Podcast Archive - StorageReview.com - Podcast #132: IGEL Future-Proof Solutions For End-User Computing Deployments

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

This week, Brian is joined by Matthias Haas, IGEL’s Chief Technology Officer and Managing… The post Podcast #132: IGEL Future-Proof Solutions For End-User Computing Deployments appeared first on StorageReview.com.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Storage Review Podcast. I'm Brian Beeler in the lab again and today I've got two guests with us. First, Tom Fenton who many of you know at least from his writing. He is one of the preeminent experts in end-user computing and yes, that will be the last time I comment. I publicly commend him and we'll see how that goes. And Matthias Haas from IGEL. And IGEL, speaking of leaders, is one of the leaders in the virtual desktop and user computing space.

And we're really excited to have both you guys on board. Thank you for joining in the podcast, gentlemen. Thank you for having us. Absolutely. Tom, again, that was your last compliment. Matthias, thanks for coming in. I know we've done the IGEL events before. I've been down there.

I've talked with your end users. I've talked with your customers like HP. So many passionate people about the IGEL technology. We've looked at it several times in the lab, but from your perspective, what's the high-level messaging for what IGEL is providing your customers? Yes. So again, thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about IGEL. So what we are doing as IGEL, probably a little bit of history, We're coming from a thin client background. So we've done thin clients for many, many years.

And since the last two years, we've totally moved out of the hardware business and we've established our core business, which is building a secure operating system, the secure operating system for now and next. What this means is that we are building a thin operating system that is purposely built to be secure, provide our customers with a great user experience, but also enabling capabilities that are essential for large organizations, in particular, managing large fleets of devices.

So basically, any x86 device can run IGELOS. And with IGELOS, you can securely connect to a virtualized infrastructure, whether it's VDI, desktop as a service, or as we see more and more applications coming as pure SaaS applications, browser is also one of our key capacities that we've integrated in iOS. All of this comes with manageability, great user experience, we have a great sustainability story, you know, spreading devices longer than any other operating system. And also on top, security is a pivotal role for what we are doing and happy to talk about the preventative security model, which is a complete new approach in the security space.

Well, you talked about some of the changes that the company has gone through. And the one thing I noticed from our outside perspective is we're seeing you guys integrated much more into the devices, which is pretty cool. And I'm sure we'll talk more about that. Tom, COVID obviously changed the way enterprises work. We threw all these people back into their homes and said, OK, now enterprises go figure out how to support all of your end users. And now we've got changes in Windows. We've got changes in Citrix, we've got all sorts of other stuff going on, uncertainty around VMware.

From your perspective, as someone that's as close as anyone to the end user computing market, what are you seeing as some of the emerging trends that enterprises have to deal with as we roll back into, in some cases, returning people to the office, in some cases, living with a hybrid lifestyle, in some cases, on people to the office, in some cases, living with a hybrid lifestyle, in some cases, on-prem and cloud-based desktops. What are some of the top issues that you've noticed? Yeah, we've seen a lot of change in the past three years. I think

three years ago, well, four years ago, I just said, you know, working from home, 10 years, we'll all be doing it right. And then COVID hit and bam, everything happened. And companies like IGEL really were instrumental in making that change happen over literally, what, in a month or two? I mean, you guys must have just seen this explosion in people reaching out to you within a matter of months that needed these solutions. And, you know, iGel, you can repurpose machines if you need to. I mean, just the options that you gave the people out there was fantastic. And now we're seeing people being forced to change from Windows 10 to Windows 11. And again, another disruption where companies are saying,

do we want to re-image or replace all these devices that people have or do something like iGel? Do you want to talk about that just a little bit? Sure. So, yeah, I think this is something. COVID definitely gave the whole approach a new velocity in looking to our solutions. But also today we see that, as you were referring to the Windows 10 to Windows 11 migration,

we've seen a lot of devices that have been bought during COVID are not fit enough to run Windows 11. And the best way to get a Windows 11 experience is IGEL device, simply IGEL it and run your Windows 11 desktop in the cloud. And with that, we are providing a lot of protocol choices. So no matter whether you want to use Citrix, you want to go with Omnissa

or use Microsoft AVD or cloud PC, we have it all integrated in IGELOS. And as I said before, we basically can run on any x86 device that is out there in the market. And not only that, we can convert existing devices. You can even buy, when we exited the hardware business, we've established great partnerships with HP, Leno we, you know, exited the hardware business. We've established great partnerships with HP, Lenovo, and LG,

where from all three vendors, you can buy pre-deployed IGEL-OS devices or pre-installed IGEL-OS devices from factory. So simple, very simple process to get your IGEL experience in place. And another thing that I'd like to mention is I was fortunate to be able to go to IGEL in Miami, had a great time.

