Is 2020 the Year of VDI?

Ryan Purvis  0:00  
Hello, and welcome to the digital workspace works podcast. I'm Ryan Purvis, your host supported by producer Heather Bicknell. In this series, you'll hear stories and opinions from experts in their field story from the frontlines, the problems they face and how they solve them. The years they're focused on from technology, people and processes to the approaches they took that will help you to get to the script for the digital workspace inner workings.

Jed Ayres  0:30  
First of all, thanks, Ryan, and Heather, for having me. Fun to, to have a conversation with you today. So yeah, I am Jed Ayres, I'm the CEO of eye gel, gel has historically been known as, especially in Europe as the dominant Thin Client player, I joined the company four years ago, with the sort of charge of bringing the company into the United States, they tried a few times. So that was my goal was to bring a gentleman the US, but not necessarily as a thin client company, really orienting it around the IP around the operating system. You know, really, the other charge was to take over marketing. And so all the marketing up until I got here, had been done in German. So this was like a transition to put it in English, bring it into the US and really invert the story and emphasize the operating system and the management console. So yeah, it's been a remarkable ride over the last four years, we've more than doubled the size of the company, both in people and in revenue. And suddenly finding ourselves in the middle of, you know, the largest companies in the world that are really, you know, getting huge value out of a Linux operating system to connect to the cloud workspaces. So, you know, how we describe ourselves today is we're like this edge operating system that sort of hyper tuned to consume a Citrix or VMware or Microsoft or an Amazon. And, you know, the operating system is a super important part of the layer of technology, the fact that we can put it on all kinds of x86 and soon arm devices and breathe a lot of life into older devices and extend the life of them, make them easier to manage, make them more secure, and ultimately deliver a really good experience to the end user. That's really what our value proposition has been. It's been really fun to, to work for a company that has such a great piece of technology has a great culture, around innovation and around sort of just partnering not only with your customers, but also this big broad ecosystem of people. And I think we're at an inflection point in the world right now, where Linux is suddenly extraordinarily relevant on the desktop of your average worker. And so yeah, we find ourselves with a super mature piece of technology. moment, especially with COVID, where you have the edge has become more important than ever, and the cloud has become more important than ever.

Yeah, so that's, that's unique.

Ryan Purvis  3:15  
It's funny, you mentioned mentioned Linux, hinted I'll be discussing in our sort of weekly catch ups how much I hate windows 10. And hates probably a strong word. But I've really struggled, you know, compared to Windows seven, an instability, just with the way that Windows 10 is operating. Now, I don't believe it's actually meant to go into laptops. I think it's I think it's mean for virtual desktop. And I think the idea is to get to something like an agile and agile at least, to give you a third client or use your own device to connect to your corporate devices hosted in a cloud environment. And you can then have an evergreen windows 10 build that slipped off succession that didn't run on known infrastructure known infrastructure, and stable and rolled out as quickly as they wanted to run away. You know, the average consumer using a laptop now, you know, this 2014 update fails, every time you do that the end user shouldn't be dealing with that kind of stuff. And I think you guys are gonna be well positioned in the future, there was a lot of prediction or financial advice. But I think you're going to be in a good position in the market, because you offer that gateway to, as you say, from age into the cloud.

