Victor: Why did you create MOBI wireless management?

Scott: In 2007, we began to see a market for simple, costefficient, low-risk, wireless managed services within large enterprises. The MOBI solution was developed more automated, more configurable, and much more robust in capability than anything else in the industry. Within a week of sketching the broad strokes, we hired a small team of IT developers and began coding the software platform. After nearly a year’s work, we began to create an identity for MOBI. We built the foundations of a sales organization, and we utilized new forms of guerilla marketing and social media to help build the brand. Eight months after taking the solution to market, AOTMP – the telecom industry’s leading research and advisory organization, ranked MOBI #1 in customer satisfaction in its 2010 annual report. Since then, MOBI has forged ahead as one of the leaders in this fairly new marketplace. We like the view ahead of us – a virtually untapped market, with no real dominant players, all while wireless technology continues to become more and more of a mission-critical tool for enterprises.

Victor: What does the name mean?

Scott: MOBI is short for mobile.

Victor: What is it? Who created it?

Scott: MOBI is a Wireless Environment Management company created by the founders of Bluefish Wireless. It was determined that there was a need in the marketplace for a carrier-neutral, SaaSmodeled solution with a white-glove approach to end users. MOBI was developed to be the most flexible, configurable solution on the market today in an effort to ease the onboarding burden and enhance the customer experience.

Victor: What does it do? What are the benefits?

Scott: MOBI utilizes best in class technology and white glove help desktop support to create an environment that maximizes the level of service provided to administrators and end users while vastly improving efficiency to drive down costs. MOBI customers benefit by witnessing a reduction in their wireless bills and an increase in the level of service provided to their end users. Soft dollar savings are also realized through an 80 percent reduction in FTE’s required to support the organizations wireless production.

Victor: How is it unique from other similar products/ services? What companies do you see as in the same market?

Scott: MOBI’s uniqueness lies first in its technology. It was developed to be extremely configurable in order to maximize the ongoing flexibility and reduce the time required to onboard. Most competitors in this industry develop a base product, then configure and customize for each customer through coding changes. These changes can take weeks or months and often result in extra charges for the customer. MOBI’s average onboarding time is 37 days and almost every customer required a to high degree of customization. Secondly, MOBI has proven to be second to none regarding the support of end users. The MOBI helpdesk is comprised of college-educated MOBI employees located in Indianapolis. These team members are arranged in separate support pods assigned a limited number of accounts. The structure means end users will routinely reach the same small group of Account Specialists providing white glove feel for all customers, large and small. Thirdly, MOBI has developed patent pending re-billing solutions designed to provide the most accurate reflection of what each user costs the organization while maximizing savings. MOBI was created as the most configurable wireless management solution for the telecommunication industry.

Victor: When was it developed? What is something interesting or relevant about its development history?

Scott: MOBI development began in 2008. The MOBI solution is a living, breathing solution that continues to grow and improve guided by customer and market needs. With one-third of MOBI employees being IT focused, the executive team continues to demonstrate that product development will always be a central factor in the MOBI business and culture. Exciting developments regarding our expense management and re-billing solutions have resulted in patent pending technology that continues to be on the cutting edge of the wireless management industry. MOBI fits enterprises with over 1,000 devices in a number of program structures: Corporate Liable, Individual Liable, BYOD, etc.

Victor: Where did it originate? Where can you get it now?

Scott: MOBI started in Indianapolis which remains its headquarters. The complete MOBI solution is available in North America. MOBI continues to develop exciting solutions to aid organizations in solving the global puzzle. Victor: How much does it cost? What are the options? Scott: MOBI’s cost varies based on volume and the type of device being supported. It is charged in a per device per month model and does not require its customers to sign term agreements. It has been a philosophy since MOBI’s inception that the MOBI solution would provide value month after month. Should a customer determine that they are no longer seeing that value, they should not be forced to remain in that business relationship.

Victor: What are some examples of it in action?

Scott: The vast majority of MOBI customers are on month-to-month agreements and yet MOBI maintains a retention rate of over 99 percent.

Victor: Who is it particularly tailored for? Who is it not for?

Scott: MOBI is designed for organizations managing over 1000 mobile devices. It is more difficult to demonstrate ongoing value for organizations with less than 500 lines.

Victor: What are your thoughts on education these days?

