Beyond The Device: ScaleFusion

Season 3 |  Episode 36

In this episode of Beyond the Device, host Reid Estreicher is joined by Amit Poona and Steven Gohl of Scalefusion to show that not all MDM's are created equally. Many of the MDM's in the market today are singularly focused in trying to beat the competition by matching features that are often unused or underutilized in a marketing slick that the competitor has.  "what has helped us a lot, and not making it feature centric but more towards to the features which our users are going to use every day in and out. I think 95% or 96% of times whatever features we have, they have been used. So, that's good to see that what we have built is actually used day to day. The other key thing is though everyone wants to make an easy to use software, and even Scalefusion is easy to use MDM. However, some people need some help, right? And nowadays with the current things. Like support is crazy, right? People have to wait in queues or they're talking to bots and so on. One thing that we have been doing differently is we don't use bots." Noted Amit Ponam

"At Scalefusion, we have this track record of replying to customers within two minutes. Now, not resolution time, but replying. At least coming back to them saying that hey we are here and we are going to help you with real people. And I think that helps a lot because that gives you that peace of mind that hey I'm not going to be stuck around and not going to get my answers. But somebody telling you, giving you assurance, I'm going to be with you, we do that.  And second response for us is close to four minutes on average. And typical resolution time is within two hours."

Transcript

Reid Estreicher:

3, 2, 1.

And we are live. And by live, I mean we're pre-recording this so we can edit it down should we make any mistakes. Which, of course, we're not going to do today because we're just joined with the fantastic team from Scalefusion. What is Scale Fusion? Why is it important? How's it going to change your life? We're going to talk about all those things. But first a round of introductions. Stephen Gohl and Amit Ponam, we're going to do an introduction. I work with these gentlemen, but you guys might not know who they are. So, without further ado, Steve I'll go to you first, and then Amit, we'll do a round of introductions, and then get right into the episode. Steven, over to you, sir.

Steven Gohl:

Sure thing. My name's Steve Gohl. I'm director of Strategic Partnerships for Scalefusion for North America. So, my role is all things partnerships, all things channels, everything to basically tell the Scalefusion story for North America.

Reid Estreicher:

Awesome, thank you very much. Amit, sir, over to you.

Amit Ponam:

Okay, thank you. So, I'm Amit Ponam. I'm with Scalefusion for over seven years, and I'm the sales director. So, I look after North America from the strategy perspective. So, everything direct or indirect, I take care of that. And that's it.

Reid Estreicher:

Okay. That was great. That's perfect. Favorite flavor of ice cream? What is it?

Amit Ponam:

For me, vanilla. I guess maybe it's cliché, but yeah, vanilla works for me.

Reid Estreicher:

Okay. Vanilla. All right. There it is.

Amit Ponam:

Why?

Reid Estreicher:

I was just wondering.

Amit Ponam:

Why would you ask that?

Reid Estreicher:

We're just trying to get to know you. Just keep this thing, I don't know. Steve, what about you? Favorite flavor of ice cream. 

Steven Gohl:

Yeah, there's a couple, but I have to claim because nobody else is going to know this unless you're from Michigan probably. So, Superman. I mean, Superman ice cream is a thing. It's like a Michigan thing.

Reid Estreicher:

Superman?

Steven Gohl:

I'm going to go Superman.

Reid Estreicher:

I don't know what that is.

Steven Gohl:

See?

Reid Estreicher:

All right, Superman it is. That's on me. I'm not a Michigander. But we'll figure it out. I am in Michigan right now. A little bit of a different setup. So, this is a thing I'm going to do later today. I'm going to try to find Superman flavored ice cream.

Steven Gohl:

Yeah.

Reid Estreicher:

I don't know what it is but I hope it's delicious.

Amit Ponam:

You never told me that. You never told me that. I was there.

Steven Gohl:

I may be setting you guys up. It may be a great prank.

Reid Estreicher:

Oh, yeah. I will find out in about two hours. All right. So, let's get into it. Scalefusion. Why is it important? How are you guys doing MDM differently? I think that's probably a great question because I think, a lot of times, people think MDM, and they kind of go, "Ah, everyone's got an MDM. Whatever. It's just an MDM is an MDM is an MDM." And you've been very different in your thinking and application for a couple key things. The support, the engineering of it, and then the overall cost. I think I probably want to talk about those three things maybe to start, and then we can launch from there. Is that a fair place to start for you guys?

