We're here at Citrix Synergy 2017 in Orlando, Florida, and we're visiting the iGEL booth.
Can you tell us a little bit about the company and what you're showing here at Citrix Synergy?
Absolutely.
Thanks for the opportunity.
The iGEL is an end-point management software company. We're headquartered in Germany and
actually been at the ThinQuiet kind of end-point management game for about 20 years and really
making a big push into the software-defined ThinQuiet and into the US over the last year.
And so what we're showing here at the booth today is all of the great software innovation
that we've come out with over the last, say, six months. So a real significant amount of
development and product enhancements that we've brought to market. So it starts with a 64-bit
operating system that we brought to market back in December, and then the ability to
take that 64-bit operating system and put it on just about any x86 device, so the ability
to plug that into really any kind of x86 hardware that's got two gigs of RAM and two gigs of
hard drive and have it run the iGEL operating system. But then most importantly, it's actually
the ability for us to manage that. And so that's our management suite, universal management
suite, UMS. And so we're showing that console and the ability to really control all those
end points that either have iGEL OS on it or the Windows bat client and manage it in
a single pane of glass with a super intuitive, simple, drag-and-drop, policy-based approach.
So all of that's on display here. We also have our friends from Samsung who are the leaders
in the all-in-one category. They decided back in May of last year that iGEL was the right
software to put on their all-in-one product, so we have them featured at the booth. And
yeah, so we're showing all that off. And then probably most importantly, in terms of the
innovation, is our UD Pocket. And actually that is a thumbnail-sized device. Let me grab
one actually. Shoot. Here's one right here. So this is the UD Pocket. This is just the
packaging. We go to market around three premises, simplifying end-point management, being smart,
so lots of ROI around it, and then security. End-point security and cyber security obviously
very important. We have a read-only operating system, 64-bit, never been breached. So inside
of here is this teeny little hardened shock-proof, waterproof thumb drive. So you plug that in
and into a USB port, you boot to it, and you have yourself really the world's smallest
micro-thin choir. And then the ability to be able to manage that, like I said with the
universal management console. The other piece that we're showing is iGEL's Cloud Gateway,
which is essentially the ability to manage not only devices that are on the corporate
network, but any device that has an internet IP address, right, will now show up through
this Cloud Gateway and be able to be managed in the same way that we manage devices that
are on network. So very powerful, opens up lots of new use cases around work from home,
and people that are mobile. So really those are the three big innovations. Again, it's
the operating system, 64-bit, the UD Pocket, the ability to put that operating system on
this little device, the management console, and then also the Cloud Gateway.
And so I see you have a Tesla in the background. Can you tell us a little bit more about what's
going on with that? Yeah, so one of the things that we've decided to do globally is actually
just try to elevate iGEL a little bit more, so people that might be considering other
thin client, you know, historically, people who are looking at Dell or WICE or HP. And
so we're in a mode, we want more people to be aware of iGEL. So in the vein of software
defined, we have decided to give away a Tesla. And Tesla is obviously the future of driving
and software defined, autonomous, a car that actually gets better, right? Sort of like
the iGEL operating system. So what we did was we picked up a Tesla, not only a Tesla,
but actually the P100D, so the quickest, safest, smartest, longest driving Tesla. And we're
having people fill out a survey, get a little bit of information about them, and they have
a chance after they take our quick demo of the management console to be entered in to
win the Tesla P100D, which is a $145,000 car. And we will give that car away at VMworld.
So it's a very good chance, actually, there's only maybe a thousand people that have qualified
at this point. And then we'll run it through the summer. And so it's a very significant
prize. And we think that it is a nice parallel between our software defined thin client approach
and what Tesla obviously has done with the car in terms of moving us forward around electric,
and the important thing is the software defined experience that Tesla delivers. So nice parallel,
very powerful. And we're having fun telling both stories, if you will.
Is there something that we could take a look at the product itself?
Absolutely. So we're lucky enough today to have one of the two of our technology evangelists.
We have Doug Brown, who works for us globally. And our US technology evangelist is a guy
named Jeff Calberg. He's here in the booth with us right now. And he would love to show
you all the things I just talked about. That's one of the powerful things. If you haven't
kind of compared us to Dell Weiss device manager or HP, when people actually see the console,
they see how intuitive it is, how powerful it is, and some of the things they can do
really contextually with security. That's when the light bulb goes off. And then of
course, when you bring this into the equation, they see, hey, I don't have to go buy thousands
of new devices. I can buy this. This is a $169 product. And it comes with our management
solution. So you can save companies a lot of money and also really improve the ability
to manage devices at enterprise scale. So I'd love to introduce you to Jeff and have
him show you what we're doing and actually show you the product.