Jed Ayres  4:31  
Yeah, it's kind of crazy, because of course, you have to have this religious moment where you realize all right, Windows is great, but it's best consumed out of out of the cloud, right, where it can be centrally managed and secured and patched. And, you know, okay, we have this third of 35 years of, you know, this idea that freedom was created, right, the whole like PC revolution, and there's a lot of emotional attachment that comes with this is my PC. I might have You know, applications in my data set on this device? And I think we're the world is actually ready for this radical departure from that right, that says, nope, doesn't matter really about the device, right? The device could be any device. You know, as long as it's tuned to deliver a great experience from the, from these cloud applications, and, and I think that's where we're headed, right? Because for 35 years, it was sort of like this hamster wheel of, yeah, okay, I'm going to give you a bigger processor, and Microsoft is going to give you a more powerful, bigger yo operating system. And we've got to this point where it's just almost unwieldy, right? To your point. Yeah, especially when you have hundreds of millions of people that are now working from home, getting that update for Microsoft, several times a week can be extraordinarily disruptive and hard for companies to manage through that. So yeah, it's very expensive. I mean, when we see the we and I get a bird's eye view of a lot of the customers that are, you know, have made it to Windows 10. And they have, you know, one person to 250 endpoints that their manager, you're like, Whoa, that ratio, we have, we have customers that have 30 50,000 devices that are be managed by a single person. Yeah. There's a, there's like a huge difference. So I mean, when we think about Linux, we look at it and go, okay, Linux is one everywhere, right? Like, there's no place and compute where Linux isn't pervasive, right? Whether it's embedded, you know, your Tesla, your medical devices, your ATMs, your gas pumps, your your cell phones, four out of five cell phones are using a Linux derivative, all the way up to like, you know, every cloud workload pretty much every supercomputer, the one place where Linux has not, you know, dominated is on the, on the, on the desktop, we think this is gonna change

Ryan Purvis  6:51  
it. And you can see that now with the distributions that are available out of rebuilds machine now, which I've started using on a Linux distro. And barring finding the apps that you're used to, in the windows ecosystem, it's pretty much like a lock, and you just need to find that app, you know, like, I need to drive equivalent, for example, but you can find many mail apps, you go into Libra offices that worked with Office files. So that transition, which used to be very difficult, you know, is now a lot easier.

Jed Ayres  7:23  
actually gonna make it a lot easier to write because their whole emphasis is to put everything into Azure, right? So the the receiving devices and the operating system, it's running while they would like to keep it on Microsoft, the new ethos around Satya is, you know, as long as, as long as we're growing Azure at 50%, quarter over quarter, that's where the real value of Microsoft that's being created, right, and I think we watched what they did with Office 365, right. And 2014 2015 when Satya took over, it was almost unheard of to be running the exchange. And, you know, the whole office franchise was very on from right now. It's all in Azure, right? 80 plus percent of every enterprises running their, you know, office 365. x frontier is, how do we get all these wind 32 apps, you know, migrated up into, into Azure, how do we get the whole desktop and application experience being delivered from Azure, that's the next sort of, you know, big transition. And that's where hijo comes in, and sort of slides in underneath that as the as the perfect operating system to take cost out and just simplify, make it easier to secure it. I mean, security is a huge deal. And part of what's driving our business is all these ransomware attacks. And, you know, we saw people that send people home with brand new laptops that have you know, $3,000 laptops with Windows 10 on it, and like literally the first day, they get hit with ransomware she's, um, and so this is the security message around Linux just being sort of so hard and write a read only file system that, you know, really is a, it's very difficult to insert malware and you know, the virus stuff that comes along with Windows, you know, with eye gel, it's like literally the device. If it doesn't have the checksums and the boot sequence, it won't even start it just doesn't start it's like Brecht. Right? So a lot a lot of chain of trust and sort of things that can be done with security when you're dealing with like a super small operating system. That's the other key, right? This operating system is now down below of gig, right. The smallest windows distribution is the IoT, which is sit around 16 gigs. I mean, there's a big difference between, you know, less than a gig and a 16 gig right in terms of attacks purpose. So yeah, I think security is going to become a bigger part of the story, especially with how distributed the workforce is right now.

Ryan Purvis  10:08  
No, exactly. I mean, we've talked to some other guests about that in people that are working from home, walking around the gardens, talking on conference calls, leaving paperwork open, leaving desktops unlocked, because they're at home, now they're safe. You need to re educate everybody, because they don't have incentives, you have an office necessarily, or they're gonna be working co working places. Now, more than an HQ kind of office. If somebody mentioned I wanted to touch upon you, you mentioned this the size of distribution mean only one gig versus 16, or 21 gigs as a solid winner. I mean, when you guys distribute your your new updates and releases is that then stream to device? Or how do you handle that? I'm just curious.

