The Future of Remote Workspaces with Jigsaw24

Episode Transcription

Karen Gondoly, CEO, Leostream
Chris Bailey, Head of Innovation and Media Solutions Lead, Jigsaw24

Part 1: The Evolution of Remote Media Workflows (0:00–8:30)

Karen Gondoly:
I’m here with Chris Bailey from Jigsaw24, which I’m very excited about. Chris, why don’t you introduce yourself and then we’ll kick this conversation off?

Chris Bailey:
Hi Karen. I’m Chris Bailey from Jigsaw24 on the media side of the business. My current role is Head of Innovation and Media Solutions Lead.

I’ve been in the industry for 26 years, working across media in roles ranging from support engineering and pre-sales to innovation. Today, my focus is on future-facing technologies and how we can tie workflows together for the broadcast and post-production industries.

Karen Gondoly:
Thank you. Leostream and Jigsaw24 have an announcement coming out about some exciting steps we’re taking with our partnership, but we’ve actually been partners since 2017, and you’ve been part of that relationship all along.

Chris Bailey:
I think it actually goes back even further than that.

Before Jigsaw24 acquired Route 6, I was with Route 6, and we’ve been working with Leostream for as long as I can remember. We were really starting to pioneer remote workflows as well as on-premises environments long before most organizations in the UK were doing it.

At the time, we partnered closely with Amulet Hotkey and used their endpoints. This was back in the Tera1 days. Leostream provided the authentication and connection brokering, and later, when remote workflows became more important, the Leostream Gateway.

It’s been a long relationship, and we’ve worked together on some amazing projects over the years.

Karen Gondoly:
Obviously, 2020 was an interesting year for everyone. Leostream did a lot of work to add Gateway support for Tera1 and Tera2 cards, and that was a great use case at the time.

I’m sure the use cases you’ve seen have evolved since then. What are you focusing on today?

Chris Bailey:
If we go back a bit, we started with traditional on-premises deployments.

For example, we worked with a large sports broadcaster that had more than 80 desktops. The workstations were tucked away in a machine room while users accessed them from editing suites throughout the building. That was really where we started with connection brokering.

At the same time, we were heavily focused on remote workflows. When Leostream released Gateway, it was a huge milestone for us, and we adopted it very early.

Our customers found it amusing that we believed remote work would become important in media. At the time, Leostream served several industries, but remote work wasn’t widely accepted in media and entertainment.

Following events like the Sony hack, remote access was considered a very sensitive topic. Then COVID happened.

Fortunately, we were in a strong position. Our entire demo environment was already configured for remote access, whether through PCoIP, RDP, or other protocols.

Suddenly, customers started calling us and saying:

“Remember that remote workflow solution you showed us a while ago that we laughed about? We need it now. How can we make it happen?”

We implemented some incredible solutions for major film studios and production companies. During that period, we supported productions representing roughly a billion dollars’ worth of feature films.

Many of those environments weren’t centralized facilities. Each production required its own standalone environment, so we created repeatable deployment templates while tailoring them to the specific needs of each production.

All of those deployments were built around Leostream brokering and the Leostream Gateway. At that time, most environments were still based on PCoIP before HP Anyware became the dominant software solution.

That experience laid the foundation for what happened after COVID. We expanded these solutions across entire facilities, including news organizations and major post-production houses.

We were brokering access to 60, 80, or more workstations across multiple organizations.

From there, we started focusing heavily on virtualization. Hardware costs were increasing, real estate was becoming more expensive, and virtualization offered a better path forward.

Our demo environment was already running on VMware ESXi, with Leostream brokering remote desktops through Gateway. Later, we transitioned to Nutanix, which was a major step forward for us.

We’ve deployed large Nutanix environments for numerous customers, always using Leostream as the connection broker and Gateway platform.

At the time, PCoIP was still the industry standard. Leostream gave us the ability to scale workloads across multiple clusters and environments, whether they were running on-premises, in AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Scale Computing, or elsewhere.

Having a single platform that could span all of those environments gave us tremendous flexibility.

Karen Gondoly:
That’s amazing. It sounds like your team has developed expertise across a wide range of infrastructures and display protocols.

You’ve talked a lot about media workflows, but are you seeing any convergence between the IT requirements in media and other industries?

Chris Bailey:
Absolutely.

