A chat with Nexthink – World of EUC

We are back again this time with special guest co-host Patrick Coble joining Jarian Gibson to talk with Tim Flower, VP of DEX Strategy at Nexthink. Nexthink is a founding partner of the World of EUC. In this podcast we talked about all things going on with Nexthink.

In this podcast we had the pleasure of talking with Tim from Nexthink about:

About what inspired Tim to pursue a career in IT and ultimately focus on Digital Employee Experience (DEX).
How his experiences shaped his perspectives on IT and employee experience.
What Dex is why it’s critical for modern enterprises.
The backstory of Nexthink, where is started, and the original concept.
Common misconceptions about DEX encountered in the IT community.
How focusing on DEX has improved outcomes for businesses.
Some of the biggest challenges faced when driving IT teams to shift from reactive to proactive approaches.
Most surprising lesson learned about employee productivity.
Where should IT leaders start when looking to adopt DEX.
How success is measured in DEX and what IT leaders should focus on.
What’s next in the evolution of DEX and what role does GenAI play in the future.
Best and worst workplace tech experiences and how it shaped perspective.

Thanks to Patrick for being our special guest co-host! Thank you to Tim for joining us to have a chat about Nexthink! Thank you Nexthink for supporting the community!

You can find more information about Nexthink at Nexthink.com. You can follow Tim on YouTube, check out The DEX Show, and also read DEX for Dummies.

Jarian Gibson, Frontline Chatter Host:
Good day and welcome to the Frontline Chatter podcast, brought to you by the World of EUC. My name is Jarian Gibson and I am back today with a new co-host, Patrick Coble. How are you doing today, Patrick?

Patrick Coble, Frontline Chatter Co-Host:
Doing good, doing good. Yeah, I'm Patrick, I'm the finance nerd of the World of EUC and the VDI hacker. If you've seen me on the internets anywhere. And so we're about to have some fun topics all about the DEX goodness of Nexthink, along with just automation and trying to make and visibility, making your work life a lot better.

Jarian Gibson:
And with that being said, we are joined today by Tim Flower of Nexthink. How are you doing today, Tim?

Tim Flower, Nexthink:
Good. Thanks. Great to join you guys. I'm usually on the other side of the microphone for our podcast on Nexthink. So it's really good to be able to explore a little bit more deeply and have some good conversation with you. Happy to be here.

Jarian Gibson:
Well, thanks for joining us today. And before we get started, kind of tell us about yourself and what you do at Nexthink.

Tim Flower:
Yeah. So I've got a pretty flexible title. I've been with Nexthink coming up on ten years. I'm the VP of DEX Strategy, former customer. I've been in end user compute. As much as I hate to admit it since 1988. So I go way back to the early days of DOS and windows and can talk through all of the technologies through the years. But the the role I have at Nexthink is essentially to help on both sides of the of the transaction, if you will help our prospective customers understand what this is all about, why they can't live without it, what I used and what I accomplished as a customer, but also internally help our teams understand our customers problems, help you know, sales rep and an SE and or even our product teams. They come up through the software business and having someone able to really articulate the impact of a blue screen to a business, or why does a slowdown or a slow boot? Why does it matter? Or why do ticket volumes matter to IT? So it's really a kind of an educational and evangelism role on both sides. And I like to say it's it's the best job in the world.

Jarian Gibson:
And for our listeners who may not be familiar with Nexthink, do you want to kind of give us like that, that quick overview of Nexthink , please?

Tim Flower:
Yeah. So Nexthink is a Swiss founded company where we just celebrated our 20th birthday. Our yeah, our co-founder is still CEO, Pedro Bados, and he explored what how I like to describe it is, big data on little machines. So, 20 years ago he was a grad student at the at a Swiss university, essentially the, the MIT equivalent over in Switzerland. And he and two of his partners, the three of them, developed this analytics Linux product that looked at, collected and looked at and analyzed data from endpoints, primarily from a security standpoint. But what they realized quickly was that it gave them visibility into the endpoint that no other technology was able to do. And in their grad study presentation of their thesis, they had to present to a board. And on the board was Rolex. Rolex said, if you take this to market, bring it out as a company and a product, we will purchase it and we'll be your first customer. And they're still a customer today. In fact, the ten year gift is a Rolex. So, great kind of foundational story of the of the company. And they expanded into the US about 11 or 12 years just before I got here. And it's been kind of barnstorming the world, opening up the regions in Australia and soon to be Japan and obviously all around Europe. Really, when you show the capabilities of what that what that, spotlight can give people in IT. It's it's really I live for those holy cow moments that. Oh my God, I've been looking for this for 20 years. Where have you guys been?

Jarian Gibson:
So you mentioned before yourself that you started back in 88 and back in the DOS days. So what kind of inspired you to get into IT and then kind of ultimately come into focusing on the digital employee experience or DEX for short?

Tim Flower:
So my schooling was all around software, coding in the, in the early and mid 80s. And what I realized was while that was, you know, kind of interesting for me, it probably meant I was going to be sitting at a desk for the rest of my life. I really wanted to get out and see customers and, kind of the the draw for me was getting into field service learning technology, hands on. I spent eight years at digital equipment, so at DEC, I learned some from some great people on, kind of the foundations and the core parts of troubleshooting, as well as customer service and working with different kinds of people, both happy to see you and angry because they're broken. So it's really great learning ground in terms of hardware in the early first couple of years. But then, got into the, you know, what makes a PC boot and what is Autoexec.bat and what is Config.sys, and then got into Novell NetWare, got certified in Novell and started servicing some of the great insurance companies in the Hartford area. And after 7 or 8 years of that great, again, great learning ground, I both for my career and my own interest, I wanted to focus on a single set of problems, a single set of internal politics, if you will. So I went to one of my customers at the time, The Hartford in Hartford, Connecticut, where I spent 20 years from 1995 to 2015. And, you know, 95 should kind of be that milestone marker for all of us. Windows 95 coming out. Active Directory. We moved from Novell to AD brought in SMS and Altiris and Ghost and Symantec and all of the great stuff to help us manage these little machines out on desks.