Amit Ponam:

Yeah. I think, yeah, that's the best place to start with, right? So, I can possibly take that question.

Reid Estreicher:

Yeah, please.

Amit Ponam:

And talk more about it. So, yeah, the very first point is that it's not over-engineered, right? Because a lot of softwares that we see today is trying to go ahead and beat the competition and trying to go ahead and have all the features which the competition might have. But since inception, our founders have always believed in building what people will use. And we always build some features based on requirements, right? Somebody comes to us saying that, "Hey, you know what? I like your software. And if you can make this for us, that would be really great." Now if it fits our roadmap, fantastic. We'll go ahead and build it, right? And even if it's not part of our roadmap but solves customer problem, okay let's see how we can solve it.

So, that's what has helped us a lot, and not making it feature centric but more towards to the features which our users are going to use every day in and out. I think 95% or 96% of times whatever features we have, they have been used. So, that's good to see that whatever we've built has actually been used. So, that's one of the point, right? And now the other key thing is though everyone wants to make an easy to use software, and even Scalefusion is easy to use MDM. However, but still some people need some help, right? And nowadays with the current things. Like support is crazy, right? People have to wait in queues or they're talking to bots and so on. One thing that we have been doing differently-

Reid Estreicher:

The bot thing? Sorry.

Amit Ponam:

Yeah.

Reid Estreicher:

Just real quick. The bot thing, can we stop with the bot thing. That is just an instant blood boil. I think that's worse than a dock and just waiting for someone to pick up to bad whatever music. You know you're not talking to anybody, and you're going to have to fail through this thing probably for 10 minutes before you can get to a person. It's so annoying. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. But the bot thing? Oi!

Amit Ponam:

I guess we all know the pain, right? So, that's exactly what we want to do differently. So, we don't have bot, right? The max bot we will have over there is after a human talking to you saying that hey if you want, when I'm looking for use for this, there's a help dock. It's not a bot, but it's a link for they can self explore until we go and get something for them. But our average industry reply, I mean, industry, I don't know really. But for Scalefusion, we have this track record of replying to customers within two minutes. Now, not resolution time, but replying. At least coming back to them saying that hey we are here and we are going to help you. And I think that helps a lot because that gives you that peace of mind that hey I'm not going to be stuck around and not going to get my answers. But somebody telling you, giving you assurance, I'm going to be with you, we take that.

And second response for us is close to four minutes, or something like that. And average resolution time is within two hours. Now-

Reid Estreicher:

That's great.

Amit Ponam:

...that's how it has been different, right? And that is one of our major, major differentiators. And coming at the price, I do not call ourself as some low-cost MDM or something. I think that we charge, we would say, the value for money type of MDM. So, you pay actually for something, what you really need to use. Coming back to the first point of not all engineered is because we don't want to create so many features that people are not going to possibly use, and then they're paying for it.

Reid Estreicher:

Right.

Amit Ponam:

So, that's why we say that the price also that makes us go ahead and make the plans based on the requirement of the customer. So, we have different plans, meeting the business requirement and the enterprise requirement. Not everyone needs integration or crazy APIs and so on, right? So, a medium-small and medium businesses maybe just need a business plan, and they have that. And for enterprises, you can go to something else. But these are the three things, that I would say, which has been working differently for us. There's some more aspects to it, but we can go on. But these are the three things that I think we've been doing it very, very well.

Reid Estreicher:

Yeah, absolutely. It's funny, too, because you talked about the amount of things that most MDMs can do. You look at some of the larger guys, it's like they're chasing after each other's checklists for a fragment of the businesses that are probably actually going to use it. It's probably maybe a percent of a percent for how most typical organizations are going to use them. And they're so heavily over-engineered. The costs do skyrocket pretty significantly to a place now where it's like you really scratch your head. It's like, oh is this even worth doing it? And then, on top of that, the support piece isn't included, which is wild to me. Because it's like hey I'm going to buy a product, and then it's not going to work properly. And then, it's on me to give you more money? That's the Spirit Airlines model, right? You buy a seat, and if you want to put your bag over your head, you got to pay more.