Jed Ayres  10:54  
Yeah, so the thing about agile is, it's funny, we sort of monetize, and we talk a lot about the operating system. But the actual, there's about, I would say sort of half the value of the company's IP is in that operating system, and all the things that are, you know, built around it. But the other half of it is this Management Console, right? It's this idea that, hey, we're gonna build a management console that can sort of precisely manage, you know, over 7000 different settings on that device, once it has enough IO s on it, right. And we call it the universal Management Suite, right the US. So it's, it's this Management Console, that you can write policy, you can write scripts and automation around and you can basically, you know, you can have visibility to your, you know, 10s of thousands of devices, and you can update the, the operating system. And you can do it in a way where literally, we can send an entire update to the operating system without restarting it, user can still be on the device working. So it's way less disruptive than, let's say, the monolithic code that's being sent down to update a Windows device.

Ryan Purvis  12:09  
And that's what I was saying my experience with it to the 2014 update. I mean, the amount of times that I've come in the morning, my machine is rebooted, without me knowing for word why. And then also been, you know, the updates are failing all the times you can't carry on doing something because it's half installed. An awful, you know, half baked some functionality. It's very frustrating. Yeah, we want to remove that friction, and you want to jump in with anything?

Heather Bicknell  12:35  
I know I am, I guess what I'm sort of curious about now is how this whole new world of work has changed things for your customers change things for, you know, bringing in new business as as time, Ben, you know, how is this time been for HR people? You know, is this a time where your technology has really been good fit for what the market needs? or How is your experience been with the whole remote work?

Jed Ayres  13:02  
Yeah, it's been really positive. Overall, obviously, we're all adjusting to it, I like to say I'm, you know, stuck in my white padded cell here for the last eight months. And so that's been obviously quite a bit of getting used to sort of managing 400 plus people without having ever been able to go see them and just doing everything through zoom, that's creating a whole new set of skills and tactics to try to stay connected with people. But as far as I tell, goes, our business model q2 is a little bit of a challenge, because everybody sort of, you know, and especially in Europe was sent home and, you know, life kind of came to a screeching halt for about 60 days. And so we didn't have a great q2. But what I would say is the tailwind coming out of q2, as people started to figure out, hey, we need to, you know, harden these environments, we need to secure them, we need to get, you know, 10s of thousands of people working at home, we started to see the benefits, you know, the we started getting jumping in and helping people. And so that was that's been the The other thing, we're not zoom. So you don't just like download the software and run with it. We are hyper sort of tuned, a piece of the architecture, right. So we actually demand kind of rigorous extensive testing of peripherals and workflows. We want it to work just as good or better the fact one, and so the it's not a it's not like an immediate satisfaction, right? We were seeing a big build up in the number of people interested and we're doing more testing and long term. It's a huge benefit. We're gonna be a huge beneficiary of this change.

Ryan Purvis  14:47  
And I think you mentioned the ability to reuse hardware. I think there's a lot of organizations that have been would benefit from not having to get rid of you know, laptops that they would have covered of PVC after three years or whatever it is, if you can use it for especially the case of the pandemic, where, you know, a lot of people were sent home on the day because of a lockdown. And they never worked on a laptop at home before they'd had an physical desktop or, and then he had to now provision whereby your laptops from the nearest computer shop, just getting any device they could wear the performance of metrics on another device pretty wouldn't have been suitable for nonnberg law working, you could use something like your technology to connect into a cloud environment and be up and running.

Jed Ayres  15:34  
Definitely, I mean, we're, that's one of my favorite, obviously, things we lead with, right? I'm a product of the hippie generation of California. So I love the Mother Earth, and I hate the you know, the fact that we've been on this, like I said, before the hamster wheel of, okay, every three years, you're going to throw that laptop away. And you're going to get a new one, right. And that creates whatever, 50 million tons of us waste a year, right? When you think about sort of how we think about the pursuit of the new shiny object. And so one of the things that's been most gratifying about this job is like, you know, we, we walk into huge companies that are working with the big players out there, that are sort of built on this or three year refresh, right? And they're like, Hey, you need to get rid of these 12,000 devices. And we tell we tell them no way, actually check this out, you don't need to get rid of them, we can just put this software on there. It's like, you know, I have a 2016 Tesla, right? And it's like the car has, it runs faster, and has more features than it did when I was, you know, when I bought it in 2016, I gel kind of delivers that same value prop or listen to some old HP device, right, we actually suddenly make the device more functional, faster, and deliver, you know, more secure better user experience, right? So this whole idea of software defined, it's very real. And especially when you're delivering when you're consuming stuff out of the cloud, all the compute, you know, and the horsepower that you need is up, up there right in the cloud. And so yeah, this has been a remarkable for me right to be able to walk in, I've been selling it for 25 years. And to be able to tell somebody, look, you're going to be able to get another three to five years out of that that device. And you're doing at times 10s of thousands of devices. This is like a very special moment. And people are, you know, are investing in eye gel, and making careers for themselves. Right? It's not too often you can walk into a CFOs office and be like, I just saved you $6 million. Right? And it's as plain as day. Yeah.

