What an Autonomous Workspace Looks Like in Practice With Omnissa

[00:00:02] - [Speaker 0]
Hi there. Welcome to Across the Techcon, The US European podcast covering big technology events and announcements hosted by David Marshall, Neil Hughes, and myself, Anthony Savas. In this show, we have a very special guest. Omnissa is a leading player in the end user computing market. It was previously part of VMware before being spun out of that organization and becoming Omnissa.

[00:00:27] - [Speaker 0]
Omnicell is busy making it easier and more secure for companies operating in virtual and remote workspaces, and in an increasingly AI driven environment as well, we must remember. Omnicell's vision is an autonomous workspace that is self configuring, self healing and self securing. Omnis' believes trusted data, observability, governance and automation are the foundation for delivering secure, scalable and actionable autonomous outcomes. Together, these capabilities can help understand what is happening across the digital workspace, identify potential issues and take action before they become problems. That's the promise.

[00:01:07] - [Speaker 0]
So before we move on, let's introduce ourselves. David.

[00:01:12] - [Speaker 1]
Hello, everyone. I'm David Marshall. I'm obviously a cohost here at Across the Tech Pond, and I'm also the owner and executive editor of the modern data center news and information site, vmblub.com, and I'm located here in The US in Austin, Texas. Neil.

[00:01:29] - [Speaker 2]
I'm Neil Hughes. I run a network of enterprise tech podcast over at Tech Talks Network from Wolverhampton here in The UK, and also write for CyberNews.

[00:01:41] - [Speaker 0]
And I'm Anthony Savas. I'm the contributing editor for IT Europa, which is a channel led site covering cloud service providers, VARs, managed service providers, etcetera. We cover all the technologies used on that. I also write for a portal called Techled, which is very much telecoms led, also IoT now, and something called the Agile Agile Telco. As mentioned, we have a very special guest.

[00:02:06] - [Speaker 0]
Adnan, the senior vice president of OLAS and chief product officer of products at Omniser. Please introduce yourself.

[00:02:14] - [Speaker 3]
Hey, folks. Good to be here, and nice to be talking today. My name is Bharat Rangarajan. And as you mentioned, I'm the chief product officer at Omnicell responsible for our product strategy and our technology alliances as well. So

[00:02:29] - [Speaker 0]
Welcome, Bharat. Bharat, for the members of the audience that aren't so familiar with Omnicell, could you first explain what Omnicell does?

[00:02:37] - [Speaker 3]
Sure. Happy to. As you mentioned, we are in the broad end user computing space, but let me explain what that means. Right? Which is, essentially, we enable IT teams to deliver a phenomenal digital work platform for employees.

[00:02:52] - [Speaker 3]
And by employee, I take a very broad definition. It could be knowledge workers, task workers, frontline workers. Depending on industry, you have different personas. So we enable IT through our platform to deliver a smart, seamless, and a secure workspace. So it's not just compelling and easy to use, but it's also operationally easy to maintain for IT and also, course, in this day and age, from a security perspective, also checks all the boxes.

[00:03:22] - [Speaker 3]
And now with AI, as you mentioned, becoming an a part of everyday life both at work and at at home, it gives us an even greater opportunity to serve our end users with this platform.

[00:03:35] - [Speaker 0]
David, you had a question for Barath.

[00:03:37] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. First, Barath, you know, thanks for joining us today. We're we're excited to speak with you. So thinking about kind of what you just kind of alluded to, Omnicell has laid out a vision for what it calls the autonomous workspace. Can you unpack that for us a bit and talk about what that means?

[00:03:56] - [Speaker 1]
And, I guess, really, in in terms of both IT organizations and for the day to day employee experience as well.

[00:04:05] - [Speaker 3]
Oh, happy to, David. So I wanna first clear up a misconception. Right? Every time when we talk about an autonomous workspace today, people think that we jumped on the bandwagon post the ChatGPT craze and and all the Gen AI hype. But if you go back in time and and YouTube histories will prove this, we coined this term in 2021 and '22 when when ChatGPT was not even a name.

[00:04:26] - [Speaker 3]
Actually, for me personally, the inspiration at that point in time was were actually two things. One was the self driving car. It is now more prevalent like that. You still had a few of these Waymo's and other things driving around in California where I live. And also the other thing is is the human body.

