RES has been making digital workspace technology solutions for years, but now, armed with new leadership, a new platform and a market that now finds what it does to be in high demand, the company expects to significantly raise its profile, and its sales.
Gene Bonacci, Vice President and General Manager, Americas, RES Software
Dutch based RES Software, which makes digital workspace technology solutions, recently pulled off a notable feat. The company has been around for 15 years, yet recently was named a Gartner Cool Vendor for 2015.
“That reflects a couple of things,” said Gene Bonacci, Vice President and General Manager, Americas, for RES Software. “While we are an ambitious company, we have been low key and haven’t been the best in the past at getting our vision out there. Because we weren’t focused on beating our own drum, we had relatively low visibility, although there was some buzz at the analyst level around what we are doing. We have also got some significant investment the last few years and have been building the business programmatically.” It is second in market share in this segment, behind AppSense, their major competitor.
The second thing, Bonacci said, is that RES’s technology has come to the fore now because the market has caught up with their solutions, and now deems them to be cutting edge stuff.
“This is largely a reflection of the market having come around to what our vision is, particularly an emphasis on the agile workforce,” Bonacci said. “There is clearly a convergence happening in the market now, a convergence between PC lifecycle management and IT service management, which is being driven by users, and which fits with our vision about driving value to the business.”
RES’s workspace management solutions are designed to greatly improve user experience and employee productivity, and their core business has been extending the value of Citrix. They are completely platform-independent, and run on traditional client-server systems, VMware and Citrix.
“We have an automation capability that automates the delivery of all IT services to the user’s workspace,” Bonacci said. “We automatically identity what room a mobile worker is in and will build an appropriate workspace with devices like printers through the ‘follow-me’ IT premise. We thus automate the lifecycle of the user, without requiring IT intervention, while streamlining operation. Others talk about self-service capability, but we are specifically about predictive automation of client services. The more complex the use case and the more demanding the business, the higher the need for our solution.”
RES is also benefitting from a leadership infusion, after having gone almost a year with a CEO since the old one, Klaus Besier, resigned last June. After a long and exhaustive search, in April they announced the appointment of Al Monserrat, who had been Citrix’s senior vice president of worldwide sales and services, and who was very popular among Citrix channel partners. Two Citrix channel executives have since followed to take over RES channel operations in EMEA and North America. The North American appointment of Adam Brush to the newly newly-created position as Vice President of Channel Sales for the Americas was announced last week.
“Our customers are primarily enterprise, and we go to market exclusively through resellers, and are pretty focused on a few market makers,” Bonacci said. “In Canada, Compugen gives us national exposure and they built a practice around RES, as part of a strategic decision to transform their business into solving business problems, not IT problems.” Mississauga’s Gibraltar Solutions, which is focused on virtualization and cloud, is another key Canadian partner, and they have a couple in Ottawa as well.
A year ago, RES introduced IT Store, their new flagship platform, which gives IT the capabilities to deliver IT services when needed and without manual intervention, and which helped RES to a record-breaking first quarter this year.
“It’s IT Store because it’s not just applications, it’s anything a user would want,” Bonacci said. IT Store collects qualification information from external sources like Human Resource or Payroll systems, to determine the identity of a person and map to other systems such as Active Directory. It then uses these data connections to determine who should have access to services.
“No one else has our combination of solutions and agnostic approach,” he said. “We think we are game changing – and the technology works. We are delivering on the vision of Bob Janssen, our Founder and Chief Technology Officer, who has been steadfast in that vision for 15 years.”