IGEL disrupt their annual conference. It was just a great conference. And just the excitement of the community. People, you got some fanboys out there. I mean, a little bit embarrassing, right? It was Miami, though, Tom, to be fair. Yes. So can we go over some of the announcements you made during that?

And maybe you can dive into them a little bit deeper. And the one that kind of caught my eye first, because it is something that I think is important, I think it's a growing field. And you guys are starting to look at the IoT sector as well, right? It's something that is, in German, there's a saying that the apple falls not far from the tree. So if you really think about what IoT is doing, it is quite similar to the use case that you see in a thin operating system environment. Actually, you want to have a secure platform that you can run applications on.

And it's definitely something that looks interesting to us to explore which apps you could run in such an environment and providing a secure platform that is manageable. It's definitely something that is driving a lot of attention right now and is very interesting for our customers to look at. Yeah, digital signage, thing like that, I think those were some of the initial applications that you guys mentioned, right?

That's exactly true, yeah. So think about applications in general terms, and you can think about those apps, applications being running a graphically user interface, which would lead you to digital signage. But I think there's also use cases where you need to think about headless type of architectures. So I think this is

a very interesting space to explore. Yeah. Another thing that you meant, that was mentioned, was the IGEL-ready developer program and the app creator portal, which I think was kind of announced in Miami. So the concept of what we did, started to have in Miami was the now and next piece.

Now is what you will see short time after the event or at the event, and next is what's coming next. So now as we are moving to the next iteration of Disrupt, which is on the 16th and 17th of September in Munich, as part of the now day, we'll talk about the iGelab creator portal, which is then going to be available. And that app creator portal actually is allowing you

to build your own apps. Now the challenge is we are providing a secure platform. So we don't just want to allow that people are building apps and they just can throw it on the system. By the way, as you were able in the past with

OS 11 with custom partitions, but OS 12 has a secure by design principle. So we are not allowing any code that has not been signed by either us as IGEL, so we are providing curated apps. But also now, as we've heard this very clearly from the community, from our IGEL-ready partners, but also from customers, they want to build their own apps. So what we are enabling with the IGELab Creator Portal is that these categories or these different users,

they can actually build their own apps. And not only build an app, but also have a mechanism to sign that app with their own key. So an enterprise customer can generate a separate key pair and sign the app so that only these apps that he's willingly signing and allowing to be run

in this infrastructure can be deployed to their environment. That's an extra level of security. If you are, let's call it brave, or if you want to have things that the community is building, you can also build this for your infrastructure

and run this as a community app in your Azure deployment. We're expecting that this will widely broaden the solution space that we can address. We've seen this in the past with the community really being active to build additional capabilities, apps, if you want. And we see that this is a huge demand and we see a lot of interest talking to customers

because they have their own private apps that they want to run on IGEL. But also the community people that do things like, you know, I want to run LibreOffice locally on that device, right? There's probably a use case doing this, but there are a lot of other things, right? So talking about digital signage, there are very

many, many solutions out there that allow you to stream content, and some of this is open source, so why not have a community app that allows you to stream content from an open source infrastructure? I didn't realize that about the community apps.

That's pretty interesting. And the other thing that's really interesting is you push more out to the edge. You're talking about digital signage and that sort of thing. It seems to me that the lack of sophistication in managing those devices and those deployments goes up the further out to the edge you go. Whether it's AI or a billboard, it doesn't make any difference. Organizations are facing much more difficult challenges to deploy the further out into the edge that you get.

So this concept is pretty interesting. It should open a lot of doors for you. Absolutely. And that kind of, To Brian's point, not only do we have to push them out, we also have to monitor them. And on that aspect, you have the insights, right?

