What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Samsung SDS on Zero Touch Mobility, 5G Integration, and Proactive Diagnostics
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Unlock the secrets of transforming your enterprise IT infrastructure with insights from Dave, a key player at Samsung SDS America. Imagine turning your IT department into a $14 billion global force driving digital transformation. In our latest episode, we promise you’ll discover how Samsung's innovative Zero Touch Mobility (ZTM) solution, developed in partnership with ServiceNow, is revolutionizing mobile device management. Say goodbye to the headaches of traditional IT practices as we uncover the intricacies of adopting cutting-edge technologies like 5G and IoT, and learn why modernizing your mobile device management is indispensable for harnessing their full potential.
Battery-related device downtime is a major productivity killer, accounting for 40% of all OEM repairs. Tune in to learn how proactive diagnostics and replacements can keep this issue at bay, improving both productivity and customer satisfaction. We also spotlight the rising significance of private 5G networks in IoT-heavy settings and the essential security measures your business needs to protect its mobile devices. This episode is packed with invaluable information on robust IT solutions crucial for staying ahead in today's fast-paced, tech-driven world.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everybody, excited to dive into the world of enterprise IT today with Samsung and their SDS America's solution group. Aside of Samsung, you might not be familiar with Dave. How are you Doing well? Thanks, evan. Thanks for having me. Well, thanks for being here. Many of us know and love our Samsung products and devices, but many of us aren't familiar with the B2B IT side of Samsung, and you guys in that area are tech global powerhouse as well. Maybe introduce Samsung SDS America, your team and your mission within that group.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. So Samsung SDS was the IT department for the Samsung group and then in about 1985, we were spun off into our own entity. So we remain the IT department for Samsung. So basically all network infrastructure, all software services, help desk, you name it all of it's done by Samsung SDS globally for all of the 200,000 plus employees of the Samsung group. We're about a $14 billion US dollar organization, about 23,000 employees and offices in about 43 countries, so one of the biggest IT companies that hardly anybody's heard of. Unfortunately. We're trying to change that.
Speaker 1:Well, that's very impressive, incredible numbers. And tell us about your focus when it comes to digital transformation. What areas do you focus on and what are the more recent innovations? You're you know interested in?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. I mean SDS has an internal business, obviously, where we, you know, work with the Samsung group. We have an external business, which I'm part of, where there are global you know external sales teams that are taking our solutions, are also coming up with brand new solutions and going to our customers and helping them solve large problems. So in the Americas we've got the solution business division, which I head up the sales team for. We have our Samsung cloud platform team, where Samsung is heavily dipping a toe into the cloud market, but more from an aggregation and also high security localized cloud sort of offering. And then we've also just come out with an SRM platform, which is a strategic resource management platform that helps large manufacturers procure and manage vendors. So those are the three big pillars of our external business.
Speaker 2:Where I focus is on mostly enterprise mobility, so working with our B2B customers, be they governments, militaries, healthcare organizations, broad line enterprise customers, institutional customers to try and solve complex issues and requirements. So where we focus there is we're a distributor for the Samsung group so we can resell Samsung hardware and services and software to customers or, through resellers, to customers. We do application development. We've also got a bunch of applications that we have built that are, you know, purpose built to help in enterprise mobility specific issues. We've got a big wearable capability, so our team does a lot of development on these watches for enterprise customers.
Speaker 2:And then most recently, we've strategically partnered with ServiceNow to bring out something called Zero Touch Mobility, so we call it ZTM. Ztm is a scoped application that is native to the ServiceNow platform, that downloads from the ServiceNow app store onto the customer instance and it essentially hyper-automates the entire lifecycle of a mobile device for the enterprise. So there's about 19 workflows that we've hyper automated and we've gone out and we've integrated with multiple different siloed systems like EMM, enterprise enrollment platforms, analytics, AI, logistics, MSPs, carriers, e-cyclers, so basically everybody and everything that's involved, normally in a very swivel chair heavy. You know, workflow lifecycle management solution is now hyper automated and, you know, done through API.
Speaker 1:Wow. It's an incredible solution set you described there. You know, when it comes to 5G and IoT, of course, you're doing amazing work with devices and applications. Today, I think businesses are having challenging times. Bringing it all together in a coherent way. Describe you know the challenges when you talk to enterprises businesses of all sizes, you know, in leveraging advanced technologies and emerging technologies, what's?
