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Top of Mind in Tech: Christa Quarles discusses ‘workplace freedom’ and AI on the desktop

August 23, 2024

Editor's Note

Top of Mind in Tech is an occasional feature that asks Ottawa tech leaders what’s keeping them awake at night.

With the AI revolution upon us, tech leaders like Christa Quarles are already taking steps to keep their companies ahead of the curve.

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With the AI revolution upon us, tech leaders like Christa Quarles are already taking steps to keep their companies ahead of the curve. A Harvard-educated business leader, Quarles has spent more than two decades in various C-suite roles for major global companies, from the Walt Disney Company to OpenTable. She joined Ottawa software company Corel as a board member and CEO in 2020, and two years later led its rebrand to become Alludo. Now, Quarles said the company is well-positioned to expand its customer base and address major client concerns, just as AI becomes a key tool in the workplace. In this instalment of Top of Mind in Tech, Quarles discusses improving security by localizing AI, reaching out to small and mid-sized businesses, and how tech companies are reworking their business models after multiple major shake-ups.

Improving security by bringing AI to the desktop

“We’ve seen the explosion of major players like Microsoft, Google and Nvidia that have added, it seems to be, a trillion dollars in market cap as this excitement about AI is being driven. And the reason for that is the (computing power) associated with AI is incredibly intense. So while there’s profound experimentation going on right now and nobody knows who the critical winners are going to be at the application layer, these players are already winning because they are really the pick and shovel that is enabling all this experimentation. “The question then becomes, does all of that AI get driven at the cloud layer? I believe that every knowledge worker is going to be running an AI on their desktop. And what are the reasons for that? One of them is really the latent (computing power) that is residing on your desktop. You’ve got a lot of processing power locally. Why do these things need to go back and forth constantly? The second reason is making sure that the knowledge worker is using the right LLM (large language model) that the company wants them to use and making sure it’s the up-to-date version. Application delivery of the LLM to the desktop is going to be an important part of the equation. “And finally, just the security of it. We’ve heard all these stories about people’s personal information getting sucked up into the training data for AI. We’ve heard about HIPPA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) violations and all sorts of medical records showing up in some of these things. One of the ways companies can keep their data and information safe is having it reside locally on their desktop and then being very thoughtful about what the secure file transfer would look like as a result. So we’re leaning in. We believe our Parallels product specifically has a very important piece of real estate, which is the desktop. We believe that we’re well-positioned to navigate this part of the ecosystem and we think the market is going to evolve. When we talk to IT leaders right now, they feel like this whole security thing is going to snap back and there’s going to be a kind of whiplash as people pull back and realize AI is changing. We want to be able to deliver that at the edge.”

Big players leaving small and medium-sized businesses behind

“The two major players in that space (virtualized desktop infrastructure), for a very long period of time have been VMware and Citrix, and they dominate the entire industry. In the last couple of years, VMware got bought by Broadcom and Citrix got taken private, and both of them have really run what we call the Broadcom playbook; you focus on your top 1,000 customers and then everybody else can fend for themselves. “What we’re observing in the market is that the small and medium-sized businesses – health-care companies, governments, manufacturing organizations – that rely on that infrastructure are, frankly, being abandoned. They’re being met with huge price increases, it's really tough to negotiate for the next long-range contract … and it’s really at a time when, especially given the macroeconomic challenges, it’s very difficult for IT departments and their budgets are being cut. Sometimes a mid-market company has only a handful of people in their IT department and they’re being asked to do more with less. It’s really, in our view, taking a swipe at these small small companies. “Being able, for them, to buy a simple product, but also a product that creates simplicity … We say it’s easier to move over to Raz, our remote application server, than it is to move over to the next version of Citrix. We pride ourselves on being simple and easy to use for these mid-market IT departments. We want to continue to invest in these mid-market customers.”

Software developers as an emerging customer base

“On the (software) developer side, we’re starting to see more and more developers choose Mac as their tool of choice. So we’re seeing pretty specific enterprise growth from Mac but if you’re a developer and you work on a Windows product, it’s pretty tough to run your development environment. You basically need to buy a second or third or fourth computer. So we think there’s a kind of green computing benefit that can come from this, where you can have and enable developers to function all within one environment. “We believe that the developer community will also benefit from this AI opportunity that I was talking about earlier. We’re starting to see a lot of AI developers need the access to these large language models in an environment that is also secure and has them working on the right things at the right time. So we’re actively cultivating this group when we think we have products that are quite interesting in terms of their ability to do their jobs and, frankly, halve the time spent on them. One thing we as a company are really all about is workplace freedom. How do we make sure you work better? And I think that anything that makes you more efficient and enables you to do your job in half the time is something we stand behind from a value standpoint.”

Tech companies rethinking business models post-pandemic

“The biggest change that I’ve seen is really just this focus on unit economics. In the 2021 software tech era, because money was essentially free, anything kind of went. There was certainly a lot of innovation at that time; a thousand flowers got to bloom. What we’re seeing now is some consolidation in certain industries. We’re seeing tech companies look at their business model to try to figure out, does this work? Can you get customers? Can you scale? We’re seeing companies have to rethink a business model that doesn’t work when money isn’t free, when you can’t buy customers in an infinite way. What that means, which I think is good, is it levels the playing field to some degree and so companies that have always cared about cash flow, like our own, become more competitive in those environments. You don’t have to play against somebody for whom the laws of gravity don’t apply.”