Hybrid Endpoint Management Is the New Normal: Jake Mosey on Visibility and Control

[00:00:00] As Microsoft Intune becomes the default endpoint management platform for organizations of all sizes, IT service providers are learning that Microsoft native doesn't always mean operationally complete. The gap between what Intune ships and what you actually need to run client environments efficiently is where real service margin lives or gets lost.

[00:00:21] Today, we dig into what modern endpoint and application management looks like for the channel, what the Config Manager migration era actually left behind, and how community-driven product development is shaping what comes next with Jake Mosey on this episode of The Business of Tech. Jake Mosey, you're the Chief Product Officer at Recast Software. Welcome to The Business of Tech. Thank you.

[00:00:48] Now, Recast positions itself as the companion for Intune. So, kind of in concrete terms, what gaps in Intune do the tools fill and how do MSPs and providers benefit when you close those particular gaps? Yeah, the two largest gaps that we see, I mean, Intune is going to continue to evolve. Microsoft's going to continue to invest there.

[00:01:13] But the two biggest gaps that we hear from our customers and from the market are number one, just visibility into their fleet. So, a large amount of organizations are kind of in between old Config Manager instances and then the newer modern way of managing through Intune. So, what happens is they're losing visibility as they're kind of in these co-managed or hybrid states. So, they have a need to have more, they need more information comprehensively about their environment. So, we help with that.

[00:01:43] And then the other piece that we see a lot from the market is just the inconsistency of application deployment through Intune as well. And the inconsistencies are anywhere from, one of the big gripes is just timing of when applications actually show up on those devices. But that also is around patching and just being able to have some flexibility when it comes to deploying third-party applications. It leaves a little to be desired on the Intune side.

[00:02:12] We want to lean in, like to lean into what they're good at. And then we like to try to have an operational and visibility layer that works alongside of it to really solve for that final 20%. Gotcha. Now, give me, there's got to be one of those actions inside the right-click tools that, you know, the first time an admin uses it makes them say, how did I ever live without it? Like, what's your favorite example of that? Oh, man. I don't know.

[00:02:39] I think it's like some of the remote help functionality, I think is really what people like to like to key in on is having things that they would normally have to go to a different console for to be able to do it directly from the interface. With right-click tools is usually where they start their eyes start to light up and there's a light bulb there. Gotcha. Okay, that makes sense.

[00:02:58] Now, I kind of want to get a little bit of a sense of like the way you think about your place in the Microsoft ecosystem because, you know, you're a companion layer on top of the Microsoft tooling. Now, Microsoft has a history of building those companion capabilities over time, sometimes by acquisition, sometimes just shipping the feature. Yeah. You know, what's your thinking about the way you position and why people should build around Recast with Microsoft always kind of slicing away at that market?

[00:03:29] Yeah, I mean, it's fair. It's always something we're kind of thinking about, but I'd like to frame it with like Microsoft's going to continue to invest in Evolve, right? And like they're a massive organization that has a ton of value. We're not here to compete with them, but we also know that they solve for the 80%. And so as they continue to, you know, to chip away at features and functionality, I view that as opportunities to innovate.

[00:03:57] That means that we don't have to maintain those features and functions anymore. We can let Microsoft do that, transition our customers over to using those, but then we like to add different types of value on top of it. We also, we also believe that we can move a little quicker as well.

[00:04:14] So like when we can be responsive to our customer base and solve the problems that they might have where Microsoft, you know, they have a lot of priorities, massive organization, tons of tons of different inputs into what they're building. We do that as opportunity for us. Makes sense now. And by the way, because I want to get a little bit of comparison. You spent 17 years at Jamf, you know, and you most recently reading their S&B markets division.

[00:04:39] Jamf lives under that same Apple shadow for years, so much so that the Apple's ecosystem has a word for it being Sherlocked. Like, you know, what, you know, what, what did, how did you think about it? Like what did Jamf do to stay ahead of Apple's native MDM that you've been thinking about that you can apply in the Microsoft relationship here? You know, that was one of the things that I thought was super interesting.