So the insight module that we are building is allowing you to create more observability and visibility of what's going on in the infrastructure. So that's something that is also very key for us to make sure that you actually, we can provide valid data.

And provide means not only to be processed in IGEL infrastructure, but we're also working together with stacks partners that are also using the data points that are being generated on IGLS. We want to make sure that we are really a trusted platform and that the data that we're providing is actually valid

and there's a standardized approach to this. That's something that we also see that a lot of customers are looking for to get more telemetry and insights into what's going on with their agile endpoints. And talking about devices being distributed,

if you stick with the digital signage piece, it's super important that these types of services are up and running, and we have a stable, reliable, and secure way to run all of these things. We've seen this just lately, what happens if those systems are crashing. I think you want to definitely avoid this going forward. Yeah, clearly.

I mean, you've mentioned security a number of times. And I'm wondering that, you know, since IGEL is so agnostic, device agnostic, cloud agnostic, on-prem, I mean, you guys don't really care where these devices are or even the use cases, clearly ranging from physicians' offices to billboards to hundreds or thousands of knowledge workers all in one spot. But as we think about security, organizations are more and more worried about their enterprise data, whether they're using it for desktops or for AI, which is obviously all the rage these days. I think security has always been a focus, but now it seems like it's for real focus. I mean, we don't have to look any further than the surge in ransomware attacks your customers and suggest to them different paths to travel to execute their specific needs and concerns. What are some of the top decisions that your customers are facing?

It seems to me it's probably the location of desktop, whether it's consumption through the cloud or on-prem. But is that true? And if so or if not, what are some of the other top concerns you're hearing right now? Yeah. So I think what we've seen also with the events that just happened recently, I think the industry has understood that adding more and more agents and protection mechanisms in place is probably not the right way to move forward. I think what we need to rethink is how can we avoid attack vectors in general. How can we, that's one of the core parts that we are addressing with the preventative security model, reduce the attack surface as much as possible.

Make sure that you're not exposing anything that you don't need to expose as an attack vector. That's the number one priority. I think number two, what we also hear very often, and you talked about this also, is the proliferation of data, your AI processing things. So the way how we are operating with IHLOS is that we are

trying to make sure that the data addressed on the endpoint is as small as possible. So just to give you an example, we are not managing users, right? So the only thing that we are managing on an IGLOS device is an entity. When you log

in to an IGLOS device, it's not that you are logging in with a user, but you're creating a cookie that represents your identity. And with that cookie, you can connect to remote services. So there's no Brian or no Tom or no Matthias on that device, right?

If I log off, the device is agnostic again, okay? Now, honestly speaking, talking about browsers, that adds a little bit of complexity because browsers actually do generate a lot of data that you don't want to have permanently on the device. So we are also building mechanisms that you can make sure that the data address

that the browser generates, let's call it the footprint, that we can also manage that and you can decide to say, okay, do I want to keep this permanently on the device? Or when Matthias logs off, that browser footprint that I've generated will be gone.

So this depends on the use case. So what I want to say with this, as with these examples, it's about enabling customers to make the right choice what meets their specific use case. And with that, we see that we can address a lot of things that are relevant to customers in terms of managing the data that is being generated.

And ideally, it sticks in a data center or in a specific cloud tenant. Making sure that you have full control over the endpoint and you can define which peripheral can be connected, what data can be downloaded or uploaded, or if you don't want to have any data being transferred to the endpoint, making sure that the identity are being correctly managed,

and you're not leaving a footprint on the device that you've been, the endpoint device that you've been working with. Let me ask you about that specifically, because I think one of the decision trees that enterprises have to work through is, am I going to enable a segment or all of my sort of thing, versus an endpoint device with something like IGEL OS, how do you help those IT admins kind of figure out the balance of, well, their customer, but end user experience versus security

versus how tight can I lock down a Windows thing, Windows system with an image or a Mac system with an image versus an IGEL OS system with my policies that are enterprise approved there. There's a lot to think about. And if an org's used to putting out Windows laptops to the Salesforce, for instance, how do you help them think about the benefits or the options, I suppose, when it comes to an IGEL OS implementation? So there's a couple of elements to look at in this regard.

