What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
The Evolution of IT Management: How NinjaOne is Eliminating Monotonous Tasks
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Automation isn't just a buzzword—it's the key to solving today's most pressing IT challenges. Jeff from NinjaOne reveals how modern organizations are transforming their approach to device management in an era of distributed workforces and growing complexity.
The conversation dives deep into how IT teams are consolidating their toolsets after years of implementing haphazard solutions during the pandemic. Rather than juggling numerous point solutions that don't communicate effectively, forward-thinking organizations are bringing everything under one platform—Windows, Mac, Linux, mobile devices, and network infrastructure—creating opportunities for meaningful automation that eliminates the most tedious aspects of IT work.
What's particularly eye-opening is Jeff's revelation that approximately 22% of common IT tickets can be fully automated with zero human involvement. One organization replaced their team of 30 people manually patching computers with a single automated solution—imagine that ROI! The discussion explores how automation isn't about replacing IT professionals but elevating their work by eliminating mind-numbing tasks like device provisioning that can consume half a day.
The future looks promising as AI enters the picture. NinjaOne's Patch Intelligence AI already helps identify problematic Windows updates before deployment, with more AI-assisted features on the horizon. For MSPs and internal IT teams alike, these technologies aren't just nice-to-have—they're essential for scaling operations without proportionally increasing headcount. Listen now to discover how you can defeat "IT misery" and transform your approach to managing technology.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everybody, intriguing chat today as I talk, with Ninja One, automating the hardest parts of IT. Jeff, how are you?
Speaker 2:I'm doing great, Evan. Thank you for having me on the program.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks for being here, Really been looking forward to this chat and, you know, for those who aren't familiar with the latest IT management tools and best practices, how do you describe the work you're doing at Ninja One?
Speaker 2:Yeah, at Ninja One, we make the tools that every person who works in IT needs in order to do their job. Our goal is to take all the most annoying aspects of managing devices and automate it. Take all the most difficult aspects of IT and make them a lot easier.
Speaker 1:Wow, you make it sound so simple.
Speaker 2:But of course.
Speaker 1:IT complexity is only growing, especially with hybrid work and other forms of remote work. Describe some of the headaches you're kind of solving for and what are the problems top of mind to your customers these days.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it is. You know, the industry as a whole, I think, is still adjusting, kind of in the end stages of adapting to the massive changes of the last five years. I would argue that the last five years have been the most seismic in terms of the amount of change that we've seen than any other five-year period that you can point to in the modern world. And we've seen, with distributed workforces, that teams have been forced to change their tech stack, change their workflows, very rapidly, and I think a lot of people were in a situation where they needed a solution to a problem and they needed it fast. It needed to happen almost overnight. And I think now, today, when people come to Ninja One, we see that they are essentially looking to see how they can improve the process that may have been haphazardly put in place, their workflows. Maybe they've got them, you know, maybe they've solved some problems, but they still have a lot of challenges. They have a lot of difficulty in scaling as they add a lot of employees, as they move these employees all over the country or all over the world, and so what we see is an approach for more consolidation. I don't want to have 10 different point solutions that are doing individual things. They're siloed, they don't communicate well with each other.
Speaker 2:There's a lack of integration, a lack of automation, and so Ninja One's approach is a platform approach, the concept that under one umbrella, under one roof, you're able to manage your Windows workstations, your Windows servers, your macOS devices, your Linux devices, your Raspberry Pi devices, have visibility on your network infrastructure, your switches, firewalls, routers, everything that is critical to making sure that your laptops are more than just expensive paperweights, right, and so we've recently launched an MDM platform, and so that also brings in Android and iOS devices as well. And then here next month, we're actually going to launch our macOS MDM, and so that'll give us an agent-based approach, with the mobile device management platform approach, to be able to manage all of these different device types, these disparate device types, under one platform, under one roof, where they can be more easily managed, and that will, in turn, promote greater automation. Instead of having to go through and do these manual, repetitive processes, you're able to have a much more standardized process in place, which means that you're going to have fewer mistakes, which I am always a proponent of.
