BizTech Unboxed – MetTel’s Connected Laptop as a Service

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another unboxing video. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales engineering. I’m joined here today with Max Silber, VP of mobility and IoT. Max, welcome on from MetTel. How are you?

Yeah. I’m great. Thanks for having me on. This is exciting.

Appreciate you coming in for this. We got a good unboxing video for everybody today. We’re doing MetTel’s laptop connected laptop as a service, a brand new thing. So exciting stuff for you guys. A lot of great momentum in this.

So By by far the most I’ve been excited about a new product since fourteen years ago when I joined MetTel and we started mobility.

So this this is a really important very big step certainly for, all your partners.

So so walk us through for anybody that, has not had the fortune of meeting you a little bit about your background, your role, and then, then we’ll jump in.

Sure. So, fourteen years now with Mattel running mobility and IoT for the company. So since day one, I went through the entire journey of building out the business with all my colleagues in in that business unit. Prior to that, I’ve been in mobility and cellular coming on probably about thirty five years now, so it’s been a minute. But certainly very exciting to see how the industry’s really evolved and certainly how it’s impacting the entire process for how enterprises and other organizations really deploy mobile technology through their field force.

Love it. So would I take that as you know some things on mobility, there’s nobody better here to have. Walk us through. Set set the stage.

What’s the IT problem as our TAs are kind of walking into these deals? Why this? What’s the problem? Set it up for us.

Yeah. So fourteen years, I’ve been listening to customers say, this is great. You solved my mobile problem. What about my laptops?

And this is a significant problem throughout just about every IT organization out there. We’ve really narrowed it down to three primary categories. The first is remote work is a thing. Even if you work in an office, and I know this gets a little touchy, about thirty four million Americans that are employed by organizations have some form of remote work that happened in twenty twenty five.

So huge amount of end users out there that IT needs to support. We also know about eighty four percent of organizations admit they don’t really have a handle around the management gap, how you deploy the device, and then how do you get the device back if the employee leaves or if there’s some some form of reason for having to reclaim that unit. And the last, which is always shocking to me, the time drain. You’re looking at seven hundred and ninety five hours per thousand laptops deployed out.

That’s a significant IT burden. Yeah. And so when we started talking about this, we were not at all surprised, but we were certainly shocked by how quickly organizations looked at this and said, you guys nailed it. This is my number one problem that I have to deal with day in and day out.

I love it. I mean, I think you you’re solving another problem too, which is, look, the TAs are always looking for a way to capture a different I I just call it wedge services. Right? What’s what’s the wedge for today?

What’s the wedge that the Mattel offers on this new thing? And so you’ve identified a way that, you know, their customers are traditionally buying this through a VAR or through an MSP, through through whatever the case may be. So to have this in a as a service is is news to everybody’s ears or everybody’s ears. Right?

So maybe walk us through how did the program come about? What is it? What is what is this new CL as a service? Another another acronym for everybody, but I like this one.

This one’s easy.

Yeah. We try to call it CLAS just because it’s, you know, do you have CLAS? It’s easy to remember connected laptop as a service. The program came about frankly because years and years ago, I was always frustrated when we would grow the mobile team at Mattel.

I’d hire new people onto the team, new team members, and I’d walk up to them on day one and say, how’s everything going? And they’d say, well, I just got my brand new iPhone or Android device company issued. It’s great. It’s working great.

And I’d ask them, where’s your laptop? And they’d say, oh, IT said two to three weeks to get that IT turnaround. So I said, hang on. Something’s wrong here.

Something’s broken with this process. We have to replicate what we do with mobile devices, specifically with laptops. And that’s exactly what we replicated. This is a very familiar slide if you know a little bit about how we deploy mobile devices.

And we’ve just applied that logic in this case to laptops. And I’m oversimplifying. There’s a tremendous amount of back end systems that go into this process. But just real quick, whether you go into the Meagan portal to place your order or we get a direct API from the customer’s ticketing system, be it ServiceNow, being their HR system like a Workday or something else, we get the ticket in, we immediately go to work.

We grab a laptop, we scan it. By scanning it, we’re actually attaching that laptop to your customer’s environment. We’re doing that through a designation called CSP or cloud service provider. It’s a Microsoft term, and it allows us to connect that laptop into the customer’s existing environment.

