Technology Reseller - v30

technologyreseller.co.uk INTERVIEW 43 is predicting to do 50 million over the next 3 years. Today, we are the only company with a good Linux connection to WVD, so if we get just half of Microsoft’s figure it would make us a $2.5 billion company. If we get 15% or 16%, we are still on target. TR : With all your focus on software, do you plan to remain in hardware? JA: I said it on the stage; we don’t want to get out of hardware. We think the largest companies enjoy having a single company to deal with. Eventually sweated devices do die and at that point they can buy a box from us and just move the licence off the other device. TR : But the hardware proportion of your revenue must be going down... JA: It is. Of the 749,000 IGEL OS seats shipped last year, 500,000 were software standalone and 249,000 were with a piece of hardware. The revenue proportion now is probably about 60% software and 40% hardware. And in three years’ time, it will be 20% hardware. It’s possible that you are going to see some relationships develop that are kind of like what we do with LG today, where we work with them and certify their devices, and more OEM-type relationships too. That’s 24 or 36 months away. In the OS space, getting to the 2 million mark will be very disruptive, when you consider that Dell and HP sell about 1 million thin clients a year. Once we start to you want a thin, light, secure, highly manageable operating system on the edge, and that looks a lot like IGEL. It’s important to understand it’s a cubed equation: it’s the operating system; it’s the idea that any x86 device with 2GB RAM and a hard drive can be used to deliver from on prem or the cloud; and it’s the management facility. That’s the other magic of IGEL. I can go into a large bank or retail organisation and I can build a profile that can control 7,000 different settings on that device. That profile is like an Active Directory. Once I have saved the profile for a company’s stores in New York, say, I can drag it into a folder and, without even restarting, the device takes on those settings and configuration. This drives huge operational benefits, including reductions in help desk tickets and the number of people needed to manage it. Luxottica, the luxury eyewear business, has 30,000 end points connected to cash registers in 5,000 locations with no IT support, like at Heathrow Terminal 2, and these are managed by just one person. The ratio for fat clients to people in a really good department is 250:1 and we have taken it to 30,000:1. TR : You had a turnover of $150 million in 2019. Why are you so confident that IGEL will become a $1 billion company? JA: We have modelled it out. We sell for about $100 a seat right now, so we would need to sell 10 million licences. Microsoft double or triple the TAM (total addressable market) they have enjoyed it will be a historic moment. If they are smart they will ask ‘why don’t we just OEM for IGEL, like we do for Microsoft?’. They would do much better to recognise us and think of us more like a Microsoft. I think that will be an investment we start to make more aggressively in the near-future – an OEM programme that makes it interesting for a hardware vendor, because there are other hardware vendors that are approaching us now. Dell and HP are neck and neck and whichever decides to use IGEL first will become the definitive hardware leader. TR : Might you also change the way you sell hardware? You mentioned earlier that IGEL was planning to move towards subscriptions. Is that for the hardware too? JA: Definitely. You have to go through this valley of darkness on the financial side, which changes how you recognise revenue, how you pay your reps, how you work through the channel. Everything in the channel is set up for perpetual up-front margin, and we have to engineer it so that we can invest together with partners towards what will turn out to be a win:win for everyone. Simpler on-boarding In April, IGEL announced a new version of its next-gen OS for cloud workspaces – IGEL OS version 11.03.500 – that makes it simpler for partners and customers to onboard end-users with IGEL OS. This includes enabling home workers to utilise IGEL OS as a secure workspace with access to Office 365, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) and collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom. In addition to support for Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD), as well as Citrix Workspace and VMware Horizon 7, the new IGEL OS boasts two key enhancements for organisations looking to establish and expand their IGEL footprint. These are: 1 Custom partition capabilities at no additional cost. Custom partitions allow non-standard applications or protocols, e.g. a ‘legacy’ application or a new connection to a system or workload, to be supported by IGEL OS and IGEL Universal Management Suite (UMS), until they are included as standard applications in a subsequent OS release. This is not a new capability, but it is the first time it has been included as standard within IGEL Workspace Edition. Before, organisations requiring custom partition capabilities would have to purchase a subscription to IGEL’s Enterprise Management Pack; and 2 IGEL Starter License. By giving 30 days use of the IGEL Workspace Edition, without the need for activation or registration of a new installation, this license makes it quicker and easier for IT teams to convert hardware endpoints on the corporate network or at employees’ homes into IGEL OS- powered devices using the IGEL OS Creator tool included in IGEL Workspace Edition. A full-featured evaluation licence is available for 90 days by registering with IGEL via the wizard inside IGEL OS. www.igel.com Continued...