SOTI

What Is The SOTI ONE Platform And How Can It Transform Your Business

Dec 30, 2019

SOTI is a rapidly growing solutions provider within the Enterprise Mobility and IoT Management industry. After decades of success with their Mobile Device Management solution, SOTI MobiControl, they have dedicated years developing other complementary and additive enterprise-focused solutions that assist in gaining total visibility over all aspects of enterprise mobility and IoT initiatives, and reducing administrative burden while providing deeper insight into your business. As your business grows, resources become busier, and departments obtain more responsibilities and daily tasks, the need for tools that can automate deployments, generate custom applications, analyze data, remotely update devices, and securely manage your business-critical mobility assets has an ever-growing justification.

Introducing the SOTI ONE Platform

The SOTI ONE Platform is an integrated suite of solutions designed to reduce the cost, complexity and downtime related to business-critical mobility. Comprised of seven revolutionary products, the SOTI ONE Platform helps businesses remove functional silos, eliminate downtime, build apps faster, manage all mobile and IoT devices in one place, and deliver actionable insights. When everything is connected, the SOTI ONE Platform makes mobile and IoT business operations simpler, smarter and more reliable.

With a refined and interconnected suite of solutions, such as the SOTI ONE Platform, your personnel can focus on growing the business and projects that help accelerate productivity instead of being bogged down by the evolving needs of mobile technology. Each component of the SOTI ONE Platform has its own purpose and benefits, but when combined and the more components you have, the stronger each of them become, enabling further reduction of administrative burden and end user frustration. Here's a breakdown of the seven products: 

SOTI MobiControl

https://www.soti.net/products/soti-mobicontrol/

SOTI MobiControl is the heart of the SOTI ONE Platform. With it you have an Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solution that is second to none. The level of integration across all operating systems that SOTI supports enables various levels of control and secure content distribution. Being able to track assets remotely, anytime and anywhere, in addition to deploying applications, security updates, OS upgrades, device settings, device lockdown, have full remote control functionality, embedded reporting, asset data collection, in depth API capabilities, and even offline wipe capabilities, making it clear to see why companies of all sizes rely and trust SOTI MobiControl as their EMM platform of choice. If your end user applications are web-based, SOTI MobiControl has a built-in lockdown web browser (SOTI SURF) for Android and iOS at no additional cost.

SOTI Snap

data-analysis

As companies adopt modern operating systems across their end user assets, specifically Android and iOS devices, there is a larger opportunity to utilize custom applications instead of paper-based or multi-interfaced processes. SOTI Snap enables your existing IT team or an MSP like Heartland to create custom mobile applications in minutes instead of months. With SOTI Snap 2.0, this goes even further with the ability to have multi-function and multi-screen applications with scripting and API integration to 3rd party systems, such as your ERP, WMS, LMS, HR management, or other back-end systems. Say goodbye to paper-based forms or checklists, for OSHA and maintenance as an example, and digitize and store them in a logical and searchable fashion with a custom SOTI Snap app. Combine all of this with the ability to make changes to the applications on the fly, have a universal application for both Android and iOS, (eliminating the need for two apps/dev teams), and the ability to automatically deploy the application to the necessary devices over-the-air with SOTI MobiControl, and you can imagine how this can enable your mobile workforce to be even more productive.

SOTI Assist

SOTI Assist interface

With these new ways to deploy, manage, and enable your mobile technology, there comes the inevitable overhead of supporting the devices and applications that can make your workforce more productive. Without a proper support process and tools to enable your team to assist them remotely, you could introduce inefficiencies and a growing headache of help desk inquiries that tie up resources that could be working on other projects. This is where a solution like SOTI Assist can help. Empower your help desk team with a tool that can fully remote control devices, record video and take screenshots for training or troubleshooting purposes, utilizes a built in ticketing system to track incidents across your enterprise, and ties directly into your EMM (SOTI MobiControl) solution for in-depth reporting and analyzing. Being able to share device logs, statistics, screenshots, and full device configuration images with other teams, you can drive your business’s time to resolution down dramatically and encourage collaboration for root cause analysis.

