Partners: IGEL Software Offensive Driving Big Sales Gains, Secure Endpoint Market Taking Off
IGEL solution providers say the company's secure endpoint software management offensive is paying off in big sales gains and increasing channel momentum.
In fact, IGEL partners attending the company's Disrupt End User Computing Forum in Austin this week are predicting a banner 2018. That's no small task given the bar they'll be measuring against: a whopping 589 percent increase in IGEL software sales in the U.S. in 2017
Bob Allred, end user computing practice manager for Right! Systems Inc., an IGEL partner and Lacey, Wash.-based virtualized desktop solution providers, said IGEL is hitting a "perfect storm" of sales growth by combining its software portfolio with unmatched channel commitment.
"The next 24 months are going to be huge for IGEL," he said. "The timing for IGEL is right with things like cloud, security, mobility, [Microsoft] Windows 10. Sometimes in life it's all about timing.For us the IGEL pipeline is huge."
Allred praised IGEL for delivering on all counts for partners with a 100 percent channel sales model. "The channel model is fantastic," he said. "You know the channel: either you are with us or against us. You can't be partially in with the channel. The fact that IGEL is 100 percent in with the channel and has changed the conversation from hardware to software has made a big difference. IGEL is just doing a great job."
One of the big drivers for the endpoint digital workspace transformation is the high cost of upgrading to Windows 10 with a major hardware refresh, said Allred. "Going to Windows 10 is hard," he said. "You can go buy 2,000 new PCs or figure out how to transform the workplace. The question for companies is, do you want to continue the status quo?"
IGEL's UD Pocket is the perfect option for customers looking to avoid a major hardware capital expenditure by extending the life of current systems, said Allred, "That's a great conversation to have around IGEL," he said."Why would you go out to buy 2,000 new PCs instead of doing some kind of workspace transformation?"
Brady Ranum, vice president of product and strategy for Dizzion, a Denver, Colo., cloud-based Desktop-as-a-Service vendor partnering with IGEL on endpoint management software, said he sees 2018 as another year of "hockey stick" -like growth for Dizzion.
Ranum compared the Desktop-as-a-Service market to the VoIP market, which started slowly and then built into a groundswell that replaced PBX-based voice systems. "When [virtual desktop infrastructure] first came out it was clunky and hard to manage," he said. "Now we have solved those problems."
Not only that, Dizzion is leveraging its Insights analytics portal to reduce costs for companies. In many cases, the Insight analytics tool is uncovering software licenses companies are paying for that are not being used. "In a couple of cases, we have been able to help a company pay for our service by reducing their licensing costs," he said.
Brian Barnes, director of solutions architecture for Coretek Services, a Farmington Hills, Mich.-based health care solution provider, said if partners not seeing double-digit sales growth leveraging the IGEL software portfolio as part of a cloud go-to-market strategy, they are not doing their jobs.
One example of Coretek's workplace transformation prowess: a Citrix Global Innovation award for building a secure cloud environment for a 3D-based engineering application for a shoe manufacturer with engineering teams in China and North America. That Coretek solution reduced the engineering time for the shoe manufacturer from 400-plus days to 115 days.
"Those two engineering groups were having a hard time sharing drawings and interacting, so we built an application and desktop delivery infrastructure on [Microsoft] Azure," he said. "It was Azure, Citrix and the power of secure end user compute. It was our services experience that drove that capability."
Roxann Sawyers, vice president of sales for the central region of MGM Technologies, a Stamford, Conn.-based virtualized desktop solution providers, said she sees a big sales pipeline for the company's innovative Anywere App, which includes IGEL.
"Customers are looking at how they can modernize with a digital transformation, and you can't do that with legacy systems unless you have IGEL," she said. "We are talking to every single one of our customers about this in 2018. This is the moment for the Anywere App and IGEL. It's a consumption model that is per month, per end user and it is flexible so if your business ebbs and flows we can scale you up and down month to month."
IGEL North America CEO Jed Ayres said the company is seeing the endpoint management market hitting a major inflection point. He said the 250 attendees at the first-ever IGEL Disrupt conference -- along with more than 100 viewing the conference online -- as a sign of the market momentum.
Ayres said the increasing focus on security among CIOs is driving endpoint software sales growth in the channel. "For the sixth year in a row, security is the No. 1 spending priority of CIOs," he said. "It's all about keeping the endpoint secure with things like single sign-on, profile management, patching."
IGEL is moving aggressively to train partners to have more conversations around the robust security functionality. "We need partners to tap into all the settings we can use to limit the attack surface on the end point," he said."There is a ton of security stuff we are building in."