Transcript
Hi Dave Littman Truth in IT. Today we are talking about end user infrastructure. I am joined by Michael Shuster, CEO of Ferroque Systems . Michael, welcome. Well, thanks very much, David. Appreciate you taking the time to speak with me and glad to be here. Fantastic. Okay, Michael, I'm going to you I'm going to turn it over to you. Let's get a brief introduction about Ferroque Systems. What you guys special in the differences between end user computing and end user infrastructure. And then I'll interject with a couple questions here or there. Sure. No problem. So Ferroque Systems has been around since 27. Sorry 2007. We're about 17 years old now, and we're an organization that specializes in what we now call an end user infrastructure. And really, it's a term that is intended to be an evolution of end user computing, which everyone is well aware of and knows. And it's been around for eons now. End user infrastructure is something that Mark Templeton coined quite recently. And Mark Templeton is the former CEO of of Citrix Systems. And he is actually one of the pioneers that actually created some of the new technology categories, such as remote access infrastructure, whatnot, way back in the day. So he had looked at the market and said, listen, based on where things are evolving, as you see, as it's traditionally known, has widened a fair bit in terms of what's now now encompassed in that scope. It's not just about endpoint devices people are using and how we're delivering applications, let's say, through virtualization to those end users and calling that remote access or a VPN connection or whatnot. It's much broader now just due to the nature of of the evolution of cloud computing and security and networking. When we got the evolution of SAS and enterprise browsers and casbs and all these other great things that are out there now. So really the end user infrastructure category as we see it, is just it's an opened up version of end user computing that now encompasses the network and security technologies that operate not just in the data center, but the edge being that the edge of the network in EMC is now all over the place. It's not just in the office. It's not just in the in the, um, in the data, the corporate data center. It's anywhere that user happens to be, whether it's on a beach or whether it's remotely somewhere else, uh, or working from home, uh, working in a third party contractors office. That's EMC that's at the edge and beyond that encompasses the cloud technologies, because so much of EMC is now deployed on clouds. It encompasses all the digital experience, technologies and monitoring solutions that are out there now, control up and what have you that now focus on that space. And a lot of vendors are starting to realize how important that is. We're finding more vendors, even on the security stacks, are packing in more monitoring capabilities to latch on to that digital employee experience piece. Because the end of the day end user computing is important chiefly because it is the area, the first part of the technology layer, that most users within an organization are interfacing with to go and do their work with, in essence. So it's important to, to, to. I think organizations in general to bear that in mind. Um, because this is truly where work gets done. Ui is where work gets done. So it's the key place for productivity and performance, um, security, compliance, enforcement, uh, flexibility and scalability of of infrastructure to support users and ensuring that we're doing that in a responsible manner that supports business objectives while managing costs. And it's really where from an information technology perspective, where the end user and it's term now. Dex digital employee experience comes from so you can have the world's best AI platform in the back end. Cloud compute. Whatever. But at the end of the day, um, it's that UI construct where the users are realizing and experiencing how their applications are behaving, how fast they can log into their applications, do their work, how much red tape do they have to go through in the morning to get things done to to log in, sign in, do their work, and are they duly protected? And are security controls and compliance controls enforced by something or things in the corporate environment to ensure that we're protecting against malware and data loss and things like that? And of course, reliability and continuity. Because if your users cannot work due to some component failure in that UI ecosystem, they can't, um, they, they're you're you're losing money and you generally can't deliver the value to the organization and the and the customers in that in that way either As far as where the Eu-uk space is going, it's continuing to grow. Vista pulled up some numbers or whatnot for us to to reference here. But I mean it's it's it's something that there's been a lot of talk in the market just about oh this, this type of technology is going down. Well this is going up. And that may be true for maybe some pockets of digital workspaces. Maybe some people are using less VDI. But we've actually seen VDI continue to grow in general as, as as hybrid work has been coming about. But there is certain applications that might switch and move to different delivery modalities, but that all in all, still falls within end user computing. And