SOTI MobiControl Reviews

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 company is a pharmaceutical company. They run plasma centers. It's like collecting blood, but they collect plasma instead. The whole process is operated through mobile devices. They can't gather plasma unless these mobile devices work. It's a way of logging the customer in, checking their plasma, and saying that this is done on the machine now. The whole process is managed with these mobile devices. SOTI MobiControl manages these devices, and I know where they are and how they're working. I need to make sure they have the right software. I can turn them on or off, and I can remote control them from the support perspective. I don't deal with the software that they actually run. I deal with the fixing of those. For example, if I was a cellphone company, I don't have anything to do with your conversations on your cellphone, but I can turn it off and on, or I can fix it for you. My role is similar to that.

In terms of deployment, it is dealing with mobile devices that are mostly Android, and they're all over the world, but the servers are all on-prem. There is a cloud solution, but we don't use it.

The company's support is the best. That'd be the number one thing. You don't play with such programs for fun. There is nothing great about any of them. They're tools, and they all do a lot. They all do the same thing. Some are better, and some are worse. In my opinion, what makes SOTI better than the others is their support. Their enterprise support is very attentive and very good.

In terms of features, the remote control feature is what I use the most.

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.

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.

I use SOTI MobiControl for enterprise mobility and remote control mobile device management. If a company has a lot of mobile devices, then they want to monitor all of the company mobile devices from the license. First, we have to register all of the mobile devices in the SOTI platform, and then we're able to manage the mobile content remotely. We're also doing localization to see who is using the mobile in the company. We're doing identity control, remote control, content management control, and surveys.

We use SOTI MobiControl to control and manage a survey. We used to give clients the area where they have to go and survey all the data from SOTI MobiControl. We've been using that tool in the database companion process.

We have some clients who request a proof of concept about the mobile they're using in the company. We make a proof of concept with them using SOTI MobiControl.

Most of the clients who request a proof of concept from SOTI also request on-premises installation from their own server because of data security and data responsibility in the data they're using. We have a client on the Ivory Coast that's the biggest company in the field of telecommunication and mobile devices, so they're more focused on securing the data.

We have two engineers who are using this solution in my organization.

We're using version 15.6. It's the latest version.

The solution is deployed on a private cloud. It can be deployed on-premises or on cloud.

The most valuable features are remote control, remote monitoring of the mobile phone data, GPS localization, automobile network management, identity management, speaker logging, and remote management of mobile content.

The way they manage data security is good because they have SOTI Identity, which we're using for identity management.

I work for a global clothing manufacturer, and we currently utilize both SOTI MobiControl and Windows Intune. I am the senior technician in charge of retail hardware globally. We've got locations in EMEA, APAC, Latin America, and North America.

In my current project, I'm using SOTI. The retail environment uses Zebra TC 77 devices that are Intune. I have to wait for a guy in the UK to do his job, and he's stretched thin. Increasingly, I must step it up and become a mobile device manager. All these other guys who are high up in the tech team access Intune, but they don't provide me with the level of access I'm accustomed to as a systems administrator.

I'm not the administrator of Intune, so I must wait on the IT guy who manages it. These Intune guys are holier than thou, and I don't operate that way. Whatever they say goes because they're the Intune administrator, and they architect things the way they want or the way they have been taught in their certification program. That's just what got me to look into SOTI.

The graphical user interface is fantastic. I had a guy get me up and running in less than two hours, whereas there are issues with Microsoft Intune. You need an administrator proficient with Intune, and he has to create the groups. 

These groups trickle down to where the devices live and how they operate in terms of the QR codes and getting the APK into the system so we can manage the devices. SOTI is more accessible. 

The ease of access was awesome. The guys helping us out were pretty fluent in the product. I currently have two devices in a dashboard that we're testing, but the solution that they have is awesome. I like that it's a cloud-based based solution, and I think there will be some significant cost savings.