Fleet CEO Mike McNeil on Rethinking MDM After $27 Million Funding Boost

Hey guys, thanks for the throwaway here with Mike McNeil's, the CEO for Fleet. And they just picked up $27 million in additional funding for a company that is, well, I have an open approach to managing mobile devices of all kinds and maybe even stuff that's not so mobile. Hey Mike, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me. So what exactly is it that you guys do? Because there's a lot of people out there who are managing mobile devices and it's not clear to me that everybody understands maybe there's a difference here.

Yeah, so I mean, one of the things out going on in the market right now is you've got a lot of companies dealing with PCI compliance, FedRAMP compliance, um, many other kinds of compliance. Um, and you got a world where 42% of organizations surveyed in the US are considering moving at least half of their cloud-based workloads to on-prem infrastructures. You got 70% of CIOs considering a move of some of their infrastructure and whether or not these folks actually do it or not, you know, if people have a B in their bon at about cloud spend, compliance is getting more complicated and organizations like having options and like having control, um, and Fleet is built like that from the start.

So it's open device management, um, you know, we're open source, so we let you deploy anywhere you want. Um, and that's how a lot of our customers have been, um, doing it. So ultimately I can, it's self-hosted in some form or another.

It's just a question whether I put it in my own data center or if I want, I can put it in the cloud. Is that about right? Exactly.

Or we'll host it for you too. You know, we have options in different regions or multi region. Um, but the main thing is folks like the option of being able to jump from our cloud to their cloud to a data center somewhere and having everything still work.

They can change it anytime they want. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but most of the mobile device management platforms that I know of are generally proprietary at the moment. And how many open source options are there?

There are none other than fleet, except there is one. Um, IR two I'll call out. So Xtra, um, a company in Europe, uh, has, has an option out there.

And then microm DM is a totally community open source project that fleet is actually built on top of. Um, but other than those options, those are, that's really, it fleet's your best open source option. So $27 million maybe in the age of AI doesn't sound like a lot of money, but it is significant.

So what are you guys planning to do and what needs to be done next? Well, I mean one of the things that, uh, we've seen such value from, we've learned so much from is hiring people from the community of, uh, IT professionals and security professionals that do this stuff every day. And we're stoked to grow the team and basically bring on people that, uh, that understand how to use MDM to support customers, to help bring in new community members, um, and to help us steer the product the right direction.

So a lot of, a lot of building, um, we're working on supporting one additional platform that we don't currently support, which we'll have some news about soon I hope. But right now a lot of it is, hey, let's take what we've got and get it out there. Especially for people on the channel.

Um, MSPs, resellers, um, we've made it as easy as possible for them to register deals, get access to fleet for their customers, um, 'cause their customers have the same problem, right. About self-hosting. Exactly.

Um, what are the challenges that people are running into with managing mobile devices? What makes it different than just a traditional desktop? And um, and for that matter, are we seeing some convergence of the management of security and IT here as well?

Well, you know, this whole idea of MDM really started as an Apple thing, right? You know, I think over 10 years ago and, uh, a laptop became yet another mobile device, but there's a really big difference between the bring your own device, BYOD world and corporate it, where you've got company owned devices, you have, uh, you can have a little bit more stringent compliance rules and maybe you have to versus you may not necessarily need that kind of invasiveness on people's mobile device, um, that they own they bought with their own money, right? So we actually support both of those use cases.

Um, but primarily a lot of our customers get started with laptops and some even start with with Linux. So one thing that's going on out there right now is if you have a hundred employees at your 100,000 employee organization that use Linux, it's usually more than that. It's usually more like 2000.

Um, those people don't really have a way to be fired, right? Or terminated from the company. So you can't actually like remote lock those computers, um, at least until until fleet came along.

And then as far as like on the security side, you know, security really drives a lot of the roadmap for this stuff. Like security is the one that says, Hey, compliance is great and everything, but we really need to make sure that we have these controls turned on on our machines. Um, so we kinda see is, you know, if products is the vision setter and engineering is the implementer in the world of product development in the world of IT and security security's really setting a lot of the vision and it is doing the implementation.

So I don't know if we'll see the departments change, but I think we're seeing a lot more cross-functional work happening. Did we kind of take in endpoint security for granted or for a few years there and suddenly I woke up one morning and every attack seemed to be going after an endpoint, but, um, have we kinda responded and understood what the implications are at the very edge of our networks with all these devices out there? You know, I think people buy EDR as a security blanket, right?

Um, and it works pretty good, right? It helps, it helps increase your security. Um, having the endpoint protected is kind of the end all and be all in a world where your network is mostly encrypted.

Now you have people phoning in from anywhere in the world. Um, I think that the endpoint is not the whole story. There's never, there's never a world where a company like Fleet takes over all of identity, all of endpoint, right?

Um, all of SaaS security, like the world of security is always gonna involve posture from SaaS apps that you use, like Slack and Gmail. It's gonna involve your network telemetry, your cloud telemetry stuff that's not even an endpoint, right? Like a Cisco router that's kind of on the edge or maybe like a, a managed database in your cloud account.

So I don't think that endpoint will ever fully take over that world or nor should it. Um, but I think organizations, uh, you know, especially like bigger banks, bigger um, bigger organizations that have more risk to manage, they're looking at a world where they have endpoint identity, um, and then the world of behavioral tools. So in terms of our IT and security on the endpoint gonna converge, I think it remains to be seen.

