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Comment by numlocked | Hacker News Reader

I am the 37 year old CTO and co-founder of a company that pays VMWare something like that per year because we need an endpoint management solution. We have a strong engineering team but that certainly isn’t something we are going to build ourselves. VMWare is not just virtualization.

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I'm in a senior position but not CEO. I'd pay VMware for virtualization as it just works compared to the complexity of opensource solutions. For endpoint mgmt, I'm curious about your use case? Is it about managing virtual endpoints in the cloud, on-prem servers (physical or virtual) or are you talking about laptops/workstations?

VMware purchased Airwatch, perhaps the premiere mobile device management suite.

Laptops and workstations. We use Workspace ONE.

Grove.co is a great example because it is totally not a software company. Is your role as CTO primarily the ERP & storefront, or just one or the other? I'm not following what you mean by endpoint (other than "storefront" because ERP would all be a SaaS right?)

Storefront. We have our own headless e-commerce platform, with iOS, Android, and Web clients. We also have our own order management system that mediates between storefront and our ERP (which is commercial SaaS). And a handful of other smaller applications for everything from outbound carrier rate card testing, to customer service tooling & automation (integrated with ZenDesk) and all sorts of other bits and bobs like ETL code, integration layers, marketing tools, etc, etc. We should not have quite this much custom software, but it takes time to migrate the non-strategic sub-systems to commercial solutions — and even then you’d be surprised how much custom software we DO actually need in a business like this.

My role also encompasses many “CIO-like” functions, but my area of expertise is in application development and I look to hire strong leaders in the other areas (or move certain tech domains entirely into other functions — eg our warehouse management system lives within our operations group, and me and my team help in an advisory capacity but don’t “own” the budget or WMS strategy).

What deems the ERP necessary that you can't do custom?

endpoint being employee devices, probably (via vmware's workspace one product)

It may be my pure naivety about management software, but I assume it just consists of spreadsheets, forms, secure login, data storage, and simple queries. I cannot imagine anything with this combination that couldn't be implemented in Google Sheets (and workspaces, and a handful of other google cloud apis) for at most $20 a month per user.

whats an „endpoint management solution“

Compliance based stuff... "do you trust this machine to access your network/services/applications and execute these commands?"

https://www.crowdstrike.com/cybersecurity-101/endpoint-secur...

(the VMWare owned product isn't CrowdStrike, that just had the best SEO page with a clear description. VMWare have Carbon Black which is the other dominant player in this market https://www.vmware.com/uk/products/whats-new/carbon-black.ht... )

That's really interesting. So a company would hire Crowdstrike/VMWare, and say "here's all these endpoints, make sure they are secure"? And then CS/VM would provide the service to manage the assets and their connectivity? Ka-ching. I would not want to spin up an IT team to do all of this if I could hire some experts with concentrated knowledge.

Hit the nail on the head. It's a bit more than that realistically.

I work for CrowdStrike just so any potential bias is out there in the open, but do not speak for them.

Hope you started working there years ago and got that sweet stock gains

They are almost certainly talking about Airwatch, which is a mobile device management solution (allows an employer to set restrictions on BYoD endpoints.) It might be a reference to Carbon Black, which is kind of like an antivirus client with some forensics capabilities added in.

Access control/management for corporate networks and networked resources.

usually cell and mobile device but can also include computers. Being able to push out software, policy updates, provisioning and remote wiping of devices.

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