Disrupting your thinking on end user computing

Welcome everybody. How's it going today? Uh my name is Maner, I'm the General Manager of User Computing in AWS. So I'm in charge of WorkSpaces and AppStream 2.0 and Amazon WorkSpaces Web.

So, um I wanna thank you for taking time out of your day to join us here at Mandalay Bay. Um we have a lot to talk about, we got some new things, uh some things, hopefully everybody's had a chance to see. Uh we've got quite a bit of innovation in other aspects of our business. And so I'm gonna get right into it.

Um for me, I've spent the last 15 years at Amazon, believe it or not. I'm a bit of an old timer. Uh but even more importantly, uh I've been part of this group and User Computing for uh almost eight and WorkSpaces uh is celebrating a bit of a birthday here at this re invent. We are 10. Uh we are. Thank you. Thank you. 10 years old. Uh that Amazon has been leading with the cloud for desktop as a service. And uh we launched AppStream in 2016 and WorkSpaces Web was a reboot of uh WorkLink that was launched in 2019.

And so, um we've been thinking about this problem for a really, really long time. But it turns out uh as everybody here is likely a customer, a journalist and analyst, somebody who's been thinking about desktop as a service or user computing, just in general, you guys have been thinking about this for a really, really long time as well. And the number one thing that I glean after talking to a whole bunch of customers for uh many, many number of years, thinking about end user computing is the constraints. That is the number one word that I would use to summarize all the different ways I get a chance to have conversations with each and every one of you. It's constraints, whether it's cost cutting, especially in recent times, it's constraints with things like, hey, i, i have a deadline and i gotta get out of my data center. It's security, which always seems like it's evolving on a weekly, on a daily basis. It's staffing, you know, it's not just uh gen a i uh and a i in all the ways that we're thinking about it, um it's just hey access to regular software. Um and believe it or not, as, you know, you know, software licensing with this group is something that uh we've been entrenched in for many, many number of years, but all together, all of these things are constraints that every single one of the folks in this room think about on a regular basis.

Now, I'm happy to share with you how I think about these constraints and how I advise my team to think about these constraints we're rooted in, you know, three things that i think you would think are very, very amazonian, right? Um flexibility, the ability to scale up and scale down. You should have to do that without having to think about how you're gonna buy your own hardware, how you're gonna maintain it, right? How you're gonna think about reserved instances or what instance types you want, like the stuff that you typically do on prem and frankly, even with other cloud providers, you don't have to think about that with us. You pay for what you use and when you're done with it, you're done paying. I think that's a pretty cool thing about our service offering choice, right. Amazon believes about offering great selection. That is a huge part of what we think about as well, right? We think about offering uh our Ubuntu desktops. We have folks from Canonical here uh at re invent and i hope you get a chance to chat with them. We have our Amazon Linux desktops and of course, we have, you know, windows server uh that you can buy through our license included bundles. Um and you have our, our Windows desktop Windows 10 with Windows 11 offering, but it's not just choice and operating systems, right? Like we we need to be able to offer many types of instances, many types of skews. And so you've got gp u based stuff, you've got typical desktop workload. So all of these choices are choices that uh we wanna be able to say, yeah, you, you, you make them when you think about your end users, we wanna be able to provide those for you as well. Don't forget productivity software. Um m 365 that is a choice that you can now have working with Amazon WorkSpaces. We're pretty excited about that. Uh you can also buy Office through us under our service provider license agreement. So, you know, the typical perpetual office uh licenses, these are the types of things that customers expect productivity software works as you would think it would work with vd. i typically, that's exactly what we espouse. So that selection, uh that flexibility, that choice, very, very amazonian.

Um think about all the different ways that you can manage and maintain these things, right? Uh we have leadership from ControlUp here and i hope everybody gets a chance to chat with Jed. Um really, really cool in so far as thinking about what is the experience that your end users are uh enjoying. So lots of really, really cool things in so far as choice and lastly that customer experience, my gosh, we can never forget about it.

Now, today you're going to hear a little bit more directly from one of my colleagues about an innovation that we've got just in customer experience. Of course, we're going to talk about cost. We're going to talk about security, we can talk about logistics. I bet you didn't think you're going to have that conversation in this conversation at some point. But yes, we're going to talk about that too. All of these things are the things to ground it out that we think about that my team and i think about on a daily basis and that is my commitment to you in this conversation.

