IGEL CEO Oestermann Says Vendor ‘Is Growing Like Gangbusters’ On Multiple Fronts
'IGEL’s on fire,' CEO Klaus Oestermann tells CRN.
IGEL CEO Klaus Oestermann is pushing the vendor deeper into the operational technology and internet of things devices space while riding a wave of customer interest in enterprise browsers, preventative security models and other trends bringing more business to the vendor and its solution providers.
“IGEL’s on fire,” Oestermann told CRN in an interview. “We're growing like gangbusters.”
Although Citrix’s recent acquisition of Unicon sparked some in the industry to see the move as a shot at thin client vendors such as Bremen, Germany-based IGEL, Oestermann said that he considers Citrix a close partner and that his company’s products are used for much more than virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) use cases.
[RELATED: Citrix Buys Thin Client OS Vendor Unicon In Endpoint Push]
IGEL CEO Oestermann
With Citrix’s all-in deal with Arrow Electronics as a distributor in certain markets, Oestermann said he sees an opportunity to grow IGEL’s business in Europe.
IGEL also offers Unicon customers a trade-in plan where IGEL converts the remaining subscription time with an equivalent free subscription to IGEL’s Secure Endpoint OS, according to the vendor’s website. IGEL and Unicon are known for coming to blows in the past, not just in the marketplace but in litigation over trade secrets.
IGEL is a part of CRN’s 2024 Partner Program Guide.
A variety of trends in the enterprise IT space are going IGEL’s way, Oestermann said. Growing interest in OT and IoT devices creates more devices for IGEL to touch. Enterprise browsers have added another layer of complexity to IT stacks for IGEL to simplify. Last year’s CrowdStrike software update that caused Windows device outages worldwide made interest soar in business continuity and disaster recovery tools.
And devastating ransomware attacks have turned attention to how IGEL and its solution providers can better prepare customers.
“There’s no better medicine against preventing ransomware than IGEL, from an endpoint standpoint,” Oestermann said. “Endpoint is the biggest vulnerability. And IGEL basically shuts them down from ransomware attacks.”
Mark Vincent, president at IGEL partner XenTegra One–whose parent, Charlotte, N.C.-based XenTegra, is a member of CRN’s 2024 MSP 500–told CRN in an interview that IGEL’s Linux-based, read-only endpoint OS reducing customer attack surfaces is “a great story” for customers, unifying a mix of products offered by his solution provider.
“I usually try to bundle a lot of these solutions together as a better together story,” Vincent said. “To me, in a perfect world, every new customer that I set up … it would be IGEL or Stratodesk sitting on that desk, connecting into (virtualization products vendor) Parallels either for VDI or any kind of other stuff that we want to send them. And then you know you're safe.”
Here’s more of what Oestermann had to say to CRN.
Has IGEL seen increased business opportunities amid legacy virtualization vendor disruption?
Our focus is much broader than VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure).
Citrix has been a partner of IGEL’s for 25 years. So when you look at the VDI space, they're clearly one of the key players alongside Microsoft.
AWS (Amazon Web Services) is gaining ground. We work with all of them and have tight technical integration. The landscape is changing very significantly, where customers are not just saying, ‘We are all in on VDI.’ They might be 20%, 40%, 50% on VDI. But then the rest is running a different setup. That's where IGEL has carved out a niche in the market and created what I call a whole new category.
Everybody in the market is running these classic Windows models for the securities, which is, you know the bad guys are going to come.
The total opposite of that is IGEL’s preventative security model, which is basically, we have got to prevent this happening in the first place.
Windows is a great operating system, but it's very open. You put 15 to 20 products on top of it to feel secure.
We basically eliminate the need for a lot of that complexity.
A lot of customers are spending a lot of time now on browser technology or moving to a browser technology. How do you combine VDI with browser?
The other thing you see now is that a lot of the people responsible for digital platforms and EUC (end-user computing) are also now becoming in charge of OT (operational technology) and IoT (internet of things).
We moved from VDI to (include) browsers and digital signage. And what you're going to see is a much broader focus on our part on including OT and IoT in the future.
We have two concepts. One is you run everything on IGEL–day in, day out. And then we also have a concept we call business continuity.
(For example, maybe a customer has) chosen to still run Windows and not make the full shift to IGEL. But if I get compromised by a ransomware attack or I have a software outage, what do I do?
They might take 50% of their endpoints, put it on IGEL.
We have basically got to be on every computer out there. Whether it's a thin client, a PC, a laptop, a tablet or handheld or digital display or, as we look to tomorrow, IoT, OT devices.
Has the CrowdStrike outage continued to open opportunities for IGEL and its partners?
There are two categories. One is software update outages, which the CrowdStrike event fell into.
Then you have ransomware attacks, which is a whole different category, which is a threat to the core of the enterprise.
In health care, it's run rampant with ransomware attacks there in the last couple of years. We have a lot of health care organizations now that are putting everything on IGEL because they're really afraid. Many of them have already been hit with ransomware. And they want to prevent it from happening again.
