SOTI MobiControl Reviews

To secure mobile devices.

It's simple to use.

Locking the device.

Identity integration.

We use it for tracking RF units. Across the whole network, we have about 1,000 devices.

The way SOTI has improved our organization is that we were trying to get off of the legacy MSP configuration. The improvement for us is having an OS and an interface for which we can get active support, if we need it, for configuring a unit.

One of the most valuable features is the ease of moving items from one configuration to another; it's a Windows-like setup. Also, the admin console is very easy to manage and to move through.

For the most part, the application deployment works well. Occasionally, when moving a gun, we'll see that we have to manually intervene, when working with the setup.

It has been very stable, so far.

The scalabililty is very good. We've not seen any issues. We have five sites, so far, that are using it.

So far, tech support has been very good. They're responsive and they've been able to provide solutions to the issues that we've brought up.

We used MSP previously. We switched to SOTI because MSP was out-of-support.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We had to work with our server team so that it was set up the way QC likes to have things set up. To set up the server, it took about a week or two, and that was more just a matter of coordinating. It was very reasonable. It took longer, on our side, to do the legal part.

Our strategy has been to use SOTI to move away from MSP and to get legacy equipment operational, before trying to get anything new going.

In terms of deployment, we've mostly had one person from each of our sites focused on this particular implementation. At some sites, the configuration changes more rapidly than at others.

We worked with SOTI on the set up.

We really haven't had that much time with it yet. It's working well. We have more flexibility with the solution, but there isn't really a fixed number that I can give for ROI at this point.

SOTI's pricing seems to be competitive.

AirWatch was the other one we looked at.

Make sure you can gather your equipment and thoroughly test the configuration before you start rolling out.

We use the remote control technology and screen sharing features for both Android and IOS. At my location, we are using it more for Windows, while some of the other sites are using it for Android. There have not been any complaints or any concerns, they've been working well. I don't know that it's reduced device downtime, as of yet. We're relatively new using it.

We also lock down units and that has also been working fine. We do not have the location services on at this point in time, with our configuration. 

We will be increasing usage of SOTI when we bring on the new DC site that we're planning to put up in the middle of next year. I can't say it's been a cost-savings. It's been more of an update solution, for us.

We use it for managing our mobile devices.

MobiControl is vital to our operation. We have to have SOTI to manage all of our devices. Otherwise, we would have different configurations at each site and it wouldn't be centrally managed. We like the fact that SOTI allows us to centrally manage all of our devices.

Among the valuable features are managing configurations of all devices and being able to remote into devices. That's pretty much all we use it for. We send out configurations for each site that has its devices. Each site has a different configuration, and SOTI manages each configuration for each site.

The remote control technology and screen sharing feature help us resolve issues faster. We primarily use them for Windows CE and Android right now, not iOS. These features are good. We like them.

We use the Lockdown Kiosk Mode feature on all of our devices. We use that so that the operators can't change any settings in the background, and so that the applications they run are immediately available to them. It's a good feature. The admin console is also good; no problems with it.

I would like them to improve the process of enrolling Android devices. It's much more difficult to enroll Android devices than it is Windows CE devices. There are a lot more steps required.

The stability is good. We've had very few cases with SOTI. Over a five-year period we've had something like ten cases.

The scalability is good. We have two groups that manage SOTI. I'm in manufacturing and I have a counterpart in logistics. He has more facilities, so he has deployment servers around the globe, whereas I just have one. 

That is going to change in the next couple of years. We're going to be putting in new deployment servers, probably in Europe and China, likely next year. From what I've understood, that's going to be pretty easily done. We're just going to use a management server in the United States and updates will be sent to all the deployment servers that we set up. 

So it seems really scalable, and we've purchased an additional quantity of licenses that we think we'll need for that deployment.

Technical support has been good. They're very responsive. We had basic support before, but now we have the Enterprise Support. We just got that, so I can't evaluate it. But the basic support we had was very good. They were very responsive. That's the main good thing to look out for: making sure they answer emails and the like.

The setup was straightforward. We have the Enterprise Support package, so they walked us through how to set it up.

In terms of our implementation strategy, right now we're upgrading from version 12.4 to 14.2. It's taken a couple months, but I just set up an on-premise test environment to start moving some pilot devices over. Once that's complete, I'll upgrade the test environment to 14.2, and we'll test it for two or three weeks and then schedule a time to upgrade the production environment.

I am doing the deployment myself, but the admins at each site are helping with the testing process. Once I've completed the test environment, the site admins will test their devices, and I'll do the upgrade after they're done testing.

We used SOTI directly. We have that Enterprise Support and they are required, according to that support model, to help us walk through that. Our experience with them has been very good.

It has saved us money because the manpower needed to manage all the devices, without an MDM, would be a lot. But I can't give any specific numbers.

It makes sense to have scanners on SOTI MobiControl, but it makes less sense to have printers because there are fewer features for them, while the price is the same for both. If they had a lower license fee for printers, we would probably want to purchase those. But since it's the same cost, no matter what kind of device it is, we've opted out of doing printers. There are just not enough features to really justify it.

Plan early and give yourself enough time to plan. Make sure you know what the customer needs as soon as possible. Make sure they understand what they need as well. Test everything. That's probably the best advice I could give, even though it's common sense.

We don't really use application deployment. We don't deploy the actual application itself using SOTI. The application is preinstalled on the devices. We do deploy certain configuration files. We also don't use the real-time location services. 

I wouldn't say MobiControl has reduced device downtime, it's just made it easier to configure the devices.

We have about 40 factories where we're using it. That is probably going to double over the next two years.

I'm the main administrator for the solution, and we have a local admin at each site or group of sites. They have fewer admin responsibilities, but they have admin over their particular sites, their particular folders and devices. I have control over everything. My counterpart in logistics has been using SOTI for a long time, so I lean on him a little bit for his expertise. So it's really two guys who support the system.

Originally, our primary use case was to manage Windows mobile devices, Intermec ruggedized devices, and now our primary use case is iPhones.

It gives us the ability to manage our mobile fleets and push out updates quickly for all of our internal applications to keep the business running. We can push an app update out in minutes, if we get something from the development staff. That's really a critical feature for us. If a bug is reported, once the developers fix it, it's critical for us to get it out to the field users quickly to resolve any issues they're having that are interfering with their ability to do their jobs.

It saves us time, absolutely. If the devices weren't managed and the users had to come back into the office... I don't even know how we would push out something easier than this. In the old days, before we had these managed devices, they would have had to come into the office to get a new version of a piece of software. Fortunately, that's not the way it works now.

The solution also definitely reduces downtime. It helps us get somebody set up very quickly. We use the Apple Device Enrollment Program in conjunction with SOTI, and the ability for us to get a replacement device set up immediately and get someone who is being paid at a high hourly rate - our labor is very expensive - back out in the field, is definitely a time-saver.

When an average salary of an end user is somewhere between $60 and $80 per hour, if you can get all of their apps loaded up within minutes instead of a half hour or an hour, you can see how much that might save, multiplied by several thousand users.

The application deployment features are usually effective. Right now, that function is broken because Apple has some problem with its enterprise deployment. In general, it's very easy to push an app, to get updates out. We manage about 6,000 to 7,000 devices in it right now, and it's very easy for us to make sure that field users get their updates when they need them.

Back in Windows mobile days, SOTI was quite effective. That was one of their strengths. Unfortunately, Apple restricts most of the MDM providers to a limited set of features, so with SOTI it's more about the overall experience, the console, their willingness to jump in and help. The features that Apple does allow are device management and pushing apps.

In general, historically, communication has been the biggest challenge for SOTI. Roadmap, general account maintenance/regular discussions, all were lacking but now they are improving in these areas.

We've had very few outages over the years. We had a couple of them where it was a bug that we had some trouble with but, considering the timespan that we've had the solution implemented, it's been very stable.

Scalability is easy. It's very scalable. Other business areas that are associated with my corporation have very quickly added 400 to 500 users. When we need to add licenses and bump up our device number of accounts, it's very quick. Within 24 to 48 hours they can add capacity for us. 

Like anywhere else, if you can get past the first-tier agents who are reading off a script, SOTI technical support is very good.