Now, a lot of this stuff isn't accidental. We take a lot of guidance from things that are in the industry. And so if you take a look at uh the Coalition for Fair Software License Principles, we believe very, very strongly that our values are aligned with the values of the coalition. If you go to fairs software licensing.com, i would encourage absolutely everybody to become a member. This is really, really critical. It's about being able to do the types of things, not only that you would do on prem uh but in all cloud providers. And i mean that and i realize that this is a native us conference and yet still i'm saying, hey, i understand that customers deserve that selection that i just finished talking about. And you want to be in control of how you're actually managing your it environments. Well, the Coalition Fair Software License Principles, they're a big part of that. And when we think about innovation, when we think about all the different ways that we want to add value, we wanna add features for customers. The one thing that i ask everybody on my team to explain to me before we launch something is why is this remarkable? So you see on the screen here, you know, running your n 365 workloads, like why is that remarkable? That's something that you get to do in so many different places. It's remarkable because Amazon Workspace is the only one identified as one of the listed providers that Microsoft has that you can actually bring your own m 365 e three a five e three e five a three a five licenses too. We're really, really excited. We work very hard to do something that we think is absolutely right for both ours and Microsoft's customers. This is feedback that we heard for years. Um that this is what you guys wanna do. You wanna be able to run those workloads on AWS. And we're very, very proud to do that. We do think it's remarkable that we are the only listed provider that enables it.

Now, just recently, we launched our Multi-Session offering, right? And so you think, hey, like, why, why is that remarkable Multis session has been around for a little while and it has, it absolutely has been around for a little while, but there's a kick to it everybody who owns and operates a multi session environment has to think a little bit about user placement, has to think a little bit about like, hey, how am i managing these instances? Not just the turning off and the turning on of those instances, but also all of the, uh you know, sort of performance characteristics about them, all of the like noisy neighbor problems. If you're familiar with that, you know, someone stealing my cpu, i'm trying to get something really, really critical done here. And i can't, well, what's remarkable about this feature, the way that we thought about it is you're not gonna need those third party tools to help manage it. This is something that customers tell us they expect is inherent with how AWS launches these features. And so it is, and so in some cases, customers are telling us with, with other providers that they're paying, you know, up to and in some cases, even more than $6 per user per month in management fees that you absolutely do not have to use or rather pay with our multi session capabilities. So, you know, we're thinking critically, we're thinking about innovating. Why is this remarkable? It's remarkable because we're avoiding you costs in all kinds of ways that hopefully you should just never have to deal with. That should be inherent in the products that you're purchasing now. Really neat.

Uh, late last week, you know, buried in a lot of the noise, maybe right after thanksgiving, right before we announced, you know, our, our big announcement on sunday evening, um we launched the second capability that we have with our multiregional resilience. So a year ago on this stage, you may have heard me say, hey, we would love for you to start trying out our compute redundancy. And i said, don't wait, do not wait to start testing this thing because we guarantee you that the data redundancy is coming and it's coming very, very, very soon. Um and this is it, it is now available to you. So you across regions can have your users sync their data one way uh two way is coming shortly. Um but we, we have, you know, that sort of one way data replication that we're gonna be making available for everybody.

There's a lot of different uh ways that we think about it. Not only is it remarkable in so far as being able to say, hey, when you want that peace of mind in a disaster like scenario or in a scenario where you need to ensure a very, very high amount of uptime because maybe you're a very heavily regulated company and you pay some penalties for downtime. We've got you covered. Not only is it remarkable in so far as being able to provide that kind of peace of mind, that security. But also again, i go back to cost, i go back to those constraints that i talked about and i led with cost as one of the biggest ones of those constraints, it is really, really critical for us to make sure that you feel like you get the lowest bill working with AWS. I think that that's a very AWS thing to say. And so when we look at this, when we looked at pricing this, we want it to be as low as we possibly can be. And we think our prices are absolutely the most competitive that are out there. This is going to be a no brainer, especially in those scenarios, as i mentioned, where you're gonna have a lot of users who you might pay some penalties if they're not available if they're not active.

Now, talked a little Multi-Session. Uh the thing about Multi-Session uh i is that it was, you know, sort of a gateway for a whole bunch of extra usage, but that's not the only way uh that we've thought about providing more remarkable capabilities for customers. So with our AppStream service, AppStream two auto, we started offering more GPU instances, more types of ways they're based on the two g five. These are the types of things that customers are pushing us on. And hey, like not only is it running graphics workload, but a lot of people who are doing a tremendous amount of computing, we have software developers, we have engineers, we have traders who are doing a tremendous amount of analysis that will require considerable compute. And so these newer, faster GPU instances, these are the types of things that um you can expect from us and then we made them available on our uh Ubuntu offerings as well.

Um so, you know, for all of these use cases that i tell you, uh hey, like the Canonical team is very much so enjoying the fact that this is, you know, a lot of additional usage. This is a lot of additional capability that, you know, they get hand in hand, not only with the operating system, but with the infrastructure that it runs on. And so you have purpose built VD that scales up, that scales down, that offers all these GPU uh related capabilities.

Now, the really, really neat thing that i, you know, i didn't make it into the slides, but it's one of the things that i wanted to talk about. We are also innovating under the covers under the hood for everybody. Here, we are in the midst of a migration of all of our instances to brand new instance types. So you get faster performance, you get more cpu and users hopefully get a much better experience overall knowing that AWS is just giving you this stuff for free. There's nothing to think about. There's no migration. We do the migration on your part, right? In fact, we do it in a way that you're not even gonna notice it and that's something that i think is my commitment to you. Is that what we want to do is be really successful and sort of being out of your way so that you can feel like you're in control.