So by doing that, processing the order, activating cellular service in this case, which we do and we’re we’re gonna talk about single SIM and why cellular connectivity is no longer a nice to have. It’s now a must have. Enrolling it all over the air with existing tools, Office three six sixty five using autopilot in this case, and then deploying it same day. So as long as we get that order before two PM eastern time, that order actually goes, for pickup for FedEx pickup same day.

So we’re fully automating that process. Again, no more waiting two to three weeks for IT to get around to provision that machine.

Yeah. And you’re I mean, you’re you’re you just made it sound so simple. Right? But I mean, talk about how much time you just saved that IT person.

What if somebody wants to onboard, you know, two employees is great, but what if they wanna onboard ten? I mean, you’ve got some math obviously here that this works out to how much time you save them and this, you know, with the just simple kidding on here. You guys kinda overviews a little bit of guys have a massive operation. This is not a thing in a garage down the street.

You could have a full blown legitimate operation that a lot of our team has seen of very eye opening as to the size and scale of what you guys are doing.

Yeah. And I think that’s a part of it. It’s the ability to do it at scale. So hundred thousand plus square foot smart warehouse in the East Coast and haven’t announced yet, but good to share with partners just down the street in Salt Lake City. We actually purchased another hundred thousand plus square foot, warehouse that should be in production in the next eight months. We’re doing some construction on it right now, but the concept is have that not only that scale, but that redundancy to be able to deploy in mass both East Coast and West Coast.

Awesome.

Walk us through then, I guess, help us understand this kind of single SIM, why that matters. Maybe talk about that a little bit.

Yeah. Sure. So first, I just wanna touch real high level because people always say, well, what’s really changing in the program? You’re going from I I go to my reseller for laptops, whoever they might be.

It could be a CDW. It could be a TD Synix, someone else. And I buy laptops today. How is this better?

How is this different?

Key aspects to touch on when you speak to your customers. It’s a complete device life cycle management program, both deployment as well as return. The second most important, we’re changing the we’re changing the business model. No more CapEx.

This is now fully OpEx. Nothing down. No cash down. You make a monthly payment just like you do on a lot of our other as a service programs.

It includes everything that’s part of that life cycle management. The consistent manageability of those devices, and that does include if you accidentally spill coffee on it or break it. We’re gonna replace it at no charge. That’s part of the program.

So again, having that maximum uptime for the employees and of course, you’re improving employee productivity and security by always having a fully enrolled secure device available to I mean, again, you know, in this whole wedge theme, I love I love probing questions.

I love partners be able to uncover these. What ask your ask your customers how much time are they spending on not just deploying and procuring and managing, but what about patching? What about updating? What about, my ThinkPad is slow. I need a new one. You kinda don’t have to worry about that anymore. Right?

You don’t have to worry about it. The nicest thing I’ve learned so far is I haven’t had a call with the CIO or a director of IT or even an IT manager, the day to day person handling this process where they told me, I’m all good. We have a great process. We enjoy doing it.

We enjoy deploying laptops and dealing with that laptop graveyard when employees leave the organization. Every single one of them starts the conversation with how is this gonna change the program and I had funny enough one great story and IT director ended up at the start at the beginning of the call was a little standoffish. At the end of the call Yeah. He said you had me at ServiceNow integration.

So that’s that’s really what you’re providing as far as an experience. The end user gets a much better experience. They get a fully functioning laptop that no one’s touched yet, which by the way, a lot of people like that Yeah. As opposed to kind of like, oh, it’s been sitting in the back room with IT for two weeks.

I wonder what’s going on. IT managers and leave and leaders love it as well because it obviously frees up all the IT time. And finance and procurement love it because you don’t have to set aside hundreds of thousands of dollars in budgets. You just start and procure when you need it.

No pre buying fifty laptops on on a pallet and having it sit in the back IT room for when you need it. As you place the order, we’re, entering that laptop, that hardware into your Microsoft environment and shipping it directly to the end user. So much, much better experience.

Easy.

And if you break it, like I said, spill coffee on it, accidentally run it over with your car, it’s okay.