Scott: Information is flooding into our lives faster than ever. Young people are wonderful adapters and have embraced the existing high tech world where social media has become so intertwined in our culture. In order to stay up with the incredible velocity of the society today’s young people grow up in, technology will have to be embraced by the education system. This can create an educational environment the maximizes the speed and access to information allowing for educators to focus on important skills such as problem solving and creative thinking rather than memorization and fact finding.

The mobility management industry is extremely confusing for organizations today. This is a very immature industry which requires continued education of our customers and prospective customers. The MOBI marketing department continually produces videos and other online materials designed to shed light on the confusing aspects of the wireless industry. This will continue to be an important aspect of the MOBI marketing plan.

Victor: What sort of formative experiences in your own education helped to inform your approach to creating MOBI wireless management?

Scott: I was taught early during my education in business school that many great businesses ideas were developed around the idea of helping people alleviate or avoid pain. Great businesses have been built by identifying areas of pain for people and developing products and solutions designed to alleviate that pain. MOBI was developed with this philosophy. The formative experiences are simple. They all involve the pain witnessed as organizations attempted to keep up with the demands of their mobility programs as its growth accelerated exponentially. MOBI was designed to alleviate much of that pain.

Victor: How does MOBI wireless management address some of your concerns about education?

Scott: While many educators recognize the need to introduce more technology into the student’s environment, there are concerns around paying for and managing that technology. Devices designed to enhance productivity such as tablets and smartphones, also can be fairly easy to break. They can be difficult and expensive to procure. They can be expensive to maintain. It can be expensive to continually refresh the technology. These are many of the reasons educators have shied away from introducing advanced technologies.

MOBI was designed to provide a framework to easily introduce new technologies into an environment and to provide the expertise and experience to ensure the technology is managed as efficiently as possible. This results in the lowest overall Cost of Ownership.

Victor: What is your outlook on the future of education?

Scott: The most successful people in our society are the most creative thinkers and the best problem solvers. They are not the best memorizers. There was a time when access to information was scarce. “Experts” were those among us who knew lots of facts and became invaluable sources of information. Access to information is not the challenge any more and the traditional “expert” is becoming obsolete. The individuals that can think the most creatively and solve problems will be the “experts” of the future and add the most value to society. Putting information at the fingertips of a student allows them to free up their area of focus to think more creatively.

I feel a shift in education is coming that will allow students to learn in a much more flexible environment that allows them to learn and grow at their own pace and in a direction led by their own curiosity. This will foster more creativity and create the next generation of contributors.

Victor: Anything else you’d like to say to educators and other leaders in and around education about the value of MOBI wireless management?

Scott: Many education systems are embracing technology. However, many are resisting for the reasons mentioned above. MOBI can provide the expertise and infrastructure required to begin to infuse your environment with technology while controlling the cost of that technology. MOBI has a track record of doing this for the some of the largest organizations in America.

By Victor Rivero. Victor Rivero tells the story of 21st-century education transformation. He is the editor-in-chief of EdTech Digest, a magazine about education transformed through technology.

Scott Kraege is a managing partner of two wireless mobility management companies, Bluefish Wireless Management and MOBI wireless management. He holds chair positions with the Center for Telecom Environment Management Standards (CTEMS) Committee, the 2012 Super Bowl Committee and the executive board of FIVE Career Advisors.

http://edtechdigest.wordpress.com/2012/04/16/interview-scott-kraege-alleviates-mobile-pain-for-education/

Deploying any device into a company’s wireless environment requires careful thought and consideration. Two major components to address are security and device support.

The tablet trend is still evolving but it’s clear that tablets require more attention than your basic wireless devices in business. Recent stats from my company, MOBI wireless management, reveal that while less than 5% of managed devices are tablets, 20% of help-desk calls are tablet-related. Deploying tablets can and will require more time and management than your average device.

Tablet security & data control

Security issues are at the forefront of the tablet movement. Why? These devices are also used in personal ways–downloading and listening to music, storing pictures, web surfing, etc.

This, along with the fact that they are often connected through public WiFi, puts them at a higher risk for security breaches and releasing sensitive data in a public place.

Currently, tablets aren’t protected in the same ways a smartphone might be, so the most effective way to deploy a secure tablet is through an appropriate mobile device management (MDM) software program that supports the tablet’s specific operating system (such as the iOS platform from Apple).