Heather Bicknell  17:51  
Yeah. And you can really tell I think that customers love idle and that people are really excited by agile, I guess, what do you what do you think is the secret behind why you guys have been able to build such a great community and really loyal customer base?

Jed Ayres  18:05  
Well, I mean, I look back to like the ethos of our founder. Yeah, he's this sort of entrepreneurial German, maybe he's not your traditional German, or sort of more rigid, right, he's like a sort of open to a lot of new ideas. He's very curious. And very empowering to, to the, to the team that built the software, but he's also a super good listener. So a lot of the value that's inherent in this management tool, and all the partnerships that are built into the, to the operating system, these are built out of listening, right, listening to our customer. And, you know, the sort of nature of Linux is such that you can, you can sort of build these little partitions with the code, right? You're like, oh, that this customer needs that. And then you're like, Oh, well, there's a lot of customers that would like that. So that partition then gets hardened into the operating system. And yeah, I think we, there's just sort of an ethos around partner, understanding what that actually means, and doing it with trust and integrity. And that drives this company. And then, you know, the idea of hiring great people and powering them. I mean, for me, it's been a gift. I actually, you know, feel so lucky to leave this company, because there's a level of passion that sort of comes along with this arc, you know, this once in 35 year architectural change. That was like this little German company that maybe a lot of people have never heard of, on the stage with Microsoft and Amazon and VMware and Citrix and extraordinarily relevant right now. Right. And so this is quite a, there's just a lot of passion in the company, right, that pulsates through and I think it extends out into the community. You've, I know talk to Doug brown and the work that he's done. I mean, he has 5000 people in that in An online slack community. Hmm. They're there in 84 countries there, they represent about 3500 unique companies. And so yeah, this is a very special thing to write this fact that digitally through the Agile community, we're having, like, you know, I think they've exchanged the 156,000 messages in the last year on that, you know, they're solving each other's problems. And it's not just about eye gel, it's about, you know, the whole end user computing solution. So yeah, that's a special thing. And then, of course, we've also aimed at creating the before, we were creating a physical version of that, right with disrupt, and we meant to do sort of, we want to have the conversation, right, these hard conversations about where, where's the world going? And how can we support the supportive through that? So yeah, I think I've learned so much in this role, and being at this company, but also being part of like an ecosystem, right? And I know, Heather, you work for Lakeside, and Lakeside, you know, super important partner die gel, you're actually one of the first partners that we actually brought in from the analytics and baked into the LMS. Right. And I think you guys even filed a patent for the ability to see all the way to an eye gel device, inside of Lakeside. So yeah, it's been remarkable. For me, I think the word I would use this partnership is that is the true different differentiator not use words used widely, right. It has different meanings, but I think I gel really understands what it means

Heather Bicknell  21:36  
to create a high value partner. Yeah, I'd love to be able to attend an in person disrupt event one day, we, you know, two, three years from now, who even knows anymore, but um,

Jed Ayres  21:47  
hopefully sooner than that, I would Oh, yeah.

