Enhancing Asset Management with JumpCloud’s Greg Keller

This is Textron tv. Hi everyone. Welcome back here to Textron tv.

You know, I haven't had my friend Greg Keller, uh, from JumpCloud on in months. You knew he must have been up to something and he couldn't tell us. Well, now he could tell us.

Let me introduce you to my friend Greg Keller. Co-founder is the Chief Strategy Officer. What?

Oh, it's Chief wear all that Ct o Chief wear, all The hat, chief cook and bottle washer at JumpCloud. A hundred percent CTO, you know, but yes, I, as Raj and I, I like to say my co-founder, uh, we now wear the hats that require us to work on the business stock in the business, you know? Okay.

Absolutely. And Greg, you been at it now, you know, people talk about overnight success. Um, you know, God bless people who have those overnight successes, but I think your road is probably a lot more the norm.

I mean, GCloud Hass been around, what, about 11, 12 years now, right? Yeah, There was A, you've been toiling. We, uh, the, the, the company and the product that I think the world knows now, uh, uh, you know, really, uh, Probably eight March, What, in September of 2014, that's when we, yes.

You know, the, the prior years were a lot of r and d prototyping, um, trying to figure out, uh, you know, what and how, uh, gem Cloud could be, uh, in terms of a replacement for, in an alternative to active director. I mean, that was our thesis as, you know, being a long time friend of the company. Mm-Hmm.

And you, you know, you started this, uh, with overnight successes. Um, well, to do that, to, you know, to basically go out on a mission like that, you're signing up for a long haul. It's an incredibly complex, not only from a, you know, a technology standpoint, but a go-to market standpoint in terms of how companies are so reliant on that mission critical, yet brittle and old Microsoft set of technologies, and how we need to gracefully enter ourselves into those environments and not let anything happen, like authentication get disrupted.

So, uh, well, You're not dealing in a very important part of the stack. It's just security and Id Right. Just, you know, the core base yet No big deal.

Masks, no big deal. Um, and, and look, the fact is, you, you're talking about displacing, you know, one of the sort of silent monopolies within tech, if you will, right? That, you know, when people think they used to think of the Wintel and, and all of that stuff.

Yep. Today we think of Linux. But, you know, AD is, was as close as you can get to something like that.

I mean, the market penetration, and, and look, there's, there's ways of skinning the cat. You guys came right at it and said, Hey, with the cloud and with the changing, with the rise of Macintosh, with the rise of bones and, and all of these different devices that don't necessarily aren't Microsoft OS and so forth, right? That was a good time to start thinking along those lines.

But at the same time, the world, you know, it's a little bit of akin to jumping on a moving trade because that static ad that was there in 2014 has now morphed into a cloud-based SaaS offering that Microsoft comes out with Azure and they wrap off 365. And yeah, something never changed. But, um, you know, so it it doubly hard mission.

And then, like you said, making the technology the better of the two choices is, is also a short, It's really true. I think, you know, interesting stat about our business. Um, so we have at this point, you know, many, many, many thousands of paying customers, about 200,000 total organizations that have touched and used even our old free version.

So lots of activity. So a lot of really rich data to examine how these organizations work from multinational conglomerates to small mom and pop shops. Um, 77% ready for this of our customer base use M 365 and Google Workspace at exactly the same time.

Isn't that remarkable? And no, I'm guilty, dude. Yeah.

I mean, people want, I do Too. They want it on Ly, You know, the, the funny part is they want, they want their Google Workspace customers on MacBooks who want the office suite on their MacBook. They get, and that is freedom, like the, the ability to have that level of flexibility, but manageability and access control across that wide variety of disparate resources is in a, in effect the, the real freedom that, that IT team and security teams want.

Which, you know, think about those three things. Office 365, a, MacBook, and GWS. When you think about, that's three of thousands of tens of thousands of things we call, you call the industry calls assets.

Yep. And as Jim Cloud, this is, you know, getting into the news that we would love to tell you about. Um, you know, to date, you know, from, you know, year zero to year nine, almost you now, year 10, um, we have been known for the, the melding of identity and access management.

That's the directory stuff, right? Largely and device management, or UEM. And we've really done this cool IP thing to kind of merge it together in a very, very unique way.