Speaker 2:stopping them? Sure, I mean, I think it's legacy processes. You know, in leveraging advanced technologies and emerging technologies, what's stopping them? Sure, I mean, I think it's legacy processes. You know mobility, you know digital transformation almost completely forgot about it, which is really odd. You know it's one of those strategic endpoint assets where everything else is centrally managed by a customer and you know they've got great capabilities and deployment and access to the cloud and all that stuff With mobile.
Speaker 2:We're still treating them like they're BlackBerrys from 2003. It's really crazy. It's the same infrastructure. You take the BlackBerry Enterprise server out and you replace it with Knox Manage or Workspace ONE. It's the same deal, right? In fact, I would say most customers the person who was managing the BlackBerry enterprise server, more than likely, is currently managing the EMM, you know. So nothing's changed. The processes are all the same. It's highly siloed, highly manual and normally it's outsourced to some third party.
Speaker 2:And it's that one asset class that you know, like I said, has been forgotten and just it's kind of like the unwanted child kind of thing, right, where it's just like somebody else deal with it, and I'm going to treat it like it's a phone that does email, right, and I think that that sort of thinking and those sorts of legacy systems and processes have really stunted the growth of things like enterprise mobility to you know these phones? This isn't a phone that does email anymore. You know this is a supercomputer in your pocket. You know that really should be a gateway to the cloud. You know we've got the fastest networks in the world. You mentioned 5G, so fastest connectivity ever invented for wide area networking. We've got processing power and capabilities on these devices that is well beyond, in fact.
Speaker 2:You know what I think. If you took the motherboard out of this thing and compared it to the motherboard in your notebook, it would probably be about the same size. It's all the same thing now, but they're not treated the same way, which is crazy. And I think it's because the support burden is so high on enterprise mobility that CIOs and CISOs basically look at these things and go no, look, you know what? I'm running around with my hair on fire just trying to keep email working. We're not giving it cloud access. We're not going any further, and I think that's a huge missed opportunity in the enterprise.
Speaker 1:Indeed, and we've had mobile device management and bring your own device and other trends in the enterprise for over a decade, but it looks like we still haven't really solved that challenge of simplicity. And you call it zero touch. So what new are you bringing in terms of scale and efficiency and security, even to large enterprises?
Speaker 2:That's a great question. So you know, I was part of an opportunity with a very large retailer where they deployed a huge amount of devices to the associates in their stores. So you know, everybody in the store got a device and you know I saw the difficulty in deploying and managing these devices on their side and on the side of the MSP that was, you know, supporting them because none of the systems were integrated together. So they were a service now shop, they were utilizing a, you know, a higher end EMM and they had an MSP, but the MSP was using a completely different system and none of these things were integrated together. So they ended up having a lot of problem with device loss. You know, device reclamation and support was extremely difficult, reassignment of these devices. So that was kind of the inspiration for what we did with ZTM.
Speaker 2:So we approached ServiceNow and ServiceNow at that point in time was not really mobile friendly. You know, again, it was one of those assets that they'd kind of forgotten about or just chose not to focus on because there are so many siloed systems and so many vendors and so many OEMs that it just it was very daunting for them to do that because they didn't have a mobile background. So they stuck with what they're really, really good at, which is, you know, data center, network infrastructure, that sort of stuff. So we went to them and said, look, we think that there's a good play for bringing aggregating all data and all systems into one system of record for enterprise mobility, and we think ServiceNow is that platform. And you know their CEO, bill McDermott, met with my global CEO, dr Huang, and everybody kind of just thought it was a great idea. So they greenlit it and we set about working with them at a very deep level, deeper than they've ever given access to a third party for with. And we've embedded parts of their technology in the scoped application yeah, for the first time ever. So parts of what they call hardware asset management are embedded with ZTM. So now we've got almost a purpose-built enterprise mobility lifecycle solution that is native to ServiceNow.
