We are back again this time with co-host Patrick Coble joining Jarian Gibson to talk with Thomas Charlton, Chairman and CEO at Goliath Technologies. Goliath Technologies is a founding partner of the World of EUC. In this podcast we talked about all things going on with Goliath Technologies.
In this podcast we had the pleasure of talking with Thomas from Goliath Technologies about:
- About Thomas and Goliath Technologies.
- How Goliath came to have a unique focus on healthcare.
- Technical partnerships including integrations with Oracle Health and Epic.
- EHR applications they support.
- How Goliath brings technology together with EHR vendors to offer better solutions to clients, clinicians, patients.
- Digital transformation with large enterprise clients and healthcare.
- How Goliath incorporates AI into their product and other planned enhancements.
- How Goliath’s solutions are helping EUC champions as the undertake digital transformation initiatives.
- Top issues Goliath solves for EUC champions.
- Moving IT from reactive to proactive.
- Changes Goliath has seen in the EUC space and how it has impacted the market and adoption of EUC solutions.
- Customer use case stories on how Goliath has helped them.
- Thoughts on changes in the EUC community.
- Where we will see Goliath next for upcoming events.
Thanks to Patrick for being our co-host! Thank you to Thomas for joining us to have a chat about Goliath Technologies. Thank you Goliath Technologies for supporting the community!
You can find more information about Goliath Technologies on their website. You check out Goliath Technologies on demand webinars here.
Thank you to our sponsors for their continued support – Founding Partners – 10ZiG, Goliath Technologies, IGEL, Liquidware, Omnissa, Nerdio, and Nutanix. Founding Channel Sponsor – Choice Solutions. Core Sponsors – Google and Parallels.
Jarian Gibson, Frontline Chatter Host:
Good day and welcome to the Frontline Chatter podcast. I am your host, Jarian Gibson, and I am back today with Patrick Coble. How are doing today, Patrick?
Patrick Coble, Frontline Chatter C0-Host:
Doing good, sir. How are you? Is the weather being nice over there? It's back to ⁓ 80s to 90s now over here.
Jarian Gibson:
Yeah, it's nice for you know rain off and on you know the Midwest is and you get after I do. So today it's sunny last night we had soccer practice in the rain.
Patrick Coble:
Here's to sending rain to me like tomorrow. Okay. Thank you.
Jarian Gibson:
and we get more rain. yeah, but other than that, it's nice today. Good to be out in the sun here. It's afternoon. Other than that, know, just getting ready up, you know, it's conference season. You just got back from NerdioCon. I'll be going to .NEXT next week. You know, we got EUC World coming up and other things in between. So busy, busy, busy.
Patrick Coble:
It is tis the season.
Jarian Gibson:
Well let's go ahead and talk about our guest today. So we are here with Goliath Technologies and before if we get into with Thomas our guest. Goliath is a founding member and earlier adopter of World of EUC. Especially after you know everyone knows how we came out with you know World of EUC 2.0. After CUGC discontinued and the whole influx of that.
That vacuum that was left. So for IT professionals, Goliath helps organizations in their digital transformation by solving the problem of monitoring and troubleshooting end user experience issues, regardless of platform or location of users or workloads. Goliath supports Citrix, Omnissa, 360 Cloud Desktop, Amazon WorkSpaces, and Microsoft AVD from a single console. Their primary vertical is healthcare.
And they are the only EUC observability vendor that provides full visibility into clinician user experience through their business and technical partnerships with Epic, Oracle Health, and Meditech. Goliath ensures that EHR applications have adequate speed and reliability so clinicians can focus on patient care over 1 million interactions per month. That's a lot.
And so we have Thomas Charlton today and he is the founder and CEO of Goliath Technologies. He's also been previously the chairman and CEO of PhD Virtual, the CEO of Shunra Software, CEO of Voice Genie, CEO of Trailblazer Systems and CEO of Tidal Software. So how are doing today, Thomas?
Thomas Charlton, Goliath Technologies:
Great, thank you.
Patrick Coble:
You've done a lot. You've been doing a lot. You've been a busy bear.
Jarian Gibson:
It's great to have you on and I know you from years back when Shane Kleinert and I started off with the Tech Bake Off and we talked to you about Goliath Technologies and the monitoring stuff. So it's good to see you and have you on again. It was good to see you last year at EUC World as well and your team with Keary also. So welcome and we're great to have you on today.
Thomas Charlton:
Great to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Jarian Gibson:
Yeah, so I know my experience with healthcare has mainly been, well recently more with Epic. So it's good to see about the Epic piece. Back in the day, I did a lot of NextGen. I don't know if they're still around anymore.
Patrick Coble:
A little bit.
Jarian Gibson:
Yeah, they are. yeah, most customers that were NextGen that I knew have gone to Epic. So Patrick, you do a lot in healthcare too. So what are you seeing out there?
Patrick Coble:
I see a lot of Epic, obviously it's kind of the Cadillac, but I see a lot of Meditech for our customers too, so that's very near and dear to my heart. So I know a lot of EHRs are out there and Cerner is still a big one, which is now what Oracle is, right? So Cerner, Epic and Meditech are the big three I see. I still see like NextGen every now and then, and still see what was it called? Greenway was one of them for like real small.
Like, I guess clinics is what it really is focused on, not like big hospitals. But yeah, there's been, you know, VDI for all those things. So yeah, it's out there.
Jarian Gibson:
So let's kind of get into the questions here. So I understand Goliath has a unique focus on healthcare. So how did you guys get into healthcare and why is that your focus there?
Thomas Charlton:
You know, it all started, I started the company about 13 years ago and it was primarily for virtual server monitoring and then we got into desktop virtualization, Citrix and then after that VMware Horizon. And we gravitated to that primarily having come out of the private equity world. I wanted to start a company where it would be a large enough niche market to grow a company, but not so large that it would attract a tremendous amount of private equity investment. So I thought by doing that, and Citrix seemed like a good beachhead into the enterprise where you could establish that beachhead in an environment where there weren't a lot of competitors.
