(intense orchestral music) >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're in our Palo Alto studio havin' a CUBEConversation, we're getting ready for the madness of the fall conference season to hit us full force, so we're excited to have things a little bit quiet this week and have a special guest, he's Jed Ayres, he is the North American CEO, and the Global CMO for IGEL, great to see you. >> Well, great to be here, thanks for inviting me, I know a lot of luminaries in the tech industry have sat in this chair so, >> That's right. >> It's an honor to have a chance to chat with you today. >> Well thank you, I appreciate that. So give a, for the people that aren't familiar with IGEL, give us kind of the IGEL 101. >> Yeah, so I wasn't actually that familiar with IGEL two years ago, and I've spent, you know over a decade in the end user compute space, so they were a little bit of a mystery I think to most people in the US; however, the companies been around for over 20 years, they're actually the number one Thin Client player in Germany since 2006. So what they really specialize in is a Linux, read-only operating system, that's fused to a management console that just really works for these cloud delivered desktops and applications, right? And so, a little bit shrouded in sort of this world of Thin Client hardware, but the company is really a software company. And so, the opportunity for me was to really help them build their US operation, but probably more importantly, put the right sort of US marketing prowess and kind of English first, we got out and kind of re-wrote their marketing playbook, and we really have exposed the IP of this beautiful, light, Linux OS, and the management tool which you know couldn't have been at a better time in terms of what's happening in the industry. >> So just to call those three things out specifically, so it's a light OS, that's Linux based, for x86 devices, >> Exactly. >> And so you're workin' with Citrix and VMware, and a lot of those platforms. >> I mean there's 17 different protocols that it works with out of the box, so, really when you think about you know Microsoft RDP, Parallels, Ericom, some of the, some things that you know, back in the history of end user compute, we still, out of the box, are synced up with those technologies. But the primary ones today are Citrix, and VMware, and Microsoft, and yeah we'll soon be doing some things with Amazon as well workin' with them to be their first Linux client for workspaces, so. >> So, we talked a little bit before we turned the cameras on, you know the bring your own device thing, we saw it first in mobile phones in a big, big way, you know people are bringing their laptops and all kinds of interesting stuff. At the same time you've got kind of this cloud move with the centralized control, and you don't have all this kind of rogue stuff, and you know some of the clouds like I don't have the right excel spreadsheet on this laptop, it's on my home desktop. So you guys are kind of riding that wave, but enabling a really interesting play on it, you enable a BYOD, but you actually have an opportunity to basically supplant that, overlay, I don't know what's the right verb, to enable a secure, lightweight, centralized control. >> Yeah, so there's really three ways to get this operating system, right? You can get it on the traditional hardware form factors that you find for most Thin Clients, right, we've got kind of a entry level, mid, high-level all in one. And then we have the ability to convert a device, so we would actually wipe the entire operating system off the device, and just, you'll have a last boot to the IGEL OS. But then, really what, two years ago we came out with this, and this is what we call the UD Pocket, it's about the size of your thumbnail, it's a hardened USB read-only stick, it has the same OS that the hardware has and the converter software has, it's just a bootable, right? So I could plug this into that laptop you have there, and you would boot to a secure Linux operating system, and we'd point it to whatever cloud delivery service that you're, you know, theCUBE was using, so if it was Citrix or VMware, so. Yeah, this has opened up a lot of new use cases, it's sort of changed how people think about Thin Clients too right, you sort of think Thin Client, kiosk task worker, not necessarily the CEO of a company or a knowledge worker, or a physician running an emergency room might want to have their own device, same device they use at home. So yeah, this has opened up a lot of interesting use cases: contractors, interns, we even see it being used for people in environments, in hospitals, where they keep a stash of these, for high availability, I guess ransomware. Right, you've seen these hospitals basically being attacked, what they would do is go and put these in, boot to a secondary epic or server environment, and you know this is kind of their way of not knowing