Tim Flower:
And again, a great environment to learn as well as take on more leadership accountabilities, manage teams, help our help desk transition from green screens to supporting PCs and and start to get into that management director type of roles and have multiple teams. And then , we can we can dig in a little bit into the story but brought Nexthink in 2013. We changed our world by 2014. And by 2015, I had that urge to go tell everybody on the planet.

Jarian Gibson:
You brought back some memories here when you said, you know, doing the Active Directory, Windows 95, that kind of stuff. Because that's how I kind of got started in end user computing, right. There was that transition from NT to Active Directory and then Windows 2000. And then also that's why I got my start in EUC with Citrix and that kind of stuff. So some parallels there. And you're bringing back some memories for me.

Tim Flower:
Yeah. Windows Terminal Services all of the the early virtualization, we stood up a remote work program with VDI that was based on our, our virtual server environment and had some hiccups there. So, so many trials and tribulations over the years and learning moments that, looking back at it, it can be pretty cool to reminisce.

Patrick Coble:
Yeah, Norton Ghost got me, because that's one of the first things that I was doing at my one of my first full time IT jobs was it was a call center with hundreds of machines, and I'd be like, close this row of computers, put the boot disk in every single one of them, get them all booted up to the Ghost server, go back into the server room, hit go, and now all of them were NT 3.5.1 to NT 4 all that Windows 95 to 2000 kind of era to especially. That was a big Transition. But yeah, that those were those were fun times. Life was much simpler then. But the one thing that's still been consistent is user problems. And trying to quantify that. Like that's never ever. As soon as we gave the very first computer to someone, like even when it only had one color, they had problems and they had to have a way to say what's going on. And so back then it would be called the telephone, which was almost rotary still at that point where real buttons, right. There was no cell phone, there was no instant messaging. You had to call someone and make a ticket, which was really just a check board or a little piece of paper. It's like, oh, I need to call Susie. She can't get into accounting and Bob can't print. Oh, okay, let me go run and do those for the day. So we've had user problems since we've had computers, and knowing what's going on in those computers is also been a mystery, because we have all done updates that have crippled things, and we've done updates that we don't hear anything. And sometimes we broke things and we still don't hear anything because we broke it that good, right?

Patrick Coble:
Like, they can't even communicate to us.

Tim Flower:
Yeah.

Patrick Coble:
Because they are blue Screen of Death, which you talked about earlier. The root of all evil in the Windows. And it's like, oh, okay. Well, they can't even contact me to tell them it's broke, but I'm going on the silence is good, right? That's been our DEX. You know, I guess KPI of knowing it's good.

Tim Flower:
No, only measure that you only measure. Yeah. You only measure the data that you have. Right? So I always told our IT leaders. Look, I'll make us look fantastic. I'm going to walk the floors, and I'm going to start telling employees to stop calling the help desk. If all you're measuring is tickets. Let's stop creating tickets. We'll look great. Yeah. Let me I'll tell you a little story about what prompted us to get out of that model. So, I was doing a field road show. I traveled to 40 of our field offices when I was at the Hartford. And I'm trying to understand all of that. Unknown. What are employees dealing with? Why are they struggling? And I saw things I couldn't believe. But I also at the time I didn't realize. Our new CEO was also traveling to field offices. He visited out to San Francisco and Portland, Oregon. When we all got back to Hartford, he kind of, he dragged us into his office. Not literally, but kind of, you know, he dragged us in to, vent about what he had experienced out in San Francisco. And he went through all of these issues that employees were having, and we had done some research and pulled up some of those tickets, and we didn't see any, any real anomalies. And we said, Liam, we don't know they have issues unless they call us. And he paused for like, it felt like a half an hour. He leaned in and he said, are you kidding me? Our employees have to stop what they're doing and call you to tell you about a problem that you don't know about, but that you probably caused. And it was that last piece that made us sit up and say, wow, when he says it out loud, it does sound kind of silly.

Tim Flower:
He said, we have 30,000 employees. They are not on the IT payroll. It is not in their job description to tell you about problems that you don't know about. Go fix this because it is going to put us out of business. So he did a really good job at not only translating the problem to real business, but business kind of terms, but bring it to the level of priority. We survived the financial crisis. This IT problem is an equal level of problem. Yeah. And it really caused us to sit up and say, you know what, we've got to do something different.

Patrick Coble:
Yeah. That's awesome. So you've had a lot of different positions over there. And, you know, how do you think I mean, we already you already kind of did that, that those experience shaped what job you have ultimately ended up in and the position goes back to if we don't know, it's not broke, right. Like, you know, ignorance is bliss. I mean, what's some of the things that like when you saw. As a customer, when you saw Nexthink, you were like, whoa. And just like those wow moments you talked about earlier and giving those because I've had many of those over the years when technologies come out and I'm like, this is amazing. And so what is that wow, that initially made you go, I want to learn more. And I see the power.

Tim Flower:
So, what's kind of cool about the role is that I get to sit on, sit in with prospective customers and see that holy cow moment over and over again. We were presenting to a very large insurance carrier up in Minneapolis. And, we paused during the demo just to say, guys, give us some feedback. You're pretty quiet. And they paused for a little bit longer, and then one of them just blurted out, this is magical. So it's those kind of moments that really say, wow, this is I'm not the only one on the planet that this means something to. This is going to affect everybody. So what we saw when we deployed part of it was in our POC and then in deployment, we saw those things that you talked about that were invisible, right. Patrick, the we don't know that the blue screen happened unless they call and tell us about it.