We've had several situations over the past couple of years. I don't remember exactly what the causes were, but once we engaged our account representation and escalated, we were able to get a very quick response. We do pay for the high-level maintenance.

This is the first MDM we ever used. At the time, Motorola resold SOTI, and so did Intermec. If you were getting a ruggedized device, you used SOTI. That's what it was for.

The initial setup of the SOTI environment is easy. They do most of it for you.

We went from an on-premise to a hosted solution, and I think the setup for the hosted took about a week. It didn't take very long for them to set it up at all. It was very simple to do.

They're actually in the process of upgrading one of our environments right now, and then we are going to migrate into the upgraded environment. All of that, again, has been done very well. Their change-review process is very effective and careful. Once you get with the technical teams, it's always pretty simple.

The way that we were able to implement MobiControl was with equipment refreshes: "Here's your new device, it's got SOTI on it, you can't take it off."

We didn't use a third-party with MobiControl. Our MDM is a standalone environment.

In terms of ROI, it's all soft costs. It's cost-avoidance, it's efficiency. There isn't really a hard ROI that you could point at. It saves us time for expensive labor representatives and in pushing out applications and updates and getting what our customers need to them quicker. We couldn't manage our mobile inventory or our mobile applications without it.

The pricing is reasonable and the licensing model is very reasonable when compared to some of the competitors in the market. I can speak directly regarding Intune, which is very expensive compared to SOTI. I would recommend SOTI. I think SOTI is also more affordable than MobileIron. SOTI is well-situated in the marketplace, from a commercial standpoint. SOTI is definitely a more commercially reasonable solution than others that are out there.

We evaluated Windows Mobile 6.1, at the time, which was a really long time ago. They were known as an industry leader for Windows mobile devices.

My advice would be not to do on-premise if you don't need to. Take the hosted solution, which is cheaper. Also, pay for the maintenance and the installation to get it done right, and have SOTI help you set it up.

From a performance standpoint, the difference between SOTI and someone else is really based around what Apple allows them to do. If we were using Android, we would have a fantastic and a much different experience. But unfortunately, we don't use Android. It's all on Apple. But overall, the product itself is dependable. They try to add new features all the time. We can take advantage of some of those, being Apple customers. In general, we've been happy with the SOTI.

We don't use the Lockdown or Kiosk Mode feature. We turn off the real-time location services. We're not allowed to use those because we are a union shop, and you cannot track a union technician. In terms of the admin console, my staff doesn't complain about it, so I would assume that it works well.

For our 6,000 managed devices I have about seven people who have administrative access to the environment. Most of them are frontline support, Tier 1 helpdesk, and then there's an environment administrator and an architect. It took about the same number of people to deploy it.

It's on all of our field-service user devices, so that's a significant number. I'm not adding staff in that area, so it will be pretty static for the time being.

Overall, I would rate the solution at eight out of ten. It's a very effective solution.

We use it for MDM.

I can't speak to any improvements to my organization right now because I don't have a functioning MDM. None of my devices are able to pull down applications. I'm at a standstill.

I do use the whitelist and blacklist. The admin part, where I'm adding users, is not too bad. It's easy enough to use.

We would use Lockdown if someone lost their iPad. Fortunately, no one has lost one lately.

The main feature that we would like to have with Soti is the ability to push an iOS update without having people come to my office. That is the main reason why we went with Soti. And that feature is not working on my version.

There's room for improvement. There are some other little features that would be nice to have, like being able to just have it play a tone. For example, if you misplaced your iPad somewhere in the room, it should be able to play a tone. 

They could organize the software a little bit better, where you access things on the console. It seems like I have to click in three different places in order to get it to go to one area. I should be able to access pretty much any point of the server, whatever I need to touch, from a panel, without having to go click on a menu, then click on the profiles, then click over on Server and go back up to the top and click on the type of device that I have, just to get my applications to show. It would be nicer if it were a little bit smoother.

I wish I had the ability to select an app singly and install or refresh it, instead of having to go into the application controls and assign it to a group. I wish there was a spot that listed all my applications. I could go into a single one and refresh or update. It's not very easily accessible, per application. You go in and you have to create a rule and in that rule you list all of the applications you want in there, and that's really your only access point to it. I don't even know, a lot of times, if there's an update available for it because I can't just go into that one application and see.

I don't find it very stable right now at all. I can't install apps on my devices. That fails. I was having issues with the profiles at one point. The iOS update is not able to be pushed down automatically. Every other day is just another problem.

I think it could handle a bit if it worked right.

Tech support is a hit or miss. You have to go in under the general support and you get a low-level person and I don't know if all of them understand the product very well. I have spent hours on the phone with them.

We were using another MDM called ManageEngine and we switched because we liked some of the features that Soti offered us, but they're not working right now.

The initial setup was definitely a little more complex. We're using the on-premise version, and to get it to work behind our firewalls was a little bit tricky. I am still basically in the process of deploying. I have about 20 devices on it and, as I said, at this point, my server is broken and I've been waiting for a technician to help. He's scheduled to help shortly.

It's been an ongoing process for at least three weeks and every day I'm running into different issues and it's frustrating.

We purchased the software through their sales department and they did not give me a consultant or someone to help with the install.

We probably wouldn't see the savings until everyone is actually on the MDM. We were hoping that we wouldn't have to have people come in for us to push out apps or iOS updates. But I do have to have them come in at the moment to switch from the current MDM to this one. It will be a little while until we see any type of savings.

The solution that we were using costs less, but it didn't offer as much as Soti. It's comparable if you look at it over the five-year term.

We evaluated MaaS360 by IBM. We also looked at SmartMDM. The other option that we liked that Soti has is their VPN on Demand. That actually worked the way we needed it to, where our current one doesn't.

My advice would depend on which version you're buying. If you're buying the standalone and you're running into the same problems that I have, then stay away. But if the cloud version is working, fine. We were told that the standalone is exactly the same as the cloud version but I am not seeing that.

The Kiosk mode has only allowed me to do one app and I have too many apps for that. I really haven't used the share mode very much. Their technicians used it and it was neat to see. I don't use the real-time location services that much because if the person's iPad is not unlocked, it doesn't register. That's a limitation for every MDM because Apple doesn't allow them to have that control.

The solution hasn't helped me with downtime. I have three devices that I have no apps on them and I can't give them back to my executives without the apps on them. The downtime on those three has been some days.

I have about 100 devices that I want to put on it. Their users' roles are field techs that are out in the field talking to our retailers and then there are our executives. We don't have any plans on increasing it because there's no need for more devices in our company. I'm the only one who is deploying it.

Right now I'm pretty frustrated with them, so I'm rating it a four out of ten. They can make it up to me by giving me a single point of contact until I am up and running smoothly. I have two cases right now and I have two different technicians on it. That doesn't make sense.

The primary use is providing support to remote employees on mobile phones. We also use it to deploy software and updates to the phones.

The remote control technology and screen-sharing absolutely help us resolve issues faster. If there is a remote user who has difficulties or does not understand an error or a problem or a crash, the support team can remote control the phone and see right away what is on the screen and act on the problem. We could debug, we can help, we can reboot the phone. We have many options to help the remote user who is struggling with an application or with the phone. Before, they had to bring the phone to the office or to their manager so that we can debug it. Now it can be done remotely, most of the time, if the phone is not broken. These are very important features that we like. That's why we use SOTI.

The Lockdown Kiosk Mode is very useful. After the remote control, it's one of the main reasons we use the solution. When you have 9,000 people remotely using your applications, you want to make sure that they don't play with Facebook while they're supposed to be working. It's a very important feature to prevent installation of applications we don't want and to provide a uniform device interface for everybody, no matter what the phone brand. The uniform interface makes training easier. It also prevents installation of software that could be harmful or compromise the security of the phone. It's a very important feature.

Because we have a custom, business-to-business application, the solution's deployment features give us the ability to control the deployment of new versions. We can granularly decide which people or which phone receive updates. It's kind of like having your own "app store" and being able to control what you deploy on the phones, how you want to deploy it and when you want to deploy it. You can see how the deployment is happening; if it's going well or not. It's a convenience feature that provides us with great flexibility in the deployment of our software to our users.