If you want water, if you want to get on the plane, I think they even charge you for that. But, yeah, it's a strange business model where everything becomes a la carte, and the end user really gets lost in the support of that, or the lack thereof. I want to talk a little bit about the ease of use from a setup perspective. I know we've got a couple of working demos here with Ambrose in the mobility center, the agility of how quick that is. And then again, I just want to hit on the support because I think you guys have something really unique. And actually, we talked to one of our partners in the identity space, BIO-key. Shout out to BIO-key and Kimberly Biddings. But we talked to BIO-key, and this is one of the things that they did well, as well, where they realized that there was such a lack of support in the market, they put a ton of resources into that.

And you guys have done very similar things where it's not a la carte, and it really is impressive what you guys can do from a support mechanism. So, I just want to keep hammering on that throughout this whole thing. But maybe to start, we can talk a little bit about ease of use because some of these things are so over-engineered that they're not even easy to set up. So, can you talk a little bit about that? Because I think you can do a lot from a single pane of glass, and we keep hearing single pane of glass, but you guys really, it's pretty easy to set up from a single pane of glass.

Amit Ponam:

Yeah, I agree. And I cannot tell more about it because I'll give you a little bit of history behind it, why we say ease of use and why it is actually like that, right? So, late 2013 is when we started, and we did not have a channel out feature until 2019. So, we were heavily inbound driven company. So, whoever hits our website, right, they have this 14 days or 20 days trial, now they have 15 days or 20 days to go ahead and try a software, and then possibly buy a subscription. Now, we manage to go ahead and have close to 5,500 customer until 2019 by just an inbound channel. Now, that means somebody was able to go ahead and to login and roll a device, and then open the wallet to pay us overseas. We managed to have close to 90 countries until then.

So, somebody was able to go ahead and pay for our software without even talking to us was itself a great gratification towards ease of use. And not only that with the numbers. I'm talking data, right? But if you go around on Gartner Pure Insight or Capterra or G2 Crowd, people rave about Scalefusion for their ease of use, right? How easy it is to go ahead and set up the dashboard, and how easy it is to go ahead and enroll the device and go to market, because everyone wants to go ahead and get the devices managed and go to market faster and forget about it, right? You don't want to have a headache after that. They want to have an MDM, which they use, and then have a good night's sleep. That's all all IT guys want.

Reid Estreicher:

I mean, who doesn't enjoy doing their work two and three, four times in a row? Redoing it, I should say. It's not fun for anybody.

Amit Ponam:

Exactly, right? So, that itself was some gratification from the data perspective, and now customers talking about it. And these are the two, one thing that everyone will talk about is easy to use. And you're talking about single pane of window, right? Yes, Reid, because they call it that. It's because we have supporting all the major operating systems. Matter of fact, it's not live on our website but we also have Linux. So, Ben said that we support Android devices, we support iOS, Mac, Windows. Linux is next. So, Linux will be followed with couple of other devices that we'll be managing into that, as well. So yes, maybe it was saved for this podcast, I don't know. But the launch just happened a few days back.

Reid Estreicher:

Oh that's great. Yeah, we didn't even know we could do that. We can do that now. That's perfect.

Amit Ponam:

Yeah, yeah. Right? So now, that's why people, like now, you don't have to have multiple MDMs to manage different devices. Now, you get to have bird's eye view on your entire inventory on Scalefusion. We have a deep dive wherein somebody logs in and a single page gives you all the information that you need to know about the devices, the battery, what is the health of the devices, and so on. All the nitty gritty, and that can be customizable. So, whatever the IT guy wants to see, he can go in and see it based on his requirement. So, that's how I would say that the ease of use that we rave about, or our customers rave about, is there because it's data driven, because we were not talking to people. Of course, we were talking to them on phone and emails, but nobody actually saw us, our matters.

But still were buying subscription for us and paying us for year and year and year and year. So, that's what we at Scalefusion are extremely proud about, that ease of use. And we want to maintain that, right? And that's where we don't want to over-engineer it because we want to keep it simple so anyone can come. You don't need to have crazy certifications done to start using the software, right? Anyone can join, take a training session from the team, and I think after one call they're pretty much like, oh I can do this on my own.

Reid Estreicher:

Yeah.

Amit Ponam:

That's a good thing to hear.

Reid Estreicher:

Yeah. And actually, I talked to Ambrose about this. We went through some of the training software with the engineering team some the training so to set the stuff up. It is so easy, even my father could do it. And those of you who know my father, let's say he's not a tech wizard. And that's an understatement. So, he's a wonderful man.