But that's not the edge of our universe. So now expanding into the world of asset management and doing so in a highly progressive way was what I kept craving. And the team kept craving.

And we, you know, there's old school ways of doing things like spreadsheets, meaning, well, here are our assets and here's a column for depreciation of the asset, and here's the tag number and all those things. Then there's slightly more advanced versions like databases and ITSM kind of tools that do that. What we wanted is a, a that plus discoverability.

What could we tell our IT and security teams, what they don't know. That's, We used to call that the hacker's eye view, right? Yes.

How do IT Yeah, It's the third party view. And you know, Greg, I I will tell you over the last three, four years, that piece of it, asset discovery has become a huge piece of the puzzle. Now, you know, being a security person, in my mind, Greg, it was always, because it's about attack surfaces to me, you can't defend what you don't know.

You have A hundred percent agree. Moreover, you gotta, there's, there's sort of the, the, what we don't know could hurt us, right? From a security perspective and what we don't know could hurt us from the financial perspective, license allocation of the asset, um, you know, the ability for an IT team to say, looks like you're using a product that was never part of our purchasing cycle.

Let's get it under management. If you really need it, we can budget and appropriate it. Um, or here's a bunch of licenses that we have allocated, but That we're not using, Right?

JumpCloud is an authentication party. We know a, you've auth any, you're in it or not. So leveraging that kind of data in combination with the technology that a company smo, uh, that we found, and I had ordered for a year, I love these guys.

They're ba they are, and were based in on Turkey. Uh, they were the team that built Ops Genie, which was acquired by Atlassian in one of their Absolutely. I, I know.

So I happen to know these guys. Full disclosure. Yeah, go, I know these guts.

I knew Ops Genie pretty well. They worked with us. And you know, the progressivity that they have possess just in terms of this problem space, the mechanism, how they built the platform in a highly progressive, you know, uh, they're all DevOps to their core.

Um, and it just, it was like peanut butter and jelly coming together. So having their, their viewpoint on dis uh, discoverability of assets, the management of it, the license reclamation, cataloging all of it, and merging that into Gem Cloud's already, well-known authentication platform. Um, it made sense.

So we, we did It Sounds great. I we're gonna jump into it in a second. I wanna get in the weeds a little bit, and you're technical, you'll be able to, you'll answer this one.

How do they do asset discovery? Is it like a scan? Is it just, you know, is it an outside in scan?

Is it an inside out scan? Is it they take, you know, because you, you can't believe part of asset discovery is fine, you're gonna gimme a list of your assets, as they say in Las Vegas. That's a fine beginning, but it's not the end of the game.

Right? I got to see what your real assets are. Yeah.

How, how, without giving up proprietary info, obviously pro, how are they doing it? There's a, there's, so let me satiate you and answer the question this way. There.

Theirs is through browser, plugin and APIs. Um, okay. Browser plugin in large part is the discovery mechanism.

Um, nothing creepy going on, as you would imagine. There's a few ways that you can and possess knowledge over what, you know, an employee is doing. Agents on the box to sniff network, the network itself through back hauling traffic, uh, in this case, um, the, the browser work, you know, we're obviously interested, interested in SaaS management and discovering, you know, external riss that companies are hitting to Mm-Hmm.

You know, to hit a service or, or do something. We, um, having really well known plugin strategy across browsers, um, it is known as Jim Claude go, uh, that we, which is our biometric based passwordless authentication. And so we System, that was another, that was another acquisition, wasn't it?

That Was not, that's purely homegrown. Um, I bring that up because No, I, We feel like we've covered that. Maybe it was you and I, I covered it, Greg.

Anyway, We, we announced, you know, when we did the actual proper product announcement, um, you and I discussed it. Okay. That's what it was.

But there's another jump cloud non identity management, but log on acquisition that would Exactly right. Uh, a company called MYP was acquired by myself and our team a number of years ago now. Yeah.

They, their product, which also had a browser plugin too, as many that's do, was really elegant in terms of their, um, the way they manage Clearex passwords and nothing stored and all, all that. But to the SMA part, we're, and with our plugin strategy we're that technology into a single strategy. Um, with it, it, it combines a number of things.

