Numecent is reshaping how organizations manage, deliver, and modernize Windows applications for the future of work. With its groundbreaking Cloudpaging and Cloudpager platforms, the company enables IT teams to overcome long-standing application compatibility challenges while providing seamless, scalable, and secure digital experiences across desktops, devices, and clouds.
In this executive Q&A, we hear from Dr. Arthur S. Hitomi on his career journey from CTO to CEO, the lessons that shaped his leadership approach, and how his company is harnessing containerization and AI to turn industry disruption into customer advantage.
1. Career Journey: Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career, especially one that shaped your leadership approach at your current company?
When I was asked to become CEO, having been a career CTO, it was my first time in this role beyond the startup phase. I was fortunate enough to have worked with some great CEOs of both startups and large companies. Though I had the privilege and knowledge to lead, I knew I still needed some guidance.
There was one experienced board member who helped me make the transition, including a copy of Colin Powell’s Leadership presentation. I had seen copies of it over the years, but until my advisor asked me to investigate it, I never gave it much thought, as I was already “bought-in” to management principles I learned in various courses. I can tell you that I still periodically revisit those slides – it never gets old!
The key takeaway I picked up is you should always communicate with your troops – regardless of the size of the organization you are managing – and avoid setting up barriers that might disincentivize that. Talking with the field really helps you understand what their perception of the organization might be and the challenges they face. I made a point of speaking to everyone I possibly could in the company. Not just what motivated them, but what they ultimately wanted to achieve. It may be counter to some advice out there, but I find it necessary to understand what everyone does every day, and more importantly, appreciate and fully take in those details to the point you could do the job yourself. I certainly feel I should understand this with the people around me as well. I find this crucial to foster and grow both the organization and its people effectively.
2. Career Path: What initially brought you to this specific career path, and how did it lead to your role in this company?
The short answer is getting my PhD at UC Irvine. My peers were the brightest minds in technology, including Roy Fielding, who created and authored the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style, from which REST APIs originated, as well as HTTP.
While working on my dissertation, my research focused on my program’s work with DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a part of the United States Department of Defense) concentrated on innovative technologies that can enhance national security. This was the conduit for what people know today as Numecent’s Cloudpaging application container technology – and later Cloudpager.
3. Company Differentiation: What makes your company stand out from competitors in the market? Can you share an example that highlights this?
Our Cloudpaging application container technology sets us apart, as it takes a fundamentally different approach to compatibility and provisioning compared to other technologies used for Windows, such as SCCM, application layering, MSI, and EXE installs. Its strength is how it addresses application compatibility and interoperability on Windows operating systems. Over time, Windows operating system changes outpace application updates. This is even more prevalent for legacy applications built for older OS versions, such as Windows XP or Windows 7.
Cloudpaging abstracts applications from the OS, breaking them down into tiny instruction fragments (“pages”), and provides granular controls over the applications you containerize. The result is unmatched compatibility, where customers like Waterman have achieved more than 98% application virtualization coverage with Cloudpaging, compared to only 60% to 70% with alternative solutions.
Many methodologies leveraged today are still based on classic approaches, with some modern twists. SCCM, MSIs, and EXEs inherently couple applications to the operating system image, which tightly binds them to the OS.
Later technologies, such as application layering, attempted to separate applications from the OS by creating a difference between the base image and applications in the form of virtual hard disks (VHDs), or disk-based layers within the OS file system. Though this works for a short period, eventually something in the OS or apps will change and things will stop working. It only gets worse when many applications are going into a single image or layer.
“Cracking” open an image or layer becomes too frequent a chore, as it only takes one update from a single app to require starting this task and testing all over again. Separating the applications into individual layers or separate images might seem like a solution to that problem, but it actually increases work for admins and creates significant performance overheads, making them costly and impractical to run.
To top that, all these older technologies (many of which are more than 30 years old) are subject to the same compatibility issues commonly associated with EXEs and MSIs. Naturally, administrators eventually give up on layering, defaulting back to these legacy formats, traditional installs, and lots of app configurations simply to try and keep up with the drastic increase in OS and application updates.
