Transcript
My Matchett with Small World Big Data here. And today we're going to talk with Strato Desk about the state of what's going on in endpoints and secure endpoints, and how the world has changed since we all started working from home and working remotely. What people are doing, where VDI has gone and went to and what people are trying to do next. Uh, and uh, Emmanuel is going to share with us, uh, a lot of the news of what they got going on. So just hang out. Hey. Welcome, Manuel. Welcome back to our show. It's been a year. Hi. Good to be on with you again. Yeah. So, you know, we're sitting here still, uh, you know, remote, all working remotely as much as we possibly can around the world. Uh, and, uh, I think it's been a good year for Strato desk. Right. So why don't you just start by telling us just to catch people up? If they didn't catch our last our last interview. What? What is what is the no touch OS? What is Strato Desk all about? And how does it sort of compare roughly to what else other options people might have? Yeah. So in a nutshell, what we have is a secure operating system for a variety of corporate endpoints. So I would take two things out of that. A secure is most important thing as a use case corporate. It's really intended for CIOs who run a diverse fleet of fleet of endpoint devices. And the new thing about about this, things that that changed is that the traditionally a CIO would, would maybe decide for one specific type of corporate workspace and then say, okay, all my endpoints connect to the same workspace or use the same workspace. And now what we see is that people expect their one platform, their one endpoint platform to support a variety of different use cases at the same time in the same company, maybe even inside the same the same department. And so the three drivers are always security, cost and ease of use, ease of management. And again, what has changed probably is that security is now number one and even more number one than it was last year. Number one, 15 years ago it would have been about cost. Mhm. Right. So see this big big transition big shift. And and somewhere in there people were concerned about you know remote performance as well when we had thin networks and things. And you know we don't worry about that quite as much today either. And I definitely see an emphasis on security. People are just hey, how do we keep data within the corporation? How do we how do we prevent data exfiltration? How do we prevent people from clicking on malware? How do we prevent, uh, this. But when people aren't in, even when people aren't in the office and they're not using our devices that we put on their desktops anymore, right? This is really the big problem. So one of the things I like about Strato Desk, by the way, is, is the idea that, you know, you're not if someone's adopting strategies, they're not going out and saying, hey, we about 10,000 new devices and preload this particular endpoint software on them and make everyone give up their devices and take these new ones. And we don't have to keep refreshing that every two years. The idea with Strato Desk is you get the secure OS, put it on whatever device you want, and it's going to secure boot to that, that stable operating system, uh, so you can reuse your endpoints, you can reuse your PCs, you can let people bring their own devices. Uh, and you're not in this like, uh, a treadmill of constantly trying to upgrade endpoints all the time. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And this is this is a cost issue as much as a sustainability issue. And you can you can argue about my PC use is one watt of power less than your PC, etc., etc.. But my argument is any PC that is not being produced, right, whether the materials are not being mined and the things that need to be to be made, uh, the components are not shipped over the whole globe three times, right? Any PC that is not produced, this is a win for for the environment. And the cost aspect is obvious. I don't need to buy new hardware. And you know, I always say security cost, ease of ease of use, ease of management. If you think about a use case like BYoD, that is literally just an extension of what we just said, because nobody cares if or at least from a software perspective, right? Our bits and bytes don't care if the machine, the PC is corporate owned or user owned. Yeah. Doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how much money you paid or who paid paid for it. It is just something that is being run, potentially even in a live boot model right from a USB stick, without leaving any trace on the hard drive. It's being run on a piece of hardware. Yeah, we could talk. We could probably talk for a long time about what's going on at the edge, too, with with the thinner and thinner devices and raspberry pies and things. And you support all that as well, as long as you can boot, boot, the secure OS, it's going to work, uh, work for people. Uh, lots of ideas there. But I think what I'd like to really just go back and talk about, uh, is this. Idea of of how the world is moving on a little bit from VDI at the endpoint to. Uh SaaS a SaaS kind of world browser based apps. And I think this is something you guys are playing a major role in helping companies do this cost effectively and securely. Tell me a little bit about, you know what, you know what's happening with this migration from needing a VDI to just doing