Phil Fersht [00:53]
There we go. Got the 2nd, 2nd best, right? Thank you for the introduction, Mark. Yeah, nice to have you, Brendan. It’s wonderful. Tell me, we just completed some pretty in-depth research and we sort of came away with some conclusions. This is over 2,000 employees we spoke to, both managers and employees, that a great resignation is kind of behind us. It’s in the rearview mirror. There’s a bit more engagement between staff, and some of the motivations are shifting a bit in terms of what engages them, that sort of thing. But what are you seeing out there when you talk to enterprises? And you also talk a lot with the contact centers as well, Brendan, in terms of staffing trends. Is this great resignation really behind us? What is happening next?
Brendan Kiely [01:47]
So, thanks very much for having us, Phil, and we’re really proud of being a Hot Vendor with you guys. I think CX providers, and all businesses, we’re entering the 3rd wave of challenge. So the pandemic came, and there was a huge crisis around that. And the biggest challenge was getting people to work at home. After that, then I think there’s a realignment going on around — you asked, is the great resignation over? I’m not sure it was a great resignation. I like to call it the great realization. So, look, our mission is to secure the edge of the infinite workplace revolution. And I know that sounds like a really big statement, but I do see it as a revolution. And this great realization was people sitting back going, actually, for the first time in history, I don’t have to work — or I don’t have to live where I work — that those two things in my life can cohabitate in a very different way. And I think the great realization was that demand from employees that I want to work differently. And the key word there, I think, is flexibility. And they want flexibility, and because it’s happened en masse, this has become a huge challenge for companies. So I don’t think it’s over. I think we’re 10% into a revolution, which we’re all part of defining. And I think 2023, and the coming of 2023, is going to be a key year in bolting down what we’ve learned, understanding what we’ve learned, taking new technologies, and how we make work at home and hybrid real and easy and normal. So, if you look at CX organizations, the next wave of challenge is actually the financial dark clouds, global dark clouds, that seem to be gathering. And they’re gathering with pace now. And CX organizations have the challenge of having to provide more service and at the same time reduce costs. And I think, if you look at what is required in that, it is giving the IT teams the agility to meet these challenges that the business keeps presenting. And they’re presenting these for the reasons we talked about — these different waves of crises that keep coming — and the IT teams, each time, have to step up and work out how to do things differently, how to do things cheaper, how to deliver for a hybrid workforce, how to do them faster, and also fundamentally, how to do them securely. So one of the big things we deliver is cost, and cost reduction, and we’re almost assisting companies in that transition from the old way of doing things to the new way of doing things.
Phil Fersht [04:46]
So what is it that employees want? We talk about remote, security, and BYOD and that sort of thing, but what is this in terms of benefiting the employee? Why should they be excited about this?
Brendan Kiely [05:18]
Well, I think that if you look at it from the employee’s perspective, going back to what I said at the top of the call, flexibility is what they want, and that cohabitation of their work and their life balance. And to truly achieve that — so, hybrid — it’s important to have a seamless user experience across the locations. So whether that’s on a BYOD device or indeed on a corporate device, it’s very important that from day one their experience, in terms of coming on board and through the onboarding process, is seamless in terms of user experience and also in terms of their ability to access what they need. From the employer’s perspective, from the CX provider’s perspective, in the past, work-from-home machines were basically just out there in the wild. And we provide the insight that they’re able to understand what’s going on with those machines, that they’re able to patch those machines and manage those machines, and ultimately secure those machines, whether it’s a corporate or a BYOD machine, and that they can have the same user experience at home, if they’re in a hybrid context, as they would in the office — both for the IT manager, but also for the employee.
Phil Fersht [06:46]
Yeah, so our research — that we just finished across 2,000 employees — actually showed one thing which was of real interest to us, which was that their technology experience is the second major factor in whether they stay or leave an employer. So how would a solution like ThinScale improve that experience for the employee, and not just the employer?