And that's how the company started. We were working with a small house, but I was looking at the forecasts and we started closing a lot more business that were health systems. And having come from the med surg background, health systems didn't spend a lot of capital on IT infrastructure. I back then, it wasn't that long ago, you were pressing multiple copies.
Carbon copy purchase orders for a million dollars of med surg equipment, right? So where the surgical theater had incredible technology, the IT departments and the purchasing departments were quite antiquated. And so I was surprised to see this. Now what had happened is the High Tech Act, which was part of the Investment Recovery Act, gave health systems the incentives, carrot as well as a stick, right?
To reach operational use, meaningful use, milestones. So to adopt digital medical records and then to use them. And so there were monies on both sides for them. So what had happened though is that during time, they purchased these medical records. There weren't a lot of budgets for tools. And so like one of the CIOs said, we move from 150,000 pencils overnight to 150,000 people getting on a computer they don't understand how to use. And it was a massive, massive undertaking. But what an unbelievable innovation that happened over a 10-year period where we're about 96 % of our health systems are digital, right? Maybe even more than that, right? And so now they're getting into tremendous amount of operational optimization and things of that nature.
We were meeting with a very small hospital, Arnett Health. I believe it's down in the Carolinas. And they were having lots of end user experience issues closely associated with Meditech. We worked with them and they said, could you monitor? We found out what the problems were. was ourselves, the Meditech support team, and them. they resolved the problems. And it was a simple conversation. We wanted to build a better product for our customers, which are IT professionals that are responsible for making having end users have a good experience. And so they simply said, look, if you could monitor for all of these events, conditions, and failure points on the Meditech servers with these sort of, for the Meditech application, that would be fantastic. That became our Meditech module. And we've sold millions of dollars of that Meditech module, helping organizations and IT pros get ahead of end user experience issues.
Medical is, when you talk about IT professionals and what we do to make people have a good experience, there's always the story about the lawyer that's upset or the executive that is not getting their reports on time or they have screen lag. But then there's the conversations with clinicians who are in a patient setting.
They can't be responsive to the needs of the patient because they can't access their application. We call those patient-facing EHR speed and reliability issues. And so that's what we gravitated to. It's more of a personal thing, an emotional thing. And over time, we built business and technical partnerships, exclusive partnerships with both Oracle as well as Epic. So we're the only company that has modules built for those three EHR platforms today. So that's how we got into it was really by accident, but overall, ⁓ trying to build a better product for our customers. So in that way, maybe not by totally by accident, you know.
Patrick Coble:
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a big one, too, because, mean, with Oracle and, you know, Meditech and Epic and all that, like, what are some of the other ones that you have modules for? I mean, those that's definitely the big two between, I guess, Epic and Oracle or Cerner, if anyone still remembers having a hard time with the new name. But like, what are some of the other modules that you all do? And because, I mean, you're not just monitoring your, you're looking at the actual session host and some of its keystrokes and how long it's taken for the name to be displayed and stuff like that. Reading some of that and are you installed also on like some of the backend components too? On some of them you can and some of them you can't, right? So.
Thomas Charlton:
Yeah, and so I think the way to think about it is for Oracle, let's say, we are the only organization that can install within the Oracle data center. So that is a huge advantage for us, right? Because without that, the folks that are responsible for managing end user experience at the health system, they can't see anything. Once this physician, they go through maybe their VDI first hop, and then they go to connect to Millennium, Cerner, Millennium, or now Oracle Health EHR, they can't see that second hop without Goliath Technologies. And so there's a huge advantage there. But the way to think about it is that we will help you. We'll support any EMR EHR application that is delivered with ⁓ using or where you're providing access, as proper way as Citrix, VMware Horizon, AWS Workspaces, and now AVD. And so we're actually just signed a partnership with another organization who is a consulting firm whose primary responsibility and focus is moving Epic to the Azure cloud and using AVD as the platform or the capability of desktop virtualization DaaS platform to be able to access Epic in the Azure Cloud. So we're very focused on that. And in healthcare, you don't have to do a lot of things well, you have to do a few things really, really well, and that's kind of where we've focused.
Jarian Gibson:
So you mentioned that you do your integrations and partnerships with Oracle and being the only one that can install alongside Oracle and then Epic and Meditech. Do you support any other ones and do you build specific modules every time you bring a new EHR on?
Thomas Charlton:
It depends on the partnership with the EHR vendor. But again, in general, if you're using a desktop virtualization platform, therefore not a thick client, trying to connect to a web-based application, we can support it. So somebody mentioned NextGen early on. NextGen doesn't use Citrix or VMware Horizon or any desktop virtualization solution to access it typically. You can, but they generally don't purely web-based application. So we don't provide as much value in that setting relative to the EHR application, right? A lot of times they'll have like a NextGen. It's amazing how different clinical workflows are between different specialties, right? Whether it's emergency room or radiology, and so there are a lot of these smaller EHR applications that are focused very specifically on one specialty. So it's entirely possible to have 400 of these things in a very, very large health system focused on multiple different specialties. And so you still have Citrix or VMware, for example, but other ones.
Jarian Gibson:
That's interesting because I know when I spent a while so I touched the it was always published via XenApp because it was more a fat heavy client that was always fun to install. So I'm glad to hear they kind of evolved into a better web client that looks like it sounds like it's easier to manage.
Patrick Coble:
Yeah, I think in one case they were one of the first that actually got to the web because like Epic's trying to get there right now and they've got some other big stuff going on there. So, you know, when we talk about that in this specific how, you know, each use case is a little different, like a surgery clinic versus a dentist versus a big huge hospital and everything in between that has some type of EHR, how is Goliath kind of bringing the value? So for Oracle, it sounds like you actually have real visibility, whereas before you just find them in line and it feels slow. It feels fast. Yeah, I see you had a problem. You're like, I can't see anything. So what are some of those values that you're bringing to the clinical team and to the IT team when you're integrated with someone that has an EMR or EHR?