I think COVID accelerated a trend that had already begun.

Historically, engineering teams within media organizations focused primarily on media workflows and perhaps some networking. Today, those responsibilities are increasingly shared with larger IT departments that may not have deep media expertise.

One of the advantages of a solution like Leostream is that it provides the documentation, technical information, and security capabilities that IT teams need to feel confident about a deployment.

We also had strong case studies from highly secure environments, including major film studios, news organizations, and post-production facilities. Those examples helped demonstrate that these solutions were secure, proven, and appropriate for enterprise environments.

That approach worked extremely well.

We’ve also seen success outside traditional media organizations. Agencies have been a strong market for us, as have other departments within larger broadcast organizations.

For example, many customers use PCoIP for their editors on-premises while simultaneously running administrative workloads in AWS that are accessed through Amazon DCV.

With Leostream, we can simply enable the appropriate protocol and provide access. If customers have Windows servers that only require basic RDP access, we can support those as well without needing a high-performance display protocol.

Because Leostream is already in place, we can create a new policy, enable a new protocol, and use Gateway to provide HTML5-based RDP access.

That was a game changer.

Instead of deploying multiple platforms, customers have a single pane of glass for the media environment, infrastructure environment, and broader IT environment.

That approach continues to work extremely well for us.

Part 2: Security, Compliance, and Life After PCoIP (8:30–16:30)

Karen Gondoly:
That’s amazing. I love hearing stories like this because it really highlights the flexibility of our platform. We hand someone the software, but we don’t always get to see exactly how they’re using it. Hearing how it supports so many different use cases is incredible.

I’m going to shift gears a little bit because you mentioned security. What are some of the factors that come into play when you’re designing these environments to ensure they’re secure?

Chris Bailey:
Usually, the first questions are around identity and access management.

Can the solution support our identity provider? Can it integrate with Active Directory, whether that’s on-premises or in Azure? Can it support multi-factor authentication? Can we implement single sign-on? Where do the machines live, and where do the servers sit within the infrastructure?

Those are the conversations we’re having right from the beginning.

Every customer is different, but we’ve yet to encounter a situation where the security requirements were beyond what could be addressed. Leostream has done a tremendous amount of work in highly secure industries, including defense, and that experience has been extremely valuable.

I remember receiving a comprehensive set of security documentation from Leostream that became an invaluable resource for our team. Rather than spending hours walking customers through every technical detail, we could provide that documentation and allow them to review the information directly.

We also have to comply with industry requirements such as the Trusted Partner Network (TPN) and SOC 2. These days, the first part of almost every tender process focuses on security, compliance, and sustainability.

Those topics come up immediately, and we address them early in the process.

To your point from earlier, we’re often working with IT teams before we ever engage with the creatives or media engineers. Once the IT team is satisfied with the security and compliance aspects, the conversation can move to the media teams, who are often more focused on performance, workflows, and user experience.

Karen Gondoly:
That leads perfectly into my next topic.

For creative professionals, so much of the user experience depends on the display protocol they’re using. You’ve mentioned PCoIP several times, so I’m going to address the elephant in the room.

What are your plans now that HP Anyware has announced end-of-life for the software?

Chris Bailey:
That’s a great question.

I actually spoke with Randy about this at NAB, and it was good to catch up with him. The announcement certainly came as a surprise, especially considering how large our installed base of HP Anyware and PCoIP deployments is.

We’re talking about hundreds, potentially thousands, of seats across many different customers.

One of the biggest advantages of having Leostream in the environment is that it gives customers choice. You’re not locked into a single display protocol.

I remember when Leostream added support for Amazon DCV within Gateway. That was huge for us because we had customers expanding into AWS. Since Amazon includes DCV licensing with many EC2 instances, customers wanted to take advantage of that rather than paying for another protocol in the cloud.

Leostream made that transition seamless.

Customers could continue using PCoIP on-premises while using Amazon DCV in AWS, all managed through the same platform.

Amazon DCV is certainly one option we’re evaluating moving forward.

We’re also looking at TGX Remote Workstation for high-performance graphics workloads, and we currently have some active use cases around that.

Another option we’re exploring is NoMachine. Those are probably the primary alternatives we’re evaluating today.

The biggest challenge is Mac support.

On the Windows side, we have several viable options and feel confident about the path forward. Mac environments require a bit more evaluation because we need to ensure the performance and user experience meet the expectations of our customers.

