Transcript
Hi Mike Matchett with Small World Big Data. We are here talking with 10ZiG today about something that really took off in a big way around Covid and is continuing this day, and that's working from a more of a thin client perspective, working from more of a of a virtual desktop where you're using VDI or desktop as a service or thin clients. Uh, you don't necessarily need all that computing power sitting on underneath you, uh, when you can access it virtually. And the experience is sometimes even better than if it were local. Uh, so we're going to dive into that and find out the latest and greatest with thin clients. So just hold on a second. Hey, Kevin, welcome to our show today. Hey, Mike. Yeah. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be to be here today. Okay. So so just just to set the stage. 10ZiG is, uh, known and is pretty much solely focused on thin clients. You guys are the experts in thin clients on there. Uh, so we're going to talk a lot about what you guys do in a second. Uh, let's just ask you first, though, how you came to be involved and deep, so deeply involved in thin clients, you personally and 10ZiG, how did that evolve that you said, like, this is where we're going to make our mark? Yeah, it's a great, great question. So I've been with 10ZiG for 13 years and I've worked in this crazy world of it. I forget the approximate number, but it's definitely at least 25 years, as you can probably tell from the, uh, the the gray speckles I've got. Um, I came to 10ZiG. Not accidentally necessarily. I mean, I came from a computer science background and all of the, uh, the past that I worked for vendors, uh, historically and always worked, um, loosely around remoting protocols. And that's what plays very well into thin clients and VDI. So that's really how it's evolved where Tanzania are concerned. We've been in business for over well over 20 years now. And as you said, we're really starting to see good growth. Um, is after Covid, you know, unfortunately Covid still is used as a term often, but where it plays really, really well into, uh, the market that we play into is around the hybrid and the remote working, uh, playing well into, um, the kind of the, the, the ease of deployment, the scale of deployment, the flexibility, the security. Uh, so this is a real growth area that we've, that we've seen and continue to see in 2025 and onwards. All right. So when you think about, um, and you guys again, with a thin client kind of experts, uh, Covid had this remote work diaspora, everyone went home. That was obviously. But today, uh, we can bounce back from that. That. And look at that. Where where is there the real opportunity or I should say, the real challenges that thin clients help address? Uh, yeah. Evolving today because we're no longer forced to work remotely, uh, although we, many of us choose to do, uh. So how's that? How's that? How's that going? Yeah, I think it's something that's again, it didn't necessarily whilst the thing was forced in 2020, it's something that we're still starting or seeing uh, in terms of enjoying the opportunity that or the, the problem that we can solve today. And I think where it really falls down to is that what we definitely saw in 2020, when it happened overnight, was, um, an explosion of purchase of things like laptops. They were great in the sense that companies could send employees home. But the problem that created was tenfold is that employees went home, they took applications with them, they took data with them, settings. And that's now a big, big problem for companies where again, those employees are remote. How do they how do they protect that. And and not just from an application data sovereignty perspective, but from a, from a management perspective and a cost perspective? What we're starting to see and continuing to see is now companies are looking to either, um, extend hardware or replace hardware. They're looking at thin clients because of what they promote around being, um, from from the software perspective, being a more lean and secure operating system. You know, they don't they're not loaded with, um, local applications. They're loaded in most cases with a very lean, uh, lightweight, proprietary Linux based operating system that's designed just for the purpose of of connecting remotely to something without the bloat. And that extends to the hardware as well, um, where companies can often, you know, save money with something that is purpose built to consume their apps and data that that live centrally. Either it's still in a traditional data center or, or, uh, or in the cloud. And, um, the very mark of thin clients is very much coming back into play now because of things like energy savings and sustainability as well. Uh, the components that they have, um, are designed to run at much longer scale. And again, this is a problem that that companies have seen by purchasing laptops that they typically are, you know, they're thrown around, they're thrown in and out of bags. And um, they typically have a less or a shorter lifespan. And I think it's I think it's worth pointing out that while, you know, a thin client deployment may be something that really helps security and it and the business side of things get a handle on management, it can also really provide some benefits to the end user. Right. It provides a standard environment. It can give them direct access to centralized resources as if they were local, and sometimes even increase their performance. What have you seen people like say, yes, yes, give me that, give me that. That's what I want. That's right. Yeah. They, you know, some of the things that they gain from moving to that type of solution is they remove the headache of having to deal with waiting for things to boot up or waiting for applications to start. They can continue their work. And again, that's