As previously reported, end user computing (EUC) and data security services vendor IGEL is this week holding its annual customer and partner conference in Miami, Florida. IT Europa sat down with CEO Klaus Oestermann to find out about the latest channel developments.
IGEL used to be simply known as the thin-client company, and benefited from the steady increase in the number of organisations putting their applications into the cloud, and then the general move towards more data being managed and processed at the edge.
It used to be a leader in thin-client hardware, but pulled out of that market a few years ago, and concentrates on developing its IGEL OS, developing data security services with technology partners, and bundling its software stack with thin-client hardware end points still being manufactured and supplied by the likes of HP, Lenovo and LG.
So about the company’s software growth? As a private company, IGEL doesn’t publicly reveal actual sales figures, but in his keynote Oestermann said the firm was targetting 45% annual recurring revenue growth in 2025. But for a comparison, he would not be drawn on revealing what the ARR growth was in 2024.
He said: “We are seeing solid growth across enterprise and corporate organisations, and on the SMB side we now mainly target those organisations that have over 100 seats. It’s the managed service provider partners that mainly deal with the SMB market, and it’s up to them how they manage that market.
“We have one US MSP partner, for instance, that looks after 50 regional banks, some of the branches have 1,000 seats, while others have barely 100, but they deal with it as a single contract.”
He said channel-only IGEL currently had over 9,000 different customers globally, served by over 1,000 channel partners, which includes 100 MSPs, with some of those being both a VAR and an MSP.
“A number of VARs also act as an MSP in some markets like ours, and I imagine we will see our MSP number go up, but we are not necessarily targeting more partners in total generally, we are concentrating on making the ones we do have generate more sales.”
There was a big conference focus on IGEL’s growing ecosystem of technology alliance partners, which includes other companies in the EUC space like Nutanix, Microsoft and VMware spin-out Omnissa, along with a host of leading cybersecurity vendors like CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks. These companies not only jointly develop products with IGEL in some cases, but are increasingly involved in joint go-to-market activities.
“This is a good arrangement for us. We might only get, say, 20% of a total sale for our solution, but the margin we enjoy from it is often much higher than the margins for the other components in those combined deals,” said Oestermann.
“We provide protection for browsers and apps through our IGEL OS, and hackers have so failed to compromise it, we are the Switzerland for the data protection industry.”
