Mike Schumacher, Founder of Lakeside Software, shares insights on the role of SysTrack in revolutionizing IT visibility, AI-powered DEX, and financial services efficiency.
Mike, could you start by sharing your journey and what led you to start Lakeside Software?
In 1997, systems integrators and customers were trying to figure out how many users could share a compute platform, how to balance system resources for the best performance, and how to troubleshoot problems that plagued these systems. SysTrack 1.0 addressed these problems, focusing primarily on Citrix multi-user platforms. The platform expanded to desktop and notebook environments and added user analytics a few years later. Over time, as we added more and more features. The collection of SysTrack capabilities came to define the Digital Employee Experience (DEX) market that exists today. While the product can do so much more today, the original driving force hasn’t changed: Help our customers deliver the best user experience at the most cost-effective price.
How does Lakeside Software’s SysTrack platform provide complete IT visibility for financial services organizations?
Lakeside Software is an endpoint monitoring platform that leverages our embedded AI engine and rich data set to enable IT teams to proactively resolve complex issues. For financial service organizations, this means having visibility across their entire IT environments, which are often incredibly complex and frequently changing. By collecting 10,000 data points every 15 seconds off of almost any type of device – from trading floor systems to an ATM – financial service IT teams can see the health, performance, and usage of endpoint devices in real time. This allows them to detect and fix issues before they become widespread or disrupt the business.
With data collection happening every 15 seconds from each endpoint, what are some of the unique advantages SysTrack offers compared to other solutions in the market?
Lakeside is the only AI-powered Digital Employee Experience (DEX) platform in the market. Not only is Lakeside the original DEX provider (founded in 1997), it is also continuing to innovate by using its unmatched depth of data collection to drive new capabilities, such as Machine Learning, Generative AI, and Predictive Analytics.
For financial service organizations, this amount of data collection means having enough data to fuel AI to provide differentiated service delivery for key employee groups while accelerating digital transformation initiatives and shedding unnecessary spend. High quality, clean data is essential to drive success with AI and ML-based applications.
How can financial services organizations leverage the data collected by SysTrack to boost productivity and efficiency?
With more data than any other DEX provider, Lakeside helps financial service organizations boost productivity and efficiency by enabling proactive IT, accelerating digital transformations, and managing costs
One example I like to share is on managing software waste. A multinational bank was struggling with proving compliance of their software inventory simply because they didn’t have visibility into which software applications were installed and where. Using SysTrack, the bank’s license administrators identified all the applications across the IT environment, ensuring compliance. They also found and removed 66,600 copies of an unused software application, saving $65 per license — more than $4.3M per year.
Can you explain how proactive IT insights contribute to significant cost savings for financial services organizations?
Again, it comes down to the breadth, depth, and history of data that Lakeside SysTrack collects. Building on this vast data set, Lakeside has been accelerating how its customers, including some of the largest banks and financial service organizations in the world, can use AI/ML to boost productivity and efficiency. The sophisticated ML model in the Anomaly Detection feature proactively identifies potential issues, resulting in reduced tickets, mean time to resolution, lost productivity, and overall disruptions to mission critical systems.
In addition, SysTrack can analyze patterns and trends within vast datasets to “shift left” from traditional reactive IT methods to proactive IT. One bank with a high service desk call rate saved approximately $300,000 annually by detecting and resolving a critical technology issue before the impacted key personnel.
In such a competitive industry, how vital is it for financial services to address and resolve tech-related issues proactively?
It’s very expensive to resolve problems reactively. Most end users are too busy to call the help desk; they just live with problems. And reactive problem solving is inherently a one-by-one process. This is very expensive, both in terms of the IT effort and the impact on productivity. If you detect a problem proactively and repair all the impacted systems at once, you can save a fortune. You also end up with much happier end users. Our tools do that.
How do the insights provided by Lakeside Software enhance both customer and employee experiences?
By continuously monitoring system performance, Lakeside’s insights help IT teams identify and address potential issues before they impact users. This proactive approach minimizes downtime and disruptions, leading to a smoother experience for both customers and employees. Employees can provide more reliable service if the employees aren’t battling tech issues themselves.
Plus, with Lakeside SysTrack, IT teams can provide personalized support that addresses specific problems. This tailored approach improves the overall satisfaction of employees, who can work without unnecessary technical hurdles, and customers, who experience fewer service interruptions.
Can you discuss some specific ways that actionable insights from SysTrack have helped financial service organizations make data-informed business decisions?
In addition to the examples I shared about software waste and high call volumes, financial service organizations have been able to enhance device management strategies by optimizing device lifecycles, reducing unnecessary replacements and associated costs. Finally, they have data on the age, warranty status, and performance of each of their laptops. Using insights based on data like this, one New York City-based bank realized it did not need to replace 91% of its laptops planned for annual refresh.
Another specific example of how financial services have been able to act on the insights from SysTrack data is offering differentiated services and role-based environments for traders, bankers, and agents. One of our customers is a large investment management firm. For it, every minute of downtime for a trader can result in significant financial losses. Our customer was able to use SysTrack data to prioritize trader’s systems to ensure uptime and eliminate potential revenue loss due to failed financial trades.
What are some of the most common tech-related challenges financial services face, and how does SysTrack help mitigate them?
We’ve discussed a lot of these already, but one we haven’t touched on much is using AI. Like many industries, financial service organizations are trying to analyze how and where to use AI to make their operations more efficient. However, many lack the relevant data to feed AI models. AI is only as good as the data that feeds it, so without high-quantity, well-structed data, it can’t be as effective. Lakeside addresses this issue with deep data collection from the broadest range of devices in today’s modern organization. This data is used to give customers a very high-resolution, real-time, and accurate view of what is happening in the endpoint environment so the IT team’s insights received from AI analysis are as accurate as they can be.
Looking ahead, what emerging trends do you foresee in the digital employee experience market, and how is Lakeside Software preparing to address these trends?
DEX no longer just an IT issue. Lakeside has helped to broaden the DEX market. For instance, we recently patented kiosk observability to extend digital user experience monitoring to customer-facing devices. We also support countless use cases, both for IT and other business functions, that can be solved with data. These include hardware and software optimization. In fact, we developed value blueprints that provide step-by-step guides on how our customers can prove ROI quickly. These will be critical as DEX becomes a business issue, not just an IT issue.
We are proud to have been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: End User Experience Management, Q3 2024. The report evaluated and scored the most significant end-user experience management (EUEM) providers, including Lakeside’s SysTrack, using 34 criteria. Lakeside scored the highest possible marks in thirteen criteria, which we believe is proof of the strength of our current offering and our long-term strategy and business outlook.
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