By enabling a faster response time to support users who are having difficulties on their device, it helps us with downtime or with a device that was blocked or malfunctioned. The support team is able to respond faster to problems, providing a faster resolution time so that the end user is back working with the device.

It has improved the security of the phone, through lockdown. If the phone is lost we can remotely wipe it. It reinforces the overall security of the device. 

There are many aspects in which we've improved the efficiency of our operation.

There are many features that we use.

• The main one is providing support through remote control of the phone.
• Another feature we use provides a lockdown screen, which prevents remote users from starting or installing applications that are not officially supported by the company.
• We also use it to deploy updates of our software remotely.
• There are some additional features, like antivirus, that are part of the solution and are nice to have.

In a nutshell, those are the four main features that we use. The software has many more options which we don't use that often.

You need to get used to the admin console. I think it could be improved. It's not the best I've seen. Certainly, the software has a lot of features so you necessarily have some complexity in the interface, but I've seen better. They could make it easier in certain aspects.

Once you know it and how to navigate through it, it's good. When you're not trained on it, that could lead to some difficult situations where you say, "Where is what I need? What do I do?" If you don't know how to navigate through it, you could get lost. It's a complex interface in that regard. You need to be trained.

Development of lockdown screens, and certain aspects of the application, are still cumbersome and difficult to work. A certain subset of the features of the application are sometimes difficult to work with due to the complexity or maturity of certain modules.

One of the main pain points I have had with Soti is support for the latest device. That could cause a problem. Let's say Samsung comes out with its latest device and Sprint and Verizon start to sell that device, and we have a few of those devices to support. Sometimes you need to have an agent on the device and there are times when the agent is not fully compatible with the new device. That can cause problems. Certain stuff crashes. They need to catch up with the latest devices. Generally, when we have difficulties, it's because the phone is brand new and SOTI doesn't have a connector or agent that is fully compatible with the device. Any MDM always has to make sure that its agents support the latest phones that come out. Sometimes it's difficult.

They have to really work on making sure they lock down a strong relationship with the device manufacturers so that they can work in advance on their agents before the phone is released to the wider market.

The solution is very stable. In the four years we've been using it, there have been very few issues.

As I mentioned, we have nearly 9,000 users on one machine. Over the four years, we have had to upgrade the type of machine we're running it on. It scales but the problem is that you need to upgrade the server on which you run. You need to add more CPU or more disk space to support the scalability.

The scalability is horizontal, not vertical. One machine has to have all the accounts. That's one of the issues that we have found with scalability: You always have to keep the same machine. If you want to add a second machine, you need to split the account and that removes flexibility of management.

The other weakness that they have currently is that they don't have systems that are built for redundancy. You have one database that manages everything and, if that database crashes, you have a problem. They could have done a better job with redundancy, and on scalability there is some weakness. It scales but you need to add more horsepower every time.

Because machines are very powerful, it's not so much of an issue. Now we're on the cloud. You can scale servers very easily. But I would like, eventually, for there to be better redundancy in the system for failovers. Failovers are a weakness of the solution. If my server goes down then my solution goes down. They don't have a failover strategy for their solution. That's a weakness in the scalability.

We have Enterprise Support. We have additional support because we are one of their large customers. We have access to some of the senior developers. Generally, we have a direct line. If there is any glitch or any step that we don't understand or we need help, we have fairly quick access to support from SOTI. 

Support is very good. They are very knowledgeable, very good at helping, at doing everything to help when we have issues. They follow through. If they don't have a solution, they bounce it to the dev. Generally, I have always been pleased by their response time, by the quality of the response, and by the knowledge of the people in support. I am very pleased with support.

Generally, you have to install from the app store or they have an OEM website where you can download the agent. Once you know the process, it's fairly straightforward. We've done so many that we're used to it.

It's not complex. It's not simple. It's in between. You have to have a license key and a few other elements on hand. Then you install the agent on the phone, you register it and it appears on the interface. Any MDM will be like that. Deploying a device takes a few minutes, assuming you have everything already set up on your server.

In terms of our deployment strategy, first, we set up our own servers. We have remote users in both Canada and the US. We break it down by countries first. Then we have a breakdown by type of device: tablets or phones. In our implementation, we then segment the phones by provider: Verizon, AT&T, etc. Within those categories, we break it down by type of lockdown screen because we have different types of lockdown screens for a manager and for a regular employee. Based on their roles, they have more or fewer applications available.

We did it internally. We have some people helping on the lockdown screen. For the rest, we manage the software ourselves. But because we are a large SOTI customer, we have Level 3 support. When we have issues or problems or questions, we have access to the top SOTI engineers.

For us, the solution is part of the overall business cost. It's required. It's not about saving money. It's about supporting the users' security.

There are solutions that can be more aggressively priced, but they may not provide all that SOTI does. It's a matrix regarding what feature you use. You need to compare the features you use and what you are willing to pay for them. You may have MDMs that have half of what SOTI provides. They are cheaper but you have less.

SOTI's pricing is okay. It's in the middle. But pricing is a subtle issue. They can provide more aggressive pricing once you start to have a lot of licenses. They have volume discounts and can be very competitive.

You can have the solution in-house or you can have the solution on the cloud, managed by SOTI. Evaluate your needs. There are advantages to having SOTI managing it for you. That's something to look at.

You definitely require some training and understanding of the management platform. That's part of the deployment, especially if you use certain features, like lockdown screens which require some configuration and setup. SOTI can provide support to evaluate this. They help you with certain deployment aspects and training on the solution.

We may look at the real-time location services from time to time, but part of our own software on the cellphone gives us tracking through GPS. So this feature from Soti is not something that is necessary. It's not critical to our use case of SOTI.

Another thing that is important is knowing very well the types of devices that you have and making sure that they are supported by SOTI. If you use older devices or devices that have been on the market a while, that should be okay. If you're planning to have a lot of new devices, and if you're changing devices very frequently, make sure they're supported by SOTI.

Also, if you use an unknown device brand, that could be problematic. We are in the security industry. While you probably you use an iPhone or a Samsung or some well-known brand, in certain industries, like ours, there are specialized phones. You may have phones that are made especially waterproof or that you can drop. They've been "ruggedized," made to work in difficult environments. Those phones may be from brands you've never heard of. If all your phones are from unknown brands, you have to make sure they are supported by SOTI. Generally they are, but you have to do your due diligence between your inventory and what SOTI supports.

For administration of the solution, we have a small team of five people. Because we are hosting the solution ourselves - we have and manage the servers - it's our responsibility. We have two sys admins who maintain and administer the solution.

We are growing every month. We are adding hundreds of licenses every month.

I would rate SOTI at seven out of ten. It's a good product, very stable. There's some stuff that they could improve and I think they are improving it.

We use it for the management of our store mobile devices. We have 12,000-plus devices managed by SOTI. We actively deploy applications on a weekly basis, sometimes multiple times a week.

We use the remote control technology and screen-sharing features for our enterprise Android devices. Those features definitely do allow us to resolve some issues faster because we can work with the store associate to have them do whatever they're doing on the floor, and we are able to actively look at the data and figure out what's going on.

While the solution hasn't helped with device downtime per se, but it has helped us resolve application issues.

One of the most valuable features is the remote control. If there are issues in the field, we can remote into those devices and see what kind of issues they are.

Obviously, the other one would be just how easy it is to deploy applications, and we pretty can much guarantee the applications are going to be set up as needed on our enterprise devices.

The management console could be improved to be a little bit more user-friendly. Some of the stuff is a little bit cumbersome, some of it feels like an engineering solution, but otherwise it's pretty good.

Most of the time it's stable. We were on the phone with SOTI pretty much every day when we were doing an upgrade. For a week or so it was pretty rough going. Since then, it's been mostly stable.

When we looked to scale out the solution to manage more devices, it became a little bit cumbersome, as far as managing when devices checked in, managing multiple deployment servers, etc.

Once you figure out how to scale it, it seems to work pretty well.

Sometimes tech support is hit or miss. Sometimes it's more an issue of trying to find the right person who can help you resolve the issue. Typically, you're dealing with an initial-help consultant, but most of the time it requires, at least in our instances, people who have more knowledge of the product, to be able to assist us.

