Published on the 24/11/2016 | Written by Donovan Jackson

If you thought there were a lot of ERP vendors operating in the market (and you’d be right) just wait until you get a handle on the number of tools vendors. They’re everywhere and most of them seem to be making money, too. One of the longest-standing is Landesk, around since 1985, but which is today making a bit of a push into end-point security in a quest to differentiate from the pack.

In a chat with iStart, Simon Townsend, the company’s chief technologist, started out by saying that the broadening portfolio of solutions offered by tools vendors today can lead to duplication and ‘shelfware’ situations, particularly in large enterprises (ANZ recently said as much). “Those technologies can be simplified and implemented easier and adopted better if integrated into an ITSM-type of structure, where you can remove levels of complexity which arise when you have 20 different tools and consoles. Instead, you want a unified look and feel from which you can deliver services – yet, breaking up, for example IT asset management in one view, security in another, and so on.”

While broad portfolios are one thing, leveraging them effectively is another. Back in the early 2000s, we recall a tools vendor which had such a problem: then known as Computer Associates (the company where products go to die – not an official tagline, but perhaps accurate), one got the impression that, after a long spate of acquisitions which had it playing in all kinds of environments, even those who worked at CA didn’t really know what the company did. Come to think of it, despite its recent acquisition of agile tools vendor Rally, nobody really knows what CA does these days either.

Townsend alluded to this kind of challenge at Landesk, which today boasts a portfolio made ponderous by acquisition and which has it playing across a very broad range of tools, from its ITSM solutions (generically named ‘Service Desk’ – now there’s something begging for a name change) to systems, security, asset, and process management software. It can get confusing, agreed Townsend, and he said the company is working towards providing a common look and feel across that portfolio; he said it is an ‘interesting time’ at the company, and that the results of this focus on user experience and rationalisation would play out soon. “We’ll be clear about what we are doing in the market,” he said.

Apart from differentiation in a crowded market, we were keen to understand why a tools vendor is positioned to take on end point security, as Landesk is doing. Townsend, who came to Landesk through its acquisition of Appsense, had a ready answer: “The question is ‘who’s responsibility is it to secure the end point’? Is it the infosec team? Or is it the Windows engineering and Desktop Operations teams? I think it is the latter.”

But, as keen eyed readers will note, the security chaps have always been pitched by the security vendors (we could spend plenty of time on how many of those there are, too). “So, as a vendor which has provided the tools for the Windows guys, we’re now equipping them with the tools to sort out the end points from a security point of view, too.”

In so doing, Townsend said a major focus has to fall on user experience, with the growing necessity to match ‘at work’ IT experience with that of consumer IT experiences. The IT department as the ‘Ministry of No’ is a no-no; users want easy access to apps, the ability to use whatever device suits them, and it should all be secure and convenient, too. He reckons that’s a large part of the CIO’s role: to engineer change, get the IT folks out of the basement and deliver quality experiences. These days, he said, failure to do that effectively means frustration, downturns in productivity, and furtive users firing up shadow IT initiatives to get around restrictive policies.