI welcomed Christian Reilly to our board of advisors. Christian is a trusted source bringing a breadth of experience and knowledge that spreads across his 20-plus years of experience in IT.

Most recently, Christian served as Citrix’s Vice President of Technology Strategy, where he led the Technology Strategy Organization. Before this role, he served as Citrix’s Vice President and Chief Technology Officer.

We recently sat down with Christian to discuss Login VSI, industry trends, and the upcoming IGEL Munich event.

Christian joins Login VSI in an advisory capacity.

Q: Christian, we are excited to have you join Login VSI as a trusted advisor. I understand you know John Vigeant, our new CEO. Please tell me a little bit about that.  

Reilly: “It’s worth mentioning that John and I go back a long way! Many years ago, when I was at Bechtel, the US-based Engineering & Construction firm, we were the first-ever enterprise customer of XenSource, which, of course, was acquired by Citrix and became XenServer and now Citrix Hypervisor.

John was at XenSource then, and we met regularly as part of that relationship. John was at Citrix post-acquisition, and as we were a large customer, we would connect occasionally. We missed each other in terms of working together at Citrix, as John had moved on before I joined. We just kept missing each other like ships in the night!”

Q: Well, it seems you and John have finally found the ideal timing to reconnect, particularly over driving the growth and success of Login VSI. I would love to know more about why you chose to be an advisor for Login VSI.

“Everyone involved with EUC, either as a vendor or an enterprise, has heard of LoginVSI due to its history and the company’s standing. It would be fair to say that historically, LoginVSI was the “de facto” for scale and performance analysis and testing, “What does the LoginVSI test show?” has been a common question relative to proving how performant a virtual environment configuration is and it’s great to have that authority. In the past years, the platform Login Enterprise has grown well beyond its roots of testing to serve the enterprise in more expansive and impactful ways.

Building from the position of trust that LoginVSI has within its global customer base makes for a fascinating proposition as the market evolves and customers make continued progress with their transformations with multi-cloud strategies front and center.

There is a team of very driven, determined, and intelligent people at Login VSI, and hence why I’m delighted to support their growth in an advisory role to accelerate the next phase of the company’s growth.”

IGEL Disrupt Munich

Q: That’s awesome to hear, especially from someone like yourself. We understand you are heading to Munich for IGEL Disrupt this week. What key trends do you expect to be highlighted at the event?  

“I think one major trend that will be covered is the intersection of work and technology. At a very high level, the pace at which technology continues to evolve is increasing year-on-year, while the adoption of technology in customer organizations is also growing. There is one key factor driving this trend – simplicity.

For many years, I’ve coined a formula I borrowed from a great friend of mine, the former CIO of Bechtel – “Speed = Innovation x Simplicity.” Now, organizations can avail of great technologies with much lower barriers to entry than we’ve seen in the past.

As “work” gets redefined globally in terms of what that work is, who is doing it, and where that work is getting done, modern technology becomes the key to ensuring that IT organizations remain agile and flexible and deliver solutions to a continually shapeshifting audience.”

Q: As you know, here at Login VSI, we are hyper-focused on supporting these global shifts in work by enabling IT teams to build high-performing, cost-efficient, and reliable VDI and DaaS environments. Can you help us understand how this impacts employees? 

“A big part of employee experience is the technology IT provides employees to succeed in their job. Unfortunately, pre-pandemic and continuing to the present day, IT is failing to implement solutions that provide exactly what each user needs. Ultimately, this results in a poor employee experience and a negative impression of IT overall.

While traditional VDI reached a level of maturity, the rise in cloud options, specifically DaaS and SaaS applications, opens the door to more choices and the ability to virtualize employee experiences that would have been difficult in years past. This means we are early in the journey of a new digital workspaces paradigm and need to prioritize employee experience.

Poor experience is undeniably reducing employee engagement and productivity, translating to inefficiency in business outcomes from the organization’s most valuable asset: its people.”

Q: So what does that mean for leadership—how should leaders think about employing technology and its impact on employees?

“Delivering digital workspaces that offer tangible and demonstrable value to an organization is not the domain of IT alone.

In the past few years, there have been countless examples of “teaming up” within organizations, which typically takes the form of joint sponsorship, or ownership, between the CIO and another C-level executive (CHRO, CDO, etc.), with one side representing the technology and one representing the needs of the business.

These partnerships are ideal as they balance ambitions and priorities. Executive-level sponsorship is critical to the success of any transformation project, including implementing new ways of working supported by VDI and DaaS solutions.”

Q: We all know the importance of data, and measurements like a digital experience score and employee experience are now standard. But why? What is the intangible impact?

“Fundamentally, the employee experience as we know it today is broken. Many DEX/EUC metrics are faulty as they rely solely on sentiment, which is not quantifiable—or performance, which is purely technical and lacks the crucial human component. This is why I am a fan of Login VSI’s EUX score because it offers measurable, consistent metrics for gauging actual employee experience.

Post-pandemic, how we must strive to understand our work as a “thing” has become increasingly complex. Every one of us lives in a consumer world defined by an experience that makes life easy, while, conversely, our work experience feels like it has come from the last century.

The challenge for today’s CIO is clear – how to provide the best experience to have happy users who want to use what they provide.

Failing to do so has many implications, not least of which is the possibility of users “self-selecting” non-sanctioned applications (i.e., ones that can be bought on a credit card and used for work without IT’s knowledge).”

Key Takeaways

Q: Thank you so much for that perspective. Do you have any takeaways for solutions? I would love to know how you see Login VSI as an answer to some of these presented issues.

“Login VSI continues to innovate to evolve the product set, accommodating customers’ present and future needs. As an advisor, being privy to their recent advancements in Proactive monitoring for availability and performance, the solution is worthy of any enterprise looking to gain insights into their virtual desktops and apps.

It is to Login VSI’s advantage that the earlier products have been embedded in customers’ key processes today. The years of industry trust across a wide range of customers is an excellent jumping-off point for the future, and that future is coming at us fast.

As an industry, I believe we’re at a pivotal point of evolution, let’s say, from “just virtualization” to a digital workspace. As that shift occurs, combined with a generational change in how people work, it will be increasingly critical for IT departments to enable their user base in a way that far exceeds what has gone before.

Those solutions, specifically how well they are adopted and used, will, in part, define the success of the CIO, and understanding the entire user experience is now more critical than ever.

Another component to consider is the pressure on IT leaders to deliver better experiences at a more efficient price. Leveraging their core with VSIMax, Login VSI is the only company I have seen today to provide guidance and ongoing price-performance metrics for DaaS/AVD.

Login VSI supports CIOs by providing both cost assessment and optimization across any infrastructure – an absolute priority as IT is squeezed to do more with less budget – and also to provide proactive monitoring by giving visibility across any infrastructure to help identify issues quickly.”

Want to learn more how Login Enterprise can support your needs now and in the future? Connect with an expert today!

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