So first of all, I think the way how we have designed IGEL OS on the endpoint, it comes from what is the smallest common denominator. So what do I really need to actually run a system, right? And then put things on top. With Windows and macOS, that's a multi-purpose operating. It's a lot of functionality by default, which is not a bad thing because it's being built to have a broad range of capabilities.

But the way how we are addressing the market is that we are working with highly regulated industries, and those are typically like large enterprises that have very specific policies and requirements to be met, either because they've set up their own security team has built this or due to regulations, governmental regulations or healthcare is a highly regulated industry, right? So with that capabilities that we've integrated in ITIL, we try to provide the best user experience for the actual endpoint user while maintaining the risk and the data that's being processed at a bare minimum on

the endpoint device. Because actually, you can way better protect and manage your data if it's in a data center or in a cloud, right? So you don't actually want this data to be on your device, okay? Yeah, totally agree, yeah. And talking about user experience, we also see that sometimes, you agreed, yeah. And talking about user experience, we also see that sometimes, you know, things like video conferencing,

so something like we are doing today, is a challenge in those remote environments. So we also have customers that got the feedback from customers, is there a way how we can make the audio and video capabilities local? So we've also announced this at Disrupt in Miami that we are also going to provide more local apps. What are local apps for Agile? These are things like Zoom or Teams or a WebEx client to be able to run locally on the IoT desktop. And with that, we are bridging those challenges

to make sure that the user experience is great. And these are different capacities and capabilities that we're integrating in the system, all with the security in mind to make sure that the experience for the endpoint user is on par with what you have with a traditional desktop. Hey, Tom, you're doing all of these thin client reviews for us. You've seen more end-user systems, laptops, all-in-ones than most.

And I'm sure at Disrupt, I didn't get a chance to go to the beach and hang out with the cool kids in the end user computing conference. I don't know why I wasn't there. I quite like Miami. However, at the top of this, Matthias was saying, IGEL OS, it's an OS. We're out of the device business. Let's leave that to HP and LG and others that are experts in such things. It seems to be historically one of the knocks against remote computing VDI has been the

hardware itself, because you hand a thin client to an exec that's used to a thin and light laptop, and they're like yeah this isn't you know the hardware isn't what i what i expect the advancements though in these systems have been tremendous and the hardware coming out from you know hp for instance is one i've seen quite a bit it's fantastic it's just like any of their other thin and light laptops with all the security and in igel os and everything else involved in it what are you seeing from the devices themselves It's just like any of their other thin and light laptops with all the security and IGEL OS and everything else involved in it. What are you seeing from the devices themselves

that are changing the way the industry looks at end user computing? Yeah, all the major vendors were Disrupt HP, Dell, Lenovo, and they were all showing off their goodies, man. They had some, I think LG had a really thin lightweight um thin client or something those things are tiny yeah yep gram I think it was Dell that had a rugged PC that we literally were throwing on the floor I don't know if you were there Matthias when we I mean we literally dropped it on the floor you know know, say, ah, step on it, whatever. And it just held up good.

And on the other end, all the major vendors, you know, they support six monitors. I mean, these were designed for people in the financial services where they got all these screens to do all the trading and things. One of the things that interested me is that Lenovo started talking about AI. And are you guys going to support AI? So that's something that we have announced in the next section. So talking about AI,

I think we've seen now a lot of things coming up with the AI PC, right, in the Windows domain pretty much. So those devices typically come with what is called an NPU. That's an additional processing unit. It's a neural processing unit. I think that's what it's called.

And it's allowing you to do interferencing. Sorry. Inferencing, there we go. Inferencing. Thank you so much. So that's where you see that I'm a native speaker. That's okay. Sometimes AI is interfering as well. So there could be either one.

Can you say that, the German translation? Because it's going to be a word about this long, right? I think in this case, it's the same thing. It's interferenzen. Because I think it has a Latin heritage. But anyway, so... But my point is that those MPUs come with some great functionality to be used, whether it's improving audio-video experience,

whether it's having some behavioral tracking. I think also on a thin operating system device, doing some behavioral tracking could be very interesting in a security context, right? So the thing that we are working on is exposing these NPUs. As we did, you probably remember this, Tom, like 10, 15 years ago is when the first GPUs came up that were able to accelerate video content. I think you can draw a line that this is something similar. GPUs came up that were able to accelerate video content. I think you can draw a line that this is something similar.