Speaker 2:So we did that. We've got all the workflows, because we look at it from, it's almost like a Mobius strip, right? You start from procurement of a mobile device, then you get through to having to enroll it in the EMM, put the right profile in place and get it to the end user. So that's the first part of the loop and then, once you get it to the user, you have to deal with the you know inevitabilities like the lost and the broken and the stolen issues, with break fix, with warranty repair, with extended warranties like Samsung's Care Plus or Apple's AppleCare, and then to reclamation of that device, so getting it back. Somebody leaves, I'm doing an upgrade, what do I do with it? Do I refurbish it and reuse it or do I send it for recycling? And if I send it for recycling, how do I manage that process so I can get the most money back for that asset that I've paid for and also take advantage of things like ESG credits, because when you send a device back for proper recycling, you get a carbon and a water offset and everybody's got an ESG goal they're trying to meet.
Speaker 2:But right now I think that from an enterprise mobility perspective, because it's so siloed, esg really isn't figuring into things, because the person who manages the buyback of the devices is not in charge of ESG and probably doesn't even know what it is, you know, and that information stays on some external system with some vendor. So our goal was OK, let's bring all of these systems and all of these workflows together into one place and have these workflows as opposed to taking, you know. So we did a study and the majority of workflows and enterprise mobility took at least four swivel chairs. The reclamation and buyback of a device takes 14 minimum. So we were looking at it, going wow, you know.
Speaker 2:I mean we can't get any sort of economies of scale or efficiencies with that amount of manual effort and the amount of times that things can fall through the cracks. There are so many points of failure. It's not even single, there's multiple points of failure. So how do we eliminate all that? So we've done, I think, a pretty Olympic job of doing that. So now we've got 19 workflows that are almost fully automated, like that buyback workflow was talking about. You know, 14 to 19 manual steps. We've got it down to three, and two of those three are physically putting the device in a box and taping it, and we can't, unfortunately, automate that quite yet. The other step is somebody making the decision of do I send it for e-cycling or do I reuse it and reissue it. So really, we've taken it down to one manual step as opposed to 19 or 14, whatever it happened to be. But you know, the savings are incredible, just there.
Speaker 1:I bet, and you mentioned retail is a big segment for you, obviously for the thousands of branches that might be out there at various store locations. What else, where are you seeing most traction for advanced enterprise mobility and other use cases?
Speaker 2:Sure. I mean we're seeing it where anybody's got a very distributed workforce, so healthcare is really starting to become a huge growth area for us. You know you've got remote patient monitoring, you've got clinical trials, you've got home nursing home therapies. You know a lot of things are getting outside of doctors offices and hospitals and going on the road, so those devices become mission critical and they're also extremely hard to manage because there is no central office per se where they can go in and get support. So automating that and, you know, especially getting into things, like you know, one of the things that we're implementing Gen AI for is to get predictive and preventative so I can actually get diagnostics from the device and see a problem before it becomes a problem.
Speaker 2:So we read this study that about 40% of the reason why any OEM, by the way, devices are returned for repair is battery related. And it kind of makes sense, right? I mean, battery materials haven't changed all that much in like 10 years, but the processing power and the radios and the displays everything's gotten bigger, better, brighter and faster. So we're really taxing that material a lot more than we were before. So if you look at a 10,000 device fleet and you look at a standard. Well, I'm going to do sales guy math, but like 10% break rate, which is actually not out of it's, pretty conservative in some cases. So you're looking at a thousand devices a year, are going to break. 40% of those, or 400, are going to be battery related.
Speaker 2:And battery is this weird, insidious thing where you know if the battery is starting to fail on a device. It doesn't tell you but it could start making the radio not function properly, so you might see it as a, you know, a connectivity issue. Or it might start messing with the processor, so you see it as an application issue. So a battery that's dying, you know, and that happens over weeks and months, could actually lead to up to 10 calls to help desk and a bunch of radical being gone down. Enterprise, you know a help desk person is going to say is well, it's got to be the battery. You know that's the last thing they think of.