SOTI Connect

SOTI Connect

The technology landscape inside the supply chain is growing rapidly. Today, many companies are not only familiar with IoT, but have implemented it into their business. The downside to IoT devices such as sensors, industrial and mobile printers, smart access points, and other edge devices, is that they are either dumbed down and record data locally or utilize a custom dashboard or application to collect and see the data. This is a prime time for a single interface to see all those assets in a single system, which is where SOTI Connect comes in. As stated by SOTI, SOTI Connect is a solution that "reduces downtime of business-critical IoT devices that can cost an organization loss of visibility into its operations, and lead to lost revenue, efficiency or even put people's lives at risk".  SOTI is working with many different manufactures of IoT devices to enhance the features of the solution as it grows. The first release of SOTI Connect allows you to manage, support, and control industrial and mobile printers from manufacturers like Zebra, Honeywell, SATO, Brother, and Printronix. This is important since most of those manufacturers require you to use their proprietary printer management software, which usually has an additional cost, but is only for their devices, whereas SOTI Connect can support them all simultaneously with having access to 80-90% of that manufacturer’s hooks and capabilities.

SOTI Insight

SOTI Insight interface

Up to this point, we have mentioned multiple solutions, each with their own database tied to them, in addition to your own internal systems and their databases. These require you to log into those individual solutions to see asset information at a glance, or you may have to run a report to see an editable data file that you can visualize. With the complexity of those systems and the abundance of data they collect, it can almost be a full-time job to pull, analyze, and review that data. This is a challenge that SOTI Insight can help resolve, by being a centralized “data-lake” in addition to being a full enterprise BI (Business Intelligence) solution, with the ability to not only pull all of that data into a central system, but also being the analytical engine that makes the data cross referenced between systems and create automated reports and visualizations of that data in a single dashboard. The first release of SOTI Insight is designed to pull data in from the SOTI ONE Platform and analyze it for device trends, such as low battery, high memory usage, out of date applications, and many other useful data that alerts can be triggered from. This all plays into having a single platform that can not only enhance your reactive IT efforts, but also provide notifications and preventative maintenance alerts to prevent a failure from happening in the first place.

SOTI Central

SOTI Central

Considering the growing expectations of personnel in each field, not every IT team is equal; with varying responsibilities, daily end user issues, deploying and maintaining devices, learning and implementing different systems, in addition to the myriad of ongoing projects, it is easy for an IT team of 1 or even 100 to become overwhelmed, behind in work, or in lack of time for their daily needs. SOTI Central is a forum-based ecosystem of like-minded individuals, in addition to partner, ISV (Independent Software Vendor), and direct SOTI employees aiding and answering questions and solving problems for SOTI ONE Platform customers. This allows your team to self-serve answers to common problems and collaborate with either customer who have the same issues or with professionals such as SOTI and platinum level partners and ISVs. In SOTI Central’s relatively short existence of less than 5 years, it has already created an open-minded and helpful community to assist in your business-critical issues in need of resolution, because it is hard to be an expert in everything IT, and we are better together.

SOTI Identity

SOTI Identify interface

The last component of the SOTI ONE Platform, SOTI Identity, can be arguably the most important. With the above-mentioned services and solutions, you can augment and amplify your business’s ability to maintain and enhance the usability of your mobile technology within the supply chain. However, even though these are cloud systems (on-premise as an option where applicable), they all have separate logins and URLs. This is where an SSO (Single Sign-On) solution can create an ease of use for accessing those systems, while also being able to give corporate IT a single platform to administer and control end user access to these systems. SOTI Identity allows you to give the correct personnel access to only the systems they need, while also determining their level of access. As an example, you can give a site manager access to SOTI MobiControl, limit to just their location, and make it Read-Only. This allows them to see only the devices that are recorded to be at their location and is an automated source for asset tracking, so they can see which devices they are supposed to have and when they were last used.

As the supply chain industry evolves, with more technology solutions becoming available to enhance your mobile workforce’s productivity, it is important to not only have visibility into those edge devices and key components, but to also maintain them and gain business insight with all of the data they are collecting. A single platform approach to enterprise mobile technology, such as the SOTI ONE Platform, is an easy way to obtain the deep analytical benefits from these investments, without the complexity. Furthermore, collaborating with Heartland and our AlwaysOn suite of services can reduce the administrative burden of deploying and implementing SOTI ONE solutions into your business, while also becoming your central point of contact for your mobile workforce when issues and questions arise.

As SOTI’s Global Partner of the Year and Value-Added Reseller for North America in 2019, Heartland can help your business increase the effectiveness of mobile technology across the supply chain by offering webinars, demos, and proof-of-concept trials of SOTI ONE’s solutions. Contact us to learn how or to discover the benefits in a more direct business to business conversation. Fill out the form below to learn how Heartland can manage SOTI One for you.