Believe it or not, Interchange 2018 in Dallas is now less than a month away. It’s the ideal place to acquire the straight scoop from Ivanti knowledge experts on how our solutions can help you meet your IT challenges successfully.

And speaking of experts, we reached out to Hannah Curtis, Director, Release & Program Management at Ivanti in Daresbury, UK, who oversees the Interchange session tracks surrounding User Workspace Management (UWM). She in turn tapped the knowledge of Ivanti’s Jon Rolls, Vice President, Product Management, who explains why UWM sessions are worth attending:

Q: In your view of the world—and within the context of the User Workspace Management track at Interchange 2018 that you oversee, what are some of the greatest challenges on the horizon facing Ivanti customers?

JR: IT faces increasing challenges: higher user expectations, a wave of new application architectures, users turning to Shadow IT to get what they want, and a constant state of migration for both operating systems and applications. IT is expected to deliver an equivalent or better experience compared to what users can get for themselves with off-the-shelf hardware and cloud services.

Q: What is it about the sessions in your track that can assist Ivanti customers as they deal with these challenges?

JR: The User Workspace Management team is going to show attendees step-by-step how to deliver an unparalleled user experience, and how to put IT back in control of delivery of the user workspace. We will also cover how User Workspace Management solutions tackle the latest applications and allow users to maintain a consistent experience regardless of changes in Windows and the endpoints they use every day.

Q: Are there certain sessions within your track that are making their initial debut? What’s the story behind why they were developed?

JR: All of the content is new! We’re particularly excited about our sessions that focus on:

  • Improving the user experience in Office 365
  • Unlocking features to reduce infrastructure costs
  • Customers describing their own experience
  • Labs delivered by a third-party consultant.

We will also demonstrate our latest, unique technology for smoothing Windows 10 migrations, and adoption of Citrix Cloud. Our goal is to give people the complete picture of how User Workspace Management products improve the lives of both IT departments and end users in the real world.

Q: Let’s talk about the future. What will the User Workspace Management landscape look like in five to 10 years?

JR: The UWM landscape is constantly evolving, but the most obvious trend is the shift of infrastructure to the cloud, which changes the cost model for IT and also provides easier connectivity for end users. Many of our customers want to do away with their on-premises data centers altogether.

Another obvious trend is the constant pace of upgrades—every device now has a mobile-like experience where application and OS upgrades are delivered continuously, and IT will have to adapt to this new world. New application and endpoint management models will make this smoother, but we can pretty much guarantee that in five to 10 years we will still be battling some of the same line-of-business Win32 applications we do today, alongside newer technologies.

Q: Borrowing the statement, “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing,” what’s the key takeaway or main thing you hope attendees of your track with leave Interchange with?

JR: We hope our customers come away with a clear understanding of what it means to secure and optimize the user workspace, separately from the delivery of operating systems and applications and other IT functions, and also an understanding of where the ROI comes from in terms of infrastructure savings, increased user productivity, and reduced IT workload.

interchange 2018