045-jed-ayres

IGEL, The next Generation Edge Operating System for Cloud Workspaces

A discussion with IGEL CEO Jed Ayres

John DeBevois: Greetings everyone. And welcome to another serving of Bizness Soup talk radio. If it’s in business, it’s Bizness Soup. I’m your host John DeBevois. Make the impossible possible. Those words came from the founding father of our next guest’s company, IGEL technology. Jed Ayres, it’s newly crown CEO will be sharing what was seemingly impossible, but a vision 20 years ago, and is now your opportunity, a small business opportunity, to control not just one or two, but countless number of computers from one secure location. That’s right. IGEL Technology bringing you the tips, tools, and techniques of secure computing from their platform, right here on Bizness Soup.

Jed, welcome to this serving of Bizness Soup.

Jed Ayres: Thank you so much. Great to be here.

John DeBevois: It’s a pleasure to have you here. And right on your website, your founder has this great statement. It’s called make the impossible possible. What is it that Heiko Gloge, the founder of this company in Germany, what was the impossibility that he made possible? What is IGEL?

Jed Ayres: I think obviously we take that ethos into almost anything we’re trying to tackle. When you think about it in the context of what IGEL actually does, it was this idea that IGEL can have a profound impact on how people consume cloud services and ultimately the whole experience that they have when they’re sitting behind a computer and attaching to all these cloud services. Whether they’re coming out of Microsoft or Amazon or Citrix or VMware. That was their vision, was that, “Hey, you should have this super tuned, highly secure operating system, that by the way, isn’t Windows. It’s a Linux operating system that’s very hardened and purpose built for that.

So that was his vision 20 years ago. And obviously for a young man in Germany to think that he could have an impact on the stage of computing, that might’ve been a fairly audacious goal. But I can tell you as someone that’s come alongside him in the last four years, that’s exactly what’s happening. The world is changing and it’s certainly changing even faster than we ever thought it would with COVID.

John DeBevois: The pandemic is teaching people that they can continue to work, but in a different work space. It’s giving them opportunities that were always there, they just didn’t take advantage of it and then they were forced into the platform.

Jed Ayres: Exactly. I think we have some great stories about this, John, where leaders just sort of thought, “Hey, these people need to get into this office five, six, 10,000 of them a day, and I need to be able to see them and that’s how we’re going to be successful.” And I think it almost shocked some of those leaders when they figured out, “Wow, the planet’s better off, my people are better off, and ultimately as we readjust to this new normal, the companies are going to be a major beneficiary too.” And the customers, most importantly. We’ve seen

environments where call centers, the metrics, every metric that they measure these people on are going up. Customer sat, number of tickets closed, all the things they look at. Suddenly in the home environment actually went up. I think the days of sending five, 10,000 people to an office to stare at a screen every day and having a desk for all 10, 20,000 of those people, those days are over. And you’re going to see people adjust to this new normal that says, “Okay, people come back and shifts and we don’t need as much office space.” And they start to think about commercial office space very differently.

John DeBevois: That was my thought was that we’re going to be seeing commercial office space, the big high towers, perhaps being looked at differently because the businesses have realized, “You know what? People work better and cheaper for me to be working at home.”

Jed Ayres: And it’s better for the planet. I can tell you, I have an office that’s right downtown San Francisco. Right in the heart of … It’s where IBM Watson is, LinkedIn, Slack, Facebook. I’m right on that street, right where the Salesforce tower is. And it is amazing to me, that all of these companies have basically told their workers don’t come back here until at least at the earliest next year.

John DeBevois: Wow.

Jed Ayres: It’s quite astonishing. It’s going to take some time to recalibrate what those, say once thriving, metropolitan office areas look like. They’re just going to change.

John DeBevois: It’s certainly brought in a different look for those of us, like myself, who work from home. So many people in the high towers were looking at us going, “Oh, you work at home. It sounds like a hobby.” Well, no, it’s not. It’s just I’ve been very fortunate to always do that, and now everybody in the workforce is now in their home. And I’m very entertained by some of the sound effects I get when I’m on the phone with a major CEO and there’s a kid riding a big wheel or something across the floor in the background.

Jed Ayres: Yeah. I think that’s part of the sort of like … You got to lean into that though. This is the real world, it’s authentic, it’s not so polished, it’s not perfect. I’ve had my cat jump up on my desk and he starts meowing and trying to take over the podcast.

