 Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studio having a CUBE conversation. We're getting ready for the madness of the fall conference season to hit us full force. So we're excited to have things a little bit quiet this week and have a special guest. He's Jet A.R.C. is the North American CEO and the global CMO for IJEL. Great to see you. Well, great to be here. Thanks for inviting me. It's, I know a lot of luminaries in the tech industry have sat in this chair. That's right. It's an honor to have a chance to chat with you. Thank you, I appreciate that. So give for the people that aren't familiar with IJEL, give us kind of the IJEL 101. Yeah, so I wasn't actually that familiar with IJEL two years ago and I've spent over a decade in the end user compute space. So they were a little bit of a mystery, I think, to most people in the US. However, the company's been around for over 20 years. They're actually the number one thin client player in Germany since 2006. So what they really specialize in is a Linux read-only operating system that's fused to a management console that just really works for these cloud-delivered desktops and applications. And so a little bit shrouded in sort of this world of thin-client hardware, but the company is really a software company. And so the opportunity for me was to really help them build their US operation, but probably more importantly, actually put the right sort of US marketing prowess and kind of English first. We got out and kind of rewrote their marketing playbook and we really have exposed the IP of this beautiful, light Linux OS and the management tool which couldn't have been at a better time in terms of what's happening in the industry. So just to call those three things out specifically, so it's a light OS that's a Linux-based for x86 devices. Exactly. And so you're working with Citrix and VMware and a lot of those platforms. I mean, there's 17 different protocols that it works with out of the box. So really when you think about Microsoft RDP, parallels, ARACOM, some of the some things that you know, back in the history of end user compute, we still out of the box are synced up with those technologies. But the primary ones today are Citrix and VMware and Microsoft and we soon will soon be doing some things with Amazon as well, working with them to be their first Linux client for workspaces. Right. So we talked a little bit before we turned the cameras on, you know, bring your own device thing we saw first a mobile phones in a big, big way. And then, you know, people are bringing their laptops and all kinds of interesting stuff. At the same time, you've got kind of this cloud move with the centralized control. And, you know, you don't have all this kind of rogue stuff and you know, simple cloud things like, I don't have the right Excel spreadsheet on this laptop. It's on my home desktop. So you guys, you guys are kind of writing that wave but enabling a really interesting play on it. You enable a BYOD but you actually have an opportunity to basically supplant that overlay. I don't know what's the right verb to enable a secure lightweight centralized control. Yeah, so there's really three ways to get this operating system, right? You can get it on the traditional hardware form factors that you find for most thin clients, right? We got kind of an entry level, mid, high level, all in one. And then we have the ability to convert a device. So we would actually wipe the entire operating system off the device and just, you know, have the OS boot to the IJEL OS. But then really two years ago, we came out with this and this is what we call the UD Pocket. It's about the size of your thumbnail. It's a hardened USB read-only stick. It has the same OS that the hardware has and the converter software has. It's just a bootable, right? So I could plug this into that laptop you have there and you would boot to a secure, you know, in Linux operating system and we'd point it to whatever cloud delivery service that you're, you know, the cube was using. So for the Citrix or VMware. So yeah, this has opened up a whole lot of new use cases. It's sort of changed how people think about thin clients too, right? They used to sort of think thin client, kiosk, task worker, not necessarily the CEO of a company or a knowledge worker or the, you know, a physician running an emergency room. You know, might want to have their own device, the same device they use at home. Right. So yeah, this has opened up a lot of interesting use cases, contractors, interns. We even see it being used for people in environments and hospitals where they keep a stash of these for high availability against ransomware. Right? You've seen these hospitals basically being attacked. Right. What they would do is go and put these in, boot to a secondary, you know, Epic or Surner environment. And, you know, this is kind of their way of not knowing which device is infected. They could just easily bypass that device, boot to this read-only operating system. It's a real game changer in terms of opening up, not only removing all the vulnerabilities that come with kind of a classic laptop situation, but even giving the things new life, right? Enabling them to kind of be reborn, really, as a thin, or excuse me, as a light client. Yeah, we see three reasons why people are buying iGEL today. And, you know, it's fun for me, because I get to go out and talk to a lot of customers and partners, you know, we're 100% partner oriented organization, which is fun for me since I spent 20 years as a partner. But what's been really fun is that it's a C level conversation. You wouldn't think thin, quiet, I can go talk to a CEO or CFO or CIO. But this is a game changer and it's really three things, right? We can save people money, which people like that, right? When you can save a company from having to go purchase 5,000 new endpoints, we just had a hospital in Texas. They were about to buy 5,000 new endpoints. That's about $5 million, right? We walked in and sold them 5,000 converter licenses for about a half a million dollar. So they saved four and a half million dollars and not having to buy new hardware. And then, you know, the second piece is the operational headcount savings. When you think about managing windows today, it's, you know, maybe great organizations, one person can do 500 devices maybe, if you're lucky and you really have all the right tools. With iGEL, we have numbers like one person managing 30,000 devices in retail, you know, places where you don't have a lot of smart hands. Right. And then the third reason why, you know, we can talk to a lot of CSOs now too, right? As people are gravitating towards Linux because of the challenges with, you know, windows and managing windows and securing windows. And Linux, when I first started, people said kind of, don't talk about Linux. You know, it's maybe kind of a bad word and people get, you know, scared. Today, we walk in and we lead with, this is a very mature Linux operating system. And, you know, we have a fantastic security roadmap. In 20 years of history, right? So you've got institutional foundation that you can build off. It was funny on the Linux thing, right? Cause I'm sure they said the same thing when they wanted to roll Linux into the data centers