When thinking of TeamViewer, many will imagine its initial habitat as a remote IT service tool. However, the deployment of remote access is far broader. TeamViewer CEO Oliver Steil says his company should connect everything from oil rigs to tech companies and Formula 1 teams.
Remote access is the umbrella term for everything TeamViewer does. It hasn’t taken on this all-encompassing concept overnight. The company was the brainchild of Tilo Rossmanith in 2005 and created out of pure pragmatism, intending to reduce the travel required for onsite IT updates or fixes. Göppingen, a southern German city with fewer than 60,000 inhabitants, is still its headquarters. As TeamViewer has grown and stayed put, however, the industry around it has changed enormously.
Oliver Steil has been CEO of TeamViewer since 2018. He’s seen customers having long moved beyond mere PC-to-PC remote access. “Customers have realized that they can connect to anything that has a computer inside it,” he says. And these customers very much want to. Pragmatism, just as before, is the prime motivation here. The need to cut costs and a drive for efficiency have banded together across industries. Remote access is a key contributor, allowing for many more things to be done by fewer people with less downtime, less travel and fewer costs. “That has led us to conclude that we should go completely for ‘remote everything’.” There’s no need to specify who’s remotely accessing whom either: IT to IT, IT to factory, factory to factory. “If people, technology and data are involved, we want to connect them.” That’s TeamViewer down to its fundamentals. It encompasses TeamViewer Remote, Tensor and Frontline, as well as specific solutions tailored for a given industry.
Broad customer base
TeamViewer’s software has lots of customers to connect. Despite a modest employee base of 1,500, the company serves customers such as DHL, Coca-Cola and Specsavers. The most visible are invariably the sporting ventures, with the TeamViewer name adorning Manchester United’s kit and the F1 racecar from Mercedes-AMG Petronas. As it happens, we’re talking to Steil on the Friday of the Dutch GP, with Mercedes’ driver pair of Lewis Hamilton and George Russell using his software nearby in between practice runs. The twin screens that drop down whenever either driver is tucked back into the garage are running TeamViewer feeds, providing critical info on braking points, teammate comparisons and more.
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Steil says the Mercedes F1 partnership is paying off handsomely. He argues it gives TeamViewer a great chance to stress-test its solutions. Formula One’s world of milliseconds allows for any weaknesses to show. “They put pressure on us and that’s good,” Steil says, referring to the Mercedes team, which has won numerous championships across the past decade.
Like F1 rivals such as Red Bull, Ferrari and McLaren, Mercedes makes use of a distributed workforce during the race weekend that all contribute to the overall competitiveness. Beyond the relatively limited trackside race team are the Mercedes home base in Brackley (UK) and the Mercedes AMG HPP power unit division in Brixworth, a 45-minute drive away. This trinity has to harmonize remotely, which TeamViewer is a natural fit for. What are the kind of challenges the software has to overcome, and how does that relate across the many industries the company is active in?
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Three challenges
Steil identifies three challenges, each of which has been met to some extent. The first is of a technical nature. Ideally, a tractor in rural America ought to have the same benefits from TeamViewer as the most well-connected places on Earth. This requires a thin client capable of running all software (including encryptions) on ancient 2G tech, with more meaningful connectivity existing at 3G. It’s no mean feat, as 2G maxes out at a staggeringly low 5 kB/s.
Basic connectivity is no longer the unfixable problem it once was, Steil points out. CNH Industrial, a TeamViewer client and the one we’ll cast as the manufacturer behind said rural American tractor, is already much more ambitious for its clientele. It’s hoping to unleash Copilots out in the field (quite literally so) for AI-driven agriculture. This goes to show we’re at the stage where interoperability and cultural tendencies pose greater (and thus much more relevant) challenges than merely finding a network suitable of running remote access software.
Interoperable
Running TeamViewer wherever is one thing. Running it “anywhere” also means overcoming issues of compatibility. How do you ensure your tool can plug into an antiquated robotic arm from industrial equipment manufacturer Kuka running Windows 3.11? Brownfield automation, the act of automating pre-existing industrial infrastructure, is of great importance nowadays. It’s the practical fulfillment of the long-coveted “smart factories” dream, boasting nearly 100 percent uptime and preventative care. A simple rip-and-replace is unrealistic, causing great upheaval. All Linux flavours require support, too, as these can be found in vending machines, coffee makers and just about any other kind of IoT device imaginable. These all need to be interoperable and have to standardizable somehow.
Why is this necessary? Well, first of all, gathering insights from industrial equipment requires connecting to them. The second point related strongly to the first, as security becomes a far trickier problem to solve once your device is connected to the wider network. The global attack surface is larger than ever thanks to the rise of edge computing, especially in the industrial sector. Add to that the fact that state actors and cybercriminals tend to pinpoint industry as a suitable pool of victims, meaning no-one sane can feel safe by looking away. Active maintenance is required, and remote access accomplishes this at scale.
More persistent problem
A more persistent challenge emerges from our conversation with Steil. And, as is often the case, it’s a people problem. IT and OT are different realms still. Having lived separately for a long time, tribal thinking prevents the two groups from bridging the gap easily. “IT vendors build software with the expectation that there will be problems with it. The OT side goes: ‘okay, prove to me that your solutions make us better and faster’, they won’t adopt anything quickly.” In other words, “move fast and break things” isn’t a mantra often heard around factory floors. Remote maintenance is an idea that can feel alien to some OT personnel. “That divergence has only become more dramatic because of the cloud. In the IT back office, everything is easily deployable and things are increasingly centralized. But that doesn’t work everywhere.”