Brendan Kiely [07:12]
So if you look at some of our customers at the moment, what they’re doing is they validate the machine within the hiring process with our validation tool. And that means when the employee shows up on day one, everything works. There’s nothing worse than starting a job and you haven’t got a machine for a week, and when you do get on there’s multiple passwords, etc. So we manage the whole security piece and the whole user experience piece right at the beginning. And then, from the perspective of the BYOD machine, we’ve had customers whereby it may take 6 weeks to get a corporate machine out. So what they do is they set them up on BYOD. They get them working from day one, but then over time they may decide to send out a corporate machine — if that employee is going to stay, or they want the employee to have a different experience. So even within that, they’re saving a lot of money, because we have a lot of CX providers who — somebody starts, they send them out a machine, sometimes they don’t even start, so that machine has to be sent back — and we all know how hard it is to get all those machines back. So, and I think, look, as well from a security perspective, we deliver the peace of mind to IT teams, to give them that visibility and control over endpoints in a work-at-home environment, whether it’s a corporate machine or a BYOD machine.
Phil Fersht [08:24]
Are you seeing unprecedented demand for what you’re doing? I mean, we’re obviously seeing security as the number one issue affecting leadership challenges right now, but it’s not the number one issue in terms of investment. So people talk about it, they worry about it, but they don’t quite know how to handle it. So do you feel there’s a big gap between leadership embracing better security partners and actually doing things, or do you see this gap closing now?
Brendan Kiely [09:14]
Probably a bit of both. But I think, if you step back — why does that gap exist in the first place? I think there’s a lot of confusion around the changing state of security, and really this is marked by the nation-state actors moving into this area. That’s the truth of it. And locking down endpoints has to be table stakes — that’s what we see it as. So yes, the gap, I think, is closing. I think if you look — again, stepping back — you look at the rise of the CISO as a role within organizations; if you look at the implications of GDPR, PCI, HIPAA, and if you’re not compliant, the costs that you can rack up from that. And more than 50% of all cyberattacks are typically traced back to failure to update applications and software with the right patches. These are actually easy things to achieve, and we help companies achieve that with our device management, which will be scaling up in the near future in terms of the capabilities of device management at the endpoint. So the idea is to try and simplify how they deliver, but also enhance security and also reduce costs at the same time. And that’s achieved through a multiplicity of things — automation, also understanding the operational implications of hybrid and the security implications of that; that it is very different to locking down and securing an environment in an office and only having it secure in the office. So the gap is closing. I think there are certain organizations who probably haven’t fully grasped the importance of the need to always be reviewing your security posture. You’re never fully secure. I think that’s something that we have to embrace and see it as a constant moving thing that has to be reinterpreted and reassessed on an ongoing basis. And I think there’s a huge amount of focus around the cloud. And even, if you look from a European perspective, Phil, there’s going to be a security certificate, a regulation, coming from the EU that you’ll have to get certified for your cloud. So this is going to become a much broader geopolitical issue as well. And that is due to the nation-state actors coming. So those items will change the context and how C-suites think about security, the importance of it, and I think they’re the things that will close that gap that you talked about.
Phil Fersht [12:17]
Yeah. And how do you help them securely manage customer data and employee data? I mean, this is the big problem right now — where is data housed? How is it secured? How do we test? Penetration testing is huge now. You can’t even get bills paid by certain corporates unless you have a penetration testing certificate, all that sort of stuff, right? So how do you play into the privacy and security of the data that the employees are accessing?
Brendan Kiely [12:50]
So our software completely locks down the endpoint when they’re using it. So they have no access to their personal machine. They can’t copy and paste. They can’t — even if there’s a screen scraper on before they log on, it can’t get into the secure area. And really, it’s not a container, but they can’t take anything outside the environment, if that makes sense. So that’s the first key thing. I think the other aspect is that when they’re inside — if they’re a bad actor — we would have various things there that would ensure that the data remains secure. And talking about penetration testing, we have a never-ending cycle of it, and that’s back to that moving thing all the time — that you have to be looking at the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.
Phil Fersht [13:40]
My brother-in-law runs a call center, and I don’t know if it’s ThinScale he uses, but he uses some device and it drives him nuts because he can’t use his Facebook or anything.