We didn't fully switch. SOTI offset some of the functionality because our legacy platform couldn't support Android devices. That's why we introduced SOTI into the mix. One of the reasons that we chose SOTI, as far as Android goes, is that it was the most advanced platform at the time. We were used to the legacy Windows mobile devices, being able to remote control and see everything on the devices. SOTI allowed us to continue everything that we were used to.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. Our deployment strategy is to do pilots, expanded pilots, and full roll-outs. The amount of time it takes depends on what we're doing and how big the application is.

Everything was done internally and we worked with SOTI directly to resolve any issues.

The only two we were looking at were SOTI and AirWatch.

Make sure to see if all the features meet your criteria. That is really the only thing that varies between MDMs, the features.

We don't use the Lockdown Kiosk Mode feature of the solution. I actually created our own version of the lockdown kiosk feature because we needed more control than what SOTI can provide.

We don't use the real-time location services since we are corporate and everything is local. We don't need to see where devices are geolocated. As for the admin console, it could be better but it's not bad; we're running a slightly older version of SOTI.

The device users are store-associates. The staff for deployment and maintenance of the solution are just two individuals, myself and another engineer. We handle the whole system.

I would rate SOTI at eight out ten. Honestly, there's no product out there that I would ever give a ten, because every product has nuances and issues. My rating of SOTI is more along the lines of the need for them to keep enhancing it and making it a better product, making it easier to use. Most organizations are looking for a more-or-less automated solution that can run and maintain itself, rather than needing a lot of man-hours.

We're a privately owned transportation company and our primary use is our driver-to-dispatch communications. We use devices, managed through SOTI, that allow our drivers to receive their work for the day. We're people movers - we're not parcel movers - so we can tell them where our pick-ups and drop-offs are located. Primarily we're using it for para-transit, for disabled and elderly transportation. People who qualify for certain subsidized programs are able to ride in our vehicles and get to and from everyday locations, like the grocery store or the hospital. We provide that service and our direct line of communication is through the devices that SOTI manages.

Deployment. We call our locations "divisions." If we have a division that's in need of 100 devices being stood up, once we have our SOTI agent on those devices, we can push software updates, we can push profiles. We can do everything that we need to do remotely. That's saving us on the costs of traveling out to a location to set up those devices. It's actually helping us be more agile - and that's the term everybody wants to be now - more flexible. We can run a little leaner as well. We don't need quite so many people to manage all these devices.

Using that remote control feature has been really helpful for us. We're a dispatch office, some of our divisions have hundreds of vehicles at a time calling in and asking for help, looking for locations. Or maybe they have an issue with the tablet that is preventing them from moving on. The interesting thing is, now that we've given some of our dispatchers, and most of their supervisors, access into SOTI, to use that remote control feature, they can see exactly what the driver sees. That has been a big help for us.

Deploying apps on the fly. We're able to update and deploy new applications, directly from the cloud. That's been a huge feature for us. Instead of putting hands on each of these devices - and we're talking thousands of devices - we can manage it all from the backend. That's a huge feature for us. It has really changed the game in how we deploy things.

The other feature, that I have got to say is just leaps and bounds ahead of SOTI's competition, is the remote control feature. It's a true admin remote control, so we don't have to have somebody on the other side of the device allowing us access to the device. We can actually remote right in. If there are problems or errors or even if it's just a training issue with one of our drivers, we're able to pull up a tablet or phone and take pictures of it and we can actually videotape what's going on, on the device itself, and that's been huge.

We use it more than just for troubleshooting these devices. We actually use it for demos and to show people the technology that our company is capable of delivering. That's all from SOTI and it's been really great.

In the past, using third-party hardware and third-party applications, we weren't really able to do that. We could get a screenshot, a moment in time, but not actually see what the drivers were experiencing. We can actually see the driver interacting with the device itself. We can say “Oh, you're pushing the wrong button” or “Oh, that's not even the correct location." It's really helped us be more efficient, and allowed us to troubleshoot issues quicker. Before, we would have vehicles that sat for a day or two before technicians could get to them. Now, we can get to them right away.

There's always room for improvement. One of the things that I would like to see in the future is more control over the application layer. That has less to do with a technical approach, but more a business approach by SOTI, to look at, "Hey, can we partner with Google, can we partner with somebody like that." Most of our devices are Android, they're Google related, so we need access from Google to do certain things. There are ways around that, but right now that's something that we're really looking for. How can we control the Apple Air? How can we get into that app?

One of the apps that we use all the time is Google Maps. Our drivers need navigation and that's something that we really look for: How can we control the Apple Air, how can we make sure that this app doesn't try to update in the middle of the day when our driver needs it? How can we make sure that this app is always available when the driver needs it? We've run into those issues in the past.

Also, training - tips, tricks, best practices, those kinds of things - while I believe we have a training console, I've been through some of it - that's where they could improve. If they could push that a little more, provide some content that's not hidden away in another portal, that would be great. They could have different flavors of training. A video is super-helpful, even if it's a video to show some best practices and the way that things are set up. And then, offering a one-on-one or monthly webinar for a captive audience would be great too.

It's fairly stable.

I'm not worried about growth with SOTI at all. I'm more worried about growth on my end. If we grow any more, I will need more SOTI administrators. That's about it. I would need more people who can do what I and my colleague do. There are only two of us. But that's just resources. SOTI itself is scalable. We're a pretty small fish compared to some of their other customers.

Support has been great, we have Enterprise Support. The 24-hour support has really changed things, and it's just recently that we've switched to that.

I don't think I've ever had an issue with getting a response from SOTI. If something pops up that I can't figure out and my colleague can't figure out, and we've exhausted the Help documents, then we'll submit tickets. We'll call in for technical support. Almost within a day, every time, we have an answer, whether it's about how we need to approach the situation, or what changes might be needed to allow some feature to do something we're trying to do.

As a specific example, we did have an issue where some devices were reaching data limits extremely fast, way too quickly in the month. We were burning through too much data. I was able to get on the phone with our SOTI rep and he showed me three different reports that would work. He showed me how we could create some rules that would allow the devices to be moved out of one group and into another, and that would show us: These devices are streaming higher data. Then we could dig down further to figure out why these devices were using so much data.

Another specific example: One of the things we try to do is have most of our devices hardwired into our vehicles, so that they're charging all the time. They're always getting a charge just to prevent losing a device on the road. The struggle at the beginning was to make sure that these devices get turned off, because we don't want to run down our vehicle batteries, especially at the end of the day. I figured there was a feature, a way to do this without having to go in every night and every day and turn off devices that were on. It was about a 20-minute conversation with a SOTI technical support rep. They showed me, "Here, you just create a timer, and then once we create this timer, at this time of day, every day, all your devices in this group will shut off." It was amazing. It was years ago that we set that up and it's being used as a standard feature at all of our of locations now.

The folks that we work with at SOTI, even level-one support, are really well-versed.

Our previous solution came recommended to us by the third-party transportation app that we use. They recommended we use some sort of free app that you download off Google Play. It was supposed to lock down the device. We deployed that at a very small location, 12 vehicles, 12 devices using it. Once the corporate support had rolled it out and it was left to the local division to man it, we realized we needed functionality to really use these devices remotely. If your users are savvy enough, they can navigate through those free-app lock screens, get around them, do whatever they want to. We noticed that right away.

We had to control those devices, we had to control the users. Our first call was to Verizon and we said, "This free-app solution isn't going to work." Our plan was to upgrade all the devices in our fleet - we're taking 20,000 to 30,000 vehicles across North America. Now, we don't have that many devices in place, but we've taken this as an issue and said, "Look, we're going to replace all this old legacy technology with a simple device and we're going to use SOTI to manage it." And it's taken off.

My 2019 initiative is to remove any legacy technology and replace it with a device that can be managed through SOTI.

I was not a part of the initial setup of SOTI. I was brought in a few months after. There were definitely some growing pains with the setup, it was brand new. We didn't have any sort of MDM or anything like this. We actually didn't deploy mobile hardware until we had SOTI.

I came in about three months after they initially started to use the MDM and, honestly, the changes we made to it were minor. It was more looking at the way device groups were structured and how they grouped everything together: profiles, settings, and that sort of thing. We figured out best practices pretty quickly.

