We are back again this time with special guest co-host Stephen Wagner joining Jarian Gibson to talk with Holly Lehman, Sr. Community Program Manager and Rick Terlep, Staff Technical Marketing Architect of Omnissa. Omnissa is a founding partner of the World of EUC. In this podcast we talked about all things going on with Omnissa.

In this podcast we had the pleasure of talking with Holly and Rick from Omnissa about:

• What’s going on with Omnissa and what Omnissa is excited about for 2025.
• Omnissa’s immediate short-term strategy and what’s in store for the long term future.
• Feedback that Omnissa has received from customers and partners.
• News on upcoming Omnissa product line and new releases.
• Omnissa’s balance working with VMware and other technology partners along with integration with other technology partners.
• Omnissa and Microsoft relationship.
• Where Omnissa sees the EUC space going as a whole.
• Omnissa’s rebrand along with impact on products and technology.
• Omnissa’s monthly technical web series.
• Omnissa community and Omnissa Tech Insiders.
• Where we will see Omnissa next event and community wise.

Thanks to Stephen for being our special guest co-host! Thank you to Holly and Rick for joining us to have a chat about Omnissa! Congrats to the upcoming 2025 Omnissa Tech Insiders! Thank you Omnissa for supporting the community!

You can join the Omnissa community at community.omnissa.com and check out the Omnissa Tech Zone at techzone.omnissa.com.

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Jarian Gibson, Frontline Chatter Host:
Good day and welcome to the Frontline Chatter podcast, brought to you by the World of EUC. Thank you for joining us today. I am back with Stephen Wagner, one of my fellow co-hosts. How are you doing today, Stephen?

Stephen Wagner, Frontline Chatter Co-Host:
Fantastic. How about yourself? 

Jarian Gibson:
Doing pretty good. Over the holidays. It's a new year. First podcast of the 2025 year. So, ready to rock and roll? How about you?

Stephen Wagner:
Yeah. I'm excited. I'm excited for a new year. There's a lot of action going on, especially in the technology community industry. So I guess you could say that's why we're here today.

Jarian Gibson:
Yeah. And speaking of that, we are joined by Omnissa today. Holly Lehman and Rick Terlep of Omnissa are joining us today to talk all things Omnissa. So I'll go to Holly first. How are you doing today, Holly? And welcome. 

Holly Lehman, Omnissa:
I'm good. We've been very excited for this opportunity to chat with both of you today. So thank you for having us. 

Jarian Gibson:
Thank you for being here. And how are you doing today, Rick? 

Rick Terlep, Omnissa:
Pretty good. Doing really good. Um, yeah. Same thing. We've actually been looking forward to this for a while. So this is it's good timing. And actually, it's a really good thing, to your point, to start out the year with something like this, if nothing else, it's fun. 

Stephen Wagner:
To start starting off the year with Omnissa. Yes.

Jarian Gibson:
Well, let's get going. So, the first thing is, let's talk about what's going on with Omnissa. You're now a new standalone company. So what is Omnissa most excited about in 2025? 

Rick Terlep:
So my point of view. So you have to appreciate that our team is like responsible for a lot of technical content. So a lot of the stuff that you see on, through, Omnissa Tech Zone right now became really close to saying what it used to be, which I'm sure I'll do over and over again. But we spent a lot of time like rebranding all that stuff, and that's actually what I'm going to trip on a lot during this conversation. So it's been a lot of time spending time rewriting stuff. You think it was easy. You could do a quick search replace on one word for another one, but you're going. There's actually language things about it. You go from, you start everything. It's a VMware. And to an Omnissa switch. Little things like that. Boy, does that make it a lot of work. So anyway, so I'm totally excited not to be doing that stuff as my primary focus anymore. And honestly, it's kind of interesting for the organization because we're going through a lot of releases that are all catalyzed, I guess, around this whole rebranding exercise that we've got to go through anyway. So we've had a bunch of releases going into the holidays, and we're going to have a few more coming out of the holidays, pretty much everything going on this week. So it's the holiday is kind of a good break point for us to turn from a lot of that kind of stuff that we just had to do to a lot of the stuff that we've been wanting to do. And you can already feel it over the first week here that we've been back from the break. 

Rick Terlep:
It's like everybody wants to do something. There's an excitement here. So yeah, it's good stuff coming out of this. Holly, you got any comments? 

Holly Lehman:
Yeah, I was going to say I realized we never actually introduced what we do for Omnissa. I think that's a really key element to this conversation. So, Rick, why don't you do a quick intro as to your title and really what you focus on, because I find your role to be very amazing and you're a key component of the team.

Rick Terlep:
So wow, way to talk it up. But yeah. So yeah. So I'm, I'm in a, a team responsible for technical marketing as far as the public's concerned. It's like tech zone. So techzone.omnissa.com I do a lot of content out there. Anything from blogs to articles to rebranding. It's, you know, there's all there's videos out there and stuff like that. So all kinds of content are out there. I do a lot of speaking stuff at Omnissa One and things like that. So and I've been with the organization golly since 2008. So I've been through a lot of iterations of all this stuff, this new Omnissa thing. Yes, it's a new company name and everything like that. But we've been through this before, so this is like third or fourth time for me, so. Yeah.

