SOTI is intensifying their efforts to get partners to sell more of their portfolio, and have been adding tools and resources to make this easier to do.
Shash Anand, VP of Product Strategy at SOTI
Mississauga-based SOTI, which several years ago broadened out its core Enterprise Monitoring and Management [EMM] solutions into a broader product line, is further ramping up its channel efforts to better take advantage of its expanded portfolio. The company is preparing a revision of their Altitude partner program that was launched in 2019, which is intended to better enable SOTI partners to go broader and deeper on their solution set than ever before.
“We are still focused on EMM, and that is our core, but the SOTI platform today is a suite of products geared at managing mobile devices,” said Shash Anand, VP of Product Strategy at SOTI. “The definition of mobile has also expanded. The mobile reader category has become much deeper and broader, and you now also have RFID, wearable, Google Glasses, sensors, printers, scanners and others. Managing mobility has expanded to managing all these different types of devices. So we haven’t changed our focus, but we have expanded it significantly.”
The expansion of mobile product has led to an expansion of the SOTI portfolio, which in turn has led to partners selling a broader range of product.
“Many of our resellers were focused on our core product, MobiControl,” Anand said. “Now as our platform has grown into six or seven products, their opportunities have grown. For example, Soti Snap, our rapid app development program, lets the partner go into deeper conversations with the customer. One customer used a large variety of paper-based forms. We took a couple as a Proof-of-Concept and showed them how to create them as a mobile app, that can be done by a non-technical person. This lets the partner talk with them not just about device management, but get into a whole different type of conversation. That’s what we want partners to do.”
The IoT market has become a hot one that SOTI wants partners to address more deeply.
“We have expanded into printers and supporting other IoT devices,” Anand said. “We emphasize to our partners that they can expand their reach by going into this market. It also needs very deep levels of management, around things like upgrading firmware, projecting end of life, troubleshooting, and dealing with paper jams. The Altitude program gives them the chance to go deeper with it.”
The solution expansion has led to an expansion in the overall number of partners, which is over 4000.
“Some are manufacturers of mobile devices who resell us as well,” Anand said. “Some are carriers, and some MSPs. We also have technology partners who have integrated with our solutions, and printer manufacturers have brought us into a new set of partners who sell printers first.”
The Altitude program has been deepened to provide instant access to training and marketing resources.
“We had support for areas like printing, but not at a deep enough level,” Anand said. “In the past, it was more informational. Now we do live demos to partners all around the world, and it is fully multilingual. The number of partners supported has increased exponentially, as has the number of manufacturers, which in turn is multiplied by the number of their models that we support. It all makes much more richer content available to partners.”
Richer content has also been provided by the enhancement of the newer products that have come onto the platform.
“When we launched, we had 1.0 versions of the product. Now they tend to be in the 3.x range, which many more capabilities in each of the products, which allows partners to be more aggressive.”
Anand also noted that SOTI has also added new services into the products.
“MobiControl now has Xtreme Hub technology,” he said. “In retail, the biggest challenge was deploying content to retail stores, on low bandwidth settings. You had to send the file hundreds of times. We implemented a hub that you send once and it deploys it all locally. It has changed the way that customers deploy. They used to take 24-48 hours to deploy to all devices. Now it’s a few minutes.” Anand added that SOTI has added new MFA services around SOTI Identity, their authentication and authorization service, and around their System Health Dashboard, with the latter geared to their largest customers who need to know everything MobiControl is doing.
“Another new service is SOTI Device Simulation and Testing Services, which helps simulate the entire environment,” Anand said.
Anand stated that the state of mobility reports that SOTI now provides also are a useful tool for partners.
“We have ones for retail, healthcare and T&L [Transportation and Logistics],” he stated. “All have amazing stats. Our partner community loves these reports, which emphasize the need for mobile technology.”
Look for further enhancements to the program in August.
“We are working on a redesigned partner portal and program, which will be announced in August,” Anand said. “It will have some significant effect on certifications. We are building out the backend now.
“We need our partner community to help educate customers on what’s possible,” Anand concluded. “Our channel goal is to make partners as knowledgeable as we are.”