Speaker 1:You mentioned automation a few times. It seems to be the magic word in this era of doing more with less, but in reality, what kinds of IT tasks can teams automate with NinjaOne, and what are some of the benefits and value you're getting today?
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure I mean. One of the things that I always point to because I personally struggled with it is provisioning new devices. That was always my least favorite thing to do when I was in the business is provisioning new devices. That was always my least favorite thing to do when I was in the business of managing endpoints day to day. Just as a brief aside, before I worked at Ninja One, I was the director of technical services for a movie theater chain, and so we were kind of already in that position of being a distributed workforce with locations all over the country and needing that ability to manage everything, and we did not have a tool like NinjaOne. We were stuck in the old days of a lot of point solutions where we were doing a lot of work manually, and that's kind of one of the things that we see is that point solutions might let you get a job done, but it might mean that you're having to do that quite manually.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. And, of course, on top of this, cybersecurity is, you know, adding tremendous pressure and challenges on the teams. You know how do you help IT teams stay ahead of the curve when it comes to cybersecurity overwhelm and stress.
Speaker 2:No, that's obviously a key factor, especially since in a lot of organizations you have a security team and then you have an IT team and they maybe don't always talk to each other a whole bunch. But what we do is we try to offer a variety of integrations. Even though we are a platform approach, we understand that people have a variety of tools and Ninja One needs to be able to fit into a tech stack and work within those tools, and so we offer a variety of integrations, especially with next-gen AV and EDR solutions. So Sentinel-1, crowdstrike, bitdefender, gravity Zone we have integrations with all of those tools, and so what you're able to do within Ninja One is essentially turn it into a one-click process.
Speaker 2:Whatever AV you want to deploy, you go to the dropdown menu, you select it and then from there, every single device that joins to that policy automatically has the EDR solution provision. So it goes from something where somebody might need to be involved. The human being needs to be involved, and we all know human beings make mistakes. It's just the way of the world, it's the human condition, and so by being able to take advantage of an integration like this with automation, you're able to then go ahead and automate that process. Just take it off somebody's plate completely so that a human being can then focus on things that human beings are good at, like thinking, strategically thinking of solutions to problems.
Speaker 2:Deployment of EDR. I would also say that patching is a huge component of security, ensuring that not just the operating system is patched, but that your applications are patched, your software applications are patched, and so NinjaOne lets you patch your Windows devices, your macOS devices, your Linux devices, while also providing a software repository to where you can go and patch common software applications as well, across Windows and Mac and then on Windows Workstations. We also offer the capability to take advantage of the Winget integration. So that is a huge repository, that's 6,000 plus applications that you now have the ability to be able to patch.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's incredible. And so the flip side of automation is AI. Of course, it's being marketed everywhere these days, but how do you see AI shaping the future of IT service management, and what's your vision for the long-term, but also short-term, for leveraging AI these days?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've actually already brought out our first AI feature at NinjaOne, which we call Patch Intelligence AI, and this is designed to provide additional insight, surface, additional information to a technician so that they're able to make smarter decisions, and so in this case, you have the ability to take a quick summary of what problems a Windows patch might be causing. We all know that never happens, but on the off chance it does. If there is a problem with the patch and it's causing issues with printers, for example, we have the ability to go ahead and say, hey, you might want to look at this. This does not look quite right. There's some known issues with this patch. It could end up causing more problems for you than it's actually going to end up solving. And later this year we're going to go ahead and introduce the ability to automate that. So if there is a questionable patch, the AI will automatically put a hold on that patch to prevent it from going out and again causing more problems than it's actually going to solve.
Speaker 2:And long term, at Ninja One, I think we have the idea that AI is going to ultimately enhance what a technician can do.