Now, when you look at the entirety of our family, uh all listed here, WorkSpaces Core our ability for uh you know, it admins to use the same tools uh and end users to use the same user experience. Workspace. Workspace is our native uh desktop as a service offering, WorkSpaces Web or browser as a service offering. Yeah, believe it. We we have a secure browser offering, you know, and the thing that that uh is catching on with that is like, hey, if you don't need a desktop, why pay for a desktop? If all your users are spending 100% of their time in in the browser? Fantastic. Most companies have almost entirely of browser based SaaS. Well, great. We have a product for you to make sure that your users are accessing that SaaS and the most secure way that we could think of.

Um and of course, you know, hey, why not take those desktop applications and turn them into SaaS? Um and, and that's what we use uh Amazon AppStream for now with all of those all put together, you know, companies are saying, hey, this is how AWS is enabling me. Would you enjoy our cost savings? Would you enjoy is peace of mind in so far as the security of, you know, your corporate data, not uh excel trading or people not getting in what you enjoy is much better performance. Like i said, we, we work really, really hard to make that better just under the covers. So that as an admin, there's nothing that you have to do. And we, we back all of this with a 99.9% financially backed up time SLA. We will give you your money back if we do not honor our commitments to your users, being able to log into their desktops or their AppStream instances. That that is how seriously we take this.

Um we absolutely absolutely love the idea that so many customers and this is just a slice of them. Uh get a chance to use our services and give us a ton of feedback and are proud to say that they use AWS for their desktop as a service or overall their end user computing workloads.

Now, everything i've talked to you about today has been something about virtual applications, virtual desktops, secure browser, right? This is all software running in the cloud. The number one thing that customers have been talking to me about in the last little bit is that sort of fully burdened cost. It turns out not only do you have to think about security, not only do you have to think about cost and up time, but you also got to think about the endpoint that users access from.

What about end user devices with that? I'm going to bring up my colleague, Melissa.

Melissa, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Thank you Muir. Hi, I am Melissa Stein. I'm a director in Muir's team on end user computing. And what I've been thinking about a lot for the last two years is the device because you really can never change the cost equation of end user computing if you don't consider the device that people use to be productive every single day.

So I'm very proud to announce and I know some of you have probably seen the press but it's always good when you actually can see it very lightweight three inch device workspaces thin client. This small device has all the power you need, whether you're running back office applications or you're doing video conferencing and it supports workspaces.

If you have a persistent desktop appstream 2.0 that Mounir mentioned for application streaming for non persistent desktop or if you just need secure browsing because you're focused on web based or sas applications, all of these are seamlessly integrated with this device.

And if you want to come up and see it later, it's right up here. So when we develop this, we talk to easily, easily 100 customers and we heard some key themes, they had some significant challenges. And one thing we heard over and over again is they have expensive computers just walking away so a lot of our customers in the contact center and business process outsourcing, they have a lot of contingent workforce. And when those people leave the computing device they use tends to go with them.

In fact, one customer i talked to was so worried about having to keep writing off capital expenditure because the laptops, they were giving about $1000 laptops and they weren't coming back that they actually had people on board and trained for three weeks with no laptop, even though they were less productive because they were so worried that they were gonna join, get the laptop and leave.

So what we wanted to focus on is cost optimization. We wanted to bring down the cost of the physical endpoint of this thin client. But it's not just even just the cost of the hardware, think about shipping, think about logistics. You are shipping and image tagging and imaging and storing this device ships through amazon business that's taken care of for you.

And then the support costs, there wasn't a lot of moving parts. You're not gonna have somebody spill coffee on the keyboard and get to get cleaned up. If you have a little $15 keyboard, whatever trash it. It's not like having to repair an entire laptop. There's no screen that's gonna break. You're going to have a great reduction in your support and break fix costs.

And then you're also because it is a locked device probably won't need to spend as much on some of the software to maintain and to secure the thin client as well.

So, the next thing that we heard is how long it can take to get people their devices and even when you get them, their laptop, their desktop and even if you're using zero touch provisioning, it can still take hours. Not everyone. Right. We have a very tech savvy crowd here but not everyone is as tech savvy as we are. And they're like, what is software center? Where do i get the apps that i need to do my job? Literally two or three hours could be spent on every single employee just to make sure they have those applications.

So what we wanted to do was to accelerate that time to productivity, but we set ourselves a goal, somebody should be able to open the box, take out workspaces, thin client cable it up, connect it to the monitor, go through an out of box set up experience and be able to log in to their virtual desktop in under five minutes. And that's exactly what we did.

And on top of that, you, your end users are not going to have to wait weeks for it to show up. We're using amazon business and amazon business prime. If you're a business prime member, it ships for free and we are talking days instead of weeks to get the computing device to your end users.

So when those laptops walk away or you lose desktop. There's a lot of proprietary information on it. Whether it is your latest llm model, everyone has to throw in ja i these days, right. Uh whether it is, but in most cases, customer service, there could be personal health care information, there could be information about your clients and your customers and what they buy and what their credit card number.

