Kat: Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the JAMF After Dark Podcast, a podcast to introduce you to the people at JAMF, learn about what we're up to when it comes to managing and securing Apple devices, along with what is happening in the IT landscape. I'm your co-host, Kat Garbus, joined by co-host Josh Lorton.
Josh: Hey cat, how you doing today?
Kat: I'm doing well. A little warm. It's very hot here in in Chicago. How about you?
Josh: Doing great. I'm honestly a little in awe because I've been keeping up with your J Nock inspired LinkedIn posts and they have been hilarious and creative. I think my favorite was you holding up a sign saying if you're waiting for a sign, here's your sign. That was like top notch.
Kat: I appreciate that. I try to tap into my comedic muscle when appropriate. And I try to just have fun with my job. So I really appreciate that. I would love for us to just amplify Januck and also just amplify all the great things we're doing. Who's with us today, Josh?
Josh: As always, your segues are the best. we are super excited. Please join us in welcoming Shreyas and Tommy from Amplifier Security to our episode today. Thank you all for joining. would you like to just take a few moments, introduce yourself?
Shreyas Sadalgi: Hey guys, my name is Shreya Sadalgi, co-founder and wearing the CEO hat at Amplifier Security. Really amped up to be here and amped up to actually show up at Kansas City in JNOC and see you all in live and in for real this year. And we've been partnering with JAMF for the last three years and I've also had the privilege of partnering with JAMF in my prior life when I was at a company called as Better Cloud. So lived in the JAMF ecosystem and here to serve JAMF Nation.
Josh: Welcome.
Thomas Donnelly: Awesome. Awesome. Hey guys, I'm Thomas Donley. I am the the CTO and co-founder of of Amplifier. I've worn the CIO and the CISO, the cybersecurity, head of cybersecurity, a couple times in my career. I love solving problems with technology. So I love JAMF, I love Amplifier, I love putting things together and making things better together. So excited to talk about those things today.
Kat: We're really excited to unpack all the questions and we've got a fully booked schedule today, so I'm excited. But before we do that, Tommy, did you have glasses last year at J Nook? Like really thick, like nerd glasses? Was that you? Was that your style back then?
Thomas Donnelly: I do have thick nerd glasses a and if you were five
Kat: Okay, I I
Thomas Donnelly: feet away I'd be wearing right now.
Kat: Okay. I I feel like I'm having like the Clark Kent Superman like situation. Like, was that the same person that I met? so I think you it's kinda one of those things where maybe if it was like Clark Kent on the street wearing his glasses, I wouldn't know it was Superman. That's kind of I think what I'm saying right now. I was like, I think that's the same person, but maybe not. So that's where I'm at. Anyways.
Thomas Donnelly: Well Sh Shrey Shreyas wanted us to look exactly the same in this podcast, so we have the same shirt now I'm kidding. It wasn't planned. It wasn't planned. Unfortunately it wasn't planned.
Kat: Twinning. Twinning.
Shreyas Sadalgi: We we always have
Kat: I love it.
Shreyas Sadalgi: these we always have these deja vu kind of moments saying, we did we get the memo? We're wearing the same T shirt and that's kind of what happened today. We have three types of hats. we again we coordinate on this one.
Kat: And the same hat. I wanna point out you're both wearing the hat. I love it. Well, we're so you're with so you're with amplifier. Our listeners may not be familiar with amplifier. So Shreyas, I'm curious, what what is Amplifier and what problems is Amplifier solving?
Shreyas Sadalgi: Well great, let's start with that. Well, Amplifier is an AI-native workforce security problem. And if you kind of dig into the real problems of what we're solving, look, cyber attacks today run at machine speed, but workforce security runs at human speed. and that happens because there's a big bridge and a divide between security, IT, and the workforce. Right. So if you look at security teams, they're creating policies and those policy gaps create security findings. And they pass it on to IT. Now IT takes those findings and turns them into tickets and they start chasing employees to go resolve them. Like things like, hey, go patch your vulnerability, go fix your unsanctioned AI tool that we saw running on your endpoint. well, maybe you've taken care of them, but maybe you just need to reboot your machine. Or we detected CrowdStrike is not running on your one of your laptops. Can you bring them online? And we just see that it's offline. So all these kind of last mile problems is where things break down. And if you look at the employees' perspective, like to them, each of these security fixes are always an interruption, right? And so the reality is that there's as these things go unfixed, the risk keeps growing. And it's just the broken coordination model that really creates toil for IT security and it really disrupts the employee experience. So that's the crux of the problem that we're solving at Amplifier.
Kat: I think you hit on some really hot topics right now. you had mentioned AI. You had mentioned attacks. How how can we connect those dots? What are you seeing with AI? I'd be really curious about your thoughts, what you're seeing with attackers, AI driven threats. Can you talk to our listeners a little bit about the role amplifiers playing with that?
Shreyas Sadalgi: Yeah, look, we just came off from a busy week at Black Hat, and that was the theme out there as well. we were also at your booth, and everybody has AI on top of mind. if you look at how the cyber landscape is looking at it, AI has made it easier for them, the attackers, to target your people by exploiting all their posture gaps, right? When all these things go unfixed, it's easy for anyone using AI to socially engineer and figure out: hey, cat has something missing, so let me just go construct a nicely constructed phishing social engineering message to go exploit that gap. But as these AI threats grow, security and IT will always be at war, right, with productivity in the workforce and employees. and that's because, you know, today the easy solution is like, hey, let's just go enforce this and push a centralized button to go take care of this. But we all know that blind enforcement without a two-way dialogue, explaining the why and partnering with employees always creates. distrust and creates friction, right? And so this is what everybody's been talking about is how do we use AI to also be defending against these AI attacks with a collaborative approach to security.
Josh: And I think that's one of to me the most awesome parts of Amplifier is that partnership with employees. Can you just share what does that actually look like from the perspective of of an employee and why is it so powerful?
Shreyas Sadalgi: Yeah, great question, Josh. so the way we see it, look, when we talk to companies, the IT and security leaders, they're saying that like to truly build resilience in the organization, it requires marshalling the workforce and like really recruiting employees to be an active part of the security program. And so partnering with them means like, hey, instead of dictating terms, let's give some agency. Within limits to make employees active partners. Let's work with them, allow them to schedule and control actions that we are asking of them so that those times align with their day-to-day workflows. And really, while we're doing this, educate them, like transparently share the reasons behind these security requests. So it builds trust and we explain the why, right? But Doing this at scale is is a lot of manual work, right? You can imagine like any IT and security person would be like, geez, I wish I had an infinite bandwidth to go do this one-on-one, right? and that's honestly the reason why we built Amplifier to solve that, so that you can use AI agents to engage with employees, collaborate with them, have conversations, and enforce those security controls.
Josh: Yeah, I think when we think about like just an engaged workforce that's actually not just frustrated because some policy comes down to their machine and it's of course right before they're about to do a presentation and they're thrown for a loop, not only do they feel like they have some some agency in that decision making process, but now they're also educated at the same time. And as threats evolve, we know getting employees up to speed on what to expect and how to prevent it is so important. So I think it's just such a cool part of your platform.
Kat: Yeah, I wanna
Shreyas Sadalgi: Thank you.
Kat: build on that a little bit more. you had mentioned in some of our conversations about Ampi. Can you talk to our listeners a little bit about Ampi?
