LoJack for Laptops

Mike Agerbo: Well, if you own your own business, you know that you have a lot of valuable assets outside your people. I’m talking about things like cellphones, laptops. We’ve got Aly Sidi from Absolute Software, thanks for coming on the show. Aly Sidi: No problem. Mike Agerbo: I’ve known you guys for many years now back from the Computrace days. Now, you have the LoJack for laptops which basically helps you keep track of your laptops and you also have other types of assets tracking capabilities as well. Maybe we can start with what LoJack is and how that helps businesses. Aly Sidi: Sure, LoJack for laptops is basically a software that’s installed on the laptops and in the event of a task, we have a whole set of team that can actually go out and actually recover them. Mike Agerbo: So, when you install this and for example, I’m a thief and I steal the laptop, can’t I go on and just erase that? Aly Sidi: We actually have a mock test that actually allows our computers or agent of south hill and that’s actually built in to the Bios so with Dell, Fujitsu, IBM—Panasonic, we have relationships with all of them and it actually comes prebate in the laptop when you buy it. Mike Agerbo: So, if I try to erase it I can’t. Aly Sidi: Well, you can erase the software if you want too. You can even throw with the hard drive if you want it, but when the thief puts a new one, the software is smart enough to self heal itself. Mike Agerbo: Okay, and then the first time I plugged that thing into an Internet connections, you guys can find me. Aly Sidi: Right, it actually calls back home. Mike Agerbo: And so do you have a whole like security call center that looks after this kind of stuff? Aly Sidi: Yeah, so we actually have somebody called TROs or Thief Recovery Officers that actually work out the company. So, what happens when your laptop gets stolen, the first thing you do is obviously phone the police. You can have a thief report and then you give us that file in the computrace console or LoJack console, and then they facilitate the recovery with local loan personnel across the world, and they give them the necessary information they need to go on as they recover it and that’s how that facilitates the recovery of the laptop. Mike Agerbo: In what percentage of laptops are recovered? Aly Sidi: We do actually three out of four laptops are actually recovered. Mike Agerbo: That’s pretty amazing. Aly Sidi: Yeah, and we’re actually doing about a 100 recoveries a week. Mike Agerbo: Wow! That many are going missing. Aly sidi: Yes, so from last year it’s up considerably. Mike Agerbo: So, what about tracking us that some things like cellphones or Blackberries? Aly Sidi: Yeah, we also on top of the thief recovery, we do an asset tracking, so you can track your laptops. What software is installed, the hardware assets, computer drift sought the hosting and changes you wanted to get an alert. We also have the data protection side as well, so if you have sent files in your laptop and it goes missing and for some reason we can’t recover it, you actually choose to delete all the data on the laptop itself. Mike Agerbo: Is that done remotely then—? Aly Sidi: Yeah, it’s done remotely and you can actually choice what you want to wipe. You can wipe the whole system, leave the system intact, target your flash drive, wipe out some registry entries. It’s up to you. Mike Agerbo: You can totally mess it up. Aly Sidi: Pretty much yeah, and there’s also a flight called Perpetual which means that it can entice with the self healings, so let’s say a thief puts in a new hard drive, reinstalls Windows. They are using it for a couple of days. Our agent calls back home and says, “What am I scheduled to do?” “Oh, a data delete so let’s go and wipe it perpetually.” Mike Agerbo: It will be the worst laptop you have stolen. Aly Sidi: Yeah. Mike Agerbo: You can track Blackberries as well. Aly Sidi: Yeah, we just actually launched the Blackberry tracking and you can actually see your assets on the map. Mike Agerbo: Which we got up here, yeah. Aly Sidi: Yeah, you can look at the screen here, I’ve got a local shot of Vancouver and it’s on my Blackberries in my account and where they could have been. Mike Agerbo: And so do the employees like that? Aly Sidi: I’m not sure if they know. Mike Agerbo: Yeah, but it’s a great way to keep track of obviously I mean, these things are worth you know, hundreds of dollars laptops, thousands of dollar. Aly Sidi: Right, exactly. Mike Agerbo: Great. Where can people find a more information about all the selling? Aly Sidi: You can go right to the website at Lojackforlaptops.com and all the information is right there. Mike Agerbo: That was Aly Sidi from Absolute Software talking about LoJack and asset tracking for your business.