>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston,
connecting with thought leaders all around the world,
this is theCUBE Conversation.
>> Welcome to this cube conversation.
I'm Lisa Martin,
and I'm joined by two guests from Ivanti, today.
Please welcome its President, Jeff Abbot
and its Chief Product Officer, Nayaki Nayyar.
Jeff and Nayaki, it's so great to talk to you today.
>> Pleasure to speak to you, Lisa.
>> Pleasure to be here, Lisa, look forward to this.
>> Me too.
So Jeff, let's start with you,
transformation, you got some big news
that you're going to be sharing
and breaking through theCUBE Conversation today
which we're going to dig into
but there's been a lot of transformation
at the top at Ivanti, you're new,
tell me about that
and what's the shake up that's been going on there
to really drive this company forward?
>> Yeah. We have got a lot of transformation going on, Lisa.
And it's been an exciting ride
for the first six months of my tenure at Ivanti.
I came in January as president along with our new CEO,
who has been Chairman, Jim Schaper.
And when Jim and I started talking about Ivanti last fall,
the challenges were pretty clear.
It's a company that's had outstanding employees,
fantastic customers, and a real heritage of innovation.
But they had leveled off a little bit.
And the idea behind the new executive team
was to bring in a team of veterans
to take it to the next level,
really to grow to a billion dollars and beyond,
both organically and through acquisitions.
So you're right, we brought in a fantastic team of veterans
people that Jim and I have both worked with:
Angie Gunter, new Chief Marketing Officer,
Mary Trick, new Chief Customer Officer,
we recently hired Nayaki Nayyar, who's with us today,
our Chief Product Officer,
John Flavin, the Head of our Industry Business Unit,
and a host of others that have all come in
with a single mission to take Ivanti to the next level.
>> So Nayaki, let's dig into Ivanti's vision,
lot of change, lot of momentum, I imagine with that change,
but what's your vision?
>> So let's take a step back, Lisa
and you look at, what I call Ivanti's position of strength.
And when you look at the entire portfolio Ivanti has,
one of the key strengths Ivanti has
is its ability to discover, secure, manage
and service the endpoints.
And if you look at the entire marketplace,
there is no vendor in the market today,
most of them UEM vendors don't have service management,
service management don't have UEM,
our ability, Ivanti's ability
to do this end to end management of endpoints
all the way from discovery to security
to service management is what our key strength is.
That's our competitive advantage,
bringing these three pillars together under one umbrella
and having a holistic story.
Especially in this day and age of COVID and post COVID,
where everyone is trying to manage those endpoints,
secure those endpoints,
and have almost a seamless experience
as remote becomes the next normal
going forward for every enterprise, Lisa.
>> Yeah, the next normal.
Well, there's data scatter, there's device scatter
and it's now almost like so many people working from home
overnight a few months ago
that now will have almost a relationship with our devices
because they're our lifeline.
So for an organization to be able to understand
where all those devices are,
people are now working from home,
but as you shared, Nayaki, with me the other day,
there's some gartner data
that demonstrates that 3.6% of the workforce before COVID
was working from home.
It might be 10X that post COVID
So the amount of device scatter and data scatter
and need to secure, that challenge is even going up.
So how does Ivanti help? How do you solve that challenge?
>> So Lisa, if you put yourself
in any large enterprise and organization
that is dealing with this post COVID
or addressing the needs of a remote worker,
the remote workers are going through,
I would say, explosive growth
where they used to be single digits 3% 4% before COVID,
and now, during COVID, and after COVID,
it's probably going to be I would say,
30, 40% of remote workers
that every enterprise has to now provide that service,
that seamless service experience
as they're working from home, they could be on the move.
So providing that seamless experience is, I would say,
number one priority
and a key challenge for every enterprise.
So what we are going to be releasing and launching
and announcing to the market
given our position of strength in managing endpoints
is how we help that seamless experience
and what I call the ambient experience for an end user
independent of where they are working from,
they could be working from home,
they could be on the move, or office.
>> Which is critical these days.
But before we dig into the announcement,
Jeff, I wanted to ask you,
some of the stats that I've been seeing
in terms of the C suite and the amount of decisions
that the C suite has had to make
in the last four months
has been more than over the last five or so years.
Talk to us a little bit about
how Ivanti got together this new C suite
to make the decision
to announce what you're going to talk about today so quickly.
>> Now, that's a great point.
And it's one that we had to, quite frankly, Lisa.
The market is demanding a hyper-automation,
it's demanding more agnostic deployment,
it needs more flexibility
in terms of the ability to be self driven and sense
and service without a whole lot of intervention.
So we knew that when we came in as a new leadership team,
the first thing we had to do was get
the go-to-market strategy in order, which we did.
