Imprivata CEO Says the Pandemic Has Accelerated Changes That Might Have Taken Years to Achieve
Published June 2020
Gus Malezis joined Imprivata as its CEO in 2016, and in addition to improving the company’s bottom line, he instituted a renewed focus on customer service. That powered a resurgence in the company and a redefinition of the services it would provide to healthcare customers, with an increasing focus on digital identity services. That new direction for its product line seems prescient, as the healthcare industry shifted quickly to respond to Covid-19 — ramping up remote and virtual care, greatly expanding telehealth services and utilizing remote workers to handle burgeoning capacity challenges. Malezis also says Imprivata is partnering to support customers during this difficult time, eschewing the sales-call mentality. In this episode of healthsystemCIO’s Partner Perspective Series, Malezis talks with Editor-in-Chief Anthony Guerra and describes how authentication services will see increased demand as healthcare organizations change the way they provide care.
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Guerra: Hi Gus. Thanks so much for joining me today. I’m looking forward to having a nice conversation about what’s going on at Imprivata and what’s going on in the industry.
Malezis: Anthony, good morning, I’m delighted to be here.
Guerra: Let’s start off by telling me a little bit about Imprivata. Most of the people that are going to listen to this certainly know Imprivata – you have tons of customers, but for the few that don’t know too much about Imprivata, tell me a little bit about the organization and your role.
Malezis: Imprivata is a digital identity company that has over the past 18, nearly 20 years, been focused on digital identity serving the healthcare community, mostly the healthcare worker, the provider marketplace. It’s based in Lexington, Massachusetts, and it’s an incredibly innovative company. It uses technology that improves the productivity, and the safety and efficiency of our healthcare workers.
We look at healthcare workers as one of our audiences. In everything we do, we look to observe, understand and respect the workflow and not disrupt it, but really help accelerate it. And on the other hand, we ensure that our technology, for the IT part of the audience of our customers, that it supports their cybersecurity initiatives, that it delivers cybersecurity controls and safety in keeping our hospitals safe from hacks and attacks, and also compliance. So this is really what we focus on – digital identity, we take it and apply it for clinical healthcare workers, make them efficient and productive with IT. And for the IT side that has to run these systems, we want to make sure that it’s effective and provides cybersecurity controls and compliance controls. We have a number of solutions around this that are well known in the industry and frankly, that we lead the industry in, and we continue to innovate in those areas.
So, in fact, one of the things that we released recently is a very simple, very transparent two-factor authentication. Two-factor authentication is used by many people to elevate the level of security. But it’s always been a pain – you have to whip out your phone, you have to look at this text message or an email, that’s got a token, you have to read the token and transpose it into your other screen – all that is not particularly difficult, but it consumes time. It disrupts your flow, it disrupts your mental acuity, it disrupts – for providers, for doctors and nurses who are trying to do their work, it pulls them away from focusing on the patient, which is really what they’re there to do. So we said, “All right, let’s solve this problem.”
We used our computing technology and things like Bluetooth to make that injection of the token invisible. So you’ve got a two-factor token that’s coming to your cell phone, we automatically know you have a cell phone, we can talk to it via Bluetooth, we find the token and we check it without the doctor having to pull the phone out, look at it, read it, type it, all of that has now gone away. So, doctors see this and they love it, and they say, “Hey, why didn’t you guys do this earlier?” and we say, “Well, you’re right, we should have done this earlier.” But, hey, we’ve done it. This is some of the work that we do – we make things very simple and efficient, respecting workflows, and secure and compliant on the other hand.
Guerra: And as CEO, how do you think of the job? How do you think of what you’re supposed to be doing?
Malezis: Boy, it’s an exciting job. As CEO, you’re really responsible for every part of the business and every part of the family and all of its employees for delivering value to our customers, all the way from ensuring that customers are getting value that we’re servicing them well, that we’re responding to their inquiries and their issues, that there’s a lot of customer interaction. That’s a part that I’m especially fond of, I really love, because that’s ultimately who gives you the real answers of what they need, and how well you’re doing in servicing their needs.