everything through a browser and what that means for, for for the endpoint. Yeah. So the I think the best way to describe it is that today, people have a choice about how to set up their corporate workspace. It doesn't have to be exclusively, say, a windows desktop. So I mean, you can still run run windows. That is that is perfectly fine with Windows 11. Run it in the cloud as a SaaS solution or from a data center. Perfectly, perfectly fine. But the point is, people have a choice and people make use of that choice. So what this means is you can have some endpoints that might not need a full blown windows OS. So I mean, in the past you would have said, then let's just publish an application and and show this this application today. You might also say I just want to run a browser, right. And again, in the past, you know, you might have run into issues like I want to download a certain file from the browser and then edit this file. But these things have pretty much gone, because if you think about a corporate workspace today, it contains everything. I don't want my users to download files. I don't know what they are doing with these files. Right. So everything and every edit capability or even a print out capability to an approved printer. In an ideal world, this all stays in the cloud. And this then being sent maybe to a local approved printer or something like this. But you don't want anyone to get your user data, your CRM data, your balance sheet, these things on a private windows laptop that is potentially not encrypted and then lost at the bus station and so on. Yeah, I mean, we see this with, you know, just the evolution of you mentioned file downloads. You know, you get to like this SharePoint idea where I navigate to a document, I download the document, I edit it, I put it back up to to to an online editing environment that looks a bit just, you know, not because I'm recommending this, but like a Google Cloud doc, you you are collaboratively or online editing the document. It doesn't have to. It doesn't have to download into your machine to to edit, share it and publish it. It can stay in in that online realm. Uh, and I think more and more apps and app developers, uh, browsers are moving in that direction very fast. You know, I was just thinking, you know, the last 3 or 4, uh, applications that I've used, even even here, uh, in the last day, uh, have been in the browser and they've been online. I haven't, I haven't brought files down. I haven't done anything. It's just it's it's there. Uh, and I'm just using the window into it, so, uh, right on top of that. So, so so the strata desk, uh, advantages in that sense, with the no touch OS, what could you just quickly number those out for us? Yes. So, um, a secure operating system is is the basis for any kind of, of these, of these, uh, workspaces. So take, for example, secure browsing. I mean, that is kind of the next big, big thing. Yeah. We partner with the makers of secure browsers. Like in our latest software release, we added support for Island. So that is an enterprise browser product that has a management software where you can set up all sorts of of roles. What can users do on specific websites? Um, in various situations. But this thing also needs a secure shell to to run, right? You boot that PC up, it's set to secure boot it only boots this secure kernel, blah blah blah goes into our Linux and and then starts the the island the island browser. That changes a lot how we interact with our with our end users because they, they have more demands in terms of us providing a solution, not just something that runs, say, Citrix client, VMware horizon client. So we we have now secure browser that we that we run, right. We we deal with browser plugins. For example we we support in our latest software release that we just literally released this days ago, two days ago, the crisp browser plugin AI based noise cancellation. Yeah. So five years ago we would not have been concerned with anything like that. These are just applications, right? Just applications. But now these these go to to the endpoint. So that means people are transitioning away from running the. Trail application workload on the endpoint meaning fed client. Right. They are transitioning away from that. And yet and this is kind of a paradox on but but yet for us the demand uh increases to make the device even even smarter. But keeping these capabilities of it being really, really lean, secure carefully. May I use the word crafted? Yeah. Crafted for that purpose. Right. We don't just download a Linux system or anything because we like it more than than windows. That's not the case. It's really meant component by component. What do you need? Read only OS, no local data storage. Secure boot. Trusted. Verified. Execution. All of these things and as minimal as possible. Yeah. Yeah, but you still. You mean it's just sitting back? I see this, like you mentioned, fat clients. And then people try to make thin clients and try to make them as skinny as possible. And now we're saying, like, well, maybe we've got enough here where we actually want to want to run a browser and have our secure OS, uh, and then maybe have that actually provide some, some advantages. So it's not the it's not an absolutely paper thin client. It's a client that can take advantage of what's there. Um, and I and I think you guys in your latest release had some, had some support for, uh, things