IGEL Weekly: Get in the Know – Reveal Blind Spots in Your Digital Workspace and Enhance UX

IT admins are having to deal with many challenges on the rocky road to digital transformation. The importance of security, cloud adoption, cost savings, and the rapid evolution of SaaS-based applications is driving organizations to a hybrid workspace that requires different approaches to how endpoints are deployed, used, managed, and controlled.

While the demand for applications is increasing, organizations are choosing to deploy a variety of platforms that bring together a hybrid mix of on-premises, virtual, and cloud-based workspaces in their environments. Whereas users expect more flexibility to work when and where they prefer, on their endpoint devices of choice with applications that ‘just work’.

This shift towards cloud-based workspaces promotes a SaaS approach to deploy applications, which combines a number of components to provide expanded functionality as a service. Therefore, it has become vital to deploy tools that allow organizations to not only get an inventory of their used applications but also to understand how they are being deployed and used in their environments.

Stratusphere UX monitors application performance by providing detailed metrics and diagnostics data that reveal blind spots to support IT teams and CIOs in making data-driven decisions.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Chris Feeney
Co-host: Jaime Reynolds

Transcript

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Andy Whiteside: Everyone welcome to Episode 88 of I, Joel Weekly. I'm your host, Andy White side of have a Chris Feeney with me and Jamie Reynolds. Guys. How's it going, Chris? How's it? Good? Yeah. Good man. I you know where wolf pack red baby, you

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Chris Feeney: That was a good one man loved. I'm sorry we missed each other at the game, but that was such

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Chris Feeney: a great game to watch. Sorry U. And C. Fans

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Chris Feeney: about 20 people my group. So I really had no control, and that was fine. I didn't want any control. In fact, I didn't reach out to people proactively, because I didn't want to have any control over that day. But yeah, I'm sorry I'm didn't get chance. No, it's fine. We bought tickets literally like 3 h before the game we're like, let's do it. Let's go so.

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Chris Feeney: anyway, by yourself. Anything exciting happened over the holidays.

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Chris Feeney: Oh, I'm sorry. Was that for Jamie? Sorry? Yeah, go ahead. Jamie.

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Jaime Reynolds: Yeah, I spent some time with the family, went to the the Smoky Mountains, and just glad to be back. We had a good time, and if we're talking sports, I'm riding high since yesterday since my Purdue boil makers are number one right now. So

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Andy Whiteside: that's basketball. Honestly, yes, it is. Yes.

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Jaime Reynolds: you know, gotten started in college basketball. Yeah, this year that'll come in a week or 2, I guess.

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Andy Whiteside: So. Let's see, today is November 20, eighth, 2023. And the blog we're gonna review for today is share my screen.

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Andy Whiteside: Blind spots get in the know reveal blind spots in your digital workspace and enhance ux experience. So II think a lot of what we're gonna talk about today is around the user experience around digital workspace enhanced ux experience for our users. But in the very first paragraph it calls out security. And we were just having a conversation for you record. I've found it very interesting and enlightening to see my new

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Andy Whiteside: newish security team as integral, really taking Igel on as a primary security play, because when they first we first start off security practice, I was having to bring up to that group that Igl, you know, a a read only Linux derivative

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Andy Whiteside: was part of a security story, and they immediately didn't grasp it. And but within, you know, within a day they were all over it. So I think part of we're gonna cover here. Not only is the user experience, but the security benefits of it. Chris. Or you guys, I know you guys as a company are

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Andy Whiteside: haven't messaging. I draw as a security platform for a long time now, by the whole time, I mean, like 5 years. Is it really starting to hit as a security play across the ecosystem?

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Chris Feeney: I think so. Yeah. And a lot of things have kind of emerged. As a result of that, there's

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Chris Feeney: what you know you didn't hear too much about. At least, you know, when I started, you know, was 0 trust architecture. That's become a very big thing. Obviously, the Federal government has a big initiative on implementing that. And so that's where I started with Igl when I went into that market, it was the first thing we talked about was security, right? Cause you, you can't put something on a cover government network without, you know, security looking at it first, and that type of thing.

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Chris Feeney: But I've II have told this many times. I've I've never lost a deal because of security problems with Ijos OS at all, never once single at all. But what's happened is obviously a lot you know, occurred in the marketplace. We've had many stories where customers got hit

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Chris Feeney: by Iran somewhere in a lot of situations their idol devices were not compromised the ones that they had deployed if they weren't fully deployed. And that just sort of you know, it's a preventive measure. And so you're gonna be hearing more about this preventive security model.