Shreyas Sadalgi: Yeah, AMP is a take on our AI agent. and look, first thing, Kat, is our North Star mission that drives our vision is having respect for the employee experience, right? How do you make security human? And so if you'll think of how and why we built AMP, AMPI shows up as a true security body to employees, right? And AMP works with employees where they work in Slack and in Teams, right? And so if you think of the experience that AMP provides as an AI security engineer, it really knows everything about you. It knows your role, who you are, where you work, what time zone you're in, and the context of the security issue, obviously, right? So it takes all that into account and it mimics. What an IT security person would do if they had all the time to speak with you one-on-one. So the experience that employees have with AMP is that AMP is my body, it will work with me, it will help me self-schedule and like pick a time to resolve these things with any of these things, you know, scheduling patches, OS updates, bringing devices online, you know, taking care of unsanctioned apps, or just you know, invoking the device to run their policies, right? And so that's what we've actually built into that platform is to have AMPy truly show up as a security button. Yeah.
Kat: Unsanctioned apps, that never happens. Never. No one ever has unsanctioned apps. I I think of Clippy. I think of Clippy when you say Ampy. I it reminds me of like Clippy from like Microsoft in the nineties, but not but more more security focused in a way. That's what goes on in in my mind. I'd be curious, do you have any success stories or outcomes that can help paint a picture for our listeners and tie it all together?
Shreyas Sadalgi: Yeah, look, I mean, I think first of all, our not star with AMP is how to not be clippy. We wrote that three times as we found
Kat: Mm-hmm.
Shreyas Sadalgi: the company is how do we not get branded as clippy, right? And and you're right, in a modern way to use AI to go build that. and then I think Tommy can speak to the cus success stories here of how our customers are getting a whole bunch of benefits.
Thomas Donnelly: Yeah, Yeah, so let's talk about number one, the the winning stories for Ampi. Number one is Ampi isn't just a bot that's gonna reach out to you. Ampi has personality. Ampi will send you memes for reminders like, Hey, you need to do this and maybe send something kind of funny to let you know that that that it's you know, we're trying to partner with you. It's a different experience. You know, any anybody can just send like a a text-based message. But being able to give the employee the context, being able to have a conversation, allowing them to actually ask questions and be able to answer those questions in language that anyone could understand. You know, that's really, really important. and it really kind of, you know, when you talk about automation tools, at you know, combining automation with the ability to have a meaningful conversation with somebody. is super powerful because that means that you can get the context before you take action. And that context can prevent you from disrupting somebody's workflow. Right. So when we talk about when Shreyas talks about how do we work with the employees, that's kind of the context is that we have a lot of data around what's going on. We know when you're in a meeting and we don't want to bother you. We know if something's going on, you know We have conversations of when the best time to do things is. You know, and those are key differentiations. It's talking to you with empathy and kind of how a human would, as opposed to just a purely, you know, AI bot. some of our big use cases that we have is number one is just when we install the product. We have we build a data graph with, you know, we're connecting to all your different security and IT tools, and we build a graph of data. And every time we do that, we find so many insights about, we're not installing JAMF on this group of servers, you know, these this group of computers over here. the conference rooms don't have CrowdStrike or another tool that we need to install. So just installing the product, we get a lot of insights with what's going on in somebody's environment. so that's the first place that people receive value. some of our most popular use cases that we implement that typically have a pretty big impact is standardization of OSs, right? We we go into a lot of environments and we'll find that people have we've had people we've seen over 70 operating systems in a company with you know 4,000 employees. And just going out and standardizing that with the employees, working with them of when the best time to upgrade is that doesn't disrupt them. we we took that down to like six, I believe. And that was in the span of a week or two, you know, with you know, zero interaction from employees, from the from the IT team to go do that. So and and not only does that number one standardize the OS reduce a lot of vulnerabilities, but it also reduced a lot of the support tickets that people were getting because When you have less variability in your environments, right, it tends to knock down on the the diversity of the tickets that an IT team is is is having. The other one is vulnerability management. A lot of people have tools to in you know to solve vulnerabilities, but a lot of people are installing different applications within their environment. There's a lot of edge use cases that those tools don't build. So having something that can look at those and say, like, hey, these are out of SLA. Let's engage with people to do that. And so that's kind of where we really shine. one thing that's really cool about all these problems is it's not like this is happening linear. When you engage and you democratize this stuff with the employees, it all happens at once. You know, so when we talk about vulnerability management, we talk about why do we need to prioritize? Let's just fix them all right now, all at once. And so that's kind of the wow moment when people install our product of hey, the the power of leveraging the workforce comes along. So
Kat: I'm just sitting here seventy operating systems where people like still on Snow Leopard. My goodness, I can't even I'm just sitting here trying to like wrap my brain around that
Thomas Donnelly: How? How? Yeah.
Josh: Knock Snow Leopard, y'all. that was a great OS. now
Kat: For its time.
Josh: for its time, yes. you've mentioned some r
Thomas Donnelly: So yeah, so so so was OS two warp, right, Kat? Like, I mean, for its time, right?
Josh: for its time. it sounds like so much of what you're doing is really taking full advantage of how technology has evolved and it's moving so quickly right now. But we know there there are so many, whether they're existing companies that have been around for decades or tons of new companies that are literally just popping up overnight that are focused on security and focused on taking full advantage of AI. How Do y'all see yourself in the marketplace? And how do you see yourself as you compare to some other vendors that organizations are trying to decide which are going to add value for?
Shreyas Sadalgi: Yeah. Well, that's a great question, Josh. and the way we explain it to any prospects is that hey, there's two problems that we're solving. Sort of this first mile problem in workforce security, and then there's a last mile problem, right? And so if you look at it, there's not a single vendor who's doing both together, right? or solving both those problems in a single platform. if you look at just the first mile problem, it's like, hey, how do I just look at all the gaps and assess it for these assets or employees? There's like cyber asset management vendors or like human risk management vendors who do that. And then if you look at the last mile problem, it's about employee chasing. How do I eliminate work and how do I partner with employees? Well, really, who we compete with is in-house, homegrown approaches. You know, some really smart IT security engineering teams have built, you know, custom Slack bots for one or two use cases. And then they look at our platform and they're like, this is an amazing thing, it's an out of the box solution. so I can just like move it over, right? So there's not a single product that actually continuously audits employee endpoint attack surface, finds the gaps, and then removes the toil and complexity while amplifying the employee experience. It's really hard to do that.
Josh: Yeah, you're I mean, approaching it from multiple angles, I think is really important. And you know, you talk about the homegrown solutions that folks have, and those can be really awesome. And there's an advantage because it is tailored to their specific use case, but there's a lot of caveats that come with that, where there's the additional maintenance and overhead and and it takes time. And what if that person who developed that custom solution isn't there? You know, what what do you do? And so those are all really challenging problems to solve. Now, of course, you know, JAMF, we've recently released some really cool AI governance capabilities and this is top of mind for us and our customers. How does Amplifier work alongside JAMF?
Shreyas Sadalgi: Yeah, so we all do that with with your latest and greatest APIs, Josh. So JAMF has done an excellent job of putting together platform APIs for all your products. So what Amplifier has done is we use those platform APIs to integrate with JAMF Pro, JAMF Protect, and JAMF Security Cloud. and really we Amplifiers platform relies on JAMF as the foundation for Any kind of device posture, device settings, device configurations, right? So host information, agent status, device attributes, smart groups, blueprints. We're constantly monitoring and ingesting that information. And then the other thing that we're doing is then we integrate with your identity stack, right? Okta, intro ID, Google, whatever you may have. And the hard part that our platform does is it maps all those device-based findings to your identities. And so then that lets us have a conversation. With the device owner and then engage with them in Slack and teams to resolve that, right? And of course, we integrate with a whole bunch of other ecosystem of security and IT tools, your EDR stack, your Vulliver T stack. And really the power of the platform is as you unlock more use cases. So that's something that we've been doing. And then JAMF AI governance is top of mind for us as well. We were at Black Hat last week. We've now integrated with JAMF Blueprints, which are an integral part of JAMF. AI governance. So really the question is like as IT teams roll out these AI policies in JAMF governance, in JAMF AI governance, how do you then educate the user at hey, you know, our company approved AI tool is Claude. It's not you know, codecs, you know, open AI codex. how do you actually have a conversation before you take away codecs, right? So that's really the layer that we fit into by tying it natively. Yeah.