And then, from customers, you go into what are our products, how well are they working, what can we do to make them better and more efficient? And also, as a CEO, you have to understand how you are presenting those solutions to your customers, what is your marketing organization doing, what are your sales teams doing to support that relationship. And of course, you’ve got a whole back end of the business, the back office and it’s there to support everything else.
Guerra: Right…
Malezis: So you kind of have your hands in everything. In my case, I really thoroughly enjoy that. But I focus a lot on customers and a lot on our customer-engaging employees, and the solution space. But it does vary by company.
Guerra: It varies by company and by person, right? As the CEO, you define the job. You say you personally, I want to work with customers very much, I like that. I suppose you can have CEOs that are more inclined to look at financials and numbers and live in spreadsheets; I don’t know if that’s the way to be, but you probably have all different varieties and flavors. You particularly enjoy interacting with customers; that helps you understand the market and set the direction of the company.
Malezis: Yeah, that’s exactly right. That’s why I prefer these enterprise-focused organizations, where the enterprise customer is very much, not just a customer, but a partner. If you do it right, you’re really solving problems today and working with them to solve problems in the future as they see them and as they see those problems as they prefer to see those problems solved. But there are other markets and other CEOs, for example at social media companies – do they interact with customers at the same level? No. They interact at a much higher volume level, which frankly is not appealing personally to me, but that doesn’t mean that it’s being done the wrong way in those organizations. So my preference is to touch the customer directly – they’ve got my cell phone number, and they can call it, and they do, at any time of the day.
Guerra: I’ve heard other organizations where people talk about that desire to become a partner to their customers, and I’ve heard it almost expressed that, “We won’t sell you a one-off piece of software – that’s not the relationship we’re looking for. We want to come in and help you improve your overall organization and better understand it.” What are your thoughts around that? Is that how you’re trying to approach it?
Malezis: Yes, I think companies have to earn the right to build the relationship. And the relationship can, at times, start with a niche solution, a little tiny gizmo, a gadget that solves a very very specific problem. And that’s fine – that is one type of relationship. But it is a tactical solution. In fact, Imprivata really was very much in this mold three or four years ago. But we saw the opportunity to be an even stronger partner to our customers. In many respects, our customers asked us to do that and asked us to be that. So we asked the question, “How do we become strategic to our customers? How do we really become a high-value partner to our customers?” And that’s really how we build this our direction and our messaging of a digital identity vendor for healthcare.
Whereas in the past, four years ago, you would have heard of Imprivata as the SSO company – the single sign-on company that makes you a badge, the one that’s got your picture on it, the one you used to enter the building, uses that to simply access your computer. We went from that very narrow solution to “Let’s use that badge, or maybe your fingerprint to access anything in healthcare – to access your shared workstation, to access your private workstations, to access a shared mobile device or a tablet, to access a medical device.” So really, wherever there is a digital identity authentication event, you can now use Imprivata, and we’re the only company that invested to do this.
We of course work within the hospital, but also with cloud solutions, with cloud applications, which hospitals especially now, with COVID, are more open to adopting. This Imprivata solution now works across so many more devices, so many more locations, so many more users that we’ve really become strategic to our customers, and that is a testament to the level of innovation that this industry generates.
Guerra: Let’s talk a little bit about the customer relationships during COVID. One of the things I’ve found very interesting as this whole thing evolved and took place was I started to see from CIOs and other IT executives postings on social media that indicated what I would call a hyper-sensitivity to being approached and sold to. And it really got very interesting to me. And I wondered, what could CEOs do? You still have to do business, and customers need you, so you have your existing customers with the relationship you have, customers that you’d like to sell to, You might say to yourself, “I think our products can help these other organizations, so we want to approach them.” I don’t know if you noticed that sort of sensitivity or thought about it or gave any instructions to your team about how we delicately navigate these waters. What are your thoughts there?