Amit Ponam:

We should let our marketing guys talk to you.

Steven Gohl:

If Reid's father can do it, yeah.

Reid Estreicher:

If Reid's father can do it. And then, it'll just be a video of him setting it up. It's like, oh my god, I really did this. Yeah, it's really, it's quite simple. And actually, is that one of the things that catch you guys into some of the certifications that you've had and some of the recognition you've gotten? Know Gartner, I think you're the youngest within the quadrant?

Amit Ponam:

Correct. So, yeah, we are the youngest and the fastest one to get over there, right? So, Gartner has a magic quadrant for mid-market MDM, UEM, and ERM category, and we fall into that magic quadrant. And they do have an enterprise segment, but we hit where we hard when it comes to small and medium businesses, and that is where we made the big differences, yes. We're not only Gartner but even in G2 Crowd or Capterra, we are the market leaders over there, as well.

Reid Estreicher:

That's a big deal.

Amit Ponam:

And everywhere, the top three things that always comes up is the ease of use and the support and the price. These are the three things which keeps revolving everywhere. And so, ease of use and support can go up and down sometimes, but they're always there.

Reid Estreicher:

Yeah. And I think, again, I want just to hammer on this support piece of this because it's so incredibly important. And it's a strange thing. We get a lot of people that want to work with us because they'll send us an email and they're like, "Yeah, you guys respond same day." I can't believe that's a competitive advantage in 2022. But that's actually a thing now. It's like yeah you answer your emails and you pick up your phone. Who knew that would ever be a thing that would make you stand out amongst other people in the work force?

Amit Ponam:

Yeah.

Reid Estreicher:

But it's a real thing. And the reason I bring that up, who knew just supporting your customers would be a competitive advantage. Oh, you guys support your customers? That seems strange. But I did want to talk about that from the customer journey perspective. You guys don't charge extra for the support.

Amit Ponam:

No.

Reid Estreicher:

And I think I mentioned that, I might have accidentally mentioned that at the top. I was trying to hold out to mention this until later. But you guys don't charge extra for this, which is again, phenomenal. So, it's not just about hey we support our customers, it's really you putting your money where your mouth is, literally in this case. Or rather not putting money where your mouth is because you're not taking any money. So, you talk a little bit about how is it possible that you're able to support the customer without your typical tiered support you see of professional services. You roll something out, and there's gazillion different skews out there for supporting a customer through the life cycle of their deployment versus actually just including it, especially at the price point that you guys are in.

Amit Ponam:

Correct.

Steven Gohl:

I can go ahead and take that if you want, Amit.

Amit Ponam:

Yeah. Yeah.

Steven Gohl:

Or I'll take a stab at it, anyway.

Reid Estreicher:

Yeah, please, please.

Amit Ponam:

Why not?

Reid Estreicher:

I mean, it's exactly what you said. It's this shocking thing in the market. Oh my gosh, you're going to sell me a product, and you're going to support it and you're not going to charge me extra for it. And people's minds are blown. So, I mean, we get the response all the time. But just to walk through that customer journey, too, is it starts before you purchase, even. So, if you have interest in checking out Scalefusion, you think it might be the right solution for what you're trying to solve, we get on the call presales and walk through that with you with the customer and say, okay, what are you trying to do, show and tell here's how it works, and go step by step through the screens to say this is what we do in your situation. Do you have questions on it?

What type of devices are you doing? What's your timeframe? All of those things that are completely different than some people will do that on pre-sale side, but then you go ahead and sell it and then hey, you're on your own. Or ask us help for help, we're going to charge you. It's not the case. And I think it actually all ties together to what we were talking about earlier, and it's not an over-engineered product, but I would say it's an elegantly engineered product in that it's easy to use once you know how to use it especially. So, if somebody may be IT centric a little bit, or is familiar with other MDMs, they're just going to get in there. They're going to know how to use it.

It's going to be easy and intuitive. We get customers all across the board, though. Somebody that maybe never used an MDM before that wants us to help support them in building those first profiles or figuring out how to enroll the devices, and then we'll walk through that with them. So, it comes all the way from the beginning of when you're just thinking about purchasing it through to onboarding that customer. And then, if things change in their environment six months, 12 months down the road, and they've got questions, we're always there to help. And they don't have to charge it, they don't have to pay anything extra to get that support from us.

