Nerdio recently released its 2026 Great Migration Report, a survey of enterprise EUC decision makers that found 71% of organizations now run multiple desktop virtualization or cloud desktop platforms. VMblog sat down with Scott Manchester, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Nerdio and the former Microsoft executive who co-developed Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop, to talk about what the data means and where Nerdio is headed next.
VMblog: Nerdio has been talking about “The Great Migration” for over a year. What prompted you to commission this research now?
Scott Manchester: We wanted to make sure our own strategy was informed by real-world data rather than assumptions. There’s been plenty of anecdotal conversation about licensing changes, Microsoft momentum, and whether enterprises are really leaving legacy platforms. But anecdote was driving the discussion more than evidence. So we surveyed 175 enterprise EUC decision makers at organizations with 1,000 or more employees across North America to separate perception from reality. The findings validated what many of us have been seeing firsthand, but they also sharpened the picture in ways that genuinely surprised me.
VMblog: What finding stood out most to you personally?
Manchester: Two things. First, the hybrid dependency. Nearly half of organizations still operate hybrid environments spanning cloud and on-premises. That was the whole premise behind building AVD Hybrid when I was at Microsoft; it wasn’t an obvious move for a company whose goal was getting people to the cloud, but the on-premises workload dependency is real and it isn’t disappearing. Second, the speed of what’s coming. It took a decade to get to 11% of organizations running fully cloud-based EUC. The data says that more than doubles to 23% in the next two years. That’s a decade of movement compressed into 24 months.
VMblog: The headline stat is that 71% of enterprises now run multiple EUC platforms. Should we read that as chaos or strategy?
Manchester: Strategy, and that’s an important distinction. Organizations aren’t accumulating platforms by accident. They’re deliberately running Windows 365 for some users, AVD for others, and often Citrix or Omnissa alongside, because different workloads genuinely need different solutions. The single-vendor era is largely over, and I don’t expect it to come back. What that means, though, is the challenge has moved.
Selecting the platform has become the easy part. Many organizations have already moved the workloads they understand well; the work that remains is assessing and migrating everything else. Operating a multi-platform environment with consistency, automation, and control: that’s where organizations are feeling the strain, and it’s why managing hybrid complexity showed up as the #1 barrier in the research at 47%.
Microsoft’s own breadth adds to the challenge: AVD and Windows 365, single- and multi-session, shared or dedicated, cloud apps or full desktops. That choice is a strength, but it can make it hard to land on the right configuration, which is where a trusted partner or advisor earns their keep.
VMblog: The report found licensing and pricing changes accelerated modernization for 63% of respondents. Is that the real story here?
Manchester: It’s the catalyst, not the destination. Two to three years ago, only about a third said those changes had accelerated their modernization. Now it’s nearly two-thirds. The market has clearly moved from “let’s see where this goes” to “we need to act now.” But when you ask what’s actually driving modernization, cost still matters, but it isn’t what’s driving most organizations. Modernizing legacy environments, automation and operational consistency, and security all rank substantially higher. Commercial disruption started the conversation. Better operations is how it ends.
VMblog: Respondents ranked increasing automation and AI-assisted operations as their #1 long-term priority, ahead of scalability, features, and even end-user experience. Did that surprise you?
Manchester: It would have surprised me five years ago. Today it confirms where the market’s head is. It doesn’t mean user experience stopped mattering; desktop virtualization has always been about user experience. It means modern cloud-native platforms have matured to the point where decision makers consider scalability, features, and user experience standard, which frees them to focus on the thing that’s actually hard now: operational maturity. Teams are managing more platforms, more deployment models, and more change than ever, and they’re telling us the way through is automation and AI doing the work that used to take specialized knowledge and hours of manual effort.
That said, people also want to keep humans in charge of decisions. They want AI agents providing guidance and recommended remediations, and I expect agents to progress from human-in-the-loop, to human-on-the-loop, and eventually to autonomous action as trust and accuracy improve. I see AI and automation as complementary parts of modernization, and the survey showed strong interest in both.
VMblog: That brings us to Nerdio Compass, which you just launched. What is it?
Manchester: Compass turns the lights on. It’s available in public preview at no cost through Microsoft Marketplace. There’s no agent to install, and you can get a first assessment in about five minutes. It connects to your existing environment and maps what you actually have running. Today that means Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops and Citrix DaaS, alongside your AVD and Windows 365 estate, with Omnissa Horizon support coming next and Amazon WorkSpaces after that.
From there, Compass maps everything to the right Windows Cloud option: these users fit Windows 365, these fit a multi-session AVD environment, and these should stay on-premises with AVD Hybrid. It also shows what an environment actually costs to run day to day, which is a different number than what the licenses cost, and it assesses the Citrix policy configuration sitting underneath a migration plan.
Discovery matters because most organizations assume they know what they’re running, and that’s the problem. Long-standing VDI environments, especially Citrix deployments, are mission-critical, deeply integrated, and built up over years of change, which makes them hard to see end to end. Today’s IT teams often don’t know why or how earlier generations deployed them, so the first job is establishing what exists, how it’s actually used, and how to map it to a future design without creating downtime or security gaps.
The Great Migration Report also found that the biggest barriers are hybrid complexity, workload dependencies, and skill gaps, and every one of those is a visibility problem before it’s a technology problem. In my experience, about 80% of the work is understanding what you have and what the economics of moving would be. Answer those questions up front, from measured reality instead of guesswork, and organizations move considerably faster.
VMblog: How much faster, practically?
Manchester: We’re seeing migration timelines compress from something like six months to two. Part of that is the discovery work being done for you, and part is the approach: the plan exports directly into Nerdio Manager, and we rebuild the environment natively on Windows Cloud while the existing Citrix environment keeps running. You test and validate the new environment, then tear the old one down.
There’s very little outage risk because nothing gets torn down until the replacement is proven. For organizations that hit a Citrix renewal and reluctantly write the check because they’re “too busy to think about migrating.” Those are the organizations this approach unblocks.
VMblog: What should people watch for next from Nerdio?
Manchester: The next six months are going to be busy. We’ll be sharing more at Microsoft Ignite, and NerdioCon will be a big moment: platform changes, new service offerings, and some new flexible deployment models for our services. We’ve also building out our product team, a significant group from my former Microsoft organization has joined, including leaders from the Windows 365, AVD Hybrid, and Intune teams. The through-line for all of it is the same thing the research told us: the next era of EUC won’t be won by whoever migrates first. It’ll be won by whoever operates best.
