An integrated technology network that is primarily designed to manage the app, data, and desktop delivery is called a digital workspace. An important benefit of this network is that it gives them access to the employees to apps and data in real-time, on any device, at any location, regardless of whether the information is stored through a cloud platform or a data center.
Cameyo is one such company that provides a seamless, secure workspace for all Windows and internal web apps, enabling your remote and hybrid workers to be productive from anywhere.
In this interview with Robb Henshaw, Co-founder and CMO, let us know how their technology works.
Tell us about the company.
Cameyo is a Digital Workspace solution that boosts the productivity of remote workers by giving them access to all of the applications they need on any device, from the browser. For example, even if your employees are currently working from home on their devices (like a Macbook or Chromebook), Cameyo enables them to still access and use all of your company’s Windows applications without those apps being installed on their devices.
By enabling organizations to provide their people with access to the business-critical apps they need to stay productive from anywhere, Cameyo helps make Remote Work, work. Hundreds of enterprises and organizations utilize Cameyo’s Digital Workspace solution to deliver Windows and internal web applications to hundreds of thousands of users worldwide.
Cameyo partners with both Google and Microsoft, so the fully-hosted version of our Cameyo platform is available in either Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Microsoft Azure. Customers can also self-host Cameyo’s platform in any other cloud, hybrid, or on-premises environment for ultimate flexibility.
Cameyo is a seamless, secure workspace for all Windows and internal web apps.
What were the initial challenges you faced?
When we initially launched the company, the primary challenge we faced was the need to educate IT that virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and Desktop as a Service (DaaS) products were not their only options. Many organizations simply cannot afford legacy virtual desktop products, and/or don’t have big enough teams to handle the ongoing management complexities.
And in other cases perhaps an organization can afford to pursue virtual desktops, but a large part of their organization doesn’t need a full virtual desktop environment – they just need access to their applications from anywhere, securely. In those cases, deploying virtual desktops for everyone would be overkill, and very costly.
Cameyo’s approach is to help organizations right-size their approach to virtualization. If you have some users that need virtual desktops and others that don’t, you can save your organization a lot of money (and yourself a lot of time) by only deploying VDI or DaaS for the users who truly need it. Then you can utilize Cameyo to easily and cost-effectively give the rest of your employees secure access to all of the apps they need to be productive, no matter what device they’re working on.
Which was that point that triggered the growth of the company?
When a majority of companies worldwide adopted remote work policies back in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, IT teams had to come up with solutions overnight for enabling their people to maintain productivity from home. Virtual desktop technologies typically take weeks (sometimes months) to deploy, so many organizations were looking for a simpler, more cost-effective solution.
Cameyo’s Digital Workspace is purpose-built for the cloud and enables IT organizations to give their people access to all of their business-critical apps within hours, not weeks. So suddenly, we saw a dramatic spike in demand for our platform to help enable remote work for people all over the world.
How have the company graphs changed since the foundation? Can you share a few statistics?
The Cameyo platform has been available for nearly two years. Before the pandemic, we had grown to over 100 customers who were using Cameyo to deliver applications to tens of thousands of employees. In the last six months, our growth has accelerated considerably and we are now working with over 250 customers who are utilizing Cameyo to deliver apps to hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.
What is the reason behind your company’s long-standing success?
Cameyo set out to solve a very specific set of issues that a majority of organizations experience when it comes to enabling simple, secure remote work. By maintaining a relentless focus on solving critical pain points for our customers, that helps us block out other things that could potentially distract us. With every new opportunity, every potential feature request, every possible partnership – we put it all through the lens of “will doing this help our customers enable secure remote work and increase their people’s productivity?” If the answer is no, we don’t do it.
The Products/Services
What are the products/services the company focuses on? How are your services different from those in the market?
Cameyo focuses specifically on providing a Digital Workspace that enables organizations to boost their remote workers’ productivity by giving them secure access to all of their applications from anywhere, on any device.
Cameyo’s Digital Workspace platform is the next evolution of the virtual desktop market. Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is a collection of pre-cloud technologies that are deployed and managed by IT on-site to deliver a virtual desktop experience to their users. This requires significant investment in hardware and requires IT to manage servers, gateways, loads balancers, and other infrastructure. Desktop as a Service (DaaS) sought to ‘disrupt’ VDI by moving certain aspects of virtual desktop delivery to the cloud, but it still relies on the same costly and complex underlying infrastructure.
Cameyo’s Digital Workspace approach eliminates the cost and management complexity involved in managing VDI and DaaS, provides a more seamless user experience that doesn’t require learning any new behavior, and enables the secure use of business-critical applications on any device – even non-IT managed personal devices.
How do you decide to take the company a step further in terms of your products/services?
Everything we do is focused on how we can provide organizations of all sizes with the easiest, most cost-effective, and most secure solution for enabling remote work. This has led to us making several breakthroughs in terms of developing and offering new technologies as part of our platform. The first of these technologies to be introduced was our Cameyo Port Shield technology, designed to protect customers from the dramatic increase in RDP vulnerabilities across the industry, including brute force attacks and ransomware.
Port Shield is the first built-in security technology of its kind that automatically closes RDP ports to the entire world, and then dynamically opens and closes them specifically to authenticated users, based on whitelisted IP addresses, only when needed. The second technology we introduced to further simplify and increase the security of remote work was CameyoNoVPN, a new solution that empowers organizations to give all of their remote workers secure access to internally-hosted web apps without requiring a VPN.
This enables organizations to give remote workers secure access to Windows desktop and Intranet web apps from behind the corporate firewall without the cost and user-experience compromise of VPNs so that people can access business-critical applications from anywhere in the world just as productively as if they were in the office.
Is there any new addition to the list of products/services? Anything exciting you would like to share?
Just this week, on Wednesday, 9/9, we announced the global availability of our fully-hosted Cameyo platform on Microsoft Azure. Previously only available on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Cameyo’s fully-hosted service – which includes premium features like elasticity, usage optimization, and Cameyo’s Session Sync and Port Shield technologies – is now available to all organizations worldwide on Microsoft Azure as well.
The most important responsibility of an entrepreneur is to maintain a relentless commitment to serving your customers.
Leadership
What do you think are the responsibilities of an entrepreneur?
The most important responsibility of an entrepreneur is to maintain a relentless commitment to serving your customers. The only true path to success is to care more about solving your customers’ problems than anything else – even more than growing your own business. If you focus on helping customers and delivering the solution to their pressing issues, then your business will grow as a result.
Can you please brief us about your professional experience?
I am currently the co-founder and CMO at Cameyo, and I have been in technology marketing for over 18 years now. Before Cameyo I was the Global Head of Communications for the IoT Business Unit at Cisco. I joined Cisco when they acquired my previous company, Jasper, for $1.4B in 2016. Before Jasper, I ran marketing & communications for several startups including SugarSync (acquired by J2 Global), GetGoing (acquired by BCD Travel), Proxim Wireless, and more.
How do you look after your employees? What makes your team unique?
Cameyo has always been a completely remote company, even before the pandemic. We are firm believers in remote work, and this enables us to hire the best talent no matter where they exist in the world. This also empowers our people to have the freedom to live wherever they want without having to give up the opportunity to work for a fast-growing startup. As a result, we have an incredible team that is the best at what they do. Also unique is the fact that over 80% of our team has worked together before at previous companies, so we have an incredible culture that is tight-knit like a family, where we value, trust, and respect each other.