You don't want that data sitting somewhere, you don't want it left on a train. So we thought that strengthening security was absolutely critical.

So first we enable device trust using hardware based authentication. There is a secure on ship secret that then basically creates a token of which, then you pull the certificate onto the device then and only then is that device registered to your aws account. Otherwise, whatever it doesn't really exist, it's a family.

We are not allowing downloading or uploading of any files or applications. You take a thumb drive and there was a, there was a mckee study earlier this year, 15% of all employees. So if i count out here, there's probably a few of you that actually pull up data that they're not supposed to onto a thumb drive.

So one out of eight, you stick a thumb drive usb drive in this device that's going to say sorry, not supported. So you have less bad data coming in through either shadow apps and no bad data coming out. We're also not storing any data on the device. Again, we're using the virtual desktops, workspaces upstream and all that data is in the cloud encrypted at rest and in transit.

So again, too, what happens if you don't have enough it staff, right? Very critical concern is there is a shortage of qualified it personnel. You can have them boxing and unboxing and imaging laptops or desktops or you can have them modernizing applications or actually providing good support to your end users your employee base.

So we wanted to make this simple. And as what man said about remarkable, one of the things that's truly remarkable about this product. Besides the cost effectiveness is that it is simple, you can set up access to your workspaces or your upstream stacks in just a matter of minutes, all updates, whether it's for the operating system or the client are pushed over the air on your schedule.

And we provide all of this in a very simple inventory view of your entire set of thin clients. And you can see whether they're compliant or not, whether they're active or not, you can remotely reset them, remotely, manage them.

So if this interests you, how do you get started? So these are available now for purchase in the us and in the early q one in several countries in the eu go to amazon business, you can purchase this device. If you need a dual monitor extension, you need to move apps across screens that is supported. There is a hub for that. Any peripherals that you need, you don't have to buy them. But if you need them all there, you can just order everything that you need to create a complete computer, a complete cloud computer for your end users.

It will ship to your office or directly to your employees. So whether you have work from home people, hybrid people, it will get directly to where it's needed. They enter a simple activation code. And again, that activation code is the magic that connects the physical endpoint, the physical thin client to their virtual desktop. And then all of that is managed in the aws console.

So just to wrap that up, what is its cost? Right? I mentioned it's cost effective starts at $195. So again, remarkable in that it is feature rich for this price point. You have a single point of control. Everything is managed over the air device goes directly to end users. Super simple for anyone to cable this up and get this going in just minutes. And finally, hardware-based authentication. It is a secure device.

And so it's always best to hear from our beta customers, right? So we just launched uh sunday evening. So and i say simple because we are creating the ability to seamlessly integrate. We had our customer set up both upstream and workspaces, connect it and create that, that connectivity of what we call an environment. Construct from the virtual desktop to the physical device. Two minutes to do both. That's all it took. No weird scripts. Nothing else.

Now, of course, everything also can be console or api driven again. Two minutes. Someone challenged me. They said five minutes. Do you think it takes to be five minutes to get this thing going? I can get this thing up and running in two minutes and they did two minutes from unboxing to logging into the virtual desktop.

And then finally, none of this matters if it doesn't perform. So we have validated with webex contact center by cisco. We have validated amazon connect. We have validated zoom, we have validated teams and we are running our, our streaming, our, our workspaces streaming protocol to really make sure there is good performance for all of your end users.

So now that i've talked a little bit about that, how about when we support third party? Cool. Uh to think about, you know, the possibilities of a device like this, right? Like to think about all the different ways that it staff has been dealing with, you know, not just the virtual elements of your environments, but all of the end user elements of it.

Yes, absolutely. As we say in aws, there's undifferentiated heavy lifting that we can take the burden of and we can get your teams back to doing the things that make them productive to make them innovative. No more packing boxes, shipping is included in that $195. This is the kind of way that we think about things. This is the kind of way that we think about innovation and what's remarkable, not just the security, not just the cost, not just the access to the virtual desktop, you get all of that stuff on one bill and we're starting to take on a lot of the it burden that frankly shouldn't be on your plate. Absolutely no way should it be on your plate?

All right. So uh i want you to pay very, very careful attention to this image. This is the entire portfolio uh that we offer. Uh now including the amazon workspaces thin client. Uh really, really neat.

Uh one thing that i want to share with the group about this thin client, you know, well, how do we achieve some of these low cost, these low prices? Well, we, we repurposed hardware that you should be familiar with, right? Like this is uh what was the amazon fire tv cube? And so, you know, the manufacturing of it stays the same.

Melissa's team delivered, purpose-built operating system, purpose-built, firmware and purpose-built software to pass the cost savings of not having to manufacture a device from scratch on to everybody who's going to buy one, really, really excited about it. The team's done a wonderful job. Believe me, it's a very, very heavy lift.

Now, as you can see here on the slide um you know, it covers the entire first party set of services, but we've got these kind of hybrid services with our workspaces core offering these offerings. As i, as i mentioned a little bit earlier, they allow it admins to use the existing management console. They allow uh end users to use the exact uh clients that they've been using for. Uh you know, some of the existing vd i providers talk about that in a second.