MDM software allows companies to push email and other businesscritical information to the tablet securely. These applications compartmentalize corporate data on the device, allowing it to be encrypted, password-protected and restricted to certain guidelines. If the tablet is lost or stolen, companies can wipe sensitive data before it gets into the wrong hands.

Ongoing IT support

Implementing wireless solutions and MDM software that keep a company’s tablets secure requires a certain level of support from IT staff. Whether it is internal resources or an outsourced IT team, trained professionals must be available for set-up, troubleshooting and ongoing management of the device.

Because the tablets are vulnerable, it’s important to have IT support at all times in the event that the tablet is lost or stolen. The use of any MDM applications (even free options like ActiveSync) for security and inventory management will also require regular maintenance and hours from the IT team. This is extra bandwidth most companies don’t account for when rolling out new devices to the field.

MDM companies are an effective way to deploy new devices and manage their wireless program on behalf of the internal IT staff. The outside support allows an IT staff to focus on other IT issues and tasks without having to devote extra hours to these challenging devices.

Deploying secure tablets isn’t easy, but when done correctly, companies experience better-connected employees and increased productivity.

BY BRANDON HAMPTON

Brandon Hampton is the director at MOBI Wireless Management.

http://tabtimes.com/analysis/enterprise/2011/12/06/brandon-hampton-two-things-you-must-address-successful-tablet

MOBI Wireless Management, and Notify Technology Corp.’s NotifyMDM have partnered to offer a combined solution to help administrators looking for centralized management and control of wireless devices used in an enterprise.

MOBI’s partnership with NotifyMDM’s advanced device management technology lets enterprise admins and IT operations create and enforce policy; manage compliance requirements; and supply realtime statistics, audit tracking, file sharing, asset tracking and report generation. The full suite also comes with an end user self-service portal, according to the partnership announcement.

MOBI Wireless Management’s solution lets admins at organizations of all sizes easily manage, control and secure numerous wireless device platforms, such as Apple iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone and select Nokia S60 Symbian wireless devices, according to officials.

NotifyMDM offers centrally-managed MDM solutions for iPhone/ iPad, Android, BlackBerry, webOS, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone 7 and select Nokia S60 wireless devices. Features support security, visibility, and device management. NotifyMDM also offers tools to manage and differentiate personally-owned devices from corporateowned ones within the same enterprise. NotifyMDM also offers a web-based activity monitor to track activity and users.

Under the partnership, MOBI customers can add the NotifyMDM solution to their current services and access NotifyMDM administration from within MOBI’s client portal.

The companies also plan to integrate NotifyMDM’s capabilities with MOBI’s current wireless mobility management services (WMM), simplifying and centralizing WMM and MDM into one dashboard to give customers access to a single web-based solution for all their mobility management needs, according to company execs.

“The collaboration greatly enhances the suite of features available to telecom managers and end-users,” said Brandon Hampton, director at MOBI Wireless Management, in a statement. “Offering both solutions as an overall integrated service could not have come at a better time as most businesses are now handling program and device management tasks in separate silos.”

“Notify has created an effective solution that can be integrated into a partner’s product offering creating a combined solution that has a more powerful value proposition to the customer,” said Paul DePond, president of Notify Technology Corp., in the statement.

by Vance McCarthy

http://www.idevnews.com/stories/5078/MOBI,%20Notify%20Team%20on%20Integrated
%20Mobile%20Device%20Management%20for%20Enterprises

Today, our Account Specialists use the global search feature roughly 180 times per day, so it needs to be as informative as possible. Our goal is to speed up and improve it so relevant information available as soon as possible. To do that we’re adding far more detail into global search including matching lines, people, and devices. This provides our Account Specialists with blazingly fast access to the information they need on a support call, meaning faster calls and resolutions for wireless end-users.

Sometimes it’s little features like this that make a big difference. That’s why we always look for ways to give our customers the best end-user experience possible.

The good news is that more and more companies are letting employees bring in their own smartphones and tablets, acknowledging the BYOD phenomenon. The bad news is that many are doing it badly and often regretting the results. It doesn’t have to be that way, but an unhappy outcome seems to be the norm, especially at midsize companies, says Brandon Hampton, a director at Mobi Wireless Management, which provides a management service for mobile devices and carrier plans.