Speaker 2:It's going to make them faster and more efficient and put up more guardrails to prevent them from making these common mistakes, or just mistakes where they don't have the right knowledge. That's really where we see AI going. There's an automation capability, and I think everybody wants the concept that AI is going to do their job for them. You're just going to click a button and it's going to automatically do everything for you. But I think maybe the technology is not quite there yet with things like code generation, you know, I think that can be very dangerous when you consider the amount of power and the scale that endpoint management is going to have. You know there's still a need there for robust QA, there's still the need for a human being to take a look at this and, you know, maybe make sure that it's doing what it's supposed to do. And so, ultimately, I think we see AI as a tool that is going to assist and enhance a technician not necessarily replace them, but make a technician, make a human being, faster and more efficient.
Speaker 1:Well, here's to that. I could use a bit of that on a Monday. Let's talk about your go-to-market Managed service providers are growing upwards and know tremendous opportunity, but they're under pressure to do more with less. Maybe talk a bit about how you help MSPs, you know, stay profitable, which is nice, but also more efficient in the current environment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think, at Ninja One. For us, the name of the game is speed, in one word. I think one of the reasons that Ninja One has always stood out to me from the first time that I laid hands on the product, is how fast it is. It's like you're there in front of the device and it's incredible to me that you can have a desktop in California and I can be here in Florida and I can open up our remote terminal or open up Ninja One Remote and be right there. And that, I think, is a huge advantage to managed service providers, because time is money.
Speaker 2:I know that is a tired cliche saying, but for managed service providers, the faster they're able to get something done or even be able to automate low-hanging issues. With Ninja One, you can detect when something has gone wrong and then run something to remediate it. So, for example, you have a critical service that's offline. Well, let's go ahead and run this automation to start that service back up. And that might normally be a ticket, and with Ninja One we essentially just take that off the board. Our data shows that at least 22% of common tickets can be fully automated. There's no need for a human being to ever be involved of common tickets can be fully automated. There's no need for a human being to ever be involved, and so I think being able to eliminate that 22% of tickets and potentially more is a huge boon to managed service providers.
Speaker 1:Brilliant, and you recently rolled out a marketing campaign around beating IT misery, which was, you know, was a funny take on a real problem around employee engagement. You know, maybe, employee experience engagement, you know how do we keep our IT folks productive and happy? Yes, even you know, engaged in their work is, I think you're trying to say you're part of that solution?
Speaker 2:We're trying, we certainly are. I think we recognize that there is a lot of repetitive, monotonous tasks in IT.
Speaker 2:And again, I have done a lot of them and I do think that that is where, you see, you know technicians spend a lot of time. Ultimately, it ends up when you're conducting these manual tasks, stuff gets missed. You then have to go back and redo your work. So, yeah, I think that's a huge component of what we're trying to do here is take those, the low hanging fruit, the monotonous tasks that nobody wants to do.
Speaker 2:I mentioned device provisioning earlier, device onboarding. I hated that because it took up so much time. It was one of those things where, when I knew I had to do it, there goes half a day. I'm not getting anything else done today. So, yeah, I think being able to take those monotonous tasks, those repetitive tasks, and essentially eliminate as much as we can, as much as is feasible, the human interaction on that, that then frees up technicians to focus on more important things. I think that improves service delivery because you're able to focus on things that are more strategic and you're not worried about the, to be honest, the scut work that you're going to have to do in order to close out your day or something like that. So, yeah, I think that's one of our goals here is to take the most annoying aspects of IT and eliminate them. Make it so that you just don't have to deal with them and you focus more on the big picture things. Try to get ahead of work rather than having to play catch up.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. Well, here's to that. You also talk about scale. You work with customers that are global.