Solutions like NoMachine show promise in that area, but we still need to perform more testing.

For our larger customers, the next step is helping them evaluate different display protocols and determine which one best fits their workflows.

The post-COVID era taught us that having the right platform in place is critical, and for us, that platform has been Leostream. Once that foundation exists, different teams can choose the display protocol that best suits their requirements.

Some editors preferred PCoIP. Others favored Amazon DCV. We also saw customers using HP RGS, which offered a lighter-weight option for certain workflows.

Regardless of the protocol, we continued using the Leostream Connection Broker and Gateway to provide access.

There’s still a lot of testing to be done, and there are additional display protocols entering the market. One of the things we value about Leostream is the ability to adapt as those technologies evolve.

I’ll give a small spoiler alert from my conversation with Randy—there may be some new developments coming that will help address the Mac OS use case as well.

Karen Gondoly:
That’s exactly what we want to hear, and it’s one of the reasons we’ve partnered with Jigsaw24 for so long.

You’ve always been willing to evaluate and support different display protocols, including technologies that many people may never have heard of because they’re accustomed to using whatever protocol they’ve been told to deploy.

PCoIP and HP Anyware are great examples of that.

We have some exciting things coming in future releases that I can’t talk about yet, but you’ll definitely see additional capabilities aimed at supporting Mac OS environments.

One of the advantages of our architecture is that we’re agile—not only as a company but also in the way the platform is built. The way we’ve integrated with third-party technologies makes it easier to add support for new protocols and new infrastructure platforms.

Speaking of infrastructure, you’ve mentioned that you’re moving a lot of customers to Nutanix.

Are you seeing that trend broadly across the industry, or are customers evaluating other VMware alternatives as well?

Chris Bailey:
We moved to Nutanix quite some time ago, well before the recent changes in the VMware market.

Obviously, the Broadcom acquisition has changed the conversation considerably, particularly around pricing. As a result, other hyperconverged infrastructure vendors are pursuing opportunities in that market.

For us, Nutanix has been extremely successful.

We’ve deployed Nutanix into a number of large broadcasters and media facilities, all backed by Leostream.

One of the key advantages is the deep API integration between Leostream and Nutanix AHV. That integration enables us to provision editing environments directly from templates and images with minimal effort.

Media workflows don’t necessarily rely on ephemeral virtual machines the way financial services organizations often do, but the ability to scale resources up and down remains extremely valuable.

We’re also seeing increased interest in cloud bursting.

Many customers are interested in cloud infrastructure, but the economics don’t always make sense when you’re running dozens of edit suites around the clock.

We have one customer with more than 120 Nutanix-based editing environments brokered through Leostream. Running those workloads 24 hours a day in the cloud would be extremely expensive.

Instead, customers may choose to provision a small number of workstations in AWS when additional capacity is needed. Leostream allows us to provision those systems on demand and then shut them down when they’re no longer required, helping control costs through power management and automation.

That’s incredibly powerful.

We’ve also evaluated Scale Computing for smaller virtualization environments, but when it comes to GPU-accelerated editing workloads, Nutanix remains our primary platform.

Part 3: Thin Clients, AI, and the Future of Media Infrastructure (16:30–24:30)

Karen Gondoly:
A good example of that is our own demo environment. We’ve been running our entire demo estate on Nutanix for several years now, with Leostream managing the whole thing.

Even at MPTS in London last week, we didn’t bring any servers or workstations. We brought laptops and a few thin clients and remoted into everything. Depending on bandwidth conditions, we could switch between PCoIP and RDP over HTML5.

That flexibility was especially valuable because trade show internet is never great.

Chris Bailey:
Exactly.

Karen Gondoly:
You mentioned another important part of the infrastructure that we haven’t talked about yet: thin clients. What types of thin clients do you typically deploy?

Chris Bailey:
We’ve been an Amulet Hotkey partner for a very long time. In fact, it was through our relationship with Amulet Hotkey that we were first introduced to Leostream.

Their endpoints became a foundational part of many of our deployments. We used traditional zero clients extensively, and I still have one sitting on my desk today. It continues to work extremely well when connecting through Leostream to our office environment or to virtual machines in our demo infrastructure.

One of the biggest advantages of Amulet Hotkey has always been security.