one of the drivers is that really is going to be, uh, just just the fact that the ongoing adoption of hybrid and remote work is certainly a thing that was always on an upward trend over the the last decade or so, but the pandemic certainly forced that forward. And although and in many cases a lot of that stuff. Now, companies that were predominantly in office in many cases are hybrid. Now, no one and no one went all the way back to to to in office, although there's a lot of mandates out there, they're being enforced. Those technologies still continue to be something that's key to a lot of different, uh, different job roles or whatnot across a number of organizations. So there tends tend to be a mix. But in terms of some companies saying, hey, we're going to try and, uh, go to return for office or whatnot. But overall, on average, we're just seeing that if, let's say, 70%, for the sake of argument, not a real number of organizations were in office before the pandemic. Um, that number has shifted backwards where there's just more of a larger hybrid trend, which is driving a lot of this market growth, uh, that we see here. So we continue to see these things, uh, these things increase and grow. So it's a great opportunity for us and a great opportunity for us to help our customers, uh, capitalize on that and make the most of those investments and those benefits, and just guide them down the right paths for what technologies make sense for different use cases. And as things are changing their business, pivot to different technologies to make sure that they can meet their needs while reducing costs and and yeah, so demand is still there. It's still growing. It's just a matter sometimes of what technology is being used over what. So major drivers talked about some of this already as far as the rise of hybrid remote work. And that continues to be an upwards trend and something that employees are kind of dictating to many to many employee employers at this time, which has been an interesting trend to see, um, uh, increased user mobility in terms of roles, whether they're hybrid or not. There's just even folks that are in office. There tends to be a bit more mobility in terms of being able to have choice or just from job requirements to be working across different locations. One thing that we found over the last ten, uh, sorry, five plus years is, uh, with the adoption of more hybrid work, it's democratized employment and geolocation. A little bit more so where historically, maybe a company would be trying to hire employees around a specific office area, there's been a bit more of a shift that I think was prodded quite along from the pandemic of being open to hiring the best talent, regardless of their location. So that has also meant a bit more mobility is required for those users as they're traveling to different offices periodically than that, but it's just obviously job roles to that that just require a lot more mobility and being able to enforce security controls and provide a good user experience at the same time has been a big factor there as well. Ongoing IT budget constraints. I mean, just as a plain example, VDI is very expensive to run, and a lot of organizations are looking at sort of their footprint going, here's what our use cases are today. Do we really need to deliver them all in VDI because VDI infrastructure tends to be expensive? Do we have use cases that might be more appropriate for, let's say, a cloud PC, or could we reduce Is the footprint of our VDI platforms. We still need the licenses, but maybe we can reduce the footprint of what's being hosted on there and therefore reduce very expensive cloud or on prem compute resources to deliver them through an enterprise browser or something else of that nature, that type of thing. Um, and that also has been a driver for some vendors doing some doing some level of consolidation where they can provide better value with, with, uh, a set of, of stuff that they have in their ecosystem that aligns to, let's say, UI and network and security. For example, they're trying to piece together a bunch of different vendors as well that might have some additional and higher cost. Mind you, there is some benefit to actually having multiple vendors in play, but that's a whole other discussion really. And yeah, just the the ongoing demand for enhanced data security and compliance. So we touched on that a bit. But the reality is and this is where where UI is really taking a key, uh, presence here and is collaborating a lot more with the network and security teams because again, the end user is really a key ingress point and risk area for malware and data leakage. So how we're protecting that edge and that edge can be within the corporate office. That can be within the corporate data center. That can be anywhere a remote user happens to be sitting, ensuring that we're able to enforce those controls and monitor the environment just as much as we're monitoring for digital employee experience. But being able to monitor and enforce security policies is becoming increasingly, increasingly critical, which is also why there's been a trend downwards of getting off VPNs as NIST, as NIST has dictated some years ago. In this day and age, um companies really need to be focusing on ensuring that they're providing remote access to applications, not networks, just from a