Speaker 2:I mean, how do you think about scaling quickly and ramping up with new customers who have very disparate, complex legacy environments, saying this entire time it's automation? I think that as you scale, that's something that you can't hire your way out of. It's just not feasible, especially if you're using legacy tools that don't communicate with each other. I think ultimately, you end up just causing more bloat. You're again causing more problems than you're ultimately going to fix long-term. I view that as a band-aid, trying to paper over the problem rather than actually solve it, that as a band-aid, trying to paper over the problem rather than actually solve it. So, yeah, I think being able to take those manual processes let's say patching, for example and automate them, that's a tremendous amount of savings. I remember speaking to someone who had their solution to this problem. They had thousands of endpoints and they needed to ensure those devices were being patched and their solution was to hire a team of about 30 people.
Speaker 2:They gave them a remote access tool and they went and remote remote, remoted into these devices overnight and patched them, and that was their job for the entire month, and I don't think I need to really put too fine a point on it. That doesn't sound like a very good workflow. It doesn workflow. It sounds rife with the possibility for things to get lost in the shuffle, for mistakes to be made, and that's where we can go ahead and take the Ninja One agent and pop them on a device and the process of patching the operating system can be entirely automated. Somebody might not have to lift a finger the entire month to ensure that thousands of devices, or tens of thousands of devices are able to be patched. And then what do those 30 people do? Well, those 30 people can then work on things that are more important, that are more strategic, rather than having to focus on these just mind-numbing tasks that are the absolute last thing that you want to do, got it.
Speaker 1:So getting your crystal ball out. We talked about AI and automation automation and there's other emerging technologies on the horizon Any trends that you're excited about that IT leaders might want to keep an eye out in the medium term.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I think seeing the consolidation under one roof and seeing the workflow engines and automation engines come out and giving you the ability to really streamline a lot of these processes, I think that to me is really exciting.
Speaker 2:I think the ability of AI to come in and assist technicians make them more efficient.
Speaker 2:I think that, to me, is one of the trends those two trends combined, I think, are incredibly important, because you're taking that monotonous work we keep talking about and you're able to eliminate it via automation, and then you're able to take a technician who maybe doesn't have a lot of experience and up-level them using AI and remove or at least reduce the possibility that they're going to make some sort of critical mistake at the worst possible time.
Speaker 2:So for me, seeing the sort of recognition within the industry that there is a need for more efficiency, there's a need for more automation, because it's the only way that companies are going to be able to scale as they grow and businesses are designed to grow, it's what they do, it's the whole point, for a business is to grow and IT teams need to be able to scale with that growth, and so I think the combination of automation and a platform combined with the ability of AI to assist technicians and make them better than the sum of the parts is something that I really think the second half of the 2020s we're really going to see that ramp up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exciting times. So, before we wrap up, what's next for you and Ninja One?
Speaker 2:Any coming updates on the horizon, new features, other moves, events that you're excited about end of March I think everybody in the world who's using Ninja One you're going to be on the 8.0 release, and that brings some exciting things. We're starting to see the beginnings of iTAM. Within Ninja One, we're introducing a tags feature that I'm very excited about, and then in early April we'll start to see the 8.1 release, and the really exciting thing about that is the introduction of macOS MDM. Apple has made it really clear in recent years that they want their devices to be managed a particular way. They want them to be managed via MDM, and so we're really happy to finally bring out the macOS MDM component so that we're able to go ahead and have that agent approach with the MDM approach, and so you get the best of both worlds. You get all the power and the configuration capabilities of mobile device management while also getting the agent approach that gives you the speed that I mentioned earlier.
Speaker 2:A lot of tools out there it's not instantaneous, it's not something that you can say. This is going to happen within 60 seconds, and with the Ninja One, you can say that when you run a script, that script runs and you get a response back immediately. So, having that combination of an agent-based approach with an MDM approach with our remote access tool, ninja One Remote. I am incredibly excited to finally see that come out. And again, that's due in 8.1, which is going to be in April.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. Well, you have your hands full doing so much great work. Congratulations onwards and upwards. Lots of opportunity to help more clients out there. Jeff, Take care. Thank you very much, Evan. Take care, All right. Thanks everyone for listening and watching and sharing.