Jed Ayres Named New Global Co-CEO For IGEL

“The channel will benefit from our rapid growth as we are 100 percent channel,” said new Global Co-CEO Jed Ayres. “Our initial partners we identified three years ago are experiencing explosive growth. Most of them have deep seven-figure IGEL practices now.”

IGEL North America CEO Jed Ayres, the driving force behind IGEL’s transformation into a next-generation edge operating system software company, has been named global Co-CEO for the Germany-headquartered company.

Ayres, who took the helm of the North America business three years ago, will now oversee global business strategy, daily operations and the executive leadership team, and become the public face of the company.

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IGEL said the appointment is part of an expansion of its executive leadership team in anticipation of continued rapid growth. As Co-CEO with Ayres, founder and current CEO Heiko Gloge–who has headed the company on his own for the last 18 years–will focus on modernization of back-office operations, compliance structure, legal and GDPR privacy regulation issues.

“This is evidence of how big an opportunity is in front of us,” said Ayres in an interview with CRN. “We will hire over 100 people in 2020 and sell over one million IGEL-powered OS [operating system] endpoints.”

In the first half of this year, IGEL software revenue in North America grew 147 percent with overall global sales up 47 percent.

Ayres, who spent 20 years as a top executive at several CRN Solution Provider 500 companies including MCPc, MTM Technologies and GE Capital IT Solutions, said the rapid growth means more opportunity for IGEL partners.

“The channel will benefit from our rapid growth as we are 100 percent channel,” he said. “Our initial partners we identified three years ago are experiencing explosive growth. Most of them have deep seven-figure IGEL practices now.”

With IGEL as the Microsoft recommended “key” partner for companies looking to deploy Linux-based edge devices that support Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD), the addressable market for the IGEL Linux OS endpoint is increasing dramatically, said Ayres.

Among his top priorities as global co-CEO, said Ayres, will be continuing to drive innovation on IGEL’s Linux OS with “significant” investment in research and development, as well as additional software integrations with key partners.

Other investments include hiring additional channel talent to drive “more and faster investment in the channel,” said Ayres. “We will continue to hire the best and brightest people in end user compute and will begin a transformation to software subscription no later than 2022,” he said.

Ayres pledged to continue to build on the “fabric of trust and customers success” that Gloge has established within the IGEL culture.

“The IGEL culture is one of a servant’s heart, where we are 100 percent focused on delivering success for our employees, customers and partners,” he said. “Our unwavering core values around trust, innovation and customer success will drive us.”

Besides the Ayres appointment, IGEL also announced that it is promoting Simon Townsend to Chief Marketing Officer, Bernd Sengpiehl to Chief Operations Officer; Lori Thompson to Chief People Officer, each at a global level.

“IGEL has doubled the size of our leadership team with this move,” said Ayres.

The new global executives in the U.S. join top executives in Germany including Simon Richards, Chief Customer Officer; Matthias Haas, Chief Technology Officer; Martin van Os, Chief Financial Officer; and Brad Tompkins, Chief Sales Officer on the IGEL executive leadership team. In addition, Nicole Simons will now serve as Chief of Executive Staff, supporting this new leadership team.

Ayres said he is looking forward to rallying partners to take advantage of the lucrative edge operating system opportunity with IGEL at the company’s DISRUPT end user computing forum in Nashville from Jan. 27-29, 2020.

“DISRUPT is going to be the biggest cloud workspaces forum of the year – a place where the entire ecosystem can come together to advance edge endpoint solutions,” he said. “My call to action for partners is to understand the revolutionary impact of Windows Virtual Desktop out of Azure and IGEL Linux OS on edge devices delivering cost effective, high performance cloud workspaces. Partners need to build IGEL into their plans and practices for workspace transformation.”