SOTI Adds IoT to Acronym Soup of Expertise
Mobility management vendor SOTI is hosting its first partner/user conference this week in Toronto, bringing together about 400 folks from around the globe to discuss the company’s mobile technology, where the company has been and where it is headed. The event is interesting for two reasons: At 20 years old, SOTI sure waited a long time to host a conference, and it’s given me insight into a company I knew almost nothing about.
Mobility management vendor SOTI is hosting its first partner/user conference this week in Toronto, bringing together about 400 folks from around the globe to discuss the company’s mobile technology, where the company has been and where it is headed. The event is interesting for two reasons: At 20 years old, SOTI sure waited a long time to host a conference, and it’s given me insight into a company I knew almost nothing about.
Full disclosure: SOTI invited me to the conference to present its Global Partner of the Year award. I came for the presentation, I’m staying for the acronyms.
For those of you who don’t know SOTI, it’s a Toronto-based mobility vendor focusing on mobile device management (MDM), enterprise mobility management (EMM) and unified endpoint management (UEM) as its main offerings. The company also is moving into the Internet of Things (IoT) space, putting an emphasis on the data aspect of IoT to drive value (or what SOTI is calling “Data of Things” or “DoT,” represented by, simply, a dot).
“Everyone’s talking about IoT, but really it’s not new to us—we’ve been connecting all sorts of devices to our network for years,” said Carl Rodrigues, CEO and president of SOTI, during his keynote discussion. “What gets lost in the marketing shuffle is the data. The technology to think about the data is really the important thing—it helps us make intelligent business decisions.”
Rodrigues wants to extend SOTI’s profile beyond mobility and into other areas where he believes the industry as a whole is heading, such as connected car technology, wherein manufacturers are thinking about what vehicles can measure beyond speed, tire pressure, oil levels and other mechanical things. One possibility is extending measurement to human health factors such as measuring blood pressure or glucose levels using sensors on the steering wheel, he said.
Other areas in which SOTI has been dipping its toes include:
- APIs;
- A marketplace that includes server-side solutions as well as apps;
- Advanced reporting and dashboards so users can understand what’s going on in their business;
- Building connectors to push and pull data into different systems;
- Help-desk technology (“We want to upsize to build a full-on help desk – we want to make sure people using mobility have that top-notch level of support”); and
- Building tools so partners supporting mobile businesses have the right tools to support from one single pane of glass.
“We’re still working on those three-letter technologies also,” Rodrigues said.
That’s a lot from a company that has pretty much flown under the radar for the past 20 years. Admittedly, I knew little about the company before the conference, partly because SOTI doesn’t throw its name around much. But SOTI has six major offices globally, with employees in 22 countries and a network of 2,000 partners globally. It boasts 15,000 enterprise customers and its revenues have grown 53 percent in last fiscal year. Those numbers tell me SOTI’s doing something right.