Thomas Charlton:
You know, it's interesting when we, if you think about it, if you were to go to any CIO, any CMIO, most VPs of applications responsible for the clinical applications, and you were to ask them what is seemingly a pretty simple question, right? Which is, can you tell me, are your clinicians having a good experience today? And if they are, who is?
If they aren't who is, and they're having problems, what is the frequency? What is the duration? And what is the root cause? doesn't matter if you have a DEX solution or another competitive solution to ours. You cannot answer that question definitively without Goliath Technologies. You can answer it definitively with Goliath Technologies. That's the value we bring. Now, with that data, we've all been in these situations, either you know, adjacent to them or right in the middle of these situations where they're trying to troubleshoot an issue. And when you get a team of clinical executives and IT executives trying to talk about the reality on the ground versus the subjective nature of feedback or counting tickets, right, or things like that, right, think about it right now. How do they know? You talk to most IT executives and they might say, or many, they'll say, well, clinicians complain.
That's what they do. They're never happy. And no clinician is going to sit there and say, I'm having a bit of latency in using Epic. I believe it might be a back end database issue. Maybe you haven't allocated enough bandwidth to Citrix. That could be the problem. It's a challenging position for our IT pros. That's how we approach the problems. So when we're talking to our health systems, whether they're large health systems like Ascension or Common Spirit or Intermountain Health that are customers of ours or small community hospitals, we've built solutions that scale to the largest but have a price or ease of use profile for small to medium sized health systems, community health systems. And that's the goal is service the health IT professionals in the health industry.
And we bring together data that the clinical folks and the IT folks can agree on. A common set of facts upon which they can build a collaborative dialogue about how to prove clinician experience and consequently patient care. But they can also take this data and have conversations with their vendors, the various vendors. So that's really sort of the value that we provide in the health care space.
Jarian Gibson:
That's good value too, because a lot of times what you said, it's like the end user not going to tell you what's going on. That is say it's slow, you need to fix it. And a lot of times they blame whatever broker like Citrix or Horizon because that's the first thing they see when they launch it.
Patrick Coble:
Well, and that's the thing, too, is, you know, we talk about being like fatigued with support tickets and like when alerts are coming in and it's just like, we get so many, we become numb to it. The users are the exact same way. I've told them it's slow every single day for the past three years. And I've made four hundred and thirteen tickets. And every time they say, we don't see a problem. And, you know, it kind of goes away. But then it comes back because we have no way to quantify anything. It's just like more feeling instead of like real data that we're like, yeah, there you do have a long login time. There is some group policy, whackery going on for you, but also something's going on on that one machine. You keep getting unlucky, know, print spoolers out of control. Something's gobbling up a couple gigs of RAM. Like what's going on? You know, someone's, you know, streaming some videos on there, you know, it's like, that could do it.
Thomas Charlton:
We have so many examples where we're brought into a health system, whether they're a current customer or they're leveraging our EHR performance improvement program, right, where we go in for a set cost and we do an analysis and assessment and show them where the issues are around speed and reliability. A lot of things that could go wrong with a health application and we don't report to solve all of those problems, right? We're not going to change the application workflows or things like that. But there's a foundational element, which is if you're investing in your EMR, EHR application, doing process optimization, optimizing the application, etc, none of that is gonna matter if your clinicians can't get to the application with good speed and reliability. None of those benefits are going to be realized.
And so we have so many situations back to your point about people not reporting, right? It's the apathetic user that many times can lead to clinician burnout. So very, very recent example where we had a problem. was a whole, and I'm not as technical as you folks, so a home folder path, an error there. And so what was happening in reality operationally is people were logging on, it would time out on that home folder path, which was not valid anymore, and then go to another one. And maybe it tried twice, I'm not sure. But either way, there was a long log on time. And we found out, even though there were only about 10 tickets, that that was impacting over 2,500 people trying to log on. They only had 10 tickets. Those are apathetic users. And when it comes to, if you want to just talk revenues for a second, if you're a clinician and you have privileges to operate at multiple hospitals, right, you will go to the hospital where the applications work. You'll go to the hospital where the staff is kind to you, right? There are tons of studies around that. Unless the hospital owns their clinicians and they have no other choice, they'll exercise their privileges, you know?
Patrick Coble:
Totally. Yeah. I won't. I don't want to pick up hours there. I don't want another shift there. Right. Shifts over here. Yeah. And so then that that that starts affecting the business like in cascading ways that multiply exponentially to revenue. And also, you know, you're also clinical experience for your patients, too, because they you you go into a room and someone's computer is working and you're having whatever medical emergency or thing going on. That's one thing. But if they're having a bad day because of this thing and then they're not able to even pay attention because they're waiting for it to load the chart, they're waiting for it to type the name, it's delayed, I had to log in six times, and then you also have charting errors because of that, because of that delay, because they remembered a couple things, but they were trying to get in for five minutes out of the 10 minute visit, you know? And so only half the notes even made it in there, you know?
Thomas Charlton:
Hey, look, I had a, when my mother was sick and she had to have surgery, we went to a hospital in our town and the clinician saw her in the office there but said, no, I do all my surgeries. Now surgery could be done there, but they did surgery across town. And when I asked why, because it's a little bit more of a drive, they said, well, let's just say things are more reliable over there. Both of those hospitals use two different of the majors, right? So I won't tell you which one they were going for, but it's pretty substantial that that can happen, you know?
Patrick Coble:
Yep.
Jarian Gibson:
So within your solution, you have large enterprise clients as well as healthcare clients as well. How do you compare the digital transformation between those two different clients types?
Thomas Charlton:
You know, I think the digital transformation and the speed with which, well, if you think about the healthcare industry, it's hard to say that they're not quick in digital transformation, depending on how you define it. Because to have an entire industry in a couple of decades move from paper to paperless is really unbelievable. I mean, it's absolutely, and then to move beyond just the transition into meaningful use is pretty unbelievable. So health care is doing a lot with less. However, it's very highly regulated. And so I think you see this with a lot of regulated industries, health care, finance, etc, where the enterprises that are not as highly regulated can move more quickly if you define it again, digital transformation has to be defined.