There's no better medicine against preventing ransomware than IGEL, from an endpoint standpoint.
Endpoint is the biggest vulnerability. And IGEL basically shuts them down from ransomware attacks. We’ve seen an influx of that (customer demand).
We've seen a lot of health care clients–and other clients, too–since July of last year report, ‘We had no issues. We were up and running.’
There were no IGEL endpoints impacted during that software outage issue. And that speaks to the resilience of your endpoint strategy, your endpoint infrastructure.
What we see most people do now is, they might have half of the apps in VDI, half of the apps in browser.
The user spends half of the day in Citrix or Omnissa (VMware’s former EUC business). And the other half of the day leveraging technology like (enterprise browser provider) Island. Island is a great strategic partner of ours.
We support all the key browsers out there. Island, we're seeing a lot of enterprise customers start adopting now. They might be spending half of the day in VDI, half of the day in browser. And you need a common platform to support. That’s IGEL.
Are you seeing customers seek vendor consolidation?
You can look at us as the most superior endpoint operating system out there as a platform.
Identity access management, think about (Microsoft) Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory (AD)) as a foundation. Okta, too (for example).
That's fully integrated onto this IGEL platform and actually delivered by IGEL in collaboration.
It's not just about, do I run VDI? How do I log into everything–whether it's (electronic health record (EHR) system providers) Epic, Cerner or whatever solution you're running? But what about all my other apps?
Some of them will be browser based. Some of them will be VDI based. That's where IGEL sits, as basically your operating system on your desktop.
And then you have a choice. You can say, I want to run Citrix. I want to run Omnissa. I want to move to AVD (Microsoft’s Azure Virtual Desktop) or AWS.
What about on the browser side? You might want to be an all-in shop on Citrix (for example). Or you might want to say, ‘No, I want to have … best of breed.’
We also enable what I call offloading to the desktop. … Applications for VDI, things like collaboration–(Microsoft) Teams, Zoom, (Cisco) Webex–some customers have performance issues in VDI with that.
They actually offload that to the IGEL desktop and then run it in what we call Progressive Web App.
You start taking all the networking security vendors. You take Zscaler, Palo Alto Networks. You take Netskope, Cato (Networks), Cisco. All these partners are already integrated and working on the IGEL platform. So that gives you optionality as well.
IGEL is one of the best enablers of zero-trust architecture because we establish trust between the hardware and identity.
When you move to the deployments, we enable zero-trust architecture isolation between VDI, browser, OT, whatever you’re doing.
When you look at the access layer, you’re now connecting to the outside world–which is a big threat as well–we then integrate with all the vendors there and do what we call zero-trust architecture access controls. Nobody else has put all this stuff together.
Has Omnissa been an opportunity for IGEL and its partners?
We have thousands of Citrix accounts, thousands of Omnissa accounts. We have a growing amount of Microsoft AVD accounts. We have AWS. So we have a mix of everything out there.
Omnissa has been a very, very strong strategic partner of ours for many years. When it was part of VMware, we collaborated very closely with them. Now a standalone company that's really, really growing very nicely, as we see it. They're a very key strategic partner of ours.
IGEL’s on fire. We're growing like gangbusters.
Citrix changed its distribution strategy, where it's now all with Arrow (Electronics). All those Citrix distribution partners in Europe who have been partners, many of them for 20, 25, years, what are they going to do?
A lot of them are paying a lot of interest to IGEL and beefing up their IGEL practice. You'll see, I believe, a very strong increase in our business in Europe based on a change in distribution strategy, where we'll see partners going in, creating a much bigger focus on IGEL.
What opportunities do you encourage IGEL solution providers to explore?
The first one is security. With a preventative security model, you can put in place real protection against ransomware. A lot of customers are investing in that. And there's a lot of consulting work because you have to tie all these pieces together
No. 2, most enterprise customers … they're looking for savings. Once you implement IGEL, on average, you know what the TCO (total cost of ownership) savings are? Seventy-five percent.
Sixty percent (of the savings) comes from hardware savings– the assets live longer, you’re buying smaller PCs and so forth. Twenty percent of this comes from software savings.
It's a much simpler stack where it's all shut down.
And then the last piece is your operations, so your help desk and everything, that's the other 20% (of the savings).
And then there are management dollars. You can manage an IGEL infrastructure.
Is the AI era an opportunity for IGEL and partners?
This is huge for us. If you look at all of the partners we have on DEX (digital employee experience), SIEM (security information and event management), SOAR (security orchestration, automation and response) and CAASM (cyber asset attack surface management), they are all getting data from IGEL.
A lot of these guys are deploying a lot of AI mechanisms–how they optimize, how they recommend the customer make changes.
And IGEL is investing a lot (here).
Is IGEL’s innovation happening organically or are you acquisitive?
We're always opportunistically looking for tuck-ins. We are known for really building up this very powerful platform organically. And we beefed up our engineering effort very, very significantly in the last two years. And we're going to continue to do that.
If there's a great tuck-in team or technology, we're always open to that.