security perspective. So this is really what Ferroque Systems does. We are a value added reseller of a number of end user infrastructure technologies. So we are a we provide professional services, managed services and product resale. What differentiates us, I feel from a lot of other folks in our space, is that we are a services centric organization. Our lineage has been really in service delivery. So professional services and managed services. So when we take on and partner with a company, we tend to develop very deep expertise with them so that we can deliver effectively, not just resell the product. And a lot of folks, as I mentioned in our in our industry, fantastic companies, but they don't necessarily have the same level of services strength. And that's where we shine. That's one of our key differentiators is that service centric focus. While others tend to focus a bit more on product, the just as an example, like our service delivery team is exponentially larger by by a significant magnitude than even our sales team is. So that's just that's just where we play and that's where our strengths are. But we've got about four key practice areas digital workspaces, networking, security infrastructure endpoints and productivity, which is sort of your modern work area, if you will. And we work with a number of best of breed vendors in there. We were very careful about the vendors that we curate to make sure that they they fit our space, and we tend to to screen out a lot of partners that we feel would stretch us too thin or taken us in a bit of a different direction. And that's outside of our area of specialization that we're trying to focus in. So, uh, our mission and DNA and all that stuff is fairly straightforward. We want to enable organizations to work securely and efficiently to deliver IT apps and services to their employees. And our vision is to really be the most trusted leader in end user infrastructure. Got a number of of of values that we feel are critical to our success in terms of how we operate, the most recent one being community that we introduced. Because one thing I'll say, having been in this field for for as long as I have and my my business partner Todd has been even longer is unlike a lot of other areas of it. The end user computing community tends to be very distinct, and they've got their own set of specialized conferences that tend to occur throughout the world, uh, put up by what organizations or or just community personnel or whatnot. It's very distinct. And what we take seriously in that area, and we take it to heart, is ensuring that we're giving back in that community. So we produce a lot of technical content, blogs, things that normally you'd think are being done as, as a way to directly do lead generation. We've kind of taken a bit of an opposite approach, where a lot of the content in the webinars that we run are, by and large, more focused on how to do something specific with the technology, not necessarily try and sell someone on something. So we it builds us credibility, if you will, from the actual technologists that use these products and therefore lend itself to our credibility overall. But yeah, as I mentioned overall that 10,000 foot view we're a we're a service. We're a bar that's very focused on service delivery. Key facts if of any use were found in Toronto, Canada in 2007. We've got a leading QC practice in North America. We actually operate in Canada. In the US we've actually got entities in both. So we cover Canada, the US, and we also support a number of um customers that are global conglomerates as well as as European organizations as well. We're a member of the M7 Group, which is kind of jokingly referred to as a Citrix mafia, which is $1 billion consortium of North American QC partners. So a member of that, which also means that we're on some special vendor boards where a lot of vendors will have boards for partners that they they'll they'll elect certain partners to come in. We're actually let's say in the case of Citrix, we're on two boards. There's the general partner board, and then there's the specialized M7 board that we are, we are we are a part of this. Well, just because of our the volume that we do with that particular vendor, and they value our insights there accordingly because the number of customers we obviously have, we as as mentioned, we had focused for many years on the services end of things. And as a result of that, we became Citrix largest subcontractor for consulting in the in the Americas. So that is them as subcontracting services to us, and we deliver on their behalf as Citrix with the same level of capability, if not further. So we spent ten plus years, um, consulting on behalf of Citrix and ensuring and having that inside knowledge of how they consult and methodologies and that level of and just that direct access to product managers and the other consultants and architects for real, true mastery of the products. In the case of Citrix, as an example, that maybe 3 or 4 other partners have globally had that level of access and capability to. So we also contribute regularly to official Citrix and Microsoft leading practices. So we've written a number of um, uh, articles for, for Citrix and Microsoft respectively. Uh, like things like the Azure landing zone for Citrix was something that we contributed for. And there's