HITT- Exploring Mobility Solutions for Businesses- May 27, 2025

In a recent presentation, the focus was on the financial benefits of mobility, particularly the debate between BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and corporate devices. The discussion highlighted the growing popularity of Mobile Device as a Service (MDaaS) as a solution for IT teams, especially in managing security and operational efficiency. AireSpring, a company with a long history in the industry, is entering the mobile device market, responding to customer demands for comprehensive mobility solutions. The conversation also touched on the complexities and risks associated with BYOD, emphasizing the need for effective mobile device management. Overall, the session underscored the importance of balancing cost, security, and efficiency in corporate mobility strategies.

Transcript is auto-generated.

Well, it’s time for today’s high intensity tech training. And as always, your comments and questions are welcome in the chat window for live Q and A, both during and after the presentation.

Introduction to Mobility and BYOD

Today’s discussion is laser focused on making money with mobility, and looks closely at bringing your own devices with their associated savings versus corporate devices with their inherent greater security and support. We explore whether MDAS, managed device as a service, might be the hero that IT teams need. Telarus VP of advanced networking and mobility, Graham Scott, returns today along with two outstanding executives from AirSpring, longtime Telarus friend and one of the most widely respected leaders in our industry, AirSpring CEO, Avi Lundstein, along with another longtime industry leader and friend, AirSpring VP of Enterprise Mobility and IoT, Felix Toscano.

Graham and all, welcome to the Telarus Tuesday call.

I’m very happy to be here with each of you.

Hey, Doug. Thanks so much. It’s a pleasure to be here as always, and, I echo your sentiments about the Memorial Day long weekend. Hope everybody out there had a great weekend and took a little bit of time to recognize those that, we’ve lost, serving our country overseas. So, today, as Doug said, we are going to talk about BYOD.

And I know a lot of you coming off the Memorial Day weekend probably went to a lot of gatherings where that meant bring your own drink. But today, we’re gonna talk about something a little bit different.

We’re talking about bring your own device, a very common refrain you hear in the mobility space. Now this term BYOD actually has a couple of different context. If you’re talking in the carrier world, BYOD means somebody who brings an existing phone to a new carrier to get service.

So meaning you have your own iPhone, you’re going from one carrier to another, from AT and T to Verizon, for example, or Verizon to T Mobile, and you bring your own device and they give you just new service on that device.

In this context, we’re talking about BYOD as it means from an employee bringing their own personal device to the corporate environment. Basically, meaning they’re gonna take their own personal device and use it to access corporate resources like email, etcetera. So we’re gonna dive into that, the good, the bad, the ugly of that whole, posture within your customers. But before we do that, Chandler, if you wanna move to the next slide, just coming off our president’s club last week and had the opportunity to talk to a lot of our top advisers that were there visiting.

And a lot of them come up to me and say, hey, Graham. I really haven’t got into the mobility game yet. Haven’t started talking about it. What should I do?

What kind of things should I talk about? I think we all recognize that mobility is becoming a bigger and bigger piece of what our customers are doing. A lot of research shows that for every dollar they spend on telecom, they spend anywhere from one and a half to two dollars on mobility services. So there’s a lot of money being spent by your customers in this area, and a lot of you are asking me, how do I get into it?

And so here’s kind of the overarching ways you can make money with mobility.

Number one, obviously, is selling the carriers. Now we have a direct relationship with all three carriers as many of you know. So we can go Verizon. We can go AT and T.

We can go T Mobile. All three of those options are available for you, and we do have a wireless team that is there to support you with that. A lot of you, though, have told me, hey. I don’t wanna get into that.

I really don’t wanna deal with those carriers. I really wanna just kinda focus on the management aspect, tems type environment, all the way through to a full management and full outsourcing of the entire mobility department in what we call mobile device as a service. We’re gonna dive into that in a little more detail here in just a few short minutes. But the last area where a lot of money is being made in wireless is in the pots replacement stuff.

And the reason why I mentioned that is we’re gonna be coming out with a guide for you guys. You’ve heard me on this call talk about that a couple of times, pots replacement and the land grab that’s happening there. We’ve got a guide coming out for you in just a couple short weeks here that’s gonna help you as you have those conversations.