Malezis: It’s a terrific question. Frankly, we’ve seen episodes such as this, maybe not as acute or as intense as COVID. In our last recession, 2008 and 2009, or even the Year 2000, where we were dealing with more of simple flip of a date, customers were very hyper-focused on very specific problem or set of problems. I had very quickly observed, back then, and these are lessons learned for me, that if you try to tell them about what’s good for you as a vendor, that’s not going to fly. You really have to do things that are good for the customer. Now, that’s no great revelation – that is what vendors should be doing around the clock, not just at a time of pandemic or recession. But some people understand these better than others. And my job, as a CEO, is to guide our organization to do the right things at the right time, and those are different.
Guerra: I see.
Malezis: Let me give you an example. As we hit COVID in late February and early March, we realized we have to close the office, get our people out of a high-density, potentially infectious environment, send them home and make sure that they’re operating so we could be in a position to help our customers. So that’s what we did very quickly. We turned our attention for a few days away from customers – we didn’t ignore customers, but we said, “Look, you’ve got to leave the office now, because that means you could get sick, and your family could get sick, and if you’re sick, we can’t help our customers.”
Guerra: Right
Malezis: “So we’re going to send you home, get you settled and get you operational, because then we’ve got to very quickly turn our attention to our customers, who are putting their lives on the line. They’re putting everything they’ve got on this.” And we were able to do this very quickly. And that meant our technical support people, people who keep our networks operational, were able to allow our customers to expand into temporary facilities and the tent hospitals that were being set up, that we were ready to help them. So our customers absolutely appreciated our help, and you just can’t miss a beat there in helping customers build and maintain these networks.
On the other hand, when you talk about selling, that’s a no-no. Pull back – give customers time to get their situation under control, to execute their plan, because their priority is to keep patients healthy, to treat them well, to keep them alive. That’s really what they’re there for. So, we really encouraged and pulled our sales team away from checking and overwhelming and asking for the deal. That’s the wrong thing to do.
Guerra: (Laughs) Very good point. Asking for the deal, right.
Malezis: You’ve got the two sides of the business. On the one hand that says, “We’ve still got to ship the product, it’s got to be high quality, it’s got to work, it can’t cause issues, and if there are some questions, we’ve got to be able to help customers very quickly.” On the other hand, when it comes to selling, that’s something that you have to understand is going to be very different, is not going to happen. But there is also a middle ground, where customers say, “Look, can you send me more remote access licenses? Can you more one-time licenses? I can’t give you a deal right now, because my back office is completely offline.” And we said, “Whatever you need. Here’s the key for more licenses, use it for the next number of months. Once things settle in three or four months, we’ll come back and figure out what’s the right thing to do.”
So that’s the other middle ground that we established very quickly. We got our employees safe and operational very quickly; we made sure that we could support customers technically with tech support and implementations; and we made sure that customers, if they needed more licenses, could get them very quickly without having to send us a (purchase order), without having to pay us money, because we knew that they were overwhelmed and this was not what they could do at that time. Other vendors did things differently – they expected a P.O., and we thought that was just wrong. That’s the way we handled this particular one, and for the most part, all of our customers have been very grateful for giving them that room to handle this emergency. Again, they’re at the epicenter of this attack.
We did one more thing that I should mention is that many customers are telling us, “Hey, here’s what I’ve done in order to provide a better service to my patients.” So they start to share use cases; they start to share things that they did in order to manage infection, you know, infection mitigation. And one of our first customers, Yale-New Haven, was very fast to reach out to us, to me, and say, “We’ve used technology, yours and a few others, to find out where the COVID patient might have interacted with a set of providers, so I can understand the sphere of infection. It didn’t cost anything; we used technology we already had (including yours). Would you post this and share this with your other customers?”