We need to expose the NPUs and provide an API so that you can accelerate specific workloads. So we started to work with partners to see where we can take this in audio-video, obviously video conferencing capabilities, but also improving protocol experience in terms of your day-by-day work, but also things like tracking, as I said before, the behavior

or doing some background tasks to enhance the security of the system. So I think this is currently an open space as AI in general is evolving very fast. And we want to make sure that the partners that are integrating on IGLOS with their apps can benefit from those MPUs. Now, granted that the first generation of x86 MPUs

are not like top-notch, but I think we will see a fast-expanding capability growth in that so that we are crossing the 40 tops pretty soon, I hope. Yeah, you're bringing up a really critical point in that the AI in the end user system is very much a moving target. And you just said the 40 tops, and that's a number that no one cared about until like eight or ten weeks ago right because intel and amd were out there with their new chip saying they're ai ready with these npus and then microsoft says well hold up guys you know for co-pilot plus we need this minimum footprint of capability and and the chips that you just announced that were ai ready now don't qualify so there there is a big a big amount of movement there.

And that's one thing with AI, but the other thing is I think about the data scientists, the AI developers that need access to GPUs, but not all the time. And that's where some of these cloud instances or even instances in the data center where you've got some GPUs for remote desktops can be really useful to make sure that as an organization, I'm enabling my workforce

with the technology they need when they need it, not necessarily giving everyone a $50,000, $60,000 workstation under the desk with two or three GPUs in it, but GPUs either in the cloud or in the data center that they can dynamically provision for these really high-end workstations. Are you seeing challenges there with, I don't even know what the right word is, but super high-end workstation? And how does IGEL help customers solve for that problem? I think there is always an answer on, you know,

being smart and leveraging the capabilities of each specific hardware. And in the end, it boils down to where the cost is being generated, right? So having AI capacities on the endpoint device is one way to offload some AI workloads on a, let's say, lower cost infrastructure, because actually, if you think about doing all of this in the data center, that can be quite a costly exercise as it is today. I think also, there are some interesting use cases in those industries where you don't want to provide direct access to public large language models.

So we've also seen some experiments, and we are also working or playing around with local large language models, which can be actually quite smart for specific use cases. I probably would call them more of an expert system than an artificial intelligence, but they are good enough for specific use cases. I probably would call them more of an expert system than an artificial intelligence, but they are good enough for specific use cases. So, again, drawing the reference back and looking back in history, in the beginning, also, the graphics cards weren't perfect.

And there was also, you know, where do I put the workload? What is the best compromise? I think we will see something in the near future that also this is going to happen in that space so that some process, some workloads will be on an endpoint, some workloads are better processed in the data center on the GPU. Talking about workloads and things like that, secure browsers, that's something that we're seeing a lot of interest in that.

We've probably talked to half a dozen different companies that are trying to get into that space. I know you guys are into that space as well, right? So we're always trying to look through the dust and to look behind the curtain what's coming next, right? And we've already seen a couple of years ago that browsers are going to become a significant play also for enterprises, right? And we've just seen that Forrester said in 2024,

75% of new enterprise apps are going to be SaaS-based. And that is generating a complete new set of challenges for enterprises that want to run secure infrastructure. And a traditional browser is probably not the best fit for this. You don't have a lot of controls in place. I think logging and reporting, creating visibility is a matter, but also making sure that through policies you can turn things off. In an enterprise browser, a secure enterprise browser, you probably don't want to have people installing plugins and, I don't know, download things or what have you, right? It's a productivity tool. So productivity tools

in enterprise environments need to have controls, they need to be configurable. And we've looked around a lot at this time. So we've seen the announcement that we did with Island. You will see another announcement that we are doing together with Island in Munich, not going to spoil that, but, and you know, working with Island, working with Citrix Enterprise Browser,

they all have a different twist and a little of a different focus on addressing specific needs of enterprises. So that's why also we have an ecosystem solution. We are onboarding different types of solutions and different types of partners to provide the right browser for your specific use case as a customer. So you aren't going to just say you can only use our browser, you're kind of opening it up and whoever can do it. Exactly.