Amit Ponam:

Yep.

And just to add to what Steve was saying, right? So, that's exactly the differentiator is we know the software works. We know that if someone is coming to us for one time, they're not going to come back again and again. So, that's the faith, and we know that very well that our software works. It just works. So, we know if we do the handholding, maybe it's for one time. But that's an investment. Because if you invest your time right with your customer, educating them correctly about how it can be used, what it can do, and what potentially it can do, then it becomes easier for your next call. Because if you just answer A for Apple and then let it go, job not done, right? If they are there, make an effort to go ahead and ask them hey what do you do? Do you want to have any other questions to be answered?

Or if there's something that could have been done on a previous call. So, how Steve said, it goes even before they come to you. So, our pre-sales guys are actually, or the account manager, pre-sales guys, call them whatever you want to. But these guys are doing the job of profiling them so correctly and making everything suit their environment that they don't have to come back. So, if you do your job correct at the beginning, they're not going to come back to you again and again. Ben said that they do come, right? It's a technical product. So, sometimes you need help here and there, and so on. So, it's there. But then, the second part comes into the picture. We all have skills, right? We know that these are the top five questions that people usually ask. Or these are the five things that we really need to know from the customer when they come to us.

So, everybody, whoever, even if there's a guy who's working on the ticket and he moves on. Second guy comes in, he's got the context of what's going on. He can pick it right up there. He doesn't need to ask, oh, which device you are using? Oh, what happened? No, he can read. He know everything what he needs to know, and just go from there. That is why we are able to do this so correctly. And actually, it works because we don't have to really have a really heavy support team, as well. We have a lot of support guys and everyone jumps in, right? We have gone into our cell phone support call sometimes, if needed be. But the whole thing idea is about we will never let customer wait. End of the story. If you are busy, there is a big support group that there is almost 60, 70 people part of it. Somebody will pick it up.

Reid Estreicher:

Wow, big support group.

Amit Ponam:

So, there's a dedicated team who will always do that, but there's always you have plan B and plan C. So, never let customer win is what you will always believe in.

Reid Estreicher:

Yeah. And again, what a novel thing in 2022 making a product that works and is supported. That's a business model that's challenging for a lot of organizations. It's weird. Yeah, that's great. And it's funny, your engineers work a lot like a lot of the sales team here where it's really more about sleuth work and you get an inbound opportunity for something, and it's like what are they doing with it specifically the reason why the podcast is called Beyond the Device is because we're always trying to get people to think beyond the device. You need a mobile device in the field, you get a thousand.

Amit Ponam:

Right.

Reid Estreicher:

I need a thousand iPads, you hear this stuff all the time. Or I need a thousand Samsung tablets. You're like yeah, sure. And then, here's your quote. It's like man, what are they doing with it? If they have a thousand Samsung tablets going out into the field, I'm positive they're going to need to connect to data, they're going to need to manage it, probably need to protect it in some capacity.

And I get it. I don't think it's anything that's negligent. It's just that people have a quota to retire in sales, and they just want to get things out the door as fast as possible. But if you just take a minute to think about what is best for the customer, and the same way with your engineers, you're like, hey, before this goes downstream, why don't we figure out what your requirements are. So that way, we can set you up on a path of success. And then to your point, you don't have to have 15, 20 additional meetings. Obviously, things in software change, you're always going to have to be available. But this difference between supporting somebody long term a couple times where something might break or something might need to be updated versus you're being on the phone with them every single day, which I hear nightmares about. Nightmares about.

So again, it shouldn't be rocket science that you make a product that works, and that you support it without charging extra for it. But man, as we've gotten into the whatever business model we're in now in 2022 heading into '23, that definitely seems to be the business model. I also want to talk about some competitive advantage. I know you guys... Some competitive advantages, excuse me, as I stutter through my speech there. Location services, there's some stuff around that. I know the OEMs, as well, 35 plus certified. Talk about a couple of those logos and then the kiosking I think you guys have that might actually be your unfair competitive advantage to the market. So, I wanted to talk about that because I think you can do kiosking probably better and more efficient than most, which is great. And then, we can talk about some vertical use cases, as well. But maybe just start at the top, the location services. Do you want to hit each at a time and go through them?