Speaker 2:So if I can use my system to pull in the diagnostic data, monitor it in real time and see devices that have a battery that are on the decline and then action and you know a replacement to that device or a replacement battery, then I can essentially head off 40% of a customer's downtime with one workflow. So the savings on that are amazing. And it's not just the savings on the pain of having to deal with the issue once it's happened, it's also lost productivity, it's CSAT, it's a bunch of other things that happen after the issue becomes an issue. So we're trying to get as preventative as possible to help these you know very distributed forces stay up, you know get a device as quickly and efficiently and cost effectively as possible, stay up and running as much as we possibly can and then, when the inevitable happens, dealing with that in really, really rapid you know situations to address the issue and remedy it as quickly as possible. And all of that is happening through integration and automation.
Speaker 1:Fantastic, really interesting opportunity. Of course Samsung is known as a powerhouse in 5G not just devices, but increasingly the networks and the edge components. You must see a big push for 5G deployments, I imagine privately, in the enterprise or in big venues. We are Hospitals. You just obviously are looking at alternatives to bad Wi-Fi. What's the opportunity there for you and for your customers?
Speaker 2:It's huge. Yeah, I mean Samsung SDS does have a private 5G force that goes out and does consulting and installation. As you mentioned, Samsung is a leader in 5G technology and private 5G. I think it's really starting to hit its stride because a lot of companies now are starting to wrestle with all right, I've got to upgrade my legacy Wi-Fi network infrastructure. Do I go with Wi-Fi 6 or whatever comes next, or do I go with private 5G? And at this point in time, from an economic perspective it's kind of a wash. So it really depends on capacity.
Speaker 2:So, if you're going to put a lot of IoT sensors onto a network, 5g with just the amount of capacity that it's got and its ability to beam split and all of that is really very good for IoT. You know especially things like video. So if you've got a lot of cameras, you're doing you know camera aided diagnostics, so I'm looking at you know we've even got it in our manufacturing facilities where a camera can see if you're walking up to a door where you know the room behind that door requires special. You know PPE. We can see if you're wearing the right PPE before you go in and if you're not, it stops your card from letting you go into that area.
Speaker 2:So that sort of stuff is happening globally. So the amount of capacity that you acquire on your network is very high. So private 5G is really good for that. And then, of course, you know it means that you've got a SIM card in the device and you can now roam seamlessly between a private and a public 5G network. So you know, it's one less radio and one less infrastructure that we have to deal with. Right, we've got private 5G and public 5G and you know the two meet together in a roaming agreement, but from an infrastructure perspective it's very similar.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic Onwards and upwards. I think we'll see more of that On the security side. You touched on that, but increasingly our devices are representing real threats, attack vectors with very sophisticated malware apps that you can download from different stores. Text you know ransomware texts are prolific, we've all seen them. You know how do your customers think about security and what are their needs today, and you know moving forward.
Speaker 2:Yeah, security is incredibly important, as you said, now more than ever. You know, I think mobile used to kind of get a pass from a security perspective because you know everything was very siloed and it wasn't really a vector that the hackers were going after. Windows was too, you know, juicy, so was Linux. But now you know we're starting to see a lot more attacks happening from the mobile endpoint. So there are a lot of technologies that you can use on the device to maintain a high security posture, but you have to get that software to the device and you have to monitor to ensure that the posture is being maintained.
Speaker 2:So part of our zero touch mobility solution is making sure that when that person is enrolling their corporate liable device, that the right profile is going down to that device, the right software being installed and that nothing has changed with that device. Because, like all things, especially on the iOS side, the end user is kind of in control so they can delete your software. So we can actually maintain that and make sure that if there is an issue on the device, it's reported, we can block access to that device until the issue has been remedied. We're even exploring integrating with there's one piece of software that's really very interesting and unfortunately the manufacturer's name is eluding me right now, but essentially it allows me to ping their server anytime somebody wants to register a device on our network or on the customer's network and we can see kind of the entomology of that device.