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Chris Feeney: It's more of a you know, proactive approach versus a reactive response. We've definitely had customers where they were reacting to a situation by running around and plugging ud pockets into devices before they got hit, or something. So looking forward to talking more about that in a future. Podcast.

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Andy Whiteside: III didn't like what you just said. So people have been using Igl something like a Ud pocket as a reactionary method in once something bad had happened. This as a just a general concept as well as what we're gonna talk about today is really trying to be both proactive and reactive. We have to be. But around, you know, user experience and security at the same time, which you know in user compute space. It's

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Andy Whiteside: end user experience, security security and user experience number 1, 2, 2, one in that order all the time. And it sounds like, you know, people are starting to understand that. I just

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Andy Whiteside: users quickly. Yeah.

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Andy Whiteside: Jamie, do you have a a a experience around customer? You've seen implement Igl from a security perspective, maybe maybe not say the customer name, but maybe tell their story.

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Jaime Reynolds: Yeah, I mean, we're seeing it more where we get with customers, and they're integrating this as part of their security practice as opposed to what you said from before, where it was viewed as primarily horizon or citrix. But

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Jaime Reynolds: I just a lot of health care a lot of you know we we certainly see epic, and and it falls into the security realm now as well. So you know, we're just trying to get that message out and make sure. As as Chris said, we're we're coming up with some new branding and go to market things and and stuff like that. So

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Chris Feeney: Chris, specifically, why did you guys bring this blog forward today? So a couple of things? So earlier this year, we launched cosmos, and a big change with that was the introduction of apps and an app portal

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Chris Feeney: similar to your mobile platform, where you got an app store, for example. And so initially, we had a few set of apps out there. Liquidware is is a stratosphere is one of the first ones that was actually developed by the vendor on idle, ready vendor. In this case we've long partnered with

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Chris Feeney: and so wanted to highlight. Them, I know. Since then we've had a few others that have emerged, but but definitely wanted to kinda highlight the fact that now we're we launched cosmos in April. Here we are. November. What? 6, 7 months later? We're seeing more and more of that ready ecosystem. Begin to you know, work on and build and then release their their apps. So.

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Chris Feeney: and I know you guys have done a lot of work with liquid wear as well so wanted to kind of highlight that today.

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Andy Whiteside: So this this first this first section here really talks about what Jamie was bringing up a minute ago. It's an end to end complete solution. And it's only as good from a user experience or security perspective as any piece

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Andy Whiteside: of the story, including in this case the managed secured input

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Chris Feeney: yeah, definitely, I think.

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Chris Feeney: that's that's always been the trick sort of that last mile visibility. There's a lot of stuff. I mean, going back to the security story earlier. I mean, a lot of what you've probably seen is people focus on the back end infrastructure. Maybe the networking to get there. But you know, endpoint visibility getting into that infrastructure having a tool that can actually show you, hey? What's really going on if an issue occurs, or you proactively wanna monitor

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Chris Feeney: and notice that, hey? You know, we got a wireless problem, and it's affecting endpoints or whatever things like that, or just basic admin, you know, functionality like inventory checking, or whatever. So.

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Andy Whiteside: Jamie, would it be fair to say that people now see this as an Indian complete solution, and they may or may not have had good monitoring on the head end in the past, and they certainly don't have it on the complete story. And that's kind of where the liquid wear product kicks in.

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Jaime Reynolds: Yeah, yeah, absolutely for sure.

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Andy Whiteside: Chris, it calls out the 1, 2, 3, 4 key features. Here, you wanna just walk us through these.

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Chris Feeney: Yeah. So this is great. What I love about. The stratosphere product. Here is you know, we for them. We've just got an agent on the endpoint that can actually monitor things on the ideal device. And and most of the user experiences, you know, be impacted based on a variety of factors. But

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Chris Feeney: they can see how the devices doing like the CPU. The networking connectivity. What's plugged into the device? A lot of different things that can report into their their console and and then provide some, you know, reporting capabilities.

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Chris Feeney: One of the things, for example, that we worked with them on a while back was for customers that were looking at. You know I need to get to windows 11. Can my devices get there? If I were to try to in place upgrade them from 10 to 11 they actually had a tool that could, you know report in kinda give some visibility. And then actually out of that

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Chris Feeney: report, hey, these devices are fine. These can these or will not be, but they will be perfectly fine for iglos. And also these use cases like, from a user experience doing user, you know, communications through zoom or teams calls when you wanna leverage the endpoint hardware for that. So a lot of cool metrics and and and reporting features that come with a tool like stratosphere here.

