Connected Social Media

Heart disease is the number one killer of people in the United States, and the leading cause of death globally. It is also the leading cause of death among women in the U.S., something that less than 50% of women realize.

In conjunction with American Heart Month, this episode features sudden cardiac arrest survivor Delya Sommerville and WomenHeart CEO Celina Gorre. Together, they share powerful personal stories, highlight the urgent need to improve women’s heart health, and offer a message of hope grounded in community, advocacy and prevention.

Tune in for ways employers can better assess the impact of their health and well-being programs to understand if they are meeting women’s needs today and in the future.

Guests: Delya Sommerville, WomenHeart Champion and Celina Gorre, Chief Executive Offer of WomenHeart

A staggering 7 million Americans live with Alzheimer’s disease, and more are being diagnosed at a younger age. However, there is good news. In this episode, Joanne Pike, President and CEO of the Alzheimer’s Association, shares the groundbreaking results of the US POINTER Study which proved that structured lifestyle interventions can slow cognitive decline.

The conversation shows that improved nutrition, increased physical activity, more social engagement and active health monitoring contribute to risk reduction. Employers should tune in to learn how these evidence-based improvements can be applied to workplace well-being and benefits programs, helping employees best maintain cognitive health and overall well-being as they age.

Guest: Joanne Pike, DrPH, President and CEO of the Alzheimer’s Association

One in five deaths in the U.S. is the result of heart disease, yet most of us aren’t doing enough to prevent it. Regular physical activity is proven to slash risk, but more than half of US adults fall short of recommended guidelines. With weight-loss medications on the rise, could exercise take an even bigger back seat?

In this episode, Dr. Tamanna Singh, clinical and sports cardiologist, explains how “movement snacks,” plant?forward nutrition, and a better understanding of family history and medical literacy can work together to reduce cardiovascular risk by up to 80%. The episode also explores what GLP?1s mean for long?term health, when exercise is risky and why women’s heart health and weight?bearing activity deserve special attention, offering critical insights for employers aiming to create safer, more supportive workplaces.

Guest:

Tamanna Singh, MD | Director of the Cleveland Clinic Sports Cardiology Center

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.

Find more enterprise cloud news, features stories and profiles at The Forecast.

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?

[Related: How End-User Computing Leaders Make IT Work for People]

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?

[Related: From Skunkworks to Leading Hypervisor Alternative]

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.

[Related: How AI is Shaping the Future of Data Storage Strategies]

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 computing space. It has main pillars, six of them, and 22 sort of sub-pillars. And the goal is you start, okay, what is EUC? What is end-user computing? What's the purpose of these six main pillars? What's the purpose of the 22 sub-pillars? First, you listen to peers, to customers, to prospects and understand, hey, what is their idea or challenge? And then you use the Hexagrid to plot maybe two of the main pillars and three of the sub-pillars to what their idea or challenge is. Before you talk about how the vendor landscape looks like, 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 and then plot six pillars, 22 sub-pillars, and then talk about the vendors, what they can do. That's what the EUC Hexagrid is all about. So it's an infographic, a graphical representation, 220 vendors are in that picture. It took us three months to build, and there's a white paper as well. So EUC Hexagrid, if you go to edition.com, you will find the resources EUC Hexagrid. Just fill in the email address, you'll get the Hexagrid white paper. And that helps in understanding what's happening in this space from a higher or medium level and paints a picture what vendors are in this space and what are the relevant vendors in this in this space.

[Related: Performance Engineering in the Age of AI]

Ken Kaplan: So how do you describe where we are today versus when we met seven years ago, for people who might be interested in focusing their career in this area of IT?