which device is infected, they can just easily bypass that device, boot to this read-only operating system. >> It's a real game changer in terms of opening up >> It really is. >> Not only, not only, removing all the vulnerabilities that come with with kind of a classic laptop situation, but even giving the things new life, right, enabling them to kind of be reborn, really as a Thin, or excuse me as a light client. >> Yeah, we see three reasons why people are are buying IGEL today. And it's fun for me 'cause I get go out you know talk to a lot of customers and partners, you know we're 100% partner oriented organization, which is fun for me since I spent 20 years as a partner. But what's been really fun is that it's a C-level conversation, you wouldn't think Thin Client, I can go talk to a CEO or a CFO or a CIO, but this is a game changer. And it's really three things, right, we can save people money, which people like that, right, when you can save a company from having to go purchase 5000 new endpoints; we just had a hospital in Texas, they were about to buy 5000 new endpoints, that's about five million dollars, right? We walked in and sold them 5000 convertor licenses, for about a half a million dollars, so they saved four and a half million dollars in not having to buy new hardware. And then, you know the second piece is the operational headcount savings. When you think about managing Windows today, it's you know maybe great organizations one person can do 500 devices maybe; if you're lucky and you really have all the right tools. With IGEL we have numbers like one person managing 30000 devices, in retail, you know places where you don't have a lot of smart hands. And then the third reason why, you know we can talk to a lot of CSOs now too, right, as people are gravitating towards Linux, because of the challenges with Windows, and managing Windows, and securing windows. And Linux, when I first started people said kind of don't talk about Linux, you know, it's maybe kind of a bad word and people get you know scared. Today we walk in and we lead with this is a very mature Linux operating system, and we have a fantastic security roadmap... >> And 20 years of history, right? So you've got institutional, a foundation that you can build off of. It's funny on the Linux thing right, 'cause I'm sure they said the same thing when they wanted to roll Linux into the data centers back in the day. >> Exactly. (Jeff laughs) Yeah, this is the year where we believe, and IDC is tracking this pretty closely, that this is the year where on the endpoints of this Thin Client, you're going to see Windows is going to be surpassed by Linux; and that tracker that IDC does doesn't even track the ones that are being repurposed, right, where Linux is going in because it's going in on old hardware. So just on the new hardware it's going to be about 40% Linux and 40% Windows, and then there's you know some other you know operating systems out there, but. Yeah, this is, this is an exciting time to be in this space, right? We look at the challenges of managing Windows 10, we look at the security issues of GDPR, you know and people are just really gravitating towards towards this idea of a Linux OS. >> Right. It's funny, it's not, not directly related, but corollary, you know as Google really pushes Chromebooks as part of their enterprise play as a much more secure platform with central control, and in fact I think Diane mentioned at the Google Cloud show that we use like 37 different basically online applications to get work done these days, whether you're in your Salesforce application, or Marketo, or Gmail Suite, or you know. So we're all basically browser based application delivery, so it really does open up this opportunity for the incline 'cause you don't really need that much function, >> Exactly. >> But you know it's serving up that central HTTP. >> I talk to people all the time who have fancy, thousands of dollar laptops, and their like, all they do is hit a browser, right? And the reality is, is that's where we're going right, it's a pane of glass accessing data somewhere else, an application somewhere else right? But the underlying operating system still needs to be secured. If you look at sort of the priorities of CIOs today, endpoint--securities number one right, and inside of that it's typically endpoint security, as you know the most important piece of it right? And so that's really where IGEL is having a wonderful time taking tremendous market share, you know we've moved, in just the time that I've been in the US, from seven to three, just in the sort of hardware part of it. And we're just having a lot of fun growing an organization that's, you know and you're growin' in triple digits, it's kind of a Cinderella moment for your career, right, so. >> Plus different kind of challenges. (laughs) >> Exactly. Exactly. >> So is there a particular vertical, is there a particular kind of business