It may be narrowly defined as adopting cloud ⁓ infrastructure and things like that. ⁓ We see the enterprises, especially smaller ones, right? That size does matter in that situation and they're moving more quickly to the cloud if you define it in that way.
Patrick Coble:
Yeah. I mean, to that point, and we talk about cloud, you know, that was the that's been the catchphrase for the past like 10 years. What about like AI? How has that kind of been incorporated or what are you doing? And I know AI gets used like cloud was for years where AI and machine learning are kind of two very distinct things. But AI is the one that's winning, right? It's the Kleenex brand of issues, right? Like that name.
AI means all the things that do something cool like searchy or generative, know, all that stuff. So how are y'all, you know, harnessing some of that? Because I'm sure you guys have like a mountain of data per customer analytics and things like that that you can show them that can help them and do lots of good things for everybody.
Thomas Charlton:
Yeah, you you can you can there's some interesting comparisons to be made in terms of adopting the cloud. Historically, right? So you remember the Glasshouse IBM, their old blog posts about how when will the last mainframe be shipped, right? And all the people that know how to code and think it was Cobalt, right, or something like that. They're all they're all dying off. So IBM is dead. Well, IBM wrapped it up and 60 with a new UI, it's oversimplification, but the 60 % or 70 % of the world's data is still on mainframes, right? So we've been told that we're going to move to the cloud for the last 10 years and you're never going to have anything on-prem, Turns out that the costing has to be worked on a bit, right?
As well as the transition and old applications that are not going to be rewritten that the entire company runs on and things of that nature. When it comes to AI, AI is really different. It's impacting consumers as well. The move to the Cloud really didn't impact consumers as much as it impact as an IT phenomenon, but AI is pretty much everywhere.
We found it helpful. We incorporated AI about a year ago into our base product. And it's really a helper. You all know this. Being experts in the World of EUC, there aren't many experts. And so it was meant to sort of democratize detailed knowledge about how to troubleshoot end user experience issues and basically bring into the product our entire support center. So that's what we trained it on, right? Was knowledge of Citrix, knowledge of VMware Horizon, now AVD, AWS. So you're in our product and you have a question about how the product operates, right? And you want to get some information. You see something and you're trying to understand what the connection speed issues mean, right? Or how do I drill down to understand if the problem, my gut feeling is the problem is the user and how they're using it, right? How do I find that out in your product? And you can ask our AI assistant that. What we're super excited about is what we'll be releasing in the next six months, which is an Agentic AI. So if you think about our technology, it's really built for to really extract the value out of it at all levels of the organization. It's a combination of machine learning as well as LLM, right? So being able to prompt the technology to show you what it might take an hour or so to resolve, right? So for example, we're in having a SWOT team meeting, IRC meeting, major incident bridge meeting, right? You've got 10 to 20 people that are on the call. Most are unnecessary, but nobody knows that, right? Because we don't know where the problem is, so it's all hands on deck. You have internal IT folks, they speed dial every vendor they can think of that could possibly be a problem. They jump on the call. We're all trying to solve problem. When they do that with our technology, you can run an on-demand report and say, look, I know that it seems like there are a lot of problems, but let me tell you, and this is an exact example from less than six months ago, there are 10,000 people currently logged on. There are 1,200 people that are having less than a best practices experience. Of those 1,200, 10 of them are critical. Those 10 happen to be in a series of surgery centers in Southern California that are orthopedic surgeons. the issues are loud and amplified, but they are not broad. And so we were able to take what could have been an hours long meeting and with productivity math, maybe a day of meetings, right? So 20 people times five hours is, you you could do the math. So ⁓ we were able to collapse that meeting to one hour with a couple of people and they had the ability to go and start to troubleshoot the problem. Now, it takes a little bit with our technology to be able to do that. It takes people that understand the technology. It's not super complicated, but what if we would have alerted in advance of those 10 people and drawn those conclusions? Now, people at the help desk did get alerts on latency issues with those clinicians so they were aware of it, right?
But the clinicians don't go through the support ticketing process. They tell somebody else to open a support ticket, right? So now they're this IRC meeting because they called the CMIO, called the CIO. Now everybody's trying to solve a problem, but they don't know what the problem is exactly, right? And so what we're going to do is, and the way we're training this agent is to do exactly what one of our senior technical folks would do to help troubleshoot a problem. So the notion is to give you advanced warning, even more than we're doing today, on issues, and then also to frame up where the issues are, to also be able to prompt. So for example, let's say you get a support ticket, right? We all know that changing the process in IT, the siloed nature of IT, is probably not going to change in our lifetime. So as we're developing our Agentic technology, we want to do it in a way that conforms to the way IT organizations work today. If they want to check, they're not, you we've been, we've had a proactive approach to IT for a long time. You bring a proactive product into IT and ask who's using it? Whose job is it to be proactive? The answer is no one. It's built on being reactive, unfortunately, right?
So the best thing you can do is get them to react more quickly. When it turns, when it becomes time to be proactive, we'll be right there. But initially, what we're going to try to do is enable the basic help desk person to pull up a ticket that says Jarian, type in your name and it was the support ticket may have gone through another country by now, right? Maybe that's complete information, maybe it not. But if you get your first name, and then you prompt in what's going on with Jarian. And it gives you the information that you would typically have to investigate, but now it's right at your fingertips. Jarian has been having issues over the last month. They occur at 8:30 in the morning, every morning from home. They do not occur the rest of the day until they occur at 6:30 at night, right? Something like that. And it's been happening. The likely root cause is a home office issue. We can tell by the IP address it's the same. Now you can get all that from our technology today, right? But we want to be able to present that up. So the mean time to resolution will save money in two ways and increase clinician satisfaction or end user satisfaction in general by reducing the time to remediation one, but also reducing the number of times things need to be escalated to staff that should be spending their time being proactive and hardening the infrastructure and doing important projects like that, but can't because it takes so much time to investigate where these issues are.
