“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

Over 150 years ago, the 16th president of the United States Abe Lincoln is credited with saying, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” 

No stranger to failure in his life, you could see this self-driven philosophy resonating with President Lincoln. Having failed in every way imaginable, he remained resilient, eventually becoming president and helping shape a nation in one of its darkest and important hours.

In the coming days, IGEL will host our annual DISRUPT conference in Nashville and then in Munich. This conference is a reflection of the progress we’ve made as a company over the past 19 years. Along the way we’ve had our successes but also many failures. Always driven forward by the conviction that there was a better way to deliver, secure and manage endpoints, our founder Heiko Gloge and his original team of developers (Frank, Klaus and Martin) listened to customers and partners. They’d return to their humble German attics and they experimented, iterated and challenged the status quo.  

They remained focused on a singular vision; create an operating system and a management framework that would deliver the ultimate experience for virtualized Windows desktops and applications. By 2011 they’d figured out how to lift the IGEL OS off IGEL hardware and place it on any x86 device. By 2016 we’d built a plan to take the USA by storm (after 2 successive failures). 

Today IGEL is delivering on the promise of delivering the #1 Edge OS for Cloud Workspaces. We are experiencing outrageous growth driven by the world’s largest hospitals, retailers, banks, manufacturers and governments all looking for a better way to deliver, secure and manage endpoints and applications. Partnering with Microsoft, Amazon, VMware, Citrix and nearly every other relevant player in the end user computing landscape, IGEL is helping create the future. A future where Windows and applications will be consumed out of the cloud and they will be delivered to a high performance, light, secure and easily managed endpoint. The world of an unwieldy fat Windows OS installed on an expensive piece of hardware with locally installed applications is officially over. Can I please get an amen?

The team in Germany predicted this future over two decades ago. Working tirelessly in dark windowless attics to create the future. They originally said, “the Internet needs an OS and maybe it shouldn’t be Windows 95.” They were definitely tracking ahead of their time. 

But we can’t rest on our initial successes.  We have to stay hungry to do more. As one of the visionaries leading the move to the cloud Satya Nadella said on his first day as CEO of Microsoft “our industry does not respect tradition – it only respects innovation.” 

Let me know what you think in the comments and I hope to see you at DISRUPT or somewhere else in this world in the coming months.