Heather Bicknell  21:49  
Yeah, let's see, it really depends on where you are in the world, I guess. But um, for me,

Jed Ayres  21:55  
I have this picture that almost brings tears to my eye, when I use it in presentations, I almost hesitate to use it because it's like, it's a picture we took of a drone. With at the last disrupt conference, we always do our kickoff right before and literally, it's the 400 you know, whatever, 25 people in the company, in these chairs, no masks on, right, because it was February 5 of this year, we knew I flew home from there after taking the torch of you know, the new taking on the global CEO role, right? It was all about, Hey, I'm gonna be very present in Europe. I'm not just this American, you know, CEO, I'm gonna I'm gonna be over here. And of course, six weeks later, I was literally that was the Friday before we shut everything down, where I couldn't fly over there that I was actually scheduled to return. So. And of course, I haven't been able to go back. So um, so yeah, it's been a remarkable year. When you think about that moment to where we are right now. Yeah,

Ryan Purvis  22:59  
sorry, I need to get a personal issue to go deal with I was not feeling very well. I'll leave, you guys can just carry on.

Unknown Speaker  23:06  
All right. Thanks, Ryan. Good to meet you.

Heather Bicknell  23:12  
Hi, it's gonna be an interesting one to edit together. Um, I guess, uh, you know, I'd love to just talk a little bit about how those virtual events went from your, you know, from idols perspective, and whether you were able to kind of capture the same energies in person, or has it sort of been a learning experience?

Jed Ayres  23:31  
Well, definitely a learning experience. These digital events were, we did the first one in June. And in the US, it was more us timezone oriented. And I think it was remarkable in terms of just exactly how fast we can pull together a content and the number of people that were involved, there was over 50 sessions, and also the number of people that signed up for. And then of course, the one thing with physical events has always been like, okay, you could spend 10s of thousands of dollars to try to like capture all the video, and then we'd have to edit it and get it into a place where people could consume it. The beautiful thing about online events is that we did 50 sessions, and immediately, they're all available for consumption thereafter. So I see that as like a positive and the number of people that were able to attend it was positive, but of course this the energy and the organic things that happen. It's hard to recreate that right and then a digital setting and maybe we'll get better we'll probably laugh about the way you and I are interacting 10 years from now, right. As you know, the kids today are going to say oh, this is a very one Dotto kind of interviews as the technology gets more

Unknown Speaker  24:46  
my Oculus on and yeah,

Jed Ayres  24:50  
so yeah, I think yeah, that's that that uh, it's, it's clear to me that humans are more resilient and faster to adapt that anyone goes credit for, right? I love the quote from Satya where he said to two years worth of digital transformation in two months, in June. That's what he said in their earnings, right? And you kind of think about some of the customers that I saw, right, that sort of had said, Oh, well, there's a portion of people that we have working from home, but we'd never let these people move work from home. And then suddenly, the call center was 5000 people in, you know, weeks time that are all working from home. And then I think shocking everyone with better customer SAT scores and faster answering the phone and all the KPIs that they would use to measure these people went way off, right. And, yeah, so I think this made the inertia that was in the system, you know, just sort of resistant to some of this technology, it just got wiped out. So that, to me, is also pretty exciter, for what we work on every day.

Heather Bicknell  25:58  
Yeah, definitely. And I think, you know, as challenging as I'm sure it was, I think it was still pretty remarkable to see those disruptive events come together, and you know, getting the live, you know, music, entertainment, and everyone on board and all those partners to come together. And really a short timeframe was still pretty, you know, remarkable, I think, and you still really managed to make it feel like, you know, an exciting, you know, conference sort of environment. And you know, I've been attending a few of these virtual events, because now, you know, sort of one of the upsides is that a lot of them are free and super easy to attend, you know, you just have to log in. So

Jed Ayres  26:37  
that is the upside, right? It's like all these events that you start to pay $2,000 to go to plus all the travel fees and everything, suddenly you're able to get all that, you know, without having to do that pay or take take the time to go do it. So yeah, that's got to be a big upside. But there, there's something magical about humans facing face to face. And one thing I think Heather that we'll get out of this is like we don't take for granted the next time I'm able to sit with you and look across the table and share a meal with you. That's the one thing I really miss. Right? I think people find a lot of like, common, you know, human spirit connection, over food, right, like over a drink or over? Yeah, over a meal together. And, you know, I really missed that. I mean, my family loves that I'm here, and I'm cooking meals for them every day. But you know, it's the business. That happened, the relationships that get built a business over from meals and in the hallways.

It's hard to get some of that through through zoom.