Amit Ponam:

Yeah. Yeah, why not. Steve, you okay with me taking that, right?

Steven Gohl:

Go for it. GO for it.

Amit Ponam:

Go for it. Okay. Okay, so location services, right? Yes. Now, many people will say, hey by the way, the other MDM also offers location services. Yes they do. But how efficiently you have made it is where we make the difference, right? For an example, you can really see devices in real time. And not only just showing them, okay this device was here that long, we go ahead and give you in detail a report about all your devices in a single pane of windows. So, you can see multiple pin drops. The pins is nothing but representing a device, right? And then, if you can click on the device, then it'll tell you all the details about the Lat and Long, and when it was last connected. And matter of fact, we can go ahead and tell you is how it was moving from point A to point B.

So, it's very big for logistic, right? Because we were talking about vertical, as well. That's one of our biggest vertical, as well. So, that's why we have done a little bit more than just giving the location services. So, not only you know point A to point B, but we furthermore went into it because now we saw that there's so much people using this location services in and out. That's one of the most used features in Scalefusion. And then, we added pit stop to it. What does pit stop do, right? In logistic, it's very important for them to know did the driver take the break or not because of the ELD mandate and so on.

Reid Estreicher:

Yeah, that's important.

Amit Ponam:

They driver needs to follow rules and regulations. So, there is one thing that says, did he do it or not? And at the same time it's good for them, right?

And so, we have done pit stops so that they get the report about okay the device moved from one point to another point, when it moved, when it stopped. And now when it stops, how do the battery get optimized, right? We have something when the device is connected to a docking station, then it's performing at the optimal level. Everything works. But when it's not, then how can you go ahead and optimize the battery because that is important for them, as well. So, when they take out the tablet and go outside, they want to make sure that the device still runs on a good battery. Maybe they will go back and plug it in again, but just to make sure that it's running. These small, small features were very key for the logistic market, and this is where we get complete in detail to it. Just not to have a checkbox, right?

Do you have location? Yes, we do. No, we have locations but we have done a better job in making it more feature centric for them to go ahead and make most use of the location services. Now, they having the data. How well they can use the data is what we enable them with. So, that's why we talk about that, right? And we do have, apart from locations, we do have another competitive advantage for Mac machines is the remote control, right? I guess there are very few, or I think we are the second or the third one, who's giving that feature out wherein you can take a remote control off a Mac device to support the Mac devices. The IT guy can literally log in and take the control and so on. It was not possible in iOS world. Screen sharing is the max that you can do.

Reid Estreicher:

Yeah.

Amit Ponam:

And this is one of the major, I would say, used feature and that's why I'm raving about it.

But apart from that, it also is important for an MDM guy to go ahead and have been certified on multiple devices because the customers can move from one device to another whenever they want, right? And they want to make sure that they have the mixed inventory that Scalefusion works on all of it. So, we have almost 35, is that what was the last known. But I'm sure in last couple of months since we last spoke, I guess, we have onboarded a lot many other OEMs, as well, to get them certified. So, whenever you want to have an out of box experience on any device, because nowadays we are hearing about zero touch, zero touch. It's nothing but either you are integrated with Android enterprise or are you a partner with any OEMs? So, that's why it becomes a key for us to go ahead and have as many OEMs as a partner, and that's what we have done.

And apart from that, also, there are some key manufacturers like Zebra or Samson, Lenovo, Sony, Honeywell, Theralogix, just to talk about the big brand, they have done much tighter integration with the MDMs, as well. So, we can leverage their APIs and go ahead and give the better outcome to the end customer. Because if they're going to buy these high end devices, that's a good investment. They want to make sure that they get to use all the features that the device can possibly go ahead and offer, as well. So, that is why the OEM aspect becomes very important. And I guess the last point that you were asking me was about kiosk, right?

Reid Estreicher:

Yeah, the kiosk mode. I think you guys do this really well. I wanted to talk about the OEM piece just because there are so many brands out there, and we work with a lot of them. I just wanted to make sure, and you threw out a couple of those names, which is great. Because most people watching are going to be like, oh, those are all the companies we're working with, as well. But I wanted to talk about the kiosk mode because I think you guys have a very simplistic way to do this. And again, you look at what Scalefusion can enable and the support, and then you look at the overall expense of it. It's a head scratching thing. You're like, man, why aren't more people doing this considering how well it works and how it doesn't break the bank comparatively to some of the other larger guys? So, can you just talk us a little bit through the kiosk mode you guys have? What makes it so great? And then, a lot of people just think it's retail. Not so. I also want to talk about that.

