IGEL’s events are generally fist-pumping affairs, and this one was no different, coming on the heels of a private equity firm taking a majority investment in the company two weeks ago.

Last year, IGEL was one of the last companies lucky enough to get scheduled physical events in, when their third Disrupt event was held in Nashville in late January, followed a week later by their Euro event in Munich.  This year, no such luck, and the result was the online DISRUPT Unite 2021 Cloud Workspaces Experience event. Unlike many companies at their virtual events over the past year, however, IGEL actually made a major news announcement. Their IGEL OS now integrates with Amazon WorkSpaces, a managed DaaS [Desktop-as-a-Service] offering on the AWS platform. The integration will be available by March 1.

“A distribution agreement has been reached with AWS which will make this fully managed true SaaS solution available through the IGEL OS,” said IGEL CEO Jed Ayres, in his virtual keynote at the event. “It uses PCoIP and complements our existing portfolio of AWS integrations.”

The out-of-the-box integration embeds the Amazon WorkSpaces client as part of the IGEL OS. It also enables self-service Amazon WorkSpaces management features so end users have greater control over their cloud resources.

“A high performing Work From Home solution would normally take months to design,” said Craig Gehrke, vice president of IT, Conn’s HomePlus, a Texas-headquartered home furnishings chain with over 160 locations. “With IGEL and Amazon Workspaces it took less than seven days to build, test and deploy. We were blown away. The icing on the cake was that we created a WFH solution quickly while maintaining PCI-DSS compliance.”

IGEL has been touting their momentum in the End User Computing space for years, but is now emphasizing that as customers reassess their long term situations in the wake of COVID, EUC as a whole stands to gain enormously.

“We are at an inflexion point,” Ayres said. “Entire industries and business models will be transformed. Within the EUC space as a whole, there is also tremendous transformation underway. Customers want something on the edge that just works. They are looking for agility. They want to use their old devices – but they need them to perform. They need Zoom and Teams and printing to work, and they need it all to be secure, and they need to manage it. The dark arts of End User Compute are now super relevant.”

Ayres, who came to German-headquartered IGEL in 2016 as CEO of their North American operation, and rose to became the overall CEO when the original one retired last year, has seen IGEL rise during his tenure there from a relatively little-known Linux-based hardware player in the EUC space to a major software-centric player in a market that has been dominated by much larger companies.

“You don’t get fired for buying Dell or HP or Lenovo,  but a lot of people have been promoted for hiring IGEL,” he said.

Ayres also gave a major shout-out to private equity firm TA Associates’ taking of a majority investment stake in IGEL earlier this month, with original investor, German firm Melchers, taking a minority position. Ayres emphasized that the additional resources will play a key role in accelerating IGEL’s growth and taking advantage of their market opportunity.

“We have this huge opportunity in front of us,” Ayres stressed. “You will see us increase our visibility, and be able to move faster, at a moment when the world really needs us and our ecosystem. TA invests in great technology, and invests in companies that are growing. I think IGEL was a checkmark in all those things.”