[00:04:41] - [Speaker 3]
It's like in terms of how it just works and adjusts itself. So when we think about an autonomous workspace in that context, we think about it from three dimensions. Imagine a an endpoint or a workspace that's self configuring. Right? You walk into an auditorium or you walk into a new country or a new office or a new conference room, all the necessary changes or a new employee, the configuration is all taken care of.

[00:05:08] - [Speaker 3]
Second, you're about to hit a problem or you hit a problem. Imagine if the problem resolution detection and the fix on remediation is all what we call a self healing. Right? And then the third, probably the most complex is, especially as a threat landscape increases is self securing. Imagine if you have some a watchdog that's essentially looking at your environment constantly and tweaking it and adjusting it so that you can protect it.

[00:05:34] - [Speaker 3]
So this concept of self securing, self healing, and self configuring is what we coined as an autonomous workspace. And the net benefit of this is as an employee, you're not thinking about IT tickets or like, hey. What what is my password or or which app do I where do I go to download the app? So it's removing the friction. From an IT perspective, it's almost imagine a world where you didn't even know that employees existed.

[00:06:00] - [Speaker 3]
They were all the silent bunch that were happily humming away. And then from a security perspective, you also keep it safe. I jokingly say it's almost like we want the end user IT and security to be completely unaware of each other and harmoniously keep this. That's the vision of of an autonomous workspace.

[00:06:16] - [Speaker 0]
Are you happy with that, David?

[00:06:18] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. I'm kinda curious though. Within that vision, do you think it's it's kind of a one year story or a five year story? How far away are most organizations from achieving that?

[00:06:29] - [Speaker 3]
Yeah. As I said, we started on this vision about five years back, and we we've got some really progressive organizations that are well into this way. Especially this concept of self configuring and self healing is well on its way. Right? And people I have examples of especially in the help desk and in application delivery where there has been significant progress.

[00:06:48] - [Speaker 3]
So I think people are well on its way. Of course, now we also push the goalpost, right, like a security threats have become that much more complex. The now agentic AI and other capabilities, now the threat surface has also increased. So we're also kept on our toes with the changing technology landscape, but this is by no means science fiction. This is science fact, if anything, pretty fast paced at this point in time.

[00:07:10] - [Speaker 0]
Okay. Neil, you want to come back with a question here?

[00:07:13] - [Speaker 2]
Yeah. Again, first of all, thanks for joining us today, Bharat. And I will echo what you said a few moments ago. I spoke with many of your colleagues from Omnisner over the last ten years, events, and remotely. You guys were talking around AI way before it was cool, shall we say.

[00:07:28] - [Speaker 2]
But on this, when I look at the website and all the the content that you're producing at the moment, you say autonomy starts with trusted data, including the importance of making data more reliable, observable, and actionable. And I know this is a very hot topic at the moment, something that a lot of business leaders listening and watching will be going through. So can you tell me a bit more about how at Omnicey you're you're helping companies achieve this?

[00:07:55] - [Speaker 3]
Yeah. I think that it's a great observation, Neil. And from our standpoint right now, as as everyone, if you think about the narrative, as before you start an AI project, the first thing people say is like, hey. It's garbage in garbage out. If your if your data foundation is broken, like, even the best AI or the best models cannot help you.

[00:08:11] - [Speaker 3]
And then, of course, we are benefiting from some of the investments we made in the data foundation, again, almost like in the same time frame. I think COVID was a good catalyst for us, not in any any way from a from a reason perspective, but just so from a timing perspective, as hybrid work became more and more popular. We set on a mission to build a unified observability in the data stack, which is serving us well. So let me kind of peel the onions layers of the onion there. First is we built a data collection layer that span all possible entities, whether it's a it's a laptop, a Mac device, or a Windows device, an Android phone, an iOS phone, servers, infrastructure.

[00:08:51] - [Speaker 3]
So the first area of investment for us was a broad set of telemetry agents and lightweight telemetry agents. As as you guys all know, there's a lot of times when you build data collection agents, they themselves become the problem. So the the the thing you introduce to fix the problem becomes the problem. So it was a lot of optimization done in not just the breadth, but also the you know, it being lightweight. The second area where we invested in is a distributed data storage layer.

[00:09:19] - [Speaker 3]
So we felt that certain data elements were operational data pieces that had to be close to the point of action or close to the point of an administrative console. Right? Like, so from architecturally, we designed it that way. So we have operational data, and then we built a common analytics data lake as well. Think of it as your your your classical multidimensional data warehouse where we can do fast data processing.

