
SINC’s Director of Content Annie Liljegren spoke with Jason Coari in November 2021, and has edited this interview for length and clarity.
I'm speaking with Jason Coari, Senior Director Product Marketing at Lakeside Software. Based in London, Jason will be joining us in Scottsdale, AZ for our 2021 West IT & Security Leaders Forum, where he'll deliver a keynote presentation: "Empower Your Digital Workforce."

Jason, you had a deep background in tech long before joining Lakeside towards the end of the pandemic year. What can you share about that move?
We often hear about a possible disconnect between the employer's perception of their employees' satisfaction level with the digital experience, and then the actual degree of satisfaction. From the vendor perspective, what do you see when coming to that problem?
Give us an example of what that self-healing functionality might that look like, and also what Lakeside brings to the table—what sets you apart?
JC: Sure, let’s say an employee is having a connectivity issue; connectivity is one of the most important aspects of having a good digital employee experience.
With a piece of software like Lakesides Digital Experience Cloud, we can actually detect wifi signal strength and we can help IT generate a popup on an employee’s laptop that says Oh, looks like your wifi signal strength is low, and then provide a course of action the employee can take to remedy.
And that sort of problem where the employee is experiencing a connectivity issue—some employees wouldn’t necessarily realize it’s a wifi strength issue, they may think it’s a website that’s not performing, they may think it’s something related to memory or hardware or their device in general. Giving the employees that bit of information they can act on is again really good for the employees, as well as for the business.
As far as what Lakeside uniquely brings to the category, we have an ability to collect a degree of telemetry off of that device application and network that is truly superior within our category.
I say that because we collect across more metrics—we collect across 10,000 metrics—and we also do it more frequently. We collect data every 15 seconds, while there are others in the category that collect either every hour, or sometimes just every day.
But an employee might be having an issue that occurs intermittently or occasionally. Well, if you’re only collecting data once every hour, what happens if you’re collecting the status of that device when the incident is not manifesting itself? You’re never going to see it in the first place; you’re not getting accurate insight. Data by itself is just data, but having better data can drive better insights and those better insights can drive better actionability. So by putting all that together we give organizations the most opportunity to impact and improve digital employee experience within the category.
I’ll also share several great case studies in my presentation, specifically, one that has to do with asset rationalization. Lakeside services some very large American enterprises, and what we’ve found is that often hardware refresh cycles are conducted in ways that cost businesses a tremendous amount of capital. When it comes to refreshing the devices of thousands of employees, you think about the aggregate amount, the overall cost of that kind of investment the company’s making.
The reality we often see is that most devices don’t actually need replacing, they just need upgrading: they need upgraded memory, they need upgraded hardware. In some cases they need perhaps upgraded processors, but there’s also an opportunity to move a lot of employees from physical infrastructure to thin clients.
Giving enterprises that kind of flexibility and the ability to be more prescriptive in how they deploy hardware to their technology ends up saving organizations millions of dollars, and so I’ll be sharing more about that in the presentation.
Great to hear you'll have some exciting case studies for us. Your presentation is titled “Empower Your Digital Workforce,” and as we're thinking about the future of work—that's become something of a buzz phrase, but let’s dig into it from the vendor perspective. I don't want to use the word ‘assume,’ but what are you anticipating about what that workforce is going to look like? Coming out of our recent global event, there must be some things you’re presuming about the workplace of the near future or of the future, and what's going to stick.
Indeed. We hear so often from our community that folks feel they're not taking full advantage of the solutions or products they have deployed. It sounds like you’re speaking to that need to take stock, to assess how we're making use of what we have. And to your point about enabling people to be productive anywhere, if we remove some of the generational challenges that we sometimes see, you can make that a lot easier for folks. So something as simple as an employee not realizing they have a connectivity issue—a system that anticipates that might somewhat level the playing field between different generations that maybe aren't as familiar with technology as another. Would that be fair to say?
Such a relevant area for discussion—we hear that theme of adoption frustration all the time. This is your first SINC event; What are you excited to share with the West audience, or to get the audience talking about in the discussion? What are you looking forward to about your presentation and the event itself?
Sounds great, Jason. That’s exactly what we are about: curating environments and events where that level of quality conversation can take place. Thanks for your time; we’ll see you in Scottsdale.