Because I wasn't there for the initial setup and start-up of SOTI, I don't know what information was presented at the time. Since then, and since moving into Enterprise Support, we do have a SOTI rep who explains things. He's open to any questions and shows us things. He's done a great job of that so far. That availability is definitely there. It's the day-to-day right now, in my staff, where we don't have time to really move ahead on other features yet. We're trying to be proactive but a lot of time we end up being reactive, just based on workload.

We were introduced to SOTI by our Verizon Wireless representative. That's how we engaged SOTI. But we did do it directly. Verizon made that introduction and then it was direct with SOTI.

I don't see those numbers and I don't think about it that way. But let me give you an example of something that happened since we deployed SOTI.

We've had a couple of instances where tablets have gone missing or stolen, but we had one really interesting case where we had a driver who was carjacked at gunpoint. They took his vehicle, with the tablet installed. And thank God we had some good local resources who could pick up the phone and call me immediately and tell me what was going on and ask if there was a way we could track that vehicle and I said, “As long as the tablet is on, I can tell you everywhere this guy goes.” We were actually able to not only recover the vehicle but, because this gentleman who decided to take the vehicle, and everything inside it, actually took the tablet out - it looked like it was "off" because the screen was asleep - he put it in his backpack and he continued on his way that day. He was arrested a few hours later because I was on the phone with LAPD talking about where this tablet was moving to.

It was the most exciting Monday morning I've had in a long time.

The transportation vehicle was a minivan but it had been highly customized. It had a wheelchair lift in it, the seating had been done, the chassis was built up. It was a very expensive vehicle. So being able to recover that $100,000-plus vehicle was one big thing.

Also, having the technology to say, "Hey, let's stop this guy from doing this to somebody else," that sent us over the moon. That one case - and I've told this story many times - has allowed us to put our foot in the door, and say, "Look, with our company not only are you getting this great technology and great service and everything else we provide, but we have these tools that allow us to  succeed and be better than our competition." This is just an example of that.

If any organization has this struggle - devices in vehicles, devices given to employees, that do go missing from time to time - we're probably at a 50 percent recovery rate, where we have been able to recover such devices. That's all because of SOTI and that we're able to track those devices through locating methods.

They've been pretty flexible with us, because we've changed the way we do our licensing a few times. We did a yearly, and then we went back and we did a quarterly, and I think we're back to yearly right now.  We've been able to work stuff out and pricing has gone down since the onset. We've got a better rate per device and it's reasonable. The licensing cost from SOTI usually doesn't scare anybody away, once it's explained.

I believe MobileIron was one of them and Airwatch was the other they were looking into.

Since being introduced to SOTI, I've become that guy in our company who helps recommend these solutions. I've been to transportation conferences where I'm being asked, “What are you guys doing? How are you managing this?” and I tell them about SOTI. I say, "Look, you need to look into this company, you need to look into this MDM." I recommend it to just about everybody who talks to us about it, especially when they start describing the issues they've seen. It's easily manageable. You don't need a computer science degree to run it. You have support through SOTI and a Help document that's very thorough.

There's a lot more competition than there was at the beginning, so we do hear from competitors trying to steal us away or move us around. We're very comfortable with SOTI right now. I don't see any reasons to leave. There haven't been any game-changers here where we've said, "Oh my gosh! I can't believe SOTI's doing this now." It's been great.

There are just two of us who are admins for SOTI. We probably have 30 to 40 users who are in and out of SOTI per day. The two of us provide the maintenance and the admin level functions. In the field, for our local divisions, we have what we call our local SOTI expert. We like to have at least one at a location, it depends on the size. If we have hundreds of devices deployed at a division, it's good to have two or three folks there who can help us. Our maintenance staff, our actual maintenance technicians, aren't too involved with SOTI. They know how to enroll a device, how to reset a device, that sort of thing.

I feel like we're probably using about 10 or 20 percent of its full features. There is a lot of functionality that we haven't touched on and a lot of functionality that we don't need. There are definitely more existing features that I could use, but it's a matter of the time and resources.

I'm using it with the handheld pocket devices from Motorola and Internic to provide remote support and employee packages. I also use it for tracking the devices.

When we use SOTI for SAP, if there is an issue where the user cannot connect, we can work on it by remoting to the device, getting some logs and finding if the problem is with the software, SAP, with the network, or maybe the end-user is doing something wrong with his scanner. It helps us to identify the issues the user is having. That means we don't need our expert IT guys to be in that place. If there is one setting that needs adjusting we don't need IT guys to be there, we can do it from here, remotely.

It saves time in supporting end-users.

The most valuable feature is the remote support because there are plants here where IT staff is not present. We can use it to provide support remotely.

The previous version, for example, had the networking signal and that feature was great. When we were troubleshooting, we could find the level of the network I/O. If the worker was working in a corner of the warehouse where the signal was not as strong as in another part of the warehouse, we could say, "Just move a little and you will have coverage for your device." That was great. I don't know why they removed it from the newer version.

The interface works really well with Internet Explorer but when I use the router and I try to get a huge number of devices the max goes from 25 to 50 to 100 or 200 or 250. I don't know why I cannot go forward with the 250 on Internet Explorer. On the screen, when collections are in transfer, I cannot move or see the whole collection.

It's pretty stable. We haven't experienced any issues. Twice in these last two years I had to restart the server but that was related to hardware and not the application.

It is scalable. As we grow, the solution can grow with us.

Technical support is pretty good. The response time is good and the results were that the cases I had were solved. There could be some improvement in the response time.

The setup of the solution was straightforward. Everything was okay with no problems related to the application. For the initial deployment, it took us about a week to enroll the devices.

Before MobiControl we had another solution from Zebra. We used that application to deploy the environment to all the devices that we had on that system. That was how we enrolled all our devices to the new solution.

We did it on our own, myself and another IT guy here.

Pricing is okay, but when you buy your renewal of licenses - at the end of the period or the year - if you have a lot of devices, obviously, it's going to increase. In the end, it's kind of expensive.

I believe we evaluated VMware AirWatch. That was the only other solution we looked at.

I would recommend SOTI for the features that it has and the uses that we have. It supports many platforms. We are working right now with Windows and we are synching with Android and Macs.

In terms of users of the solution, there are 15 IT guys from the Service Desk who use it and about 30 users, who are still IT Operations guys at the facilities. We have several offices here in America, so IT guys use the platform to support end-users in those offices. We have three administrators for the application. The three administrators were involved in the deployment at the start of the project.

I rate it at nine out of ten. To be a ten they would need to improve the pricing.

Our primary use case is version control. A secondary use case would be remote support.

What's really nice about SOTI is that I'm able to push out updates through the devices all over. We have plants here, where I'm located, in Perris, California. We also have plants up north in Modesto and Fresno, and they all have the solution. I'm able to create new software updates here and push them out to people all across California. 

As far as for remote support, anyone from here or any of our other plants can call me, and I can remote directly onto the device and see what's going on.

It saves a lot of time. Before, when I had any official updates, I'd have to collect all of the hardware and physically plug each one of them in and copy over a file to each one of them. As soon as we got this, it saved me a ton of time on that. Now, I don't even have to collect any of the devices. I can just push out updates and continue working. That's pretty awesome.

• It allows you to remote onto the devices. That's really cool.
• Also, using SOTI MobiControl for file sync purposes. I've really enjoyed the use of the file sync when I'm administrating version control in my program.

If the interface was a little bit more intuitive, more easily allowed me to get to where I want to be, that would be a little bit nicer, as far as the file sync goes.

I think there's a lot more functionality to this that I'm not utilizing. I wasn't really given extensive training on the product. I'm using it for just what I need it for, but there's probably a lot more than I could use it for. So more training from the account management team or Professional Services, so that I knew exactly what the functionalities are and the scope of what the solution could bring to us, would be helpful.

There was a time, for a couple of weeks, maybe a month, that I wasn't able to use SOTI Assist. I'm not sure why. When I tried using it again, more recently, it was working. That was the only issue I ever had. It's been very stable.

It's super-scalable. We started here in Perris with the phones that we're using, and I was able to role this out to two more divisions and it was no issue at all. It was pretty much the same thing: "Assembly-line" them through; got them set up. The app automatically pushed out to all the devices so I didn't have to mess with anything on the device at all. I just went and dropped off the devices, did some training, and they were good to go.

