The SOTI One Platform has received multiple enhancements to keep up with the trends that SOTI’s customer base wants, including new ones around their Connect and Snap products.

Shash Anand, Senior Vice President of Product Strategy at Mississauga ON-based mobility vendor SOTI, which has a strong focus on multiple aspects of the Enterprise Monitoring and Management business, has just come off a holiday season this is important for their business. The company has been making major enhancements to the core products in their SOTI One Platform, responding to customer demand, and putting themselves in a good position as competitors move to deepen their positions in these areas.

“Our most recent update was to SOTI MobiControl,” said Shash Anand, Senior Vice President of Product Strategy at SOTI. “Our customers asked us for real time tracking location services around indoor locations, and to create a geofence for alerts. What’s new is the indoor location. We worked with different access point vendors to get XY coordinates of a device to get locations within 4 walls.”

Anand stressed that this is something that clients have really been asking for.

“This is big for clients, particularly as it relates to the protection of health and safety of employees,” Anand said. “It can alert them to leave a hazardous area, and can then take a notification based on the fencing. They want to be notified about the presence of things like too many people in a certain area. Customers can also use workflows based on historic travel partners, to determine things like how long it takes to travel. In retail, you can see if there are major lineups, and you would get notified of this before a rep called to report it.”

Anand said they are also seeing strong business around their SOTI Connect printer management offering, one of two SOTI products where enhancements are being announced today.

“There has been a big uptake around printer management and a bigger reliance in particular on specialized devices like printing labels,” Anand said. “Companies don’t have visibility into all devices connected to the  network. Security is a big issue because they do have firmware and there are concerns about printers as a focus of data breaches, since physically going to every single printer would take months. A hacked printer could also lead to a compliance issue. All the vendors like HP, Zebra and Brother have their own printer management solutions, but we let you update all printers in an organization. What customers want is a solution that covers more than one printer vendor. We provide one place to manage it all for all IoT connected devices, including RFID readers and cameras. The largest retailers in the world do not have that today, which is why some are using SOTI Connect for their printer management.”

Another newer offering is SOTI XSight, which just launched at the end of November 2021. It adds a proactive element to SOTI’s intelligent diagnostic capabilities so that customers can manage app and mobile device issues more effectively.

“Customers like device management they have been but asking for what they see as its next evolution,” Anand said. “That involves having more visibility of what’s happening before it actually happens, and more proactive management of mobile devices.”

Anand said that 86% of IT workers indicated that when they report mobile issues, they effectively have to leave the IT department blind until they are resolved.

“This can tell them why a battery is degrading, and which applications cause battery consumption to be used up more rapidly,” he indicated. SOTI XSight gives visibility around application use, data consumption and signal strength. Since it kicked off at the end of November 2021, we have quickly signed up over 500 enterprise customers.”

The other announcement being made today is that SOTI Snap is being repositioned to a workflow tool. SOTI Snap Workflow Engine will enable customers to create and map approval-based business apps using a single platform.

“Originally, Snap was about business process automation and digitization – basically a tool to help you build mobile apps,” Anand said. “But it’s really about understanding business process to do this, and helping you build a workflow that automates work processes. It lets you define a workflow, which we have made a drag and drop type experience, and we have built a workflow engine to digitize these processes easily.”

Anand expects that the trends that SOTI has already begun to implement will become ever more standard in the industry.

“We expect to see a continued increase in cloud security and the growth of Zero Trust,” he said. “In 2021, over 80% of companies had cloud security incidents. Zero Trust is the big thing that needs to happen more to deal with this, to better enable enterprises to validate their employees’ credentials.”

Anand also believes that other vendors will put more effort into intelligent diagnosis solutions like SOTI XSight.

“Behavior and text are driving sustainability,” he said. “People replace batteries and devices prematurely – typically every 2 to 2.5 years, which contributes to e-waste. These batteries are usually replaced without knowing if they are healthy or not. We can tell you if you really do need to replace it.”