Jarian Gibson:
Yeah, that's a big help too. Especially when talk about the manpower and the number of hours and having those meetings and stuff to be able to reduce that and have that meantime of resolution can not only make clinicians happier, but it can help possibly save someone's life too. Because if you're having delays of getting some info or medication and you get something wrong because some kind of, as long as it happens, you know, that can impact someone's life too. So you're improving the all around system with that. So seeing that Agentic AI come in is great to hear about then, so we take the Agentic AI, but then and how do you see your solutions also helping EUC champions today as they undertake their digital transformation initiatives outside of the AI piece that we just talked about?
Thomas Charlton:
Well, let me ask you a question. When EUC folks are engaging these digital transformation initiatives, what are the major problems that they have? Like at sort of a high level.
Jarian Gibson:
Change is the biggest one.
Thomas Charlton (33:06)
Change, right? And so what we find so often is what stalls these projects is complaints from users that are complaining because of change, not necessarily specific performance issues. And here again, we come back to how big is the problem? We have a special relationship with Google, and we support monitoring their Chromebooks in a different way than other folks. We're not talking about the Chromebook browser. We're talking about the Chromebooks. Okay?
Jarian Gibson:
At the OS level.
Thomas Charlton:
Yes, and we integrate that with our technology. If you're running said this is how we started the partnership, very large organization deploying thousands of Chromebooks, Chromebooks are a problem. Chromebooks are a problem because they were using thin clients with the laptop they had always been using before. And this required a change to a Chromebook that has some different intricacies in terms of how if you're not using a Chromebook and you try to help your child with homework, and they're using the Chromebook, there's just certain things that are a little problematic, right? OK. And so the further away you get from technology, the more problematic they are. And that's kind of what happens with most of the people that we're supporting, right? You don't get a lot of tickets from the IT support teams, right? And so what Google came to us with is they said, hey, could you associate a Chromebook and the operating system of the Chromebook and associate with a Citrix session. So when we get a complaint in literally the same view, I can click on a tab and I can see the Citrix data, the backend server data, as well as the Chromebook. And that's what we delivered to Google. And that's really the value of the technology is that people say, well, don't you all integrate with the same APIs? And sure, that's true.
But it's what you do with the data that you're pulling and how you correlate it with other data in the infrastructure. So we're able to show that in a single view. You literally will tab through. Now let me look at the Chromebook. Let me look at the virtual server. Let me look at my Citrix infrastructure. Let me examine the problem. They're saying it's slow. But is the slowness user behavior? Is it the application? Is it connection speed? Is it the slice of the network? That we're assigning to this particular application, right? So that's sort of what we try to do. So the answer to that question is we are trying to make sure that our IT professionals, our EUC experts that are trying to execute against these initiatives are not stalled and having to answer questions they don't have the answers to, right?
Stalled projects are the worst. And once that stinking thinking started happens, right? And look, every executive like myself loves to stand up there and you do, first it was BYOD, we're gonna bring our own devices. You can work from home, right? We're hundred, we're zero footprint. We're gonna do all these things. Well, every one of those great announcements, we're going green. All of these announcements, right? No matter what you think about them, they drop onto the backs of the EUC experts to execute them. And I am telling you, myself included, and maybe a little more now, nobody understands what they're actually asking the IT departments to do. Wait a minute, we have to upgrade our infrastructure to be able to do that? What are you talking about, right? We need a larger network to support this? You know what I mean? So it's after the press releases.
After all of that grandstanding, it really gets down to EUC experts trying to make these initiatives happen. And we're focused on trying to make sure that they have the tools they need to successfully complete them.
Patrick Coble:
I think that's important because I mean, everybody is always going to have those kind of reoccurring issues and depending how the data is laid out and how the product works is going to be like that time to value for it to go like this thing was worth its weight in gold. And to that point, like what are some of those top issues that you guys are able to solve for, you know, EUC nerds out there that have deployments and can really save their bacon? Because you talked about one of them where the user was having all these crazy problems. And within a couple of minutes, you're able to see, this is going on. So what's some of those big aha moments that have helped you all in your momentum?
Thomas Charlton:
Yeah, I think we focus on three things, Helping IT professionals, World of EUC experts overall anticipate issues before they happen. Man, if we can get advanced notice before users complain, if use American Airlines said to us one time, look guys, when I get complaints, all their reservation specialists work from home.
Right, so they got of them all across the United States. When I get a call from the folks that are managing the Sabre application that their reservation specialist in California can't log on to the application, I don't need to know in advance. That would be gravy. What I want to be able to say is I'm aware of the problem and we're on it. Right. So anticipating the issue before it happens. The second thing we're trying to do is help them troubleshoot it as quickly as possible when it does. The third thing, and this is super important, is to be able to document the root cause of the issues so you can solve them permanently. How many times you brought this up when we first started, I think when we were sort of quote unquote in the green room here, and we were talking about it, it's like you have a problem, and all of sudden the problem goes away. No one knows why it happened or how it got solved.
Patrick Coble:
Oh yeah.
Thomas Charlton:
Which makes us all sit back and say, okay, we're waiting till the other shoe drops because this is going to happen again, right? And you can't go to the network team or the server team and make a viable argument without analytics, right? So exactly. That's what we're trying to end. I think we're rare in this situation where we charge nothing for historical look back, right? Because it is super important to our IT folks to be able to give them the ability to report historically because it is, the past indicates the future in so many ways in IT. And if you restrict them to 30, two weeks or 30 days and then say, yeah, you can have some additional historical look back, but it's gonna cost you, it just throws, I think a lot of, challenge a little friction in there that doesn't have to be there.