In 2020, Covid-19 changed this dynamic. Suddenly, entire factories had to be built without much of the outside assistance many had been used to. Outside expertise couldn’t be flown in, and even a broken elevator wasn’t immediately serviceable to an external technician. TeamViewer had rapidly become plainly relevant to all for many more use cases beyond IT.
However, it’s not just the OT side that was in need of a mindset change. Tech giants now also understand that the realm of IoT devices and industrial tooling speaks a different language. “If you ask Microsoft about this now, they admit it’s a complex problem to solve. A few years ago, they would have dismissed your concerns and confidently stated that Azure could be used for industrial settings in a plug-and-play fashion.”
“When I speak to customers, they are adamant that they will not connect their factory to the Azure cloud. They’re not going to transfer all the data. They often can’t because of cycle times or latency. You can’t get insights from analytics out of the cloud fast enough because of the latency involved.” Today, Microsoft Industry Clouds are service packages offering tailored solutions. It’s a far cry from the simple IT-to-OT jump the company had anticipated before.
Security initiatives
As mentioned, the ongoing OT/IT convergence increases the attack surface. If you can get more done remotely, so can attackers. What’s TeamViewer’s role in securing matters? This is a more pertinent question now than it had been before, given TeamViewer itself has been targeted by Russian state-backed hackers. Code reviews and pen testings are important puzzle pieces, but Steil points to the right personnel being at least as important. He praises the expertise at his disposal. “We’re cloud-based, but we build security in a way to the scale that most customers can achieve.” His phrasing relates to the fact that there’s no on-prem variant which you can venture to protect on your own. “The value of TeamViewer diminishes if it’s not cloud-based,” Steil says. All learnings are pooled together, which he argues is to everyone’s benefit.
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Some may have a different view. “When people talk about cybersecurity, they mostly fall back into a mindset of defense,” Steil says. It’s not the preferred direction of travel, he proposes, as thousands of employees are using credentials that can all be stolen at the flick of a wrist. An infiltration can be near-instant after such a compromise. Two things are more important than plain-old firewalls and other on-prem safeguards: the initial incident response and the hardening of infrastructure. For example, aided by partners such as Microsoft and through proper network segmentation, TeamViewer managed to prevent the Russians from gathering any customer data. Employee data along with encrypted passwords were stolen, which is still something to be concerned about, but it’s safe to say the company prevented far worse.
Data dilemmas
Our conversation has somehow avoided the topic of AI until now. We can’t help but wonder what TeamViewer is doing in this regard. As ever, Steil points out the technology’s potential is enormous, but unlike many others, he doesn’t go much further in emphasizing its opportunities. To customers, he says, the benefit is already obvious. IT task automation, work process optimalization and preventative maintenance are clear wins that can be turned into a reality soon. TeamViewer can play a role in this regard, even though such things as virtual agents are still a topic of exploration.
AI requires solving some major data dilemmas. How do you handshake with all the tools required? OT device manufacturers are stakeholders in this regard and have their own views on data governance, Steil says. “We’re still looking to solve that right now.” There will inevitably be a solution, Steil believes. “The need exists. People have realized that and they want to fix it.”
There is already AI
TeamViewer does indeed offer AI solutions of its own already. Frontline AiStudio helps customers count boxes and detect misplaced ones, check for safety violations by spotting helmets or the absence of them, and help explain where to place specific kinds of oil in a machine. Obviously, this requires visual information. Stationary cameras can’t carry the weight here. TeamViewer caught on to this fact early on and has acquired several augmented reality (AR) companies over the years.
TeamViewer’s AR efforts started as an experiment. Ever since, the company has spotted support for AR broadening. For example, ARCore was launched as an Android component in 2018. “We asked ourselves: to what extent does this technology improve interactions? After all, we were already using video.” Use cases were quite clearly inside a niche where it would be eminently suitable to help technicians and experts interact. Moves to acquire Piscavi, Viscopic, Upskill and Ubimax led to customers recognizing TeamViewer as an AR company in its own right.
AR is a big enough venture to essentially dominate the smallish TeamViewer Experience Day show floor at a Zandvoort beach resort. It demoes well, of course. An orderpicker demo guides users to the right product to put into the right box through basic colour coding, while other demonstrations feature AI voices guiding one through a simple task. The failed Google Glass project from 2013 had the right ideas in mind, it appears, but today’s manufacturers are finally executing on this fundamentally viable concept. “Sticky pointers”, often in the form of 3D digital objects placed inside one’s regular vantage point, can be an effective aid for navigation and many manual tasks. As it doesn’t prevent the wearer from plainly seeing the world around them, it’s additive. Steil sees no real downside to using it in industrial settings as it’s at worst useless and at best an enormous productivity boost. One major benefit to using a phone for interacting with an outside expert: you can still use both hands.
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TeamViewer’s evolution continues apace, and the AR efforts are the best way to show it. The Apple Vision Pro also features and immediately impresses. However, it’s somewhat dainty exterior is ill-equipped to handle the industrial world of bolts, grooves, grease and sweat. “Imagine the capabilities of a Vision Pro in a warehouse or on an oil rig. It will not be a distraction, but simply make your work easier, simpler and better.”
For now, this is the latest chapter in the TeamViewer story. Not unlike collaboration tool and fellow Covid hit Zoom, it’s tackling challenges beyond the pandemic now. Having seen the world turn towards remote access through necessity, TeamViewer is hoping to ensure it remains the preferred way of doing things. It was ready to pounce when the opportunity arrived, based on a deep understanding of where customers are at in their digital efforts and, in particular, where they want to take said efforts. The answer is: everywhere.
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