where the hybrid thing comes. Plays really well into play. That, uh, yes, they can move their laptop around and the data can follow them, their apps, but they don't necessarily have to carry the laptop around. They can they can say, start a piece of work in the office. And then if they're working from home the next day or they continue to to work from home in the evening, they can just continue where they left off without having to, you know, shut down the OS, power up the OS. Everything is always available. They're there at their fingertips. And I think what plays well into the thin client model is some of the the kind of conditional access and zero trust that comes into play with a lot of organizations where because it's a trusted model, um, some of the ease of access into the either the apps or the desktops is made much easier and faster for, for those employees. Yeah, I'll tell you, even even with this idea of AI at the edge and people saying, oh, I need a powerful GPU in my in my home so I can do inference at home. It's like, well, you'll never have a laptop that's as powerful as what's running in your AI data center of excellence, right? That's right. A super cluster there. Yeah. Wouldn't it make more sense for you to, no matter where you're at? Uh, virtually, uh, present yourself at the super cluster or whatever, however we want to say it, where you've got a thousand GPUs at your fingertips. That's right. No matter where you're at, rather than trying to say, like, yeah, and the performance would be even better, not just on the compute side, but even on the display side and the rest of it. Um, tell us a little bit then about. So where do you guys fall into the spectrum of thin client providers, uh, or virtual desktops? Because, you know, there's a number of competitors out there that say, hey, we can turn, we can turn your machine, or we've got this cheap little box that we take a thin client. What separates ten eight apart? Yeah. So what separates ten apart is there's a couple of angles here. The first thing is that we we are solely focused, um, versus our competitors, uh, that, that offer lots of different, a plethora of different solutions. And that's really important in today's market because of how quickly the market is continuing to, to adapt and change. Uh, so a great example is when I joined the company, um, an organization that was doing a VDI deployment would would more than largely not necessarily even update the the client through the journey. Now, because of changes in security posture, changes in in the in the clients and the plugins that we integrate. Organizations are having to update the endpoints much more frequently. And where they can really facilitate that is the flexibility that we offer. So we adapted our we change really the architecture of our operating system to make it much more simple and easy for organizations to adapt to that environment. And we're generally much more ahead of the curve. So we partner with all of the major VDI industry providers, and we're generally much further ahead of the curve than than our competitors. Another differentiator is that we are as well as being solely focused. We're not either just a hardware or a software vendor. We're both so we we can offer everything under one roof, and that gives organizations satisfaction because they know that they can take that as a, as a combined single solution offering from from as a vendor, as opposed to having to go to perhaps 2 or 3 different vendors, uh, to, to, to gain competitive pricing and to gain a, you know, support model from 2 or 3 different vendors. And you've got. A pretty well, you know, pretty good reputation in service and support as well. Right. And that leads. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. And yeah you're right. That's probably the third and most fundamental thing really that we, you know, we kind of regarded as offering that white glove treatment to, to, to our customers. And we're really proud of the fact that we have really good retention for end customers. You know, where they're on third, fourth, fifth, uh, replenishment cycles with Danzig. And the fact that we've been in the market for, for, you know, 20, 20 plus years. So, yeah, we're very proud of the, the, the, the support, uh, ecosystem that we, that we offer our customers. So just one sort of one question about, you know, what you guys are doing lately. I understand you've got some some new endpoint management, uh, or your based manager. What's going on with that? What's new with that? Yeah. So what's going on with the the manager we've been working with? We we take feedback from our customers. And what they really wanted to move away from was the dependency on Windows Server as a, as an operating system. And we've been working with a number of target customers over the past year with regards to our Linux based version of Tensor Manager. So we've built it as essentially a virtual appliance that you can dip into your virtualized infrastructure, and that saves companies a lot of money. It saves them from having to to the the windows license. It's it saves them having to stage and manage that OS based on the fact that it's all self-contained and, um, because it's it's purpose built, it can, um, in most cases use a lot less resource than the equivalent windows based operating system as well. And I think the other thing that's great about that is that it still remains free. So another differentiator for the manager is that if you buy, whether it's a hardware based endpoint or software based endpoint manager is is free. And again, many of our competitors charge um, either that as a flat fee or as an additional subscription costs. Harvest that extra subscription for uh for managing. Absolutely sold you right now open your checkbook a second time. That's right. Uh, all right. So lots of