[00:09:42] - [Speaker 3]
Right? And the concepts of lake houses were also emerging. So data collectors and then now you have a distributed data storage layer. That's the second model. And then the third layer in this is the analytics.

[00:09:54] - [Speaker 3]
So we have built a lot of like you said, before AI was cool, it was called machine learning. Right? So we built a lot of machine learning models to do anomaly detection, insights, root cause analysis. Right? So essentially creating a lot of algorithms on top of the data because eventually those power the workflows and the actions and and the end user outcomes we want.

[00:10:17] - [Speaker 3]
So this concept of even observability was not a very well known term at that point in time. It was a pretty vague term. But then, again, our investments have served as well. And now as we think about scaling with AI, this data platform is serving as well, for sure.

[00:10:33] - [Speaker 0]
Neil, does that answer your questions?

[00:10:35] - [Speaker 2]
It does. And I think we all scroll down our LinkedIn news feed and see the headlines of no data, no AI, or garbage in and garbage out. I'm just curious. Are are there any myths or misconceptions around the use of data and AI and the relationship around that, especially when clients arrive at your front door and say, hey. I've got this problem.

[00:10:54] - [Speaker 2]
I need this with my data, and I need this with AI. Are there any trends in the kind of stories that people are coming to you with, and are there any myths and misconceptions we could maybe retire today?

[00:11:06] - [Speaker 3]
Yeah. I think people sometimes misconstrue volume of data to be equal into, like, a high quality decision. Sometimes volume is it's the kind of data that you have. That's one misconception. Second is there's not a lot of attention being played prepaid to data taxonomy and data classification.

[00:11:25] - [Speaker 3]
That's again an important there are good news that there are now full fledged tools that allow you to do that. And I think a lot of times people jump into the, hey, I wanna solve the data problem. Right? Like, it's almost first principles. You wanna understand what are you trying to accomplish because how you structure the data and how do you go about solving the data problem to some extent, a lot of times it depends on which use cases we wanna tackle first.

[00:11:48] - [Speaker 3]
So taking this this use case centric approach also makes the data problem a lot more manageable. So those I would say are the key themes I'm seeing.

[00:11:56] - [Speaker 0]
Okay, Barath. One for me. Obviously, AI and automation has a role in turning data into insights and into action, and also reducing manual intervention, of course. So Rav, what is Omnicell seen around this in the market? And are customers taking full advantage yet?

[00:12:15] - [Speaker 0]
We're talking about it here and the market's talking about it. Are the customers actually doing it yet?

[00:12:20] - [Speaker 3]
Yeah. And look, again, this automation the concept of automation has existed for for several years. Right? Like and if you look at especially the data center world and and and other places that you guys some of you are are closer to that side too, automation has has been around for several years. It's not a new thing.

[00:12:35] - [Speaker 3]
Of course, on the end user computing front, it's more complex because when you automate things in the data center, typically, it's a lights out operation. It's you know, you're updating some profile or some configurations on a server or or changing some some other other pieces. That's largely doesn't affect day to day workflow. When you're running automations on the endpoint, you're gonna be super careful because you have a at least for now, humans are at the other end of their endpoint that are that could be impacted. So you gotta be tread carefully.

[00:13:03] - [Speaker 3]
But I'm seeing I've seen some really fascinating pieces of automation. For instance, I saw a retail company completely automate their drop ship of PCs. Right? So they were shipping thousand PCs to thousands of their stores. And it was a complex process that they that somebody would have to receive it there and then open it up, configure it, and then make it ready for use.

[00:13:22] - [Speaker 3]
Right? Because the frontline workers have no idea in how to configure the the laptop. And you don't have a big IT team in every every one of those retail stores. But they have now automated an entire process by which this whole notion of zero touch drop ship provisioning is working across Android devices and Windows machines as well. So I see that.

[00:13:43] - [Speaker 3]
There was a super interesting nurse and patient care automation workflow I saw in terms of how especially during COVID when when clinical volumes increased, automation was used to solve that. And and now I'm seeing a lot of security patching. Right? Like, now patching is becoming such a critical component. And so now the time you have to patch has gone down from days to now, maybe from weeks to days to now seconds or minutes, right, like, given the sophistication of some of these attacks.

[00:14:11] - [Speaker 3]
So that's an area where I'm seeing customers do this. And and this is why we had bespoke automations like any platform in our product too. But then we realized that the number of use cases and the number of industries we support are far too varied for for us to keep building these things block by block. So like anything else, we introduced a a no code platform and to complement the data layer I was talking about. This no code platform is called Freestyle, which allows you to, as the name suggests, just drag and drop all the good stuff.

