362% ROI in 3 years: Breaking Down the Value of Automox

Episode Summary

In this episode of Product Talk, Peter Pflaster and Ashley Smith take a look back at the year, chatting about key product innovations and insights from an IDC study revealing the business value of Automox. They talk about the reported 362% 3-year ROI from the IDC study, how policy-driven automation boosts IT efficiency, and the recent revamp of Automox University, which helps train users and allows them to freely gain knowledge and certificates. The conversation highlights the need for quick implementation and delivering immediate business value in today's IT world.

Transcript

Peter Pflaster: Hello everyone and welcome to the final Product Talk podcast of the year. Today, we're gonna be discussing kind of the year as a whole. We're gonna look back at some of the key releases and new innovations on the product side. And we'll talk about some exciting new data that we've gotten from a recent study from IDC. Joining me today, I have another star of the IT or Autonomous IT Podcast Network, and that is Ashley. She runs our customer marketing here at Automox from the IT Heroes podcast. So welcome, Ashley. I want to just give folks a quick intro about you before we dive into the product talk side of things.

Ashley: Yeah, sure. Hi, everyone. If we haven't met yet, my name is Ashley. I talk on our Autonomous IT podcast for our Heroes of IT segment, where I interview people who we think are our heroes of IT. And those episodes come out on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Peter Pflaster: Awesome. Yeah, it's a great podcast. Definitely recommend checking it out if you have not. so having, we got Ashley on this month to talk a little bit about the year in review, but also a little bit about, our, our virtual summit. and for those of you who don't know the, the Automox virtual summit, happens, is it biannually still Ashley?

Ashley: You know, this probably isn't the best thing to say on a podcast. I always have to stop myself because there's a difference between biannually and semi-annually. And so I think it's technically a semi-annual summit. But essentially, for those of you who haven't seen, it is a virtual summit that we have in the spring and then in the fall of every year, focusing kind of on similar but different themes, bringing in people from Automox to talk about the product as well as our customers.

Peter Pflaster: Yeah, and we just had our virtual summit a couple of weeks ago. It was a lot of fun. We had a ton of people there. I always try not to look at the attendee list when I present at those things. But it was a ton of fun. We talked a little bit about the previous year. So we'll be talking about a lot of that stuff here today..

Without further ado, I suppose we can jump in. Today we're going to be chatting about a lot of the stuff that we've reviewed. I've cherry picked kind of three or four items that I think are really exciting that have come out in the last year from a product perspective. So I think the first thing that I want to talk about is our third party.

study that we worked with IDC International Data Corporation with to talk a little bit about the business value of of Automox. And this study dove really deep into the ROI that real Automox customers are getting from the platform. Ashley, why don't you tell us just a little bit about a couple of the top line stats from that report.

Ashley: Yeah, definitely. I think that's something that I've noticed since being here at Automox for the past two years is

when you're speaking to a customer, like how to compare pre-Automox to what they're now currently experiencing. And it can be really difficult, like with older tools, it can be really difficult to know your baseline or even just find time to track the data if you do have access to it. So that's kind of why these numbers are so awesome to see. It kind of gives you a direct insight into how IT is being transformed. But customers are really excited about the value that they get from

That's kind of the resounding note that we heard from this study. The IDC business value study found an astounding 362% three-year ROI for our customers on average, which is kind of an incredible number. Do you know what are some big drivers of that or if there's been any recent product updates that could have driven that number?