Amit Ponam:

Yeah, okay. So, yeah, kiosk basically because we see a lot of kiosks in the region. Yeah. No, in a simple line, if I have to explain you what is kiosk mode, right? So, kiosk mode is wherein you can log down any Android, iOS, Windows device into a mode wherein only few applications are running. So for an example, let's take an example of healthcare, right? If it's a patient monitoring system, now if it's in the hospitals, that tablet is dedicated to use only for few apps on that device and nothing else, right? You don't want possibly somebody misusing the data over there, or patient related data. It can be scary, right? You don't want to have any hands on to it where data goes here and there. So, they want to go and protect it in such a way that only two apps are running.

So, though it's an Android device, but only two apps are running. And why we think that we have done this better than everyone else because when we started as a company, we started as just Android Kiosk. So, we've been doing this from day one. And all the other things have started coming in with time, right? People ask for it, customers ask, and then we build and so on. So, Android Kiosk was the first thing that we built and that's our experience coming into that sector, as well, not just because we were doing Android Kiosk. So early days, we only had those customers. Now, that's a good case study for us to understand what does a kiosk industry needs? And that's how we build the features around that. And there were a few things that we built, a few apps that needs to be running in the background. Now, they want to have a kiosk mode, but they want to have users to visit only few websites, right? Only their work websites, or only the website that they need to access to.

Now, with the kiosk mode, if you give them the browser, now they can go ahead and open the whole Pandora box, right? They can go wherever they want to. But now, what we did is we created our own browser over there or give them an ability to manage Google Chrome. So, you can possibly go ahead and have Google Chrome over there, but it'll only work the way you want to. And to top it up, right, now you have all the solution put out on the field, right? Everything is working, few apps, few websites, and the way you have designed it, you can put your company branding over there. That's one of the thing that we do it so well because now even if you have the device, you can put the top bar color, you can change the wallpaper, and so on. So, the whole branding consistency is there throughout all your devices.

So, wherever they go, let's take an example of a hospital. If there are hundreds of tablets everywhere, if the same branding is everywhere, now it gives the good image about that organization. And at the same time, that brand awareness is happening everywhere, right? You see it and you know, okay, this tablet belongs to this particular organization, and the branding aspect becomes very important. Now after this also, in kiosk mode, there is one where somebody's using it, right? In this case when I was talking, somebody using it. Now, we have deployed a couple of tablets or big TVs onto the airports where there's no one to touch. Now, something goes wrong over there. How do you fix it? How do you-?

Reid Estreicher:

Good question.

Amit Ponam:

Yeah, right? And how do you give support to those devices If somebody calls in from the airport saying that, hey, this is not working. And so, we have our own remote support app, right? So it not take control of the device, it can cast it on your screen so you can go ahead and fix the device sitting wherever in the world, right? It works on internet, it works on cloud. So, wherever you are in the world, you can take access of the tablet, see what's going on because you are an IT admin, you possibly have access to more of the settings than anyone else does.

Reid Estreicher:

Of course, yeah.

Amit Ponam:

So, you can get out of the kiosk mode, fix whatever is going on, replace the device, or not even replace, put it back into the kiosk mode, and send it. And if something is going wrong, then they have a partner like you, right, who can just go ahead and send them a replacement device.

Reid Estreicher:

That is a thing.

Amit Ponam:

And here you go. And out box, right? Hey, it's ready to go. Just have to ship it over there, and we can do overnight deliveries.

Reid Estreicher:

There you go. That is a thing. That is a thing. If it's broken broken, yes we absolutely can do that.

Amit Ponam:

Yeah. So, these are the few things that I think, like kiosk mode, also we say, not a big differentiator for many people. They would say, but we take pride in it because we understood that market very well because that's how we grew and we catered to kiosks. We have a lot of customers who are just using kiosk mode.

Reid Estreicher:

Yeah.

Amit Ponam:

So, we understand that world very well because there are so many problems, and we have exactly made features based on those requirements.