Everything is manufactured in the UK, and they’re heavily focused on industries where security is critical, including defense, oil and gas, and other highly regulated sectors.

Security has always been important in media as well. In many cases, media organizations are protecting highly valuable intellectual property. Whether you’re talking about a major studio, a broadcaster, or a post-production facility, security is a top priority.

We’ve partnered with Amulet Hotkey through multiple generations of technology and operating systems, from traditional zero clients to more modern endpoint solutions.

Whether users connect through a PCoIP client, a browser-based session, or Leostream Connect, we’re able to provide secure, managed endpoints combined with Leostream’s connection brokering and security controls.

There are a lot of moving parts, but they work together very effectively.

Karen Gondoly:
Absolutely.

Let’s shift to the future. Where do you see both the industry and Jigsaw24 heading over the next few years?

Chris Bailey:
That’s a great question.

AI is obviously the topic everyone wants to talk about, but one of the most interesting things I saw recently at NAB—and previously at IBC—was something slightly different.

For the first time, I saw major vendors actively collaborating with one another.

Traditionally, vendors have been fairly siloed. At NAB, however, I saw companies showcasing each other’s technologies and promoting integrated solutions rather than isolated products.

That was incredibly encouraging.

What customers want are solutions that work together. They don’t want vendor lock-in. They want flexibility, interoperability, and integrations that solve real business problems.

Leostream is a great example of that approach because it serves as a central management layer while working with multiple display protocols, infrastructure platforms, and technologies.

That trend toward integration is only going to continue.

Everything is increasingly being connected through APIs.

In the media industry, customers want the freedom to choose the technologies that best fit their workflows. They want to select the AI tools they use, the storage platform they use, the transcoding solution they use, and the display protocol they use.

The goal is to make all of those components work together in a way that’s simple, efficient, and easy to manage.

We’re also seeing workflow orchestration becoming much more accessible.

Tasks that once required significant engineering effort can now be automated more easily than ever before. AI is beginning to play a role in building and managing those workflows as well.

That’s clearly not going away.

The challenge, of course, is understanding what role humans continue to play as more processes become automated.

At the same time, the goal isn’t necessarily to replace people. It’s about increasing efficiency across the media supply chain.

Whether that’s providing secure access to systems through a platform like Leostream, automating workflows, or streamlining operations, customers are looking for ways to improve efficiency and productivity.

I think we’ve also moved beyond the peak of the AI hype cycle.

Organizations are now using AI in practical ways to solve real problems. The technology is advancing at an incredible pace, and part of my job is making sure we’re staying on top of those developments and identifying the right technologies to incorporate into customer workflows.

Ultimately, it’s about assembling the right components to help people work more effectively.

Karen Gondoly:
That makes a lot of sense.

I’m going to wrap up with one final question. Where can people learn more about Jigsaw24?

Chris Bailey:
Jigsaw24 has two primary sides to the business.

There’s our broader Apple and IT infrastructure business, and then there’s Jigsaw24 Media.

If you visit jigsaw24.com, you’ll find a dedicated Media section where you can explore the solutions we provide for post-production, broadcast, news, live production, and related workflows.

The broader business focuses on areas such as IT infrastructure, Apple technologies, and enterprise solutions.

What’s interesting is that those two sides of the business are becoming increasingly connected.

Many of the technologies that originated in media environments are now being adopted by large enterprise organizations. That’s one of the reasons Leostream has become such an important platform for us.

A solution that began as a way to provide secure access to media workstations is now helping organizations provide secure access to a wide range of IT resources.

That’s also why I’m excited about VPAM.

VPAM gives organizations a secure way to provide controlled access to systems without relying on older remote support approaches that many businesses are becoming uncomfortable with.

Whether users have direct access through the Leostream platform or receive temporary, controlled access through VPAM, it creates a much stronger security posture while simplifying support workflows.

I think that’s going to be extremely valuable for a lot of organizations.

Karen Gondoly:
That’s another little spoiler alert for one of our upcoming products.

VPAM will support a number of additional use cases that we’ll talk about in a future podcast.

Chris, thank you so much for joining me today. It’s been a great conversation. I’ve really enjoyed hearing about the wide variety of use cases your team is working on, and I look forward to many more years of partnership between Jigsaw24 and Leostream.

Chris Bailey:
Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

Karen Gondoly:
Thank you.