John DeBevois: And my audience knows that if they happen to hear a horse in the background, well, that’s my home based business. We’re talking with Jed Ayres. He is the newly crowned CEO of IGEL technology company. And 20 years ago, I was just barely operating on a Windows 3.1 operating system, and here your founder is talking about cloud space. I didn’t even know that the internet was available, let alone cloud space. How did that evolve into cloud space? And how does that work for say a small business operating off the cloud?

Jed Ayres: You know they say John, “Everything old is new again.” So if you really go back to the early days of computing, you have this idea that there was a million dollar computer on the other side of the wall. And the idea was, “All right, we’re going to stretch the computing of that. And we’re going to emulate that to a terminal.” And that is sort of what a thin client was. Was this purpose built device that could actually emulate that if you think about green screens. That was the early days of what that looked like. And so if you fast forward to the idea that that mainframe that was sitting on the other side of the wall is now in the cloud, it’s this whole idea of a network of compute and storage that’s sitting somewhere else and connected to your device. That’s the world that we’re headed towards.

And so there’s this intersection of the Bill Gates vision that said, “Hey,” for 35 years he said, “Hey, you need to have really big operating, powerful operating system on your device.” Personal computer revolution we lived through in the last 35 years. Steve Bohmer carried on the Bill Gates torch, that said, “Hey, you need to buy a more powerful device, an Intel device typically, or X86 powered device. And you need to put a Microsoft operating system on it.”

John DeBevois: Well, more power. It’s always better to have more power.

Jed Ayres: Yeah. More power. So it was basically this sort of every three year cycle, with a bigger, newer operating system and a fresh, more powerful chip set. And it’s Moore’s law. Every 18 months, things got faster and we’ve been on this sort of cycle. Well, along comes the cloud and it basically says, “Hey, it might be more efficient for all of you to put all of these applications, all your data up in the cloud, and then that basically gives you the question that says, “Do you really need this extraordinarily expensive device on the edge that has this huge processor and this unwieldy operating system that’s become hard to manage, secure, patch, maintain. And so that’s where we find ourselves square in the middle of this vortex of what COVID’s creating. It’s this whole new architecture that says, “You want to work on any device, anywhere, and you want to do it securely? Well, have this hyper tuned, hardened Linux operating system that’s connected to those cloud services.” And that’s what IGEL has been working on for 20 years.

Our brilliant moment was when the founder decided like, “Okay, we make them, and today we sell them on a piece of hardware, a thin client.” He said, “Let’s figure out how to take that operating system, this Linux operating system, off that box and be able to put it on anyone’s hardware.” And that happened in 2011, I came along in 2016 and transformed the company by basically saying, “That’s all we’re going to sell. We’re going to basically turn this into a software company. Really don’t care who’s hardware goes on. Yes, we make great hardware. We make these things called thin clients that last 10 years, and they come with the operating system.” But the more powerful value proposition was put this on any piece of hardware that you have sitting out there and connect it to the cloud. We’ve doubled the company in the last four years and made it a lot

more profitable, obviously, because we’re not attached to hardware. It’s a software store.

John DeBevois: We’re talking with Jed Ayres, the CEO of gel just came on not too long ago as the CEO, and your vision, as we were talking about, is the evolution of right from your website of the future of workspace. If I’m a small business and I’m looking to utilize your services, what kind of business am I looking to operate, or am I operating? And how are you going to make that wheel that I talk about so often, how are you going to make that business wheel of mine turn better, faster or smoother?

Jed Ayres: Historically, John, we’ve been in the areas of retail, healthcare, finance, insurance, and really where we come in and help is anybody that’s building a company that doesn’t want to deal with the sort of complexity and security challenges of managing 10, 20, 50, 100, 100,000 end points that are running Windows. Windows by its very nature, Windows 10 actually, is the newest version of Windows, and it’s the last version of Windows. And really what’s happened with Windows is that it’s getting so big now and they’re updating it so often that it becomes really challenging for a small business, especially just sort of keep up with that. That has maybe a limited IT staff. So the alternative to that is don’t use Windows there, and actually put this hardened IGEL Linux operating system that’s super easy to maintain. We have retailers like [Ludsatika 00:10:13], you probably know these guys that they have the Sunglasses Hut, Pearl Vision …

John DeBevois: Oh wow. Yeah.