Holly Lehman:
And your focus is really your content of focus is Horizon content. 

Rick Terlep:
Focus is Horizon. But again, I've been here so long I kind of know everything. Not everything, but. 

Holly Lehman:
Oh gosh. 

Rick Terlep:
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. 

Holly Lehman:
And I hyped you up. Hold on. 

Rick Terlep:
Yeah, yeah. Well, you know. 

Holly Lehman:
So my name is Holly Lehman, like you said, and I have the privilege of running the community for Omnissa. So I am the senior community program manager, and I say that title with mounds of love and respect for the company. But for all of the humans that are making up the customer community, the partner community, the insider community, there's just so much happening. And, we also I have a stake in the game when it comes to our portion of sponsorships, attendance at events and running four different social handles. So yeah, we're busy over here. But to your question, what I come from a community lens like Rick has all of the technical acumen and depth. I come with more of the human lens. And that's one thing about brand that we'll get into that Omnissa really wants us to interject is a human, empathetic transparency. So I love what I do. I truly mean that. And so one thing that we're looking forward to in 2025 is just bringing enhancements right to the website, to the forums, to events. The ability to enhance the Tech Insider program and really learning from what we've done in the past that didn't land well and getting new and innovative ideas for what we want to try moving forward. 

Jarian Gibson:
So yeah, so it sounds like for 2025, it's kind of turn the page, fully to Omnissa and to get you to start hitting your stride and start getting that momentum from there. 

Holly Lehman:
Yes. 

Holly Lehman:
Absolutely. 

Stephen Wagner:
And just to say something. 

Jarian Gibson:
Oh go. 

Stephen Wagner:
Ahead. Yeah. I was just going to say I have a major appreciation of both of the programs that both Rick and Holly run. Tech Zone is huge for me and it's huge for my customers all the time. I'm sending Tech Zone articles along with the knowledge base articles that Omnissa. And I love contributing to the Omnissa community. The Tech Insider I haven't talked about that yet, so I'll leave that for you, Holly. But, just a thank you to both of you for what you do, because it's, it's a big deal for me and for my customers and probably for a lot of the folks on, World of EUC as well. 

Holly Lehman:
Appreciate you. 

Stephen Wagner:
Yeah. Now, I know that we might have touched about this just slightly with the last question, but just jumping into some more detail, if you can share more about what's the immediate short-term strategy for Omnissa and, beyond that, thinking big. What can you share? For what's in store in the long term. 

Rick Terlep:
So you know, it had, you know, thinking about this from your last question to this is one of those things where we have been focused as an EUC business unit on this whole space for quite some time. And heck, I've been you know, this has been my primary role within what at least was within VMware for like eight years. Prior to that, I was doing infrastructure stuff, but that's just it. As a part of VMware, we, you know, the EUC organization, we had a lot of autonomy to do the things that we needed to do to help grow our space, grow our business and everything like that. But at the end of the day, we were a part of VMware, which was an infrastructure company, which for a period of time was owned by a bunch of different infrastructure companies. We're very focused on infrastructure. So at the end of the day, there's a lot of stuff that we always had to do To, to align with what the greater business goals were of those organizations and that organization as a whole. So now we have an opportunity coming, spin off and everything to do things differently and to really get a focus on the stuff that we care about in the end user compute space. And look at it a little differently. It's going to be a change for us, too, because frankly, there's a lot of habit built up behind us of thinking things from an infrastructure up point of view. And now we get a chance to take a look at things like security differently, with a focus lens on the end user compute space and building capabilities within individual products to be supportive of each other rather than to necessarily be two distinct products or multiple distinct products to handle individual problems and things like that. 

Rick Terlep:
You know, UEM has always been something that has been focused on endpoints and endpoint management and policy management, people using them, making it easier, making organizations have better control over those kinds of things. Every VDI thing that we do with Horizon has an endpoint. There's a lot we can do. There's been a lot that we could have done to try to start bringing those things together. And that's where I think now in 2025, that's at least one of the key things that you're going to start to see from us is we're going to start putting more attention on doing things that will start to bring our products together and make them more useful when used together. Other things, I mean, look, a lot, you know, every, you know, a huge focus of EUC for a very long period of time is being able to do remote work. So, you know, VDI is a primary way to do that kind of thing, but there's a lot more that we can do about there. You know, look, VDI itself, virtual desktops and applications, all that kind of stuff. It's really a solution of a bunch of disparate components that were never really intended to do things the way we're asking them to do things and to make end users able to do things with applications that, frankly, they were never intended to do. That way we hide all that. So we have an opportunity to really focus on those kinds of problems and make those things better. I don't mean that really lightly. This is what we're really excited about going forward. I hope. 