Um and so for today, you know, the amazon workspace, then client is supported on our first party services. Look for it very, very soon to be supported on uh some of these third party services as well. And don't forget, uh we also build a protocol. So not only do you have our fully managed services but a lot of customers here, you know, they, they think about the diy route and that is what i love about this portfolio of services that i get a chance to work on on a daily basis. Not only do we offer the fully managed versions, we offer the diy solutions as well.

And so with ec2, you get the full uh bread of every single instance, an instance family that is supported with our protocol. And it's a really, really killer 12 combination, enabling customers to be able to choose their own adventure with, you know, their pixel streaming applications now workspaces core. This is, you know, one of those things that i think is truly, truly remarkable, right? Like, hey, why not take advantage of the existing vdi infrastructure that you've been operating, that you've been managing the licenses that you've already paid for. Why not take advantage of that and we'll meet you where you are with the expertise that we have, right? Like we have the expertise and building a whole bunch of enabling us to scale up and scale down and manage that infrastructure instead of you taking those costs. But you know, it's a big step as people tell us about going from, you know what you've been running on prem for a number of years to cloud native solution. There's migration, there's a whole bunch of policy that needs to be migrated, a whole bunch of apps that need to be tested. Gosh, wouldn't it be simpler if we just had a way to say, look, can i just replace the infrastructure yet with workspaces core? That is exactly what you can do.

And with works spott with leos stream and with horizon eight, this is something that we're very, very proud. We love the uptick, we love the adoptions just makes it simple. And my favorite part of this is that your end users, they got nothing new to learn. They're still logging in with the exact same client just on different infrastructure and you get the full breadth of like, hey, changing infrastructure types that you want like all the different uh uh compute resources, all the different bundle types that we support and at lower prices, these are all byol.

So you are in more control of the costs of this service. You might have caught uh mid-september this year, we announced our partnership with citrix and so i have a little coming soon sticker

Um it will go g a soon. Do contact your uh end user computing sales rep or some of your account reps if you don't have an eu c sales rep assigned to you, so that you get access to, you know, the citrix version of workspace and you can start playing with it right now. We are going to go ga just in a short little while here. But again, it's about simple deployment. It's about making sure your users get a chance to continue to use the things that they're already familiar with and your it admins, you guys each get a chance to do the exact same thing that you've always been doing with the tools that you've been doing.

Alright now, my favorite part of reinventing truly. And i mean, this, my favorite part is giving this talk and asking customers themselves to come up and tell you a little bit about their journey. I'm gonna start with my colleague graham from genomics. Graham. Come on up, graham, tell us a little bit about yourself and tell us a little bit about genomics. Ok?

So my name is graham bins. I'm the director of strategy and architecture at genomics. England and genomics. England is an organization which supports the nhs in the uk to deliver whole genome sequencing, to support the diagnostic services to understand rare diseases and to support cancer, precision medicine use cases. And what i'm going to talk to you today is about how we're using amazon workspaces to transform the experience of the research community in helping to understand rare diseases and cancer.

Um so whole genome sequencing um generates a lot of data. Um there's 3.2 billion base pairs in a human genome and each human genome when sequenced generates up to 200 gigabytes of data. That's an incredible amount of data. It's also extremely sensitive. And what we do in terms of genomics england with the consent of patients is to make this data available to the global research community. And we have about 150 to 160,000 whole genomes available today. And we're complementing that data with data sets in terms of pathology and radiology, imaging, et cetera. And that data set is 22 petabytes of genomics data. And in total now over 100 petabytes of data, the research community globally um is 1800 research users from both clinical scientific community and from commercial drug companies to effectively use this data set to understand rare disease and come up with new cancer treatments.

So how do we do that? So we deliver we deliver that through the genomic medicine service. And on the right hand, i think it's the side of this diagram, we provide the diagnostic services for the and on the other side, we have the research environment. So once we've done the genomic sequencing for the patients with the consent of the patient data is deidentified and made available in the research environments and what we try and do with this research environment. Our model is a reading room or a goldfish bowl. You're not allowed to take data out this environment. So it's really important for the trust of patients that those researchers are not able to exfiltrate or download the data.

So what we do is we provide a virtual desktop environment for researchers to come to the data, they can bring their tooling and and explore that data and then when they need to export their findings that's done through a controlled process, we call the airlock.

Um so we support this in using virtual desktop net technologies in the past. And um we looked at the customer experience and asked our research community what they thought of our environment. And the number one issue that came up was the experience of the remote desktop. Not only was it frustrating for our users in that the existing technology had problems in terms of scaling and performance, but also for our aws platform engineers, they are spending far too much time supporting the existing technology when they should be supporting the really cool genomic tooling that we provide to our research community.

So you know, what were the issues? Well, effectively they were competing for resources and the solution was not able to scale for the demands of our research community. And it was, it was costing us a lot in terms of employee time to support the environment and to manage the research community.