[00:14:41] - [Speaker 3]
And so we have seen about 10,000,000,000 workflows run through the Freestyle platform over the last few years. So I think to your question, Anthony, automation is well and alive, and and if anything, it's only gonna skyrocket from here given what we're seeing.

[00:14:56] - [Speaker 0]
Yeah. Well, thanks for confirming. I mean, some people might have had the conception that on the store, we're just basically a workplace connectivity and security firm. But by the sounds of it, isn't so that's why we're doing this, just to give people a better idea of what they can do in this sort of market.

[00:15:10] - [Speaker 3]
Yep. Absolutely. That's good.

[00:15:11] - [Speaker 0]
David, you want to come in?

[00:15:14] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. There's a a real tension here. Organizations want AI to act autonomously, but they also need to trust and control what it's doing. From your perspective, as organizations give AI and automation greater ability to make decisions and take action, governance and guardrails really become critical. How is Omnissa helping customers strike that balance?

[00:15:39] - [Speaker 3]
Yeah. It's it's a it's definitely a top of the mind topical question because as an IT consumer myself, like, as an employer from this, I am the first to put my hand on, like, hey. Let me just download this Perplexity Cloud and all of that stuff. And then sometimes my legal and privacy and security teams are are a little nervous, so we've got to balance the governance play. But the good news here is that if you look at our pedigree, right, what were the use cases we were solving with virtual desktops and even mobile device management?

[00:16:07] - [Speaker 3]
When the iPhone came into into the industry and to the enterprise, it became a a a it was a great productivity tool. It was fascinating, but it was also a chaos generator. It's like in the sense that we we had to solve the governance problem there too. So mobile device management and putting controls around that allowed us to battle, hey. I can give you your corporate email and corporate apps, but I'm also giving the governance that IT needs.

[00:16:34] - [Speaker 3]
Thing with virtual desktops. We have a huge footprint in financial services, for instance, and they use that virtual desktop environment as a guardrail, as a governance mechanism. Because if somebody quits tomorrow with an Excel laptop with 50 confidential client files, it's a it's a difficult problem for a bank to solve. Virtual desktop takes it away. So we've we have been in the business of putting guardrails and governance for a long time, and we introduced capabilities, for instance, called something called desired state management.

[00:17:05] - [Speaker 3]
Right? So the world is moving to more of a intent based management as opposed to a policy based management. You're not saying, hey. I need these 10 things to be done. Here are the 10 steps or 10 policies.

[00:17:17] - [Speaker 3]
Instead, you say, like, I want this device to always be patch compliant running the latest. That's the intent. And then desired state management keep gets you there. And if it sees a drift from again, very common things you see in the CMDB and and and data center systems, right, like this drift management and bringing it back to the state. We have brought those kinds of governance controls.

[00:17:38] - [Speaker 3]
So I'm talking about all the things that exist today that will help you govern AI or any kind of new onslaught of technology like what we're seeing. But, again, I gotta leave some suspense for you to wait till Omnicell one. We are gonna this is an area, of course, is top of the mind for many of our customers. So we're gonna be talking a lot more about AI governance and some of the new capabilities we're gonna be bringing in this area too.

[00:18:04] - [Speaker 0]
We'll come back to Omnisoder one later on in the podcast. But, David, does that convince you with that answer?

[00:18:11] - [Speaker 1]
It does. But I I guess one thing I'm curious from what you're seeing talking to your your existing customer base, we AI is adding in this new layer, and we we talked about that, you know, governance within a customer's organization. Is this being owned by IT, security, compliance, or is it all three wrapped up?

[00:18:31] - [Speaker 3]
I think it's I mean, if I take again Omnicell as an example where I have the front row seat to go see. We are a 5,000 or close to 4,000 people company. So it really is not large, but, like, the the process is similar. Right? Like, IT is responsible for rolling out whether it's cloud or Copilot or OpenAI.

[00:18:47] - [Speaker 3]
They're responsible for the rollout. There is a governance team where and the legal teams are involved in in data governance to make sure that, hey. We have long standing contracts with the federal government and large banks, so we had to make sure that the date their data is being handled properly. Right? So we have compliance requirements.

[00:19:04] - [Speaker 3]
And, of course, privacy and security. Security is deeply involved to make sure that the threat surface is not I mean, look. Whether we like it or not, the threat surface has increased now with all the agentic tools, but they have to be at least have the necessary controls and visibility. So I think all three teams, if anything, I've not seen any other technology where we bring these three teams together so fast to solve a problem of this scale.