Holly Lehman:
I will chime in one thing on that. I know, Rick, when you and I were chatting, I was like, oh, I don't have anything to say about that. But I changed my mind. In my previous world company, unnamed, I had the privilege of starting a customer community, and the first year we watched it kind of fumble and tumble, and then year over year, we saw it grow and get really strong. And that's where from a community lens, I'm looking forward to this community. We've had year one for Insiders, we've had almost year one for the customer program. And so now that we have a foundation, it's up to the team and the community to really drive strength, continuity and engagement. To Rick's point, we need to know from the Insiders and from our community, what do you want and why? And then on the opposite side of it, I really want to create a landscape that helps our customers get quick answers, get accurate answers, and really understand that this is a quick place to go so that maybe you don't have to put that support ticket in. Maybe somebody from the Insider program or tech marketing team or a PM can jump in and answer your question. And guess what? You don't have to go through all of that monotony. The other thing, selfish plug, is to help our internal team to realize their benefit of being part of the community by answering questions and providing content, strong technical content for our monthly webinars. Because there is a confusion out there that the community forum is only for customers and that is a false statement. The community needs to use the forum to get questions answered, but they can't get them answered if we don't have the Tech Insiders and our Omnissa internal employees answering them. 

Stephen Wagner:
That's a great point. 

Jarian Gibson:
Oh, sorry, Stephen. I was going to jump in real quick. That's a great point too of using the power of community to kind of help streamline support, whether it's your Tech Insiders, whether it's regular forum users or customers, or having involvement from Omnissa staff as well. So that's a great point. 

Stephen Wagner:
I've had quite a few customers reach out, pretty surprised that they can sign up on the Omnissa communities, ask a question, and then I'll get a message on teams or on a different platform saying Stephen, the product manager just responded back and how to do this. That's pretty cool. I was like, this is why I've been telling you that you need to sign up on here and just, you know, taking a step further back. You know, I tell everyone Omnissa is it's a new community, but with a or sorry, it's a new company, but with a ton of experience. And the thing is, is that as far as we look forward in the future, I'm really excited to see where the innovation goes, and how this technology can evolve. Like as someone who's really passionate with virtual desktop infrastructure, specifically Horizon, I couldn't be more personally excited to see where this all goes. 

Rick Terlep:
So cool. Yeah. And we feel the same way, honestly. You know it. You know, I'll let Holly take all the thunder on communities, but there's probably been at least 3 or 4 times, even in the past day where it's like, oh, it would be really nice if you actually and you know, the, you know, the Q&A that I was involved with internally were like, can you just put that out in communities? Can you take the extra step and put something out there because it's all good for everybody to see. And again, as a part of the last few organizations, that was never anything that was really ever encouraged within the organization, especially on the EUC end because we were just one part of a much larger organization that was focused on a lot of other stuff. So yeah, it's all good to be able to do this kind of stuff and be a little more proactive and active in it now. 

Jarian Gibson:
So you mentioned before, Holly, about, you know, getting that input from the community to kind of help drive things. So speaking of that, what kind of feedback have you received so far from customers and partners? 

Holly Lehman:
So my side of it will be different than Rick's response. But what I've seen, like when I went to the EUC World, I mean, people were floored that I landed at 8 p.m. and I was there by myself to represent community. And then Chris Halstead showed up and Jim Yanik showed up and Jill Carter showed up, and they were just kind of like, wow. I mean, Omnissa just sent you here because you care about community. And I said, yes, is this not great? Like, we're changing these behaviors and the perception of our side of the previous world. And we do want to show up at events more and more. We do want to actually I would show you, but it's scary. I have a ton of swag sitting here just waiting to get into the community hands, right? So I guess the perception is changing. The feedback is, thank you for putting the money in to spinning up the community website. Thank you for, you know, enhancing the Insider program. Thank you for getting them swag and Insider kits and really pushing the needle. As to we're not just saying that we care about community and we care about helping our customers, but we're actually doing something about it. Yeah. And on that note, you come with a totally different perspective. 

Rick Terlep:
Yeah. And, you know, I guess it's kind of a swizzle on that though too, because, you know, again, feedback that we keep getting my primary feedback, especially the last six months, has been was really out at the music conferences and it was so it felt so good to be standing up in front of, frankly, a bunch of people that I knew, but I hadn't had an opportunity to really talk to for an entire year after the spin off and everything and just see those same friendly faces talking to them and everything. It sounds like such a little thing, but boy, it meant such a huge deal for all of us here to be able to re-engage in this new way. With all of our customers, partners, everybody involved with the space and everything. So it's been absolutely good. You know, most of the feedback has been really positive. Everyone's pretty upbeat and pretty interested in where we're going to go and everything like that. But there's this weird thing going on where it's like, you know, there's you have to appreciate from a customer and partner point of view. When we spun off in July, 100% of our customers were VMware customers. Broadcom customers. We want to put it. That's who that was who we focused on. And we always felt like there was a bigger community, a much broader community of end user compute stuff there. But historically they were all these folks and everything. So. So we're going to have an opportunity to make our own path, not just through the way that we've done things, but through new people, new partnerships and stuff like that. You can't just shed 100% of your focus, 100% of your customers and partners and everything immediately and completely shift and change. 