Ruben Sprujit: Opportunity, I would say. Like, look at AI. But people are also scratching their head, hey, what does it mean for me? What does it mean for my business? What does it mean for products? I'm responsible for products. How can we leverage AI to make life simpler as an admin? How can we solve issues before the end user sees them? Would be great if that is possible, and it is possible, that's something we're building. So that's one angle to understand, hey, what the possibilities are. The beauty of cloud is that you don't need to spend a crazy amount of money to get started. And that applies to, well, Gemini, JetDVT, that whole theme of AI, that's where I would spend, if not spend already, time in understanding what the value is in your personal life, but also like with agents, communicating with agents, what it might look like in two, three, five years from now. No one knows. It's tough to predict. Also with this whole, like, global thing that's happening, tough to predict, but nevertheless, don't be shy, don't be sort of confused by that. It's not something you can control, and if it's not something you can control, just set it aside, focus on the things you can control. That's what I would do. And one of the things is understanding what's new. AI is newer, but still like the as-a-service cloud, hybrid cloud, I see customers moving from public cloud back to on-prem for different reasons, understand why, understand what kind of tools and vendors are key in that space. It's really exciting, exciting time.

[Related:

FinOps Flicks on AI to Optimize IT Resources]

Ken Kaplan: You're also so well known in the community because you're very involved. You're on webinars. I remember you'd be at your desk and talking with your hands in the air, or you had your home desk set up just perfectly for these kinds of interactions that you have with people. Where can people go to join the community or learn more about the community? How do they get in to follow what you do?

Ruben Sprujit: Well, the beauty is there are many different communities. So I would say my community is all around end-user computing, about GPUs, about remoting protocols, about VDI and that. So that's my community. One of the communities is World of EUC. So World of EUC is a massive community. There is a European community called E2EVC, not connected to any vendor. It's crazy guys like myself organizing it. And there are also online communities as well, like on BlueSky, on X it’s relatively easy to find the right folks and connect with them. So if you're new or newer to this space and want to learn, my experience in the past 20 years in that community is that I would say everyone, 99% is here to help. So if you're new and maybe new to writing or new to presenting or new to technology, just reach out. I'm still Ruben with two feet on the ground. I'm smiling, right? You can see.

Ken Kaplan: Even just to get you to sit down and sit with me, I waited in line because people just want to come and talk to you.

Jason Lopez: Ken Kaplan is editor-in-chief of The Forecast. He interviewed Ruben Spruid, field CTO and VP of product at Dizzion, a company that provides desktop as a service and cloud computing solutions. Learn more about end-user computing at Nutanix.com. Go to Nutanix.com slash solutions slash end-user-computing. I'm Jason Lopez. This is Tech Barometer produced by The Forecast. You can find many other technology stories at theforecastbynutanix.com.

Intel IT operates 50+ data center modules across 15 sites, which house over 464,000 servers. To support Intel’s critical business functions, while operating our data centers as efficiently as possible, we constantly evolve our data center strategy. We run Intel data center services like a factory, accomplishing change in a disciplined manner and applying breakthrough technologies, solutions, and processes. From 2010 to 2024, our data center strategy generated savings exceeding USD 11.41 billion. Our strategy provides a foundation for continuous innovation that will improve the quality, velocity, and efficiency of Intel IT’s services and Intel’s business.

Intel IT is leading efforts to enhance outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) operations. We have developed a confidential manufacturing infrastructure solution that protects sensitive data and intellectual property (IP) and is scalable to adapt to evolving demands and growth. Our efforts help ensure robust security and enable efficient management of increasingly complex manufacturing workloads. Our confidential manufacturing infrastructure solution is highly secure—it is approved for use with data that is classified as Intel Top Secret. We hope our confidential manufacturing infrastructure blueprint inspires other manufacturers to boost their organizations’ efficiency and security.

In this Tech Barometer podcast segment, Mayank Gupta, director of product marketing at Nutanix, explains how intelligent FinOps tools automatically detect optimizations and take corrective action to manage cloud costs, track carbon footprints, and meet regulatory requirements in the AI era.

Find more enterprise cloud news, features stories and profiles at The Forecast.

Mayank Gupta: How can we make FinOps itself a lot more intelligent, now that we have Gen AI, can intelligence be built into the system where it automatically understands usage patterns and takes action to bring it down?

Jason Lopez: Generative AI is transforming how organizations manage cloud and IT spending. Although it brings new costs and it also affords new opportunities for automation. This is the Tech Barometer podcast, I’m Jason Lopez. On today’s edition: FinOps, bringing together finance, engineering, and business teams to manage cloud computing costs. This is increasingly important for optimizing IT resources in the age of AI.