things going on in the theme client world. Clearly it's a growing space. You know, we kind of expected this to maybe shrink back after things like Covid, but, uh, there's a lot of advantages to, uh, to going to thin clients. Um, there's more power. You guys are building more powerful, thin clients as well, even though it's not totally the power most people are thinking of its power to represent, I guess. Or how would you correct? Yeah, yeah. I think you hit the nail on the on the head. It's it's it's power where it where it's needed. It's certainly not powered for as you touched on before to it's not AI ready. It doesn't need to be ready because it's not doing those local, um, workloads. It's not dealing with, um, heavy amounts of graphics encoding. It's just it's almost purpose built around doing what it needs to do for the purpose of the job. And in most cases, that's either decoding the graphics protocol from the back end or it's it's being capable enough to be able to encode and decode video streams like the, the, uh, zoom call, for instance, or a teams call that, uh, the endpoints are capable capable enough that they can offload that to, to a tens again point and not run that in in the cloud, for instance, where they would pay a consumption charge for that, uh, for that workload. All right. So you got that. Um, also some security improvements. I understand you've got some helping people out in this age of, uh, cyber, cyber security and need for increased cyber resilience, I guess. Yes it is. Yeah, indeed. So, uh, I don't want to reveal too much because it will ruin the, uh, the news that we're looking to share next year. But, uh, yeah, we're looking at, again, a preventative and an automated model for the manager that we can almost offer an organization, an ability to set a security posture, either for their, uh, deployment as a whole or perhaps a subset of their most security conscious, uh, users or endpoints. And where that posture falls out of place, um, it can both alert, uh, the IT admins, but also either fix or prevent, uh, access based on the fact that that security posture has been changed or, or or compromised. And that's again, just the way that we, you know, we talk and listen to our to our customers, uh, through the journey of their, of their deployment. So yeah, expect to hear more on that next year. All right. So so kind of one one last question here. If someone's looking around at their own environment and, and, uh, they want to give themselves a little self-assessment on are they right for thin clients, is the thin client strategy something they should look into? What would be your your top piece of advice? Uh, I think the top piece of advice I would look at is, uh, you know, how much money and time is spent, uh, managing that, uh, that, that endpoint, um, and that rule obviously goes predominantly to companies that have deployed VDI and Das. And, you know, it's scary to see that there's a number of organizations that do deploy VDI and Das. But still, after doing all of that work where they've effectively moved all of their apps, uh, and data to the cloud or a data center, they still then, uh, go to the extent of just leveraging a regular desktop operating system. Uh, and obviously that then not just doesn't come with added cost, because when you couple that together, you've got essentially a desktop PC that's designed to run things locally, but it also adds time and cost. With regards to management, you're having to manage that operating system from from both a usability and a and a security sort of posture and standpoint. So that's really again where this where this does come into play. And uh, and I would really encourage anybody who's who is doing VDI or even web apps to look at, uh, what, what we do have available to really take that headache away from having to inspect and manage the endpoints because of the way that we can automate and scale things with, with manager so easily. So if someone, uh, does want to, uh, take a look at, uh, kick the tires maybe, or, uh, dive deeper and do a little bit of research. Um, you've probably got a website, but is there any particular learning path or place to start you'd recommend? Yeah, that's a great question. So yes, we do have a website, thankfully. Uh, and that's uh, we make it very, very easy that, uh, uh, if somebody goes to, uh, they can very quickly from the home page. Uh, fill out a very basic form. We offer no obligation demos, both on the hardware and software. We have, uh, you know, various knowledge bases and articles both on. Com over the past sort of five, six years, again with, uh, the whole remote thing. We put a lot of our educational content on YouTube. So I would definitely recommend going to YouTube. Uh, and looking at the channel there, it isn't just restricted to just specific content. We have done things around the entire ecosystem that we work into with different authentication mechanisms, ways and means to even, uh, manage and deploy things like Intune and Windows. So we do have a good following on YouTube, so I'd definitely recommend going there. But as I said, with regards to support, we're we're we're humans at the end of the day. So don't be afraid to, uh, you know, reach out to us either through the website or, or through, uh, through our email and phone. That's again what makes it great. It's the people that work here and the service that we provide as as good, good, honest humans. Yeah. So, uh, thank you so much, Kevin, for explaining all that to us today. Uh, you know, it's, uh, you know, it's a for the, uh, the, the, the endpoints that you've got there, right? So you got skinny them down to the point where they're manageable, more secure and more performant. Exactly. Cost effective. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me. Really enjoyed it. All right. Take care folks.