Rick Terlep:
A it doesn't make any sense. B why would you ever even want to do something like that? So right now we're going through this phase where we've got to take care of everything that is you know Broadcom is our biggest partner right now. Full stop that for multiple reasons. One they're our biggest partner. But then number two that's where our customers are at. Going forward. We want to get a lot of new customers. We want to engage with a lot of new partnerships with a bunch of different organizations that aren't necessarily focused on infrastructure type stuff. But all of that is going to take time. We have to build those relationships. We have to re-engage with relationships that, frankly, probably were a little wonky over the last couple of years. While all the spin off stuff and all of this buyout stuff was happening and everything. So it's going to take us a little time. And I think right now, especially this week, what I am feeling personally is the impatience around all of that stuff. Because, look, we've spent the last few years trying to go through all of these machinations of trying to get the company bought and then get spun out and everything, and now we're all ready to start to make new friends, to engage with new people and do new things. But we got a bunch of folks who we've been working with for years and years who are all fantastic to work with, so we want to keep those relationships alive, too. So yeah, that I mean, the feedback has been really great. But even internally within the organization the feedback is just as great. 

Stephen Wagner:
So question we had I believe App Volumes 2412 dropped in December. So I have to ask, is there any upcoming news on the Omnissa product line that you can share? Yeah. Any new potential releases coming out here? 

Rick Terlep:
So yeah, good timing on all of this conversation too. So yeah, like I said earlier, we're going through this phase right now. We're in the midst right in the middle of a bunch of product releases. We try to get as much as we could done before the end of the year. There's a couple things that slipped into the new year. So yeah, so pretty much every product is being touched again, mostly catalyzed around this whole rebranding thing. You can't see the air quotes because my arm's out further than what the screen is, but it's all, you know, that was what really catalyzed everyone towards the date of at least refreshing everything. So you're going to see product releases for everything in the near future if it's not out already. It's going to be coming out soon. If it's a cloud product and it doesn't necessarily get a release download or something like that, it's rest assured it's going to get refreshed sometime. That's not all we're doing with all of these. We still have a bunch of updates, technical updates, like you mentioned, with App Volumes. I think there were some very specific things in there around being able to support physical devices and support persistent desktops and persistent everything with the last release. So there's a lot of really good stuff in all these releases, but at the end of the day, they're all coming out and they're coming out right now. So, you know, so things you're going to see, you know, details of stuff like I mentioned with App Volumes a lot of the persistent stuff we announced back in November. We even had a release for App Volumes. I think it was late October or early November. 

Rick Terlep:
But it was in support of the Azure Virtual Desktop AVD app, stream or app? No. The app attach Yeah. App attach Stuff. Sorry. Too many app things. Yeah, I'll probably get slaughtered for that. But anyway, it's one of those things where we, we've been moving along with all the products as we go along with this. And App Volumes specifically just had A 1-2 punch of a couple of releases where there's some significant stuff, some significant, very foundational functionality that we're going to start to consume within the other products going forward. So Horizon, there's a bunch of enhancements around in this next release, new client, new agent and all that kind of stuff and everything. And I think all that stuff's released right now. But some of the things that we're trying to do in 2025, you know, around modernizing things, being able to work better with Entra ID and stuff like that. So there's stuff like that that's still coming out and still being enhanced with the individual releases on at least the Horizon line and the, UEM, side are big thing. For the past a year now has been around the modern SaaS architecture that we're doing. So what you're going to start to see there, now that we've gone through the process of replatforming all of that stuff, we can start to do things a lot better. It's funny, going into last year, it looked like it was going to be a rough year from a how many features or how many things we're going to be able to do and everything, because there was this replatforming exercise. Now that we're kind of that's in the rearview mirror for a lot of at least the bulk of the work is in the rearview mirror. 

Rick Terlep:
Now, we can actually start iterating on getting some new functionality out on the, UEM, side a lot more quickly, and you're going to start seeing that in the next couple of months, too. 

Jarian Gibson:
One thing I kind of want to touch base on, or you have something Holly? Okay. One something, one thing I want to touch base on, as you mentioned about now that you work with more partners, and be able to kind of open up to, you know, be more of that EUC focus. So how was the balance with Omnissa VMware and then working with other technology partners? Then anything that we can kind of look forward to for integration with other technology partners as well. 

Rick Terlep:
So we've been working, you know, so I think back at Omnissa One Amsterdam, that's where we announced our new partnership with CrowdStrike. And that's the beginning of a new partnership that we're going to have. But at the end of the day, those kinds of partnerships, that's an announcement. That's something we're doing as a new organization. There's a those are that's a type of partnership that we might not have been able to do back when we were part of a larger organization who already had a product that was really focused in that space. So you're going to start seeing us to do those types of things. But by and large, we've been partnering with companies like Microsoft and with, Amazon for quite some time now. And, you know, everything that happened back in November with our announcement that we're doing, working with Microsoft on AVD app attach and everything with App Volumes, that's been the culmination of years of work with them to be able to make all of that stuff happen. We did the announcement with Amazon back in 2022. I think that, that we were going to partner with Amazon to do things around Amazon Workspaces. And so last summer we started, we announced general support for Amazon Workspaces and Workspaces Core from Horizon 8. So all of those kinds of things take time. If nothing else, you're going to see a lot more of both of those, where we're, you know, striving out and finding new friends and making new friends and trying to make new partnerships. But at the end of the day, there's a lot, you know, Google, the infrastructure providers of Google, Microsoft, Broadcom, all of these folks, they're all still really important to us, and we've got relationships with them. 