We’re not gonna hate you for it. We’re just gonna ship you overnight a brand new one to replace that one, and we’re gonna reverse logistics. The broken one, so unenroll it, issue a data wipe certificate back into your ticketing system. So completely close that loop on that piece of on that asset to really again stay compliant, stay secure, and have that end user as efficiently operational as possible.

Love it. Kinda reminds me of, I think some tires on my car. I’m always debating like, do I wanna get the road hazard warranty? Am I really gonna need it?

And I’ve used it twice now in the last three months, two different vehicles. So it’s kind of that, you just don’t need to worry about it. I I like that I Yeah. Maybe I pay a few more dollars for it.

I just need to think about it. Right? It’s included in that and it’s just not that’s not where I need to be spending my time. Right?

I I need to be spending time on other things. The customers don’t need to be spending time on this stuff. It’s not the best use of any IT person’s time.

So It’s it’s it’s exactly where the industry’s going.

IT doesn’t have the time or the resources available to have to deal with this. So the ability to just have somebody else handle the entire lifecycle management, it just creates a whole new experience.

Awesome.

You did ask me earlier around single SIM. This to me is a game changer. And by the way, I’ve been, you know, customer one on this product, this is the in fact, of the original laptops we used for it that I’m using today. This changed the way I operate and the way I work.

I don’t go out to a Starbucks and look for the free Wi Fi. I don’t go to the airport and try to log into the airport Wi Fi or anything else. I have multi carrier connectivity as the second the laptop detects no Wi Fi, it automatically switches to that cellular connection. I’m the guy sitting in the back of an Uber taking video Teams calls and Zoom calls, and people are like, how do you make that screen move behind you?

I was like, well, I’m actually in a moving vehicle right now. The experience with five g has completely transformed any misconceptions around what the connected experience is like Yeah. For the end users. And once you put it in the hands of the users, it completely changes the game.

I love it. Alright. So we’re gonna open this in a second. I know everybody’s itching to, you know, cut the box open. But maybe before we do that, walk us through a little bit about show us the portal, what that looks like. I know the TAs don’t always get to see a glimpse of that. Maybe walk us through the portal and then let’s talk a little bit of logistics and then we’ll cut into it.

Sure. So instead of reinventing the wheel, we we simply added the product categories of connected laptop to our existing Bruin platform. This is the same platform you can place orders for. Your customers can place order for wireline services, for wireless services.

Very simple experience and then we have some shortcuts that we built for clients so that they could just buy based on persona. Is it an executive machine versus a programmer versus someone in marketing versus someone else? They can just select the laptop of choice and this is actually the process I went through to get this box. This was actually delivered to our Salt Lake office.

So the process works. That’s good.

I think the process works. Once we unbox it, we’ll find out. It it could be a surprise, but I selected a machine. I went through the checkout process.

Super simple. The second I I hit submit, that went to our smart warehouse. This is one of our and our warehouse techs pulled the machine, scanned it into Mattel’s Office three sixty five environment, added anything else required. We could do things like asset tags, anything to do with if it’s an a device trade in through reverse logistics, any other, virtual depot services.

They’re all part of that process. And then the this box showed up the next day in Salt Lake City. So I think we should unbox it.

I’m Take it.

Yeah. I’m getting excited.

Cut something.

I’m gonna The people are here to see somebody cut.

Hopefully, it’s not me getting cut.

Hopefully, none of us.

I know it gets more clicks.

Don’t know.

Hopefully, none of us. Yeah. So very simple process. And again, imagine that this is the end user. This is someone working at home or working at a regional office. They open up the box.

They’ve got again take the bubble wrap.

Yeah.

You you get the bubble wrap. So give that to your kids. They love it. In this case, we just use the standard welcome guide from Meagan.

Very simple process. Has a QR code for your support. And right in here is looks like the right the right unit. Easy.

It’s a ThinkPad. So got the machine ready to go. And again, notice something very important. It’s sealed. It’s brand new.

No IT tech has been punching codes into it or anything else and the only thing is yeah.

All you really need to do as the end user, this is meant to be simple to use for provisioning, power on the laptop, connect to your Wi Fi and then log in to your Office three sixty five credentials and it will say, please wait while we finish the onboarding process. Simple as that.

Beautiful. Alright. So from a hardware perspective, what do we got? We got couple options here.

