SOTI XSight adds a proactive diagnostic capability to phone analytics, something that is common in desktop and mobile PCs, but has not been part of broader mobile solutions before now.

Mississauga-based mobility vendor SOTI, which started out in Enterprise Monitoring and Management [EMM] and has since broadened out its product line, has enhanced their capabilities further with the introduction of a new diagnostic intelligence solution, SOTI XSight. It significantly increases efficiency, and reduces both operating costs and downtime.

“SOTI XSight is very unique in the market,” said Shash Anand, VP of Product Strategy at SOTI. “It is the only solution for incident management, advanced diagnostics and operational intelligence, so it can fix mobile issues faster, the first time.”

SOTI XSight is a completely new platform integrated into SOTI MobiControl, but it continues the company’s recent focus on expanding their mobile analytics capabilities.

“We previously merged two products – SOTI Assist and SOTI Insight – which combined a diagnostic health desk tool with a business intelligence tool,” Anand said “That was a very big evolution on top of those products, because the two original products needed a very tight integration. What we are now doing with SOTI XSight is expanding intelligence further with the introduction of a new category – diagnostic intelligence – which is proactive rather than reactive in its focus.”

That kind of proactive intelligence is something that customers expect today in their mobile and desktop computers, but it is not something that has been present to date in phones.

“Diagnostics is about trying to uncover issues to be proactive,” Anand said.  “I don’t want to have users have to call in. I want to be able to do something before they know that there is a problem. Existing tools have been trying to achieve a portion of this, but the actionable side of this has been missing. We have been able to tell users that their mobiles are going to run out of power, but the way the process has always worked is that if there was a problem, you would ship the devices back to the IT department and they would handle it in house. That was how it was done. That doesn’t work any more, however, because these devices are now more mission-critical. There is also more global spending on mobility solutions, and this is in an environment where 65% of businesses don’t use mobile data they collect to optimize their performance.”

Anand said that while carriers can generally provide some degree of capability around this for their own devices, that is less helpful if a company uses more than one carrier.

“The providers have a form of this that is biased towards them,” he noted. “The  device will tell me the reality of its signal strength regardless of carriers. And because companies are generally on multiple carriers, you want some kind of system that will do it for all of them.”

Anand stated that the key here is SOTI XSight’s ability to minimize downtime and keep businesses running smoothly.

“Through these built-in analytics, SOTI XSight lets critical data, including real time as well as historical metrics, be pulled in to analyze battery health and cellular connectivity,” he said. “You have all these proactive things your admins can create, such as watchlists, so device downtime can be avoided.”

Anand said that this will greatly simplify partners lives.

“They will love that we have now given them tools to address problems that they are having with the deployment of mobile devices. “They had no insight before into what batteries in devices needed to be replaced. Sometimes entire fleets would be replaced when they didn’t have to be.”

Anand also said that partners previously would have no way of knowing what was being used in apps that they built, had no idea about visibility around cell coverage, and couldn’t tell which phones were consuming access above plan coverage.

“Support agents also lacked tools to diagnose remote application issues,” he added. “Field workers would have to drop off devices or perform complex manual tasks for support agents. Now they can download diagnostic files with just the click of a button. This really eliminates the ‘broken telephone’ problem where a developer wont know all the issues involved from help desk tickets.”

Anand also emphasized that the technology to do this wasn’t just a quick fix, but required a lot of work.

“Weve been working on this product for about five years now,” he said. “It’s not as simple as it sounds to replicate this. You have to be working with the manufacturers, and platform vendors. We don’t just offer surface capabilities. You have to go very deep.”

Anand concluded by saying that SOTI has very high expectations for XSight.

“We expect adoption to be very quick because there is demand from many areas, including transportation and logistics, health and retail,” he said. “People have told us that Assist is a wonderful reactive tool, but they want to be proactive because downtime is costly.”

SOTI XSight is available now.