So you mentioned disrupting in Munich, September 16th through 17th. Can you give us any sneak peeks there? What are we missing out on by not being there? So you definitely should come over to Germany. And so just by accident, the disrupt is one week prior to Oktoberfest. So we only guess for no obvious reason. Tom, fire up the plane and get your glass boot. Let's get over there. Absolutely. So the way how we are structuring things is, again, we have a two-day event.

It's about now, so things that are coming up. And I already talked a little bit about the App Creator Portal. You will see us talking about new apps and new capabilities that we're integrating in that app space. Things like, you know, how do I deploy apps to large infrastructures? How do I make sure that apps can be deployed in challenging environments, right? So we have a lot of customers that have a lot of branch offices, and sometimes you don't even believe that the bandwidth can be this small. So we have to come up with smart solutions and we will talk about that.

This is one of the things that really matters to us. Adding capabilities in the sense of conditional access. So we actually will launch the Intune client to be available on IGELOS, enabling the IGEL device to recognize conditional capabilities. And on day two, we talk about next. And there's going to be some new announcements that will really change the way how people are looking at IGELOS, what you can actually do with IGLOS.

But we also continue to share the things that we are working on in terms of digital signage. So one of the things is, how can we make digital signage even more secure? How can we make it even reduce the attack vector even further? That's one of the things that we want to talk about because, you know, having digital signage infrastructure in place doesn't

mean that these devices are not attackable so they are also providing a risk to your infrastructure. I've seen this asking a lot of customers so who actually manages your endpoints or the devices that do render the content? I don't know.

Do you know whether they are current on the patch? I don't know. So these are things that you want to address, right? And make sure that you have an operating system that is purposely built to securely render the content and doesn't expose you to any attack risks. So these are the things that we want to focus on. I don't want to spoil it too much, unfortunately.

All right, well, don't spoil it, but do do this for us. For people that aren't your customers yet but are listening to this that are curious about what I gel can do what's the easiest way for them to get hands-on to learn a little bit about what I gel OS can be do you have a demo environment or you know a workshop or something that they can go through to learn more so yes that's a very good question. So first of all, I always recommend people to start with our website.

And we have also a great community that is helping you to understand what we are doing. So this is a very good place to search for things. It's a Slack community. This is very responsive. We have lots and lots of customers in there. We have partners in there. Even IGEL employees and my dev teams are

working in there. So there you can get a lot of first-hand experience. Just trying IGEL OS 12 out, simply go to the website, download OS 12, deploy it on your device of choice. You can even run it

in a virtual machine. So if you don't want to convert a device, just put it in a virtual box or VMware, whatever type of workstation, these types of things and try it out. And we are happy to give you a live

demo and provide you with some infrastructure to play with. That's the one thing. And I also can only recommend you to come to Munich, watch the event. There's a lot of partners, sponsors here, a big part of our ecosystem. And it's an event to network, to share,

to get FaceTime with people that you want to learn more about. We are happy to learn more about what the requirements are from our customers. So, Thomas, you've seen it in Miami. I think it's a big event that is uniting the EUC community. We have all major players in place helping you to find the right solution and connect to that solution through an iglo s device there's there's no doubt about it I mean when Tom came back from Miami and he and I chatted on it I don't

want to speak for you Tom but you felt like this even the US event was sort of the preeminent EUC conference for the year, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, with some of the changes that we're seeing in the industry where, you know, VMware is divested itself of the EUC, I'm going to VMware, you know, explore next week, and there aren't any, there's very few EUC players there. So so so conferences like this are fantastic and you know when i showed you that new interface that os 12 interface that is you know so attractive to you know that kind of caught my eye well yeah i agree lots of great

stuff here we shall link in the description to igel site where you can check out os 12 the demos everything else uh this is a great conversation. IGEL is a leader in the space quite clearly. And if you don't know them, definitely check it out. Go to Germany, evidently, and check out potato pancakes and schnitzels and beer and maybe learn a little something about IGEL while you're at it. Matthias, thank you so much for doing this. It's great to hear you and your thoughts on everything that end-user computing can be. We really appreciate it. Thank you guys for inviting me and having me on this interview.

So really looking forward to it. And thank you for giving me the opportunity. Happy to have you. Tom, thanks for checking in too, buddy. Yeah, yeah. Thanks, guys. Thanks, guys.