other Tech Zone documentation and other standard leading practices at Citrix and Netscaler have, for example, that we've actually defined and contributed to. Uh, we also, uh, through our, our other areas of endpoint management or whatnot, also have practice areas where our talented resources have also contributed to vendor recommendations in those categories as well. Uh, we've got global capabilities. Follow the sun support for customers that are, again, their global customers where they've got presence in North America and Asia, Europe and what have you. So we provide that 24 seven support. Our service delivery teams got over 20 years of uh, of global project exposure as well. Um, when we did we recently did an analysis of sort of the the experience level amongst our team and across our our server, our service delivery department. Uh, 20 years is the average number, and that's pretty significant. Um, in this space. But it just goes to show just how the longevity that you can specialize something in and still have folks that that hang around in that. So we, we definitely cherish and value that. And we talked about our practice areas. Um, one thing that's, uh, that's worth noting as well, especially as our, as far as our managed services go, is where we're Soc2 type two compliant. We align to this CSF and then Dora as well. Dora is more of a newer compliance, uh, regulation system that came about in Europe recently in the banking sector. So by the numbers, we've impacted well over 4 million users over the years. We can typically deliver about 30,000 annual annual consulting hours specialized in the technologies that we work on. We typically do about 100 projects. Consulting projects annually hold over 100 230 industry certifications across our our team, our NPS score is even. I'm still surprised by this because it just seems unrealistic. But the reality is the numbers don't lie. Our NPS score is nearly a ten out of ten. So again, we've got that focus on service delivery and that methodology that we aligned to being. It's been honed and developed over 20 plus years. And it just just works. And that then the customers experience seems to reflect in that. And yeah, practice areas that we've already gone over those. But I think beyond that, let me know if there's any questions I haven't answered. I'm happy to. Yeah, yeah. Let me um, I don't know. Not not too many questions, Michael. But, um, you know, one question I know will come in is are there any specific company sizes that you guys focus on, like SMB, mid-market, large enterprise. Mid-market, large enterprises where we generally play. Uh, we SMB isn't really a space that we've been particularly excited about, but our history has generally been in, uh, mid-market and large enterprise. Okay, so how do you guys define that 500 plus end users? Something like that. So, so what's interesting in the Canadian market and the US markets a bit slightly different. Like at like a mid-market or a medium sized business or commercial in in Canada might be even like 200 users plus. So generally 200 users, uh, and beyond is really our, our preferred area. But uh, many of the customers that we have tend to be in the thousands or tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands. Okay. And, um, how about in terms of industrial verticals, are there any specific markets like, you know, healthcare, uh, state and local, you know, education? Yeah, absolutely. So be with our just our history of project and delivery experience in general. Over the last, uh, since our inception, we've touched pretty much every major industry out there. So, I mean, there's actually more more of these to add, but our key ones are finance and healthcare. Those are the areas of specialization that we have across North America. We work with 75 different healthcare organizations, including the largest in North America. And we've also worked with over 55 financial institutions. So, uh, in terms of the different types of customers we've worked with, uh, sets us apart, I feel, um, quite distinctly in the market just because of the amount of exposure that we've had across industries. But and with the volume that we have of projects that we've delivered, but especially in those two key areas where when you're when when you're working with 55 plus 75 plus organizations, that's that's a significant piece of of experience you're collecting there. Nice. So. Well. Michael. Fantastic. Um. Awesome. You know, where can folks go to learn more? Sure. Uh, easiest place to go is Ferroque Systems .com. F e r r o q u e systems.com. Or you can search that up on LinkedIn as well. We always love our our LinkedIn community. And we do most of our posting there. But we've got a sales North America and Canada that would love to speak with anyone who's interested in learning more about anything that we do, and hope to hear from anyone that's curious. All right. Dynamite. Michael, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. So make sure you check out Ferroque Systems if you have any kind of, uh, challenge with end user infrastructure. And, uh, you know, you've got a few hundred employees, um, or end users where you're trying to manage those devices and that infrastructure. So, Michael, thank you again. And thank you all for watching. Dave Littman with Truth in IT make it a great day ahead. Take care.