We balanced our direct sales strategy
with our partner strategy.
We made some changes in the marketing organization
to a more contemporary content-focused
demand generation style,
and we reset the company's focus on customer outcomes.
And in so doing, we changed the mentality to success
as measured by are we meeting
our customers intended business goals?
And that led us very quickly to say,
"Listen, the unified IT message
we've been using for the last few years has been great,
and our customers have responded well to it,
and we've acquired a lot of new customers with that message,
but the game has changed."
And as Nayaki was leading up to,
the expectation has changed.
And the entire IT space is relatively mature
but the expectations and the pressure on that space
has grown tremendously, as you pointed out,
in the last few years.
Just think of the number of devices
we all now have to manage as a company, and it's growing.
And as Nayaki pointed out as she discusses our launch,
it's growing almost exponentially.
So we knew that we had to have a new product strategy,
we had to take the unified IT message
and start to think differently
about how the IT leaders in the field
and our various customers around the world,
how their game has changed
and lean in to what they need in terms of automation, AI,
bot technology, and so on.
And that's what we're announcing with this latest release.
>> All right, Nayaki, take it away. What are you announcing?
>> Yeah, so what we're super-excited about, Lisa,
is to just point, to handle this explosive growth,
growth of devices,
growth of data that is being generated from those devices,
and also this explosive growth of remote workers.
Meaning the only way to handle this growth
is through what we call automation
and we are taking that next, advanced automation,
that leap proc strategy of what we call hyper-automation,
embedding that into our entire stack,
into our UEM endpoint management stack,
into our security stack and also service management
to help customers, what we call, self heal,
discover all the devices continuously,
optimize the performance, optimize any configuration drifts,
and proactively predictively remediate any issues,
any issues that you see on those devices,
and get into a world
of what we call self healing autonomous edge.
Where it's continuously detecting every issue
and being able to predictively
and cognitively self heal that edge.
And this is what we are launching,
is what we branded as Ivanti Neurons,
is the brand that we are launching
for these automation, this hyper-automation bots,
that every company can deploy these hyper-automation bots
into their network
that will constantly discover every device you have
across your entire network,
discover any performance issues, configuration drift issues,
security issues, vulnerabilities, anomalies,
and really get into what we call self healing, self securing
and providing a service experience
that we are used to in our day to day life
or in our consumer world.
So that's what we are announcing,
super-excited about the overall launch.
The fact that every enterprise, every company,
and it's not tied to any single vertical, Lisa,
any vertical organization can leverage these neurons
and get that closer to self healing of those devices
that they have to now manage
every organization that (indistinct).
>> I know Ivanti has a lot of strengths
and several verticals, one of them being healthcare.
And I can imagine right now, the last five months,
the hyper status that every hospital and clinic is in,
I'm curious, though, about the name.
Jeff, talk to me about in this new, the next normal
that we're living in, neurons, what does that mean
and what does it mean to your customers?
>> Yeah, great question.
And I know this will resonate with you, Lisa,
as an accomplished biologist.
With the idea is with what we're providing
and what we're launching with neurons,
there's a sense of hyper-scale, hyper-automation,
like the synapses in your brain,
handles so much information at once.
So we wanted to personalize the launch of these solutions.
When you see the announcement next week,
you'll see a series of products
across the spectrum Ivanti solutions;
the ITSM, endpoint management, security and so on.
And we're addressing each of those areas,
the self sensing, self healing, self servicing,
each of those business processes.
But like your synapses or your neurons in your brain,
there'll be a lot of super-fast automation,
super-fast sensing of challenges
and addressing those challenges.
And that's why we went with neurons.
It was actually a pretty fun contest in the company
and we really believe neurons will connect
with our target market.
>> I love it.
And the biologist part of me is gone, "That makes sense."
So Nayaki, over to you.
And in terms of that connectivity perspective,
there's so many disparate data sources out there,
it's only growing.
And Jeff, you mentioned this,
how can one of your existing 25,000 customers,
use, deploy, this on top of their existing infrastructure
to start connecting data sources
that they may not even know they can connect
or that they may not know
does it make even sense to connect them?
>> Yeah, so the beauty of the entire neuron network
is it uses MQTT protocol, Lisa,
which is the protocol that immediately detects every device,
be it endpoint desktops, laptops, mobile devices,
or even, I was suggesting IoT devices,
that it automatically detects.
And senses if there is anything happening on those devices,
any (indistinct) issue that may happen,
like I said, performance issues,
configuration drift issues, security issues
and pulls that data in real time.
The beauty of this is the speed at which it poses data,
I've seen customers who can deploy this
across their entire network around the world
and within seconds,
it's able to pull the data into a centri console,
and give ourselves a full 360 view of every device you have,
every user that's using those devices
all the applications that are running on those devices
and the services that are being delivered to those devices.