I believe I did reach out to them once. They got to it quickly and resolved my issue.

It was pretty straightforward. Our administrator set up the local server that would run SOTI, and getting all the devices configured was super-easy. The setup went really well.

To get all the devices set up didn't take very long at all. In total we have 60 devices. It took an hour-and-a-half to do all of them.

Our implementation strategy was like an assembly line. I wrote down the last four digits in the serial number, and then as I edited each device, I input the type of device with the serial number, and then just dragged the file onto it.

It's really a time-saver. It allows our plant to keep moving. If we have an issue, I don't have to recall all the devices. It allows things to keep flowing, whereas before, everything had to stop, wasting time and money.

I thought pricing was kind of high, but I believe that SOTI is probably the best out there for this type of software, so there's not much I can do about that.

The licensing is annual, per device.

I tried a bunch of things but there was nothing that really worked the way SOTI does. I don't remember any of the names, but they weren't that good.

If you're looking for some software where you can manage a large deployment of hardware, and then you would be able to have remote access, I don't really think that there's anything else out there that's like SOTI. As far as advice goes, work with support. I'm pretty sure you can get done anything you need done, with this software.

In terms of users, it's just me right now. I use it for version control and sometimes I send out messages to the users, to keep track of devices, as well; and for remoting in. That's pretty much it. It's just me. I also take care of any maintenance issues.

We don't have plans to increase its usage at this point. We have everything deployed that we need with it. If we ever have more divisions or we get a new device, of course I would use it then, but there are no plans for a major extension right now.

I would rate it at about nine out of ten. It's pretty solid. The interface is decent. If it was a little bit more intuitive, I'd probably give it a ten. Other than that, it works well for what I need it for.

We use it to track our iPads and for upgrading them with software upgrades.

For us, having a 40-person sales team, it's definitely helped improve efficiency. Using the serial number and all the different filters within SOTI, I have the ability to not only keep track of a device when a sales rep forgets to let me know which one it is, but definitely to do better inventory, too.

With SOTI allowing me to remote-access the devices to either unlock, lock, or change any settings, it has saved us the manpower of needing to hire someone to go to where that device is to fix it or do any troubleshooting. That's where SOTI has been very helpful, in terms of saving time and money.

The feature I find most valuable within SOTI is the ability to reset or unlock a device. A lot of the devices that we use are in the field. We have locations in Dallas, San Diego, Seattle, Washington, and Phoenix, Arizona and there isn't always someone, within our company, who is managing these devices. Sometimes it's the doctors' offices that we partner with where they use these devices. Having the ability to remotely reset a device or unlock a device has been super-crucial for me.

Also, although they're Apple products, we don't use the Find My iPhone feature because that would require us to use so many fake numbers or come up with a list of numbers. SOTI has been super-helpful in helping us track where an iPad is and in knowing that we can remote-access it.

If SOTI had an in-your-account chat feature, that would be super-helpful. I've been having some trouble with getting ahold of someone to help me when I have an issue within SOTI or with a device or with my account. And with staff members of SOTI being in Canada, the time difference doesn't tend to help. They have fewer people in the office at times that I'm in the office.

So if SOTI is able to build in a chat feature where it allows a user to chat with someone while they're in their account and trying to figure out a problem, that would be super-helpful for me and my company. That is one of the biggest things we have struggled with, with SOTI: finding what's wrong with our account at, say, 2:00 pm, when no one at SOTI is available to help; or when our account managers have stepped away from their office or email and they can't get to us, but we need the device working.

Also, one thing I asked our account manager and one of the tech support agents about, previously, was: There is a feature within SOTI that I've seen where I can right-click my device and it would allow me to locate my device. However, the thing we've struggled with is that SOTI requires me to have the Find My iPhone feature turned on. What I want to know is, can SOTI, within their mobile device management system, as we're downloading that into the device, have something that reads the location without the Find My iPhone - or Find My Device on the Apple iPad - turned on? With the privacy setting on the 300 iPads that we use, we allow the location to be found, but we don't have the Find My iPhone feature turned on. So if SOTI can somehow build it so that I can locate my device without needing Find My iPhone turned on, that would be another super-helpful thing that would benefit our company.

Another issue is that if someone is using an Apple device and they're on the SIM card for data, it does not push the SOTI management system through immediately. It only works when you have it on WiFi. That's something I've noticed as we're troubleshooting and deploying devices into the field. Some of our sales managers have had an issue with this, waiting for SOTI, plus our company's app, to go through to their iPads. It does not work on a SIM card only, it only works through WiFi.

Additionally, reporting could be better. When I try to run a report, it doesn't have a filter or even a feature where I can choose what I have in the report. That's been a struggle since the first time I used it so I just don't touch it anymore.

SOTI has the ability to help us scale, no matter what market we're in.

One thing that would be helpful is, when we purchase licenses through SOTI for our devices, there isn't a reminder that lets us know when we're about to run out of licenses, and that has been a bump in the road for our company a few times. There are so many iPads or devices in the field, with so many different managers utilizing them to download the SOTI management system, that when we're running low on licenses I don't know about it. The day a manager needs to sync with SOTI on the device and it doesn't allow it, we go through so many different hypotheses on why it is not working. Is it the iPad? Is it this? Maybe, at the end of the day, I go into our SOTI account and see it's because we have no more licenses. And there is a 24- to 48-hour window that it takes for our license to go in, get approved, signed, etc. If SOTI is able to build that to help us scale, that would be very crucial.

They let me know when my device is about to expire but shouldn't they let me know when my licenses are running out? If we have ten left, we might easily purchase another fifty from SOTI. That way, they would help us scale and they would have more business.

If the chat feature is able to be built, that would be the only thing I have a comment on when it comes to tech support. Overall, technical support has been sufficient.

I wasn't here when our account was set up with SOTI, but what I can speak about is setting up SOTI within the device, when we have to deploy a new one.

The process, at least for me, having been trained by our engineer, has been super-straightforward. Knowing how I can troubleshoot it myself, knowing what needs to happen in terms of right-clicking it so it pings to the device, all of that has been very straightforward. I'm not sure if I would describe myself as a super-tech-savvy person, but the technical understanding is straightforward: You have a device that's paired with SOTI, now you have to turn on the iPad to make sure it works. That has been very straightforward for me. SOTI has been super-easy on that side.

When we're pairing a device to SOTI, it takes no more than five minutes, as long as it is on WiFi. As soon as it's on WiFi, it takes no time. 

We were trying to negotiate with our account manager previously, in terms of pricing, and he was able to lower it by $500 if we were to renew our license for another year, but he wasn't able to give any bigger discount than that, even with us using it so frequently. My suggestion would be, if it's a customer who's worked with SOTI and wants to continue to work with SOTI, and they have so many licenses already - we have at least 350 licenses already - I would hope that they could do more deals. What our account manager told us was, unless you purchase another 200, we can't give any bigger discount. And I was thinking, "Well, I have no need to just buy 200 licenses." Every time we purchase a license it's a lot for our small start-up already.

That's one of the reasons, right now, that we're on the fence if we want to continue our partnership with SOTI: because the price couldn't be lowered. If they're able to provide packages for, say, 50 licenses, to give a slighter discount, that would better, because the 200 is just not ideal for a company that's a start-up. If they're working with Google, sure, give them 2000 licenses. But for smaller companies, I hope SOTI has something that they can provide.

I would say go for it, if you need to manage and track devices, it's the way to go.

In our company, I and two engineers utilize SOTI. I am our project coordinator and there is our lead software engineer. The two of us handle maintenance and deployment. The third user is our VP of engineering. I use it on a daily basis.

We bought it directly from SOTI.

If I were to rate the solution from one to ten, I would give it a nine. It's not a ten because of the things that I mentioned above. But SOTI has been efficient and responsive enough to allow me to do my day-to-day functions without needing much assistance. The ten would be if they added the chat feature, if they had the SIM card and the cellular working together. Then I would definitely give SOTI a ten.

In our company, we have a net promoter score, with the promoters, the detractors, and the passives. I definitely am a promoter for SOTI. I would not be a passive. But if SOTI is able to fix some of those features that would be fantastic.