Patrick Coble:
Totally. I saw they rebooted it five times on their own. Right, right. Because they're annoyed to even call us. Right? Too. Right?

Tim Flower:
My VP at the time, I was doing a debrief at the end of the day, and he was shutting his laptop down, and it blue screened, and I said, John, what are you? What are you doing? Why why do you have that problem? You should have had it fixed by now. He said, Tim, I'm going home. I'm not calling the help desk at 5:00. I'm like when I come in tomorrow, it's going to be fine till 5:00 again. So it's those things that we don't know about. I saw things in the field offices with 90 minute hourglasses for applications. People waiting from 8 to 930. So in our POC, we found three big things that really said we've got to go deeper. We found those blue screens all around our environment. At the time it was Windows 7, but only on our desktop PCs, and we didn't have that level of intelligence through tickets per se. Or if we did, it would have taken some time to do that analysis. But we immediately saw the laptops are fine. Why are only the desktops blue screen? Our vendor had included a legacy NIC driver in the desktop build that was blue screening the machines. One driver update took care of all that, and the light bulb moment for us was we're fixing the people that are calling the help desk, but we're also fixing the people that aren't calling it. Yeah. And that was the communication back to the business was you're not going to see these anymore because we see them immediately. The second thing we saw was laptop users doing the ten second power down. Just a hard stop, no blue screen, just a hard stop in the middle of the day, but only two laptops and it turned out to be a legacy video driver crashing and freezing the screen.

Tim Flower:
The only recovery is to reboot, and they were shutting down in the middle of the day. Losing data, losing time. And one driver update fixed those. And the last thing we found across the entire enterprise, physical and virtual, was 90% and above memory utilization. All day, every day, eight hours a day. The memory is there to be used. Your machines got to use RAM, but the more RAM it uses, the more starts caching your disk. The more things slow down. The more things are prone to crash, the more CPU has to work to keep up with the load. So we experimented in San Francisco, that same office that Liam, our CEO, had visited, and it was like the clouds parted and we solved, you know, world hunger. The employees were ecstatic, not just about the improvement, but the fact that they could actually now go get their jobs done. We got a memory upgrade approved across 30,000 machines and 8,000 VDIs in about a week because we had the data. Not only did we have the data from San Francisco, but we had the data on the other 29,900 machines that say these are all suffering from the same problem. We've proved the solution and we could monitor it as we went. So that kind of, you know, RAM, you can't distribute RAM. You've got to send people out and install it. So it was a it's typically a tougher thing to justify. But we had the data and we could prove that we, we we could pull it off. Bottom line, the kind of the punch line there is between those three things. In our early days of the rollout, we pulled 52,000 tickets down to 40,000, down to 30,000 when we hit 20,000.

Tim Flower:
I said, I've got to go tell everybody about this thing. Yeah. Hartford now is about 7,000 tickets a month. It's over 80% reduction on the L1 inbound, for a $2.5 million year over year save.

Patrick Coble:
Yeah.

Tim Flower:
So the things that you find when the light bulb comes on is just amazing. You find things you never knew were out there.

Jarian Gibson:
So you've kind of been touching on this too, but you kind of gone through about tickets versus being proactive, having the data, you know, making sure that you're fixing things before people are telling you about it, but kind of taking a step back. And for our listeners who might not understand the complete DEX message, can you kind of tell us what DEX is and why it's critical? You kind of touched on it, but let's take a step back to make sure that our listeners know what's going on there.

Tim Flower:
Yeah, I love I love, these kind of conversations and understanding the audience. Right. So I think that that baseline is helpful. We kind of got into the weeds. So, DEX we work very closely, obviously, with the analysts, the way Gartner phrases it. And I don't know if I'll get the phrasing exact, but it's a strategy that focuses on how technology affects the employee experience, and that doesn't necessarily always mean break fix. It can mean service delivery. It can mean access to systems. It can mean adoption of new technology. So a DEX platform, if it's holistic, can help with not only stabilizing your environment, reducing the strain on IT, but also giving those productivity hours back to the business so that they can actually do their job right. If IT isn't enabling the business, then what good is it? We don't do IT just for IT's sake. So from a leadership standpoint, DEX, if you're a senior leader, DEX allows you to manage your teams and your technology enterprise in a way that better services and better enables the business that you support. Hardware and software asset management. Who's using what? How frequently? Whether it's SaaS or installed locally. All kinds of new adoption capabilities. New VDI Capabilities, workflow automation. So DEX is not just about kind of collecting data and seeing what's broken. It's about gaining visibility across your entire enterprise and making data based decisions on a kind of a proactive basis. But the way I like to look at it is DEX allows you to specifically design your employee experience. Let's face it, the experience we have today is happens by chance. We'll put a patch out and we cross our fingers. Right, Patrick? It goes out to hey, you want it to 100 people with no problem.

Tim Flower:
Let's send it to 40,000. And we just, you know, we never do it on a Sunday night because it makes Monday miserable.

Patrick Coble:
Mhm.

Tim Flower:
That is not by design, right. That's hoping that you don't break something. So DEX really gives you visibility with to have that higher level of confidence that not only will you not break it, but now you've got opportunities because you're not reacting to those fires all over your enterprise. Your staff now has opportunities to go do some strategic thinking and some strategic implementations. We've got all this AI stuff right on top of us. If you're putting out fires with blue screens, you're not giving AI the attention it needs.