like, uh, uh, video teleconferencing, RTC connections and things. So tell me about that. How how does that how does that work? Absolutely. So imagine you are connected via, say, a data center. You run a windows session that is hosted in a data center. You run something like Microsoft Teams or even something in a browser, then say it uses web RTC or similar technology. What you do not want is that car or that video stream to terminate in the data center because. Like they would with VDI, right? If I had VDI, it's got it's got to terminate where the VDI host is. Exactly. So you actually wanted. To us to the endpoint to, to to my home. Yeah I want this in my home. And so this is also where we're, where we need to to help. We need to work on in providing web RTC environments. So we have these specifically Microsoft AVD, Azure Virtual Desktop and windows 365. There is this optimization where the web RTC functionality is then run on on the endpoint on our side. So that means the video streams, audio streams terminate locally. You have peer to peer from my home. It's not going through the data center. And that also means of course if there is hardware acceleration available, we can make use of it where you don't re-encode the pixels in some VDI protocol. It goes there directly here makes a huge difference in user experience. All right. So we're going from that fat client to a thinner client, but one that still has some muscle on it. I'll give you that analogy right. Not not one that's just skin and bones, but one that's actually can use the resources that are there for, for, for the benefit of the user and the organization, which exactly. Yeah. Yeah, I like that. Uh, all right. So, uh, what uh, you mentioned you have this current release, uh, that just that just came out, uh, anything else interesting in there that people should know about? Yeah. So we support, um, arm 64 bit. Okay. Um, raspberry Pi five. And and, uh, that, you know, is if you can get your hands on Raspberry PiS, right, then then this is a great solution. Or if you have a lot of them, uh, you can you can turn them all into Strato desk endpoints, uh, which would be really nice and fairly cost effective. Um, and, uh, it's something with, uh, Microsoft as well, or, uh, VMware. Yes. Um, we have VMware workspace one support. We greatly improved our Microsoft AVD support. So this goes in the direction of improved web RTC, right? Browser forwarding. Like if you run a call center application that's inside the browser, then the audio can go. It's not just, uh, restricted to teams optimization. So there is there is a lot going on. There have been a lot, a lot of improvements. Now we know, you know, we've talked here in the last few minutes and mentioned an awful lot of companies that have, uh, in this space that are undergoing a lot of changes. You know, there's acquisitions. I mean, everyone knows about VMware, right? And there's some rumors about what's going to happen to horizon there. But probably, you know, some question about what goes on with that. Citrix is having some challenges that we know of at the moment. Right. And, uh, we're, we're we're looking at uh, even some things, uh, going on at some of these other options we talked about. But Strato desk has been fairly stable. Right. So so so same ownership, same CEO very stable. So tell me so and then just conceptually if, if a if a company is like transitioning and shifting and lifting different endpoint solutions every couple of years because they've got a they feel they have to or they've renegotiated stuff. The one the one thing that you might want to keep the same, I would guess right would be the secure OS, uh, that is underpinning all that. And if you do that and you're using strata desk, you've got a lot less churn both on the devices and, and, and at the endpoints where you've got, I mean, endpoints are where you've got tens of thousands of things out in the field. Right? Those are the hardest thing to change. Right. Exactly. That's the last thing I want as a CIO is to to go out and, uh, repurpose all my, my endpoints again, just because the vendor is trying to force me on subscription just because they were sold, got a new CEO, they changed their business direction or anything. So that's one thing that, um, I take pride in is, is giving people from a strategic perspective is stability. And so the. Insanity, let's just be honest here. It's sanity you're selling. It's it's on there. All right. Well there's a lot of cool stuff there I think if people aren't aren't aware or comfortable with their knowledge about what strata desk is doing compared to the other, uh, players in the market, you really should take a look at it and, and, and know that this option is there. Uh, Emmanuel, if people want to look at strata desk, you've got a website. What would you recommend they would you recommend they start? I would definitely go for the free trial. Download it. Get your hands on the technology so strata desk.com and and do the click the free trial button. All right. So free trial folks you can't you can't not take advantage of that. Uh, and I think you'll be surprised at just what the opportunity there is. And you can be ahead of the trends here, uh, as we go from VDI to more of a browser based future. It's it's in the cloud, folks. We know that it's all cloudy. Uh, thank you, Manuel, for being here today. Thank you. Mike. All right, take care folks.