We're a mobile refueling company. We go out into construction sites where they have fleet trucks. We do about 650 million gallons of fuel a year, and we have about 180 fueling trucks in the Midwest, east of the Mississippi. We use the Zebra MC67 devices, with software that we've purchased to control the truck when it distributes fuel to a semi or a reefer trailer or a large earth-moving piece of equipment. We do deliver to trains. All the fuel delivered is real-time to the end customer.

For us to manage that we have MobiControl, not only for setting them all up and connecting them, but also for managing and synchronizing files, and for our logistics center - which is the call center - to help the drivers change routes online in real-time. We remote into them and we make changes, or we make changes on our side and then we can watch what happens on the handheld. We walk through issues with the drivers, if they have issues on the handheld.

The tool has become incredibly valuable for us in terms of helping the drivers.

It was the tool of choice. We had the tool, we owned it, but as we got better at using it, its success became self-evident. The ability to remote into the device, help the drivers, set up devices in the field, all that pooled together into being critical. 

And now, with its growth in other environments, our IT department is exploring other uses for agents and remote access. We're not a really big company in terms of the corporate level, so it takes a little time for us to get traction on stuff. But it is certainly the key to the logistics side of our business. We couldn't have our call center without some remote access tool. Our decision to stay with SOTI was, initially, a default decision, but then it grew into all the capacity.

It is the key component in our logistics center. Every one of our logistics personnel is trained on SOTI as an end-user, to be able to help people in the field. It's as simple as that. It's the primary tool when it comes to assisting drivers in the field.

For us, the ability to connect with the driver at a moment's notice and support them in the field is paramount.

On a side note, it helps me set them up and manage them remotely. Without remote management, I'm not sure we could execute that, with that many trucks in the field. Our market area is Wisconsin, Michigan, all the way down to Florida. There's no other way, at this point in time, that I could think of how we would do it, other than having remote software. 

We stay with Mobi because of the functionality. It's amazing software.

We're not using MobiControl to its capacity. We're not driving the ports out of it, we are just starting to enter it. It's a function of time and personnel, in getting to all the other attributes it has. At this point in time, until my staff and I can really dig into MobiControl and take it to another level, I don't think it would be fair for me to talk about improving anything. And right now, I probably couldn't tell you what to improve.

We're at a level that SOTI MobiControl can far outdo what we're using it for right now. I would not be doing MobiControl justice if I said they have to improve something, because I'm not working from a position of being a super-user, I'm just becoming one right now.

It's extremely stable. I rarely have any issues with it. Even with the patching of the servers, it's all Microsoft Server-based, it's not running on Linux. If the patching failed - which it hasn't - but if the patching failed, the restore is really straightforward.

It's very much scalable to our needs. It's a function of devices out there. We acquired 220 device licenses, and we float between 200 and 210. I do have spare devices, I still need that room. Then, depending on our company strategy, if we're going to provide another device - we're looking at the tablets - if we do that, then we acquire as we need. If we're willing to pay for them, we can get as many as we require.

SOTI's customer service is top-notch. We have asked for and have received incredible customer service.

We recently signed up for SOTI Enterprise Support. It was worthwhile to do it, with the additional training, and the call testing. It's a huge opportunity for us to continue to explore the functionality of SOTI in a contained environment.

The customer service has always been excellent. I've never had bad customer service. And I've called. I'll say, "How can I do this in here?" and they'll run through some scenarios. SOTI MobiControl also works with our partners like Zebra. Zebra was on the phone with tech support from SOTI and it took four minutes to figure out what I wanted to do between the two, and I got a solution. They helped me out when I needed it. How can you put a price on that?

We had no previous solution. 

The part I can speak to is the version updates. The initial installation went quite well. We had five users five years ago. Now we've got 50 users. How we used devices five years ago is way different. We did not have a call center at the time, and now we have a call center. The version update is what I can talk to you about because I pushed for it, to get the latest and greatest version, and they were incredibly helpful.

We had older servers it was running on, so we had to update the servers. The quality of the technical people at SOTI was phenomenal, it didn't take much to figure it out. We were able to import our stuff from an older server to a newer server and connect to the database with minimal impact.

Once that happened, all consecutive version updates are basically pushing a button and letting it chug and it's done, it's up. We have a really solid platform for what we're doing right now.

We were on version 9 or 10. Once the servers were updated to the most current servers that support version 14.3, after that, it was straightforward. It took 15 minutes to do the last two updates that came in. MobiControl was already up, and all we had to do was update the agents. I had no issues with the devices in the field connecting. So as far as I'm concerned, it was a 20-minute window.

In terms of updates, we haven't had any bugs. As soon as the device comes online, I can do a global Agent Upgrade within 24 to 36 hours, and the handhelds all update. I haven't had an issue with an agent. It just works.

Time is money. I have a truck out there, a $450,000, 5,000-gallon steel truck that's automated out there, and I'm paying a very qualified driver to run it. These guys have commercial driver licenses, and every hour they're not pumping is an hour of cost.

For every shift, there are five or six hours man-hours we have to have put aside to process those customers, to get them into our system, so their information is available, and that, of course, is manual time. If a truck's not running, not moving, not pumping, it's costing us something.

If you're running around with a half-million-dollar asset, or even a $350,000 asset, it needs to make money. It needs to be pumping fuel to make money. So, yes, we have return on investment with this solution.

It's a reasonably priced tool for what we're using it for. To be fair, I don't have much to compare to. But being in IT for 20 years, I thought it was really reasonable. When you take into consideration the maintenance cost on it, it's is very low. There's a one-time license fee for a device. But you can call support under standard support, which I had up until about two months ago, and it has been excellent. All that updating I mentioned was done under our standard license.

When you get customer service tied in with a reasonably-priced service and product, there really is no other reason to go anywhere else.

At this point in time, I would give it a ten out of ten. The reason I say that is because it's not just the software, not only the stability of the software, but it's the customer service. You get somebody on the line and you're not waiting 40 minutes. Call Oracle once and see how fast you get somebody.

I'll give it a ten in my world because, when I call and reach out to support, or if I call to reach out to my technical rep, or if I call and reach out to my account manager, I get a response. I may leave a message, but he'll call within a couple of hours. I always get an answer very quickly. They have automated voice menuing but it's not eight layers deep, and each layer's not ten layers of options. It's quite refreshing.

We use it for mobile management of tablets and PDDs.

The most valuable feature is the fact that I can manage my devices remotely.

We're deploying an application upgrade. We can't do more than three or four devices at once, and we don't know if the device actually received the upgrade. There's no indicator saying it's 100 percent complete until everything is done. Let's say I work East to West. I work on the East Coast and I want to confirm it is done with the upgrades in that region. I won't know until I actually go into it. There's no indicator telling me that it's complete.

The stability is fine.

We haven't encountered any issues with scalability, as long as we meet the minimum requirements on the server side. If you want to scale up, they're able to do it and support is there. They'll help you out through the process.

It's fine. We have Enterprise Support, so they're always there for us.

Our company has always only used SOTI.

The setup was fine. The only time we actually need any assistance is when we're doing an upgrade.

Licensing is fine. We're notified a few months prior to renewals.

I give it a ten out of ten because it does what we need it to do. The support is there. And even though certain items are now end-of-life, the support is still there. They're fully aware of letting us know ahead of time if there will be no more engineering behind a particular product. And even if there is no more development on that product, they still support the product for us.

I find the following features most valuable: remote control, telecom expense, scripts and packages, tracking, geofences, and reports.

The remote control, force kiosk mode, and force GPS mode have benefited the sales force. The geofence in the warehouse has also been helpful.

I recommend adding MAC administration.

I have used this solution for four years.

I have had issues with new Android devices that are not certified in our region (South America). It takes a long time to get all of the features.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I would give technical support a rating of 9/10.

I used MaaS360. I switched to get better features for iOS and more stability for non-brand Android devices.

The initial setup was very easy.

I prefer the cloud option. The cloud team is always alert.

I evaluated MobileIron. I decided against it because the sales team was very slow and did not answer me.

Try the free trial. If you want total control over the device, then this solution is a good option.