[00:19:28] - [Speaker 0]
Neil, you wanted to come in with a question?

[00:19:31] - [Speaker 2]
Yeah. Just listening to you today, it feels like the journey is definitely towards autonomy, progressing from alerting and assisting to advising and ultimately replacing or retiring alert fatigue and replacing with autonomous work. But I've got to ask, when do you think most organizations will reach their autonomous working targets? And the reason I ask this is because there will be many people watching and listening that still hear. And when they hear this stuff, they think about science fiction, and that it's in the future, as you said at the very beginning.

[00:20:03] - [Speaker 2]
It's not that. Automation is alive. It exists today. But when do you think this will reach most organizations for those business leaders watching?

[00:20:12] - [Speaker 3]
Yeah. And and like I said, I mean, it's like any technology. Right? There there is the the classic you've got different segments of customers that you got your innovators and then your your mainstream and then the and the laggards and late adopters. So I think for many reasons.

[00:20:25] - [Speaker 3]
And then this is this this this kind of autonomy curve is also seeing that. And like I said, there are some companies here in the Bay Area and and and few tech mostly in the high-tech space that are pushing the envelope. We have a company that has that has essentially reduced their helped us ticket volume by 50%. Like, they have completely solved this notion of it's almost a taboo in their environment to file a ticket anymore. It's like it means that they're not doing a job job well enough to educate.

[00:20:53] - [Speaker 3]
We have another company that's essentially managing our own software rollout through infrastructure as code. So, essentially, they essentially use AI and infrastructure as code in a combination to roll out our entire stack and manage it. They have only two people in the entire IT team, and they wanna manage these fleets of hundreds of thousands of devices. Right? So without autonomy, there's no way you can do that.

[00:21:19] - [Speaker 3]
But there's an interesting large car manufacturing company that we work with. They have standardized on a on an agentic platform, and they want that agentic platform to almost be the primary users of our admin consoles. So we're enabling MCP connections and things like that so that autonomous agents or agents in general can autonomously interact with our systems. Right? So we're seeing a lot of these use cases already.

[00:21:44] - [Speaker 3]
But then the practical reality is that people are looking at this this in a in kind of this classic risk reward graph. Right? Certain in certain cases, the risk is low, like the help desk ticket solving and the reward is high, the cost. So those use cases tend to become primary candidates. When you're talking about software patching, the reward is high, but the risk is also high.

[00:22:08] - [Speaker 3]
Because if you go screw up a patch, you're going to break about hundreds of thousands of devices. That's the last thing you want as an IT operator. So I think and then you add the industry dimension. Like I said, people in in manufacturing and and IT I'm sorry, in in high-tech have been easy because they are not in highly regulated industry. And you go to health care, of course, they have to tread really carefully.

[00:22:30] - [Speaker 3]
They're dealing with human lives, so they they have their their additional responsibility that that some of the other industries don't have. So it's a balance of all these things. But so but I think the the way it was is only gonna get faster, but that said, even in the regulated industries, I was talking to a bank and and they were saying on an average, they could see about 150,000 agents running across the board. And on an average, an end user potentially leveraging 300 to 400 agents on a day to day basis. That's a pretty ambitious but also a scary world that we're looking to.

[00:23:04] - [Speaker 0]
What do you think, Neil?

[00:23:06] - [Speaker 2]
Well, I'm curious. I mean, when you make it possible for enterprises to go on this autonomy journey with you, you've probably got, I don't know, quite a few different use cases in mind. And then you give it to the innovators and the the companies in that Bay Area, and you see a help desk reducing tickets by 50%, another company managing fleets of devices, car manufacturers, banks talking about autonomous agents. Is there anything that's took you by surprise that maybe using your tools here for something other than what you originally set out? Do you ever see cease to be amazed at what people are doing when you you give them that possibility, that tool in their hands?

[00:23:44] - [Speaker 3]
Yeah. There are many many use cases. For instance, I saw kinda a complete point of sale automation. Right? Like so where they have, like, robotic in a retail store where they have robotic delivery systems with point of sale.

[00:23:56] - [Speaker 3]
And and I had a I had a demonstration of that. They had taken every piece of our software in terms of the software rendering, the device management or automation workflow. And then this is like a store completely devoid of humans there and robots moving things there. Like, I was like, wow. I didn't I didn't realize that.

