>> Live for London, England, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference Europe 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to the theCUBE here in London, England for Nutanix .NEXT 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost, Joep Piscaer. Happy to welcome you to the program, first time guest. Simon Townsend was the chief marketing officer of EMEA for IGEL. Thanks so much for joining us. No, thanks very much for having me. All right, so I see your team has a booth here and it's the end-user computing space, the EUC, as we look at it... We look at... The VDI marketplace is one that's been around for quite a while, but EUC has been heating up quite a bit. Maybe help set the stage for us as to what you're seeing in the marketplace, what's so important now. >> Yeah, I mean, the EUC market's served me very well across my career. I've been in it for probably near on 20 years and for the majority of that, I've seen Citrix dominate that market. When we talk about EUC, we typically are talking about desktop virtualization or terminal services, as it has been for many years. EUC, to me, interestingly enough, probably extends out to these types of devices that you've got in front of you as well now, right? We shouldn't think EUC is just desktop virtualization or desktop as a service. It's how we deliver the workspace, how we deliver applications and data to our users. But yeah, in the last couple of years, we've really started to see a few new, big players come into the market. And I think as we look forward now to 2019, we're now starting to see even more technology and new vendors come into this space as well. >> I actually had a friend of the program, Christian Riley, who is actually now with Citrix, had him on the program two years ago at the Nutanix European show in Vienna. He actually had educated me early on, back when he was at Bechtel, and he said, "We did a disservice to the market calling it "desktop virtualization." Because it's really not about the desktop. It's about the applications and how I get them. And therefore, if I can make that experience on a tablet or on a phone, get it to the mobile workforce, as it were, we're breaking down it into pieces and just enabling the workforce. And therefore, that end-user computing was a better nomenclature. And therefore, architecture's changed greatly from what we called VDI back in the day. >> You're exactly right. And I think as we move forward, at the moment, end user computing... A lot of organizations who historically have had separate VDI teams and separate Windows desktop teams, those two parts of the organization within IT, have actually come together now. And now we have Windows engineering or end user compute teams. But what's interesting is not just the new technology and, perhaps, new organizations, vendors that are coming into the market, but also what's going on on the endpoint at the moment with regard to to Windows. Right? Microsoft is moving very much to this Windows as a service. Lots of organizations are still considering how they're gonna get to Windows 10, but more importantly, how they're gonna deal with Windows 10 once they get there. And IT, to be frank, has been used to building a machine, putting an operating system on it, putting applications on it, giving it to a user, and saying, "Hey, come back in four years time "when it breaks." And Microsoft is changing that. They want to deliver updates significantly quicker as I'm sure everybody's that's watching knows. And I think, actually, that alone coupled with security, which tends to be a key priority for the CIO at the moment as well, that is actually driving some of this change and this fact that this market is heating up again. Because people are saying, "Well, how can I challenge how I deliver applications again? "How can I overcome some of the challenges that Windows 10 "and desktop endpoint management presents me? "And how can I deal with it differently?" >> Yeah, gosh, I think back to... I used to read Bryden Madden when I wanted to learn about VDI He said, "All I need is Microsoft to flip the switch." Because Microsoft Licensing was one of the major things holding us back >> Yes, it was. >> I give Microsoft great kudos as to the push that they've done to sass-ify the world. They not only gave the green light, but they're pushing customers to move to Office 365. And therefore, it's moving to a sass world And so, it sounds like that same floodgate is helping in the EUC space. >> 100%. I mean, if you roll the clock back to Ignite, they announced their Windows Virtual Desktop service that sits on Azure, and about how organizations can (mumbles) for a much lower price point. And then only last week, they did the acquisition of FSLogix, who again, enhance how things like Office 365 are being delivered on those types of non persistent platforms. So Microsoft are putting some investment and some time into desktop as a service or what we would know as VDI, which to be fair, in my opinion, is probably the first time we've seen that in the 20 years I've been working in the EUC space. For many, many years, Microsoft sort of sat back