Mayank Gupta: A lot of companies are getting into a hybrid multicloud environment as they're using GenAI.

Jason Lopez: Mayank Gupta, Director of Product Marketing at Nutanix, tells The Forecast editor-in-chief Ken Kaplan how FinOps is evolving with better observability and automated cost controls.

Mayank Gupta: They are realizing that they have to actively track these dollars they cannot just use and run this forever without having some sense of accountability.

[Related: AI is Hungry for Data, But Can IT Infrastructures Keep Up?]

You used to just track your CPU storage. Now you're tracking one more resource, which is your GPU. Similarly, when it comes to training and inference, whether you're running on prem or whether you're running on the public cloud, a lot of these FinOps tools have to have insights into your training cost and inferencing cost. Training models can be a very expensive proposition. So we are building that in the tool, and we're building these new features into our cost governance models, where we are seeing something which has come into the industry, going to be there for the very long haul. Let's bring in those models and have that. The other very interesting side of this business is, how can we make FinOps itself a lot more intelligent now that we have Gen AI? Can intelligence be built into the system where the system automatically, through agents or through intuition, through learning, understands, hey, this is the usage pattern. And if it's deviating from them, let me take some action automatically and bring it down. How can we make the job of an IT admin or a FinOps admin easier, getting all these signals from different places? And now we have AI to help. We can distill these signals in something which is easily digestible. Even on the actions that need to be taken off, the user can say, hey, take these actions based on a set of best practices, and now Gen AI can help with them. So we are looking at, how can GenAI make it more effective?

[Related: Performance Engineering in the Age of AI]

Ken Kaplan: Let's talk about maybe the biggest challenges of your customers, the biggest challenges that come to mind and you hear all the time.

Mayank Gupta: Certainly I think what's happening a lot is customers have their on-prem infrastructure, which is their data centers. They might have stuff on the edge. They definitely have stuff on the public cloud. How do I have visibility across public cloud, edge core data center visibility is the first step in you controlling your cost. The second big step is having an accountability and doing the due diligence of let's put this set of dollars to this account. Let's set this dollars to this account. Who's using what and where? That's the second important step. Once you have the visibility, once you have the accountability, how do you make sure you're optimizing those dollars? How do you set constraints and limits on those dollars? There has to be a sense of checks and balances that, and this is the industry term for this is a showback. We'll show back to you how many dollars that you'd use. Right? You might not pay me for that, but at least these are the resources that you're consuming. And then we optimize this, right? If you are wasting dollars, let's bring those resources down. If something is not needed, let's turn it down. That's the third very important step where we make sure that nothing is being wasted.

[Related: How Ivy League Dartmouth College Moved to a Future-Ready IT Platform]

Ken Kaplan: You do a lot of webinars, and you talk with professionals and also customers. (3:12) Are there some stories that come to mind about how they've applied FinOps?

Mayank Gupta: I was talking to a Philadelphia utility and the cloud bill just from one vendor had 160,000 line items of different services each costing something else, and they were getting overwhelmed because they could not A understand, and then B, how do I optimize this? So having a solution, having a product, having a tool that can ingest all this information, tag it appropriately, and then automatically give you suggestions on, Hey, you know what? These are the resources that can be reduced or eliminated or optimized. That is something which everybody needs, and I think that's just one use case. And across the board, every single time they started using our product and they realized that it was a lot easier when we tagged things under services and we said, Hey, this is your storage. This is your load balances. These are your VMs. These are your containers in a graph format, and this is where you can optimize.

And they were able to click and right-size things. So that's one example. The other case where I've talked to customers, 80%, in fact, I think it's 83% of Nutanix customers have not just their on-prem system, but they also have multiple hyperscalers. So these are multiple public clouds because all of these vendors have different clouds. The ability to see all of this in one single place is a great benefit for these vendors, and that's what finops tools provide them. You have the ability to see every single thing in one single place. That's a fun conversation for me to have. If you had this visibility, what would you do? And they say, oh, you know what? That would make me so much more empowered. That's what I see every single time.

