Blog 1000 – Sumir Karayi looks back at 17 years of 1E

To mark the milestone of our 1000^th blog, Sumir Karayi CEO looks back over the past 17 years and the development of the innovative IT cost optimization solutions of 1E.
What is interesting is that when we started the business in 1997, the core focus and the IT problems that we were dealing with (for our customers) were around simple automation. This was because the basic Microsoft tools hadn’t reached maturity, and what we were providing from the outset were solutions to make the Microsoft tools work effectively, such as patching the PCs of remote users – so we wrote Nomad; computers were being left on when not in use constantly because no one was using Wake-On-LAN technologies – so we wrote WakeUp and NightWatchman.
As 1E evolved, we began to concentrate on infrastructure as there is so much technology needed to manage the machines people are using, so we advanced some of our toolset to help customers reduce servers. We realized we had something very revolutionary when we had Nomad deployed in a large North American insurance company, and they were able to take out the need for 18,000 servers. It was a turning point for us – we could make a substantial difference to even the largest organizations.
We realized there was a much greater need for automation especially in Windows devices, and even today one of our key focus areas is helping organizations do more with the same resources. Therefore we augmented a lot of our technologies effectively with automation ‘glue’ to enable companies such as Verizon Wireless migrate 80,000 desktops in four months. The way they did that was through 100 percent automation on the vast majority of their machines, this was fairly unique, and furthermore they did it with the Business-as-Usual team rather than spinning up a new project team to manage the Windows migration.
Today our evolution has brought us to the point where we are bringing all our IT cost optimization technologies together to help our customers run IT for less. Our initial focus is to help customers to run their Windows PC for less, and we have provided a lot of innovation very recently in just the software space having realized that a lot of software installed is not being used on machines. Traditional SAM vendors work hand-in-hand with software license vendors themselves, their primary purpose was never to reduce the cost of software estates but only to ensure compliance. However this only stops you getting on the wrong side of a vendor when you are audited. How about reducing the software bill and as a side effect of that you also will have no fear of software license audits because you have better control of your licenses?
That’s become a big focus for us, now that we are joining up all the dots between hardware, energy, software, and automation. We are looking at $100-300 of savings per Windows PC per year. We are excited about the journey we take with our clients, freeing up many millions of dollars that they can reinvest on innovation to take their businesses forward. We have achieved 39 patents over the past few years, one that we are incredibly proud of is a very new, very unique, way of enabling BYOD/BYOPC which we believe is a key trend regarding how people will work in the future. Watch out for more on that coming very soon.