Patrick Coble:
Yeah, and to the business too, because the business needs are always changing and everything like that. And I know DEX is, you know, a newer acronym and you just kind of explained it, but what's some of those kind of common misconceptions? Because I know we are always as IT nerds looking for that silver bullet. Right? The person behind the curtain, let's just make the magic happen. Whatever. And you've talked about a couple high impact things that made you do it, but what are some of those most common misconceptions? When people say, oh, I want a cool DEX solution to help make my experience better for my users that they're not going to get right. It doesn't have a superpower. But what what are those most common that you see in those types of meetings that you go to?

Tim Flower:
Yeah, I don't know if it's so much about, kind of the missing superpower. I think there's so much superpower when you start to look at it. You're not too worried about what it can't do. It's really not a it's not an SCCM replacement. It's not a security tool replacement. A lot of senior leaders will say, well, I need the budget for this. So what can I remove? You know, I've got to do the the old school CIO kind of mentality was what line item can I delete in my budget so that I can afford this new thing. And it is something new. If you had something that could do this, you would have been doing it already, right?

Patrick Coble:
Totally.

Tim Flower:
The first misconception is I must have a tool here that does this already. The second I would say is, our biggest, I think our biggest hurdle because it still is very much an evangelistic kind of process. Our biggest hurdle is that status quo. Right? I've been doing it this way for 35 years. If I get a spike in tickets, I'll just offshore some more resources, throw people at the problem. , but even that you're reacting, you're solving for a workload problem. If you're only looking at those tickets like we talked about, your IT problem solving brain goes into, how do I solve the ticket problem. So the misconception with DEX is I think leaders don't ask enough of the follow up questions about why. Why are tickets a problem? Well, it affects not only it, but the business. Okay, well, when it's in the business, why does it affect them? They can just reboot. Well, it affects revenue and potentially external customer satisfaction. So I think the misconception is that it's an easy button.

Tim Flower:
Let's just install this AI thing and it's going to fix all my problems. But it really is the, the, the misconception of, you know, AI ChatGPT is easy. Why isn't this not that it's difficult, but it's certainly not just an easy button to install. You've got to change your processes. You've got to change your people. You know, I think, the way I put it is the technology is the easy part. It's the people that are hard getting people to change and work differently. I had an executive in one of our sales cycles down in Atlanta, look across the room at me and say, Tim, I can't afford this. And I looked at our sales rep. I said, Jeff, why? Why is he saying he can't afford it? We've done the analysis. We've done the ROI. You priced it the right way. And the executive looked at me and said, no, Tim, you don't understand. I can't afford to find all this stuff because now I have to fix it.

Jarian Gibson:
Yeah, you're making me work harder.

Tim Flower:
And he's no longer an executive at that hotel chain. If that's your mentality, then you're in the wrong job, like we said earlier, right? I'll fix everything and just tell people to stop calling. Yeah. So the biggest misconception, the biggest hurdle is, is getting people to think differently.

Patrick Coble:
Yep.

Jarian Gibson:
So we kind of touched on, you know, improved outcomes. You know, that doesn't help businesses. So I'm going to kind of skip forward here and talk about some of the biggest challenges you face in driving IT teams to shift from reactive to proactive approaches.

Tim Flower:
Some are when you show them that this is magical kind of a moment. They can't wait to get going at a at an organizational level, at a more senior level, more kind of enterprise change level. The biggest hurdle, the biggest challenge is that 35 years of ingrained process service management did its job. We're all trained in ITIL. We all developed these painful processes. It took a while to get going, and we don't want to change it because, you know, it can be career limiting if it doesn't work. And that's the second challenge is that fear of change, there's risk. Not only is it difficult, but it's risky from an enterprise standpoint. It can be career limiting. You know, the change agent at the top really needs to be visible if you've got leadership that is status quo or afraid of change or kind of been there, been there, done that, and I'm just going to going to run the clock out. It's going to be difficult to get the people following you to change as well. And in addition to that kind of VP story of I can't afford to fix this stuff, there are also times where and I hear it more on a help desk than anywhere else. There's a protection of staff.

Patrick Coble:
Yeah.

Tim Flower:
A lot of the ROI comes from being able to gain efficiency in the work we do and automate a lot of the work we do, and I don't look at it as staff reduction. I look at it as a career path. People don't get into it to be on the help desk forever. They're looking for their next role. And if they've learned and if they've got the skill and they've got the ability, move them on to that next level of troubleshooting and then of engineering and then into design.

Tim Flower:
So it gives you ability to move staff instead of just keeping them on that, that treadmill. And Jarian. And I think the last one in terms of, in terms of a challenge getting people to make that shift, is that they've got to have that shift as their priority. Some prospective customers come in and they're looking at DEX just as a way to gain some ROI. I'm going to invest in this so I can get money back. And if value is the only thing you're after, financial value, all the rest is secondary. You're going to be chasing that value forever. I think you've got to get folks to understand that the benefit of DEX is enterprise wide it and the business and a side benefit your stability, reliability, predictability, your speed. Now you can speed things up. All of that is going to cost you less as a benefit. So you've got to start with the right problem in mind and make sure it's not just about saving money.

Patrick Coble:
Yeah. And I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head for a lot of it changes and business as usual as being one of the biggest challenges in the way we've done it, even though it might not be because there's always a hunt and especially IT there's 100 right ways, right? And one right way is free, and all the rest of them cost more money, right? And some of them are going to be more steps, more difficult. But, you know, when I look at trying to get started in this DEX world, what is kind of the best place to start? So I know there's lots in IT products that we've had over the past like 30 years that you have to see it to believe it with your own data. You can watch a demo, you can go, oh, that's cool, it's a start menu anywhere in the world on my phone. Okay, VDI. That's neat. Oh wow. I can actually render 3D objects and build a car like Holy moly from VDI. That's neat. But I think probably POC is probably where it has to start, like right after demo. And what some of the tips that you save to like it leaders that are watching this, like, what's the thing to do? Like, what's your next step like? Get your website. Learn a little bit, schedule a demo and then you need to see it with your own stuff. Right. Like walk us through that.

