IGEL and Contour Design – Delivering Secure, Reliable, Ergonomic, and Easy-to-Clean Workspaces

In just a few short days, the IGEL Now & Next 2025, the Ultimate Endpoint Security and EUC Event of the Year, will come to EMEA.

The four-day conference will take place from November 3rd to 6th at the Congress Center at Frankfurt Messe. It will feature keynote addresses by industry leaders and experts, as well as detailed sessions on Healthcare, Finance, Government, Retail, and Manufacturing sectors. Additionally, there will be breakout discussions focused on EUC and cybersecurity, along with presentations of innovative strategies, solutions, and insights from IGEL partners.

Among the IGEL Ready partners sponsoring and presenting at IGEL Now & Next Frankfurt is Contour Design, which will demonstrate its award-winning RollerMouse and UniMouse, designed to promote healthier and more comfortable computer work.

We sat down with Stefan Leitz, Director Marketing, Sales & Business Development at Contour Design, to learn more about what attendees can expect to see and learn from the company at IGEL Now & Next 2025 in Frankfurt.

Could you tell us about your company and how you partner with IGEL?

Stefan Leitz: Contour Design develops ergonomic input devices – such as the award-winning RollerMouse and Unimouse – designed to promote healthier, more comfortable computer work.

Since June 2025, Active Key, with 20 years of experience, has also been a part of Contour Design. Now, Contour Active Key is a leading manufacturer of hygienic and industrial keyboards and mice, offering products for healthcare, industry, and POS applications where infection control, usability, and durability are essential.

Our partnership with IGEL Technology combines IGEL’s secure endpoint OS solutions with Active Key’s hygienic and industrial-grade hardware. Together, we deliver secure, reliable, ergonomic, and easy-to-clean work environments, particularly in medical areas and other critical sectors where both data security and hygiene are vital. We see IGEL and Contour Active Key as key enablers of safe, clean, and secure workplaces.

What are some things your organization is doing with IGEL to shape what’s ‘Now & Next’ in EUC?

Stefan Leitz: Contour Active Key is partnering with IGEL to shape the future of secure and hygienic end-user computing. Together, we are merging digital security and physical safety – two essentials in today’s connected workplaces.

At IGEL Now & Next Frankfurt, we are extremely proud to launch the first hygienic keyboard featuring a dedicated IGEL OS button, designed to deliver instant, secure access to IGEL-powered environments. This innovation bridges the gap between trusted software and hygienic hardware, ensuring seamless, safe, and efficient user experiences.

What are the advantages of combining IGEL’s Preventative Security Model™ with your solution offerings? How does it benefit our mutual customers?

Stefan Leitz: By combining IGEL’s industry-leading Preventative Security Model™ with Contour Active Key’s hygienic and industrial-grade input devices, we are enabling organizations – especially in healthcare, manufacturing, and other safety-critical sectors – to create secure, clean, and future-ready workplaces.

Together, IGEL and Contour Active Key are redefining what’s “Now & Next” in end-user computing: a workspace that is safer, smarter, and built to last.

How has being a part of the IGEL Ready program improved your business or enhanced the customer experience?

Stefan Leitz: Being a part of the IGEL Ready program brings several key business and customer advantages for Contour Active Key:

• Validation and credibility: Our solutions are verified for compatibility with IGEL OS, providing customers with increased confidence and trust in our joint offerings.
• Go-to-market leverage: We can leverage IGEL’s ecosystem by listing our hygiene keyboards and mice in the IGEL Ready Showcase, aligning with channel partners, engaging in co-marketing campaigns, and enabling mutual lead generation.
• Elevated partner engagement: We work more closely with IGEL’s engineering and partner teams, which helps us stay ahead of the product roadmap, ensures our solution architecture is aligned, and enhances mutual collaboration.
• Improved customer outcomes: Because we are validated and aligned, customers identify our Contour Active Key products as their preferred solution for hygiene-critical environments.

What key trends impact your partners and customers as we close out 2025? How is your organization addressing/aligning your solution offerings with these trends?

Stefan Leitz: Several key trends are shaping the EUC and endpoint space as we head into the last quarter of 2025 (and beyond), and our partnership with IGEL ensures we are aligned to address them:

• Hybrid/Anywhere Work: The workplace is increasingly distributed – users expect seamless access from home, the office, on the go, and edge sites. We deliver relevant, easy-to-clean, and ergonomic peripherals, aligned with endpoint strategies that support this, including IGEL OS endpoints, remote management, and secure connections to cloud/VDI/SaaS.
• Sustainability & TCO Pressure: Organizations are under pressure to control costs, extend hardware lifecycles, reduce e-waste, and achieve sustainability goals. This is where Contour Active Key comes into play.
• Channel Ecosystem & Partner-led Services: As complexity grows, customers increasingly rely on trusted service/solution providers rather than pure product vendors. We are evolving our offerings around and within the IGEL Ready ecosystem, where ContourActive Key plays a strong and relevant role as a hardware partner.

