In July 2023, I decided to join Juriba with one clear goal: to create a product vision and strategy to excite customers and deliver innovative new offerings that solve real-world problems for enterprises. Reflecting on my first year at Juriba I'm amazed by how much has changed. Let's dive into some highlights and discuss what the future holds.
First and foremost, we’ve established a much clearer mission at the company level: powering enterprise digital workplace change, at scale. Driven by the changes we are seeing in the market and the needs of our customers, we are focused on ongoing value—shifting our focus beyond individual projects to deliver value within everyday business operations.
The products have evolved to align with this mission. I saw untapped value in what was called Juriba Enterprise (Dashworks) to create more valuable use cases. What was named AppM lacked market fit as a tool focused primarily on manual repackaging. As a result, the positioning, naming, and roadmap for all products has undergone varying levels of positive change, resulting in a vision everyone is excited to bring to market. In fact, we are onboarding new engineering teams to accelerate such efforts now. Below is a summary of the many developments I’m excited to have already delivered, as well as some significant efforts now underway.
Juriba AppM evolves to Juriba App Readiness
Originally positioned toward packaging teams to accelerate the repackaging and testing process for third-party applications, we have made several incremental changes for better market fit. Repackaging is now secondary to powerful, new vendor command line support, and there’s been considerable investment in simplifying the UX while continually improving automation capabilities.
Now named Juriba App Readiness, it delivers unmatched automation to cover more applications than any other solution while ensuring high-quality results that work within the complexity of your unique environment. The solution takes an automation-first approach with an improved user experience suitable not just for packagers but also for non-technical users. The administrator can dictate desired standards, output formats, etc., so anybody can initiate its intelligent, automated packaging and testing features.
Most enterprises prefer to leverage vendor command line support, often wrapping with PSADT, to generate new and updated deployment packages quickly and in a supported way that retains the installation logic delivered by the vendor. So, this is the approach that Juriba App Readiness takes to automate the packaging process. We can help you quickly identify the best command line options with a multi-pronged approach: a programmatic suggestion by examining the installer, a curated suggestion based on our growing application knowledge base, and finally, new Juriba AI-driven suggestions. Soon, we will attach success rate details, leveraging our automated smoke testing, to further simplify the process with quality at the forefront.
When vendor command lines can’t cut it, or alternative formats like MSIX are desired, Juriba App Readiness still provides powerful repackaging capabilities. Leveraging its integrated, automated smoke testing capabilities, both command line and repackaging results can be quickly validated.
When discussing application deployment and updates with large companies, the recurring theme I hear is that while a patch catalog saves valuable time, it can only do so for a modest fraction of the applications in their portfolio. A critical goal of Juriba App Readiness is to tackle this limitation head-on by providing an ability to address EVERY application in the environment whilst still accepting that some apps will never be suitable for automation. Achieving maximum coverage means addressing everything possible while specifically identifying those applications that cannot be automated with an explanation as to why they require the attention of a packaging expert.
Juriba Enterprise becomes Juriba DPC
Juriba Dashworks, later named Enterprise, or Platform, has delivered enormous value to customers in helping them drive change projects, particularly device lifecycle, application lifecycle, and Windows OS migration projects. This is important; and we will continue to offer these powerful use cases.
However, Windows OS migration projects are becoming less necessary since upgrades can be seamlessly managed and applications are more compatible. We have a vision to drive increased value in managing ongoing tasks. After all, many “projects” translate to things that require ongoing attention ranging from every so many years to every so many days, or even hours.
Renamed to Juriba DPC, we have begun executing a vision to drive less toward project-focused use cases and more toward business-as-usual focused use cases. We can provide many insights quickly, and we will introduce data packs to further enrich connected resources. Gartner recently recognized Juriba in its Digital Platform Conductor (DPC) Market Guide, and this notion of pulling in data from multiple sources to orchestrate change aligns perfectly with how our most successful customers achieve value.