Um, but it is how security gets things done. Is there any effort to centralize the management of this stuff? Because at least not too long ago, um, you know, people were managing Windows with Windows tools and they were managing Macs with Mac tools and they were barely managing Linux things at all.

Um, so is there now an effort to kinda centralize the management of mobile devices that are heterogeneous almost by definition these days? You know, I was, uh, I was talking to someone from a company like Fleet, um, but a few years back they went public and the journey for them, they talked about with one large, uh, telecom company is they started with a a hundred iPads, I think, right? And within five years it had turned into like a $15 million contract.

Um, I think that where we're at in the technical selection process for folks is, um, I literally met someone named client platform engineer, right? 'cause they wanna make it flat across Windows, across Mac, across Linux. I think people are there mentally and I think they're in a world where like, hey, the products that can do this are very new.

Um, workspace one is out there in this space, fleet is out there in this space. Um, workspace one has gone through lots of changes. So I think people are watching that closely.

I think people are watching Intune closely being a Microsoft product. Like, is this where I should put my max? Right?

I don't know. It doesn't support remote lock on Windows or maybe it does. I think that people are kind of in this election phase and I think in like three years time, we're gonna see which of the relationships with these companies really expands and like what technology is working, but the ambition is there.

Um, and people are tired of siloed teams running Windows versus Mac versus Lennox. There's also a lot of talk these days about AI and agents can't walk down the street without somebody leaping out to tell you about their great new thing. But, um, it seems to me maybe there's a way to apply AI agents to the management of laptops and mobile devices.

Is that something you're thinking about? Totally. And much in the same way as things like the SOC or things like network security, there's a lot of moving parts, right?

Like, uh, your, your identity is important. The context and the data from more than just the endpoint is important. So I think the best endpoint solutions are gonna be like the musculature.

It's gonna let you change things on devices, get information from devices. Um, and I think the way that the brain works for these, for these customers is gonna vary a lot. Um, we've seen some customers that have their own AI powered solution that they plug into Fleet.

Um, we've seen other customers, even pretty advanced customers, um, like a, like a large, uh, gaming and AI company who just want to use the most basic features, um, of fleet without plugging in anything at all, really. Um, except for the minimum they need for their organization, right? All the certificate management tools, all the zero trust pieces.

Um, so I think that, I think that you've kind of, you're gonna have a lot of variability in how the decision making happens, but the parts that are always the same are the actions you need to take, right? Like, I need to run a script on this computer, I need to work reliably. I need to, I need to be able to trust the code that's running the script and I need change control on that.

So we can make this repeatable. Among the organizations that you've seen that are doing this well, what sets them apart from everybody else? One of the things that, and this is probably just, this is kind of generic, but it's proven to be true, is the people that, the people that really succeed with device management are the people that are willing to say, Hey, we're gonna think from first principles here.

We're gonna own how we do this and we're gonna make it the right way for our organization. We're not gonna like plug into, um, a particular way of doing, doing things that we've been doing for 10 years. Um, unless it's working great, in which case why question it, right?

Um, so I think that attitude generally has been what we've seen in the most successful companies. And then in terms of a specific practice that's been pretty cool is a lot of folks lately have been doing GI ops or configuration as code, um, where they can basically go in, create a repo and we actually have a tool in Fleet now that will automatically create the repo. So you can build everything in the user interface and then kind of switch over when you're ready.

And that means that if security has a question, you can be like, oh, just check, check the repo and you don't have to give them special access to fleet. Um, you can do all that stuff, but it's kind of a heck of a lot easier if you already use Git just to add someone to a repository, use all the same access control your organization already supports. So we've seen, um, we've seen a lot of cool stuff happening there where you can actually have accountability on, Hey, who made this change?

Who reviewed it? What's the blame history? And I'm talking about everything from scripts to, Hey, we changed the control and now Mike's not allowed to change his desktop background anymore.

I'd be sad about that. But, um, who wakes up in the morning and has this aha moment and says, we need to rethink the way we're managing all of this stuff. You know, it's funny 'cause we're a real open organization, we fleet too, like the way we run the company is all pretty out there.

So, uh, we have a public handbook and in there we actually have some private Google Sheets, links, um, to stuff like our license keys and stuff like that. And we keep those very secure, obviously. And someone forwarded me one that we got, and it was actually someone from a company, um, in Japan asking, Hey, I have data residency requirements, like, can I, how can I find out like, you know, where this works, how my, how flexible really is this?

Um, and that was just an example from like this morning. Um, but a lot of stuff like that where people, they have a problem, they find it on Google or they talk to someone in the community, um, especially in the Mac admins community, and they're like, oh yeah, fleet Fleet does that. If I have anything custom I need, if I have somewhere special, I need to deploy it.

Um, or if I just want, um, a little bit clearer access to what this code is doing that's running on my employee's computers. Um, fleet is a fleet's a great choice. All right, folks, well, you heard it here.

Hey, it has changed. The end points are different. And if you're still trying to manage things the same old way, it might be time to take another look at it.

Mike, thanks for being on the show. Thanks, Mike for having me. All right.

And back to you guys in the studio.