Great. So what are you going to show us?
Well, I think today we're going to go ahead and start with a review of what it is that
makes IGEL so special. IGEL technology being a software company. Okay. Very much focused
on putting together solutions that are good for the enterprise and do a lot to help their
daily workflows and make sure everybody's more productive and at the same time, serving
money. So what we're going to do is we're going to focus on the management system again
and what we're looking at here on the screen right here is an IGEL thin client running
our management interface. This is the tool that people use to work with the thin clients
that are out and about in their organization. What we're going to do is take a look here.
I've got a thin client here on the right that is a factory defaulted thin client. We're
now going to take this thin client. We're going to go ahead and reconfigure this thing.
So inside the management console, we're going to go ahead and we're going to go take our
device which is right here. I'm going to go ahead and deploy this device to my London
office. So we'll grab this right here and I'll go ahead and drag this off and drop it
off in London. Okay. And we'll go ahead and move this and I'll tell the management system
that I want to go ahead and have the thin client perform this update right now. I go
ahead and do that. What we're seeing on the right hand side here, we're seeing this thin
client get fully deployed for our London office including locking down the device, changing
our wallpaper to a London wallpaper so that we know we're in London. Okay. This full configuration,
removing any kind of aspect for an end user to change the configuration. Anything that
they want to do is now completely handled and managed by the management system. So here
we see we've got a connection to the Citrix Storefront. Okay. We've got the change to
a London time zone where it's late at night. Any access to the access to setup which would
have been in the lower left hand corner has now been removed, essentially locking it down.
If I come back over here, we say we can look at that thin client here. If I wanted to go
ahead and take this thin client and I needed to say shout out for example because I wanted
to provide support for an end user, I can go ahead and right click and I can shout out
for this device. One of the things that we've added over the last recently is the ability
to shout out device using a secure tunnel. So we're actually making a connection, making
a recording or making log entries to who's making this connection. Okay. And who did
it and what it is that they shouted. We don't record the sessions. That works with other
tools but the idea is to be able to track that we've actually done that. So here we go.
We're seeing this device over here. If I were to take this device down and say, hey, let's
go ahead and re-associate this. Maybe this device is going to get redeployed this case
to our New York officer or we can go ahead and just simply take this drag and drop it
to our New York location and we'll go ahead and click on this. We'll let those settings
take effect now. Okay. And we'll now see this thin client. Go ahead and reconfigure
yourself for New York. And we see that on the thin client. We're also seeing that happen
inside this shadow session right here. It's actually going to close right up. Okay. And
then we'll go ahead and re-establish that connection to that thin client by right clicking
here and going and taking a shadow and connecting that. And then here we go. Now we have our
New York office here. So remind everybody that the way this works is a very powerful
tool for this management system in terms of the approach that we use. It's a policy-based
approach. We create profiles. Profiles are snippets of a configuration. So something
as simple as a time server can be a configuration. It could also be that we set up shadowing
as a profile. It could be the Citrix connection as a profile. It could be time zone as a profile.
We associate those profiles with the management system here. I go in here and I created a
directory tree for my enterprise. I called it enterprise. If I was a company, I'd probably
name it after my company. Okay. And at that level, I've gone ahead and associated different
aspects of that configuration. As I said, a time server, a base configuration to lock
down the device. A shadowing profile. Different things that we need. Perhaps some special
network settings, network security settings. I've associated that. When I moved into New
York, I went ahead and picked up an Eastern time zone in the U.S. I picked up New York
wallpaper. And then of course, when I moved between locations, all that happened automatically.
We have the ability to profile devices inside this management system. So when a device shows
up, it'll automatically contact the management system, automatically place itself inside
this directory without me having to do anything additional other than just boot the device.
It allows an organization or a user, a single person to manage hundreds or tens of thousands
of devices, hundred thousand devices around the world and spend very little time doing
it. There's all this automation built into the system. Great. Well, thanks for taking
the time to show this to VMBlog and we hope you have a great show. Very good. Thank you.