Kat: I love that you tied in AI governance. I think it's just so important right now. A lot of organizations are still honestly trying to wrap their heads around it when AI just kind of showed up and it became the wild, wild west. That kind of all being said, so you I think you did a pretty great job already kind of describing this, but if we were to put a bow on it, what would the outcome of using both JAMF and Amplifier together be rather than independently, if that makes sense?
Thomas Donnelly: I I would I would say the the biggest thing is be able to actually secure your workforce without blocking productivity. Right? there's a lot of tools out there on the market that secure AI, right? But what people haven't realized is like we're gonna have to change the our operational model to be successful at this because people are are using these tools, they're pulling in these tools every single day. And they're not because they're malicious, but because they're trying to be productive, right? And we can't as IT or security practitioners be everywhere at all at once. Right? So how do we engage with the organization to make sure when they are doing something, is it the right thing to do? Do they know how they're supposed to use these tools? Or if we haven't seen this tool yet, how do they get that approved? Right. And that has to happen near real time today. Right. And so that's where that conversation of like, what are you trying to do? Get that context and then kind of orchestrate and lead that employee down the right path to make sure that we're approving these applications if they're used for productivity. Or we're getting them off their machines if we notice that that's something not not approved by the organization we think it's at risk. And so it's really that operational change. That in that organization that we enable together, which is huge. And a lot of people aren't thinking about it a lot, but I promise you, when they see that they have 300 AI applications, right, that hey, we just re-force re and that they need to figure out what to do about those, or hey, we just force rebooted a a critical vulnerability yesterday and we got a new one this morning. And we're gonna have to tell everybody, hey, we gotta reboot your machines again. That's when the light bulb moment is coming on for people. And that's how we can work together to really transform how we actually interface, secure, and ensure productivity with these companies together. and that's the companies that that have bought us and you are seeing. And that's why they love the solutions together. So
Josh: And I know y'all were at J Nock last year. And and I can say honestly, I had random attendees coming up and and asking hey, where's their booth? Where can I find them? Like they were so excited and just I think energized by the ideas that y'all shared and presented. But that was almost a year ago now. So when you think about what y'all shared and talked about last year compared to now, what's that journey been like? What's new and exciting for your customers?
Thomas Donnelly: Yeah, I would say that we've really gone all in on the agentic capabilities of our our platform. before we had to be kind of descriptive in how we and design these engagements. But what we're really doing is we want our agents to be able to reach out to your CIO or your CSO, hey, did you realize that you have this this you know, this Kev came out, this vulnerability, and you have 20 developers that are on it. It's actively getting exploited. Do you want me to create an agent to go and engage with them and and get this fixed by lunchtime? Right? That's the kind of capability that we're building into the product. and we've really gone all in with how our application engages with people and brought a lot of intelligence and nuance into how we're actually engaging with your workforce. And that a lot of people are like, it it talks to the employees. It's it's really not that easy. You know, we talk to organizational psychology like you know, you think about the difference between a B2B business and a B2C business where you're actually trying to sell to the customers. So that's kind of how we think about our our our product is like the employees have to like it, right? With a lot of security tools, the employees may or may not like it, right? But for us it's kind of paramount. And so those interactions and making those really awesome to be able to recognize if people are like kind of angry and they're not having a good time, hey, let's just get a live person on the on the line for you because it seems like, you know, we're giving you instructions for this vulnerability and you're having some problems, right? Or just having a conversation and being able to don't force them to click on a button, but just like, hey, I want to schedule this for next week. Okay, cool. We'll connect to their calendar, schedule it, and then at that time orchestrate the reboots or whatever we need to do applying the vulnerability. So just that intelligence. of that conversation has really, really greatly increased. and then just really maturing our integration layer. Like a lot of people think like integrating products from seven different categories, you know, and hundreds of different, you know, products is easy. But normalizing that data, we're kind of lucky because we had engineers that came from that world, but you know, it takes a lot. to mature integrations and to be able to pull that data in where it can be actionable for your employees. So just working on that stuff is is what we've been doing. And it's paying dividends, right? We've got a really strong data layer that people can can we can layer AI on to solve an a bunch of different use cases. so I really think that we're built for the future and being able to solve the the problems of tomorrow.
Josh: You know, I think it's it's a lot of folks sometimes think just getting the data is like the problem to solve. But I think when we're talking about agents and using data with an AI, that's just the first stepping stone is getting that data there. It's actually really difficult the more data you have to effectively use it with these agents based on their limitations and and also trying to make sure costs aren't ballooning for for something that in your mind can be really straightforward, but thinking like, how do you structure this in a way that
Thomas Donnelly: Yeah.
Josh: an employee is excited about or or at least cooperative with, not like, how do I bypass this and, you know, make sure this doesn't pop up again? 'Cause that's what they'll
Thomas Donnelly: Yeah.
Josh: do otherwise.
Thomas Donnelly: Well yeah, and then the other problem is if you're pulling data from so many sources, I can engage with that employee on 20 different problems. We're gonna find a lot of problems. But what are the most important problems? And then what are the problems that say like, hey, if I fix this one problem, all these other ones will kind of go away? Right. So really building the intelligence on the back end when you're pulling all this data in. To make sure that we're prioritizing the right things, to make sure that we're not bothering Kat every single day for a different thing, giving her a pull a cool-off period, right? all you know, not bothering her her at night, right? all those things pulled in to have a conversation and an experience with the employees that they'll actually like is it's a lot harder than it seems.
Josh: Yeah.
Kat: bother me at two AM with your snow leopard drama. I don't wanna hear it. I don't wanna hear it.
Thomas Donnelly: Hahaha
Josh: That's right. That's right. So I I know we've got Jay Nock coming up here soon. Are are y'all gonna be there? And I know you mentioned Black Hat just now. How did that go?
Shreyas Sadalgi: Yeah, look, we are amped up to be at JNOC this year as well. and especially with the theme that's top of mind for all our mutual customers, which is AI governance. we're excited to showcase what we've built and how you can roll that out without disrupting the employee experience. we're gonna be there at J Noch and and look, last year, remember, we gave away this amazing co-branded water bottle, which is still my favorite Owala, which I keep hearing from a lot of people. That I keep meeting is like, hey, I have Oala's, but that green one and the that we got at JNUC was our favorite. we have a special edition t shirt that we're planning for, and that's a special collectible item that you can you know, attendees can get at our booth. we're excited to design that and give that away. but look, even from Black Hat, the energy that we got from delivering these sessions at your booth and the excitement and the buzz around AI governance is is really is real, right? And the top of mind for A lot of customers. And you know, this is something that's been top of mind in both the security community as well as the Mac admin community, which is like, hey, how do I govern this experience on my Mac and my Apple fleet? Right. And so that's what's keeping us top of mind for being at JNOC.