Of course, as a provider, we’re delighted to do that. We opened up a page on our web site; we called it, very imaginatively, the COVID page. And customers could go to this COVID page and see these use cases with usable descriptions and technical descriptions about how to get this running, and of course, we would help them if they needed help. And we now have nearly 20 of these use cases on our web site. They’re all free of charge for customers to access. So these are really the two things we did for customers right away because we knew customers were overwhelmed – that was the early phase.
Now, the customers are more in control of their environment, and things are starting to be in a better understood cadence. Now, they’re reaching back to us and saying, “Hey, I need your help here; I need your help there.” For that, we are absolutely responding with our design engineers, with our sales engineers and with our sales teams. We’re saying, “How do we help you? Let’s make sure we do this right so this isn’t just a Band-Aid.”
One thing sometimes you’ve got to do in a crisis is you have to throw some Band-Aids on; fine. But once you start to clear the fog of war, you really should be doing things with more of a strategy in mind. Even your Band-Aids have to fit into your strategy. And this is how we’re guiding customers now, saying, “Let’s observe your digital identity strategy. What is that, and let’s do things that you need now that don’t complicate your strategy down the road, that actually support your digital identity strategy today and down the road.” So that’s the mode that we’re in now, 60 days into this pandemic.
Guerra: How would you describe the speed at which this unfolded? I was thinking about it this morning, and depending on how you’re thinking about it, you could say that this happened really fast or you could say it happened kind of slowly. I think it all depends on your perspective, but I’ve also heard other CIOs, and they’ve talked about that it’s a really good time to have had a good amount of experience. You wouldn’t want it to be the first six months of your first CIO gig. You’ve been around a while; you’ve had other CEO positions. Do you feel like, “Well OK. This is big, but I’ve got enough experience; I’ve got enough lessons learned, and I see the speed at which this is evolving, and I see it coming.” You have some clarity; “I understand and I’ve got this.” Did you feel like that, or how did it evolve for you?
Malezis: Well, I think my foresight has gotten better over time and with events such as this. And when I looked at the Year 2000 event and I looked back at it and said, OK, I did OK, but there’s a bunch of things we could do better, that I could do better, that I could see more clearly into the future. Then in 2008 and 2009, we had, as a company and myself, had prepared better for that. For this particular one, it was a double whammy. Remember, 2000 was just a date; 2008 was just the economy, right. It was the subprime market. This was a double hit. This was the pandemic followed by an oil crisis followed by an economic crisis. So you can almost say it was a triple hit. So this was very unusual; not very many CEOs would have experienced a double hit like this – maybe in some other parts of the world where there are times of war etcetera.
But coming to this particular event, I did feel that we had a seasoned executive team that understood that something real big here is starting to happen, and we didn’t have the head in the sand syndrome. We didn’t have the wishful thinking that, “Hey, we’ll wait this out – it will be a couple weeks and then we’ll be back to business.” We knew this was big. We started to see it in February; we started to see it elevate in the early days of March, and we took early steps to close the office and to limit infection. We took quick action to send our people home and guide them so they could be productive. And remember, many of our people have kids and they have other people at home. Do they have a quiet space? Do they have an office that they can operate in? Can they do eight hours of continuous time? You get all these complications that we understood pretty early, and we worked with our employees to make sure that we could support them, because they didn’t know how to handle this.
I think we observed it and we understood it reasonably well early on. But I will tell you that we also had a kickoff in January, and had this thing shown up a month earlier, it could have been that our kickoff was such a major super-spreader event, that we could have been on the unlucky side of the equation. We were just fortunate, I think.
So yes, definitely tenure, definitely experiencing rough seas makes you a better sailor. This is something that’s helped us and ultimately put us in a better position to help our customers.
Guerra: You mentioned your seasoned executive team, and this is something I’ve been wanting to ask you for a long time. You’ve been there about four years, right?