Number one, um, when you start to interact device trust with which we have, right? And as part of the zero trust framework that we've, we've launched, um, with this plugin, we really start to help it. And security teams control their environment, right?

The boxes which are Mac, a MacBook, a Windows machine, a Linux desktop, whatever, with our agent on it is controlling all these transactions. So the IT security teams know that the right device with the right user that is authenticated is accessing the right resource. Now with this new plugin technology, we'll be able to start to discover that's out of the purview of what security and it even knows.

So how do we wanna deal with that? Do you wanna apply policy to restrict, would you like to get that and record it as an asset under management so we can start to learn more and properly make sure the asset is managed. It just gives us ridiculous kind of insight.

Yeah. In control, Insight, controllability, et cetera. So have you taken this plugin and integrated it into JumpCloud Go at this point?

So, beautiful, or that's the plan. You're rushing me over here. Alright.

I'm sorry. I don't mean to jump the shark think it's still put on the position style that, that I joke that work is going on right now and, uh, you know, having done a now, uh, three acquisitions, uh, we have really learned a lot just in terms of like, we're very aggressive. We want, we, we want everything poured into the same framework.

Our, you know, the original, you know, platform making the, the singular platform better said differently. We don't want disparate tools and experiences, so we're not interested in that. So we have to do the work of, in importing and integrating, uh, their services into our platform.

Um, in prior acquisitions, we learned a lot. We tried to do, we're so excited. We want to get all the things out.

And you, you're trying to jam so much work. Yeah, no. That's how you, you break your eggs making omelets that way You got it.

And you know, now a very deliberate set of milestones to decompose, deconstruct their very robust platform into meaningful chunks of value that are our customers can anticipate. It controls the test cycles, the quality gets higher. So, uh, that's kind of where we're at.

Expect some stuff in the, in the coming quarter. So really just a quarter out. That's not, that's not terrible at all.

No, no. I thought you were gonna tell me by the end of the year. No, no, no, no, no, no.

Yeah, no, we, we really have, and the, this team is incredible. They extremely talented and very, very hungry to get, I mean, part of their allure is wow, gem Cloud, you have thousands of customers. They, as any aspiring, you know, engineer, let alone entrepreneur, but engineer, they just want their stuff used and, and have the public writ large, like really see the value in it.

And that's what we love. Beautiful. I assume the whole team there is staying on, they're working on this.

Well, I mean, keeping the ongoing business wheels turning as well. Oh yeah. We, everyone stays every engineer, they have wonderful, like product marketing that really get the space.

Um, in fact, to be very candid, this region is crazy. So there's so much talent, um, you know, going, especially in Ra Turkey, which is a university town, and yes, what our intention is as we are doing, and anyone who goes to the JumpCloud website can look at our careers page and you will see what we're hiring for. And that region is already, the resumes are incredible.

You know, it's pretty, no, I was out in Athens actually before Thanksgiving, before AWS reinvent. Yep. And so there's this whole thing going on in that region of the world, because southern Europe is, look, it's an affordable place to work, and it's not a bad life.

Right. Especially if you're skilled work, you know, you've got some skills and in fact, good Internet. Yeah.

And motivation. Oh, they Got great internet. I mean, they're not, um, I, I agree with you.

I mean, that's, look, you know, there's a lot of very expensive places in the US to do business in. There's a lot of inexpensive places in that part of the world with some great talent. And it's crazy.

You know, we, this is a, a, a company. JumpCloud is a company born in the United States, capitalized largely, you know, within the United States. But Alan, our revenue, It's a global world.

What, uh, 50% of our revenue comes not from the United States, but from the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brazil, Greg, it's the same thing here. 42% of everyone who's gonna watch this or read anything or listen to anything on our text, on, you know, platforms, only 42% are norther, let alone US North America based. That's a good ratio.

Incredible. But it, it kind of freaks me out still. I remember, you know, this goes back to the internet first came out and you'd get on the internet on a thing and it would say, hi from Anchor Turkey, hi from Athens, you know, and I'd be like, wow, these are places I've seen on the globe spitting around when I, when I was a kid.

Yeah. It still gets me when I see, you know, how many people log in from everywhere you can think of. And now just I'm afforded the opportunity with Rajet, um, to ex, you know, spend extensive time on the road visiting with and exploring these places where the talent lives and venture capital is rushing in.