Jed Ayres: They have 30,000 devices, and of course these are in locations that are airports and kiosks, and they don’t want to be running Windows on those places where they have very few IT people to support them. So they put this IGEL device, running an IGEL operating system, in those places. And then they’re literally managing 30,000 devices with less than one person that’s sort of part time looking after them. That’s unheard of, obviously. For anyone in your audience that’s trying to manage a fleet of even just a few Windows devices, it can become very quickly, a full time job to keep them patched and secured and managed.

So that’s really the value we bring is just to sort of set up that architecture for you so that your applications, and every organization typically has four or five applications is the heartbeat of their organization. And people may be trying to migrate as many of those applications to cloud delivered applications that come through the browser Windows applications are around for a lot of companies for a long time. So our architecture allows you to put those into the cloud and then get away from Windows on the edge. That’s our religious moment, is where we’re going to make your life a lot better. There’s so many security challenges today with managing Windows.

John DeBevois: Let me ask you this, let me bring it down to the level of my audience. The most prolific small business out there are the restaurants. And of course during the pandemic, they have really been squeezed and challenged. How would my audience, say of restaurant owners, that have three, four, maybe five restaurants, how would they use this system to help manage it from the point of sale machine all the way back to the back office?

Jed Ayres: When you think about how you use IGEL, any device that you have today that’s running Windows, so a lot of people may even have in your audience, maybe are sitting on devices that are maybe even running Windows 7, which went end of life and is no longer supported by Microsoft at the beginning of this year, and so anywhere they would have Windows in any of its different formats, whether it’s 7 or 10, you would essentially replace that with this IGEL operating system. And then you would have a much leaner, more secure, much more easy to manage operating system. And then you would have to figure out how to consume your applications out of a cloud service from a data center somewhere. But you would take your Windows applications that are running on those devices, potentially locally, and move them to the cloud.

And that’s really what we’re helping people with is the journey to get to a place where all your data is sitting somewhere secure, all your applications are sitting somewhere to be consumed directly to any device, anywhere. That’s the sort of continuity that companies need today to give them the most flexibility. But specifically for a restaurant, you probably have some accounting, you have some point of sale technologies, you have inventory tools …

John DeBevois: Oh, there are so many systems on a restaurant’s computer screen. It’s usually twice as big, as at least twice as big, as their menu out on the other side of the door.

Jed Ayres: So you’d want to figure out how to get as many of those being delivered from the cloud, essentially. Or from a data center or from even a server that would sit somewhere centrally in your restaurant. And then the idea would be just eliminate the sort of complexity of dozens of devices that are running Windows.

I’m sure your listeners that are tuned into the, or have a responsibility for dealing with fleets of Windows devices, especially if they’ve even made the move to Windows 10, they realized what the challenges are around that. Microsoft has doubled the number of updates that they’re delivering to those devices that are running Windows 10, it’s like painting the Golden Gate Bridge, John. No sooner do you update it, you need to update it again. And that’s quite challenging, especially for a restaurant where it might take an hour for it to update and it may want to update it right in the middle of your restaurant shift. That could be catastrophic.

John DeBevois: So instead of having to update, say, every restaurant computer that might be working off of a unit, there’s a duplication of all the hardware and software on

each unit, instead of having to update all of them independently, they can all be operating off an updated system that is up in the cloud when I updated Linux.

Jed Ayres: Exactly. You definitely are hitting it John, that’s the idea of centralizing Windows.

John DeBevois: And I can manage this from anywhere. I can manage it from my boat or from my horse.

Jed Ayres: Exactly. And that’s really the vision, I think, that everybody needs to get into their mind. Obviously, this sort of transcends the restaurant, but although maybe restaurants now are trying to serve people in parking lots and makeshift places that have open air and they’ve had to do all kinds of … I think agility is our new super power right now. But when you’re thinking about delivering compute and applications and data, it’s the idea that, “Hey, I don’t care what device it is, and I don’t care where it is. I need to be able to do this. I need to be able to pull those applications and data to that device.” If you’re in your ranch somewhere on the back of a horse, or you’re sitting in a high rise office building in downtown San Francisco, you need to have the same access, the same fidelity of that experience. And that’s really the power of cloud computing, is that you’re going to be able to have that high fidelity, high security experience on any device, anywhere.