[00:24:14] - [Speaker 3]
They said, like, yeah. A lot of these controls are I I was pretty interested. There are also some small things we do. For instance, like, improving the like, single sign on and automation automating the login process. Right?

[00:24:26] - [Speaker 3]
An interesting stat someone shared, but, like, certainly not the the most the the hallmark of automation by any stretch of imagination. But if you take it in a practical sense, they found again in a retail out, they say like, hey, that saves about five seconds of time for an for a frontline worker to switch from one person to another. And if they compound that over over a week or a month or a year across that entire store, they take those savings and multiply those savings by about 1,500 stores or so. They're able to use those operational savings to fund CapEx or opening up a new store. Right?

[00:25:03] - [Speaker 3]
So Wow. I was that was a pretty fascinating way of how people are using automation and some of these enhancements to drive profitability then fund new initiatives too.

[00:25:13] - [Speaker 0]
Awesome. And fund growth.

[00:25:14] - [Speaker 3]
Yeah. Exactly. I mean, that's that's ultimately, that's what people care about. Like, all of this technology is great, but then eventually, it should mean mean something to the top line and bottom line. So yeah.

[00:25:24] - [Speaker 0]
Yeah. And it helped us expand the company. Obviously, you were talking about that. I need to get my channel related question in here. As mentioned, Omnice is a major player in the overall end user computer market, which includes the likes of virtual desktop integration, desktop as a service, and Fin and No Client Computing for instance.

[00:25:43] - [Speaker 0]
So what is Omnice's go to market for the people who don't know? Are you channel first? If so, what would you like to say to partners about the opportunity you're offering for your ecosystem?

[00:25:55] - [Speaker 3]
Excuse me. Yeah. When we spun out of VMware and became an independent company, we had a we essentially inherited a lot of the go to market motions that we supported, albeit the ones that were relevant to our part of the business. And so the first order of business to keep the continuity for our customers and make sure that our existing partners were also equal part of the ecosystem. But that was just more playing defense to make sure the continuity was there.

[00:26:19] - [Speaker 3]
But over the last year or so, we have completely revamped and launched a new Omnicell partner program focused on multiple classes of partners, hosted service providers, the classic resellers, and the distributed distributors. And also, we have now active presence in the hyperscaler marketplaces. So we do have a balance of we go direct in certain scenarios, but a vast majority of our business still goes through the channel ecosystem, different kinds, sometimes MSPs, sometimes the classic two tier reseller distributor, and now marketplaces. So we support all of that. And so we are really a channel committed and a channel friendly player because the significant value that they bring to the table, whether it's the relationships or the services or the economics, right, of how a customer consumes the product.

[00:27:05] - [Speaker 3]
And so we are actively working through that, and and it's a it's a global program. And we have also tweaked it. For instance, when you go to Japan, the channel ecosystem operates on one way versus in in EMEA versus The US. So we've also built regional flavors to this channel programs.

[00:27:21] - [Speaker 0]
So as well as some of the big distributors, which I'm sure people can probably think of, the global distributors, in terms of the technology alliances, who are the the big names you you you actually have a relationship with which some of the audience would like to know about in the cloud, the sort of the hardware companies, etcetera, the chip companies? Who are the big names do you actually promote through your ecosystem?

[00:27:42] - [Speaker 3]
Yeah. Since we are squarely in the the physical endpoint space. Right? So great partnerships with Google, with Apple, with certainly with Microsoft. We have just full disclosure, we have some parts of Microsoft that we compete with, but then there's but then who doesn't?

[00:27:56] - [Speaker 3]
Like, Microsoft would you have to you have to compete and collaborate with Microsoft, but it's certainly great partnerships there. And then on the on the virtualization side, we have great relationships again with the hyperscalers. Azure AWS is a great partner there. And we'll also do a lot of work now with now GPUs backing virtual desktops for AI workloads is a is a big focal area. So we have a multiyear relationship.

[00:28:18] - [Speaker 3]
We've been doing this with NVIDIA of of this relationship with NVIDIA is is ten plus years old in terms of just all the things we've done in the past, right, with regards to high performance PCs and others. But now AI is adding yet another dimension to that. Right? And so across the board, cloud players, then certainly HP, Dell, on the OEM side as well. End user computing is such a collection of so many things have to come together.