Kat: I love it. I'm I'm really excited that you will all be back at JNUC. I love that you can also really integrate so well with our products. Before we let you go, I did want to pick your brain just a little bit more about one of your recent implementations with the large distributor. Tommy, if you don't mind kind of talking to us a little bit about that and some of the things that you helped problem solve that listeners might be wanting to ask you about at JNUC when they go to your booth this year, they see you all there and they may want to say, Hey, can you repeat this for us? Or if we're, you know, looking to be a mutual partner, right? How can we work
Thomas Donnelly: Yeah.
Kat: together?
Thomas Donnelly: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, we just had a a great engagement with a large distribution company and and the problem that they had was they have a very, you know, distributed group of Mac and iOS devices. They're a shipping company. These devices are online sometimes, they're not online other times. They're security teams trying to get in touch with people. Is really really hard. They're using these devices in their trucks. So if they reboot them at the wrong time, then it can be very disruptive to their operations, right? So that's not an option, right? So like they were looking for something of like how can I kind of be everywhere all at once, right? How can we engage with this workforce and be successful in patching these things? Because they were just all over the place. you know, and so we work with them to Pull in that data from JAMF. They had it in smart groups, right? Of like which devices weren't compliance. We use those smart groups as a trigger to launch our agents to actually go have conversations with the owners. And it's really kind of funny because we sat down, we ingested their data. The next meeting, three days later, we're like, hey, we'll just design this little group and listen, design this engagement is gonna reach out to everybody and engage. we had another meeting three days later. And the guy was like, yeah, I turned it on for the entire company. He was not shy, no testing or anything. He just, let's let's let this baby rip. And he was blown away because he said, Hey, in three days, we are where we would normally be in four weeks with five people just hammering these people, right? Trying to get things that things done. So the power of being able to see when people are online, see when we can engage with them. speaking to them in pain plain language, it really, really scaled how they can patch those devices. And so hopefully there's some use cases that are coming out pretty soon who you can see who that was. But they were very, very fired up about the whole process and and now are really kind of all in and like what else are we gonna do? we're ready to go. So so yeah that was a that was a big win for us.
Kat: It's like you took smart groups and amplified it with your solution. I just someone take this microphone away from me. so that being said, so as we kind of start to wrap things up, if someone's listening right now and we kind of sum this up for them, like what would get a listener wanting to use jamf and amplifier? What got your customer wanting to use jamf and amplifier? How would someone listening want their customers to use JAMF and Amplifier? So I wanted to kind of ask that question before we start rounding things out.
Shreyas Sadalgi: Yeah, look, I mean, like Tommy said, the first problem that Jamf customers can really solve is all their smart groups, right? I mean, so if you have a smart group and you've been waiting to see those smart groups kind of like diminish with all the exceptions, come talk to us, right? And we can, you know, just like burn those findings tied to those smart groups down. And so you don't have to like really chase employees. And the easiest way to get started is come and visit our website, amplifier security. You'll learn more about the integration. We have some great case studies there. You can also watch the little clip from the keynote from last year's JNOC. And really, we are still staying committed to the offer that we announced at last year's JNOC, which is if you have JAMF and if you want to solve JAMF use cases with Amplifier, you can use our product for free, just for JAMF use cases, for a whole year. So you can use Amplifier with JAMF for one full year, no cost, no questions asked. And that's something that customers find really easy to experience the value of Amplifier for JAMF. And then obviously they bring other use cases to us and then we can help with, right?
Thomas Donnelly: Yeah.
Josh: software is always demoed really, really great. And then they get the actual tool and it's not so amazing. And and that's honestly been amplified. I'm gonna pile on with the pun, with AI. So what are some specific like ROI stats that y'all have actually seen with your organizations that show like this is actually having a significant impact?
Thomas Donnelly: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so yeah, so when we're engaging with people, when we look at kind of success metrics, we're seeing from a from a standpoint of say like OS devices getting updated the fleet you know, the fleet updated, we're seeing those updates happening seventy percent faster across different fleets from people having to manually do it or sending out emails to everybody. so that's one thing that we're seeing. We're seeing SLAs of outstanding vulnerabilities. We've seen customers with hundreds of thousands of vulnerabilities, right? Going down to hundreds of vulnerabilities it very, very quickly. You know, 'cause I w when you think about it, we're not it's not like we have an engineer that's having to call, you know, people individually to get them to to to install things. We're really hitting everybody all at the same time. Hey, use your workforce, democratize this. so we've seen you know single digit vulnerabilities coming down from a hundred thousand vulnerabilities. We've seen training compliance, reaching out and engaging with people to make sure they're taking their trainings. If you s run training engagement, you know you typically you'll see about 75% of the people take trainings without having to go out and reach out to them and actually kind of prod them to do it, we see that to go up to ninety eight point five percent on average. Right. So we've really, really have seen pretty tremendous RI, not only in the speed in which we do things, but also the amount of those things that we can knock out in a short amount of of time. I'm trying to think of another place where we've go ahead, Shreyas, did you have something?
Shreyas Sadalgi: Yeah. And so Josh, I'll give you some more data points, right? So I think the intangible, right? That's that's the biggest ROI is the employee experience. Like employees and users, end users within our customers really love the product. And it's really hard to quantify, right? because they don't hate their security teams anymore. They don't like like you know, vent at their IT teams anymore. And that's just the intangibles, right? That you just can't quantify. but just for this distribution company that we just talked about. Right. So they have like 1300 iOS devices. and we helped eliminate five people in their IT department. And that's like around 800 hours of manual chasing by their IT and security teams. And that's the kind of ROI and impact that we can really drive with Amplifier.
Thomas Donnelly: Yeah. I I think the other important thing that we can actually measure that a lot of tools can't, because of our integration layer and being able to integrate with all of our tools, is we can look at the amount of risk that you're that's coming into the business every single day. Right. So I can tell you, hey, this company A had twenty thousand risky behaviors that happen in that organization. And then after we engage with people, Take them along for the journey, orchestrate action, they stop doing the thing, right? Like we actually start having to engage with people less, and we can actually see that, hey, 20,000 risky things used to happen every day. Now only 5,000 risky things happen every day. So I think there's a lot of just unique power with the data graph that you can measure, like the impact of these programs and how you're actually building resiliency within the organization. that you really can't do unless you normalize all this data. So I think that's another point that's worth making.
Josh: That's fantastic. well, I know we're running out of time. I just want to say thank you both so much for taking your time today to join us and share more about the work that y'all are doing. I know we're super excited to see y'all at J Not coming up here soon.
Shreyas Sadalgi: Thank you, Kat and Josh, for the privilege and the honor to be on After Tower.
Thomas Donnelly: Yeah, think yeah, thank y'all. Josh I'm
Josh: Really appreciate it.
Thomas Donnelly: Josh, I'm gonna bring you some homemade hot pockets to jam Juck, so get ready.
Josh: I can't I can't wait. I'll be at the JAMF Loves booth. absolutely there for some fancy hot pockets. Well, as always, y'all, Jamf After Dark is a podcast from JAMF. It's copyright 2026, all rights reserved. Technical details and product offerings may change at any time, so always check jamf.com for the latest info on our products and services.
Kat: You can reach out to us if you have questions or comments or suggested show topics or even fan mail. Simply send a friendly email to infojanf.com with the subject line Attention to the podcast. And of course, if you need support, visit JAMF account to start a conversation or to open a ticket and get your technical questions answered.
Josh: And again, special thanks to our guests this week and also to our audio and video engineers, Merlin and Martin, who help us look and sound awesome. Until next time for Cat Garbus, I'm Josh Thornton.