Why is your organization sponsoring Now & Next 2025 Frankfurt?

Stefan Leitz: Contour Active Key is sponsoring IGEL NOW & NEXT 2025 in Frankfurt as a premier gathering of leaders in end-user computing, digital workspaces, endpoint security, and hybrid work. The event provides a unique platform to engage with ecosystem partners and customers – particularly within the healthcare sector, which is prominently featured on this year’s agenda.

Sponsorship allows us to:

• Showcase our joint solution with IGEL to a highly relevant audience
  of decision-makers, customers, and channel partners.
• Demonstrate thought leadership within our business segment – showing how we are shaping the “now” of today’s workplaces and preparing for the “next” wave of transformation, towards a more ergonomic and hygienic workplace environment.
• Collaborate closely with IGEL and the partner ecosystem on site – engaging in co-branded sessions, networking with customers, sharing insights, outcomes, and case studies.
• Generate new business leads, deepen customer relationships, and demonstrate our commitment to delivering solutions for more secure, modern, efficient workspaces in our key markets: DACH and the United States.

In short, the sponsorship allows us to increase visibility for highly demanded hygienic peripherals, reinforce our partnership with IGEL, and deliver value to both our customers and the ecosystem.

What will you/your team present to attendees at Now & Next 2025?

Stefan Leitz: At the Contour Active Key booth and during our sessions, we plan to present:

• Live demos of our Contour Active Key HDII fully sealed PI68 Hygiene Keyboard with the IGEL OS Button.
• The Breakout Session Workshop on how the Health Care System and the Industry have benefited from our joint Contour Active Key + IGEL and partners’ solution approach.
• An interactive discussion with attendees around “What’s next in the industry” for products and innovations.
• Partner enablement and channel opportunity talks for attendees who are channel or service partners, where we will share how to build a business around the Contour Active Key stack, how the partnership works commercially, and how to engage with us as a partner.

What do you hope attendees learn at Now & Next 2025?

Stefan Leitz: We hope attendees to walk away with:

• A clear understanding of the modern endpoint challenge in a hybrid/ anywhere world – and how endpoint strategy is not just about devices, but about OS, management, security, lifecycle, and user experience. The whole ecosystem, which is a workplace solution and not just a set of products.
• Awareness of how IGEL OS (with its Preventative Security Model) can form a secure, manageable, future-proof endpoint foundation, and how when combined with Contour Active Key’s services, you get a full end-to-end solution rather than a point product.
• Insights into how customers are realizing value from endpoint transformation: lower cost of ownership, improved security posture, reduced downtime, better user experience, simplified operations.
• Inspiration on what comes next in the workspace: edge/OT endpoints, device convergence, AI support in endpoints, sustainability and lifecycle management, hybrid workforce evolution.
• Contour Active Key value proposition awareness: Understanding of our business and partner approach, as well as how our solutions transform the healthcare sector.

What do you/your team hope to take away from participating in Now & Next 2025?

Stefan Leitz: From our participation, we hope to:

• Deepen our relationships with IGEL in terms of our solution-selling approach, as well as with the broader IGEL ecosystem – enabling more collaborative go-to-market strategies, co-innovation, and richer solution sets.
• Collect first-hand feedback from customers, prospects, and attendees on their pain points, use cases, and roadmap priorities.
• Generate new leads, pipeline, and business momentum in the European/North American markets for our joint solution-selling approach and Contour Active Key.
• Strengthen our position as a forward-looking solution provider in the hygiene peripherals space, recognized by the ecosystem and customers for delivering secure, innovative, and premium solutions.
• Identify new opportunities and emerging trends that we may not yet have fully addressed, and map these back into our strategy to ensure consistent progress.
• Share and showcase our success stories, as well as our premium HDII keyboard with the IGEL OS button included, using the event momentum to accelerate adoption, references, and advocacy within future and current customers.

Do you have any examples of joint customers who have benefited from working with your company and IGEL?

Stefan Leitz: Absolutely – I would like to share a high-level example (without naming the customer) from the US market:

A Hospital group in South Florida improved its security posture by eliminating legacy OS vulnerabilities, reducing the time to deploy security updates, and utilizing IGEL’s hardened endpoint OS as part of a broader Zero Trust architecture. With Contour Active Key Hygiene Keyboards and mice, the customer renewed their peripherals in the emergency room and all hygiene-critical medical areas.

The IT department was exploring solutions that are compatible with existing equipment and easy to deploy. The Contour Active Key’s hardware was part of a full Ergotron WOW station package, which provided the customer with the best application fit, as well as high cost savings due to reduced downtime and the optimal disinfection effect, saving lives.

Don’t miss IGEL Now & Next 2025 in Frankfurt. Register today!