Reid Estreicher:

All right. Well, there you have it. I just want to cover real quick before we're out of here. We'll go ahead and move on to wrap up and closing comments, verticals, logistics, retail, healthcare. Are we going to leave it there to focus three? Or do you guys want to... I mean, you technically can play. This is always the thing with MDM, especially an inexpensive MDM that's very well designed. You guys can play everywhere, which is a bit of a gift and a curse because you can't boil the ocean. But I just want to make sure that we have an accurate representation of the verticals that we want to focus in right now to make sure anyone who's listening and knows where to point you guys.

Amit Ponam:

Of course. Yep, go ahead, Steve.

Steven Gohl:

I think we touched on those. From my perspective, those are the key categories, or verticals. But there's really two segments overall if you want to talk about where we play. And one is that managing your whole corporate inventory, that could be everything from employee phones to their laptops to any connected device. It's almost one segment that you're trying to make sure those mobile devices are secure, and we look at that holistically and we help companies do that.

Reid Estreicher:

Okay.

Steven Gohl:

Then, the other side of it is the kiosk mode that we were just talking about, which are very specific business applications. Sometimes a person has that device, sometimes a person isn't involved at all, but it's locking down a mobile device for a specific use case and that's where that kiosk mode comes in. And we really play in both of those lanes, although they're completely separate across all verticals.

Reid Estreicher:

Okay.

Steven Gohl:

Yeah.

Reid Estreicher:

All right. Thank you, guys. That brings us to the end of this particular episode of Beyond the Device. Wrap up and closing comments. Amit, to you, first. Then, Steven, to you.

Amit Ponam:

Yeah. Okay. So, I think [inaudible 00:36:27]. So, yeah, closing comments would be is people can talk. People can go ahead and say that we are good at this, we are good at that, and we can do so many different things in the market. What we really want to say to whoever is listening out to us today is just evaluate us on the three things that we have been talking about, right? Ease of use, our support, and the price. And the product just works., right? So, whatever we have said so far, you can go ahead and sign up for a free trial and see for yourself. Did these guys really say what they really are?

Reid Estreicher:

Hey, they actually can do the thing they said they can do. That's incredible. Again, what a weird business model in '22 and '23.

Amit Ponam:

So, yeah, that would be my closing comment. Because, personally, I think our product has been doing great. One thing that I think, I guess maybe we should talk just maybe 30 seconds on that, but how did we survive this big market, right? We've been swimming against all these big boys and all because we know these few things that we were doing, and we were doing it correctly. And that's how we survive, and that's how we keep growing. And that's still the model, and we are not hiding the secret sauce, right? We are going out and telling. Because by end of the day, I think whoever is using anyone's service, they deserve to get that support back. So, we all should do it, and there's nothing secret about it. So, people are paying you for some services, you got to respect that, and you got to give them the support that they need.

Reid Estreicher:

You would hope so.

Amit Ponam:

Yeah.

Reid Estreicher:

Thank you, sir. Steve, over to you, sir.

Steven Gohl:

Yeah, Amit covered it really well, but I'm not sure if we touched on this. So, I'll just say this. There's nothing too big or too small. So, we have customers ranging from five licenses for one account up to 500,000 on one account. So, we can scale anywhere from really small business to enterprise. So, exactly what he said, give us a try, get the demo lined up, we're happy to walk through all the features, and then do a trial account for folks to give it a try and see if it works.

Reid Estreicher:

That's awesome. Yes, we did not mention that earlier. So, thank you for bringing that out.

Steven Gohl:

Yeah, thank you, Steve.

Reid Estreicher:

Five to 500,000 is quite the swing of size. So, yeah, thank you for mentioning that. So, and guys, thank you so much for watching or listening, depending on the meeting that you chose. Please leave us a comment in the comments section. Let us know what you thought, what your thoughts are, what you think of these types of episodes, what else you want to see. If you guys want to have Steve and Amit back on, because they're coming back on anyway. We've got another multivendor solution in front of you guys. But do leave us a comment in the comments section, click like, and subscribe. It makes us very happy. And be sure to check us out on the next episode of Beyond the Device. But in the meantime, also, I forgot. If you want to just email us directly, you can do that at sales@3eyetech.com. It's sales@3eyetech.com. I almost got it out without stepping on myself, but not quite. Thank you guys, again, for joining us. Thank you for listening. We'll see you on the internet. Cheers.

Steven Gohl:

Thank you.

Amit Ponam:

Take care guys. Thank you for listening.