What shocked me was why so many customers are unhappy with the results.

The naive motivation for BYOD – The typical experience, Hampton says, is that companies that decide to migrate a large portion of their users from corporate-provisioned smartphones to employee-owned units — in telco parlance, from corporate-liable to individual-liable — are unhappy that it takes 20 to 30 minutes per user to accomplish the transition, including device setup, message forwarding, and so on. Also, they normally can’t reduce their telecom support staff when the transition is done even though they’ve doubled or tripled the number of users in the process.

My reaction - How can they not be happy that two to three times as many employees are now able to be productive when on the go, while maintaining the same support overhead? (Hampton reported that support calls drop from an average of 4.5 per user per year to 2.5 when employees use their own devices, and the nature of support changes from dealing with billing questions to dealing with corporate access questions.) I also thought, “How could they expect the transition to require no effort? Plus, don’t they get it’s a one-time investment in increased productivity?”

Hampton laughed at my naïveté. The reason most companies — especially midsize ones — do a BYOD transition is not to increase productivity but to palm off telecom costs onto employees. Their goal is to reduce absolute cost; productivity and employee satisfaction are mere side effects. That of course is the problem: Their goals are naive, so what should be viewed as a positive outcome isn’t. The problem is not that BYOD itself is negative, it’s that many companies do it for the wrong reason and don’t get what they wanted.

Poor implementation worsens naive approach to BYOD – Some companies compound the (perceived) poor results by making other mistakes. One is to have employees expense their mobile bills, which costs about $25 per expense report to process (adding cost). Hampton suggests that companies pay a flat fee, perhaps in each paycheck, for mobile reimbursement for users whose mobile needs are moderate, and buy and manage the devices (and data plans) used by heavy users. In his experience, the flat-fee reimbursement is cheaper, especially if you base it on role and have just a few tiers of reimbursement amounts. If you tie it into your Active Directory monitoring, you can see which employees are accessing corporate resources via mobile and reimburse just those employees.

He recommends companies continue to provision devices to heavy users even if you let them choose which device to use, as is increasingly common. That way, you can usually get better coverage plans, especially for international travelers, when you bundle them as a package to a provider.

The other common mistake is not to have a mobile management strategy in place; whether a device belongs to the company or employee and whether or not the company pays for it, you manage access to your network and corporate resources using mobile device management (MDM) and other tools based on policies you should already have in place for internal access to corporate resources. It turns out that many companies don’t do this, then get surprised when a departed employees’ tablet ends up on eBay still containing corporate data.

Hampton notes that midsize companies struggle with these issues more than large ones because they typically have a “phone guy” rather than a team of people experienced with the various areas, which include device management, security, policies, and carrier relations.

The “dump the costs” strategy may gain traction, unfortunately – Because the motivation at so many companies is to save money, but not increase employee productivity, Hampton has seen odd deployments. For example, one company charges its employees an annual fee for access to corporate resources from their personal devices. More surprising, employees are willing to pay this “convenience fee” to do work from their own devices.

Hampton has also seen companies purposely require the use of expense reports to claim stipends, knowing that many employees won’t do the paperwork and the companies won’t have to pay those stipends. Employee acceptance of such abusive actions only encourages the notion that BYOD means “shove the costs onto employees” rather than “let’s figure out how to work better and smarter.”

It’s possible that “shove the costs onto employees” approach will only gain more acceptance. I’ve heard in the last year several executives muse about having employees buy their own computers, selling it as an opportunity to use a computer of their own choosing. They saw that employees were willing to buy iPhones, iPads, and Androids — and that corporate security was not compromised in the process. Hampton has also heard such musings.

We’ve already seen companies stop paying for at-home phone lines and broadband, as employees willingly picked up the costs for their own convenience. Perhaps if this trend continues, we’ll have to pay to use a desk at the office, like independent contractors such as hair stylists and real estate agents do.

I hope not. If a company’s motivation is to shift costs to employees, BYOD and the consumerization-of-IT trend will fail to benefit that company in the medium to long term. The company will instead get employees used to standing apart from the organization, with the dire results that usually brings. You’ve been warned!

JANUARY 13, 2012

http://www.infoworld.com/d/consumerization-of-it/how-screw-byod-rollout-183334