Malezis: That’s right.
Guerra: And you took over from the founding CEO, correct?
Malezis: That’s right.
Guerra: So what I found to be very interesting in your tenure is that you’ve retained almost all, or quite a bit of your executive team. And a lot of times, when someone comes in, there’s significant turnover. So I suspect there’s something about your leadership style that kept these people around. What do you think that is?
Malezis: It’s the focus on the customer is ultimately what it came down to. We all believe – and we did have a little bit of turnover, and it was by design, it was necessary turnover – but the people that stayed were really committed to two things. One, our customers, and two, the realization that we have to have a well-run business if we’re going to serve our customers well. We have to have a sustainable business, a business that wasn’t losing money, and at the time, the business was losing a lot of money when I came in almost four years ago. In fact, we were so deep in the red that we needed to go find and borrow more money, but no one would lend to us.
Guerra: I didn’t know any of this.
Malezis: No one would lend us money at the time because we were doing some things pretty well. The product side was working really well, but the efficiency within the business, the way we spent our money, our customers’ money, was really pretty poor. There was no reason why, at that time, we were in that state. It’s just that we, as a company, the prior team had no interest in that, the way that they had been running the business.
So as I came in, I said the customer is always first, our people need to understand that this is more than just building a product – this is helping healthcare. And that meant a lot personally to us. And those that felt that way stayed with the business and made sure that the business could be self-sustaining. That was the third thing that was lacking in some parts of the business was teamwork, and if we couldn’t work together as executives and as teams right across the business, then we have a real issue.
That’s really what got us to where we are now and I’m actually very grateful that we time to sort these things out with the business before COVID hit. Had COVID hit in 2016 as I came on board, we would have had a lot more challenges – we didn’t know each other, we didn’t know each other as people, as professionals, we didn’t trust each other, but we had time to sort out a number of these things. And fortunately, we’re here and we could move very quickly and very efficiently.
Guerra: Well it’s very interesting – it’s almost like if look at taking care of the customer as the fun, it’s almost like, listen, if we want to have fun, we have to get our house in order, to get our business in order, and that might not always be fun. We have to do the work in order to play. Right, is that a little bit of it?
Malezis: That’s right. You know, some of it is hard work, right, but there is satisfaction in hard work. There’s satisfaction in the accomplishment of something that’s difficult. The easy stuff – I don’t know who remembers the easy stuff, it’s easy. We did a lot of hard work early on in 2016 and 2017, and we could actually see the team come together, and 2018 and 2019 were terrific years – so was 2017, by the way. And we really started to gel as a strong culture of confidence, of trust, of commitment. All of that for the customer, and in fact, we’ve seen customer relationships elevate and we went from a niche company that just did the badge tap-and-go to now a digital identity strategic vendor with mobility, with identity governance, with so many more things that our customers need and are getting from us.
Guerra: It’s interesting, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. They talk about – it’s a poor term, but the winners and losers from a business point of view with COVID. You could be the most brilliant restaurateur in the world, right? You were running your business beautifully, you were playing and you were working. Your house was in order – your business has probably been completely decimated. Sometimes, the world moves away from you through no fault of your own. Sometimes it moves toward you. Based on what’s happened to healthcare organizations, with extending through telehealth, remote employees, all the things that have happened that healthcare organizations have to do, the world has moved towards Imprivata. People need you more than they did before, and because of some fortuitous timing, the house is in order. It’s almost like, OK, we’re sturdy enough to handle all this that’s going to come our way. We’ve earned the right, because our house is in order, and we’re going to do things the right way. Do you see it a little bit that way?
Malezis: We do. We were fortunate enough to get our house in order. We were fortunate to fix the roof, to fix the foundation, fix the walls, put the right windows on, so when it rains, it pours sideways. So that our ability to look after our customers was very much intact. And when I say house, it’s really about people. It’s not the physical entity of the business – it truly is the people. It’s reorienting our people’s attention to the house and the customer, and doing the right things for the customer, so we can sustain these rainstorms and these intense storms. And I think you’re exactly right that by the time of crisis, customers run to the safest decision.
