Ivanti Reviews

The exec team seem totally unwilling or unable to effect any changes in the culture of the business. It's absolute chaos everywhere, in every dept, all of the time. If one thing needs to change at Ivanti it's that the C-suite need to get a grip of what is actually happening on the ground floor and enact some kind of systems or processes to start putting out the fires. But all we hear is how brilliant everything and everybody is. They all remind me of that old warner bros trope of the ostrich with it's head jammed into the sand, "la, la, la, everything is great, sorry I can't hear you, yes I know, this is advanced AI isn't it, what? WHAT? No sorry, I need to go" Products are unbelievably oversold. The simplest, rudimentary and seemingly pointless product change is sang out like we've just invented cold fusion. Of course the people doing this are also the same people who are driving these initiatives. Scratch the surface and all of our advanced AI, etc. is just over sold held together by sticky tape junk. Lets list some of the titles of execs held in Ivanti: - President, Service Management Solutions Group and Chief Product Officer (my favourite one) - Senior Vice President of Strategic Alliances & OEM - Sr. Vice President and Chief Information Officer – Senior Vice President and Internal Chief Technology Officer - VP of Ivanti Neurons Product Management Now add to this mix that anyone person holding one of these titles can and do leave and/or be "promoted" (usually when someone leaves) at regular bimonthly intervals. You just get this effect of a revolving merry-go-round of initiatives, changes, strategic changes, etc. It got to the point where I just ignored all communications on what we should or shouldn't be doing, because honestly, you'd get half way though implementing something dreamt up by x exec and before you'd finish, they'd quit or get "promoted" and someone else would appear and start dreaming up what they wanted everyone to do. Lets take an example: containerisation. On the face of it a good thing, lets move all our technology into containers off Service fabric. Great, good idea. Ok, lets do it this qtr. erm, ok. Might be tricky but I guess. Oh, lets also re-write everything into .Net core as well... why? Oh and while were at it, architecture has dreamed up this new Service bus structure, lets do that too...hold on, hold on... Oh and these subscriptions in Azure are costing too much money.... lets move everything on to new ones at the same time... :O.,....Oh we've bought two new companies this qtr too...We need to integrate them in before the next Gartner Magic circle(or whatever it's called) meeting...eh...ok...I'm just going to get my CV together. I mostly sat and watched this unfold on the sidelines. 18 months in, still not complete. The goal was to make everything more reliable...surprise surprise it's now much LESS reliable. Oh and the exec that dreamed this up? They quit (rumour is he was pushed) before it was finished. The incredibly annoying thing is, all the Engineers knew this was stupid. We know what's wrong. We know how to fix it. No one ever asks us anything ever. Remember that king Kanute guy sat on the beach shouting at the waves to stop coming in, yeah, that's me and the sea is Ivanti. The strategy appears to be to buy up a lot of moderately failing businesses, glue them all together (usually very badly), re-package them as "Ivanti" and sell the package on to someone, somehow. As you can guess, the work required in this is hardly exciting or cutting edge. It's just annoying political coordination task one after each other. Much of the actual integration is laughably feeble. Staff attrition is so high that all the knowledge has left the business meaning you get assigned some software written by someone who made terrible choices and who has now left the company. Your not allowed to re-write any of it, because that's a waste of money. So your continually trying to stick these mis fitting parts together. Soooo many of the issue are caused by extremely dubious, top-down and misguided decisions made by the architecture team. Who's main job appears to just be a blocker to progress. x component is a mess and is causing all sorts of issues all over the place, you suggest a solution, architecture wade in saying they need to look into it and "design" a better solution. You never hear anything back. You look at who caused the mess in the first place, oh it was the architect themselves in some mis-guided hubristic attempt at "enterprise software". You'd imagine in this environment there would be at least good progression? Well no, not really. Pay reviews are a race to the bottom. Seemingly the only people who get "promoted" (inverted commas because this often involves someone dreaming up a dubious title for someone) are execs.

The company's primary goal is to make large amounts of profit, which is what the CEO has said on multiple all hands calls where he has said he expects organic growth and profitability to be 50% combined. To quote the CEO - "I will never apologise for making large profits for our investors", and he has said that to the business many times now. If they are not investing in products to maintain the profit levels they want, then it makes it very difficult to expect organic growth when your competitors like Microsoft, VMWare and ServiceNow are the market leaders on the enterprise side, and smaller players who have simpler and easier to use products are undercutting them on the SMB side. At the start of 2020 they replaced all Exec's, then started with the senior leadership bringing in ex Infor staff who had worked with them. They had a goal of limiting voluntary attrition, which during a pandemic should be relatively easy, but that has now been abandoned as a goal, and you can tell by the fact that there is very emphasis on looking after people. When they sold part of the share in the company to a new PE firm, they paid out anyone who had shares in the company for shares that had vested, but wrote of any that were provisional on the company being sold, and now only a few select people at the very top appear to have been given shares, presumably because they are there to prep the company to be sold at some point in the near future. The previous comments about culture are correct. With multiple acquisitions there is always going to be some level of culture clash, but it always felt like the employees cared about each other because that's the way the Exec's treated people. Now the CEO says things like if you don't agree with what we are doing leave, or that they know people are going to be working their day jobs and then having to do more work on acquisitions every night. It is all about being able to show the investors and bankers that they are slashing costs and increasing profit so they can keep borrowing to do more acquisitions, and the staff either get on board or leave, and they don't care if you leave as they will simply replace them with someone from Infor. It feels like Ivanti has become a soulless husk of what were relatively successful companies. LANDESK was a technical leader in the Systems Management space, AppSense and RES were leaders in the Workspace Management space, Touchpaper and Frontrange were good service management platforms, Shavlik was the leader in the Patching market, Wavelink is still the leader in the back-office systems management space, and MobileIron was a strong Mobility management solution. All great solutions, but when they become part of Ivanti the funding is cut, innovation slows, and they cash cow the customer base relying on existing customers and renewals to maintain profit. Very sad when you think of the strength those brands had before becoming part of Ivanti.