John DeBevois: As far as the updates and the security, we already talked about the updates can be done once for your entire system in the cloud. With it being in the cloud, what about security? Are all my units that are operating through this system protected by the same internet security or software malware, or do I need to have on each machine a separate malware detection and cleanup system?

Jed Ayres: One of the advantages of Linux is that it’s a read only piece of software. So the firmware or the operating system, it’s literally hardened. So when you think about places like ATMs, or cars, or Teslas, or what have you, they’re running Linux because it’s very, very secure and it’s very, very stable. And so those are characteristics that people don’t typically associate with Windows. Windows has gotten very, very big and it’s very challenging to manage and secure. So the idea with an IGEL Linux operating system is that it’s sitting on the edge, it’s super secure, and it’s easy to manage and it’s hardened. So that means as it boots, if anything’s changed in that boot structure, it literally will just not boot. So if it’s compromised by malware, ransomware, any of these terrible things that afflict Windows devices, instead of booting and compromising your company, Linux just doesn’t even boot. It just sort of says, “Sorry, this machine doesn’t look the same as it did last time. I’m not going to even start up.” And also the smallest they’ve ever gotten Windows is 16 gigs. Our operating system’s just over one gig. So the attack surface and the way that it’s built, it’s just way smaller and way more secure. For your Uber technical listeners, they’ll know. There’s a reason why Linux has done so well in the cloud and in these environments where you need to have high security and really high stability.

John DeBevois: So Linux has really taken the platform of keep it simple and then build off of the Linux platform, whatever your programs such as the IGEL and the UD3 hardware system that you have, you build off of a simple platform and the security is elsewhere in the cloud.

Jed Ayres: Exactly. Yeah. The whole idea is keep that underlying operating system hardened, and then centralize all your services in the cloud in a way that keeps your data safe. This is why this architecture has been so widely used by government, healthcare, retail, is because they’ve already been impacted by the hackers. And they’ve had regulation.

John DeBevois: Yes.

Jed Ayres: Think about all the three letter acronyms that protect healthcare and retail. PCI, HIPAA, all these government regulations. That’s forced those industries to move their data into the cloud. So they’re the early adopters of this, but I think every company is going to see benefit from moving to software and data that’s delivered from these highly secured hardened cloud infrastructures. But the idea is, “Okay, if you’re going to do that, do you want a really huge operating system and a huge expensive processor on the edge? No.

John DeBevois: We all have experienced this. It’s very frustrating when you’re looking at your computer screen and something isn’t working and you’ve got to reboot.

Jed Ayres: Yes. I think that is a big part of the Windows blue screen of, “Let me update this for the next six hours.”

John DeBevois: Well, it’s kind of like a flat tire. There’s never a convenient time for a flat tire or an update. So if I’m a restaurateur, small business is a small business, and I’m just talking to my restaurant owners out there as they are coming back to life. And I like what I’m hearing, and I might say, “You know what? I’d like to find out more information.” Well, folks, you can go through my website at Bizsoup where we’re going to have all the connections where you can get in touch with Jed and the company IGEL and find out what can they do for you.

I want to ask you about something I’m entering, and that is on your website you have an enter to win a workspace make-over. Boy, if we couldn’t all use that. What is that all about? And this entry, what do I have to do to get a makeover?

Jed Ayres: It was actually thought of before the whole COVID thing happened. But with more and more people working at home, the place that you might’ve worked at a couple of days a week or never worked at before, suddenly you’re there for hundreds of days. One of the things we’ve done is we actually hired a consultant through this contest. When you go to the IGEL website, you’ll see it. And Vicky Norse is her name. She’s sort of helping deliver some insights. She’s a world-class thought leader on how to organize your office for the best productivity and inspiration and how you should set that up.

John DeBevois: So Vicky is a professional organizer. So you teamed up with her.

Jed Ayres: Yeah. We teamed up with her, and then, so what we’re trying to do is obviously introduce some people to the IGEL story and the technology and have a few minutes to talk with you about the technology. And as you said, if you go to the website, you’ll see how to enter, but we’re giving away $5,000, sort of all the cool stuff that you’d want in your office. From espresso maker, to chairs, to screens, and different gadgets, lights, and computers, that kind of thing. And we’re going to do that four times. I think we actually just gave the first 5,000 package away last week.