Guerra: Yeah, good point.
Malezis: They’re less likely to make high-risk decisions. They’re less likely to take a flyer. One, they don’t have financial security and comfort that they had under sunny days. It’s pouring, and it’s rough and bad out there. So there decisions really have to matter, and they’re going to assume less risk. And they look for partners that they can trust, and they look for partners that are self-sustaining, are stable, and partners that they’ve shown they can depend on. So this actually is a very mutually beneficial relationship. We help our customers, and ultimately they are helping us to get to another level, a higher level of servicing them.
Guerra: Great point. And I think the term we’re looking for is reputation. If we’ve done the work, if we’ve treated people right, we have the reputation. If we have the reputation, in times of crisis, the reputation makes the sale before anything. It’s done. The sale is made. We know this company is trustworthy and they’re going to do what they say they’re going to do. They can deliver – they have the reputation; they’ve earned it. If you do things the right way, sales happen on their own.
Malezis: That’s right. Sales become just a transaction. It’s just an indication of the trust. Reputation is analogous to trust with our customers. We may not be able to solve all of a customer’s problems, but we’ll be very honest with them about that, and we’ll be very honest about what we can do very well, and that’s really what matters. And our message to our customers is, “This is our core strength, and we’re not going to let you down. If you want something outside, we’ll gladly send you to somebody else, some other vendor that we ourselves know and trust, and we know can better service your needs.” But if it’s digital identity, we really think that we are it.
You know, it’s a run to safety. These relationships of confidence and trust and reputation matter. And this is an industry that really depends on this. It’s healthcare, and people’s lives are at stake, so we take that very seriously.
Guerra: And we have to keep delivering, right? That’s what you as a CEO tells your organization. If there’s different kinds of stresses – one can be too little business, one can be too much business. When there’s too much business, hey, we have to deliver, we have to scale; nothing can fall through the cracks. No one can be let down. Just because we may have an influx, that can’t happen. Right?
Malezis: That’s exactly right. I’ll give you an example where in late February, we saw COVID developing, and we have a number of cloud services. We’re known as both an on-prem vendor with pretty strong capabilities, but also a cloud services vendor with, for example, secure messaging, with remote access and secure token service that’s in the cloud.
So as we started to ask the question, “How do we give customers more access to our cloud technology,” we also started to ask the question, “Can we serve twice as many customers? Can we serve twice the load of what we see today?” So customers are going to use more of our CorText, our secure messaging, and they’re going to send more messages around, at what level do we believe we can service them with confidence, without dropping a single message? So we started to test. Can we do twice the level of volume? Can we do three times? Can we do four times? And the bar was set at 4X. And we tested, and we found that, no, we could only do a little more than 2X. So we put the equipment and technology in place so we can safely do 4X before we tell the customers that they can use as much of it as they want.
So we took the steps to assess our capacity first, knowing that there’s going to be a spike, understand what that capacity is, raise it up to a level that we felt was safe, and that we weren’t going to miss a beat, drop a message. And we did that all on our nickel, before customers needed it. I think that’s just terrific work by our teams and our engineering and our dev ops team, because they worked around the clock and on weekends to do this. They did it in literally two days. And then we announced to our customers, “Hey, use as much CorText as you want,” and we saw the volume frankly spike. So I could sit back and say, well, I think we’ve done this reasonably well. We were pleased with what we could do for our customers. Of course, we did this in many other areas – this is just one example where we wanted to test our systems and make sure that they would stand up under the onslaught of COVID.
Guerra: The CEO has a sense of direction. So in January, you had a direction of products you were working on, things you doing, customer wish list, whatever you want to call it. Has COVID-19 changed your thoughts? This is sort of a chance to give a message to customers about here’s what I’m thinking as CEO. Here’s where I’m thinking we’re going to go a little bit left instead of straight because of the new world. Any thoughts there around the direction of Imprivata, things you’re going to be working on?
