IGEL Disrupt 2020, Part 2: Updated UD3, new UMS web console, and session notes

IGEL Disrupt news from Munich

Heiko Gloge, the founding CEO of IGEL, is stepping aside so that Jed Ayres can go from CEO for the U.S. to being the full global CEO.

Apparently, they literally passed a lighted torch to Jed on stage in Munich. Making the figurative literal may be a bit grandiose, but it’s in line with the type of marketing they’ve been doing over the last few years. More importantly, you can’t argue with the results: IGEL has grown their market share, they have everyone talking about thin clients and IGEL OS, and Disrupt brought together a ton of great minds in the desktop virtualization community. It really will be interesting to see how Dell and HP start to respond this year.

In product news, IGEL announced a new version of their UD3 thin client, based on a new chip (the AMD Ryzen Embedded R1505G, if you were interested). The new UD3 uses less power (10 watts), has hardware optimizations for PCoIP Ultra, and the AMD Secure Processor feature checks to make sure the UEFI is signed by IGEL.

What else I learned in Nashville

I was excited to finally hear concrete plans about integrating IGEL UMS with Workspace ONE and Intune (which I covered last week), but what got even more attention at the show was news about the new web console for UMS. It uses lots of trendy sounding web frameworks, so it should be nice and modern; IGEL highlighted the new search capabilities. For now, they’re just focusing on features for help desk use cases. The console will launch in March as an experimental work in progress, and it will use your existing UMS database and user roles.

Turning to other vendors, in Ruben Spruijt’s session about Nutanix Xi Frame, I learned how IGEL’s support for Frame works. Frame has long been known for their HTML5 browser-based clients, but they now have clients for Windows and Mac. These are native apps based on Chromium, so they use the same protocol, but can get more access to the device. On IGEL OS, a Linux version of the Chromium-based Frame client simply runs in a custom partition.

Some other things I learned and sessions I enjoyed:

• Running Windows Virtual Desktop on Azure Stack is possible and actually quite simple. Denis Gundarev is the the product manager for Azure Stack, so it will be cool to keep on eye on that now.
• The audience was excited to see Microsoft’s Scott Manchester speak in the keynote, but we still didn’t get to hear about what Microsoft is planning now that Scott is working on Brad Anderson’s team. We’ll learn when it’s time, though!
• Patrick Coble gave a session on VDI security. The security world and mindset can often seem imposing, so I liked that Patrick was there to help introduce attendees to it.
• Gartner’s Mark Lockwood gave a keynote session with a broader look at the state of end user computing. For those who are focused on desktop virtualization, this was a good look at the big picture. One of the key themes was that the employee experience trend really is an important movement, not just a buzzword. And the most actionable recommendation was that everybody should be doing end user experience monitoring.

Overall, being in Nashville for Disrupt was a perfect way to kick off the year. IGEL put on a good show and it was great to see everybody.