Kat: And for Josh Thornton, I'm Kat Garbus, and we will catch you after dark again. And please don't have any snow leopard show up on your reports. Have a great night.
Josh: Hey cat, how you doing today?
Kat: I'm doing well. A little warm. It's very hot here in in Chicago. How about you?
Josh: Doing great. I'm honestly a little in awe because I've been keeping up with your J Nock inspired LinkedIn posts and they have been hilarious and creative. I think my favorite was you holding up a sign saying if you're waiting for a sign, here's your sign. That was like top notch.
Kat: I appreciate that. I try to tap into my comedic muscle when appropriate. And I try to just have fun with my job. So I really appreciate that. I would love for us to just amplify Januck and also just amplify all the great things we're doing. Who's with us today, Josh?
Josh: As always, your segues are the best. we are super excited. Please join us in welcoming Shreyas and Tommy from Amplifier Security to our episode today. Thank you all for joining. would you like to just take a few moments, introduce yourself?
Shreyas Sadalgi: Hey guys, my name is Shreya Sadalgi, co-founder and wearing the CEO hat at Amplifier Security. Really amped up to be here and amped up to actually show up at Kansas City in JNOC and see you all in live and in for real this year. And we've been partnering with JAMF for the last three years and I've also had the privilege of partnering with JAMF in my prior life when I was at a company called as Better Cloud. So lived in the JAMF ecosystem and here to serve JAMF Nation.
Josh: Welcome.
Thomas Donnelly: Awesome. Awesome. Hey guys, I'm Thomas Donley. I am the the CTO and co-founder of of Amplifier. I've worn the CIO and the CISO, the cybersecurity, head of cybersecurity, a couple times in my career. I love solving problems with technology. So I love JAMF, I love Amplifier, I love putting things together and making things better together. So excited to talk about those things today.
Kat: We're really excited to unpack all the questions and we've got a fully booked schedule today, so I'm excited. But before we do that, Tommy, did you have glasses last year at J Nook? Like really thick, like nerd glasses? Was that you? Was that your style back then?
Thomas Donnelly: I do have thick nerd glasses a and if you were five
Kat: Okay, I I
Thomas Donnelly: feet away I'd be wearing right now.
Kat: Okay. I I feel like I'm having like the Clark Kent Superman like situation. Like, was that the same person that I met? so I think you it's kinda one of those things where maybe if it was like Clark Kent on the street wearing his glasses, I wouldn't know it was Superman. That's kind of I think what I'm saying right now. I was like, I think that's the same person, but maybe not. So that's where I'm at. Anyways.
Thomas Donnelly: Well Sh Shrey Shreyas wanted us to look exactly the same in this podcast, so we have the same shirt now I'm kidding. It wasn't planned. It wasn't planned. Unfortunately it wasn't planned.
Kat: Twinning. Twinning.
Shreyas Sadalgi: We we always have
Kat: I love it.
Shreyas Sadalgi: these we always have these deja vu kind of moments saying, we did we get the memo? We're wearing the same T shirt and that's kind of what happened today. We have three types of hats. we again we coordinate on this one.
Kat: And the same hat. I wanna point out you're both wearing the hat. I love it. Well, we're so you're with so you're with amplifier. Our listeners may not be familiar with amplifier. So Shreyas, I'm curious, what what is Amplifier and what problems is Amplifier solving?
Shreyas Sadalgi: Well great, let's start with that. Well, Amplifier is an AI-native workforce security problem. And if you kind of dig into the real problems of what we're solving, look, cyber attacks today run at machine speed, but workforce security runs at human speed. and that happens because there's a big bridge and a divide between security, IT, and the workforce. Right. So if you look at security teams, they're creating policies and those policy gaps create security findings. And they pass it on to IT. Now IT takes those findings and turns them into tickets and they start chasing employees to go resolve them. Like things like, hey, go patch your vulnerability, go fix your unsanctioned AI tool that we saw running on your endpoint. well, maybe you've taken care of them, but maybe you just need to reboot your machine. Or we detected CrowdStrike is not running on your one of your laptops. Can you bring them online? And we just see that it's offline. So all these kind of last mile problems is where things break down. And if you look at the employees' perspective, like to them, each of these security fixes are always an interruption, right? And so the reality is that there's as these things go unfixed, the risk keeps growing. And it's just the broken coordination model that really creates toil for IT security and it really disrupts the employee experience. So that's the crux of the problem that we're solving at Amplifier.
Kat: I think you hit on some really hot topics right now. you had mentioned AI. You had mentioned attacks. How how can we connect those dots? What are you seeing with AI? I'd be really curious about your thoughts, what you're seeing with attackers, AI driven threats. Can you talk to our listeners a little bit about the role amplifiers playing with that?
Shreyas Sadalgi: Yeah, look, we just came off from a busy week at Black Hat, and that was the theme out there as well. we were also at your booth, and everybody has AI on top of mind. if you look at how the cyber landscape is looking at it, AI has made it easier for them, the attackers, to target your people by exploiting all their posture gaps, right? When all these things go unfixed, it's easy for anyone using AI to socially engineer and figure out: hey, cat has something missing, so let me just go construct a nicely constructed phishing social engineering message to go exploit that gap. But as these AI threats grow, security and IT will always be at war, right, with productivity in the workforce and employees. and that's because, you know, today the easy solution is like, hey, let's just go enforce this and push a centralized button to go take care of this. But we all know that blind enforcement without a two-way dialogue, explaining the why and partnering with employees always creates. distrust and creates friction, right? And so this is what everybody's been talking about is how do we use AI to also be defending against these AI attacks with a collaborative approach to security.
Josh: And I think that's one of to me the most awesome parts of Amplifier is that partnership with employees. Can you just share what does that actually look like from the perspective of of an employee and why is it so powerful?
Shreyas Sadalgi: Yeah, great question, Josh. so the way we see it, look, when we talk to companies, the IT and security leaders, they're saying that like to truly build resilience in the organization, it requires marshalling the workforce and like really recruiting employees to be an active part of the security program. And so partnering with them means like, hey, instead of dictating terms, let's give some agency. Within limits to make employees active partners. Let's work with them, allow them to schedule and control actions that we are asking of them so that those times align with their day-to-day workflows. And really, while we're doing this, educate them, like transparently share the reasons behind these security requests. So it builds trust and we explain the why, right? But Doing this at scale is is a lot of manual work, right? You can imagine like any IT and security person would be like, geez, I wish I had an infinite bandwidth to go do this one-on-one, right? and that's honestly the reason why we built Amplifier to solve that, so that you can use AI agents to engage with employees, collaborate with them, have conversations, and enforce those security controls.
Josh: Yeah, I think when we think about like just an engaged workforce that's actually not just frustrated because some policy comes down to their machine and it's of course right before they're about to do a presentation and they're thrown for a loop, not only do they feel like they have some some agency in that decision making process, but now they're also educated at the same time. And as threats evolve, we know getting employees up to speed on what to expect and how to prevent it is so important. So I think it's just such a cool part of your platform.
Kat: Yeah, I wanna
Shreyas Sadalgi: Thank you.
Kat: build on that a little bit more. you had mentioned in some of our conversations about Ampi. Can you talk to our listeners a little bit about Ampi?