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Andy Whiteside: Well, let's just walk down. So it's metrics for application, performance, device, device, health and network connectivity. That's one call out device, inventory and configuration insights. It's almost like those are 5 all by themselves. Proactive event logs and alerts

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Andy Whiteside: and comprehensive compliance, reporting, you know, obviously, things that have been part of an Indian story all this time easily done in the windows world, but not always thought about in the delivered compute world and inclusive of the endpoints. And that's where the liquid where solution kicks in Strasbourg, just in general, on the windows side, but has been available on the Igl piece, for I don't know what. 3, 4 years now.

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Chris Feeney: Yeah, I think we first announced the integration at Citrix Synergy in early 2020,

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Chris Feeney: right before the world came to a halt, if you remember and they had just integrated into OS. 11 at the time. Prior to that, we were using the custom partition mechanism. So it's been, you know, coming up on 4 years now

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Chris Feeney: and and then. Obviously, they've now built the OS 12 version of that same app that works with their products.

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Andy Whiteside: Okay, and then the last section of the blog says, reveal user blind spots didn't go to a lot of detail here. But, Jamie, what are they trying to say here?

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Jaime Reynolds: Oh, I'm sorry I was saying

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Jaime Reynolds: me, hey, Chris, you wanna take that one?

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Chris Feeney: Well, II think from the my interaction with the folks there, I mean, you can see. You know the users complaining about something? Where? Where's the problem? Maybe if it's.

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Chris Feeney: is it something inside the application they're accessing, or is it a virtual desktop that is performing

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Chris Feeney: seemingly slow. Is it? Actually something where it's maybe logging in, you know, taking too long whatever which, as you're logging in, you've got things like user persona de details.

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Chris Feeney: profiles. You know, all that stuff that that there are tools out there that can kinda help optimize that but do you have something that can kind of really point out where the smoking gun is? And you know, the users generally gonna experience something on the end point.

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Chris Feeney: They don't know if it's an issue. With the end point it might be something completely different. And so this tool

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Chris Feeney: can kinda help figure out, you know, hey? If there's nothing wrong from the endpoint to the network, maybe there's something going on inside the user ex resource desktop application that is is causing an issue.

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Chris Feeney: And this is kind of what

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Chris Feeney: what that's revealing here is is you know, cause I'm blind. If I don't have that data, that information.

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Jaime Reynolds: Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I wasn't seen that before. But yeah, I mean, just thinking back to, you know, being an admin back in the days right? And you hear Vdi is slow this morning, right? It's always a tough spot, or even a blind spot, getting all the way back to the endpoint if a customer doesn't have an end to end solution. So you know, as an example, customers love features like

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Jaime Reynolds: the Citrix monitoring, and things like that. But we're only looking at the application servers or the the Vdi instances. So this is a great, great utility to have here, or feature right to see a full end to end visibility to what might be going on as far as the blind spots go right. So

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Andy Whiteside: set this up by saying this, Jamie, I'll ask you a question. How how long has it been since you administer a

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Andy Whiteside: an actual end user compute solution at a.

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Jaime Reynolds: how long, how long? How long?

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Andy Whiteside: Maybe just weeks. Okay? So here's the question to you, traditional in user computing where you take a windows computer that's joined to a domain or something, talking to servers and things on the back end versus in user compute, where we're delivering a virtual workload of some type, maybe apps, maybe desktop. What have you to a a endpoint that is specifically being used to connect to that, you know, delivered compute workload.

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Andy Whiteside: would you? Would it be fair to say that Euc has more blind spots than traditional client server computing

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Jaime Reynolds: it certainly could be depending on, you know, the the.

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Jaime Reynolds: the build of it. But yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And it, it's often forgotten. Right? I mean, we think we're gonna build these in the data center and deliver them. And everything will be great until there's a problem with the endpoint. Right? So my response, absolutely, there's more blind spots. And they're not where you think they're going to be, because you're deliver, not deploy. And the truth is, and what you just said and and is, it's not. Sometimes it's every time.

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Andy Whiteside: always, always, always Gremlins in end, user compute solutions. And they're fixable. But most people who grew up in a traditional client server compute world have no idea where to start looking.

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Chris Feeney: Yeah. Now, this is great cause. And Andy, we've talked a lot about just certainly at events and on this podcast before just you know helping people understand what is their actual endpoint strategy. And I think, you know, going back to the security conversation earlier, we're we're at a point in time where yet another technical trend is is emerging windows. 10, for example, is gonna end of life. In 2025

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Chris Feeney: windows 11 is emerging more and more and more. But you know, and the hardware refresh cycle is back up again, you know, after you know, everybody bought their stuff 3, 4 years ago, and

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Chris Feeney: you know. So there's this you know, tsunami of of scenarios going on where maybe, you know, they have to consider their endpoints. You know, they they either can't upgrade the ones they've got, because the hardware doesn't support the new version. But they can go virtualize that. Obviously, or maybe take advantage of some Microsoft licensing. They they own whatever it is.