So lots to do on the mobility front. If you’ve got questions of the about these or any other things, please reach out to me. I’m here to help you with those mobility conversations. So, Chandler, if you wanna move to the next slide, let’s talk a little bit about what we’re here to talk about today.

Understanding BYOD Policies

BYOD, bring your own device. And, again, what this means is when a company will allow their employees to use their own personal devices to access corporate applications, data, and services. And typically, what you have here is where the corporation will say, hey. Bring your own cell phone.

Use it for work, and we’ll give you a small stipend on a monthly basis to help cover some of the cost that you use your phone for as it relates to work. Why do companies do that? Well, because it’s really, really easy. Right?

They just give each employee a couple of bucks a month. Fifty bucks is usually common. Somewhere it’s in that fifty to seventy five dollar range. And the company then as a as a result of that has no management, and they don’t have to support those mobile devices at all.

It’s a fixed cost for them. They can tell exactly how much their mobile services are gonna cost them every month, just based on the number of employees they have. And there’s no challenges around mobility.

However, a lot of risks come with that. And I know a lot of you you guys tell me that this is the conversation you’re having with your customers when you engage with them on mobility.

The risks associated with letting, your employees bring their own device have really started to outweigh the benefits of that lack of management. And, you know, the one thing we know about mobile devices, they are ubiquitous. They are prevalent.

Everybody’s got them. And because of that, they are target rich environments.

Hackers and ne’er do wells out there in the Internet are using or zeroing in on corporations that use this policy as a way to get in the door because typically that personal device is not secured.

You’ve got no sort of control as a corporation over what that employee has done with it since before they got onto the network, and you’re creating threats. A lot of the research we see shows that seventy three percent of breaches that are happening in the last couple years have started as a result of a mobile device being brought into a corporate environment. So there’s a lot of stats around that. That’s the one that we’ve seen recently. So definitely a lot of risks that companies are taking by using this approach.

Exploring Mobile Device as a Service

So what’s the alternative? Well, we talked about a couple things. But, Chandler, if you wanna move to the next slide.

One of the alternatives that is gaining in popularity is what we call mobile device as a service. And within the Telarus portfolio, we have a couple of folks that do this, including our guests that I will get to in here just a few short minutes. But really what this is, it’s an outsourcing of the mobile support and mobile services to an outside organization. So you’re basically handing off everything that surrounds the mobile practice to another company that can handle it for you.

So there’s a lot of pieces that go into mobile device as a service. And in, depending on what your company your customer needs, there’s different aspects of this service that we can get into, including, everything from device procurement and deployment all the way through till bill management, mobile device management, and, all kinds of, security and those types of services on the thing. So we’re gonna dive into that in a little more detail. And, Chandler, if you quickly wanna just bring the the, slide down here actually and go full screen.

Introduction of AirSpring and Its Services

Wanna introduce our guests here to the crowd and, folks who’ve been with Telarus for a long time know Avi very well. Long time Telarus friend and, a partner with us, AirSpring, CEO of AirSpring. Avi, welcome to the call. We’re also gonna be joined by Felix Toscano who is taking over their, new mobility practice.

And, we are pleased to announce here today, guys, that this is the initial launch of your mobile device as a service product. So, Avi, why don’t you introduce AirSpring to the folks on the call who may not know you guys and, talk a little bit about what you know, the decision you guys went into to get into mobile device as a service because I I know you and I have talked about this for a number of years as you guys were making plans to step into this business. So, Avi, over to you. Tell tell us a little bit about AirSpring and, why you guys decided to get into MBA assets.

Alright. Well, thank you so much, Graham. Appreciate the very warm introduction, and, very happy to be here today.

AirSpring is a company that has, been in around for quite a while. In fact, I’m pretty proud that, we go back with, the the folks at Telarus all the way back to the very beginning and founding of our company, in the two thousand and one time frame. We’re approaching our twenty fifth year in business, owner operated and managed. The three Lonstein brothers are very involved in the business, privately held, no outside investors or outside debt. So we get to set our own direction for what we do.

And we are a managed services provider and managed solution provider.

I’ll tell everyone a a really interesting story.

But, when I initially, founded, AirSpring, which is, really my second company, in the telecommunications space, I originally, decided that we’re gonna go into the wireless, in environment. In fact, it was wireless data at the time, with a device that would compete with, the Blackberry of the time. So we’re going back a ways here for those who remember their Blackberry devices.