Shreyas Sadalgi: Yeah, AMP is a take on our AI agent. and look, first thing, Kat, is our North Star mission that drives our vision is having respect for the employee experience, right? How do you make security human? And so if you'll think of how and why we built AMP, AMPI shows up as a true security body to employees, right? And AMP works with employees where they work in Slack and in Teams, right? And so if you think of the experience that AMP provides as an AI security engineer, it really knows everything about you. It knows your role, who you are, where you work, what time zone you're in, and the context of the security issue, obviously, right? So it takes all that into account and it mimics. What an IT security person would do if they had all the time to speak with you one-on-one. So the experience that employees have with AMP is that AMP is my body, it will work with me, it will help me self-schedule and like pick a time to resolve these things with any of these things, you know, scheduling patches, OS updates, bringing devices online, you know, taking care of unsanctioned apps, or just you know, invoking the device to run their policies, right? And so that's what we've actually built into that platform is to have AMPy truly show up as a security button. Yeah.
Kat: Unsanctioned apps, that never happens. Never. No one ever has unsanctioned apps. I I think of Clippy. I think of Clippy when you say Ampy. I it reminds me of like Clippy from like Microsoft in the nineties, but not but more more security focused in a way. That's what goes on in in my mind. I'd be curious, do you have any success stories or outcomes that can help paint a picture for our listeners and tie it all together?
Shreyas Sadalgi: Yeah, look, I mean, I think first of all, our not star with AMP is how to not be clippy. We wrote that three times as we found
Kat: Mm-hmm.
Shreyas Sadalgi: the company is how do we not get branded as clippy, right? And and you're right, in a modern way to use AI to go build that. and then I think Tommy can speak to the cus success stories here of how our customers are getting a whole bunch of benefits.
Thomas Donnelly: Yeah, Yeah, so let's talk about number one, the the winning stories for Ampi. Number one is Ampi isn't just a bot that's gonna reach out to you. Ampi has personality. Ampi will send you memes for reminders like, Hey, you need to do this and maybe send something kind of funny to let you know that that that it's you know, we're trying to partner with you. It's a different experience. You know, any anybody can just send like a a text-based message. But being able to give the employee the context, being able to have a conversation, allowing them to actually ask questions and be able to answer those questions in language that anyone could understand. You know, that's really, really important. and it really kind of, you know, when you talk about automation tools, at you know, combining automation with the ability to have a meaningful conversation with somebody. is super powerful because that means that you can get the context before you take action. And that context can prevent you from disrupting somebody's workflow. Right. So when we talk about when Shreyas talks about how do we work with the employees, that's kind of the context is that we have a lot of data around what's going on. We know when you're in a meeting and we don't want to bother you. We know if something's going on, you know We have conversations of when the best time to do things is. You know, and those are key differentiations. It's talking to you with empathy and kind of how a human would, as opposed to just a purely, you know, AI bot. some of our big use cases that we have is number one is just when we install the product. We have we build a data graph with, you know, we're connecting to all your different security and IT tools, and we build a graph of data. And every time we do that, we find so many insights about, we're not installing JAMF on this group of servers, you know, these this group of computers over here. the conference rooms don't have CrowdStrike or another tool that we need to install. So just installing the product, we get a lot of insights with what's going on in somebody's environment. so that's the first place that people receive value. some of our most popular use cases that we implement that typically have a pretty big impact is standardization of OSs, right? We we go into a lot of environments and we'll find that people have we've had people we've seen over 70 operating systems in a company with you know 4,000 employees. And just going out and standardizing that with the employees, working with them of when the best time to upgrade is that doesn't disrupt them. we we took that down to like six, I believe. And that was in the span of a week or two, you know, with you know, zero interaction from employees, from the from the IT team to go do that. So and and not only does that number one standardize the OS reduce a lot of vulnerabilities, but it also reduced a lot of the support tickets that people were getting because When you have less variability in your environments, right, it tends to knock down on the the diversity of the tickets that an IT team is is is having. The other one is vulnerability management. A lot of people have tools to in you know to solve vulnerabilities, but a lot of people are installing different applications within their environment. There's a lot of edge use cases that those tools don't build. So having something that can look at those and say, like, hey, these are out of SLA. Let's engage with people to do that. And so that's kind of where we really shine. one thing that's really cool about all these problems is it's not like this is happening linear. When you engage and you democratize this stuff with the employees, it all happens at once. You know, so when we talk about vulnerability management, we talk about why do we need to prioritize? Let's just fix them all right now, all at once. And so that's kind of the wow moment when people install our product of hey, the the power of leveraging the workforce comes along. So
Kat: I'm just sitting here seventy operating systems where people like still on Snow Leopard. My goodness, I can't even I'm just sitting here trying to like wrap my brain around that
Thomas Donnelly: How? How? Yeah.
Josh: Knock Snow Leopard, y'all. that was a great OS. now
Kat: For its time.
Josh: for its time, yes. you've mentioned some r
Thomas Donnelly: So yeah, so so so was OS two warp, right, Kat? Like, I mean, for its time, right?
Josh: for its time. it sounds like so much of what you're doing is really taking full advantage of how technology has evolved and it's moving so quickly right now. But we know there there are so many, whether they're existing companies that have been around for decades or tons of new companies that are literally just popping up overnight that are focused on security and focused on taking full advantage of AI. How Do y'all see yourself in the marketplace? And how do you see yourself as you compare to some other vendors that organizations are trying to decide which are going to add value for?
Shreyas Sadalgi: Yeah. Well, that's a great question, Josh. and the way we explain it to any prospects is that hey, there's two problems that we're solving. Sort of this first mile problem in workforce security, and then there's a last mile problem, right? And so if you look at it, there's not a single vendor who's doing both together, right? or solving both those problems in a single platform. if you look at just the first mile problem, it's like, hey, how do I just look at all the gaps and assess it for these assets or employees? There's like cyber asset management vendors or like human risk management vendors who do that. And then if you look at the last mile problem, it's about employee chasing. How do I eliminate work and how do I partner with employees? Well, really, who we compete with is in-house, homegrown approaches. You know, some really smart IT security engineering teams have built, you know, custom Slack bots for one or two use cases. And then they look at our platform and they're like, this is an amazing thing, it's an out of the box solution. so I can just like move it over, right? So there's not a single product that actually continuously audits employee endpoint attack surface, finds the gaps, and then removes the toil and complexity while amplifying the employee experience. It's really hard to do that.
Josh: Yeah, you're I mean, approaching it from multiple angles, I think is really important. And you know, you talk about the homegrown solutions that folks have, and those can be really awesome. And there's an advantage because it is tailored to their specific use case, but there's a lot of caveats that come with that, where there's the additional maintenance and overhead and and it takes time. And what if that person who developed that custom solution isn't there? You know, what what do you do? And so those are all really challenging problems to solve. Now, of course, you know, JAMF, we've recently released some really cool AI governance capabilities and this is top of mind for us and our customers. How does Amplifier work alongside JAMF?
Shreyas Sadalgi: Yeah, so we all do that with with your latest and greatest APIs, Josh. So JAMF has done an excellent job of putting together platform APIs for all your products. So what Amplifier has done is we use those platform APIs to integrate with JAMF Pro, JAMF Protect, and JAMF Security Cloud. and really we Amplifiers platform relies on JAMF as the foundation for Any kind of device posture, device settings, device configurations, right? So host information, agent status, device attributes, smart groups, blueprints. We're constantly monitoring and ingesting that information. And then the other thing that we're doing is then we integrate with your identity stack, right? Okta, intro ID, Google, whatever you may have. And the hard part that our platform does is it maps all those device-based findings to your identities. And so then that lets us have a conversation. With the device owner and then engage with them in Slack and teams to resolve that, right? And of course, we integrate with a whole bunch of other ecosystem of security and IT tools, your EDR stack, your Vulliver T stack. And really the power of the platform is as you unlock more use cases. So that's something that we've been doing. And then JAMF AI governance is top of mind for us as well. We were at Black Hat last week. We've now integrated with JAMF Blueprints, which are an integral part of JAMF. AI governance. So really the question is like as IT teams roll out these AI policies in JAMF governance, in JAMF AI governance, how do you then educate the user at hey, you know, our company approved AI tool is Claude. It's not you know, codecs, you know, open AI codex. how do you actually have a conversation before you take away codecs, right? So that's really the layer that we fit into by tying it natively. Yeah.
