Oh my gosh, this changes everything. It was one of those kind of wow moments for me. It's going to change the industry. Stunned, I was blown away. Checked so many boxes of what we were missing. It was probably the most exciting product I've ever heard about in my life.
Over the past few years, the Enterprise browser emerged to become one of the hottest new technologies for Enterprise. We're really talking about the future of work here, how to enable individuals to be more efficient, how to reduce the cost of the business. We started to go discuss it with some of the big CIOs and CISO thought leaders, and they kept saying the same phrase: 'Wow, you do that, that'll change everything. This can change everything.' They're literally telling me our tagline: 'This can change everything.' The Enterprise browser is both inevitable and invaluable. I can't believe I'm seeing what I'm seeing. I can't believe I can add that layer of control and create that great user experience.
But what is an Enterprise browser and how did we get here? 95% of all work is being done in the browser. We were exploring many solutions: cloud workstations, remote desktops. Each solution was a really huge burden and was not scalable. We are a remote-first company. Probably 85 to 90% of our employees do work remote. It's critical that we protect that last mile.
As the vast majority of applications moved to the web, the one application not designed for the Enterprise suddenly became the most critical application in the Enterprise. It's the heart and soul of the Enterprise. If you ask people, 'What would you choose: your operating system without the browser or the browser?' It was clear that the browser became bigger than the OS itself. The crazy thing was, it was never designed as an Enterprise application. Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and other Chromium browsers became the way businesses ran. Nearly all applications became web applications, all were accessed through the browser, but these browsers weren't built for Enterprises.
If you think about where they were sourced, they're the original source of the browsers that we've all used for many years. They're for shopping at their core. The people that make them, at the end of the day, they monetize off of them and they make the consumer of the product. That's around the ad revenue models that are associated with them and the analytics off of users' behaviors. Well, that's all fine and good. That's great for consumers. It's not what the Enterprise needs. At the end of the day, we don't need coupons in the enterprise. We don't need ad tracking. We don't need preferencing. You're not going to care where I surf in business and try to monetize that. Chrome is dictated by 5 billion end users, 5 billion consumers. It's designed for e-commerce, it's designed for advertising, etc.
To remedy this, Enterprises have spent the last decade and billions of dollars attempting to secure the consumer brand browser, protect users, and enable their workforce to access work applications wherever and however they need. The current approach requires us to take a consumer browser and then layer on all sorts of technology to achieve our outcomes, whether it's security technology, whether it's efficiency, whether it's to enable an understanding, compliance, visibility, you name it. All of that is extra tech, extra challenge. Most of that tech integrates in a way that has a level of extraction to it, a level of challenge in the data that gets resolved.
We now use a browser for absolutely everything. 98 to 100% of our day is spent on a browser, but it's a consumer browser. And so we've obviously had to wrap it with all these different technologies. Dan Amiga, my co-founder, he saw this opportunity from his work with Chromium, the open-source project around browsers. In 2020, we decided to embark on the journey of building a new browser distribution, one that's better on Chromium, the largest open-source project in the world after Linux.
The Enterprise browser is a browser built on the Chromium open-source project that installs on your desktop. It connects up to a management console. The management console downloads a policy, and then the policy runs local. The policy governs everything that happens on the last mile. If you wish it to copy, paste, upload, download, screenshots, data redaction, automation, from watermarking to where data is stored, to what the device has to be configured as, to literally what's presented to the user, everything about that last mile is in control.
When we started designing Island and thinking about what's a roadmap in year one, year two, we're here to do three things: dramatically improve the end-user experience, drive cost reductions for our customers, and the third, improve in all aspects of security in IT. Since coming out of stealth in 2022, Island has seen tremendous success with some of the largest hotels, airlines, and banks, along with a score of other companies betting on the Enterprise browser to improve security, reduce costs, and enhance the end-user experience.
We've got some organizations saving hundreds of millions of dollars a year, literally removing a massive amount of spend, and it's a spend that compounds. I think I've shared even on some blogs that I've never seen an ROI as high as that when you're replacing hardware with an Enterprise secure browser. But right now the ROIs are so wildly high that I almost can't believe I'm writing it down because I'm usually not a big fan of arguing big ROIs because they tend to be very exaggerated. But this one is not, particularly when you're replacing hardware. It's a no-brainer because it's just a huge value-add from a client perspective.
In that security and risk space, we went in thinking, 'Hey, this is going to be a great security tool.' We came out of that with what is a revenue-generating tool because we're able to automate things within that workflow that you would not typically be able to do. Because the browser is the critical component of almost every Enterprise workflow, it means Enterprises can use it to solve a wide variety of challenges. When we think about the most popular use cases, the thing we should always note is the originality of use cases at the customer never ceases to amaze me. The problems we're solving, the problems they have, it's just as creative as all get out.
What we see, I meet one-on-one with my executives every quarter. I talk about Island because a use case comes up that only Island can solve. Customers would start with two, three, four of our modules, and then they would call us back: 'Hey guys, can you activate this thing? Can you activate that thing?' Once you have it, you just can't unsee all the opportunities to have a positive impact on the business. And that's really one of the things that we have to do first with a customer is just figure out where to start. They usually have 20, 30 spots that they see could be benefited, but where is the right ROI, the right implementation to justify the change?
As I was showing some of these use cases, she mentioned, and this is an IT person's dream: 'Everything I raise, you're showing me, and I'm just checking off boxes now that I'd have to go look at other solutions.' It was crazy. I've had a CIO say this is the coolest tech they've seen in 25 years. They've never seen anything better. It's just so much fun when that light bulb hits and they see what we can do. They start to have so many questions, and all of a sudden they want to spend all this time with you because they're like, 'What else can we talk about?'
I spent a lot of time working the deployment of those iPhones to the AT&T network. That product made sense, and it still does. It sort of changed the whole world. I think you could put the browser in a similar sort of vein there. What we're delivering today will be a fraction of the value that we see this thing deliver over the next 5 to 10 years. And what we're delivering today is enough to change organizations.
When you think about Island, it's not a secure browser, right? It's a central working tool in the organization. My initial reaction when I heard about Enterprise browsers as a game changer was, 'It's just a browser.' Only when I saw a demo did I realize that it's a lot bigger than a browser. Customers start to realize that whatever they see, I can control. Think about the possibilities there. It's almost endless when they can just open the aperture as to the art of the possible.
We get off that first call and they've had the moment. They say, 'We want to get together with our teams and talk about it.' And they come to the next call with 30 use cases. You see that they got it right out of the gate and they see the power of it. And the explosive power once you get beyond that first use case just starts spreading throughout the organization. It's unlike anything I've ever seen before.
To me, the future of work is this wonderful destination where cybersecurity is just part of how we operate, where we've made the intelligent decisions to enable a safe and secure but effective world. We have done so little to innovate for the end user. It's time to focus on them, and I think we can do that. That's the future of work as it should be: frictionless wherever it needs to be, and secure. All of those things matter. They're all as important as the next one. I think that's the future of Island.