Tim Flower:
Yeah. So over the ten years in doing this and it was a bit of a transition for me going from enterprise IT into the vendor world. I had started in the vendor world at DEX, but this was different being on the front line of our revenue teams. And having that enterprise understanding what stuck out to me was so many people diving right into the technology. I need a tool, I need a tool, I need a tool. If you're only focused on the tool and you don't know what you're solving, you're not going to succeed. So the very first step is what's your problem? Right. Define very specifically what's your problem? And like I said earlier, ask yourself why that's a problem. I have too many tickets. Well why is that a problem? Well it drives my expenses up. Why is that a problem? Well, then I can't invest in Investment strategy. Well, why is that a problem? Well, then my business doesn't advance. So the more you ask why on every answer, the better defined your problem is going to be. And then ask that same problem question on the business side, you've got IT problems and you've got business problems. And once you go into the why. Over and over again, you're going to have a really well defined problem and then look for the capabilities you need.

Patrick Coble:
Gotcha.

Tim Flower:
You know, going after just the tool, you're going to end up in your POC and then implementation in a rowboat out in the middle of the pond looking for fish. Right. You're going to be fishing and looking, and you're not going to know where the value is. You're not going to know what the benefit to the business is. So it really comes with that problem definition.

Tim Flower:
And for me, the bottom line is when you're in that once you've defined your problem, you know what you've got to solve. You're looking at those capabilities. Really dig into that question about status quo. What happens if we stay in the dark? What happens if we don't change? Is it sustainable? Are we scalable? Does it risk company viability? Go beyond just the hey, this is a cool checkbox. And look what happens when I do this. Really make sure that as you're looking at capabilities and value and solutions to problems, that you also look at the the other side of the coin and really run out the outcomes of doing nothing. And I think that really will help you combat that status quo mentality that that gets deeper the higher you get in the organization. So yeah, it comes from learning, seeing the product, understanding its value. Once you've got your problem, get into a POC and see it for your own eyes. Get multiple not only multiple levels on board, but involve as many people as you can. It's not just EUC, bring in the server team, the storage team, the network team, the application teams, your help desk. Our biggest advocate when I was a customer in our command center because we put it on the big board in the command center was the director of network engineering, and Stu now is retired, but he's still on LinkedIn cheering us on. He the comment that he made to me that sticks with me still is Tim, we spend in network. We spend 90% of our time troubleshooting to prove it's not our fault. That's why they have all the tools. It's always they always blame it. And if it's not a network problem, then you blame the Citrix team.

Patrick Coble:
Yeah.

Tim Flower:
But the network teams always got the brunt of defensive troubleshooting. And he said with neck stick up on the board, we can immediately say that office is under configured with RAM. It's not a bandwidth or throughput issue. Go upgrade your memory.
Patrick Coble:
Yeah. Not it.

Tim Flower:
So that step in the process, bring in other people is going to build your your path to value.

Patrick Coble:
Yeah.

Jarian Gibson:
It's funny that you mentioned the line about I need a tool, I need a tool, I need a tool. Because that goes back to that saying, when you're a hammer, all you see is nails.

Tim Flower:
Yeah, right.

Jarian Gibson:
And you're not looking at the big picture. You're not looking at all these things like you said, you know, it could be networking, it could be storage, it could be application, it could be the broker. You know, EUC touches all these things where you know, you're constantly each person is always in it's either it's someone else or prove it's not you mentality. And you talked about going through the POC and you know the having the big board and networking being your biggest advocate. But you know, as you go through the POC stage and into pilot into production, you know, besides, you know, some of the automation, some of the proactive stuff, what specific metrics are IT leaders looking for or what should they focus on as they go through these stages?

Tim Flower:
So the great thing about DEX is it's not just technology measurement. You're also measuring the sentiment of your employees. And it's not a follow up survey from a ticket about how you felt about the service you got. The sentiment that employees can now give is in context with what they're doing. We had a customer on the third launch of an employee's visit to the benefits enrollment website. Third time pop up a little campaign dialog box. How do you feel about the 401K or medical benefits this year? You get immediate feedback on what they're doing in context. It's like, you know, Patrick, if I asked you, you know, how you enjoyed lunch four weeks ago on a Monday, you have no idea. Right. But if I ask you, how's that ham sandwich you just took a bite of, you're going to be able to exactly tell me how you're feeling about it. So the metrics are more than just MTTR and average handle time and ticket backlog and ticket volumes and start times. Ticket bounce. Part of the defensive troubleshooting now means I've got to bounce tickets from one team to the next. Those are the traditional metrics, and I measure those to make sure you're you're gaining ground and making progress. But now you start. you start measuring your baseline device health, your baseline application health in this remote work world. Now you baseline and measure how are my collaboration tools performing? How is teams call quality? How to and how to not only the technical metrics of that but how are people feeling about it. So now you've got an enterprise health check that you can look at on a daily basis. You've got your baseline and you're no longer reacting to problems. You're reacting to deviations.

Tim Flower:
If my deviation and problems go down, I can scream it from the from the rooftops. My score went from a 77 to an 82. And here's why. If my score goes, if my score goes in the wrong direction, I can dig in specifically to what caused that deviation and get it resolved so it doesn't become a bigger problem. So the metrics you're looking at are more a lot of companies now are adopting an XLA strategy, an experience level agreement versus an SLA. The difference between an XLA and an SLA. The SLA is how quick is the fire truck going to show up? How quick are they going to get the fire hoses out and put the fire out? And how quickly are they going to rebuild the building? And XLA is more about the measurement of your life inside the building that's not on fire. How are you feeling about the kitchen? How are you feeling about dinner last night? How's the TV? All of your experiences in the house? To avoid it burning down and making sure you're getting the most out of that experience. So the metrics are more around that daily assessment of the experience, not only the experience of employees, but even the adoption. Let's talk a little bit about what I mean there. So AI and machine learning GenAI, this is all coming at us, I would say at a faster pace than any technology that I can remember. And not only is it tough for IT to keep up with that pace, it's tough for employees to keep up. You know the thought right now is that AI is going to make everything easier. But look at some statistics as you start to look at Copilot embedded in office products.