Peter Pflaster: Yeah, so this report, and I should have explained this at the beginning, is we help to source customers that are on the platform. And IDC goes through an independent, anonymized interview process with those customers. We're actually working on finalizing the full white paper right now, IDC is. And we should have that available in the next couple of months on.

on the website as well. So folks want to dive really deep into like the methodology of the study. I would totally recommend that. know that, you you, don't, never want to accept things that face value, especially when it's a vendor saying something. But this, this report had some really cool findings from, from real customers that are using us. So the ROI is really based in, kind of what we believe.

from a product perspective, like everything that we do is based on these beliefs, right? Like our product, we want to be the easiest to use, easiest to implement and maintain. And a lot of that is focused around being in the cloud, right? So there's no infrastructure to manage. There's no dependencies on VPNs. And there's no ongoing maintenance of infrastructure, databases, et cetera. That's a huge part of it. The second piece is automation.

which we'll talk about as well. But one of the biggest benefits for a lot of customers that pays off probably in the first couple of hours of installing Automox on their endpoints is just third party patching. It's really should be pretty simple, but it's a problem that has not been solved. And like we've seen the amount of applications that businesses need to function today increase.

astronomically, right? Like for myself, I'm a heavy Slack user, obviously like Google Chrome browser stuff, but I would probably, I don't keep my Google Chrome up to date the best, but my IT team through Automox forces me to update it. So I actually do keep, do a pretty good job of keeping it up to date now on Automox. And this year we blew past 500 parties.

500 third party software titles that we can automatically patch with Automox. I want to say when I joined three and a half years ago, we were probably at 42 or so. And even over the last year, we've added over 50 new titles to that third party catalog per quarter. So just huge velocity there. The ability to just automatically detect and package and then deploy third party updates when they're available.

It's a huge time saver for IT. That same IDC study found that customers saw 128% more software titles covered when they switched to Automox. That was a huge efficiency gain for them just in reducing their overall attack surface. But because of the way that we automate the packaging, deployment, and detection of those updates, we actually saw, the average customer saw 280% more patches applied.

per full-time employee on the IT team. So huge efficiency gains there that help to drive that ROI number from a patching perspective.

Ashley: Yeah. It's actually a little bit funny whenever someone asks me.

what Automox does like from my personal life, like my parents or like family friends. I'm always like, you know when Google tells you that your browser is out of date and you need to update it, like that's what we do. So I think that that kind of speaks to not just how third party patching is so important in IT, but it's also important to like your end users and people who have no clue what patching is and no clue what IT operations does. But.

Another big benefit of switching to Automox is policy-driven automation, which is a big driver of that three-year ROI figure that we talked about earlier. For those listening who might not own Automox yet, they're maybe just starting a trial. They've seen a demo on the website. Peter, can you break down what is policy-driven automation? Because it sounds a little bit like a buzzword.

Peter Pflaster: Yeah, it's pretty simple, really. And it actually describes pretty well what we do there. Essentially, what it is is I dictate a desired state or a thing that I want to happen on an endpoint that might be enforcing a configuration standard that is part of a compliance requirement.

that my organization has to abide by, might be auditing devices to see what processes are running at a given time, right? So it's just setting that desired state and then adding a cadence to it so it's automated, right? So I'm setting a schedule and I'm setting the desired state and Automox is automatically checking and then potentially taking action if required and if dictated in that policy-driven automation.

So that's, that's big. and really how we do that, right. So like patching is one aspect. right. The, the other side of that is worklets and we have made great strides with worklets over the last year. worklets are, are just units of, of automation work is, is that's where the name comes from originally at some auto mocks history, there for you. So they give you the ability to like take action.

remotely and at scale on Windows, Mac, Linux devices, right? That can be that policy driven like automated action, but it can also be via fix now, which is that like point and click. I select my devices, I run the automation, I get the instant feedback on what actually happened on the devices, right? Just depends on what type of work the IT team is trying to accomplish with that task. So you can build your own.

bespoke, right, based on unique use cases that you have as an IT team. But you can also utilize the WorkWith catalog, which we feel like is a huge benefit of the Automox platform and also a big driver of that overall ROI metric that we talked about at the top of the podcast. That WorkWith catalog is, I think, up over 360 different.

use cases that's run the gamut from, you know, security, auditing, vulnerability, remediation, device configuration, et cetera. And that's built and maintained by former IT administrators that work at AutoBox now. So we have a whole team here that that's essentially keeping those up to date, building new ones all the time for you. And I think we more than doubled that catalog over the last year.