Malezis: That’s a terrific question. COVID has impacted our customers’ thinking and our customers’ needs from technology, especially the technology that we are involved in, and many other areas. So one of the things that COVID did very quickly was that it pushed our customers to embrace the much broader network. It sent a lot of people to work from home; they implemented telehealth in ways that were very creative, and we observed all of that.
We were thinking, before COVID, that this was naturally going to happen, but over a period of maybe four, five, seven years. But COVID made this happen in two weeks. Our customers are very creative. Contrary maybe to some belief that healthcare is stodgy, healthcare is very creative and very innovative, and I’m not just talking about the vendor community. I’m talking about the healthcare givers. What they will never compromise on is the value and the healthcare delivery to the patient. Most vendors don’t understand this. Vendors who are not in healthcare don’t understand that guiding principle of providers.
But COVID pushed a rapid expansion of networks beyond just the hospital, the well-known parts of the network. Now these hospital networks are embracing all of their employees’ environments – their home environments, their remote environments, and we very quickly shifted our energies to say, “Let’s make sure we scale, to make sure our solutions can scale to these levels of growth, Number One.” Number Two, cloud – the ability to implement technologies with very light and zero touch from an IT perspective, became very important, simply because, with our customers that do things so quickly, they didn’t have all the right staff in the right locations to do all these implementations, so technologies had to be very light touch or zero touch for an implementation. So that’s a second key element that COVID not just accelerated but really introduced and made real.
We also saw customers adopt a lot more cloud because of this light, zero-touch technology perspective, and they did so very well. So yes, we saw our customers move very quickly in a number of areas, and frankly, we thought that made terrific sense, and we followed these trends and supported them. And what we did with our products, we accelerated the work that we did in mobility, in IoS and Android, with smart phones and tablets, to support the telehealth initiatives that our customers were investing in, we supported more automation and simplification of remote access with two-factor authentication, automatic invisible two-factor authentication, and we felt that other things could be delayed – things like, for example, digital patient identity, which probably is important, but in the heat of the battle, you’re going to look to treat patients, and you may come around later to build up things like patient identity, so that you can understand exactly who you are dealing with. So we definitely adjusted our priorities pretty significantly, especially in these areas of mobility, in these areas of cloud, and the areas of light and zero-touch technologies. So our customers should know that they can now implement our stuff completely virtually, very light or zero touch – we don’t need to send people on site, they don’t need to send people on site. We can do things completely remote.
Guerra: Excellent. Well, I think I’ve taken enough of your time today, Gus. Is there anything else you want to add before we get going? Any final thoughts?
Malezis: No, thank you, this has been terrific. Thank you for your time. This is frankly a time where we will come together as an industry and the principles of putting customers first and building the right relationships, I think allows us to work together in this fight, in this war against COVID.
And I will say that, when I see that some of the legislation and some of the work that’s happening in D.C., where the focus has been a lot more on the physical work on, for example, PPE, I think we stand to benefit by bringing technology into this COVID fight. So if there is an area where we might have left one of our star players on the bench, metaphorically speaking, I think that our legislators, maybe parts of our government, our directional guidance has been more oriented toward classic physical investments vs. technology and digital investments. America is renowned for its technology, its strength in technical areas and innovation. And I’ve really felt that we left that star player on the bench.
Now, Imprivata didn’t stay on the sidelines – we dove right into it, we didn’t have to be asked, we didn’t have to be told. I think it’s important to understand that we have a great asset as a country, and we shouldn’t be afraid to use it and, in fact, we’re going to be much better served as we pull it into the fight.
Guerra: Very good, Gus. Thank you so much for your time today. I really enjoyed this.
Malezis: Anthony, a pleasure.