Kat: I love that you tied in AI governance. I think it's just so important right now. A lot of organizations are still honestly trying to wrap their heads around it when AI just kind of showed up and it became the wild, wild west. That kind of all being said, so you I think you did a pretty great job already kind of describing this, but if we were to put a bow on it, what would the outcome of using both JAMF and Amplifier together be rather than independently, if that makes sense?
Thomas Donnelly: I I would I would say the the biggest thing is be able to actually secure your workforce without blocking productivity. Right? there's a lot of tools out there on the market that secure AI, right? But what people haven't realized is like we're gonna have to change the our operational model to be successful at this because people are are using these tools, they're pulling in these tools every single day. And they're not because they're malicious, but because they're trying to be productive, right? And we can't as IT or security practitioners be everywhere at all at once. Right? So how do we engage with the organization to make sure when they are doing something, is it the right thing to do? Do they know how they're supposed to use these tools? Or if we haven't seen this tool yet, how do they get that approved? Right. And that has to happen near real time today. Right. And so that's where that conversation of like, what are you trying to do? Get that context and then kind of orchestrate and lead that employee down the right path to make sure that we're approving these applications if they're used for productivity. Or we're getting them off their machines if we notice that that's something not not approved by the organization we think it's at risk. And so it's really that operational change. That in that organization that we enable together, which is huge. And a lot of people aren't thinking about it a lot, but I promise you, when they see that they have 300 AI applications, right, that hey, we just re-force re and that they need to figure out what to do about those, or hey, we just force rebooted a a critical vulnerability yesterday and we got a new one this morning. And we're gonna have to tell everybody, hey, we gotta reboot your machines again. That's when the light bulb moment is coming on for people. And that's how we can work together to really transform how we actually interface, secure, and ensure productivity with these companies together. and that's the companies that that have bought us and you are seeing. And that's why they love the solutions together. So
Josh: And I know y'all were at J Nock last year. And and I can say honestly, I had random attendees coming up and and asking hey, where's their booth? Where can I find them? Like they were so excited and just I think energized by the ideas that y'all shared and presented. But that was almost a year ago now. So when you think about what y'all shared and talked about last year compared to now, what's that journey been like? What's new and exciting for your customers?
Thomas Donnelly: Yeah, I would say that we've really gone all in on the agentic capabilities of our our platform. before we had to be kind of descriptive in how we and design these engagements. But what we're really doing is we want our agents to be able to reach out to your CIO or your CSO, hey, did you realize that you have this this you know, this Kev came out, this vulnerability, and you have 20 developers that are on it. It's actively getting exploited. Do you want me to create an agent to go and engage with them and and get this fixed by lunchtime? Right? That's the kind of capability that we're building into the product. and we've really gone all in with how our application engages with people and brought a lot of intelligence and nuance into how we're actually engaging with your workforce. And that a lot of people are like, it it talks to the employees. It's it's really not that easy. You know, we talk to organizational psychology like you know, you think about the difference between a B2B business and a B2C business where you're actually trying to sell to the customers. So that's kind of how we think about our our our product is like the employees have to like it, right? With a lot of security tools, the employees may or may not like it, right? But for us it's kind of paramount. And so those interactions and making those really awesome to be able to recognize if people are like kind of angry and they're not having a good time, hey, let's just get a live person on the on the line for you because it seems like, you know, we're giving you instructions for this vulnerability and you're having some problems, right? Or just having a conversation and being able to don't force them to click on a button, but just like, hey, I want to schedule this for next week. Okay, cool. We'll connect to their calendar, schedule it, and then at that time orchestrate the reboots or whatever we need to do applying the vulnerability. So just that intelligence. of that conversation has really, really greatly increased. and then just really maturing our integration layer. Like a lot of people think like integrating products from seven different categories, you know, and hundreds of different, you know, products is easy. But normalizing that data, we're kind of lucky because we had engineers that came from that world, but you know, it takes a lot. to mature integrations and to be able to pull that data in where it can be actionable for your employees. So just working on that stuff is is what we've been doing. And it's paying dividends, right? We've got a really strong data layer that people can can we can layer AI on to solve an a bunch of different use cases. so I really think that we're built for the future and being able to solve the the problems of tomorrow.
Josh: You know, I think it's it's a lot of folks sometimes think just getting the data is like the problem to solve. But I think when we're talking about agents and using data with an AI, that's just the first stepping stone is getting that data there. It's actually really difficult the more data you have to effectively use it with these agents based on their limitations and and also trying to make sure costs aren't ballooning for for something that in your mind can be really straightforward, but thinking like, how do you structure this in a way that
Thomas Donnelly: Yeah.
Josh: an employee is excited about or or at least cooperative with, not like, how do I bypass this and, you know, make sure this doesn't pop up again? 'Cause that's what they'll
Thomas Donnelly: Yeah.
Josh: do otherwise.
Thomas Donnelly: Well yeah, and then the other problem is if you're pulling data from so many sources, I can engage with that employee on 20 different problems. We're gonna find a lot of problems. But what are the most important problems? And then what are the problems that say like, hey, if I fix this one problem, all these other ones will kind of go away? Right. So really building the intelligence on the back end when you're pulling all this data in. To make sure that we're prioritizing the right things, to make sure that we're not bothering Kat every single day for a different thing, giving her a pull a cool-off period, right? all you know, not bothering her her at night, right? all those things pulled in to have a conversation and an experience with the employees that they'll actually like is it's a lot harder than it seems.
Josh: Yeah.
Kat: bother me at two AM with your snow leopard drama. I don't wanna hear it. I don't wanna hear it.
Thomas Donnelly: Hahaha
Josh: That's right. That's right. So I I know we've got Jay Nock coming up here soon. Are are y'all gonna be there? And I know you mentioned Black Hat just now. How did that go?
Shreyas Sadalgi: Yeah, look, we are amped up to be at JNOC this year as well. and especially with the theme that's top of mind for all our mutual customers, which is AI governance. we're excited to showcase what we've built and how you can roll that out without disrupting the employee experience. we're gonna be there at J Noch and and look, last year, remember, we gave away this amazing co-branded water bottle, which is still my favorite Owala, which I keep hearing from a lot of people. That I keep meeting is like, hey, I have Oala's, but that green one and the that we got at JNUC was our favorite. we have a special edition t shirt that we're planning for, and that's a special collectible item that you can you know, attendees can get at our booth. we're excited to design that and give that away. but look, even from Black Hat, the energy that we got from delivering these sessions at your booth and the excitement and the buzz around AI governance is is really is real, right? And the top of mind for A lot of customers. And you know, this is something that's been top of mind in both the security community as well as the Mac admin community, which is like, hey, how do I govern this experience on my Mac and my Apple fleet? Right. And so that's what's keeping us top of mind for being at JNOC.
