Lakeside Software is a company focused on giving organizations with large and complex IT environments visibility across their entire digital estate, empowering IT teams to do more with less. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Lakeside Software CEO David Keil to learn more about the company.
David Keil’s Background
Keil is an experienced CEO and board director with more than 30 years of expertise in the tech industry. And Keil said:
“Over the decades, I’ve helped companies ramp up growth and productivity to achieve that next level of success. Throughout my career, I have worked with proven technology founders to help scale companies, elevate management teams, and accelerate growth.”
“I’m currently CEO of Lakeside Software, where we help global enterprises with complex IT environments gain visibility across their entire digital estate. With the shift to remote and hybrid work, there’s never been a more critical time for IT teams to deliver exceptional service to their end users by collecting and utilizing real-time quantitative and qualitative user experience data. Prior to Lakeside, I acted as COO at Tricentis (the leader in enterprise software testing) and CEO at QASymphony, Digistrive, and Momentum Technology.”
“Along with running businesses for more than 20 years, I have a passion for sports, thrive on competition, and value the opportunities I’ve had over the years to mentor and guide exceptional talent. Additionally, I am a strong advocate for entrepreneurship as a catalyst for social change. For the past six years, I’ve been involved with Endeavor, where I also serve on the Atlanta board. Endeavor is a non-profit organization dedicated to building thriving entrepreneurial ecosystems in emerging and underserved markets worldwide.”
“I earned an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and B.S. in applied math and economics from Brown University.”
Formation Of Lakeside Software
How did the idea for Lakeside Software come together? Keil shared:
“Lakeside Software was founded in 1997 by Mike Schumacher, who built a strong culture of innovation and technical excellence. The Lakeside team has built a leading solution focused on collecting more endpoint data than any other solution in the market to offer real-time insights and historical trends that help proactively identify IT problems and automate their resolutions. Additionally, these insights bolster planning and transformation efforts, enabling IT to maintain a keen focus on enhancing the digital employee experience.”
“In May 2022, the same investment team from Insight Partners, with whom I had previously collaborated during my tenure at QASymphony and Tricentis, enlisted me to lead Lakeside.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Keil explained:
“Effortless management of ever-changing IT environments is essential for ensuring that users genuinely enjoy their interactions with workplace technology. To achieve this goal, Lakeside has developed SysTrack, a proactive IT platform designed to provide organizations with a comprehensive view of their IT landscape.
SysTrack enables:
- Shifting IT operations and support left, allowing for the detection and mitigation of problems before end users are even aware of them, reducing the need for IT help desk calls.
- Empowering IT infrastructure stakeholders to conduct real-time capacity planning across the organization, leading to time and cost savings.
- Providing IT management with a holistic view of the entire technical estate, enabling strategic decision-making based on data rather than assumptions.
- Equipping digital workplace leaders with insights into employees’ actual experiences with enterprise technologies and the complete digital employee experience.
All these capabilities are made possible through our Intelligent Edge, which is powered by a lightweight agent installed on each device. This agent gathers more than 10,000 data points every 15 seconds and functions like a “black box,” offering precise information in case of issues. Additionally, it assists users with self-help functionality and AI-driven automations where it matters: on the endpoint device.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Keil cited:
“Lakeside now has nearly 500 customers including some of the largest banks, healthcare institutions, and technology companies in the world. We are recognized by Forrester, IDC, and other leading research firms as one of the leaders in the Digital Employee Experience market.”
“Recently, we launched multiple generative AI features to enhance solutions for customers. Building on the massive amounts of data SysTrack already collects and analyzes, we’re now using this critical data foundation to fuel the industry’s top AI technologies to offer intuitive and accelerated issue resolution, self-service, and proactive IT. Through our Intelligent Support feature, IT service desk technicians can access the full power of SysTrack data combined with the leading large language model at their fingertips. In addition, SysTrack now has integrated support for chatbots to further automate self-service and proactive service delivery at scale.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Keil about customer success stories, he cited:
“While I can’t name specific companies, I can tell you that hundreds of the world’s leading brands trust Lakeside. We work with organizations in more than 30 countries, including several Fortune 100 companies, to give them a better view of their IT estate.
In fact, we recently announced that we secured more than 25 contracts in the financial services sector alone during the first half of this year. Among these wins, customers ranging from global fund managers to regional banks selected Lakeside to support critical use cases including:
- Detecting and resolving technology issues before they impact key personnel, which is how one bank with high service desk call rates saved approximately $300,000 per year.
- Optimizing software costs by identifying unused licenses across the enterprise, which is how several institutions have identified cost-savings opportunities ranging from $60,000 to more than $4 million.
- Offering differentiated services and role-based environments for traders, bankers, and agents, which is how an investment management firm eliminated potential revenue loss due to failed financial trades.
- Enhancing device management strategies by optimizing device lifecycles, reducing unnecessary replacements and associated costs, which is how one New York City-based bank realized it did not need to replace 91% of its laptops planned for annual refresh”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Keil affirmed:
“The breadth, depth, and history of our data. No other solution on the market collects more telemetry data than SysTrack. Our Intelligent Edge collects more than 10,000 data points every 15 seconds. Not to mention, the 1,200+ sensors constantly running automated investigations on every endpoint.”
“Our unique, distributed architecture offers capabilities unparalleled by other platforms. While powerful enough to capture 10 times more data than the nearest competitor, SysTrack is extremely light in resource consumption. We offer more than 300,000 endpoints supported out of the box and as little as 30 minutes of deployment time. This breadth, depth, and history of data allow IT teams to shift from reactive to proactive IT, as well as plan for optimal digital transformation initiatives based on historical and current data.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Keil concluded:
“We will continue to lean into and leverage our heritage and leadership in the End User Computing (EUC) market. We believe the inevitable future of the EUC market is an AI-driven world where computers fix themselves before users even notice and the human helpdesk is irrelevant. We already provide the data that helps the human helpdesk fix issues faster. We will win the race to the AI future by providing the best data and investing heavily in data collection and data access to extend our differentiated position in the market.”