Heather Bicknell  27:45  
Yeah, it's really hard to replace. Yeah, certainly. Yeah. So I guess, you know, I'd love to talk about to, you know, like, what's new with agile and what's coming? And, you know, how are you envisioning this whole, you know, future of work?

Jed Ayres  27:59  
Yeah, I mean, we the way I saw a chart the other day, I wish I could, I'll just try to visualize it for you. But it was a great chart that came out from Gartner. And they sort of showed like, hey, maybe at the maximum, there was about 300 million people that were able to work remotely in the world, in the end of 2019. And that seems about right to me, right? When you think Citrix probably has 100 million customers and VMware and Microsoft, you know, okay, so this is a number you can all have agree on? Well, in q1 and q2, you essentially saw that shoot up to like, over a billion, right? Um, and then that, to me, becomes the high watermark for kind of like, Okay, everybody needs to be sort of ready to, you know, see that happen again, right. And, of course, we're headed into these lock downs right now, even right, where we could be in for sort of a dark period. And so business continuity, in my mind has sort of taken on a new context, right, the most important thing in business continuity is human beings, being able to do their job, and potentially need to be able to do it at home. So I think there's like this really interesting, you know, opportunity for all of us right now, as we help companies sort of, you know, harden the architecture for those billion plus people to, to flex there, and the charts interesting, because it goes to 2024, it shows about 600 million people sort of ending up remotely, indefinitely, right. So almost double a four year period from the 300 million to 600. So I think, you know, that's remarkable too, because those will be people that are just 100% of the time sitting at home. So, yeah, I think when I think about the exciting future of ihL, the work from home use case and the things we've done around the UD pocket, you know, for BYOD or just, you know, the security factors and the performance factories, all these things loom large in helping people helping those billion people figure out how to do that. And maybe we're not the right answer for all of them. But Jeez, if we can answer for a fraction of that, we can build a hugely relevant company. And I think that part of that's interesting for us is that we can sit underneath the core leader that deliver this stuff. And that to me, and so when he's asked about the future, that'll be the future, right? It's really about how we become, you know, super easy to connect to the solutions, right, in a way today, where there's not as much testing required, and some of the friction of of it, you know, the, the proof of value or proof of concept that has to happen with every deployment today. And, you know, testing each device, like, hopefully, we get to a more ubiquitous and less friction to like, connect to those services. Yeah,

Heather Bicknell  30:59  
that's my vision, at least, yeah, certainly a lucky time, you know, to be in technology, and to be able to solve, like, some of those critical pain points for our customers, I know, we, you know, helps to move 10s of thousands of employees home to basically, you know, before you had this huge office building, or a few or everyone would be and now it's, you know, thousands of mini office buildings, you know, distributed across the globe. So it's definitely been a huge shift and really fascinating to experience firsthand. But I guess, do you, what do you what is your hope for, you know, idol as a company, do you see sort of, in person offices, like the magic and collaboration that happens there? So being an important part of your culture? Is that something

Jed Ayres  31:47  
for you or not? We

we have two offices that are pretty big in Germany, one in northern Germany, where the companies started in Bremen, and the other ones in Augsburg, just outside of Munich, where our developers are, and then we have offices in the UK and Sam in San Francisco. But the big thing, you know, places were in Munich, and are outside of Munich, and Oxford and Bremen. And in the middle of the pandemic, like, in April, we signed leases on new offices, office parks, and both of these, and I thinking to myself, wow, this is kind of an unbelievable like, moment that we would, we would do this. Now. We had a it was a gut check, right? Like, okay, we have 200 people, and there's about 100, and each one of those locations, and we wanted to, like modernize it, we're busting out of the seams of the location. And we're all developers are, they're actually in three different buildings. And so we remain sort of like a very convinced that you're going to still need to be around people, especially developers, they do a lot of things that are collaborative. And so I feel pretty good about the fact that we, we locked in on these faces. And yeah, they'll probably be built out a little bit different than we might have imagined about the beginning of this year, for sort of that very flexible, you know, work style. But yeah, I Dell still invested in real estate. And, you know, I think it's all about having flexible, modern kind of thought processes. And I just saw Google in the midst of the whole, you know, crazy thing that's happening in San Francisco, they just signed a huge lease for more real estate in downtown San Francisco. I'm sure they're getting a you know, really low price. But you know, I think long term, like we talked about before humans need to be around humans and offices aren't going to completely evaporate.