Rick Terlep:
And I think you're going to continue to see us working really heavily with all of them to be able to make our products work with all their stuff, too. 

Stephen Wagner:
Yeah. And speaking of partnerships and speaking about Microsoft, Microsoft being a massive, massive player in the EUC space, a player that everyone has to compete and also partner with. How has the spin out and the creation of Omnissa been impacted? The relationship? With Omnissa and Microsoft moving forward? 

Rick Terlep:
Moving forward, it'll be interesting to see how it changes, honestly. Because again, EUC, like I mentioned early on in this thing, we were given a good deal of autonomy to be able to work with third party infrastructure providers that I don't know if the rest of the organization was really going to be doing too much of. So we've had a lot of lot of integrations with a lot of these platforms in specific ways to be able to enable all this stuff. So with Microsoft specifically, yeah, we've competed with them on the AVD front for a while, but for the longest time we've been working with them to make Azure better for being able to do virtual desktops from. I don't want to say 2014, 2015 is when we started doing that kind of stuff. So we, you know, things evolve and over time and everything and, you know, we compete from on a product by product basis or in a functionality by functionality basis. But, you know, a lot of us at Omnissa have a belief that if you really want to be a leader in something, you don't really compete with anybody else. You just lead. You just go ahead and do what you need to do what's good, what's best from your DNA, the best things you can do and let everything speak for themselves. And that's kind of what we believe from a product portfolio point of view. We think it's better to be leaders than to competitors, if that makes any sense. 

Stephen Wagner:
Yeah. Well it you know, it you know it. Definitely it competes, but the solutions complement each other very, very nicely. 

Rick Terlep:
Right. And that and that. And that's part of it too, with all of these spaces with, you know, especially on the UEM side, there's a lot of heavy competition there between Microsoft and, and all of the Omnissa stuff, all the Omnissa properties that we have there and others. There's it's a huge space that we could be playing with. It's not just Microsoft. There's lots of players there. Yeah, Microsoft is a competitor, but it's just one. It's you know, again, focus on leading. Don't focus on competing. 

Jarian Gibson:
With, you know, technology and everyone in the space. That rising tide kind of floats all boats because that helps drive innovation. It helps, you know, make things better. And so it's one of those types of situations. So, you know, speaking of the EUC space and, you know, kind of thinking about things as you go forward, where does Omnissa see that? Where do you see the EUC space as a whole going? So, you know, it's only been, you know, as you said before, VDI and virtual desktops. But, you know, there's endpoint management, there's application delivery, there's device management. And now AI is even becoming a big thing in EUC. So where do you see Omnissa going in that direction? 

Rick Terlep:
So for the past few years we've had a heavy focus on, Workspace One Intelligence and DEX and stuff like that. And I think, you know, this is just, again, Rick prognosticating here more than anything else, just from what I've seen, a lot of the stuff that we're doing there is going to start to bear some fruit. Because look, like you mentioned, with AI and all the wonderful or terrifying things that I could do and everything, there's a lot of opportunities there to do things differently. Once you have enough data, information on what's going on within your system or within your space. And if you look specifically at what we've been trying to do with Workspace One Intelligence, with intelligence just in general is to gather as much information, telemetry about how each deployment is running, how individual deployments are running, how a user's experience is, and things like that. There's a lot you can do from gathering all that information and trying to make something meaningful from it. So I think we're going to see a lot more on the DEX front, on that whole front. Being able to do more meaningful stuff with all of that information that we've been gathering. And as we learn what we can do, you just, you know, take it, you know, again, just two separate domains. You have the whole, you know, device management domain, and you have the whole VDI domain. If you just take those things, once you start putting some of the information that you've gathered from those two domains together, you start to appreciate that. Every one of those VDI instances starts at a user's endpoint. So all of the information that you can gather there, what kind of insights can you draw once you start to pull the two of them together? 

Rick Terlep:
Those are the kinds of kinds of things where once we start pulling all of that stuff together meaningfully, that's where we're working on all this stuff. You're going to be able to do and do much, much, much more interesting stuff. You know, again, VDI specifically is a total solution of stuff that was never intended to work together. So once you have telemetry and information and visibility across the entire space, you can do a lot more things with being able to provide meaningful guidance on how you can make things better. Back in the days I used to, I used to do a lot of voice over IP stuff and there was a thing. I remember there was a thing you had with voice over IP communications. It was around MOS scores, which was a mean opinion score, which the whole idea was if a user were to rate this, you know, on a scale of 1 to 5, what would be the what would they rate this, this call quality as or stuff like that? Well, it's really hard to get people to actually go ahead and actually click, oh this is A, B, C, or D one, one through five. No one's ever going to do that. But what we were able to do for a while back at a previous employer with the information that we had within the system, monitoring the whole thing, we can make a pretty good guess based on what information we'd been tracking and what information was actually occurring real time, how good that that individual's call was. We can do those same kinds of things now too. So, you know, that's kind of stuff I think we're going to see really bring this whole space forward. And at least that's where I think we're going to see that. 