So we made the decision to move to a and workspaces. And the reason is to lower our operating costs for employees but deliver a much better experience for our users and also improve the security posture by using managed services in aws.

So as we did that implementation, we effectively made a number of key decisions in terms of how do you manage costs with amazon workspaces. So we implemented the pattern for cost optimizer using lambda functions, how to provide a seamless user experience and how to manage the transition from the existing environment.

So we had a very careful piloting project where we made sure that the experience was great before we migrated all our thousands of users across. How do you make this easier to support and operate? We worked with ns which is which have a tool called workspace manager, which we incorporate into the environment, the solution easier to operate for our internal teams.

We also needed to make sure that it was easy to access the data that the researchers work with within the environment. And so we integrated to amazon efs. And finally, from an authentication perspective, we use for two factor authentication.

Ok. So how does that look when we bring it all together? So what we've been able to achieve with the solution is a single environment that our research community can use to access all of the applications they need to do cancer research and rare disease research and access that genomic data securely. And we can be sure that that data cannot be exported or exalted from the environment to provide that assurance to our patients. Their data is secure.

So the results, well, i think they speak for themselves. We've seen a massive reduction in the in the scalability issues that we are facing and the improved performance for our users and our support tickets that we receive in our operations team have been massively reduced. And i think you can kind of wrap that up with a quote there on the slide in terms of the users once they migrated, gave great feedback and never really wanted to go back to the old system.

So um really successful project um for genomics, england. So i'm gonna hold now hand over to ha thank you graham. Before you go off before you go off stage, quick question for you. What, what's next? What's next for genomics as you think about the future?

Well, we really want to scale this further and that's our ambition to scale this and make it accessible to as many researchers around the world as possible. So we have ambitions to scale to at least 5000. 0, wonderful. That's our next ambition. Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you again for coming on up. Really, really cool use case, right? Like in, in, you know, not only is it, you know, highlighting that like, hey, we we all are a little bit of snowflakes when we think about our it environments, right? Like, you know, th think about all the, the different systems, all the different technologies, not just aws based ones, but like, you know, third party technologies that, that graham described in so far as being able to put it all together. Again, i go back to that flexibility, that choice, that customer experience, you should be in control and that is exactly what we believe here.

Um so thank you again, graham. Alright. Now, uh i'm gonna bring up another customer. Uh you know, it's, it's always super humbling for me to hear about how we uh you know, are involved in the lives of so many people, you know, first you heard about cancer research and now why not hear about something that's near and dear to all of us taxes? Um you know, so i'm gonna bring up my colleague, hugh from into it. Uh talk about their journey with amazon workspaces as well. Thank you. Take it away.

Thank you. My name is hugh and i work for intuit who's into it into it is a global financial technology company. We are 17,000 plus strong and our mission is to power prosperity for our people and communities. We serve now the products that run our engine that drive our a i platform are turbotax and quick books. As part of that family, i'm a principal end user computing engineer and i'm the technical lead for our workspaces deployment. This falls under the umbrella of endpoint engineering at in into it. And endpoint engineering is a very critical role that we provide for intuit. We're the team that provides that secure end point device to make sure that the employee is productive and collaborate. Day one, we support over 50,000 plus devices and our role is a hybrid role, right? That means we're the traditional systems engineering working on the back end, but we're also developers because we're facing complex challenges today and we could only solve that by via code and by development, we collaborate very closely with our security and our cloud engineering team. This ensures that we align to what we call our pay rules. This is our best practice for security and hosting.

Now, our journey started when we were presented with two problems. The first one is our developers, our developers are on mac hardware and they need to spin up virtual machines and these windows virtual machines are unmanaged. That means that they don't have any of our security controls. They, we don't know where our data is being used or governed around there. We don't have all of our security controls, our and our, our um security and legal hold to understand this. So this is a risk for us.

Alright. And then our next use case is our product experts. Now, this use case is very complex. They are the uber of our team. So they will come in, they provide support, like answering tax questions related, providing product support. They could work for a week and then they could say i need a break and then they come in and the range a scale of what they need at this level is that they could come in as 1000 users or next month, we need 30,000. So it's very fluid on the population. The challenge is they come in with bring your own device and the vpn into our network. That's a huge risk for us because they're as our tools and services on a byod. We have no data governance. Yes, we do posture assessments and we validate they have antivirus. They have minimum requirements like encryption and so forth. But that's a risk for us.

So when we looked at these two use cases, we knew that virtual desktop technology could solve our problem. So we had to start our journey and to start the journey, we had to map out our requirements and what you see here is our minimum requirements.

So now we knew what we needed. Now, we need to find a solution. So we locked down on five principles, right? For our customers now was with the solution that we're looking for. Could it meet all of our needs? Right? The requirements that we set forth in the previous slide. Would it work at scale? Could we spin up 1000 workspaces? Could we meet the regions that we need to operate in secure security is paramount for us? Like i mentioned, we have to make sure that we had data governance around our data. Could it meet all of our requirements from security? Could it integrate with our security controls? Would it be compliant with our security policy efficient to support? Now, in this area here, we have limited staff, we can't go hire more staff to support a new solution. We have to take the existing staff uplevel them and could they support that? And finally, investment protection. Would this solution grow as we needed that solution to grow? If we had to change our business, would the solution be able to be flexible enough to change with that?