Brendan Kiely [13:49]
That’s probably us. And there’s whitelisting. So if people want their employees to be on Facebook, that’s no problem. One of the things we’ve really tried to build into our products is giving that flexibility to the IT administrators, that they decide what their posture is, and that they’re able to achieve that posture with our software through multiple checkboxes and things that they can do to achieve that.
Phil Fersht [14:18]
It’s also — you’ve got to figure out, employees: should they manage their personal digital life separate from their professional digital life? Because they get very — especially during the pandemic — they got very, very blended, and now people are pulling back a bit from this.
Brendan Kiely [14:31]
And that’s the key thing that the Secure Remote Worker or BYOD solution solves. So it is an application that sits on the personal machine. They can use their personal machine. Once they go into Secure Remote Worker, they’re temporarily, completely locked out of their personal machine. They can only access what their employer wants them to access. And once they log off, the application disengages, and they have their own personal PC. Whereas, to contrast that, on the corporate machines, our ThinKiosk product locks down that machine completely, and you can’t get to the C drive in any way, shape, or form. You can only access, all the time, what your employer wants you to.
Phil Fersht [15:09]
I mean, it seems to me that this should be — every company is — but most companies now have hybrid work and have this issue, whether they’re a call center or service center or whatever, right? In terms of being able to partition what is corporate versus what is personal.
Brendan Kiely [15:40]
There’s some customers who put Secure Remote Worker on a corporate machine because they want to allow their employees to use the corporate machine for personal reasons. So when they do their work, they do it inside Secure Remote Worker, and when they do the personal stuff, they do it outside. So that means then they’re only carrying one device if they’re traveling. And I always remember being at a C-suite meeting, and I made that point, and somebody in the room said, well, we don’t allow our employees to use their corporate machine for personal reasons. And the CTO very nicely put up his hand and said, “I use my corporate machine for personal reasons, and if I am, everybody else is.” So you can have a policy, but you’re very dependent on the employees to follow that policy, whereas if you can force the policy through how they access the apps on the machine, it’s a much safer way of doing it. So, Phil, you had a lot of talks with the organizations that we would deal with, particularly around the awards. What were the particular aspects of our technology that stood out, that the researchers decided to include us as a Hot Vendor?
Phil Fersht [16:45]
You know, I think a lot of it was around the applicability to a major industry, rather than just saying, here’s a general security BYOD product. I think it was very tailored for the CX space, and an understanding of the needs of the CX space — in terms of, they would roll-on, roll-off staff, they would have staff with their own personal devices, staff with their own corporate devices, the fact that you get hybrid. You get the EX/CX components of the industry, and you have something that’s very plug and play, very immediate for their needs, versus something that’s very complicated and is going to take an awful long time for them to implement. So I think speed of implementation — we had positive feedback from clients that were using it, obviously from the Hot Vendor process — and very, very relevant and ahead of its time, to be honest with you. And what you’re doing is very, very relevant now, even more so than ever. And now we’re seeing a lot more gig work starting to happen, different types of work that the CX firms are dealing with. We’re also seeing a lot more of the staffing firms getting into CX, getting into tech. So I think you’re in a good place to keep evolving what you do to be very, very relevant. And honestly, this is the era of services. It’s got a $1.7 trillion market and growing, and with the inflation and wages we’re seeing now, and the talent resourcing that’s going on, I can only see this going in one direction. You’re in a good spot.
Brendan Kiely [18:43]
Well, first of all, thanks for those insights. I think something that we’ve focused on is really reducing that time from sale to seat — getting agents onboarded and trained and into production. Getting them up faster is absolutely crucial. So, from when a CX operator closes the deal, how can they get that first employee up and running on that contract, and how do you narrow the gap at that time? But yeah, that’s something we’ve been focusing on a lot. And on the issue of services, I agree with you. I think, as you said earlier in our conversation, the need to — everything’s moving so fast — the need to have specialization, out-house as well as in-house, is going to increase rapidly over the next period of time. So I would definitely agree with you on that. Yeah, it’s exciting times ahead, Phil, exciting times.
Phil Fersht [19:32]
OK, well, it’s been a pleasure meeting you, Brendan, and I look forward to keeping close to your product.
Brendan Kiely [19:56]
Yeah, I look forward to the next time. Thank you. Thanks, Phil.