Rick Terlep:
Does that help?  

Jarian Gibson:
Yeah. Okay. 

Stephen Wagner:
So changing topics slightly here. Now talking about Omnissa being a new company, we're talking about a complete rebrand. What, what can either of you tell us about what's going on with the rebrand? How has it impacted Omnissa products and technologies? Like, I know that a lot's happened. I love the colors. I love the images. I know that the word Omnissa itself has quite a meaning to it. But what can you guys share with us? 

Rick Terlep:
So again, rebranding and Holly touched on this, so I'll tap her to retouch her, to reiterate what she was saying, as far as, you know, the company persona, I guess. But really a lot of, a lot of what we're working on. Yeah. You're going to see new skins, you're going to see new colors, you're going to see all that kind of stuff. It's a different focus for us right now. We really are going to be able to focus on end user compute as a domain now to a level that we haven't been able to before. And again, coming out of all the stuff that we've had to do for the past six, nine months, with spinning out, everybody's hungry to do that, and everybody is impatient to start working on all of the new, fun things that we've been saying we really, really want to do. We're going to get an opportunity to do them now. So I think that's probably the biggest, you know, change from a rebranding point of view. It's not just a corporate rebranding. It's a corporate persona thing. Holly, you touched on that before. Do you have any more comments on that? 

Holly Lehman:
So for me, there's a lot that I can talk about when it comes to branding and brand awareness. And in years of working at different companies, you would hear like, this is our brand, this is what we stand for. This is, you know, our tagline. And it was really hard for me to believe it based on what I had seen. And for the most part, some of it was even hard for me to stand behind because it wasn't part of my belief system or something that I thought was fair to the customer. And I feel totally opposite with the Omnissa brand. And when I saw the colors come out and when I saw the word cloud shared, I thought, this is truly a brand that I can stand behind, and it's what I believe in with technology. So when I think about my past, I am not the technical coding person in the room. I know enough to have a decent conversation, but I'm not going to get into the into the weeds. And there's a lot of them not employees, but there's a lot of customers out there that are in the same boat, right? They didn't always work on Omnissa product lines, right? They might have come from a different EUC background. And now they're learning this new world as well. And so having the brand about being transparent, having confidence, having a human perspective, having an empathetic perspective, it's only going to make us a better company. So that's where the community comes in great. Because I don't have to get this very like thought out methodical like answer. It's like, no, I just want to help you. So here's what I know and here's your answer. Go do your thing. And the other component that I really like is the fact that it's a simplistic perspective from eye catching. 

Holly Lehman:
Right? The colors are a perfect blend of masculine and feminine. It's a blend of keep it simple, but also let's bring the spotlight when it comes to the more, second layer colors of magenta and the lime greenish color. But for the most part, we just want you to understand our products. And that's why it's navy blue and it's white. It's just get to the point. Let's not put a bunch of fluff around it because our technology is powerful. So let's showcase what it can do. And then when we think about how we're using the elements of color and iconography, we're making the platform more realistic and not so cumbersome for customers, but yet it's fun, it's simple, it's inviting. And so it's just telling our customers what you were talking about earlier, Rick, about partnerships. What I love about our technology is the fact that it does work. It's a multi-cloud solution, and it just showcases the fact that we want our customers to use the technology based on their needs, not just shoving a shoving a product in their face and forcing them to say, this is why it works. We're saying no matter what you're doing, let's showcase how you can use it better. No matter how you're laying the land of your cloud offering. So we just want to make sure that you understand what we offer. It's engaging. It's inviting. It's an open conversation. And at the end of the day, we just want you to have a technical force behind you to make your technology work in a safe and consistent manner. 

Jarian Gibson:
And speaking kind of on that lines about getting the word out and, you know, helping those customers that may have come from other solutions into Omnissa because we all know there's transition in the market and that kind of stuff. You have a monthly technical web series as well. So can you kind of talk about that and what kind of topics have been out there? 

Holly Lehman:
Yeah, I'm really excited for this because we really want to, not from a brand lens. I'm going to take a step back. Not everybody knows who the Omnissa employees are. It's a new name, and for a while we weren't really face forward with our customers. Executives were, 1 or 2 in a handful are out there. But guess what? Like, I feel like the Teen Mom. I'm pretty dang proud of the team that I work with, and I want people to know who Rick Terlep is. I want people to know who Dale Carter is, and Regina and Jen Godwin and, you know, so many people instead of just the same names. We have a very hard working community. And so, yeah, that's one of the biggest parts is getting our face out there, having the technical conversations. And that's where I look to the Insiders. I'm going to do a plug for all of you that we'll talk about in a minute. I need to know what people want to hear about. We know what we're presenting internally, but if you're not telling us what you want to hear about, guess what? I might be coming to you with an agenda that you don't really care about. And that's not what I'm here to do. I don't want to waste my team's time, and I don't want to waste those that are listening to the technical webinars. So we are getting ready to in 2025, we're going to kick off a DEX discussion. We're going to kick off a security discussion. We're going to talk about certifications that have been rebranded as well. We've already had Workspace One mod stack. There's so much that we're delivering. And I will say the stronger the attendance or the watch on demand later, those numbers matter. 