Patrick Coble:
It's a lot. It's a lot of valuable intelligence having those trends because then you can see it used to be this fast. Now it's this fast. Now it's this fast. And being able to see those trends just visually, can, you may be able to spot something and go, Whoa, what's going on here? Why is, why are log in times 30 seconds longer right now? And then why are just these people like this, you know, to be able to get those kinds of indicators. So yeah, it's.
That's really cool in that sense because some other people in this space will charge for that ⁓ for that extra time to have that, you know, be able to eat phone home back a couple of weeks ago, you know.
Thomas Charlton:
Yeah, I should also say that all of the data that we're talking about, right, which if we walk in and we talk to people, they say, well, what does Goliath do? We say, we will tell you without self reporting and think about this, without anyone telling you, we will tell you who's having a problem, frequency and duration and the probable root cause. Right. And.
We'll do that without self-reporting. I mean, that is a huge advantage to any IT professional that's engaging in any sort of digital transformation initiative.
Jarian Gibson:
You mentioned earlier about going from reactive to proactive and some aren't ready for being that proactive yet. So it's kind of a transition. But you talk about moving there. Can you give me some examples? Have you seen that customers have gone there and how it's working for them being more proactive in IT?
Thomas Charlton:
Yeah, you we have a great example. We did a webinar with Kansas University Medical Center and that's my backyard. What? Yeah, My backyard. So they did a they have our technology. been a customer of ours for about six years and they just purchased the whole Liberty Hospital system. Right. So they they run what we call a scorecard. So I mentioned that we can tell you who's having problems with frequency duration. We also excuse me, take that data and we roll it up into a score. So what does it mean? You've got to have a baseline. You've got to be able to say, what does it mean? How do you define a good experience? And so we use Citrix best practices. We'll roll it up and give them all an automatic score. What Sean Bennett, who runs the support group there at the IT department, gives those reports to his IT staff and says to the help desk, I believe it's on Fridays, but it's a day a week they run a report and they can proactively reach out. So imagine the dynamic change. And he talks about this as well in our webinars and follow on materials. He says, look, the credibility of IT is improved. We are literally reaching out to people proactively who have not raised tickets and said, you know, we've noticed there's a lot of slowness with Epic at this particular surgery center.
Are you having slowness? Yeah, how did you all know? Right? The other thing he said, paraphrasing, is it's a lot more difficult to push IT around when we have data. Right? The flip side of that is we have much more productive conversations with clinical and IT executives when we have data at our fingertips. Right? Because think about this, why are there problems?
Think about this just for a second. What they're doing is engaging and hearsay, right? So a few clinicians or powerful attorneys or pick the industry, right? The head of manufacturing calls in and says, everything is slow. And they take that to the next executive. Nobody is asking the detailed level questions. How do you know it's slow? Who asked you? How many people? Then they get it down and people are screaming. like, what are the incident?
Go to Service Now and give us a readout of the incident reports, right? Etc, etc, etc. That's great. But there's nothing there that talks about actual users' experience breaking it down into metrics, right? And so that's a huge, huge help for the IT pros. So we're injecting objective data into what is entirely a subjective conversation right now. And the thing is, it's nuts that it has to be that way because it's supposed to be digital transformation. Everything has a login time. It has a digital footprint. We are IT folks. We should be able to report on this stuff, use it to our advantage to be able to provide, yes, a better end user experience. But for God's sakes, if we can achieve that and make our lives a little bit easier, that should be the net goal, you know?
Patrick Coble:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, that's like, you know, when it becomes rumors and there's no data, then everyone's just pointing fingers and that just causes chaos in any IT department. And, you know, that's just going to change a lot of stuff and probably not for the better. And, you know, like right now in the world that I know I see and I think everyone sees, there's been so many changes in our VDI market with like Citrix and Omnissa.
And obviously the rise of AVD and Cloud PC and those changes have been very rapid and everything like that. And what's some of the impacts that's had on your solution? Because I mean, I'm sure everyone, I know when AVD or WVD or RDmi first came out, we were like, okay, that's cool. But Citrix and Horizon were like the incumbents and had all the whiz bang features.
But it seems like in the past two years, they've closed the gap to what that minimum viable product is. And that's kind of like on the news all the time. might as well be, AVD has probably talked about just like AI has talked about, just like cloud was talked about, just like paperless was talked about, right? Like it's becoming a force of nature. And so how is that going to change what you do or have to do at Goliath?
Thomas Charlton:
You know, it is going to be interesting to see how those things shake out. What I can tell you, and I don't like to make forward-looking statements, right? But the industry we're in right now is very, very dynamic. And I can tell you, let's just take AI, for example. Hasn't AI dramatically changed in its capabilities over just the last six months? It is just literally amazing that we were talking to a fantastic company about what we could do with AI six months ago and we had a meeting this week about what it can do now and it has changed. mean, it's literally different. So I think the thing that we can do is to really continue to ask a tremendous amount of questions and listen to the responses thoughtfully and deeply because I don't think there's any way in this level of a dynamic market. I mean, every day when I'm driving home, I'm consuming information from podcasts. I don't read while I drive, but I do listen to podcasts and things of that nature. We talk to, I talk to customers twice a day where I'm literally asking them questions and not just customers of our product, customers of IT.
Right, customers of new technology. It's not uncommon for me to read an article on AI or something like that and give the author a call and say, hey, do you have 15 minutes? I'd love to get an opinion on this. There's no sale there. There's nothing. There's only insights. I think it's dangerous to try to think that you have it all figured out.
Because it's way too complex, you know?
Patrick Coble:
And it's moving so fast. That's the thing too. It's the speed of all that too, right? Yeah. And I mean, cause one of the things that comes to me is it sounds like, when you talked about the history of Goliath, you know, it kind of started in that virtualization world when we were first putting, especially like EUC related VDI, RDS, whatever things in to virtualization and we were running into CPU ready, right?
And so we chased CPU ready until we finally figured out like, you can only do so much, right? Like you can only put so many VMs with so many sockets and so many cores. And that problem kind of like fixed itself over time. And obviously modern stuff's gotten better. And then when VDI came there, then you guys focused on that. So you had like CPU ready era, VDI ready era. And now it's probably more cloud ready era.