Speaker 2:I can see if it's a CPO device that was Frankensteined by some third party. I can see if that device has ever been jailbroken. I can see if that device has ever been jailbroken. I can see if that device has ever been stolen. So any of that stuff we can see and we can use as context in order to either grant access or not. So that's even a step further and beyond what we're able to do currently, which is just make sure the device has the right profile, maintain the posture and ensure, if there is an issue like a lost or stolen, that your data is safe. You know, into that perspective, you know lost and stolen, I think is one of the areas where it scares SISOs the most. Yeah, because this device, like I said, is capable of being a computer, but it is a lot easier to lose this than it is a notebook. Right now there's not a lot of good processes or systems to be able to address that issue quickly. You know, more than likely what would happen if your device was stolen right now is that you'd have to call a help desk and that help desk probably doesn't have access to any of the systems they need to, you know, fix or remedy the issue. They don't have access to the EMM. They don't have access to the emm, they don't have access to the enrollment platform, they don't have access to the carrier. So they just put out tickets and say it's like one o'clock in the morning in vegas and you've gone back to your hotel after a conference and you're like where's my phone? Now you call a help desk. It could be the next day. If it's friday, it could be mond before that's actioned. So by that time the device is out of batteries. You know more than likely it's never going to be charged again and you don't have the ability to ever have an audit trail that says I got my data off of that With ZTM. Someone can go into, you know even a Microsoft Teams channel and go I lost my phone and an AI will pick up and say oh, that's terribly sorry. What happened? Okay, do you want us to wipe it or do you want to try and find it? I want to try and find it. We'll then take a ping from the EMM and come back with a map and say here's where it is.
Speaker 2:At the same time, we're encrypting the device. So we're locking it down so that the data is safe. In some situations we can even put a lock screen on it that has, you know, it's custom, so I could type in I'm at the Hilton, you know, las Vegas. Here's the phone number. I could even play a chime on the device to get people's attention to it. But you know, I can locate it, I can go and find it. If I recover it, I can come back and say I found my phone and it'll unlock it.
Speaker 2:And all of that happens within seconds. And it's all because we've taken people out of the equation. And it's not that we're giving the help desk access to sensitive systems. We're giving them, or the user, access to a workflow that has authorized access to an API that can trigger specific command as part of a workflow, you know. So we're taking people out of the equation that don't need to be in the way and that enables us to, you know, react to things as they're happening.
Speaker 2:You know, so I could say that within 10 minutes of losing my device and be able to have that audit trail that says my data's off the device, you know. And then we can tell the carrier kill the SIM card and we get that back saying, yep, sim card's killed, and all of that happens within minutes as opposed to days or, in some cases, weeks. So from a security perspective, we're using automation to address common issues where we have the tools already to manage those things. But because of legacy issues and siloed systems, it's very manual so it can't be addressed on time. So we're changing the game in that perspective.
Speaker 1:Wow, huge advancement. Congratulations on that, thank you. So we're in the dog days of summer, can't believe it's August. It used to be a slow time of the year, but no longer. Got Black Hat next week and got going to VMware Explorer the end of August. What happened to August being downtime? But what are you looking forward to? What's on your agenda the rest of the summer into the fall?
Speaker 2:Well, we've got a new version of our ZTM software being released in August, and it brings out direct API access to a number of carriers. So now our ability to do the MACD that I just told about to you is going to be live and ready to go November we bring out an even bigger release, which has extended capabilities for MSPs, because we're seeing managed services providers adopting ZTM to help them run their business and deliver their services to their customers. So that's really exciting. Besides that, I've got a world tour coming up. The solution's gone global, so I'm going to be in Australia. We've got some Canadian customers that are starting to get spun up as well. You, you know, we've got some Canadian customers that are starting to get spun up as well. So you know, it's starting to grow pretty dramatically. And yeah, I don't know, I got a team of 14. So there's always something that comes up. I think I'm booked for travel every week until the end of the year, except for next week, pto with my kids.
Speaker 1:Excellent, We'll enjoy that. One final question Do you get good discounts for friends, family podcast interviewers?
Speaker 2:at.
Speaker 1:Samsung. I'm sure you have every device known to Samsung.
Speaker 2:At the end of the year, I think, depending on your level in the company, they give you kind of a gift certificate to the employee store. So in the beginning you're like, well, I need a fridge, I need a vacuum cleaner. But I've been with the company for six years so at this point in time I'm like I need a portable projector so that we can watch a movie while we're sitting by the fire.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow, as a gadget guy, I'm very jealous, I'm very jealous, I'm very jealous If you need anything let us know, we're certainly happy to help out. All right. Well, thanks so much for joining Really insightful inside view of a part of Samsung many of us don't see or know and appreciate your time and interest, my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Thanks so much and thanks everyone.