back in the day. Exactly. Yeah, this is the year where we believe and IDC is tracking this pretty closely, that this is the year where on the end points of this thin client, you know, you're going to see windows is going to be surpassed by Linux. Right. And that tracker that IDC does, doesn't even track the ones that are being repurposed, right, where Linux is going in because it's just going in on old hardware. Right. So just on the new hardware, it's going to be about 40% Linux and 40% Windows. And then there's some other operating systems out there. But yeah, this is an exciting time to be in this space, right? We look at the challenges of managing Windows 10. We look at the security issues of GDPR. You know, and people are just really gravitating towards this idea of a Linux OS. Right. It's funny. It's not directly related, but corollary, you know, as Google really pushes Chromebooks as part of their enterprise play as a much more secure platform with central control. And the fact, I think Diane mentioned that the Google Cloud show that we use like 37 different basically online applications to get work done these days, whether you're in your Salesforce application or Marketo or Gmail Suite or, you know, so we're all basically browser based application delivery. So it really does open up this opportunity for a thing client, because you don't really need that much function beyond serving up that central. I talk to people all the time to have fancy, you know, thousands of dollar laptops and they're like, all they do is hit a browser. Right. And the reality is, is that's where we're going, right? It's a pane of glass accessing data somewhere else and application somewhere else, right? But the underlying operating system still needs to be secured. If you look at sort of the priorities of CIOs today, endpoint security is number one, right? And inside of that, it's typically endpoint security as the most important piece of it, right? And so that's really where iGel is having a wonderful time taking tremendous market share. Yeah, we moved from the time, just the time that I've been in the US from seven to three, just in the sort of hardware part of it. And yeah, we're having a lot of fun, you know, growing in an organization that's, you know, when you're growing in triple digits, it's kind of a Cinderella moment for your career, right? Well, that's different kind of challenges. Exactly, exactly. So is there a particular vertical or is there a particular kind of business group within the companies that you guys use as a point of entry? Or, I mean, how do you, what kind of market do they do to opportunity, right? Yeah, very specific verticals where we're having great success. So hospitals are number one. We've sold to 143 hospitals in the US, if you can believe that. And we're in pretty, and that was just last year. 143 hospitals in just one year. Typical average, whatever metric you want to use is how many OSs going into a hospital. I mean, last quarter, we sold about 10,000 into one hospital. Yeah, it's usually anywhere from 2,500 to for 5,000, 10,000. And then, you know, these hospitals are all merging with each other. That's another value of iGELs that they're all kind of combining. And as they combine, iGEL can take all this heterogeneous hardware, heterogeneous operating systems, homogenize it, make it easy to manage and secure. And go back to the same spot. So yeah, it's definitely healthcare is number one, but we're also doing very well in retail, very well in finance, kind of banks, really well in higher education. And like I said, we're getting to talk to at the C level, right? They really love the savings, right? Not only are they saving on the hardware, but they can get rid of antivirus, disk encryption, they can redeploy people to do things other than patching devices. We have some brilliant things in terms of the technology. I mean, you mentioned we have the IP of 20 years. The three guys who wrote the code at the very beginning of the 20 years ago, actually they were with an iGEL version before the current iteration. So literally in the end of the 90s, we were, idea was let's build an operating system for the internet, which, you know, they may have been a bit ahead of their time in 1999. But those three guys are actually still in the building. There's a hundred engineers in Germany that are sort of iterating on this and solving for this problem. And I think they've, you know, now with the U.S. operation and the new marketing, you know, we're kind of, it's just a perfect storm, I would say. Right, right. And then with 5G, and again, the increasing importance of cloud-based applications, whether it be in Salesforce or whether it be whatever's that's delivered through Amazon. I mean, you guys are in a very good spot. Yeah. And I would tell you, it's not just about, you know, it's this operating system that's used to a management console, but then it's sort of the curation of that, right? Like, okay, every 12 weeks, I'm going to push you a new OS. And I have an elegant way to get that to tens of thousands of devices. So we're also starting to see managed service providers, right? The guys that are under contract to manage millions of devices, you know, the DXCs and WID Pros and IBM Global Services, those guys are starting to really look at IJEL also, right? Because for the same reasons, the enterprises who are managing large environments, so that's been an exciting part of our growth. Yeah. And that's another huge validation point because those guys don't make big, they don't make small bets. They only make big bets. Exactly. And we're just sort of hardened into their architecture, which is great. Right. All right, Jed. Well, it sounds like a great story and we look forward to watching it unfold over the next couple of years. Yeah. Well, hopefully for those of the people out watching, we'd love to have them come by. We're doing an event in Las Vegas inside of the Mandalay Bay at VM World. Okay. We actually have our own event rightfully called Disrupt. And we're gonna be there from the 26th to the 29th and in the border grill. So we've actually taken over this restaurant. That's kind of like right, you know, in the footpath of... In the hallway, right? In the hallway, yeah. So, yeah, we're actually taking a page out of your book. We're gonna have a little EUC TV. So we'll be interviewing people about, you know, what they're doing to solve for their end user compute challenges and talking to the ecosystem. We have an innovation theater in the border grill. We're gonna throw a pool party at the end out at one of those beautiful pools that no one ever gets to go to in Vegas. We look at it though as we walk just past the border grill. You can find a little beautiful look at that pool. So we're gonna try to take advantage of it, although it'll be a bit hot out there. Yeah, it's a hundred plus degrees of Vegas this time of year, but we're gonna have some fun. And yeah, you gotta do that a little bit. Work hard, play hard. All right, we'll see you in Vegas in a couple of weeks. Yep. All right, look forward to it. Thanks very much. All right, he's Jed, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE conversation from our Palo Alto studio. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.