[Related: Search for VMware Alternatives That Meet Existing and Future Needs]

Ken Kaplan: Do you see FinOps, does it help with other parts of budget control, like sustainability issues, energy consumption? And do you see FinOps maybe evolving to other places such as that?

Mayank Gupta: Yeah, a lot of our customers are seeing that, hey, we are a little mindful of their dollars. People are being mindful of their carbon footprint. And this is all coming together. So you bring a great point, Ken, that yeah, people are bringing it together and people want to see, hey, this is another evolution in me seeing off my costs, my carbon footprint, and all of those things. Yeah, absolutely.

Ken Kaplan: Yeah, it feels like maybe it starts to move into this regulatory area where you have to report out certain performance of your business and maybe FinOps helps contribute to those pure reporting that needs to be done.

Mayank Gupta: Yeah, no, absolutely. (5:50) There are regulations with some time-bound periods where these reportings are going to be as a part of your regulatory planning. (5:57) Just as you file your quarterly Q1 reports and 10K reports, this will come in there, right. (6:01) So a lot of our customers are getting ahead of the curve and they are asking these things, not just for FinOps, but also for their carbon footprint. (6:09) And that's why a lot of vendors are actively working to build that into their dashboards and their metrics that they track, yeah.

[Related: Composable Data Centers That Power Enterprise AI]

Ken Kaplan: Yeah, I mean, anything you want to say to people who are just getting into FinOps? (6:21) How do you see this evolving.

Mayank Gupta: A lot of people think that, Hey, you know what? This is a rum part of business, I kind say is that this is the kind of business which your CIO, the CFO, and don't be surprised, even the CEO would actively track. So it's a great line of business to be in because this does touch the bottom of the company, the dollars that you save, other dollars that can be applied in other parts of the department. So it's a great field to be in. A lot of companies are getting into a hybrid, multi-cloud environment. As they're using genai, they are realizing that they have to actively track these dollars. They cannot just use and run this forever without having some sense of accountability as the regulations for carbon, as the regulations for cost come even more mandatory than in that regards. It'll be a more exciting field to run. There'll be always more to be done, and there's always be an opportunity to be in the limelight because you'll be saving your company dollars and saving your line of businesses dollars, and you could be the hero.

Jason Lopez: Mayank Gupta is Director of Product Marketing at Nutanix. He spoke with The Forecast’s Ken Kaplan.  Learn more about managing FinOps with Nutanix Cloud Manager software. Search Nutanix NCM Cost Governance. This is the tech Barometer podcastI'm Jason Lopez, Check out our other stories at the forecast website which you can find:

nutanix.com/theforecastbynutanix

Upon receiving a cancer diagnosis, the first priority is to build a clinical treatment plan. But there is another equally important step in the path to recovery and well-being — supportive care.

In this episode, Les Biller from the Sheri and Les Biller Family Foundation describes the services that encompass supportive cancer care and shares how they can improve quality of life for both patients and caregivers. Individuals who are provided with proactive support can better navigate their cancer journey and remain more productive at work, improving overall health and well-being for patients and reducing costs to the employer.

Guest: Les Biller, Founding Director, The Sheri and Les Biller Family Foundation

Managing Intel’s thousands of applications and millions of IT resources (such as identities, Domain Name System (DNS) records, accounts, certificates, VMs, databases, and more) requires capabilities beyond those found in commercially available application portfolio management (APM) solutions. We have developed a custom APM framework that strictly gates the provisioning of new resources used by applications. Our goal is to provision IT resources only when an application is correctly registered and the resources are linked to a specific application. This approach to APM helps enable cost savings, creates more efficient application and resource lifecycle management, and reduces security and compliance risk.

Intel IT’s agentic GenAI platform called One AI uses open-source tools to consolidate siloed chatbots into a single, unified agentic AI platform. Although it has a single user interface, each specialized agent addresses a unique business use case and chooses the most effective large language model (LLM) for its task. Intel’s Sales and Marketing group is already using the One AI platform; we plan to scale the platform to embed GenAI into business processes to improve Intel’s productivity. One AI enables us to simplify agentic AI deployment and maintenance, drive cost and resource efficiency, and quickly deliver new GenAI use cases.