In this Tech Barometer podcast segment, End User Computing veteran Ruben Spruijt cuts through chaos from recent changes around virtual desktop infrastructure and desktop-as-a-service offerings.

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Transcript:

Ruben Sprujit: It’s like a massive plate of spaghetti. Where do I start? What’s the challenge?

What’s the idea you have?

Jason Lopez: Ruben Spruit is the field CTO and VP of product at Dizion, a company that provides desktop as a service and cloud computing solutions to enable remote and hybrid workforces. He helps companies understand how to deploy end-user computing technologies, but not only companies. He’s passionate, hands-on, and ready to help anyone in the EUC community.

Ruben Sprujit: First, you listen to peers, to customers, to prospects and understand, hey, what is their idea or challenge? And many of us listen for a couple of seconds and then, okay, this is the problem, this is the solution, this is the vendor. But it’s good to step back and listen a little bit more.

Jason Lopez: Here at The Forecast, we’ve interviewed Ruben numerous times for articles and Tech Barometer podcasts to learn about end-user computing, virtual desktop infrastructure, and desktop as a service. In this interview at .NEXT 2025 in Washington, DC, he talked with The Forecast editor-in-chief, Ken Kaplan, about changes around EUC, such as new vendors and partnerships in the wake of Broadcom VMware’s spinoff of its EUC offering, which became Omnissa. And he talked about AI and methodologies for helping IT teams build and evolve their EUC strategy, and offers tips for building a career around the EUC ecosystem. But he starts with the question, why are people using desktop as a service?

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Ruben Sprujit: It could be students with their own Chromebook want to access SPSS, nuclear power plant designer and builder using high-secure, sensitive data with design apps to design a nuclear power plant. It could be a retailer or using a handful of Windows apps in their retail office. It could be government agencies using office productivity. So it’s different reasons to use virtual apps and desktops. But it all starts with, OK, I want to have a simple access to apps and desktops. I want to be workplace independent, need to be secure. And simple is the key. How can I keep it simple so the operational complexity is sort of gone? And that’s important these days because knowledge and people with skills is challenging nowadays. Keep them is challenging. Find them is challenging as well. So building a platform that’s easy to run as an admin and easy to consume as a user, like both we are also end users, consumers of solutions, these are the main ingredients of a good platform.

Ken Kaplan: I met you seven years ago at Nutanix. It was explained as it’s streaming your desktop experience from a server, from the data center, from the cloud. That idea, just how we would watch a Netflix video, it’s streamed to you. So your apps aren’t necessarily on your device. And there are lots of reasons for doing that. And it seems to be almost the status quo now. So what has changed in those seven years and what are you excited about today?

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Ruben Sprujit: A lot of things changed. Like seven years is a long time. So if we go back maybe seven years, Nutanix acquired our company, Frame. We saw Corona and a surge of workplace independent work. That’s one of the reasons why we grow like crazy also within Nutanix. So that changed. That’s new normal nowadays, right? Hybrid cloud is new normal. So supporting on-prem, supporting NT2, supporting public cloud natively. Unified communications is normal as well, supporting that. High-end graphic apps, all kinds of apps supporting that. But still with a clear strategy, keep it simple. Like how can we make sure that admin experience and user experience is as simple as it can? Everyone is using today a browser. 70% of the work we do as end users is browser. And then the other 25% often is like Windows apps. So how can we deliver both web and Windows apps in a seamless way to users? What is happening as well, we spin out of Nutanix, a little bit more than two years ago. So Nutanix can focus on infrastructure, hybrid cloud, and we can focus on end-user computing. So Dijon acquired Frame technology. Look at Frame as the car engine, while Dijon is more like a sort of managed services company. Coincidentally, both companies, so Dijon and Frame started roughly in the same time, 2012. Dijon with focus on Horizon, nowadays called Onisa, build their own control plane to orchestrate and automate Horizon deployments. In the same time frame was built as, okay, how can we build in cloud native solutions to stream apps and desktops to end users? So fast forward today, 2025, Dijon is using the engine, the Frame engine, to stream desktops and apps, Windows and Linux, personal and pooled, that’s technology, but also add a managed service on top of that to help customers when needed, not required, but when needed to add admin services to local admins with service we offer. It’s a services company with a very strong engine called Frame.

Ken Kaplan: The ecosystem, you touched on it, can you talk a little bit more about the constellation that you’re seeing out there, companies and changes that are happening?

Ruben Sprujit: It’s a very exciting space, end-user computing. So end-user computing, I always explain as a massive umbrella, and end-user computing, in essence, is the solutions we, you, listener, are using to get work done. That could be a virtual app, virtual desktop, that could be unified communication, that could be an AI agent, it could be a web or SaaS app, it could be a mobile device, it could be cloud storage, all the things I just explained equals end-user computing. And virtual desktops and applications, my expertise, or one of the expertise I have, is a fundamental element in end-user computing, but end-user computing, as I mentioned earlier, is much broader than that. So if you look at the bigger picture of what is happening in end-user computing, AI is part of that, AI agents, SaaS tools, old tools but then sort of AI-infused is happening, unified communications, but still Windows apps, SaaS, software as a service, desktop as a service, application streaming, all these items combined is what is real today. People think, well, Windows apps are dead. That’s not the case. They are kicking alive. Yes, it’s slowly degrading from 100% usage, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, to maybe 70% or 60% nowadays. Yes, SaaS and web did pick up the other like the bucket, but it’s a combination of SaaS, Windows, mobile applications which gets work done for us. So that’s happening. The whole industry is evolving to as a service. If I zoom in a little bit into like the VDI, the virtual desktop infrastructure, and DAS, the desktop as a service space, that’s evolving as well with private equity taking over like the Citrix part, same for Omnissa, spin out of Broadcom, VMware, refocusing, finding new alliances, including with Nutanix. That’s good for the industry, gives more choice. If you look at from a vision perspective, all these developments are helping us big time because a lot of customers, I would say 60% of the conversation I had in the show for past days, are customers, partners, scratching their head, price increase, 2x, 3x. Some vendors are refocusing on like only top segment of customers, and they are not in that segment of their customers. So they are scratching their head, hey, what is next for us? And next could be a physical PC. Next could be alternative for Citrix or Omnissa. That’s happening big time. It’s a very interesting space right now. Combination of like hybrid cloud, on-prem, public cloud, workplace independent, building a secure workplace, security is super critical for many. So if there’s no data on the endpoint, which is the case with virtual apps and desktops, that makes life much easier, not easy, but easier to build a secure workplace. That’s happening in our space.

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Ken Kaplan: There’s not even a perfect storm, but it’s certainly a storm of changes out there, from the vendor changes, the price hikes, to just the innovation that’s coming across, the options that are out there. You add to that AI and people are thinking differently. How do you characterize this time in your career and what you’re seeing? It seems like there’s a lot of partnerships going on, a lot of working together. There’s some urgency.

Ruben Sprujit: Yeah. On one side, it’s super energizing, but it’s also complex. It’s like a massive plate of spaghetti. Where do I start? And to help customer with that conversation, and there’s nothing to do with vision or product. My background is consulting, and I always try to explain the bigger picture and understand the why. What’s the challenge? What’s the idea you have and you want to sort of solve? Okay, then what kind of concepts fit with that, and then which vendors can help to fill in that concept to help with the idea or challenge. So what we did last year, we built an EUC Hexagrid. The EUC Hexagrid is a physical representation of our end-user co