So we looked at all the top vendors out there and we found that amazon workspaces checked every single check box on there.

So now next, during our journey, we had to look at how do we integrate and we ran into some challenges with that. Like any solution you buy, you have to integrate it. There's gonna be some challenges. I'll highlight a couple of them.

The first one is technical now our product expert inter interface with our users, they're on calls with them. And like if you've been on a zoom call and you had a poor zoom quality, that's bad meeting for you, for your team. But if you're interacting with our customer and you had a bad video conference or call on there, that's impacting our brand and that's not good and we had to solve for that.

So we customize our amazon connect deployment. So that meant that we had to figure a way to optimize the audio stream. So we had to go through line by line of our code to figure out what we did, how to optimize it. We pulled in amazon which is a great partner. They went with us and went through line by line. We figured out how to optimize the audio.

Now, while we're solving for technical, we have to address the architectural. Now making decisions pretty simple, make a decision. You can move on the problem with intuit in many, many organizations is that when you make a decision, six months down the road, you can forget about that decision.

So what we did was we created a framework, we made a decision, we documented, we captured the rationale, why did we make the decision? Then we also captured the implications of that decision. Do we make tradeoffs? And then once we were able to create that framework. We were able to make architectural decisions on what regions we want to operate in to what ip address how we can solve for the population of 30,000

so while we're dealing with a technical architectural, we have to deal with bureaucracy. this is the red tape and probably the biggest challenge of all because this slowed us down on our deployment. this really did slow us down our, just our journey alone.

when you look at it, we're trying to run a race and, but we needed the entire team to run with us to finish at the finish line. and the problem is that the race cannot be won by one team. so we had to sit down with all the teams that were involved, not just our security, not just our it, but our finance, our legal and bring them on this journey, what we call a shared vision

once we are able to establish a shared vision that allowed us to move a lot faster to execute. and that was what was critical.

if you look at all these challenges again, barox, you got to knock that down first. so now we've addressed all the challenges. what did the solution look like? and i call this the intuit recipe, right? like any recipe this met all of our needs.

we had strong authentication. we had security controls at every single layer from the workspace all the way to the back end cloud on there with any recipe we could change, right? if you needed something within the recipe and you need to modify it. you could. and literally, this recipe allow us to deploy rapidly in any region in any location.

so when we looked at this, we took our, for instance, our developers, they didn't need high resiliency. so we removed that multiregional resiliency out of there for our product experts which require heavy data governance. we implemented stronger data loss prevention controls. so this allowed us to roll out um in this past summer for our developer community and then our product experts just recently about a month ago.

so this takes us to close to the end of our journey. now, the question is, is our journey successful. so we address all of our needs. we met the needs from an it perspective, we could deploy in any region, we could deploy under 30 minutes. but the biggest piece of all was that we provided more security for intuit. we removed the vpn component, we improved our security posture. posturing is like a journey. you're never going to be 100% secure.

so what we ended up doing was we took a major leap forward in securing into it. and that was our goal.

now, with any solution question is that is it going to be successful because you could be successful from the back end? but you might not be successful in front of the customer. and if you're not, then the customer is gonna figure out a way to bypass it.

so when we sat down and talked to our customers, did you enjoy this experience? did you have a good time using workspace? and the response was, it was a great experience. they loved it. it was intuitive. it's familiar with the windows desktop operating system. they love the persistence experience where they could sign in, they could do their work, shut down for the day, come back and everything is still there. they're up and running right away.

now, this is positive because when the biggest complaint was they're sitting now they would have to power the computer load up their apps. it would take minutes sometimes 1020 minutes. so they're being less productive. what was surprising of all from the philippines was that they were saying that it was more responsive than actually their own byod device, which was surprising. and when we unpack that more, there's like, yeah, we don't have the right cp us or the horsepower we need on the memory workspace is just provided for us and we're able to leverage that.

so overall, it was a complete journey. we were very successful and i'd like to say, thank you for allowing me to share it into its journey. thank you, hugh.

same question that i asked graham, what's next for into it? yeah, we're actually exploring the thin client, the militia show. so we are very excited about that. and we're looking at solving for our backup uh use case for ransomware too. so we've workspaces. so there are many new opportunities for us. right on. right on. thank you.

one really, really, really critical thing that i wanna uh highlight that. he said, you know, he talked a lot about, you know, sort of the security of that data. he talked a lot about, you know, the different systems that they've stitched together to make this reality uh for different type of whether they're experts or whether it's developers.