[00:28:45] - [Speaker 3]
So as a result, we have we one thing we take pride in is is an open ecosystem. We don't pick favorites. Say, if you're on Mac shop, we support it. If you're a Windows shop, we support Google Chromebooks, or you wanna be on iPads, play. Same thing with cloud.

[00:28:57] - [Speaker 3]
So an openness in the ecosystem, whether it's the channel or technology alliances, is a key part of our go to market strategy.

[00:29:06] - [Speaker 0]
Thanks for that. David, you want to come in now?

[00:29:09] - [Speaker 1]
Yes. Speaking of systems right around the corner, we kind of alluded to this earlier, but I'm personally looking forward to attending my first ever NISA one customer and partner conference, which takes place in Orlando. Can you help sort of set the stage and give us a little sneak peek at what I and other attendees can expect to see and hear at this upcoming event of yours?

[00:29:32] - [Speaker 3]
Absolutely. It's gonna be two days at least for the primary attendance of significant action. Right? So you're gonna hear more details about our road map. Some of the problems I've talked about in terms of autonomy and governance, etcetera, are all gonna be front and center.

[00:29:48] - [Speaker 3]
So you're gonna hear from me and my colleagues in terms of the specifics around the product innovations we're driving. Right? But that's only certainly an interesting part and and and piques everybody's curiosity. You're gonna see a lot, I think, all the partners I named, right, like all the alliance partners and channel partners, they're all gonna be there in full bore talking about their own offerings and some joint offerings we have with them. So you're gonna see that.

[00:30:13] - [Speaker 3]
So and then you you wanna hear customers in in the day two. We we we have some interesting panels where we bring in customers and breakout sessions are always a great thing because you can if you wanna go geek out on a particular area and go learn about a technology, you can go do that. And then we'll have some partners come in too. There's gonna be hands on. And certifications and hands on labs is a super popular part of it.

[00:30:35] - [Speaker 3]
So if especially if you're a hands on type of guy, I wanna go play with this this technology, we'll have hands on labs, and you can even get certified on Omnisys technology right then and there. We typically see hundreds of people go through the process while while they're there. They get some benefit out of that too. And look. End of the day, all that aside in the evenings, you will have time to connect, talk to people, have some drinks, listen to music, all the all the stuff about meeting people that we didn't get to do during the COVID days, but now it's all back in full swing again.

[00:31:05] - [Speaker 0]
Are you still looking forward to it, David?

[00:31:07] - [Speaker 1]
I am. I'm I'm very much looking forward to, again, being immersed into into their world, their ecosystem, and learning as much as possible. So I appreciate not only invite, but the the sneak peek that you've just provided with us.

[00:31:23] - [Speaker 0]
Excellent. And I also I also believe there's there's an Omnicell One in Amsterdam in November as well for the European channel and customers, etcetera. They they don't necessarily have to go to North America to learn a bit more as well. Is that right?

[00:31:38] - [Speaker 3]
Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. We we have three installments of the Omnicell one one in Orlando for for The Americas at large, and then in Amsterdam for for EMEA at large, and then in Japan for the for Asia Pacific region. So recover try to cover the globe as much as possible.

[00:31:54] - [Speaker 3]
Okay.

[00:31:56] - [Speaker 0]
Neil wants to sort of, like, move towards summing up here. So, Neil, come in. What do you have to ask here?

[00:32:01] - [Speaker 2]
I was just gonna say it's been an incredibly busy year for you guys. I think earlier this year, Omnicell was named a leader in the twenty twenty six Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Employee Experience Management for the second year in a row as well, I believe. You've also got the partner and customer conference coming up. But if we look into the future, 2027 is literally just a couple of months away now. So anything else you'd like to leave everyone listening with regarding how leaders can maybe prepare for the workspace changes that are happening and anything else that you see on the horizon as well?

[00:32:35] - [Speaker 2]
Because as I said, 2027, a few months away. So what can you leave us with?

[00:32:40] - [Speaker 3]
No. That's great. No. Absolutely. Been been a busy year.

[00:32:43] - [Speaker 3]
You called out some of the analyst accolades, and and that was one. And then we also had a similar one just to use this to time to brag a little bit about the the the desktop as a service magic quadrant was out and then the unified endpoint management. So we are we are unique in that we are leaders in all all of these quadrants. And and part of it is because we wanna think of these as not silo technologies. They all have to come together.