Heather Bicknell  33:46  
So yeah, no, I agree. Well, is there anything coming up with idle that, you know, folks might be interested in learning more about?

Jed Ayres  33:55  
Yeah, well, I think we're gonna, yep, stay tuned for a whole series of I think we're going to create the digital, yo, yo events that we've done, virtually, we're going to have a huge series of things we do next year, and we're going to just sort of make it super easy to like opt into it, where it'll be like, yeah, just wrapped as a service, if you will, right. So this whole ongoing conversation that will host throughout the year digitally, obviously, we expect that to become continue to be in a pretty virtual format. So we're gonna try we're you're gonna see a whole series of things. We're actually starting to do our own video series with thought leaders, kind of like what you do here Heather called

Heather Bicknell  34:40  
saying what's it called?

Jed Ayres  34:43  
The Origin Story of Agile is that it started in Bremen, in a corner out with with the founder, and then there was an attic and all these were where they did the development and I started here in San Francisco also in an attic. So we have this sort of, not a garage, but out of story. That's pretty humble. And that's, that's the name of it. So I look out for that. And I think, yeah, I guess just also continue to look out for the innovation that's coming from the operating system and the management, over 2500, like new things built into the, the product, you can look for some big announcements around arm, in the coming weeks, I think you'll see some big announcements around some of the, you know, the mainstream hardware vendors out there that you know, every names that everyone knows and loves, you're going to see more of them sort of like attaching I gel yo at the factory. So kind of like our already I gel, you know, cert certified and burned in device, whether that's a laptop, or a, you know, a desktop or a thin client. So I think that's also a really exciting moment for eye gel, right as an operating system company to see huge tech companies basically saying, Okay, yeah, this is best in class product, yet, we're gonna, we're gonna basically license it onto our hardware, like a, like a true OEM Eye Gel inside type thing. So powered by eye gel. So I think that those are exciting moments for the company just in terms of broadening our reach.

Heather Bicknell  36:18  
Now, that's super cool. Looking forward to watching all of that unfold.

Jed Ayres  36:23  
Yeah, thank you. And thanks for Yeah, thanks for the being a supporter of Ico and being part of this community. And, you know, I think that's the other thing that excites me is just that the whole problem we've all been trying to solve for 20 years, is suddenly a very mainstream problem, right? And, you know, this is something that I think has our little ego checks Chamber of yo end user, compute the, you know, whatever it is six plus 10,000 people that wake up every day and really, you know, have wrestled with this all the sudden, this is a mainstream conversation, right? So yeah, the, this is our moment, the year of VDI we've been joking about for years right? Now, I think it's finally arrived. It's 10 years late, and it came, obviously, through a somewhat painful global crisis. But here we are ready to help the world right? Definitely.

Heather Bicknell  37:17  
Well, um, if our listeners want to follow you on social media, where should they look out for you?

Jed Ayres  37:23  
Well, I'm most oriented around LinkedIn, you can just find me up just jet airs JD last name errors. A Why are Yes. And same on Twitter. So yeah, those are the two big ones that I

that I use.

Heather Bicknell  37:38  
Fantastic. Well, I super excited to, you know, keep falling idle and all the great work you're doing. And thanks again so much for joining us on the podcast.

Jed Ayres  37:49  
I hope you have a great rest of the year, Heather and here's to 2021. Yeah, a whole lot better for everybody. So

Heather Bicknell  37:58  
thanks again. Looks like can only go up from here. So yeah. All right. Well, thanks, Jen.

Unknown Speaker  38:02  
Take care. I

Ryan Purvis  38:06  
thank you for listening to today's episode. Hey, the big news producer editor. Thank you, Heather. for your hard work for this episode. Please subscribe to the series and rate us on iTunes or the Google Play Store. Follow us on Twitter at the DW w podcast. The show notes and transcripts will be available on the website www digital workspace that works. Please also visit our website www dot digital workspace that works and subscribe to our newsletter. And lastly, if you found this episode useful, please share with your friends or colleagues.

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