But, anyway, the interesting part of this is, it didn’t quite work out mostly because, we were ahead of our time in terms of what small to midsize and enterprise customers, really wanted to see. And so we pivoted at that time into a set of wireline services. I’m really proud that as of about, three years ago, we are now, added wireless into the mix. But as you can see from this slide, I won’t I won’t spend too much time on this, family owned and operated, as I mentioned.

We’re very proud that we offer a full suite of services to enterprise and midsize customers across the United States and globally.

This includes global connectivity, US connectivity and aggregation, cloud voice, a suite of managed SD WAN, SASE, and security services. And, really, what we help our customers do is pull this all together into a single solution, which we then, are able to help them, visualize through our air control, AI powered IT service management platform. We’re really excited about air control.

This is, a new a relatively new new visual for our customers and partners to really see the entirety of their, customer, environment, you know, open support cases, look at billing, look at orders moving through. Literally every part of the, telecom process that we work with is there. As you can see, we work with, all of the leading global network providers and US network providers, and we offer a full range of, solutions with, many of our, best of breed technology partners, all of which we have, advanced certifications with. You see Fortinet, where we’re an expert partner, VMware, Cisco, Cato.

And on the right bottom, you can see some of our certifications include our Fortinet engage, our HIPAA, SOC two, and CATO.

So that’s a quick view of, just where AirSpring is. Now about three years ago, we reentered, as I said, after a twenty plus year hiatus, the wireless environment. And we are a fully fledged MVNE, which is a mobile virtual network enabler. What we do is we have a complete end to end platform for MVNOs or mobile virtual network operators to stand up their business, access, and, wireless network services, aggregate them. And so we’ve been doing that for a number of years quite successfully.

What has happened in the last, year to year and a half is we have been receiving, requests or almost demands from our customers and from partners too that they really would like us to manage a full set of solutions, including their enterprise wireless solutions and mobile device as a service. And so, we started about a year ago entering into the enterprise mobility space.

Felix joined us, who has deep experience in that environment.

And what we’re doing is really meeting the needs of our customers. Our customers have spoken. They’ve said this is an area that’s complex for them. It’s too much work, And that’s what AirSpring has really done over the years. How do we take the complexity that’s involved in this whole space of networking and allow allow that to be offloaded and taken away from the customer, and we take over those, functions and that workload, allowing them to focus on their core business.

And so that’s where we are today.

Yeah. And I think that’s the powerful part of this conversation, right, Avi, is that you were pulled into this by by what your customers wanted, which is the same, thing that’s happening with our tech advisers. Right? They are being asked to take on responsibilities with mobility, help manage mobility because, you know, obviously, there’s a lot of dollars being spent by our customers in these products, and they need help, because it’s getting more and more complex.

You’re you’re right. And I’ll just wrap up on that point. I mean, the reality is is that in fact, in some ways, the potential losses for customers in this space is is, what we’ve seen is is far exceeding that in wireline. I mean, there are potential ways to you know, through lack of management or security to have issues in wireline, but wireless is sort of like it can become an open wild west, and customers are in pain. They really need help on this.

Yeah. No. For sure. We’re seeing a lot of that, and I I do wanna correct myself what I said earlier about the seventy three percent. The correct way was seventy three percent of companies have had a breach from a mobile device versus seventy three percent of breaches start from a mobile. So I phrased that wrong. I do wanna correct myself on there.

Challenges in Mobility Management

But let’s bring in the man of the hour here. So, Avi, the guy you tapped on the shoulder to to launch this for you, to run this product for you, is a well known name in the industry in the mobility piece. Felix, welcome to the call. Why don’t you talk through a little bit about, you know, your journey as you as you started this product, and, again, some of the things that some of the challenges that you’ve had as you guys have got this off the ground.

Yeah. No. I appreciate the opportunity to be here with Avi as well. And I think there’s been a lot to say with regards to where AirSpring, you know, has has been to where they are going in terms of this road map.

