Last week in Bremen IGEL Disrupt EUC was the conference to visit. Together with a few hundred others I enjoyed the event and participated. I thought I give a short impression of the event and the vendors/solutions I saw there.
IGEL
I think it goes without explaining as everyone knows IGEL, they are one of the leading End Point management solution vendors. They offer;
- Thin Clients
- Zero Clients
- UD Pocket (or should it be listed under Thin Client?)
- Client operating system
- Management console
At vEUCTechCon in 2017 we gave away an UD-Pocket device to all attendees, they got to play with this awesome little device. Who knows what cool device we will give away in 2018, mark your calendar for the 28th of June (mostly Dutch spoken event).
Disrupt or be disrupted
John Chambers, CIO of Cisco, used the quote during an interview with CNBC. He used during an interview with CNBC in Vancouver at a conference. It is a very true quote as we have seen the disruption in the market in the last, well 2o odd years I would say at least. The mobile market is one of the best examples of disruption, we saw the rise of Nokia. When at some point they failed to find a disruptive answer for the market they were disrupted by others like Samsung and Apple.
The EUC market holds another example. From halfway the nineties Citrix was king in the EUC market. Citrix offered published applications, desktops to any user anywhere on any device. They stayed king for a long time, far in the 10s of this century they ruled the EUC world. Citrix had little competition as Microsoft didn’t really offer anything worth mentioning. VMware, however, was slowly working to offer similar functionality and from the 10s until now they have disrupted Citrix market. Citrix failed to create new disruptive solutions in the last 7 to 10 years leaving room for others to become a competitor.
IGEL is in the endpoint management market and also there you see that without disruptive solutions other like IGEL become a serious player. The main players in the past were the hardware vendors and Wyse. HP, DELL, Wyse and some others ruled the market. HP, of course, got traction when they made the move with Neoware. All of them offer interesting products but not very disruptive. IGEL moved on that and became a serious player in the market.
What is IGEL doing to disrupt?
IGEL offers 5 years hardware support and 3 years support on clients after end-of-life is reached. This is a massive difference from other that stop at 3-year support. Manageability is another disruptive feature they offer. IGEL offers a management solution that offers on-premises and off-premises support. This is a massive important option as you might have devices roaming the world. The feature about that that I think is rather amazing is that if you turn on a client somewhere if can “call home” and be managed instantly. Depending on your setup the device will take on the configuration you assigned to that location. If you move your configuration will change once the connection has been established. A third feature they offer that is disruptive is the ability to deploy the IGEL operating system on any x86 device. IGEL’s operating system can be installed on e.g. HP thin clients or Samsung all-in-one devices. This could lengthen your client lifetime or change a laptop in a thin client device instantly.
We have a customer, more than one, that has offices, factories around the world that would benefit from this feature. Send the devices power them on and gain instant access to the network together with managebility.
Vendors at Disrupt EUC
There were several vendors at Disrupt EUC, I can’t mention them all but I will mention three and go into two of them a bit deeper. The three vendors that were interested were;
- ControlUp
- DeviceTrust
- Cherry
ControlUp we all know and they continue to develop their awesome product. Took a look at their new monitoring capabilities like diving into a PVS environment and looking at storage 
environments. I think they are doing a great job but I would like to focus on two other now that have more touch with the endpoint.
DeviceTrust is offering security by using context awareness. What we have been doing with UEM solutions like RES and Liquidware they now extend that even further. They can determine an amazing number of context-aware properties from your endpoint. The number is huge so I just include the link to the pdf for you to have a look – pdf -.
DeviceTrust can integrate or extend a UEM solution but they might also just work with GPO’s. When the context of the endpoint changes, the firewall is disabled or you switch to MacDonalds WiFi it will trigger this and act. You might see an application closing as access is not granted in those conditions, you might have access to fewer applications and so on. It will act instantly and change when the context changes.
Below is a YouTube video of their solution, take a look and see what they can do.
DeviceTrust can be found at https://devicetrust.com/
IGEL is the first vendor to integrate DeviceTrust in their sofware. All Thin clients and all other clients that run IGEL operating system have the client included. It is not enabled by default but can be enabled. Together with the next vendor, this could be a cool secure endpoint solution. They intergrate with Citrix but not yet with VMware, So VMware there is a job to do. Together with you UEM and NSX this would be a great solution… get on it 
Cherry is a keyboard vendor but not just a keyboard vendor. They created a secure keyboard which of course integrates with IGEL. A secure keyboard that runs a TLS server. The client, IGEL in this will be the TLS client and together they make sure the communication is secured. This is a great solution for healthcare with the patient data, no more tapping on data from the keyboard to the client. I can’t find a video or anything from them but I will add more about them when I get my hands on it. Cherry is found at https://cherry.de
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