Transcript
We get Peter the month off, so you're stuck with me, but in his absence, I did bring on a very special guest, someone that I work with very closely with our partnerships that we do. And so I'm really excited to have her on today. We have a really exciting topic to talk with you about a new partnership that we have here at Audimox. Catherine, could you give us a quick intro? I know you've been on the podcast before, but in case we have any new listeners. Yeah, yeah. Thanks Steph. It's great to be here. Super fun. And I think we're on almost year five at Audimox, just from an intro perspective. So we've definitely seen a lot and been very lucky to talk to a ton of you and customers as far as our pre-sale solutions engineering team and kind of build out and value throughout the years, right? Kind of gauging where Audimox has actually been impacting our customers and how do we continue to do those things well with Steph and team from the product standpoint against her will for sure, but we're very grateful for her. And over the years, partnerships has been specifically technical alliances, a huge pull from the market. And we can definitely get into why more, but loving that we have a team here at Audimox that is very serious about investing in tech alliances in a meaningful way. And you'll see that with, with some of the partnerships we'll talk about. Yep. For sure. Yeah. So for this one, we are going to focus on one of our newer ones, which is our partnership with Zendesk. We just launched right with their ITSM tool, something that Catherine and I have worked hand in hand on, and we'll get into some of the specifics, but before we do, I think it'd be good to kind of level set. So folks understand kind of the why, right? Like why Zendesk, why now, and what we're trying to accomplish, right? What, what gaps are we trying to fill? What are we trying to help our customers with? Yeah, a hundred percent. So, you know, to the, to the why Zendesk, and it'll be interesting for, for listeners maybe as well, because, you know, in previous years, when you hear Zendesk, you might think like customer experience, right? And Zendesk has taken that incredible product and thought, how do we treat our employees like customers? So that when Catherine opens up a million tickets to her IT team, that's affecting, you know, productivity and her day and, and things like that, giving them the best experience, like I said, to up-level business productivity, to up-level those IT workflows. And so I think for that perspective, their investment in the IT user and how they can actually make their day better aligns a lot to when we think about, like I said, Audimox's value in the market space and like, where can we continue to, where can we continue to improve there? And I think in general, why like a tech alliance and why this is so important is because you've got these two very distinct paths today, right? You've got the, the one to many solutions that cover a ton of functionality, right? Which I think is incredible for some organizations to have those options, right? There's one place that I go for, for what I need for the most part, but for Audimox, I think a lot of what we see in the space that aligns pretty well to Zendesk specifically is, you know, there are companies that are interested in best of breed tools, right? And how do we work with those best of breed tools, integrate to actually provide value. So it's kind of like having your cake and eating it too, almost, right? Like this is the tool I want to use for certain reasons and functionality and investment we've made. And I want those in each category. So, you know, a service desk for Zendesk, endpoint management for Audimox, make them work together so I can keep both best of breed and improve that value. Yeah. And yes, let's talk a little bit about that's, you know, why Zendesk at a high level. I want to get into the integration itself too, because it's really cool. People are really excited about it. And we've spent a lot of time on it. Maybe we could talk through, Catherine, like what we were kind of setting out to do specifically, like what need we saw that we thought, hey, if our customers could do this, right, we're helping them, you know, mean time to remediate tickets that come in, helping them to not have to context switch, right? Like I got this ticket, now I have to go open up Audimox, I have to dig for this data, and then I have to actually solve the problem, kind of teen it up. That's the problem space that we're in. But let's talk about that and what need we saw. Yeah. 100%. I mean, I think Audimox from the beginning has wanted to be the best fixer tool, right? When you need to take action, you need to do something on an endpoint, we wanted to be the most reliable, easiest to use solution in that space. And so there's no shortage of what needs to be fixed, which is good and bad, right, for folks in the space. And, you know, it may not always be thought about in this context, but you're exactly right, right? The IT team is constantly fixing things and the service desk, when it does its job well, as a tool, surfaces those problems in a way, right, specifically, you know, baseline use case being an end user opens up a ticket, something needs to get done. And to your point, right, part of that is initial troubleshooting and triaging, right, of what actually is the issue? What do they need? Is it simply software requests for an install? Is it some sort of diagnosis of a piece of software or the device itself, you