And India, you know, for the past 40 years Has, India is almost old hat. I mean, you know, they, well, and Here's the deal. Like the, the, the perception was, and I think, you know, for the less savvy is like, well, that's the back office.

That's where we will quote, outsource being there Is too expensive to outsource anymore. They are Outsource, They're exactly, they are now. It is their moment.

They are building amazing unicorn companies that are building services that service the rest of the world. This is the absolutely a moment. And guess what?

You better be there. And not just, you better have GTM, you know, like we do legal functions, like being able to really service those communities. Greg, you know, when I know I land this, I, I was interviewing a CEO maybe three, three or four years ago, and I'll dawn if I can remember the name of the company, but they were like DevOps for Salesforce.

Yeah. And Salesforce was a, a strategic investor was talking to the CEO. I said, when did the lights, like when did the thing switch for you?

When did you really start, you know, hitting your stride? I think, you know, when I did it, Alan, I went through all of our web registrations and realized that 90% of them were East Asian names. Yep.

And I said, I don't care what my sales team says, we've gotta be in India. And he said, we opened our first office there in, uh, in Bangalore. Yep.

I was there for the office opening. We had people lined up around the corner. It's, and I said, this is where we have to be doing business.

Oh, no. And, and it's crazy. And from there, their business took off.

Right. I mean, it, it, it accelerated, you know, beyond, this is the fact of the world. 6 billion people there, right?

Yeah. And they certain you've, I've also traveled in that part of the world. You're in India, you go to Singapore, you go to Thailand, you go to Vietnam, you know, all the way down to Oz in Australia, that sphere.

And then it carries this way into the Middle East, into places like Dubai and Oh yeah. And Israel obviously, and, and you know, up into Turkey and Greece, there's action there. There's a ton percent that Yeah, no doubt.

And any, for any entrepreneur watching this, and you know, because I grew up like Raj did, Raja and I kind of grew up as entrepreneurs together. Well, you gotta establish a US base. We don't go to Europe or anywhere else.

Right's. That's, you know, I mean the internet to your prior point has changed everything. And, and if the service is valuable enough and it's accessible and it's reliable and secure, really it doesn't matter.

It's sheik service the world. Well, yeah. I'll tell you something else.

I find, and, and maybe this is my own, I I, this is more gut. I don't have real objective numbers, but I think in a lot of these places in the world, they're more open to new, new solutions, right? Where Microsoft maybe isn't as embedded as it is, let's say in some US enterprises and stuff like that, right?

Absolutely. Hey, smo, So are they, they're still operating is SMO right now? Where can we get more information?

Where do they go? They, uh, any of our websites, including their own, um, will drive them towards, you know, the appropriate, you know, Hey, I need to find out about my account or, you know, but everybody has been outreached it, it was a very graceful transition. com.

You got it. And, uh, so people are interested. Go check it out.

Yeah. All subsumed into Gem Cloud. Now business operations are now fully within Gem Cloud, um, and they're moving forward, right.

You know, most notably on the engineering front, already embedded with our teams, right. We had a huge Summit, engineering Summit and product and engineering summit in India, um, uh, this is roughly three weeks ago now. And they came in with their top talent just to start the integration process, to speed up things.

And it was wonderful. Um, so very cool, man. Very cool.

That's, congratulations, Greg. It sounds like a great acquisition. It, you know, it fits right into where you guys want to be going and where you've been and you know where you are.

You gotta, you gotta love those. It's, it's officially closed. It's out there.

And like you said, maybe by the end of quarter we'll see it a more tight coupling integration into the JumpCloud Go and the whole JumpCloud platform, you'll start to see the, the heads of that start to pop through and our customers will feel that benefit. Yeah. Within a quarter.

Excellent, my friend. You know what Raj would say? Okay.

What's next? Exactly. Exactly.

Anyway, thanks. Thanks for coming on, Greg. Always a pleasure.

Again, congratulations. Say hello to all our JumpCloud friends. We'll be in touch.

I'll Alan, stay healthy. Thank you. Thank you.

You too, man. Greg Keller, CTO JumpCloud here on Text Trunk tv. We're gonna take a break.

We've got a full day of great text, strong TV for you, so standby.