In this Telarus Executive Interview, Richard Murray introduces Max Silber, the VP of Mobility and IoT at MetTel, who shares insights on the company’s success in technology and partnerships. Max highlights three major trends in the mobility sector that advisors should monitor, emphasizing the burden mobile devices place on IT departments and their role as entry points for cyber attacks. He notes a growing preference for ‘as a service’ models to manage mobility solutions, alongside a shift back to corporate liability for mobile devices driven by security needs. Max also discusses the importance of simplified solutions and the MDaaS offering for managed mobility programs, encouraging advisors to engage with customers to identify specific pain points.
Transcript is auto-generated.
Hello, everyone. Richard Murray, chief commercial officer with Telarus. And today, I am joined by Max Silber, the vice president of mobility and IoT at MetTel. Max, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thanks for having me. Really excited to be here.
Yeah. I I I look forward to the conversation. I I think when I when when I look at MetTel and all the great things that you guys are doing, there’s a reality that you you’re in a lot of different technology areas, and you’ve done super well. We’ve had some really good wins with your pots replacement, which I know you’re aware of.
We we’ve done well, certainly with just the the regular wireline and type business. You guys have done a great job with your STARLINK, management and wrapping around that. But we’ve had some incredible wins with mobility over the years together. And where that’s your your focus and and, really area of expertise, really look forward to bringing that forward with the advisers today.
Great. Yeah. And and we have had some great wins. We’re looking forward to hopefully some more. So glad to be here.
Excellent. Well, so as you look at the the mobility space, what are some of the, overall, market trends within the mobility sector where you think advisors really need to be paying attention to?
Sure. So I think for this year, you’ve got three major trends.
The first is really, mobile devices are a massive burden on IT. And I say that this year more than any other years because, companies have really cut back on the amount of IT staff they have on hand. And the IT staff that’s left is spending anywhere from thirty to forty percent of their time just putting these devices, provisioning them, putting, software on them, and then putting them out to end users. So that’s become a huge burden. So where you have advisers that might say, well, I’m I’m a little concerned because if I bring any kind of managed, service or managed mobility offering to a company, maybe the IT individuals will think I’m trying to replace their job. Now more than ever, those IT professionals are really looking for advisors to bring in partners that can really take on a lot of the the burden of all those tasks. And in our case, certainly automate a lot of them to provide a better user experience.
So that’s the first real trend. The first one. Yeah. So number two is, mobile devices have actually become the new threat vector, used by cyber criminals.
We used to worry a lot and focused a lot of our time and effort on firewalls and VPNs to secure the network.
Hackers have figured that out, and they’re now using mobile devices, the the, you know, the the smartphone in your pocket as the point of entry into an enterprise.
One of the biggest, numbers to share with your customers is more than half, actually about sixty percent of enterprise have already reported a cyber attack that originated on a mobile device, as that’s point of entry. And if that’s not bad enough, the average cost of those hacks, are somewhere around four point five million dollars. Now that’s a big number. That’s certainly a big number for a big enterprise. But if some of your customers are small and midsize businesses that do somewhere between fifteen or twenty million dollars in revenue a year, that is an industry or a company ending event. So now more than ever, cybersecurity securing that mobile edge. And the last real trend I’ve seen is companies really wanna expand the concept of as a service.
They don’t wanna make huge investment, through capital expenditure to buy any kind of mobile equipment. They really want all the elements that are required for a, for managing, deploying, and an ongoing, integration with their systems on mobility, all done through one vendor. So the expansion of the as a service within the industry.
And I think what I hear in in those three points is it’s not a mobility conversation. It’s a time savings conversation. Yeah. It’s a security conversation, and it’s an as a service conversation, which are things our advisors want to be talking about. And I think sometimes mobility has a dirty name.
Or Absolutely. And I think it’s about perception of mobility in the enterprise is not just about a device and service. There are so many more elements. Today, the way we access information from the enterprise, whether that be health care, retail, transportation is through an edge device, which is a smart device, a mobile device, whether it be your smartphone or your tablet, for example. So that’s how people are working today and managing all those elements typically require multiple vendors, multiple complexity with systems and automation. And that’s why we’re seeing the shift where companies are basically saying, this is way too complicated. If I can have a single vendor manage this problem for me, that’s the solution I’m I wanna look for.