And you’re right. I think there has been a lot of a lot of customers who are coming to us specifically and talking through these requirements and these sort of nuances associated, whether that be, you know, security concerns that that are popping up, whether that’s going through regulatory compliances that are being discussed within organizations and how do you manage that within certain environments, all the way down to the support, scalability, or operation efficiency. Right? So the biggest piece of this is really making sure that these components come together and that we’re doing it correctly at the end of the day and ensuring that there is transparency across the board with how do we solve for this such this level of a need.

And throughout the entire time, you know, doing mobility, I think there’s always been this this need and a gap in this industry for a way to offload the shadow IT sort of component associated with mobility. Right? So coming in, we’ve really focused on identifying ways to leverage our managed device as a service solution to help identify areas that we can really focus on and deliver when it comes to this environment. That that journey has really brought us where we are, right, with the ability to really offload almost the entire component of an IT environment of how they’re managing mobility to the invoicing, to the procurement side of the house, to logistics, and everything in between.

Comparing BYOD and Corporate Devices

Yeah. So let’s, let’s kinda dive into the meat of the of the order here and and kind of the topic that we came to discuss, the BYOD versus corporate owned devices, the good, the bad, the ugly. And, Chandler, if you wanna go ahead and move us to the next slide. So, Felix, talk through some of these with me. I know this is really what a lot of our TAs are facing when they have a conversation about mobility.

The response they get is, hey. We just let people bring their own device.

And, you know, we give them fifty bucks a month, seventy five bucks a month. So let’s start off with, you know, the cost. Right? Obviously, that’s one of the main drivers of why corporations do this. They say, hey. It’s a set cost for me. It’s easy.

And and mobile device management is really expensive. Not necessarily so though. Right?

Correct. Correct. Yeah. I think there’s there’s more of the understanding of when you really get into this, where do you see that cost kinda outweighing sort of the let me give you that stipend and let let’s set a set it and forget a model where there’s a lot more to be said with is it you know, the cost of a mobile device management type solution is worth its weight over time in comparison to the security that you sort of see as you alluded to, right, where there’s been a lot of cyber threats as they have increased over time and and I would say both in volume as well as sophistication.

And I think corporate owned devices, you know, when we put those mobile device management solutions and applications on it, regardless of that three dollar cost or that five dollar cost or sometimes it’s six, you know, six or above, you’re looking at the ability for them to truly implement that zero trust model that is that is now allowing them to offset and offload three key components of the hardware, the software, and the network at the same time. Right? Where when you have that BYOD model where they have that stipend and that set it and forget it concept, you really don’t gain that sort of visibility and control over it.

So those costs outweigh a lot of the benefits when it comes to having this this sort of a model put together and deployed where you’re you’re gonna pay three times or five times that amount when it comes to those, you know, stipend models where, yeah, we’ve paid it for that month. However, when you add on all of these additional costs that you’re gonna gain from the security threat or the billing entities and all the other things you have to go through, it’s vastly higher at the end of the day.

And I think one of the things that I’ve noticed over the last couple years here as well is if you’re paying your employees, let’s say, somewhere between fifty and seventy five dollars a month, a fully managed mobile product, you actually might be spending considerably less over the time. Right? I mean, the cost of these things have come down so much over the last couple couple of years as we’ve got, as we’ve got more and more efficient with managing these types of services.

Yeah. One, I I agree with you a hundred percent. I think there’s there’s a lot to be said with the efficiency of the operations now being ran with this kind of a model compared to what it used to look like. Right? And I think that’s where there’s there’s a a capability and a component now where with this managed device as a service sort of environment, we can ship, you know, preconfigured devices day one or for an individual. Right? Where that lowers your operational cost, that lowers a lot of the human capital cost associated with it, and they’ll be able to honestly secure the devices within minutes of it arriving within that end user’s hands where it’s already ready and set up to go without having to go through the BYD model where they have to do it themselves and figure this whole concept out.

The Importance of Control in Device Management

Yeah. I think the big thing you gain as a corporation though really is control. Right? I mean, control and management.

And, you know, we see all the rigor and the discipline that is going into place over the last couple of years around cybersecurity and protecting that corporate environment and that corporate data, the threats that are there, in so many ways, it’s irresponsible to then turn around and let a device that’s been who knows where, doing who knows what, access to those that corporate data, you know, while you’re doing so much of protecting it, you’re just opening the back door over here.

Right. Yeah.