I’ve heard from countless organizations that struggle with rationalizing a confident view of their environment with different solutions providing different, sometimes contradictory, information regarding applications and devices. The answer isn’t yet another agent that does a better job of collecting more information but rather capitalizing on the multiple agents and solutions already deployed throughout the enterprise.
Right now, our teams are actively working to improve our new Integration Connector offering, which simplifies connecting to on-prem data like Active Directory and ConfigMgr. We are taking a big leap forward regarding our ability to ingest and merge data from multiple sources for a truly federated view of your digital workplace. The first targeted use case to take advantage of this new investment will be a new software vulnerability management accelerator for Juriba DPC. Heavy investment in this area means big things are coming soon!
Introducing Juriba App Owner
At Juriba, I can take on big improvements and direction shifts and solve new problems in new ways. Listening to customers and crafting solutions to the challenges they face is the charter of any strong product-led organization. Still, to be successful, the entire company needs to be along for the ride. While some software companies may shift their product investments to chase a new shiny object, they do so at the risk of reduced investment and attention to what begins to be treated as “legacy” solutions. In contrast, Juriba is an organization focused squarely on application and device management, watching for opportunities to extend its value without abandoning the market it worked so hard to establish.
After years of speaking with enterprises about their approach to application owner programs and the challenges they face to make them successful, I’m very excited to launch a brand-new product that resonates with everyone I’ve shared it with. We’ve developed a new SaaS offering from the ground up to provide a simple, out-of-the-box solution to ensure application coverage, visibility into what application owners are, and are not, reporting, and helpful information to make the lives of application owners easier.
Juriba App Owner can manage application assignments, send reminders, and provide helpful information to application owners about their assigned applications. Leveraging integration with Juriba App Readiness, application owners can also be empowered to initiate their own automated packaging and testing process, saving valuable time and money.
We are delighted to announce that Juriba App Owner has officially entered its beta release phase, and you can be among the first to experience it by joining the program here, but we intend to launch it for general availability in early 2025. As that release rolls out, the team will be hard at work extending our initial check-in reminder and tracking system to support UAT testing requests, a common role application owners play in enterprise environments.
What’s to come
While it has been a great first year, the groundwork for year two is shaping up impressively. After many adjustments and changes to our products alongside the launch of a completely new product, many great things are already planned. Customers repeatedly tell me they cannot keep up with the demand for new or upgraded applications, slowing business productivity and introducing security risks. Our goal is to simplify this issue for these already overworked teams. I see the opportunity to advance our solutions to address such needs further taking three main forms:
First, introducing a powerful application normalization engine will allow multiple sources of application information to refer to the same application record despite minor differences in how they may be named. This is important to our ability to ingest inventory and security data from connected systems and provide a single, more valuable application record for management.
Next, by building up an exhaustive application knowledge base. The many ways we help manage applications provide us with a wealth of domain knowledge that can help save our customers valuable time and effort. All our products will begin encouraging customers to share data anonymously in exchange for access to these crowd-sourced insights.
Finally, there is a great opportunity to introduce data packs to expand the many valuable use cases for Juriba DPC. We are considering a growing set of data sources you can easily leverage, including sustainability, device warranty, MSIX suitability, Windows compatibility, and more! While we have decided to start with software vulnerability data, where we go next will be driven by ongoing discussions with our customers to align with their specific needs.
Application owner program automation: Leveraging our investment in Juriba AI and training on our growing knowledge base, it won’t be long before some applications can be put on autopilot. Along the same lines, Juriba App Readiness will begin to provide application subscriptions. In cases where we have all the information necessary to do so, you will be able to subscribe to automatic updates and package/test/publish new versions of applications as they are released. Leveraging our insights with Juriba App Owner, you’ll be able to consider what application owners across the globe are recommending such as updates to avoid blindly processing every new version when they may not be necessary.
I love talking with customers, or potential future customers, and exploring new ideas, or challenges together. Please schedule some time to chat through any of these current or future plans and what they could mean for your organization!