Cloud desktops perform different than desktops that you control all other aspects, right? You're in a cloud with who knows how many other people in that region, how many people are on that host, we don't know. And that's what I've seen from monitoring solutions overall is that your mileage varies drastically when you're using a cloud desktop. And if you have no visibility and you're just relying on native tools, you're lost in the sauce, right?
You do not have a cloud desktop solution hosted from anybody's broker. It doesn't even matter the broker without some kind of DEX solution to have that visibility. So I think that's like, know, CPU ready VDI and now cloud is probably the new era of Goliath and AI and all the things that come with it.
Thomas Charlton:
Yeah. I'm also seeing too, when you look at how infrastructure, isn't it true that when infrastructure delivery platform changes and application delivery changes, a whole new host of systems management tools evolve, isn't it? So when the mainframe moved to Unix, which was distributed, and then to Windows, and now to the cloud. Every one of those leaps, the old platinum technologies, Unix, right? Products didn't work well on the Windows platform. So all of these new companies, I was one of them, came up in the Windows environment. Back then it was NT, not there, right? And now it's moving to the cloud, which interestingly people are calling back to the Glasshouse, which was that old euphemism for the IBM mainframe right?
As those things occur, the systems management teams, the IT pros are opening up their bag of tools and saying, look, you're all really excited about cloud and that's great, but it's literally a server in a different location. AVD is a different DaaS solution. So it's really uncomplicated for the IT pros where they're not mystified by this stuff. Isn't it funny though when you see people that clearly do not understand what cloud actually is using the wrong words and terms. You get to an IT guy and he's like, look, that's compute. It's an AWS. It's a colo. It's an AVD. Come on. It's right. But one of the things I had conversation, we have a customer that's a service provider that has 3000 AVD. They're ⁓ hosting an application for a health care organization. And it's on Azure with AVD. That's the combo they have there, right? And they also have our product to monitor Citrix. So they're monitoring Citrix, and it's basically an on-prem solution. And they're monitoring AVD with our other solution, which is SaaS-based. Both of them talk to each other. And I was asking him how there were requirements are changing and he was saying that when he purchases tools for Citrix, his driving factors are resolving end user complaints. He said when he's managing AVD, his opinion, and this is one person's opinion with 3000 users on AVD, is that our tools need to be better for the administrators because AVD is easier on the user, more difficult on the administrator to manage.
And so it's really interesting. So when I talk about asking questions, those are the types of questions I ask is not only like we have plenty of people that can talk about the technical requirements, but a lot of the questions we need to ask from a product management and product specification point of view is understanding who the buyer is and what their challenges are, right? Because there are tremendous number of solutions that are out there right now. And tremendous amount of confusion about what can be used and things of that nature.
Jarian Gibson:
Earlier you talked about University of Kansas Medical Center about how they went from reactive to proactive and having the data and so forth. Were there any other customer use cases as you want to discuss that Goliath and all these has helped them?
Thomas Charlton:
I mean, just about every client that we have features in our technology that give organizations the ability to be proactive. And I mentioned the American Airlines example, which is great example, right? So they log on to an application on a daily basis to make sure the application is up and running. And they start that process two hours before people get to work in a particular time zone, right?
And that's a very common use case for our technology. Now that's just a feature in the product because if there is a problem, the great advantage of having a logon simulation feature integrated fully with the product is that you can stay in the same product and automatically look up the user that's having that problem, right? You know what I mean? So, you have countless examples. And generally, when we train, when somebody adopts our technology, we train multiple teams, right, from service desk to the escalation point and management, right? We call them consumers of the data on how to leverage and use the product. And I would say that it becomes more proactive as you go higher in the organization because they're making more the decisions that are more macro, right? So the folks that are the escalation points, the architects, folks probably like yourselves, they're not looking at resolving tickets that's reactive. They're trying to look at overall, give me the top 25 of my 140 health system locations, or me the top 25 that are having long on long logon issues or latency chronically and what applications.
And they're not even interested necessarily in who for their purposes, though it's important. They're interested in the macro issues so they can solve macro problems that impact many, many users, not just ones.
And of course, the upper management, whether it's health care or otherwise, wants to understand across their user base, what is the end user experience, right? If it's good, let's just check the box. But right now, they just don't have that visibility that we provide.
Patrick Coble:
So the, you know, one of the things that's, you know, we talked about all the VDI changes that have been going on and, you know, that's been a real dynamic market, but it's also been the EUC community has changed a lot too with some coming and going lots of new ones. mean, I know we, you know, World of EUC, this is like, you know, year two-ish. So we're rocking and rolling there and, you know, trying to do our thing.
And we just had a couple of new user groups have their first meetings this week and last week. So I mean, stuff is happening. So what do you as like a vendor, what do you see in that kind of like EUC community? Because you have a different view than us like in the community, but as vendor and trying to help and get the word out and stuff like that.
Thomas Charlton:
I really thought I was super impressed with the first EUC meeting down and outside of DC. I thought that was fantastic. I it was great. And I like the, you know, we all came together, didn't we? I mean, I got a call very quickly when CUGC was, you know, unceremoniously disbanded. And I got a call within a couple of days, or no, I reached out and we were an early supporter.
Right before the thing was actually really formulated. I was really impressed with it. There are a number of things that impressed me. Besides Jarian and you coming in and saying thank you for your support. I thought that was great. I think everybody was really appreciative because we know it's a grassroots thing. It's just not sponsored by a large corporation. You know what mean? So I thought that was great. Having, you know, the the OGs come in and do their presentations I thought was was fantastic. But it's also fantastic because
I think there's more than just Citrix out there, right? There's Omnissa, there's Parallels, AVD, there's AWS Workspaces, Windows 365 PC. There's all of these other desktop virtualization solutions. So I like the broadening of the technology aperture a little bit and allowing for more solutions to be involved in it leads to...
