548: Interview With Chad Swarthout and Ryan Ball of Alectrona - Patch Management
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Topics:
-We are pleased to welcome back Chad Swarthout, founder & CEO of Alectrona. We also have the pleasure of welcoming Ryan Ball, Director of Engineering at Alectrona.
-Chad was on the show back in 2019
-We discuss the road Alectrona has taken since back in 2019.
-Chad had the insight to go fully remote and close his office prior to the pandemic of 2020.
-A majority of their clients have offsite employees as well.
-All of the clients Alectrona has taken on since the pandemic have been all over the country.
-Jerry wants to know more about how they acquire clients outside of their local area.
-They tend to try and meet with customers on a regular basis to keep in contact and be aware of what needs changes.
-Chad talks about how they found a need for patch management in many of their Jamf engagements.
-From there, Alectrona Patch was born
-Ryan gets into the details of how Alectrona Patch works, mainly by the use of a configuration profile.
-Multiple times a day, they system polls for product updates to have them ready for update deployment.
-They account for a variety of installer formats like DMGs, PKGs, and zip files.
-Alectrona Patch is meant to by deployed via MDM.
-Learn more at https://www.alectrona.com/patch
-Alectrona Patch is on a monthly consumption model. $2.50/Mac per month up to 199 Mac computers. For larger needs, reach out to their team for pricing.
-Monthly pricing is based on how many unique devices are reaching out to their content server.
-Ryan & Chad talks about the back end details of how the tool works.
-Joe wants to know if Dolly Drive is supported.
-Another tool that Alectrona offers is called Migrator
-Migration Assistant has caused issues in business environments so the Alectrona team wanted to create a replacement for offsite users to seamlessly migrate to a new computer.
-This also sped up the return rate for previous computers.
-Jerry wants to know about white labeling, which the Alectrona products can support.
-You can reach out to the team about Alectrona Patch by visiting their MacAdmins Slack channel.