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?
From Telemetry To Time Saved: How Lakeside Cuts Help Desk Costs
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Want proof that better IT experience can be engineered, not wished into existence? From the floor at Gartner, we sit down with Lakeside to explore how a lightweight, 29‑year-old agent design built for scarcity is suddenly perfect for today’s edge. When compute, memory, and network were expensive, the team designed a platform that sips resources, keeps data close to the device, and structures it cleanly. That constraint-driven approach unlocks speed, privacy, and resilience for modern fleets spread across remote and hybrid work.
We dig into how first‑party endpoint telemetry becomes actionable insight: structured SQL tables that AI can query without guesswork, a built-in server that responds to natural language, and clear answers to everyday pain like “Why is Outlook slow?” Instead of sifting through noisy logs or waiting on remote sessions, IT can see patterns, correlate changes, and resolve issues before they cascade. The payoff shows up in the metrics executives care about—lower MTTR, fewer escalations, and help desk costs cut by up to 50 percent. Just as important, employees feel the difference in fewer slowdowns and faster recovery.
There’s a practical path to proactive support: detect drift early, isolate risky cohorts, and push targeted fixes across the fleet. By keeping much of the data local and imposing a consistent structure, Lakeside shortens the path from question to answer while preserving performance on the endpoint. That makes scale manageable and ROI visible, which resonates with the “bosses of the bosses” walking the Gartner halls. If you’re wrestling with sprawl, inconsistent tooling, or elusive root causes, this conversation shows how to turn devices into their own best administrators and turn IT data into durable advantage.
If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a teammate who fights ticket queues, and leave a quick review telling us the one metric you’d improve first.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
And we are here at Gardner Symposium with Lakeside. Tal, how are you? How are you, Evans? You know, we've been talking uh for so many years that I think you've seen me through like nine different companies.
SPEAKER_00:I've seen that, and I've also seen this uh transition, which is really exciting. Congratulations on coming back to Lakeside. And for those who may not be familiar, give us the pitch. What's the big idea?
SPEAKER_01:So Lakeside is a uh digital employee experience platform. Uh what we do is we collect a whole bunch of first-party telemetry uh from edge devices, endpoints, laptops, and so on and so forth. Uh, and then we provide IT that information to help uh root cause analysis, reduce MTTR, make it easier to solve problems, be proactive. The whole idea is that uh essentially Systrack is like shipping every device with an IT administrator in it. Wow. So that you know it's it especially for large organizations that struggle with you know how to deal with problems or scaling. Like, does this problem exist only on one laptop? Does it exist on a thousand laptops? How do I prioritize the issues that I deal with?
SPEAKER_00:Uh, it's a great tool. That's amazing. Well, digital employee experience has been such a challenge for like decades. Yes. It sounds like you have um quite a game-changing solution.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, well, what's game-changing is actually uh, you know, the rarely in technology do we see uh uh the phrase uh everything that's old is new again. We don't really hear that often. But when this was designed 29 years ago, uh this agent was designed at a time where uh compute was expensive, memory was expensive, network was expensive. So we designed a very lightweight technology that today happens to be a really great fit for edge. Right. Uh concurrently, we keep all the data locally, a lot of the data locally on the device. And what's cool, we used to be picked on on this, is that we structure our data. So the data exists as SQL, which is great for training AI. Wow. You know, AI loves structure data. And so uh what we've built is essentially an MCP server uh directly uh built into the product. So now you could, with natural language, either agentically or directly through human beings, ask questions from your endpoint.
SPEAKER_00:Like, hey, why is Outlook slow? Amazing. Well, that you talk about 50% reduction in help desk costs. That's a pretty practical, compelling value prop in this age of Sora videos and open AI. Um, how's the reception here at Gartner?
SPEAKER_01:Uh it's been wonderful. I mean, this particular conference is about shoot clicks higher than the the people so we would consider to be our economic buyers. So we're usually talking to the bosses of the bosses, of the people who buy our stuff. So a lot of the conversations we have are like, hey Lakeside, I saw I saw your name on a PO that I signed. What value are you bringing to my organization? You know, that kind of thing. So it's been great to sort of educate them and explain to them how they're saving money using our software. Well, congratulations on all the success, onwards and upwards. Very excited. Great to see you. Great to see you. Thank you.