Tim Flower:
Are people really using it? And if they are, are they using it to its fullest? DEX allows you to get an assessment on how employees are adopting that new technology. Sure. Intune SCCM deployed it, updated the app or the vendor did directly. You got success codes. It installed. There's no tickets at the help desk. But that business can still be struggling because employees don't know how to use it. Or they were trained a month ago and they forgot everything that they learned. So the DEX platform is more than just a metric of health of your environment. It's a metric of health of your employees. And how well are they actually able to leverage the technology that you give them?

Patrick Coble:
Yeah. And I mean, AI is, you know, obviously the coolest buzzword because it was cloud for like a decade, right? PC was like 20 years, right? VDI is kind of sprinkled in there. That same 20 plus year period.

Jarian Gibson:
Yeah. Every year is the year of VDI, right?

Tim Flower:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, VDI was about 20 years ago. VDI was going to be the death of the PC. And we're still waiting for that one. Right?

Patrick Coble:
Yeah, and it still hasn't happened. Well, we're still not paperless yet either. Right?

Tim Flower:
Right.

Patrick Coble:
Like, that's been. Like, over 30 years that we're going paperless. But yeah. So, I mean, when I think about the AI thing, I think that's probably the coolest way to measure it, because otherwise a lot of these tools, even Copilot, all you can really do as the admin is you're really just kind of see queries and be like, oh, they had 72 this month. But when we give anyone any new thing, you know, when we talk about change and it being painful, it's the same thing because it's also learning as painful, something new. And how do I use it. Right? And I think the some of the metrics that you can gain at the endpoint with some of those surveys, along with the context. They're actually doing something. And then you had a pop up that says, how was that? And they said, terrible.

Tim Flower:
Right.

Patrick Coble:
Oh, okay. You know, because it's kind of like, you know, so many things in the IT world are like the drive through at a fast food place. Someone gets the thing, they didn't complain, they didn't come back around. Then they went all the way home or they ate it down the road and they're like, there's no pickles. What? I wanted pickles, I wanted extra pickles.

Tim Flower:
And you're not going back to get your pickles.

Patrick Coble:
You can't call you back, right? They don't. It's going to go to some big automated number. So I think your context of what's going on with the sprinkle of AI and the goal of DEX is something really powerful, like a trifecta of all that, to be able to kind of find out how things really are, instead of just going by tickets and hoping for the best, you know. And, you know, because I think the AI play is a big thing and I know probably a lot of some of the stuff in the product is, you know, machine learning and looking for anomalous behavior and correlation of a whole bunch of these things. Danger. Will Robinson. Right. And you're you're constantly learning as a company to what's the new thing. Right. Because now we're everyone's trying to get to Windows 11 kind of finally. Right. And now the start menu is not on the left side like it's been for 30 years now. It's kind of in the middle. And like do I as an admin, go ahead and just say just change a group policy, move it over just so that everyone doesn't do it. Or should I go? They should embrace the new thing. And if we go back to Vista and that train wreck.

Tim Flower:
Oh my God.

Patrick Coble:
I don't know. You know, so how do you think some of that AI stuff kind of plays within the product? And, and some of the cool things you're able to do?

Tim Flower:
Yeah. So, early on, I think our, our thought in the last couple of years, ChatGPT, I think is the biggest, . Oh, my God, kind of a moment. Look at this. What this can do. What's that?

Patrick Coble:
They had a Super Bowl commercial.

Tim Flower:
Yeah. Yeah. But it's not a fad. It's. It's here. It's going to continue to grow. Our product is actually unlike a lot of things out on the market that grew up as a VDI load capacity tool or a plug in for SCCM to fix some of those gaps. It's founded on AI and machine learning. Even 20 years ago. So we've been able to evolve it over the years to do some really cool stuff. And the bottom line for AI is there is just too much data for humans, or even humans that can write cool queries to keep up with. We talked a little bit about employees not being able to keep up with the rate of change. It can't keep up with the rate of data, the volume of data. So you need if you don't have a platform that has machine learning capabilities on the back end, you're going to continue to struggle. What really was the enlightenment was the GenAI capability on the front end married up with the learning on the back end. You can now leverage staff that doesn't need to be deep level scripters, and just need to have some logical assessment in their mind and say, you know how many blue screens happened in Dallas last week? And have the machine have that GenAI go gather the data that's already been assessed, already been correlated, and give you a robust dashboard to show you what the problem is. But here's the next part of it. And you started to get there, Patrick. It's the analysis in context of why those things are happening. It's not a deep diagnostic tool to do a memory dump and then analyze a stop code. It's, hey, these 3,912 machines, all blue screened. And the one thing they have in common is the patch that deployed last night.

Tim Flower:
And to back it up, everyone without the patch is not blue screening. So you've got cause and effect correlation versus having to collect memory dumps and try to figure out scope. How many people are having this problem and is it all the same stop code. You've got the cause and effect where I think AI is going next is GenAI is going to develop those answers and it becomes input for the next question. So let's play it out. Where are these blue screens happening? When did they start and what's the cause? GenAI gives you all that data, that input. Now that is input for what change or vendor is responsible for that? Do they have a patch or a fix? Is it automated? Those answers then feed into write me an automated script to solve it. Test it against this lab environment. Who's the target audience and who would approve the change? So you've now got a chain of automation based on GenAI that can do it on its own. And now you become the. I forget which CEO said it recently. You IT is starting to now become the HR of, of AI, right? We have digital employees instead of human employees. And you still need change control. You need automation is great, but when it goes wrong, it goes wrong. So I think IT is going to play that more, managerial role over AI. And I think, I think it's got some really cool possibilities.