[00:05:00] I'm so I'm pretty comfortable with being in the shadows of these large organizations because at Jamf, you know, it was always the question of, well, Apple's just going to build that. Apple's just going to innovate you and a couple like I actually feel similarly about Microsoft. And there's one of the big things that we did at Jamf is like we just built the relationships that we were able to do. Like Apple was notoriously very secretive, notoriously. We didn't really know kind of what was happening.

[00:05:28] We would be able to do things and say things and Apple could it. So that was an advantage for us as we were really the enterprise partner for a lot of organizations. The same I view the same way for Microsoft, to be honest, they're less secretive, but they're I mean, they're huge organization. But we have the relationships there. And we so we we do we do what we can to actually give them feedback and what's working with us. And they they kind of do the same. I mean, there's a lot of personal relationships throughout the organization, too.

[00:05:57] So I actually view it as like very similar kind of, you know, parallel traps of we want to work with them and partner with them. They might not, you know, they're going to do their own thing. But we view that anytime they change, we like to view that as opportunity for us to innovate. Gotcha. Now you're at Recast. And so you're deeply tied to the Microsoft ecosystem. Now, that's a much more kind of heterogeneous environment than many Apple environments.

[00:06:25] Like what is that platform shift been teaching you about how service providers are involved in managing those heterogeneous environments today? Yeah, I mean, it's the biggest like the biggest change is just number one is just the sheer scale, like small organizations. There's small windows deployment to like 5000 devices now. Right. Like there's just like show. It's just at scale. And then they're fairly fragmented. Right. Whereas Apple shipped, you know, three or four different hardware types.

[00:06:54] Right. And they try to standardize an operating systems where we have just so many more variables and so much more scale that it really helps. It really makes us empathize with, you know, with the MSPs that have to deal with this day in and day out because of how many different variables there are to actually deal with. Whereas that was actually simplified on the Apple side. Now, most MSPs clients aren't all Windows or all Mac anymore. Right. There's the you know. So how does how does recast have their your heterogeneous story?

[00:07:24] Like, or are you betting that the Microsoft endpoint management is just the way the channels volume is going to go? Like, how's your recast heterogeneous story fit in? You know, I believe in focus. Yes. You know, like, let's try not to do everything because then we do nothing well. So believe in focusing on in the Microsoft world, let's be the best and let's solve those problems there. Now, like if if there are Mac needs, every organization has some sort of, you know, different types of device types.

[00:07:53] And my recommendation is to lean into the providers that do well on those platforms. And, you know, we can help on on the Mac side for sure into and has some Mac functionality and features. But we really want to focus on as much value as we can in the Windows platform. We'll be right back after this message. I track MSP community conversations every week as part of what we do here.

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[00:09:14] And we're back. You know, one of the other things I thought was really interesting was you co-founded Jamf Nation, which is one of the more successful practitioner communities in endpoint management. How did community feedback change product direction at Jamf? And what are you building toward at Recast with the same idea? The number one is the community helps us understand the problems that the market is having.

[00:09:39] When they're talking and discussing and talking about their actual problems, that's just an opportunity for us to really truly understand what they're dealing with so we can put solutions in place to help them. The best thing about the community is like the answers are not inside of the walls of Recast. The answers are in the market and those problems and answers are out in the market. The other thing that I thought was that I think is just so cool about community is like everybody kind of supports each other and wants to help each other.

[00:10:09] And so when we can help facilitate the customer to customer interactions or when we facilitate that, you know, the business as Recast to customer interactions, I think that those are opportunities to show like genuine, authentic ways of engaging with them. Like in the Jamf Nation days or in the past, I like I actually made friends from that community and like text with some of those people still just because it was like, yeah, like we're here to help.

[00:10:37] It was less about it was less about an opportunity to sell our solutions. And it was more about an opportunity to understand a problem and see if we could help them. And I thought that I felt that the and I still feel this way. The best way to engage with the community is just authentically and say, how can we help solve your problem versus you should buy our stuff?

[00:10:57] The thing I think is that's cool about Recast is we have so many tools and so much value that's just available for free to the community that we still see significant amount of usage every month. And so it means they're coming to us for help. And we don't necessarily need to treat that as an opportunity to say, hey, you need to buy our solutions. Treat that as an opportunity to understand what their problems are and see where we can innovate to continue to grow our business.