[00:33:03] - [Speaker 3]
Of course, Gartner, for instance, from a research perspective breaks them apart, but an end user has or a customer typically has to think about all these things. So therein, right, I think the main thing to for what I would advise digital workspace leaders is that you've gotta have a good anchor about where your organization is and what use cases matter to you most. Right? I think trying to go after the shiny object is a is a bad strategy at large. And like, maybe as a curiosity exercise, you can go, hey, do this or not.

[00:33:35] - [Speaker 3]
But I think you need to have a good grounding on, like, what are the key use cases? What's gonna move the needle for me? Like, the examples I used in health care or in detail. Right? Every industry and every tech every company is going through some kind of a transformation, albeit more internal or responding to market needs at large.

[00:33:53] - [Speaker 3]
So you gotta you gotta move your technology strategy in alignment with that. And I think that's certainly a first principles that I would advocate. The second piece that I would and another theme you're gonna hear is is this concept of consolidation. I'm hearing we've we've got far too many platforms and far too many point solutions. Right?

[00:34:13] - [Speaker 3]
If I think about we did a survey, a digital workspace survey. There's a lot of fascinating things we found about shadow AI and all of that scary stuff, but we also found that a typical end user computing organization has 11 plus tools to manage their end user estate. That by no means is a is an operationally simple endeavor, and by no means is gonna set you up for success. So I'm not saying you can just consolidate everything into into one tool, wondering that rules them all kind of an approach, but there is a prosaic approach you can take in terms of, hey, what makes sense? Where do I and we call this approach the consolidation without compromise.

[00:34:52] - [Speaker 3]
This is not the good old days of ERPs like, okay, just buy one thing. Yeah. They do materials management reasonably okay with their finance back. No. No.

[00:35:00] - [Speaker 3]
You have to you have to hold the bar high and don't consolidate with substandard tools. You ought to consolidate but without compromise. So but this consolidation is the theme that every IT leader is thinking through, not just from a financial perspective, operational simplicity, and security. And so that we provide kind of a prescriptive approach. Look.

[00:35:20] - [Speaker 3]
We are vendors, so there is some vested interest in us in perkling people consolidating on our platform. But there is a mission beyond that too, and and we wanna highlight that in these these conferences as well. Neil,

[00:35:32] - [Speaker 0]
you wanna say anything about that?

[00:35:34] - [Speaker 2]
Well, first of all, I just love the line at you need an anchor for your enterprise and understand what will move the needle for me rather than getting involved with those shiny distractions or the next big thing. And this year was a Gentic AI. Next year will be something completely different. I'm just wondering if I could push you for any other teasers for future conversation on on what we can expect from you later this year and maybe next year too.

[00:35:58] - [Speaker 3]
Yeah. My my hands will will get slapped on David and team. I I gotta be pretty tight lipped about especially in this day and age, it's it's gotta be super. So but, anyway, the good news is that it's just less than two weeks away. So Okay.

[00:36:10] - [Speaker 3]
We'll all be out in the open very soon.

[00:36:12] - [Speaker 2]
Awesome. Sounds like we will have to get you back on another day, but thank you.

[00:36:16] - [Speaker 0]
Thanks for that, Baraf, and we hope we have generated plenty of interest among our audience for those questions and answers. It just remains to say goodbye. Thanks for being here, Baraf, and it's goodbye from me until our next across the tech pond very soon. Alright.

[00:36:31] - [Speaker 3]
You very much, guys. Thank you. I really appreciated this conversation. Neil.

[00:36:36] - [Speaker 2]
Yeah. Big goodbye for me. And for everybody listening or watching, we'd love to hear your feedback, what you'd like to see or hear more of. Remember, you can get the podcast on wherever you listen to your podcast on all audio platforms and YouTube. So if you like this one, please subscribe, and also get in touch if you'd like to be featured.

[00:36:54] - [Speaker 2]
But, also, I would say, finally, before I go is on the run up now until the end of the year, the three of us are gonna be at a lot of major tech conferences. So if you see us around, please come over and say hello, and we'll share a hot coffee or a cold beer.

[00:37:09] - [Speaker 0]
David.

[00:37:10] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. Bharat, thank you for taking time to join us today, and, hopefully, I'll see you in person at the OmnisalOne event. I'm looking forward to that. And thank you everyone who's watching and listening, and we hope you enjoyed another great episode of Across the Tech Pond. And for any companies out there watching who would like to be a guest like Omnissa on a future episode of the show, please reach out to myself, Anthony, Neil via email or LinkedIn, and we'll make it happen.

[00:37:39] - [Speaker 0]
That's great. Goodbye. Cheers. Thanks.