Steven Kaplan Joins Remotely Advisory Board

As a veteran to the IT space, Steven's career spans from managing the PCs for the convenience store chain he worked at, to opening a computer store, to starting, running, and selling two highly awarded channel partner businesses, to helping grow Nutanix from a tiny startup to a datacenter giant.

Today Steven is a managing partner in HMG Ventures, a sister company to HMG Strategy which has the largest IT leader network in the world.
Apart from HMG, he is advising a handful of startups - all with the potential to disrupt their industry categories.

In addition to coauthoring 8 books on Citrix and VMware, Steven also solo authored a book on financial analysis. Steven is currently working with some of the world's top IT architects in contributing to and writing the Foreword for 'Stories from the Field Volume II'.

Securing Remote Productivity

When I ran my channel partner businesses, I was always looking for how to differentiate from the competition. On the surface, the security space would appear to be the exact opposite of this strategy - there are estimated to be over 3,500 players in the cyber security space. But Remotely provides customers with both a great solution, and partners an opportunity for deeper and more strategic customer relationships.

The Sudden Move to Remote Work

The pandemic instantly created a new global paradigm of remote workers. I knew of multiple customers at Nutanix that moved hundreds, or even thousands, of employees to remote work in a number of weeks. But providing the infrastructure for remote work, of course, doesn’t begin to enable a secure and productive end-user environment.

As a result of the sudden paradigm change, IT departments hunkered down hoping that they wouldn’t have any major support or security outages or breaches. But as Work-From-Anywhere (WFA) increasingly becomes the new normal, IT departments no longer can leave their success to chance. They are demanding the ability to prioritize user locations and applications for first remediation, and then automation. Remotely provides this visibility.

Accelerate, Grow, Close End-User Computing Business

According to Gartner, IT departments are overworked with 78% spending more time supporting remote workers. And hackers are more vigorous than ever - attacking at the edge.

Meanwhile, remote users are frustrated as well. 41% have missed a deadline while 32% have lost a client opportunity. And in general, the remote IT experience still is not up to par with what they used to experience at HQ.

Remotely provides a platform with which channel partners can differentiate themselves from the competition. Their clients now have an EUC single pane of glass providing visibility, reporting and support.

• Security Posture, Risks, Visibility
  Real-time scoring of end-user device security postures
  Real-time information on Azure / Microsoft services such as Office 365
  
  
• Configuration + Consumption Data
  Every machine, Every User, Every Application, Every Network, Everywhere + who, what, when, and where they are working. Location, network security, external devices plugged in. Gap analysis.
  
  
• Reporting Engine
  Customers analyze and interact with their data to both take remediation actions for specific users, groups or locations, AND plan strategic security, mobility, or migration decisions.
  
  
• Project + Services Guidelines + Costing
  Consumption, configuration, compliance, update + patch rings. MDM, Intune enrollment status and more are now actionable.
  
  

The ROI of Remotely from a Channel Partner’s Perspective

In addition to shoring up security vulnerabilities and enhancing end-user productivity, Remotely encourages a more strategic and differentiated role in your customers’ businesses. Whether they’re running physical laptops, virtual machines, or some form of TS or Presentation Server, you have the tools and data to help them look at EUC more strategically. You can show them how to use their assessment data to assist in step by step strategic initiatives.

For those partners wishing to move beyond EUC, Remotely offers a great opportunity as well. You can help your customers take advantage of Azure offerings such as AI which Remotely ties into, but which they may not be capitalizing upon today. In this manner, you become an even more trusted and differentiated partner.

Nutanix Parallel

The Remotely opportunity reminds me a lot of the environment I faced when starting the Nutanix (Americas) channel in early 2013. In fact, for the first few months until I started hiring like crazy, I was THE channel program.

I recruited a lot of early Nutanix partners - starting with small firms, many of whom grew into large companies based largely upon their Nutanix success. Just as HCI fueled early partner growth, so does Remotely enable partners the ability to provide everything from assessment services to hardware / software upsells and upgrades to managed services.

This is why I am proud to announce that I joined Remotely as an advisor.