And then at the end of this year, we’re going to actually do a full make-over. So sort of like these shows you see on TV, the home makeover, we’re going to work with Becky where we actually go in to someone’s house and we look at their office space and we reimagine it. We’re actually going to put $20,000 into somebody’s office to just completely make it over, with Vicky’s help. So I think that’s the grand prize. And then if anyone’s interested along the way, they also will get a chance to talk to IGEL about how we might uniquely be able to help them with their edge computing.

John DeBevois: This sounds fascinating. I can see how so many applications for my audience and the different businesses that they operate, particularly if you have more than one facility, one more than one restaurant, dry cleaners, gas stations. It is a nightmare when you have multiple computer systems that are operating independently of each other are suffering their own various viruses, and numbers aren’t coming up where they’re supposed to be because something’s not updated, something’s infected. It’s a nightmare when you have more than one facility. I see a lot of value in this. When I first heard about the cloud, I’m going, “Oh, putting all my information up there. How secure is that?” Well, I’ve gotten over that.

Jed Ayres: I think you’re going to see more and more innovation pour into this space John, because of … COVID is just sort of helping the accelerator pedal on innovation. And then you also have this catalyst with the connectivity, 5G is coming.

John DeBevois: Yes.

Jed Ayres: One of the challenges with putting things in the cloud and some of this architecture, especially for places that might be gas stations, or dry cleaners, or whatever, that are in places where they may not have great internet, is that through 5G we’re going to get to a place where everybody in the world has super high speed internet. And that takes away one of the biggest challenges with this architecture, has always been cost, complexity and connectivity. So the connectivity is going away. The cost is definitely coming down and the complexity is also going down because the cloud is just abstracting a lot of the complexity. And so, yeah I think anybody who’s looking to sort of simplify,

harden, deliver better security, better performance in any kind of a setting, you owe it to yourself to look at the entire architecture.

John DeBevois: Jed, I want to thank you for being on this serving of Bizness Soup. There’s a lot more questions that I have about this, but the fundamental drive of this program is to provide the tips, tools, and techniques and the resources to the small business owner. And we just touched on the restaurant industry, out of the fact that they are coming out of a bad time.

Jed Ayres: The key too John is that we can do this on existing hardware. I think a lot of people might be thinking, “Oh, I got to spend a whole bunch of money on new hardware.” That’s one of the beautiful things about IGEL technology is we actually put this operating system on the existing PCs that they have sitting around. In some cases, ones that they thought, “Oh wow, I can’t use this anymore because it won’t run Windows 10 anymore.” Well, it’ll run IGEL. You don’t have to get into this sort of world where because of Windows, you’re throwing away devices every three years because you need a bigger, faster processor to run the newest version of Windows. Any device that has two gigs of RAM and a hard drive, it will run IGEL.

Part of how we’ve disrupted this space is we walk in and say, “No, you don’t need to replace those 100,000 devices. Actually, just put this really small high performance operating system on that device, and literally any device that’s still plugged in today. I don’t care how crusty it is, will probably run IGEL.” In fact, we have people that are finding pallets of devices they thought they were going to have to send to the landfill and bringing them back and saying, “Whoa, this will actually run IGEL really well, and it connects to the Microsoft or Amazon Cloud services? Beautiful.”

John DeBevois: All right. So I get all these services. How is this monetized? Is this a subscription, one time fee, annual? What?

Jed Ayres: IGEL is moving towards subscription in terms of how we sell our operating system today. It’s sold on a one time perpetual license. So fortunately we haven’t quite got to subscription. They’ll happen in the next year. You basically buy IGEL’s operating system on a one, three, or five year contract. The good news about it is that we are constantly updating it and tuning it and putting new innovation into it. And so that’s one of the cool things. We make it really easy to update devices. And in many cases you don’t even restart them. The end user doesn’t even really even know that they took an update.

John DeBevois: Jed. I can’t thank you enough for being a part of Bizness Soup. Thanks so much for sharing the insight of IGEL, and if you’d like more information about IGEL and a home workspace make-over, we’ll go enter. Go to Bizsoup.com. You’ll find all the information about not only Biz Soup, where you can subscribe as well, you can get to IGEL, enter it, and get more information on how they can make your

business run smoother, faster by putting a new spoke in your wheel and making your technology better and easier to use.

Jed, thanks for being on this serving of Bizness Soup.

Jed Ayres: It’s been my pleasure, John.