Inspiring Tech Leaders - Exploring Effective Management of End User Computing with Lee Murray, CEO of ClearVisibility

In this episode, I speak with Lee Murray, CEO of ClearVisibility, about the challenges of End User Computing (EUC) and the strategies for managing it effectively.

Discover why there is more to EUC than meets the eye, and learn how organisations can tame its complexities to unlock significant savings and enhance security.  Lee provides invaluable insights and actionable advice that will change the way you approach End User Computing.

Tune in for a deep dive into the world of EUC complexity and efficiency optimisation.

Transcript

Welcome to the inspiring Tech leaders podcast with me Dave Roberts. Today I have the pleasure to be talking with Lee Murray, a Serial Tech entrepreneur and CEO of multiple businesses focused on End User Computing. Lee is the Vice Chair for a Central Government Council that brings together leaders from across the tech industry and also operates as part of the tech UK defence and security board, which focuses on addressing the Strategic IT concerns that impact the defence and security sector. It's fantastic to have you here today Lee. Thanks Dave, it's great to be here, as you know I've been listening to the Inspiring Tech Leaders podcast for a number of years now. Excellent, so Lee we've known each other for for quite some time now and it's been amazing to see the journey that you've been on and the success that you've been having in end user Computing, especially given the partnership that you've established with Microsoft so you've developed these tools that can enable organisations to manage their Estates more effectively and efficiently for less cost, but can you tell me why you focused on End User Computing? Absolutely Dave as you know, I've been in End Using Compute now for the best part of 10 years in my various businesses, but when we formed Clear Visibility it was back in 2022 and that's when the End Using Compute market was estimated to be worth about $10.3 billion, today it's well in excess of that, it's about $11.97 billion and over the next 5 years, it's about expected to grow to $19.32 billion and my software, Clear Visibility, can save over 10% of their annual spend on end using compute, so it's the perfect market for us. That's fantastic, but why is it more complex than most people think? Well it's such a complex market, the reason for this is the number of components involved in a typical user estate. What we find is if you've got 10,000 users, you've got between let say 3 to 500 named applications, like your usual Microsofts, your Adobes, etc. but there's around a million individual instances of software installs, with different versions, dependencies, drivers, making it complex and far more complicated than first meets the eye. Now, the way most organisations believe they know the devices and software is they check and compare data from things like SCCM, Intune, AD and ServiceNow and many others. But they won't show their major discrepancy, not understanding exactly what's on the network represents risk, non-compliance, over or under licensing, software audit risk, increased service desk tickets, and most importantly it's a major security risk. Now the best practice would be to rationalise and consolidate the estate to reduce this complexity but that's easier said than done. Often organisations only do this before a migration to a new platform, but best practice is to do this every day and I'm very pleased to say that there are tools available, which allows this to be automated and performed every single day. So can you tell me how do customers typically approach reducing the complexity and the rationalisation of their End-User Computing estate? The way it's typically done that from what we see is IT staff do a manual audit using usually already overstretched IT staff and a spreadsheet, or they contact a service provider to do a SAM audit. The problem with this approach is it provides a one-off snapshot shot, which becomes out of date the moment that you do it. A SAM audit may tell you that you have for example 400 licenses of let's say Adobe Acrobat Pro, on a particular day, more useful would be to know is are these 400 licenses actually being used? If only 150 are being used, it would make more sense to rationalise this, and swap out the other 250 users to a much cheaper or free version and that can generate in its own a saving of over £207,000 over a 3year period. Actioning change requires communication though with the stakeholders, application owners and users, and this can only be best achieved by Automation and tooling to communicate to the stakeholders and you've also got to get their agreement to change and then affect the change to realise the savings. No point on just showing people more data and obviously it's not just software, we had a customer who believed that they had 12,000 devices on their Network by scanning the estate and pulling information from things like SCCM, AD, ServiceNow, HP warranty information into a single view we were able to show that over 2 and a half thousand of these devices were not in use, they were lost, left in cupboards, some stolen and not been logged in for more than 30 days. This is a big security risk for all the devices, as they may not be patched to the latest version it's also a massive waste of expense and resource not to mention the unused licenses. Now most of these licenses can actually be reused, so we set up a project to communicate with all the last known users, asked them to log back into the network, return the device and we were able to receive over 900 machines back into the IT stock for reuse and that's all via tombstoning and anything that was not returned, was closed off as a security gap. Well that's unbelievable that so many devices could be under the radar there and not be seen! What advice would you give to an organisation planning a migration you know say from maybe Windows 10 to Windows 11, which is something that we all need to get completed before October 2025? Well this is one of the reasons why we work so closely with Microsoft and everything that I'm actually saying is available via the Microsoft Marketplace but you need to understand exactly what you're migrating from and to and don't try to do this with a spreadsheet. Ensure that you know what your 'As-is' is and and 'To-be' position is because you've got to rationalise and consolidate the estate early in the process. If possible, avoid Big Bang migrations, it's far better to have a policy that migrates devices on a constant rolling basis, track dependencies and blockers remember, and this is really important, to include the non-core it systems like CCTV and door entry systems, which often run on Legacy software and most importantly is partner with experienced organisations to assist with migration to allow you to handle the peak workloads if you've got to do it by a specific date. Now we have a a great document, but I'm bound to say that Dave, where you can download a Windows 11 Readiness assessment from our Resource Center on our website. Well I'm definitely going to take a look at that, so why do organisations partner with you? Most of our clients actually come from the Microsoft Marketplace but we are not Microsoft specific, we show every piece of software and obviously Microsoft is only a part player in the software estate or it is via Word of Mouth, which is by far the best way that we want to do business and we also do a lot with fractional CIO and CTOs, as they need to see what's in the new organisation they're joining quickly and many use Clear Visibility just because of the speed of deployment, because I can give them information within hours. Now the main reason that people choose clear visibility is that we have the experience and tooling necessary to manage large end using Estates efficiently, we allow a customer to do miles more with less while significantly reducing the cost and cost of the end user environment, along with our 193 page Playbook with 21 separate value driven elements, enabling compliance and transparency. We provide insights with Integrity in the matter of hours with pinpoint accuracy and the most important thing with Integrity is we can prove all of this upfront in the first 30 days, that is completely free of charge to any end user. So finally, if people wanted to learn more about the solutions we've discussed what's the best way for them to continue the conversation with you and actually see for themselves how powerful the tools can be? So via our website is the best way Dave, which is www.clearvisibility.co.uk or the Microsoft Marketplace again just type in clear visibility one of our globally approved Partners or directly via your Microsoft account manager, as we can actually be purchased once proven directly via your Microsoft contract. So thank you again for talking with us today Lee, it's been insightful as always and no doubt will have sparked many other people to think about how tools such as clear visibility can help reduce the complexity and cost within their end user Computing Estates. Dave absolutely my pleasure thanks for inviting me keep on listening to the Inspiring Tech Leaders podcast.

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