[00:11:26] Gotcha. Now, one of the things you've done is you've described your role as elevating the voice of the customer. But community led product development can also mean building for the loudest voices, not necessarily the most impactful. And you're chuckled already. So you know what I mean? How do you tell the difference between the loudest voices and the most impactful use cases? And can you give me an example of where the community was wrong? That's a really common product management problem, right?

[00:11:53] It's like, are we solving for the 5% or the 80% here? And the way to do it is, and when I say my job is to elevate the voice of the customer, like I really do mean that. But we have to make sure that we are getting multiple points of view and multiple understandings of those problems. Talking to enough customers, the problems generally bubble up and become pretty clear over the ones you need to solve.

[00:12:19] And the, you know, I mentioned earlier, like focus is so important because the loudest voice could take you outside of what you're actually supposed to be focusing on. So being really clear on what your guardrails are and like where you're going allows you, gives you a little bit more confidence to say no. When there are times where someone asks for something and you just have to say that's outside of our strategy, that's outside of the direction we're going. The answer is like, not now, right?

[00:12:47] So there's different ways to approach that. We're from the Midwest, we have a hard time saying no sometimes. But that being said, if we can say we're not focusing on that because we are doing these other things, that's always a much better way to engage with the community, engage with the customers, is help them understand and be transparent about what the direction actually is for our solutions.

[00:13:14] The other thing is, is like, you know, we have a great support organization, we have a lot of people that do just want to help. So sometimes people are, you know, they're loud because they have pain, they need, there's some sort of pain that they're trying to resolve. You know, being able to connect them with other community members, transfer some knowledge is still a way to help them without necessarily saying we're going to build a solution to solve that problem.

[00:13:39] Now, Reef has recently partnered with system centered dudes to help organizations modernize from config manager of config MGR to into for MSPs are managing dozens of clients, all at different migration stages. Like give us a little bit of sense with what are the blockers that stall those migrations? And how do you know what done actually looks like? Oh, um, the so it's interesting.

[00:14:08] I don't know if a full migration is actually the end state that people are going to get to like, we've, we've actually surveyed the market talked to a ton of customers who essentially say they're they believe that they're going to be in some sort of hybrid world for a significant period of time. Like that is the state of that, that they will be living in. So what it means for operators and for, you know, for MSPs is like, we have to plan for that.

[00:14:36] We have to know, like, operationally is automated as much as possible, obviously, but, um, get comfortable with the fact and find the tooling or find the solutions that assume a hybrid state, um, where the end state might not just be the super clean. We're fully migrated now. I think that, um, that's ideal, but I don't think that that is necessarily realistic or practical at the moment.

[00:15:02] So what is the, like, what, when would change to make that different? Like what would, would have to be the end state that gets us to like, you know, that kind of ideal world of fully migrated? Um, I think it starts with the visibility piece is people need to have a comprehensive view of their fleet, right? Regardless, regardless of what you're doing with it, it starts with, do I know what's out there?

[00:15:28] And once I at least have an idea of what's out there, I can start taking action and finding the right tools to either remediate or keep my devices compliant or deploy the applications to manage whatever I need to do. Um, we don't, there is not a good enough visibility story today in order for customers to feel confident on one platform because they don't have, they have to use multiple platforms and multiple solutions in order to get that true visibility.

[00:15:55] So I think it actually just starts with, with inventory and a view into the fleet, um, in order to start moving that direction. And then it would, you know, it would take all of the actions and the things that you would need to do in order to manage your environment and secure your environment with an end user focus, uh, to be able to, um, to be able to consider yourself fully ready to fully migrate. Okay. So the other area that I wanted to ask about is like some application management, because that's often treated as like a solved problem, right?

[00:16:24] You deploy an agent, you run a script, you call it done, but your application workspace claims to be a game changing end to end app management platform. So tell me what specific failure modes like in traditional app management lead you to justify that bold of positioning. I mean, there's, there's some bold marketing speak there, isn't there? Uh, like just, so here's what it's about application workspace.