Yeah.

And that’s exactly right. I mean, I think, you know, the as is mentioned here is the off boarding risk is a is a serious concern. Right? I mean, you’ve got you know, you don’t know what corporate data has landed up on a mobile device, and you don’t know if it’s segmented or not fully.

That device is floating out there, in a way that, can leave you, you know, with corporate IP and, proprietary information, out of your hands. And and that that has a whole another set of legal issues that could be involved.

Yeah. You know, that employee controls that device. They get to do whatever they want with it. If they decide to sell it, they decide to get rid of it, turn around, give it to their kids, whatever.

Who knows what you’ve got on there from what’s been accessed? So I think it’s just something that a lot of companies don’t think about. And, you know, we should be candid here. Right?

Mobile device as a service is not a great fit for every single company out there. Right? But for the companies that where they’ve got employees in the field, employees out there, which is most of them now. Right?

We’ve got a lot of remote workforce out there.

To have some kind of control and policy around mobile devices, what they’re doing, what they’re accessing, and some kind of control around it is just it’s critical to the business operations.

So let’s Yeah.

I think go ahead.

Sorry. Quick, so I can’t it’s it’s privacy without compromise, right, at the end of day is what I will allude to. Right? I think that’s where it really allows the best parts of this this model to come to play is where employees know that these devices belong to an organization and that the personal data stays separate from the corporate environment. And a and a lot of employees and end user nowadays, and the vast majority of them are now carrying either two devices, so they’re more comfortable having that separation versus trying to bring it all together because of this.

Yeah. So let’s move to the next slide there, Chandler. And kind of, Felix, if you wanna sort of talk through obviously, we’ve got some unique environments where maybe you’ve got a compliance issue or something like that where I mean, I think this is a a environment that’s ripe for, you know, threats, etcetera, and and they really have a target rich environment for our TAs when they’re looking at bringing in mobile devices service.

Use Cases in Regulated Industries

So talk through some of the some of the fits you guys are seeing, some of the use cases, maybe some of the clients that you guys have first started rolling this out on. Where are you seeing your customers really adapt? Is there a specific type of business or a specific concern that they’re bringing to you to kinda get this conversation started?

Yeah. I I would say finance has really been one of the the fastest ones that I’ve seen sort of want to have this engagement in these discussions. And it’s really because it’s a very or it’s a highly regulated industry in the first place. Right?

I mean, there’s there’s a lot of information that’s transmitted back and forth, a lot of of other regulations that need to be maintained within compliance that is nonnegotiable at the end of day. So I’ve got customers that come to us within that specific vertical, and they’re looking to really obtain not only the control back of that corporate, you know, ownership of proprietary information that they’re transmitting back and forth with their clients, whether that’s financial results or anything like that. They want to ensure that within the second that it is out in somebody’s hands that they know it has met every single piece of requirement from the regulations, the certificates, you know, stock compliance, two factor, you know, authentication.

All of these components are properly set up and established when it goes to those end users’ hands. And IT is already overburdened and understaffed as it is, and there’s not a lot of resources going back into let’s increase the IT headcount staff. So the financial verticals I’ve really started looking at, how can we make this more simplistic? How can we streamline the entire deployment?

Because like you mentioned and alluded to earlier, there’s already a lot of focus on other factors that IT is focusing on, whether that’s your network, your your data centers, or all these other things in between. Mobility added a whole another layer of complexity to this. So that vertical has really focused on, let’s offload a lot of these these tasks and ensure that within the fact that we have these corporate owned devices, it can eliminate all of these gray areas associated with giving them much more of a clear sense of control and access to their applications and the data accurately and in real time.

So those are the the the use cases we’re seeing more and more of. Anything from, you know, fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty plus device environments are where we’re seeing a really huge success of wanting to get back into and controlling that environment a little bit more and gain that visibility and control.

Cool. So I know where the the chat’s being lit up with some questions, and we’ll tackle some of those here in the q and a period. So keep them coming, folks. I appreciate you guys jumping in on that.

Implementation Process for Managed Mobility

Chandler, let’s go to the next slide. I wanna talk through a little bit about what it looks like from a, like, from an implementation standpoint for a TA. Say they’ve got a customer that’s interested in looking at this. Why don’t you, Avi or or Felix, whoever wants us to jump in and handle this, let’s walk through what the process looks like for engagement and then how they go about getting a quote, that kind of thing. Let’s talk through what that looks like here quickly.

