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01732 759725 INTERVIEW 42 the latest operating system onto it’ and I’m there thinking ‘OK, well maybe you should buy another piece of hardware at this point’. The real difference we made was to turn this story upside down and to lead with the software. We had the product to do that, an operating system for people to put in their old devices, but we were selling very small amounts of it – maybe 30,000 seats. No one knew how to sell it because they were locked in this hardware-selling motion. I met with Heiko (Heiko Gloge, IGEL Founder, Board Member and erstwhile co-CEO) . We had dinner and I realised that IGEL was a software company, but the go- to-market was locked in this thin client – low margin, long sales cycle, kind of brutal. I saw an opportunity to turn the exposure up on this convergence software and to go into the enterprise, because the other thing about IGEL is that they had historically been serving the smaller companies that Dell and HP weren’t paying attention to, especially in Germany where there is a big middle market. They had been Number One in Germany since 2006 but had failed three times to break into the US. There were two things Heiko hired me to do. The first was to get the US right and the second was to get the messaging right. At the time, all the marketing was done in German and it was very technical, very feature-focused. I inverted that to focus on business outcomes: IGEL saves you money; IGEL makes you more secure; IGEL delivers a better end user experience. IGEL was failing in America because it was under-resourced – they never had more than 5 or 6 people. So I said if we are going to do this, we need a marketing team, we need a channel team, we are going to have to make a lot of investment, we are going to have to remodel a whole bunch of things. It was a perfect scenario for me because I knew the channel: I had spent 20 years in the channel, including time at a big Citrix and VMWare reseller; I knew all the people in that space. I wrote a 150-page business plan and said if you want me to take this job, these are the things you have to commit to. In February, IGEL, provider of the next- gen edge OS for cloud workspaces, promoted Jed Ayres from co-CEO to global CEO, following year-on-year growth of 35% for the year ending December 31, 2019. These results included a 200% increase in software units sold, highlighting the value (and success) of IGEL’s strategy, since 2016, to pivot itself from being a hardware-centric company to a software-first business built around its IGEL OS, IGEL UD Pocket and IGEL Universal Management Suite. Technology Reseller asked Jed Ayres about this transition and other developments at the Disrupt 2020 conference in Munich. Technology Reseller (TR) : IGEL used to be known for its thin clients. Now, there is much more emphasis on the company’s software solutions for converting and controlling endpoints and accessing secure workspaces running in the datacentre and the cloud. How has this transformation come about? Jed Ayres (JA): When I joined IGEL, almost every sale was a hardware sale – say 300 euros for a piece of hardware that had a beautiful operating system and a beautiful management tool that was being updated about every 12 weeks. You would pay 300 euros for a converged device and have it for seven or eight years, fully supported. I remember in my first few weeks here, people calling up and saying ‘This is a 10-year old device and I can’t download TR : And have you stuck with that plan? JA: We have accomplished it early actually. Basically, we said we wanted to go from Number 7 to Number 3. This year we plan to go to Number 1 in the US and worldwide. TR : Have competitors like Dell and HP taken their eye off the ball? JA: Absolutely. They don’t have anything to compete with the way we are doing things and are still stuck in the rut that IGEL was in. At the end of 2019, IGEL had $150 million of revenue and most of that comes from software, which is also driving most of the profit and most of the net profit. The entire financial complexion of the company has changed as a result of selling software. Now, the long-term vision of IGEL is to move to subscriptions, which is the way Microsoft is going. TR : You mention Microsoft. It recently named IGEL as a key partner for its Desktop-as-a-service offering, Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD). What is your proposition with regards to Windows? JA: An important thing to understand with virtualising Windows applications is that we are trying to escape some of the challenges of managing Windows – to have more security, to have easier management by centralising it and to have easier deployment. One thing that has worked in our favour over the last five years is that people who are looking at virtualisation realise they should probably not have Windows on the edge of things because not to get away from Windows basically defeats the value of what they are trying to do. Microsoft has its thin operating system; it was called Windows Embedded and now it’s called Windows IoT. It’s a slimmed down 16GB operating system, but it’s still Windows. IDC has been tracking the incline of Linux and the decline of Windows and 2018 was the year when the majority of people used Linux to control these virtualised endpoints; it basically became the operating system of choice. If you are going to embrace this architecture, With Jed Ayres, CEO, IGEL Q&A Jed Ayres (l) and Heiko Gloge (r)