So just the power of being able to pull that much data
in seconds and provide that 360 view
of what we call, a neuron workspace,
for any IT organization to have that full 360 view,
and detect and predict that there's any issue
and almost like get into a self feeling remediated
before it interrupts your productivity
or interrupts your...
Any service disruption.
I think you were trying to say something, go ahead.
>> I was just going to add to that, Nayaki.
And you asked this or made this point, Lisa,
Nayaki and I are speaking to the healthcare industry
almost every day.
We are very in tune
with the challenges they're experiencing,
obviously, with what's happening right now around the world.
And as Nayaki is describing,
the neurons we intend to be a very seamless improvement
to their existing IT processes and so on.
In fact, when I described this
to some of the hospitals I've been speaking to,
and certainly the IT staff and leaders within,
they are fascinated and very excited
about what we're describing.
Because if you think about it,
IT challenges down at the device level
in the healthcare industry can be life critical.
And they need to solve those IT challenges very fast.
They need to know when their new endpoints are online,
they need to know when they need servicing,
and then they know when their software needs patching.
We're not talking about just being at home
and being frustrated if you're having an IT challenge,
we're talking about life and death.
So neurons is absolutely what the healthcare industry
is asking for in terms of self healing, self sensing,
self securing and so on,
they need those attributes
in their business model, now definitely more than ever.
>> Absolutely, they do.
So Nayaki, talking to customers in healthcare, whatnot,
I can see this being a great tool for the IT analyst
but also maybe even helping the IT analysts
and business users have better relationships
that overall help drive a business forward.
>> Yeah, so you put yourself in an end user
or line of business, they expect,
and especially in this day and age of post COVID, Lisa,
they expect a consumer grade experience
to be delivered to them.
They expect their service provider
to know exactly where they're working from,
what devices they have,
how all those devices are not just secure,
but understands the preferences I need as an individual
and provides that service experience to me.
So I mean that, I would say, a close tie in
between what the business wants,
the end users in those lines of business want
and how IT or any service organization
can provide that service to employees, customers,
and consumers is what really neurons, I would really...
Helps us get closer and closer to consumer grade experience
that we all are used to in our day to day life.
And to Jeff's point, in addition to healthcare,
which is a strong industry vertical for us,
some other industries, retail is another big industry
that we are very strong in, Lisa,
and also supply chain drugged devices in a warehouse.
So it really gives us a huge expansion opportunity
beyond just managing the IT devices
or endpoints to also managing the IoT devices
by industry vertical, in those segments,
where we already have a very, very strong foothold,
because of the technology that we have
that powers this whole thing in the backend.
>> And we're seeing some of the numbers of 40+ Billion,
connected devices in the next few years.
So Jeff, let's end this with you.
I know there's more coming,
but you probably have a great partnership suite
that you're working with to enable this,
talk to us a little bit about the partners,
and then what's next?
>> Yeah, no, great point, Lisa.
I come from a heritage of companies
that have leveraged our partners.
And we continue to grow our partner network.
We believe strongly in the strength
of the extended ecosystem, solution partners,
delivery partners, global systems integrators,
they all have a role in neurons.
And we're excited to continue to provide the platform
for mutual growth between us and those partners.
And what's really important is,
these are companies
that our customers really love as well.
So we're going to continue to,
in some cases, tie our solutions together,
in some cases,
extend our services organization through partners,
and in some cases,
we'll actually service our customers
through our channel partner network.
We actually went through a little bit of a rationalization
to really zero in on our most strategic partners,
we've done that, we've finished that
in the first six months of coming on board.
And now we are hitting the gas foothold
going full speed to market with a great group of partners
and again, we'll see that ecosystem more and more
as part of our strategy.
>> Excellent. So neurons announced, what's next?
>> Well, there's quite a bit behind neurons.
So it will take us probably into at least 2021
getting all the solutions launched,
and getting them ingrained with our customers out there.
Well, we fully intend to continue to innovate.
And if there's one thing I leave you with, Lisa,
it's that that's our big announcement more than anything.
I mean, Ivanti's had a history of innovation,
it's a company that practically invented patching,
and keeping all of the devices up to speed
on the latest virus protection software and so on,
there's a lot of legacy companies within our footprint
that are now completely tied together
and under the neuron strategy under Nayaki's leadership
we intended to put innovation out in the marketplace,
quarter after quarter after quarter,
but neurons for now will keep us quite busy.
So we're very excited.
>> Well, congratulations on that.
Ivanti, innovation, hyper-automation.
Jeff, Nayaki, it's been such a pleasure talking to you.
Thank you for joining me on theCUBE today.
Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you for having us.
>> For my guests, I am Lisa Martin,
you're watching theCUBE Conversation.
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