Device location and the ability to remote into the devices is the most valuable feature.

Reporting!!!

I have been using MobiControl for two years.

It could not handle any device updates sent out from vendors (Verizon, ATT, et al.).

We have not had scalability issues.

I give support 1/10.

We were using Blackberry Enterprise Server. We moved to Soti to include our radio devices which it handles well.

Since this was mostly for the radio devices, I wasn't part of that evaluation, but yes there was some evaluation of other options done.

It is good for radio devices ONLY. Do NOT consider SOTI for iPhones, Androids and other smartphones.

• Usability of the platform
• Integration with special APIS for Android.
• Remote Control in Android +
• Scripts and Packages
• Remote view for iOs
• Adhoc Reports

• Update of the apps using silence installation
• Applying policies that makes up the productivity of the users
• Share documents
• Locate devices.

• Support for Windows Phone 8.1
• Improve time to market

3 years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Very good.

Very Good.

No.

Through a vendor team. Very Good

The ROI is US$4 for each US$1 invested.

The original setup cost was US$3K on training, licenses and hosting.

The day to day cost its around US$2.5 per device monthly.

We evaluated, 3 years ago, Afaria, Airwatch and Soti. Soti had an excellent relation between price and quality.

Understand the devices that can support Android or Android Plus. There are devices that are present in our market but not in the North American, so the support for some Android devices sometimes are poor.

After that, the relation price - quality should be your next decision maker, including the support that the manufacturer can provide you.

1. File Sync Rules
2. Registry editor for Windows
3. Scripting
4. Remote control

Actually, that is the main support tool used in BAT by L1 to support are mobile users.
I cannot say anything about improvement cause we started to use that when we change the sales model for direct and implement mobile systems for Sales Reps. For sure it gives a very big value for our support quality.

An example lockdown menu for Motorola WM 6.5 devices:

There are a lot of things which can be done for Android devices support. There are no features now to deploy settings for already installed applications in Android's. Mobi should have also access to all of "root" user files on device which will also help which application settings deployment. For sure there should be also some features to check on all devices size of chosen file or maybe CRC sum.

I started to use MobiControl in May 2013.

Sometimes I reached problems with big file deployments. From time to time when I need to synchronize files bigger than ~100Mb and synchronization crashes in the middle it will not continue at next schedule and files will not reach device correctly. Second thing is packages deployment with included installation which is running pretty slow. Instead of that I use file sync rules and scripting which is much better.

Haven't encountered stability issues.

Not to big but when I wanted to deploy some files on couple devices which where connected to a small router they where started to disconnecting for Mobi. There was no clear requirements in the documentation about how big link capacity should be per one device.

I haven't contacted them.

Technical support in SOTI is not to advanced. They are not stubborn in problem solving. If they know something from their knowledge base they will send some explanations but if not you are staying alone with your problem.

Did not use any other MDM.

It was pretty simple.

I implemented that by my self. I did not use help of anyone.

That was not an investment at all. Just a tool to manage some mobile devices so it will be hard to calculate "return".

It is a global solution for BAT so I did not evaluate any others.

Collect your requirements before you will buy it. It is pretty expensive for MDM and you need to be sure that you will not be disappointed after attempting implementation.

Easily one of the most valuable features is the ability to give remote control support to Samsung Devices from Android version 2.3.6 and up. The Application Catalogue for deploying Google Play and Enterprise Apps is also excellent, as well as the secure content library for distributing files to devices in a secure manner. The ability to also remotely and silently install apps on mass to a device fleet is a great way of maintaining core app consistency and version control.

SOTI MobiControl has greatly benefited the Information Services department of our organisation, as well as the users of the device. The Remote Control feature for our Samsung Android devices has allowed us to greatly improve resolution times for users having technical issues in the field (a lot of our employees work remotely and visiting head office can sometimes be a multiple day trip). It also allows us to monitor the fleet and alert us to any situations that can potentially cause a security or privacy issue. It also has allowed our staff to stop using the devices as a simple phone call and email device and allow them to take on more and more of their work using this device by allowing us to distribute internally developed productivity apps and enabling them to access files, forms, policies and procedures through the Content Library.

SOTI MobiControl can improve itself in its Reporting module, as while it has a lot of pre-built reports, making custom reports can be quite cumbersome and the addition of a Report Building wizard would be ideal. It also lacks App Containerization features that other EMM and MDM solutions offer. Also, currently if you want to push out a new version of an App, you need to create a new App Deployment rule, as it gives no ability for you to change an existing rule to push out a new APK file.

I have used this product from version 6 to its current version 11 -- for 4 years.

We did not encounter any issues with deployment; it is a simple and easy process to get started with this product. Even with scaling the solution up as our fleet grew, we did not encounter any major issues with migrating the deployment to new servers or databases.

We have only encountered minor stability issues. When we have, SOTI support was able to resolve these quickly.

We have only recently encountered scalability issues with our current deployment outgrowing the Database server’s performance. One piece of advice is that once you get over about 1000 devices deployed, invest in a dedicated SQL server for this product.

Customer Service has been great, it is easy to get in contact with SOTI for questions or issues, and our Australian account manager has always been easy to get in contact with.

Technical support has been great; we have a primary contact dedicated to us in the Australian office, as well as access to the rest of their support teams. Any technical issues or enquiries usually get a response and reaction from SOTI either same business day or next business day.

This has been the only Mobile Device Management solution that our organisation has deployed to date.

Setup was very straightforward. The installer scales quite easily to allowing you to install everything on a single box, or splitting the roles among various servers for high-availability. The most complex part of setup was configuring all the firewall rules for Device Agent communication and web portal access.

We deployed the product with an in-house team, but on occasion would use the vendor team for assistance with steps.

Original setup cost for this device was $24,000 AUD initially with software assurance and support on annual renewal. It has now grown with our devices to around $80,000 AUD annually, leaving at it costing us $220 AUD a day to run.

MobiControl was initially used by the South Australian company before it merged with the national organisation. When we were looking for a National solution, we evaluated Dell’s K3000, AirWatch, MobileIron and SOTI MobiControl. SOTI MobiControl was the clear choice for us as a non-for-profit, as they presented us with a very competitive price and the superior Remote Control functionality allowed us to provide support to our 4 metro and 30+ country bases from central sites much more easily and with a smaller team.

The advice I can give you if you are looking into deploying MobiControl is to have a look at the functionality you need. SOTI MobiControl is one of the clear leaders of Android, with their Android+ technology supporting Samsung, LG and other major vendors, so as a person with a majority iOS fleet, you may find other MDM’s do the same things. If you are a predominately Android shop, this product is the clear choice, as SOTI is one of the major innovators with MDM’s for Android. It had support for SAFE and KNOX technologies with Samsung for example well before the other MDM providers did.

Remote Control Devices, Creation of Packages, Deployment Rules, Setting devices Timezones/policies etc.

Using SOTI Mobicontrol we have been able to install and upgrade the Mobile application on 1600+ devices in the field. This is a huge task in terms of good efficiency.

More detailed documentation is needed for the product and its features and dependencies.

Two years.

Yes, there were issues in setting up and configuring SOTI Mobicontrol at our site.

Yes, We used an older version of SOTI MobiControl v4.1 and sometimes it becomes unresponsive considering the huge number of devices. Also if the rules are applied to a larger number of devices the system becomes unstable.

Haven't tried scaling up.

Customer service is good but there is lack of technical support for older versions. For every fix that we asked, they suggested to upgrade the system to their latest version of SOTI Mobicontrol.

Average.

No.

Initial setup was complex for us as we wanted to upgrade from an older version V4.1 to Version 9 or 10 or later. We have 1600+ devices that were to be upgraded to new server and device agent. But even after multiple rounds of calls with SOTI Support they were still unable to upgrade correctly. They suggested to install a new version instead of upgrade and then move the devices. This is not an easy task and we are still on old version 4.1 of SOTI Mobicontrol.

We used In-house team to setup along with SOTI Tech Support.

No.

The product is good and is stable and I would recommend it to new customers. But you should have the correct setup and configuration of this product. If you make any mistakes during setup then it may not be easily corrected once you start managing devices in production. If you are looking for an upgrade from an older version to a new version then it can be very challenging.