know, permissions, patch issues, application glitches, you know, device not working properly. There's a whole host of endpoint issues that these IT teams have to support every single day. And you have this really segmented, like ticket created, diagnosis, troubleshooting, to your point in a different tool. A lot of the time, there has to be some sort of manual configuration or conversation. So one thing that was interesting when you and I interviewed our IT team internally was also the disruption to the end user. They care about that, right? How much do they have to communicate with the end user to actually figure out an issue? And then we're not even to the solving piece. Now we're to the solving piece, right? If I have to do something, can I do it as an IT admin? Am I doing it in a separate tool? Am I asking my end user to, you know, to communicate with me and taking time out of their day and kind of blocking their productivity? And so it was just a process that was very ripe for improvement and improvement in a quantifiable way. So you mentioned MTTR, right? That meantime to remediation is very much so something that our IT teams care about. You know, also looking at things like first contact resolution rate, SLAs and compliance, the health of the device in general. So the thing that I love about that when you look at those three is that they're all quantifiable, right? And that was where when we look at alliances, when we look at value, there's things that are more anecdotal, things that you feel in your day to day, but this was all such quantifiable value to make those IT teams lives better, but to also make their programs look better, right? To make them shine in terms of all the work that they're doing and operationalizing and streamlining. So now, you know, you no longer have sort of this just jointed, I have to go somewhere or I have to do something somewhere else, but giving them that context first and foremost in that one tool, in their service desk tool, which is Zendesk, and being actually able to take action right from there too, without having to communicate with the end user as much, without having to bother them, without having to context switch, was super exciting to be able to launch and present. Yeah. And so one of the things that we kind of focused on was first the visibility aspect, right? And we really looked at what do folks need to troubleshoot this ticket? You know, Audemars collects so much data, right? All these things about the endpoint. And it was interesting to talk to folks to understand what of those data points are going to be the most valuable when you're trying to troubleshoot, when you're trying to solve an issue. And that's how we kind of chose what we surfaced there in the visibility. So we had the piece of giving specific things to aid in troubleshooting, like when was the device last restarted, right? That's the first step at any, did you turn it off and turn it back on? Just works for everything. So it's always your first step. So it's, you know, we introduced that visibility, then with the action, right? Okay, you don't need the user to do that. You can go ahead and take care of that for them by restarting the device. But then beyond that, we took like the Audemars take, here's your troubleshooting, but let's also surface more data about what updates are missing, right? And where you have things that need to be updated and where maybe you don't have policy coverage there. I think that's kind of our interesting take on it, right, is to be able to surface up, here are all the updates that are available in the device. And hey, by the way, it looks like you don't have a patch policy that's covering updating Chrome, right? It's almost like that built in gap control to help you set up the automation. So maybe next time the ticket doesn't even get created, right? 100%. It was bigger picture, right? The thing that you and I always talk about, which is that proactive or preemptive, which is kind of our mantra, if you will. And so not just how do I respond to these tickets more, but upstream, how do I create less and less tickets? So I loved when we had those conversations about the Delta, because, you know, to your point, it was, it's good to know that Chrome has an update available. Maybe that's why it's not working well or keeps crashing for this end user. But I also see that it's not automating or updating automatically. And AutoMox has a built in browser policy, right, to make sure that we're staying healthy more globally as an organization. And I thought that that was probably one of the things that the end users were most excited about as well. And you have both tools, right? You have Zendesk and AutoMox, I think the more we can help them get the most out of their purchases is probably something that you all focus on a ton in product, right? That adoption. