With the ability to serve more customers with customized offerings, it’s easy to understand why dedicated device adoption is rapidly ramping. In fact, according to data from 451, today, 49% of leading organizations manage fleets of over 1000 devices and 69% expect to reach that scale in the next three years.
However, what often gets overlooked is that while the number of devices we rely on to run our businesses multiplies every day, the tooling and infrastructure needed to support these devices are still catching up with demands. This entropy, puts organizations in a precarious position when building their device strategy. Fortunately, understanding the essential tooling for both stability and scalability can set you on the right path to device innovation and delighting customers.
Here’s what organizations need to know about building a future-proof device strategy.
MDMs don’t work for dedicated devices and they never have
At Esper, we have a saying: MDM is dead. Because in terms of dedicated device management, it was never alive. Mobile device management (MDM) software simply wasn’t built for large fleets of dedicated devices like kiosks, tablets, PoS systems or other smart hardware. It was built to protect corporate information on employee-owned devices like laptops and cell phones. MDMs are great at endpoint security and network and data protection, but this isn’t enough for building a long-term device strategy.
It can, however, be tempting for early-stage businesses to turn to MDMs when they deploy their first few devices. Most MDMs include Google Play Store management, which means a young company that might not yet have a custom app can launch a PoS app from the Playstore as a placeholder. But, as a business grows, the MDM software can’t grow with you. MDMs require manual monitoring — setting up each device individually and monitoring it to ensure it’s working correctly. As your fleet grows, monitoring and updating each device individually exponentially adds work.
Besides lacking robust features and capabilities to manages large fleets, MDMs weren’t built for creating exceptional experiences. And in today’s competitive landscape, where customer expectations are higher than ever and change quickly, that won’t cut it.
Essential tooling for modern device management
Now that we’re clear on what you don’t need and why, let’s talk about the tools to help you scale your device fleet. At Esper, our software delivers DevOps for devices, with the end goal of total device automation — a large number of custom devices running APIS, scripts, integrations and advanced telemetry. While this state of complete automation may seem like a pipe dream or a far-off future state, there are tools you can use now to start taking steps toward automation. And you should — because automation gives you the freedom to focus on innovation, customer experience and staying ahead of your competitors.
Drift management. As mentioned earlier, it’s not feasible to scale your fleet while managing each device individually. Instead, you need to manage by exception. With drift management, you can apply all device settings and configurations to a group of devices that should look and act the same. Then, when a device is no longer in compliance, you receive an alert.
Remote control. Typically, when a device in the field fails, there are two options — ship the device to headquarters for repairs or send a support person to the location. This creates a poor customer experience and, as your fleet grows, becomes even less sustainable. With robust remote capabilities, you can see what’s happening on the device, troubleshoot and even debug an issue from wherever you are — providing speedy customer support and saving your staff the hassle of hopping on an airplane to repair a kiosk.
Telemetry. Organizations relying on devices for daily customer interactions can’t make informed business decisions without the data about those devices and how they’re used. With advanced telemetry, you gain real-time insights into application and device performance, usage and behavior. So when you’re deciding which changes to make, where to expand and where to scale back, you have the information you need.
Whether you’re a large enterprise organization looking to modernize or a scrappy startup building your fleet, don’t underestimate a powerful device strategy. Devices no longer need to be a cost center; they’re a strategic tool you should leverage to scale growth and delight customers — the difference is modern tooling.