um but there's a user experience thing and i wanna make sure that that's not lost, right? and i, when i go back to that slide, flexibility, choice, customer experience, think about it. if you're talking to a tax expert and it gets cut off. gosh, that sucks. can you imagine what the net promoter score for that agent would be at that time? and that is exactly the kind of thing that we absolutely have to obsess about now with a lot of our colleagues in aws who think a lot about server workloads, you think about redundancy in very, very different ways, but in a situation where like you're on a sort of virtual phone call and it hangs up and there's no redundancy that makes that easy. and it's one of those situations, it's a very human moment. you're having this very sensitive conversation with someone taking for granted that the connection is stable and just works and is very high fidelity. that is something that we absolutely absolutely love to work on. we love getting feedback from teams like into it uh to make sure that, that, you know, we are always going to be meeting your needs.

now, you've heard about some of the work that we get to do with genomics, right. kid, thousands of cancer researchers doing cutting edge stuff you heard about the work that we do with into it.

um you know, all these sort of different use cases with developers, tax experts and the sort and they're thinking about the future in very, very different ways, how they're scaling as their business scale. but we have so many more product offerings. if i could you learn to use the clicker, i would learn to move forward into some of those things, right?

one of them is neo financials, it's a digital native bank out of canada, right? and this is like i wanna stress that it is a bank, this is a very, very heavily regulated industry, this is a very, very heavily regulated company. they are literally handle, handling people's money. and so the cool thing about that is they went to that whole, hey, why, why do i need to give my users a desktop when all the users, the browser? and so they they're very, very proud to roll out uh you know, our secure browser solution, amazon workspaces web to all of their end users and that is our primary way of interacting and they've been thrilled with the usage and we've been thrilled with the feedback.

all right, amazon appstream, another customer in for it's an, er p company. they have er p software. now, their journey with the aws end user computer team very different than anything we've talked about. still, this is about turning software into sass and look at that weeks, weeks is what it took them. now, most people are thinking about, hey, this is going to require rewrite. this is going to require all kinds of re architecture and what's our data models and how does a i fit into it? and these guys said, listen, we've got to go fast. the expectation is that we offer sas, they were able to do it with upstream as quickly as they possibly could and they're in control per second. billing is what they get. and so they feel like, hey, they are paying exclusively for what they use.

we have more examples. um so many more examples of companies who've used our tools like multi view, almost the exact same use case where they took, you know, financial software and uh they, they got it running as fast on aws as quickly as possible. again, using appstream, we have tally prime. uh it's a company out of india. these are one of my favorite examples. they took our protocols and they said we're going to run them on uh linux, they use windows emulation api s to get out of the, the typical license fees and all that and they completely changed the floor of their cost structure. and so all kinds of different ways that customers have been turning their applications into. sass.

you heard hugh talk a little bit about the future. this is one of the earliest pieces of feedback that we've gotten. we're so proud, we're so thankful for the intuit team for being able to share it. this is about using and testing out that workspaces thin client that we've been talking about. really, really neat that we've been able to do that.

and lastly, and i hope you can see that logo project kuiper, right? we actually work to help build the chips on some of our satellites, some of the satellites that amazon builds our protocols team enables the asic design for some of the most complex engineering that, that we do at amazon. it's really, really cool to think about the breadth of end user computing and that's exactly what we want to get across uh with some of these customer quotes. it's cool for me to be a talking head and to describe all of that to you, but better to hear it from customers themselves.

all right, we're running out of time here. so uh i would uh love to continue by spending hours and hours and hours um with all of you to talk about all the different ways that you can access uh our content here. please do get a chance to have a look at this. uh going sort of uh left to right, i guess left to right for me.

um you know, at the top corner of the choc talks, right, these are all the sessions that, that uh we're gonna have dedicated exclusively to the workspaces that client right underneath that uh this is our sign up genius link to go sign up for actually getting your hands on the device here at re invent. this has been bonkers. there have been so many people there. i would strongly encourage you to get in as quickly as you possibly can to take as many slots as you know, are available to us. and we would love to show it if you can't go in person to some of the slots available or maybe they're all taken, come check it out at our.

absolutely. we're doing demos there. our booth is powered by the thin clients. so we're excited about that. if you don't get a chance to see it at our booth, i would invite you to go to the cisco booth.

um they have a really, really neat call center uh set up. um and you can actually listen to, you know, your voice and a colleague's voice coming through this thing all powered by the thin client. this is live uh using the webex contact center use case and then we have a ton more of eu c sessions covering so much more of the content we covered here today.

now. uh i'm really, really sorry. usually at the end of this, i, i have time, you know, i hang out in the hallways with some folks and, and we spend a bunch of time talking. i, i do not have as much time here and i imagine my colleagues are pretty busy as well.

um this is how to get a hold of us. um they all take you to, to linkedin links. um happy to, to engage, happy to take you through. um you know, some more thought we would love to hear from you. uh we would love to make sure that uh end user computing and aws is meeting all of your needs, is giving you that flexibility, that choice and uh highly valuing that customer experience.

and lastly, thank you. thank you for taking the time. um i know you guys are all really, really busy, so i don't take it very lightly that you came and you spent some time with us this afternoon. thank you to my colleagues uh who are on stage. uh they did a wonderful, wonderful job and please do leave some feedback for us. uh the survey link should be coming to you.

thank you again. enjoy the rest of the re invent.