Jarian Gibson:
It's almost like that, that Tony Stark in the Iron Legion type thing before Ultron comes along. Right.

Tim Flower:
Yeah.

Jarian Gibson:
You know, the reference of that one is.

Patrick Coble:
I sit there and think about it also kind of like a like a Batman, like Batman would only ever and think of every single person on your help desk or your IT engineers, architects. Batman only comes out when the light's on. Right? And now this is like an army of virtual Batman that are looking at the data of the crime stats and this and that and the traffic data from Google and going like, oh, we need to be over here at this street because, you know, there's always these muggings here. Oh, bam. We were able to stop one before it happened because we know it's there and it's just the light bulb was out. Right. And now that the light's out. Oh, we put a new light bulb in. Now they can see the problem. Right. And, you know, stop it before it happens. So.

Tim Flower:
And that is one of the big other big misconceptions is because it is a listener on an endpoint, it gets tagged as an EUC device monitoring tool. It's more than that. It's looking outside in to the whole enterprise. What server is unavailable? Which one is is responding with more delay than it did against my baseline? What software vendor or SaaS product is no longer available in what region? So your your visibility is tenfold over just over just what's happening on that one device.

Jarian Gibson:
Yep. So speaking of like work or workplace, and tech experience, you know, what's the best or worst workplace tech experience you've encountered and how did it shape your perspective?

Tim Flower:
So in the early days before we had DEX, there are a couple that stand out. I've written about them in a couple of different blogs, but they still, in my career, I think, are the couple that really highlight to me the lack of visibility. The first is I mentioned it earlier. We had a remote worker program, both offshore app developers. So an IT contingent as well as claims people, business people who are working from home, we call it RWP back then the remote worker program. And because VDI was in the data center, our server team made the argument that it is a server based technology and the server teams would design it and implement it. It's just a different operating system, right? It's not a server OS, it's a client OS. It can't be that different.
Patrick Coble:
Yeah.

Tim Flower:
So they put they started mixing, VDI sessions into the ESX platform that was serving up servers.

Patrick Coble:
Mhm.

Tim Flower:
And, the deployment went well over, you know, once we got over the user education of having two start buttons and two desktops to have to manage. But at a certain point we reached a threshold where performance fell, dropped like a rock. Nothing worked. We'd back off the previous night's deployment and performance would come back. So we really we found that it was a threshold problem, but we were on outage calls for weeks through the night, through weekends. With every discipline, defensive troubleshooting. It's not my fault and not my problem. And finally, our storage, our NAS device storage provider, gave us the IOPs performance data on their storage device. And they said, guys, do you realize you have ten employees, ten OS sessions for every single, for every one spindle. You have ten people all hitting it for OS functions, all hitting it for application functions, all hitting it for data transactions on the network for one disk.

Tim Flower:
The read write capabilities of the disks in the storage device can't keep up with that load.

Patrick Coble:
Response time.

Tim Flower:
The server team didn't know it. Didn't see it. Servers don't act that way. They weren't looking at that kind of a metric. And the EUC guys and gals didn't have the visibility into the data center, or even tools that would be able to tell them that. So we struggled for weeks. Had we had the type of VDI capability that is in the next platform now to go deep and really see it. It would have been a completely different world. We had some moments in that program where we really did feel like it was career limiting. Who's driving this? Who owns this design? And tons of finger pointing.

Patrick Coble:
Oh, yeah.

Tim Flower:
So from a career standpoint of technology standpoint, that for me was the big career moment that said, wow, something's got to change.

Jarian Gibson:
It reminds me of the early days of VDI, where everyone didn't understand the storage impact in the environment and just started throwing things on there. A lot of those scenarios out there.

Tim Flower:
Well, yeah.

Patrick Coble:
And it was the same thing. Not even the storage side. It was also the server side when we went to virtualization, because it was just mixed in with Genpop. And eventually you're like, EUC, you need your own prison ward, right? You've got to be on your own servers so that you only mess up them and not the servers that you're actually connecting to. And the rest of the business is connecting to. Right. You know, people that are in VDI, you're wrecking it for everyone. And then you are always looking for these little time slices like, oh, it happens now. And then you go look at it at 2:00. It didn't happen again.

Tim Flower:
Yeah. And is it is it time based? Is it time based or is it happening across every time zone at the same time or only at 2:00 for everybody.

Patrick Coble:
Yeah. Yeah. And then it was only like 2:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays where we hear what's going on. What?

Tim Flower:
Yeah.

Patrick Coble:
Tuesday and Thursday. It's like Taco Tuesday. I don't know what's going on, you know.

Tim Flower:
But it's it's part of why we decided to name our technology rollout for Nexthink. It wasn't we're rolling out Nexthink. We rolled out Project Edison and we named it that because we've had other technologies go south and then you get tagged as, oh, he's the Nexthink guy, or he's the Altiris guy that would. That didn't work out too well. But Project Edison also gave us the imagery of the light bulb. We told all 30,000 employees we're turning the lights on, we're not in the dark anymore. The overwhelming feedback was, thank God, what took you so long? Jarian one other, and I know we may be going long, but one other kind of career story the VDI piece was a slow burn that turned into a big issue. The quick hit kind of, holy cow, heart in your heart in your mouth kind of moment was in our kind of mid life cycle of SCCM. We had our top engineer drag an Oracle runtime client package in their SCCM console and drop it onto the collection he needed to test. He was targeting 100 people. He targeted a collection that was his target collection was all all test computers. He dropped it onto the collection called all computers a difference of 100 machines versus 45,000.