and said, "Well, we've got this terminal services technology, "but somebody else, and A and other vendors "can build that market and sell that product." And now, obviously, Microsoft (mumbles) service. So, things are gonna get interesting. Are they suddenly gonna take over the world? Probably not. People are still gonna wanna deploy things on-prem. People are still gonna want to utilize technologies like Nutanix to deliver a scalable performant desktop at a known price point. It's gonna be a hybrid, but I think it definitely validates the market, and it makes sure that when we're talking about end user compute, VDI or desktop as a service, and virtualized (mumbles) is a serious and key consideration. Yeah. >> But it does move the goal post from it being a problem of hardware, a problem of the operating system, towards solving problems around the applications so that you deliver, solving problems around security or latency. So how does that changing market affect IGEL? >> How does it affect us as (mumbles) organization? IGEL have been around for over 20 years producing... Let's not beat around the bush, it's thin client technology. But as you scratch the surface and you look into what this organization is actually built on, it's actually a operating system organization. The fact that we've got some hardware, the fact that it's German engineered hardware and that we ship hundreds of thousands of these units every year, that's great. And those thin clients, if you like, are provided a way in which organizations can access those virtual desktops, whether that be Citrix, VMware or whatever else the market might offer. But the strength of what we're now doing is in this operating system. And whether that's an operating system that we are delivering via SCCM or an endpoint management tool or whether it's on a USB key, it's the operating system. And the simplicity and the security about Linux space operating system that is changing how people think about the endpoint. And so when I couple what's going on in the virtualization, desktop as a service space, and then also the challenges that people are facing with security and endpoint management, all of a sudden, we have a very unique proposition. It's slightly disruptive because, ultimately, you're saying, "Well, does Windows belong on the endpoint anymore?" Right? There's a strong argument to say that, Microsoft now validating it, saying that Windows probably deserves to belong in the data canter where it's a lot easier to manage, it's a lot easier to patch and deploy applications to, and what you actually need is something that is simple and secure on the endpoint that you're not wasting weeks' worth of time on to try and keep it up to date or to patch it. And it's that operating system that IGEL is providing our customers with that extends the life of the endpoint, but also offers significantly lower operational costs. >> All right, so Simon, Nutanix did a good job of simplifying a good chunk of the stack here. Update us on the relationship, where you see the joint customers, where that's leading in the marketplace. >> Yeah, I've really enjoyed yesterday and today, by the way, at this event. And one of the key reasons for that is not just the joint customers that I get to talk to, but more importantly, the joint partners that we get to talk to. I think there's three words I would use, simple, scalable, and performant. And I think when you're delivering a desktop or applications and data services (mumbles) a user, you want something that's easy and simple to do. You want something that is easily scalable, both up and down. But also something that is performant. And I think when you combine... Particularly historic, when you look at combining Nutanix, Citrix, and IGEl, all of a sudden, you've got all the right ingredients there to provide a very simple, secure and performant environment. As I said, a lot of the people that are here today, joint customers that are using our technologies, we're worry about how we can simplify and secure the EDGE. They're worrying about... Nutanix is really looking at how we simplify and scale the data center and how those desktops are delivered. We've got a whole host of joint activity in the market that goes on, lots of joint customer case studies. But more importantly, I think... And kudos to a lot of the partners that are here. It's the partners that tend to pull a lot of these things together. It's very easy for IGEL and Citrix and Nutanix to say, "Let's work together, do some joint marketing, "et cetera, and go to market." But it's the partners, the valuated reseller, the systems integrators, they're the brains that are pulling these together. And actually, they're removing the complexity of what the products are and the technologies underneath, and providing a solution to their customers. >> All right, Simon Townsend, really appreciate the updates on IGEL, for Joep Piscaer. I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more coverage here from Nutanix 2018 in London. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (slick electronic music)

(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)