really cool. We added some great new use cases, auditing and then potentially automating the updating to windows 11, for devices, for organizations that are trying to modernize their operating systems on devices. That's a huge one. There's also a ton of, worklets around vulnerability remediation. We, we saw a lot of, activity around Log4j a couple of years ago. So we created a Worklet there.

to help teams find and then remediate that vulnerability before the patch became available. So there's a lot of cool use cases for both IT and security. And ultimately what that leads to, and what we discovered in the IDC study, is 56% more efficient troubleshooting teams because we had healthier devices, but they could also remotely access the devices very easily with automox. We also saw

44% more efficient security teams because of that automated remediation of vulnerabilities and auditing that we can do with workloads. And then from a patching side of things, when we talk about policy-driven automation, on average organizations had almost double, so 96% more patches automated with Automox. So huge outcomes there.

Ashley: Yeah. And I think something that kind of lends itself to those numbers is when we're saying, you know, like 44% more efficient security teams or 96% more automated patches. those aren't people that's been in the tool for like,

two, three, four years. The IDC study actually found that people are seeing these results in as quickly as like four months, which is like immediate business value, which I think is pretty impressive, especially if you're having to speak to like your higher ups, you're talking to your CIO, your CTO, your CISO and having to justify, you know, having an IT tool being onboarded quickly and fluent quickly in a tool is so important.

Peter Pflaster: Yeah. And I think, you know, today in like, not to get on a soapbox or anything, but like today in society, right. It's very much focused on, on more instant gratification, right? So we can't, as it administrators, you can't really, buy a tool and have a, you know, 12 to 18 month implementation before you're up and running and start to see return on that investment. just doesn't work like that anymore. Right.

Ashley: That's why we're here.

Peter Pflaster: You have to be able to not only justify the cost of the tool, but really return results pretty quickly. And we were pretty proud in the IDC study with finding a four month payback on the initial investment for those customers that were surveyed. So huge outcomes there. We really feel like the biggest drivers of those are just how the platform is designed. Right? So like being cloud native, like many other SaaS tools, right? Like that.

blends itself to a very quick implementation, generally speaking. But we take it a step further with how we design the platform, right? To be very intuitive, have a simple user interface that people can pick up quickly. So most people can be proficient in the platform in much less than a week. And most are.

pretty knowledgeable and are able to get most of their work done within a couple hours in the platform, which is not a given for most IT tools and security tools out there today. One of the things that I think was most exciting from this year was our revamp of Automox University. And Automox University is a totally free tool that...

We have created for all of our customers. And even if you're like not a customer, I think you can go look at it and, and, sign up and take courses. I mean, obviously it wouldn't be super applicable to you because it's all about using Automox but you can see the platform, and get a sense of, how it works pretty easily. as I mentioned, it's free for everyone. We completely revamped the university this year. We added, new learning paths. So you have a clear, curriculum of what you need to learn in what order.

And we also added certifications to that along with nine new courses. So we're always adding courses as we release new features, as we come up with new best practice advisories, right? So it's not only about using the tool, it's about getting the most out of the tool, which is really cool. And then the certifications are really exciting as well because you're able to take something real, like a true credential that you can add to your LinkedIn or your resume.

when you move on to your next position or to justify a raise at your current job. So I think that's really cool. And worst case scenario, if you take all the courses, you're probably going to get more efficient in the platform and save time for yourself.

Yeah, so those were really the three things that I wanted to highlight from the year that I felt like were the most impactful that we released this year that kind of drive that 362% three-year ROI that our customers who are surveyed in the IDC study saw. Much more coming there. You'll probably see some additional media and papers around that as well. But thank you very much for joining us this month on Product Talk.

Happy holidays to everyone listening and thank you Ashley for hopping on today.

Ashley: Thanks for having me.