Cloudpaging changes all of that. It containerizes each application and virtualizes it per user. The concept of containerization has long been used in Linux and MacOS successfully, but not for Windows desktop applications, until now. Cloudpaging features a mini operating system within it, similar to Docker, except faster and more portable. This allows for far less effort, maintenance, and headaches. It also enables the Netflix-like application store concept, allowing for the dynamic, on-demand provisioning of applications directly to any endpoint, including physical devices running Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows on Arm, as well as virtual desktops like Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop.
4. Product Innovation: Are you working on any exciting new products or projects? How do you think this innovation will positively impact your customers?
Our mission is to simplify the mobilization and management of Windows applications across modern desktop and multi-cloud environments. In other words, allow people to easily lift and shift applications to any Windows device without a second thought. This requires continuously enhancing and expanding our products.
The future of Windows is AI and Cloud. At the beginning of 2022, we launched Cloudpager, the first and only cloud-native application container management platform for Windows desktops, which extends DevOps capabilities to the management of Windows applications. IT teams can now dynamically provision, update, rollback, remove, and meter applications just like infrastructure teams have been doing for more than a decade.
A few months ago, we rolled out AI Packaging, transforming the application packaging process into a series of clicks. Now, even our Marketing team can package applications into Cloudpaging containers with confidence that it adheres to packaging best practices.
This is crucial for IT teams to keep pace with the volume, speed, and scale of application updates in a secure and compliant manner.
To continue delivering on our mission, we launched native support for Windows on Arm a few weeks back in tandem with Microsoft. This builds upon our big announcement with Scott Manchester (VP of Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop at Microsoft) last November, where we were an App attach in Azure Virtual Desktop launch partner.
Ultimately, it’s all about ensuring a seamless application experience for IT and employees alike. With our stuff, apps just work wherever you are.
We do have some new announcements on the horizon, but I can’t unveil them just yet. All I can say is make sure you’re following us and be ready for some really exciting stuff in Q4.
5. Success Insight: What was the tipping point for your company’s recent success? Was there a change in strategy or approach that others might learn from?
Leveraging AI. To be more specific, creating something new with that knowledge and capability: AI Packaging. We have always leveraged AI in our technology. Many companies are using AI to scale their teams’ productivity, or even eliminate people, but they are not thinking about how AI can also fundamentally change their own software technology or offerings, beyond, let’s say, integrating a chatbot. We have fundamentally adopted the use of AI for our product designs. By embedding AI directly into our products, we have enhanced both the performance of our software and the user experience. However, our products utilize AI to take their capabilities even further. AI Packaging, our latest product offering, is a result of that thinking. It’s making our product more capable, more compatible, and faster than even the best individuals or teams can achieve, in the hands of a novice.
6. Challenges and Lessons: Can you share a significant challenge your company faced and how you overcame it? What key lesson did that experience provide?
The biggest challenges that many face are the constant changes in the law, technology, business, regulatory, and social environment, which ultimately impact our team. Technological changes are so significant that they have been driving changes in every other aspect. It is happening every day. It is genuinely affecting everyone I speak to, both within our organization and outside. Our point in time today reminds me of when I was working with the research team at my university on the development of the World Wide Web, before anyone had even heard of it. I remembered thinking and discussing its implications on technology, people and society. I remembered reflecting on how many jobs or even industries might this eliminate, and started thinking if technology needed (certain) people. I see this happening again. As a business, it is incredibly easy to be blinded by profits and lose sight of the intangible effects of eliminating people within the organization.
However, when you fail to find a way to evolve and retain people, and intentionally replace them with technology, you are losing one of your most significant investments, and it is a path that never ends well over the long term. We always focus most on people, even as a technology company.
7. Leadership Impact: In just a few words, what differentiates your leadership role from others in the company? What impact does this have on company culture or product success?
I do not agree that all companies, such as ours, should require people to work in the office. They should invest as much as possible in technology to allow them to work from home as much as possible. I feel this is the best way to work. We are leading and providing the best technology and organization in this way.
To learn more about Dr. Arthur S. Hitomi or Numecent, visit the website here.
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