Holly Lehman:
So if we don't get the numbers up, if we don't get the employees engaged, this huge benefit, it goes away. And that's not what I want. I want people to see the value in these discussions. So that also means unlike many webinars that are pre-recorded, you can't ask questions. I'm literally pulling not just a speaker in with a co-presenter, but I'm also bringing in technical folks on the back end that you don't see that are just here to answer your questions. So if you're not asking questions, those are two people that have had their hour wasted where they have a lot to go do. So I look at it from multiple lenses and we're coming with more. So it'll be on the calendar. Each month we're about to land February, March and April content. And so month over month, you will see us on our social channels saying join, record, watch, listen, attend, ask questions. We're also working with the Envision team, who is the main company that runs the website for us, and we're sharing information with them monthly. We have a bimonthly series with them to say, here's the things that we need to enhance the customer experience to make it easier for the end user to say yes, I want to RSVP and it auto populates to their inbox. It goes to their calendar. So we're looking at things in different ways to make it easier for people to find the value in attending and joining. 

Stephen Wagner:
Yeah. And that calendar that you mentioned, that is the calendar that's on the Omnissa community, correct? 

Holly Lehman:
Yes. Yeah. Yes. 

Stephen Wagner:
So I know that we've talked a little bit about the community. We mentioned the tech insiders just briefly, but if we took a couple moments to specifically talk about the Omnissa community and the Tech Insiders in detail, what can you what would you like to tell us more about with those two programs? I know that right now we're in the process of getting everything set up for the 2025 group of Tech Insiders. I think the applications, correct me if I'm wrong, closed on January 5th. What can you tell us about any of the above? 

Holly Lehman:
Well, I'm very excited to see what's coming in 2025. When I talk to our internal team that is working with their customers and their partners, I'm like, this is a free benefit. Why wouldn't you tell your customer to join? You just log in to community.omnissa.com, it's a very easy registration experience and you have a wealth of opportunities. So you'll see that on the website. It's broken down by each product itself. So Workspace One, Horizon, DEX, security. You also have kind of the general area where if there's either too many integrations with our technologies, we just kind of put it in the general. You'll see blogs from myself, you'll see blogs from Jen Godwin on tips and tricks on using the forum. And then you'll also see an area that if you didn't know about the webinars, that's fine. We have a whole subforum that has all of the previous recordings just ready and waiting for you to listen to. They, actually Envision just came out with V2, so I'm excited to see what they provide to really enhance the online experience for our customers. So that said, not only are you able to have discussions, but you can ask quick questions, you can read blogs, you can share your content. There's a lot of people that are net new who have applied to be an Insider. And they have so many awesome blogs that are out there. Put your blog on. Link it to your website. We want to make this a place of connection and collaboration. You can ask questions, you can connect with customers. You can get answers from the internal team. I mean, I run community for years and I never had that opportunity. It was always me going and forming the answers and then providing it to you. 

Holly Lehman:
On this, employees care enough and the Insiders care enough to give you the answers. The other component of community that is near and dear to my heart are the Tech Insiders. So we did just close the 2024. We went through a whole year together. It was bumpy. It was wonky. It was a lot of adjustment. We went from Slack to no Slack. I know we went from... 

Stephen Wagner:
You know, it was fun. It was. 

Holly Lehman:
Fun. Oh, is that what we're calling it? But it was great because I really got to know each and every one of the Insiders because you gave me your feedback, and we're really doing our best to listen. We moved over to, you know, the community.omnissa.com forum. You were given your own private little sub forum that no one has access to but the community team, which I think is very cool. And within that, we're looking at 145 applications. And of that we are only able to pick 65. So we have our work cut out. And people have said, well, why? Why are you capping? Why are you capping at 65? Like that's crazy. Well, I'll tell you why. One, we want the best of the best. And to do that we have to start small. We have to get rid of some that just don't want to level up. We need to get new faces. And then we want to keep our rock stars. And so month over month, we have contribution offerings that we provide to the Insiders. But we also need you on the forums. We need you answering questions, doing user groups like you do. Stephen, we need people that are hosting events and speaking on them in a positive, tactful manner that is giving an accurate information and an element of a human touch point. So there's all different lenses that we're looking at, and it's also not done. Just me. It's done on a review board. So it's the community team, it's leadership. It's people in tech marketing who are reviewing the accuracy of blogs or video content. And then we're really looking to each of you to be our external advocates of Omnissa. So, by way of that, it's how are you doing your user groups, are you branding it correctly? 

Holly Lehman:
Are you using your name? Are you wearing this the swag? And talking about swag. That's why we're capping it at 65 right now. We have to prove to leadership that each and every human in the program are driving impact. Dale will love that I'm saying this, but data is king. And so if we see that you are. Yeah, I said it, Rick, I said it. Um, if we're seeing the numbers uptick on, you know, are you referring customers? Are you answering questions? Are you engaged with us on our social platforms? We want to show the data, to give you swag. We want to give you new opportunities. We want to enhance the program. And the only way to do that is to start small and grow something really amazing. And I know that with the right people, we're going to get there. Yeah. 