And I think your trends speak to it, but can you talk to a little bit about what is a shift back to corporate liable and why that’s happening?
Sure. And I I’ve been doing this for a really long time, so I’ve seen this shift kind of the peaks and valleys back and forth and back and forth. Certainly, when we talked about the the need for to provide edge devices to enterprise users, that allow them to actually work from anywhere. So that requires additional controls for the enterprise to be able to provide that in a very seamless, very secure way. And secondly, because of what we talked about with the new attack vector being a mobile device, It’s no longer about a preference. It’s a lot more about protecting the enterprise and protecting the in intellectual property and all the elements of compliance that are required today regardless of the vertical.
Well, let’s dive in real quick into what what are some of the technology, you know, the cool technologies and solutions that you guys have that our advisors need to make sure they’re aware of.
Yeah. So I think if you don’t know about it, our MDaaS offering or mobile devices of service has been one of the greatest success stories for advisers that really wanna provide a complete managed mobility program to their customers. And that’s important because it’s not just, again, device and service. It’s all the elements required.
So when a new employee enters a new company, one of one of the advisors customers, everything is pre provisioned for them. So they they don’t just get a device. They get a device that’s fully programmed with the applications specific to that user. It’s deployed in a very quick, seamless, automated fashion.
In many cases, we’ll even integrate with the customer’s own, internal ticketing systems like ServiceNow or maybe an HR system like Workday. So very automated, very seamless, and very secure.
And then the the flip side of it, as we know, sometimes users leave companies or ask to leave, handling the reverse logistics piece. So bringing it back in house, erasing all the data in a secure way, doing any repairs to the devices if the company wants to keep them in their own depot as an asset. So that entire process, is something that we’ve had great success with, and we continue to expand on that program. And we’ll soon be talking about things like connected laptop as a service, for example, in addition to the traditional program.
And I think there’s one more that, you know, when when we have the other, you know, the the big names where you can go buy a product from, you guys have a product where you can bring some redundancy across those suppliers that I think advisors need to know about as well.
Yeah. It’s it’s the flexibility and ability to really move around, choose different carriers, or choose secondary SIM options where you’ve got redundancy built into a smartphone. Things like our single SIM product, which we you can install on a smartphone or a data only device and gives you that redundancy.
Excellent.
Look, our advisors have a lot of different, conversations they can have. If if you had them for five minutes, what are the really unique solutions that you guys have that stand out in the marketplace from your competitors?
So I think it’s important to note, mobility impacts every industry out there right now. And instead of coming in and talking about the overarching story and manage mobility, it’s important for advisors to identify what is their customer specific pain point. Are they trying to solve for things like security and compliance or complete life cycle of the device from a management perspective, or centralizing multiple mobile vendors? It’s important to hone in, focus in on the problem statement, and then engage us. Engage, obviously, the folks at Telarus and engage us. We’ve got a whole team of wireless solution engineers that will help you through that process and ask those qualifying questions to identify the real pain point and, obviously, generate success for your for your partners.
And I think that’s where we’ve seen so much success is you guys have made it really easy for, you know, maybe advisors that don’t have history in mobility, but whether it’s how you guys support it, your portal is world class, in in what they’re able to show, and so that that’s really helpful.
As as we wind down, you’ve done this for a long time in this space. Do you have any advice for how advisors should engage in this conversation, how they can make sure they win in in pitching your service offerings?
So I think the first step is always engage your customers and ask them about what are any current pain points around, their mobile environment, how they’re managing it today, and also ask about if they’ve had any conversations to ingest cybersecurity into the mobile environment. Once they do get that follow-up conversation, I would strongly recommend engage us, engage our team. We’re there to help. We know how to identify the specific pain point for that customer and help you, achieve some success with your existing book of business.
Well, I think that’s a a great place for us to end off. Great advice. Max, thank you so much for joining me today. That’s all we have. Take care, everyone.