Patrick Coble:
That'll be a day, right?

Tim Flower:
So when you start getting calls to the help desk, why am I getting this Oracle update and why is it forcing a reboot in the middle of the day? Oh my God, what did we do? And you guys know SCCM better than a lot of people. You can't stop it. If you tell it to do something it's going to do it. You can tell it to stop, but it's going to take time for that action, that request to go out hours. We thought we were going to be running through the the wiring closets with with hedge trimmers just to cut the cables. We didn't. And you don't get status back. We didn't know who received it. We didn't know if there were problems because of it. We didn't know who rebooted. We couldn't do an uninstall because some people actually needed the Oracle runtime client. We would have removed it if we did that. It was a mess.

Patrick Coble:
Yeah.

Tim Flower:
That didn't go to 45,000. We were able to stop it after 6 or 7,000, but damage done. And we you know, once the dust settled, it was another of those instances where as we look back on it and now we've got this visibility, we say, wow, you know, all of these scenarios from the past, what if we had it back then? Look what it would have told us immediately. Who got it? Are there errors? Did they reboot? We can now prompt them with a message. We understand you got this. We're working on it. Don't call the help test so many things you can do in your environment to be able to react.

Patrick Coble,:
I don't even think I'd even think about that simple thing. Just there. Is we know there's a problem. I can send a message to those devices saying, hey, don't call the help desk. We're on it. We'll give you a status update in 15 minutes or whatever.

Tim Flower:
And you can pre-stage those if you've got a top ten or top 20 applications, pre-stage that message. And when the GenAI and machine learning pick up an anomaly, pop the message. And if there's an anomaly, the message is how is this impacting you? What did this do to your business because of this problem? And now you get to prioritize. It's not just the squeaky wheel that gets the solution. You may find you've got 10,000 blue screens, but if all ten people in finance are crashing, that's 100% of that organization. That's the priority versus we'll do the blue screens later.

Jarian Gibson:
Work smarter, not harder.

Patrick Coble:
That's right. That's awesome.

Tim Flower, Nexthink:
And now you become a trusted partner with the business, right? You're not just a high paid firefighters running around putting out fires. You're now a strategy team not only with a better reputation, but you've also created yourself capacity. Like we talked about earlier, I have now people who can go work on strategy versus just paying them more money to put out more fires.

Patrick Coble:
Yep. That's awesome.

Jarian Gibson:
As we, close things down, any closing thoughts here, Tim?

Tim Flower:
I appreciate the opportunity to be here. Right. My charter in life is to spread the word from Australia, New Zealand, Singapore through Europe into the US and beyond. So, we've got our own podcast called The DEX Show. Happy to have folks join and listen in. We don't. It's like Fight Club. The first rule of the DEX show's. We don't talk about on The DEX Show, about Nexthink . It's thought leaders on what it's like to be an employee these days. Adam Grant, Arianna Huffington, we've had some really great guests to share their perspectives. So join us there. You can also get a copy of my book, DEX for Dummies. There's a link, and if we can put it in the show notes, we'll do that. But it's up on the Nexthink website. And I'm also kind of, as you do these days, doing a little bit of, of a side gig. I put it to the side a little bit, but on YouTube, I'm the Proactive IT guy. Follow me on YouTube as well as LinkedIn, and I'm happy to continue the conversation outside of this, but I appreciate the opportunity to be on.

Jarian Gibson:
Patrick, any things closing thoughts or anything?

Patrick Coble:
No, no, I appreciate it too. And and when I sit here and think about this, I think in my closing, I think about all the IT problems that I've suffered through over almost 30 years. And if there would have been a product like this or even half the minimum viable product.

Jarian Gibson:
Yes.

Patrick Coble:
How much of my life I would have got back, how many more school things I would have been at with the kids, and I wouldn't have been up till two in the morning chasing down some random DNS record that I'm chasing. Network problems, VDI problems, application problems. So to me, that's what stands out the most, is getting time back by letting something help you get that time. And yeah, it's going to cost money to do that, but you only get so much time. And if you can make the user's time better, you will become a champion there. And this product is pretty much centered on doing that. And I think it's probably going to be could be worth its weight in gold. And your organization, if you're out there going like we've had random problems like this and we've had some uh ohs and we've had some surprises with updates that explode, I think it's definitely worth reaching out and learning more and then seeing what this can do for your business.

Tim Flower:
And we've got some great enterprise customers. One of the biggest advocates for us over the years has been Johnson and Johnson and the executive there. After maybe six months, his feedback to us was, the best thing I like about Nexthink is that I don't get interrupted on a Saturday at the soccer game.

Patrick Coble:
Ha! Yes. So yeah.

Jarian Gibson:
That's key. Making sure that that family time is not interrupted and you're having that work life balance. So that's a great testament there. And I just echo what Patrick said, you know, spot on there. Everything you said about that. And this would have been a great tool to have earlier in our careers. I like to thank Tim for coming on today and joining us. I'd like to thank Nexthink for being one of our founding partners of the World of EUC and being continued support from them. I also like to let our listeners know that make sure if you are not signed up, please sign up on World of EUC dot org where you can get all information about things like this, webinars, any events coming up. We have the registration for EUC World open. So make sure you take advantage of the early pricing right now for that. But again, thank you Tim. Thank you. Nexthink , thank you, Patrick, for coming on today and being the co host with me. Thank you to our listeners for listening to the Frontline Chatter podcast, brought to you by the World of EUC. And we will talk to you next time.

Patrick Coble:
Thank you.

Tim Flower:
Thanks.