group within the companies that you guys use as a point of entry? Or, I mean how do you, what's kind of your go-to-market, >> Yeah, so there's some very specific-- >> 'cause it's a huge opportunity right. >> Yeah, very specific verticals where we're having great success in: hospitals are number one, we've sold to 143 hospitals in the US, if you can believe that, and we're in pretty, and that was just last year. >> 140? Just in a typical, typical, average, whatever metric you want to use, is how many OS's going into a hospital? >> I mean, last quarter we sold about 10000 into one hospital, you know it's usually anywhere from 2500 to 5000, 10000. And then you know these hospitals are all merging with each other, that's another value of IGEL is that they're all kind of combing, and as they combine, IGEL can take all this heterogeneous hardware, heterogeneous operating systems, homogenize it, make it easy to manage and secure. >> Putting it all back in the same spot. >> So yeah, it's definitely healthcare, healthcare's number one, but we're also doing very well in retail, very well in finance, kind of banks, really well in higher education; and like I said, we're getting to talk to at the C-level, right, they really love the savings, right? Not only are the saving on the hardware, but they can get rid of antivirus, disk encryption, they can redeploy people to do things other than patching devices. We have some brilliant things in terms of the technology; you mentioned we have the IP of 20 years, the three guys who wrote the code at the very beginning of the 20 years ago actually they were with an IGEL version before the current iteration. So literally in the end of the '90s they were, idea was let's build an operating system for the internet, which you know they may have been a bit ahead of their time in 1999, but those three guys are actually still in the building. There's a hundred engineers in Germany that are sort of iterating on this and solving for this problem, and I think they've, you know now with the US operation and the new marketing, we're kind of, it's just a perfect storm I would say. >> And then with 5G and again the increasing importance of cloud-based applications, whether it be Salesforce, or whether it be, whatever that's delivered through Amazon, I mean you guys are in a very good spot. >> Yeah, and it's, I would tell you it's not just about, you know it's this operating system fused to a management console, but then it's sort of the curation of that, right? Like okay, every 12 weeks I'm going to push you a new OS, and I have an elegant way to get that to 10's of thousands of devices. So we're also starting to see managed service providers, right, the guys that are under contract to manage millions of devices. You know the DxEs and Wipros and IBM Global Services, those guys are starting to really look at IGEL also, right, 'cause, for the same reasons the enterprises who are managing large environments; so that's been an exciting part of our growth as well. >> Yeah, and that's another huge validation point, 'cause those guys don't make small bets, they only make big bets. >> Exactly and market's sort of hardened into their architecture, which is great. >> Alright, Jed, well it sounds like a great story, and we look forward to watching it unfold over the next couple years. >> Yeah! Well hopefully, for those of the people who are out watchin' we'd love to have them come by; we're doing an event in Las Vegas inside the Mandalay Bay, at VMworld, we actually have our own event, rightfully called disrupt. And we're going to be there from the 26th to the 29th, and-- >> What venue? >> In the Border Grill, so we actually taken over this restaurant, that's kind of like right you know in the footpath of-- >> In the hallway, right? >> In the hallway yeah. >> That's the inside, I know exactly where that is. >> So yeah, we're actually takin' a page out of your book, we're going to have a little EUC TV, so we'll be interviewing people about you know what they're doing to solve for their end user compute challenges, and talkin' to the ecosystem; we have an innovation theater in the Border Grill, we're going to throw a pool party at the end, out at one of those beautiful pools that no one ever gets to go to in Vegas. (both laugh) >> We look at it though as we walk just past the Border Grill, you can find a long beautiful look at that pool. >> So we're going to try to take advantage of it, although it'll be a bit hot out there, yeah it's a hundred plus degrees in Vegas this time of year, but we're going to have some fun. You know, you got to do that a little bit, work hard, play hard. >> Alright, we'll see ya in Vegas in a couple weeks! >> Yep! Look forward to it. >> Thanks for stopping by. >> Thanks very much. >> Alright he's Jed, I'm Jeff, you're watchin' the CUBEConversation from our Palo Alto studios, thanks for watchin', I'll see ya next time. (intense orchestral music)