Jarian Gibson:
And that makes a lot of sense to just being a part. Well, a long time ago as part of the original EUC Champions group. But then these other community programs as well, understanding how what all goes into that and making sure you have that data and that those that are in the program are staying engaged, giving you feedback, not just, you know, the sun is shining type feedback, but giving you constructive feedback as well to help improve the product. So it definitely is a big thing with that. And so, you know, early congratulations to the 2025 class as you go through that through that process and select those 65 members. 

Holly Lehman:
It's hard because I've gotten to know the 67 Insiders, and we have some really phenomenal people. And what I would say, being that I've been in the EUC space for ten plus years, I will say someone said to me, this, this EUC community is different. And I was like, everybody's great in community. But they are they really are different. It's been really nice when I've gone to in person events. Everybody has made me feel welcome. They've made me feel included. They've not ever left me by myself. It's like we're going here. Do you want to come with us? I feel that community is valued for what we provide. And then on the other side, one thing that I think makes our Tech Insiders just outstanding is they're not just focused on one technology. They know our technology, but they have to also be able to understand other technologies with other competing companies in order to be the Tech Insiders, not just for the program, but for their customers. So my goal is that if you walk into a room and you say that you are an Omnissa Tech Insider, you're already seen as a respected human within this industry.

Stephen Wagner:
One thing I just want to add, too, is that a lot of us in this space, we are members of various community or technological advocacy programs. And the one thing that I have to say is that since Omnissa started the Tech Insider program, the big key differentiator, me being a proud Tech Insider myself, is the presence of Omnissa at the various conferences. It doesn't matter whose conference it is. A lot of the Tech Insiders, a lot of the people in these communities, we all go to these events and we all know each other. And for the first time, we actually have a company that's standing with us in person, behind us, backing us. And it feels good. It feels great. It's, it's a nice change. It's nice to see. 

Holly Lehman:
Well, we appreciate that. And when we think about partnerships, the one partnership we didn't talk about is the fact that communities are making new partnerships as well. So community is reaching out and we are a partner with World of EUC. We have become a partner of the admin Slack channel. And there's more coming down the line. So we believe in strong partnerships so that we all succeed. 

Jarian Gibson:
So both you and Stephe mentioned about Omnissa being at community events and being out there in the community. Where will we see Omnissa next? You know, what's the next event? Where will we see you next in the community? 

Holly Lehman:
I have a whole PowerPoint slide deck to Dale and team on where I want to see us at. Why? I want to see us there. You will see us at not net new. Ideally, we're playing around with a few ideas, like possibly going to IGEL thanks to Rene Recker and their team, giving us the opportunity and the space for community. We're hoping to be at Mac Admins UK, possibly Mac Admins, Penn State because we really want to focus not just on community, but devices themselves and the customers using them. Obviously you'll see us at Omnissa One information TBD that's not coming from me yet. And then we have a few that we're pipelining that are net new. Where do we to your point, where do we plug in in the Microsoft space? Does it make sense? Should we be there I say yes. So we're looking into what's worked and where we've always been and where should we dip our toes in and see if it makes sense to wiggle our way into some of our competitor focused events? 

Jarian Gibson:
So, thank you both, Holly and Rick, for your time today. So as we close things down, any closing comments or anything you want to share that we didn't cover today? 

Holly Lehman:
Join the community. 

Jarian Gibson:
So where can they. So where can they go? Just one more time to join the Omnissa community. 

Holly Lehman:
Community.omnissa.com. 

Jarian Gibson:
And then any closing thoughts for you Rick? 

Rick Terlep:
Yes. You can read all the wonderful content and watch all the fantastic videos over at Techzone.omnissa.com if you want to see that. But no, honestly, this has been really good. Again, a good opportunity for us to come out and talk to folks in the EUC space directly to all of you. But more importantly, we're excited to be taking this next step as far as our organization goes. Be patient with us, at least for a little while. It's going to take us a while to get our footing and everything, but I think once we get everything under us, we're going to be just fine. It's going to be a lot of fun. So thank you again for having us on. 

Holly Lehman:
And we appreciate all the work you're doing as well. This has been really nice. So thank you for pulling, you know, the EUC community together as an agnostic or agnostic community effort that you're driving. So we're excited to see, you know, our partnership moving forward and what you do in 2025. 

Stephen Wagner:
Yeah. And that was actually one thing I wanted to say is thank you to everyone at Omnissa for being one of our founding partners at World of EUC. We really appreciate the support for the organization and for the community as a whole. 

Jarian Gibson:
Yes. I just want I just want to echo that. Thank you for being one of our founding partners for World of EUC. Thank you for supporting EUC World. And again, thank you, Holly and Rick for coming on today. We appreciate your time. To our listeners out there, make sure that you go check out the Omnissa community. If you have not signed up for World of EUC, make sure you go that on worldofeuc.org. And then as far as anything else, we have some webinars coming up, along with, stay tuned for more podcasts. Thank you for listening to the Frontline Chatter podcast brought to you by the World of EUC. And we'll talk to you next time. 

Stephen Wagner:
Thanks, everyone. Happy new year. 

Rick Terlep:
Take it easy, everyone. 

Holly Lehman:
See you later.