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Chris Feeney: But as you've talked about, you know, don't forget the endpoint. It all starts there, you know, the users are gonna walk up and touch something with their hands. And and you know, keyboard and mouse, or whatever you know.

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Chris Feeney: You have to have something that can deliver a great user experience that will reject the solution if they don't have that. These are all things that you guys have focused on quite a bit, you know, all the time.

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Andy Whiteside: And user compute is an asynchronous solution. Where you have a head end, you have an endpoint. But you gotta have both. The head end could be in the cloud. It could be your data center. That endpoint could be full blown windows with the gazillion gigs of memory in it, or it could be a limited thing client or somewhere in between. More than likely, is the answer. But here's the main thing I find all the time is people I talk to when I ask this question, do you have a digital workspace strategy? If they even try to answer, it comes out, and it's like they really don't.

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Andy Whiteside: And then, if I say, Do you have a digital workspace strategy that includes an endpoint strategy that fits into that digital Workspace strategy. The answer is almost always, no. We just have to keep beating the drum and sending the message out and trying to get people to think in those 2 ways.

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Andy Whiteside: Jamie, you just came from an organization. We're not gonna say who it is. Here. The leadership of that organization? Did they have a true digital workspace strategy for the organization? Or was it just a kind of ad hoc

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Andy Whiteside: using solutions as needed?

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Jaime Reynolds: They. They certainly had a solution, and it was being developed and and

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Jaime Reynolds: and streamlined, if you will. So

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Andy Whiteside: it's good most most organizations, you know, somewhere at the top of the stack, when I ask them the question, they really really don't and sometimes you pull back the covers in 80% of the users are, you know, riding around with a windows device and a VPN, and that is.

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Jaime Reynolds: it's very common. Yeah, by far common. 90 plus organizations are still doing the same thing I did when I got my first job in 1,997

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Andy Whiteside: brand new laptop.

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Andy Whiteside: no more than 3 years old, with a VPN. On it.

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Andy Whiteside: Most organizations still do that. How crazy is that? 2023

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Andy Whiteside: alright guys! Well, thanks for jumping on and and covering this. Happy to talk about the look of where solution and what it does in ecosystem in general. Specifically as a relacy user compute Nigel. Really is something that has a lot of value for users.

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Chris Feeney: Yes, and I know before we wrap up just kinda tying into just the larger ecosystem you're working on. You guys actually worked with liquid wear to set up

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Chris Feeney: a service. Now, scenario, where, you know, having a tool like this in their environment that could actually feed into their service. Now, environment, too. So

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Chris Feeney: that is just another. You know, thing that you guys focus on and

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Chris Feeney: and I know we're, we've been talking about a similar thing for Igl, we talked about in this podcast

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Andy Whiteside: comes back to it's great. If you can get the data. But what are you gonna do with it?

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Andy Whiteside: And that's where in our world we get that back into service. Now and then you have a fighting chance as to what you then do next, and that that world is going to evolve a ton. Once you start talking about AI. And what artificial intelligence can then do with that data that humans would have taken forever

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Chris Feeney: to to do with that same data? Yeah, it is. It is fascinating to see. Kind of what? What's emerging

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Chris Feeney: with that whole topic the the tremendous benefits of using something like that to, you know. Look for, hey? We've had 12 cases on

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Andy Whiteside: this same topic right? Here was the resolution. And you know, feed that back to a user or something rather than a ton of podcasts. This morning, one of them on the advancements in AI. When the last 6 months for example, in one of the AI tools. They told it to go right the the game pong

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Andy Whiteside: and it did it in 30 30 s.

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Chris Feeney: Scratchy. I wrote

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Andy Whiteside: crazy apparently the guy who originally wrote Paul took 3 months to get it done. But an example of What you'd have said, Chris, is you through liquor? Get stuff into service. Now you look at it with artificial intelligence. Find out that it's that it's been some problem, and through generative artificial intelligence you tell it to write a script to solve that problem. Boom! It's done.

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Chris Feeney: I think we're just on the cusp of the capabilities here. Hopefully, nobody develops Skynet, and we're now looking at Terminator 3. But you know, the guy predicted, within 6 months one of the AI tools will be able to create a Pixar movie from scratch. That's incredible.

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Jaime Reynolds: Yeah, I did see that something else.

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Chris Feeney: Wow.

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Chris Feeney: thank you.