[00:16:51] The reason that we think it's a game changer is it provides that it provides a unified experience for the end user where they just have one spot to go to get their productivity apps. Like, you know, you can go to this spot and get a secure access to the solution that you need to do your job. And it can pretty much change whatever they need behind the scenes without impacting the end user.

[00:17:15] Oftentimes, like we see that, uh, uh, deployment or changes to it systems are delayed or take a lot longer because of the change management process that happens for the end user. You got to communicate it, you got to answer all the questions, you got to hear from angry end users that you're potentially moving their cheese. But what we can do is we can provide that consistent experience so I see you can change what they need behind the scenes.

[00:17:39] And also the end user shouldn't have a different experience to launch an application or get access to an application because they're in, you know, on a shared guest, guest Wi Fi or in a different country. We can set up the rules to securely access those applications where the end user doesn't even know it's different. They shouldn't have to know they need to go to a different spot because they're on shared Wi Fi. They should just be able to double click their application or open up their application.

[00:18:07] And it should be it should launch the secure version based on the security posture of that device. Now, third party patching is the other area where you you've made a big investment and it's an unglamorous part that's often very messy. Like what breaks in a client environment when that patching is treated as an afterthought? The some of the best it and the best MSPs are the ones that no one sees right because stuff just works.

[00:18:35] And when when application deployment or patching is done haphazardly, the people that are ultimately impacted are the end users that are on the device. They're the ones they're the ones on the keyboard. They are the ones who have are not able to get their job done for an hour or they have to walk away or whatever because they're unable to access the productivity applications they need. So what actually breaks is end user productivity if that is not done thoughtfully.

[00:19:04] So we do believe strongly in like in finding ways to do this where it's minimal end user impact, making sure we can do it consistently and we can keep the security and patch posture strong. Like that's the goal without making it hard for the end user is the goal. Now, I intentionally held off on using the magic words, A.I. And in particular, I'm thinking about agentic A.I. in this context because I wanted this to be a very practical conversation.

[00:19:31] Tell me what the way you're thinking about the use of agentic A.I. agents, advanced automation. Like how are you thinking about it in terms of what you're doing at Recast? Yeah, I like to think of it like. I want to be practical about it. Like, yes, it's like I think that all all of us are a little cynical or skeptical about, you know, how much it's actually going to change our jobs.

[00:19:57] I think that there are practical ways in order to deploy certain intelligence tooling to help our customers or to help the market and automate things that were just tedious or, you know, too manual in the past. So we use it. We're thinking about Recast two ways. One is operationally, can we get more efficient? Are there just things that we can do to be more efficient before continuing to scale headcount? How do we become more operationally efficient internally?

[00:20:24] Like we use it in our product organization with rapid prototyping and getting doing things that would take a long time before we can get value in front of our customers or feedback from our customers faster. So that's operationally. As far as customer value, there's a bunch of spots in environments that I think intelligence tools can be deployed and be very helpful just with the data layer.

[00:20:45] Right. With the visibility layer of being able to bring insights and information that would that that agentically could just be surfaced for our customers, I think is like a practical way to think about that over time. Like, I don't think that we're going to be in a spot where, you know, an IT admin just sits back from their keyboard and lets, you know, the robots take over.

[00:21:10] There's always I think there's always gonna be some sort of manual intervention, but I think there are ways for us to be automating manual repeat repeated tasks like patch. There's certain things that we should be better repeatable that we should rely on. We should rely on AI to handle for us. I think that's a great place and a great vision to end on. Jake Mosey is the chief product officer at Recast Software. Jake, if people are interested in reaching out and continuing the conversation, what's the best way for them to do so?

[00:21:39] You hit me up on LinkedIn would be great. Sounds good. Well, Jake, thanks so much for joining me. Sweet. Thanks, Dave. Want more from the business of tech? Join business of tech plus for ad free episodes, early interviews, extended cuts, subscriber only shows and exclusive member perks and analysis. Sign up at business of dot tech slash plus and follow this show on your podcast app.

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[00:22:41] Part of the MSP radio network. Surgery is a great highlight.