I don't know, just better conversations, I think, and better for all of us who are involved in this space to understand what's available out there for sure.
Patrick Coble:
Yep.
Jarian Gibson:
Yeah, I completely agree too with that because as we started going from just being a Slack instance to the greater World of EUC that we've grown into the past two years. That's one of the things we all first started talking is that not only we want the community to be agnostic, but even us on the board too, having different backgrounds as well. And not just being coming from a Citrix or Omnissa or a Parallels or whatever, that we all have different backgrounds that we come from. So not just having the community agnostic, but our boards agnostic as well in the technology.
Thomas Charlton:
Right. And look, I think the folks at Citrix have done an outstanding job. From my perspective, the Citrix Ready program, and for us on the outside, it's difficult dealing with changes. But those of you that have been in large organizations that are going through tumultuous change, it's really difficult to keep your head straight and try to support a community and care about the community when you might not know whether or not you're going to be employed the next week. You know what I mean? So it's just super, super challenging. So, you my hat goes off to them. think they've been as much as they possibly can support the community and things like that. And we've met with the new Citrix teams, the executives, as well as the new Citrix ready folks. I just think they've done a great job under very challenging circumstances as well, you know?
Patrick Coble:
Yep, for sure.
Jarian Gibson:
Yeah, I would say on the Omnissa side too as well, especially as they transition from going from under Broadcom and VMware to being off on their own too as well. That's a tough transition.
Patrick Coble:
I think that's been great to see because it's kind of like your kid going to college or something and have to go do their thing completely on their own. And they are stepping out on their own. They're coming up with their strategy, their branding, their messaging, and getting out there because that's one thing everyone's just wondering, like, what's next?
Thomas Charlton:
Yeah.
Patrick Coble:
Things are coming. And I think that's their biggest thing that they've been focused on, which I think is the right thing. They've got to get the word out. And it's just like you and your team is getting the word out on Goliath and what awesome things you're doing, have done and are about to do, right? which is really cool. And that's where the EUC community is so important to that is so that hopefully we can be a conduit for those types of messages so that people can like, you know, make their life better and make their users life better.
Thomas Charlton:
Yeah, we met with the Omnissa team a number of times and we obviously support them. And I just think it's fantastic. think that they breaking away from VMware is going to to allow that team to really, really evolve in a quick way. So we're very excited about our partnership with Omnissa as well.
Jarian Gibson:
We talked about community and you mentioned being at EUC World Independence last year in Maryland. We're going to see the Goliath team next. I think I briefly saw Keary at IGEL recently, but any upcoming events you're all going to be at that we should be aware of?
Thomas Charlton:
World of EUC for sure. We have a number of healthcare specific events like KLAS, KLAS, the analyst firm, kind of like the Gartner Group of Healthcare. We will be at their events ⁓ as well. Yeah, World of EUC, probably the next time we all get together for sure.
Patrick Coble:
That'll be fun. So that'll be in Minneapolis. Like I can't believe it's like May 1st today. And like that's only in August. So it's really not that far away. And you know, by then I'll have to have, you know, teaching my kid to get his learning permit, you know, so August is like close.
Jarian Gibson:
As we're things down, any closing remarks Thomas or anything like that that we might want to talk about?
Thomas Charlton:
I appreciate the World of EUC very much. And it's fantastic to be part of it. I think the community is really, really good for the community, right? So the group is great for the community. So I just think it's great. And I hope we continue to grow as the World of EUC.
Jarian Gibson:
Patrick, any closing thoughts?
Patrick Coble:
No, no. I mean, I'm excited because I've always been a fan of like Goliath and the way they've done things. And I've seen them go through the eras and go from just virtualization to VDI and now into this new world of AI and cloud PCs. And I'm just excited to see what's next because I know how important monitoring is and visibility. And so many people just go like, well, we're going to save a penny and not get something like this. And I think you're, you know, kind of shooting yourself in the foot.
Because without that visibility, you're going to have those users that aren't going to report anything because they're just burnt out reporting it because you keep not seeing the ghost in the machine. You know, you don't have any trends, you don't have any analytics, don't have any visibility. And so I think that's where it's important for anyone that has a EUC deployment of whichever VDI flavor you have to have a monitoring solution and Goliath is a good partner for that.
Thomas Charlton:
Well, listen, what we say all the time is monitoring without end user troubleshooting is really meaningless, right? There are a lot of monitoring technology out there, but, we started as a troubleshooting consulting company, troubleshooting really difficult end user experience issues. And then we took all that knowledge and packed it into a product. So the product is automatically looking, this is kind of scary, but 350 events, conditions and failure points that cause end user experience issues, right? I mean, there's that many in a Citrix environment of any size, you know what I mean? So it's just, it's, you don't have the troubleshooting aspect and you're simply monitoring technology and there's limited value, you know.
Jarian Gibson:
I also also want to say thank you Thomas for all the support from Goliath Technologies. I really appreciate it and thank you for supporting the community and being a partnership in this with us. I also like to say those listening. This is going to be out there on where you get your podcast, also on YouTube and the blog post, you can subscribe and follow those locations for World of EUC. This will also, don't forget to join the website and subscribe and join our Slack, where Goliath is in there also as well. And if you have questions or that kind of stuff from the community, then we all can collaborate in real time. Again, thank you Goliath for your support. I also want to thank our sponsors for their continued support, our founding partners, Goliath Technologies being one of them, 10-ZiG, IGEL, Liquidware, Omnissa, Nerdio and Nutanix, our channel founding sponsor, Choice Solutions, and this year our new core sponsors, Google and Parallels. So thank you all. Thank you again, Goliath. And thank you again, Thomas, for coming on and supporting us and having a chat with us today.
Thomas Charlton:
Sure. Thank you for inviting me. I appreciate it.
Patrick Coble:
Yes, sir.
Thank you. It was good stuff.
Jarian Gibson:
And with that being said, thank you for listening to the Frontline Chatter podcast brought to you by the World of EUC, and we will talk to you next time.