Kat: I love it. I'm I'm really excited that you will all be back at JNUC. I love that you can also really integrate so well with our products. Before we let you go, I did want to pick your brain just a little bit more about one of your recent implementations with the large distributor. Tommy, if you don't mind kind of talking to us a little bit about that and some of the things that you helped problem solve that listeners might be wanting to ask you about at JNUC when they go to your booth this year, they see you all there and they may want to say, Hey, can you repeat this for us? Or if we're, you know, looking to be a mutual partner, right? How can we work
Thomas Donnelly: Yeah.
Kat: together?
Thomas Donnelly: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, we just had a a great engagement with a large distribution company and and the problem that they had was they have a very, you know, distributed group of Mac and iOS devices. They're a shipping company. These devices are online sometimes, they're not online other times. They're security teams trying to get in touch with people. Is really really hard. They're using these devices in their trucks. So if they reboot them at the wrong time, then it can be very disruptive to their operations, right? So that's not an option, right? So like they were looking for something of like how can I kind of be everywhere all at once, right? How can we engage with this workforce and be successful in patching these things? Because they were just all over the place. you know, and so we work with them to Pull in that data from JAMF. They had it in smart groups, right? Of like which devices weren't compliance. We use those smart groups as a trigger to launch our agents to actually go have conversations with the owners. And it's really kind of funny because we sat down, we ingested their data. The next meeting, three days later, we're like, hey, we'll just design this little group and listen, design this engagement is gonna reach out to everybody and engage. we had another meeting three days later. And the guy was like, yeah, I turned it on for the entire company. He was not shy, no testing or anything. He just, let's let's let this baby rip. And he was blown away because he said, Hey, in three days, we are where we would normally be in four weeks with five people just hammering these people, right? Trying to get things that things done. So the power of being able to see when people are online, see when we can engage with them. speaking to them in pain plain language, it really, really scaled how they can patch those devices. And so hopefully there's some use cases that are coming out pretty soon who you can see who that was. But they were very, very fired up about the whole process and and now are really kind of all in and like what else are we gonna do? we're ready to go. So so yeah that was a that was a big win for us.
Kat: It's like you took smart groups and amplified it with your solution. I just someone take this microphone away from me. so that being said, so as we kind of start to wrap things up, if someone's listening right now and we kind of sum this up for them, like what would get a listener wanting to use jamf and amplifier? What got your customer wanting to use jamf and amplifier? How would someone listening want their customers to use JAMF and Amplifier? So I wanted to kind of ask that question before we start rounding things out.
Shreyas Sadalgi: Yeah, look, I mean, like Tommy said, the first problem that Jamf customers can really solve is all their smart groups, right? I mean, so if you have a smart group and you've been waiting to see those smart groups kind of like diminish with all the exceptions, come talk to us, right? And we can, you know, just like burn those findings tied to those smart groups down. And so you don't have to like really chase employees. And the easiest way to get started is come and visit our website, amplifier security. You'll learn more about the integration. We have some great case studies there. You can also watch the little clip from the keynote from last year's JNOC. And really, we are still staying committed to the offer that we announced at last year's JNOC, which is if you have JAMF and if you want to solve JAMF use cases with Amplifier, you can use our product for free, just for JAMF use cases, for a whole year. So you can use Amplifier with JAMF for one full year, no cost, no questions asked. And that's something that customers find really easy to experience the value of Amplifier for JAMF. And then obviously they bring other use cases to us and then we can help with, right?
Thomas Donnelly: Yeah.
Josh: software is always demoed really, really great. And then they get the actual tool and it's not so amazing. And and that's honestly been amplified. I'm gonna pile on with the pun, with AI. So what are some specific like ROI stats that y'all have actually seen with your organizations that show like this is actually having a significant impact?
Thomas Donnelly: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so yeah, so when we're engaging with people, when we look at kind of success metrics, we're seeing from a from a standpoint of say like OS devices getting updated the fleet you know, the fleet updated, we're seeing those updates happening seventy percent faster across different fleets from people having to manually do it or sending out emails to everybody. so that's one thing that we're seeing. We're seeing SLAs of outstanding vulnerabilities. We've seen customers with hundreds of thousands of vulnerabilities, right? Going down to hundreds of vulnerabilities it very, very quickly. You know, 'cause I w when you think about it, we're not it's not like we have an engineer that's having to call, you know, people individually to get them to to to install things. We're really hitting everybody all at the same time. Hey, use your workforce, democratize this. so we've seen you know single digit vulnerabilities coming down from a hundred thousand vulnerabilities. We've seen training compliance, reaching out and engaging with people to make sure they're taking their trainings. If you s run training engagement, you know you typically you'll see about 75% of the people take trainings without having to go out and reach out to them and actually kind of prod them to do it, we see that to go up to ninety eight point five percent on average. Right. So we've really, really have seen pretty tremendous RI, not only in the speed in which we do things, but also the amount of those things that we can knock out in a short amount of of time. I'm trying to think of another place where we've go ahead, Shreyas, did you have something?
Shreyas Sadalgi: Yeah. And so Josh, I'll give you some more data points, right? So I think the intangible, right? That's that's the biggest ROI is the employee experience. Like employees and users, end users within our customers really love the product. And it's really hard to quantify, right? because they don't hate their security teams anymore. They don't like like you know, vent at their IT teams anymore. And that's just the intangibles, right? That you just can't quantify. but just for this distribution company that we just talked about. Right. So they have like 1300 iOS devices. and we helped eliminate five people in their IT department. And that's like around 800 hours of manual chasing by their IT and security teams. And that's the kind of ROI and impact that we can really drive with Amplifier.
Thomas Donnelly: Yeah. I I think the other important thing that we can actually measure that a lot of tools can't, because of our integration layer and being able to integrate with all of our tools, is we can look at the amount of risk that you're that's coming into the business every single day. Right. So I can tell you, hey, this company A had twenty thousand risky behaviors that happen in that organization. And then after we engage with people, Take them along for the journey, orchestrate action, they stop doing the thing, right? Like we actually start having to engage with people less, and we can actually see that, hey, 20,000 risky things used to happen every day. Now only 5,000 risky things happen every day. So I think there's a lot of just unique power with the data graph that you can measure, like the impact of these programs and how you're actually building resiliency within the organization. that you really can't do unless you normalize all this data. So I think that's another point that's worth making.
Josh: That's fantastic. well, I know we're running out of time. I just want to say thank you both so much for taking your time today to join us and share more about the work that y'all are doing. I know we're super excited to see y'all at J Not coming up here soon.
Shreyas Sadalgi: Thank you, Kat and Josh, for the privilege and the honor to be on After Tower.
Thomas Donnelly: Yeah, think yeah, thank y'all. Josh I'm
Josh: Really appreciate it.
Thomas Donnelly: Josh, I'm gonna bring you some homemade hot pockets to jam Juck, so get ready.
Josh: I can't I can't wait. I'll be at the JAMF Loves booth. absolutely there for some fancy hot pockets. Well, as always, y'all, Jamf After Dark is a podcast from JAMF. It's copyright 2026, all rights reserved. Technical details and product offerings may change at any time, so always check jamf.com for the latest info on our products and services.
Kat: You can reach out to us if you have questions or comments or suggested show topics or even fan mail. Simply send a friendly email to infojanf.com with the subject line Attention to the podcast. And of course, if you need support, visit JAMF account to start a conversation or to open a ticket and get your technical questions answered.
Josh: And again, special thanks to our guests this week and also to our audio and video engineers, Merlin and Martin, who help us look and sound awesome. Until next time for Cat Garbus, I'm Josh Thornton.
Kat: And for Josh Thornton, I'm Kat Garbus, and we will catch you after dark again. And please don't have any snow leopard show up on your reports. Have a great night.