Yeah. So you’ve got currently, we have two OEMs. We expect that to grow. We have Dell, which is obviously a popular machine. About thirty three percent of the enterprise market today use Dell. So we again, we got different personas, advanced executive power user, and we even have a ruggedized field worker unit.

And then we have the same for Lenovo. So a whole nice lineup for the Lenovo models, again, within those specific personas. And we you will notice one thing about us, we do overbuild. We don’t like the standard sixteen GB.

We feel like this machine should last you at least three years, which is our standard term. So go ahead and overbuild it. Just some examples of different personas that class really solves for. This is me, the traveler.

Yeah. You got the field worker, knowledge worker, hybrid work, and just a nice little side by side to say what are you really getting? Well, you’re getting the laptop in the box, you’re getting five g connectivity already active, already ready to go, MDM enrollment, over the air enrollment for the device, help desk and support, device refresh at the end of the term. So as you get to that thirty six month, we’re doing a refresh for a new machine.

In the AI age, you you always have to be better than you were with your last machine. So super important. And of course, that entire life cycle management. So if you spill coffee on this one, we’ll just get you a new one directly to your home or or wherever you work out of.

And IT doesn’t have to deal with it. IT doesn’t have to get involved in that process.

So what do we do we know what we have here? Do we say is this is excellence? Should we bust this thing out?

Yeah. Sure. Probably gonna get all that if we don’t We’re we’re definitely not getting yelled at.

Alright. Oh, look at that. Oh, that’s pretty. And I’ll let you do the honors.

Yes. So it’s it’s a full unboxing here. I mean Wow. They don’t mess around. This is about this is about as nice as it gets.

You got your unboxing. You’ll notice it already has the Metzel single SIM in it. So there’s your little kit.

And Look at that.

I’m sure there’s a much more eloquent way to do this, by the way. I know.

This is Christmas. Everything’s Christmas.

Feel like I that’s exactly how I feel.

I feel like you you gotta just People want people want the experience.

I just think it’s great for TAs to go, what does the end customer get?

What does it really look beautiful Carbon x one ready for provisioning.

All you have to do is hit the power button and follow those steps. Shiny.

Ready to go.

Okay. So maybe just bring us home here a little bit in the wedge, the winning position for advisors. I mean, you you kinda doubled down on it originally where, k, obviously, there’s great CapEx versus OpEx. Yeah.

We love as a service. Right? The the channel and and CapEx are just that’s not our DNA. Right?

So what’s the final kind of how to win, how to wedge, how to have the conversation?

Maybe maybe take us home with that a little bit.

So this is really gonna help you get into accounts. This is gonna help reignite some old conversations. Start by identifying that challenge. Ask them very simply as we identified, what’s the current process you use today for deploying laptop laptops to your field users and and how do you handle the process of getting them back?

You’re going to identify some pain points for that, some of the management gaps, some of the time drain that’s involved with that. And then all we really do is we’ve got this nice online survey you could send to your customer and it’s gonna just identify some of those initial pain points. We get on a quick thirty minute discovery call with one of our wireless sales engineers. We identify the problem, and then we very quickly turn around a potential quote as a solution to that problem.

So super easy. Don’t need invoices or anything that we need for other services. We just need to understand what the problem statement is and come up together with the right solution for your client.

I love it. I mean, it seems like a very this is a very unsaturated market. I mean, there is a ton of opportunity here. I would think if I’m a TA that this is just not this is not a product that’s been readily available yet.

So kudos to you guys for identifying a gap and, you know, you got a lot of people out there that are itching to go get in this thing. So any any kind of final thoughts? Any, you know, any any moments from Max here for TAs Yeah. Away with?

Unlike other products and services, there is no organizations I’ve I’ve bumped into yet where they are not deploying laptops. So every single one of your clients is a potential customer for CLASS, and this is like our other products. Certainly on the mobile side, this is typically one of those products where you can even enter with a small twenty five laptop, fifty laptop order. And before you know it, by the end of the year, it’ll be a couple of hundred just because of the way organizations operate. So huge opportunity here and certainly excited to start working with all your TAs on it.

Awesome. Okay. Great stuff. Max, thanks so much for coming in, man. Really appreciate it, buddy.

Awesome product. Alright, everybody. Until next time. This has been MetTel’s connected laptop as a service. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales engineering at Telarus. Thanks, everybody.