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And you know, that was kind of, okay, so we gave the visibility, right? And then we have the actions piece. Okay, now they know what they need to do. How do we help them solve that? And, you know, we did your standard ones, right? Restart this device, scan this device. We're allowing them to apply the patches, we're allowing them to see what policies they have in AutoMox without having to go there, right? Being able to run their policies from there, so you don't have to have the forethought of knowing everything that you've set up in there. But then I feel like integration went even a step further. And we looked at what are some common things that IT folks are going to have to do that could be a little bit more time consuming? And how do we automate that for them? Right? And we took that approach with those remediations that they can essentially do by just a button. I wanted to maybe talk about that a little bit with you. And maybe we could just go in the specifics so folks understand what they can do and just where we're going. Right? That's what we're trying to do. How do we obfuscate the complexity and make it to where it is complex, but you as the user don't know that, right? Because we've taken care of that for you. And it's what we try and do in our own product and what we've really brought through to the integration. Yeah, 100%. Well, maybe I'll ask you this, and it'd be cool to talk about the worklets as a foundation for AutoMox. Right? And that's your point. How do we integrate them, maintenance tasks, security settings? And as your team is thinking about, hey, how these actions are used first and foremost, and how do we make it as simple? How did we choose those common resolutions? Where do you see us building on? And then I have one other thing. Yeah. Yeah. So if you're a customer of ours, we have this worklet catalog that we've spent a lot of time. We've spent a lot of time kind of like packaging up solutions for you, right? But today, they're in the context of a policy, right? So you have to take those, put them in a policy. And we have some folks that even though we've done the work to write them, right, their scripts within aren't always comfortable dealing with that. We have different levels of users that have different comfort levels. So one of the things that we're moving to, and this was really like the first time we've implemented that, is taking away that layer, right? And how do we free up this space without you having to be comfortable in the script world, right? You press a button, we do it, and it completes the task. And I think that's where you're going to see us going in general, right, is less work for our customers, more ease of use, and being able to do those kind of things. So it's really cool to be able to use that in the Zendesk integration that we have. 100%, right? It's like, it's so, I don't want to understate it, because it's that next step of a customer having to have the foresight, right, of what's important to me in my environment, and then how do I do it? And more and more, I think, seeing Automox and your team identify, like, this is what we know customers need to be doing or should be doing. And just taking away any type of, you know, thought or diagnosis around it, and just giving them the ability to click of a button, which, if you're in IT out there and listening, it's just really not how the processes typically go, right? We think about common IT resolutions of resetting passwords, right, and password complexity on next logon, or freeing up the disk space, resetting Windows settings, right, maybe cleaning up old files and folders. I mean, maybe this is the ask of whether you know what Automox can do or not from a configuration standpoint. What are other common resolutions that teams have to take manually today? Because the cool thing is, we have so many, but also knowing what maybe they're interested in or what, like I said, from a common IT resolution standpoint, like, what's that manual thing you're having to do? Like maybe it's registry key settings or killing processes or, you know, how do we keep unobfuscating these problems? But, like I said, feel free to... Yeah. Another thing, I'm just going to do, like, this shameless plug for another integration that we have while we're on the topic. Another really cool part about this integration, especially for, you know, the help desk, is we have that Splashtop integration now, right, where you can click and troubleshoot a device. So we've built the integration to give you all the visibility, right, take these common actions, but we know there are going to be times where you're going to have to go to the endpoint itself. And what you can do from here is, we have a hotlink, right, that you just link into the device. And right there, then you can jump into a remote desktop session, right, through Automox with all that already built. So with two button clicks, you're in the device, right? So it's like a two-part thing that we've done. Here's the data, here's some quick actions, and we've tried to make that as simple for you as we can. And if that doesn't work, here, try this best-in-class remote control tool that we have to, you know, troubleshoot anything that maybe has more complexity behind it. 100%, right? I think if you look at it beginning to end, how do we, with that visibility, give IT admins the ability to have a healthier environment, right, first and foremost, with the gap control into what you could be automating today into the state of your environment when a ticket is open, right? How do you make sure that you're giving them proper context, the actions, right, the suggestions, and then to your point, finally, knowing that there's always going to be stuff that you need to dig into more, still being able to control that from kind of this relationship and interface with the Automox Zendesk flashtop, I'm really excited about. Me too. Okay, Catherine, I think we are out of time. Thanks everyone for tuning in, and have no fear, Peter will be back to man the show next month. Thanks for taking the time to talk, Catherine, and thanks everybody for listening. Thanks everyone. Bye.