Felix, go forward with that. You’re you’ll be deeper into that.

Yeah. Yeah. No worries. Yeah. I I think for us, you know, where we see and how we we’ve seen success with this model is where we’re becoming part of this discussion in the beginning, right, where we’re looking through uncovering those known and unknown pain points.

And the the first starting point to really put a full comprehensive analysis together with us is obtaining some of the data points that we need in order to do that correctly. And what that means is we need to obtain, you know, the wireless invoices that we obtained from the wireless carriers portal, whether it’s AT and T, Verizon, T Mobile, as well as coming along with a couple of inventory reports that we need to obtain and and pull from. So those those key identifying reports that we obtained from the customer directly will allow us to then turn around and put together a comprehensive wireless analysis where we can show you, here’s what we’ve identified.

Here’s what we see the customer being you know, meeting the needs of a managed device as a service environment or some type of form of or manage, you know, manage solution that we can put together and having that discussion together prior to going back to the customer and presenting that. So obtaining that key piece of information directly allows us to come together and put put that quote together so that we can go back and provide that information back to the customer accurately and in a timely manner.

Awesome. So then, Avi, I know this is one of the things you love to talk about. The beauty of this is all that data that you guys collect, everything that comes together integrates full into your air control ITSM platform as well. Right? So Right. They’ll be able to see everything together, wireless, wireline, all together, living beautifully.

So, obviously, you know, whether it’s BYOD or MDAS, one problem that every customer has is how do they manage this environment.

Right?

Wireless, you know, just in a as a whole is many, many different devices floating around.

And customers find that they are, not in, not managing these devices well. Right? Landing up with devices that are not in use, that have been turned up, but, should have been, brought back and and, reused, overages on on services. All of these things add up pretty fast. And so with that said, what you see here is a screenshot of essentially the, single pane of glass platform that really gives customers, a complete view into what’s going on in their environment. Right?

You know, what’s the billing looking like? How many lines are there that are overusing, underusing?

Do I have pending devices that need to be that are in process? And so this gives control to a customer, and we co manage this platform with the customer so that, we help them.

The whole idea of this is let’s get visibility into what’s going on. And that’s the whole idea of air control is letting our customers, gain control and get visibility into what’s going on in their network environment.

Yeah. And I think this is something we hear being requested a lot. Right? Is is some kind of portal, a pane of glass where I can get in there, and getting everything together on one pane of glass is really what customers want. So let’s take a look at the next slide here before we get to q and a.

Once a customer has agreed, hey. We’re interested in doing the managed mobility.

This is kinda what the process looks like, right, and how easy it is for them. Felix or Avi, why don’t you kinda just walk us through this here quickly before we get to our q and a. Just let us know kind of, like, the I think the ease of of doing business this way is what appeals to so many customers.

So walk us through this.

Felix, you can jump in there.

Yeah. Yeah. I call this our our Lean Six Sigma model or approach methodology, right, where we’re going from a six to eight step process within IT to now, hey. It’s a three step process where you make your request on our side.

What happens in the magic that occurs on the back end is essentially what you guys are seeing here, where we ensure that the devices are, you know, fully stocked and supported in within our our our facility. What happens from there is we have a team that will go through and essentially make sure that these orders are pulled from the shelf. They’ll go through and set up a device, whatever the configurations are that you want. So IT doesn’t have to be involved in the meticulously going through and setting up your profile, putting, you know, these cases and accessories together.

We’ll do and handle all of that for them. And then the beauty of it is we ship it directly to the end users, or we can ship it in bulk to a main facility or location that IT may need, you know, in order to make a deployment. The value of this is it can be easily and quickly replicated once we start with the process on our with our customers, whether that’s for a smartphone, a tablet, MiFi, doesn’t matter. We can ensure that that is quickly done, and we ship across the nation.

So it doesn’t matter if it’s, you know, Florida all the way to Portland, Oregon. We can support every single one of those customers in those locations.

Yeah. And I think from a from an employee experience standpoint, if you think about this, right, when I start IT, you know, you the requisition comes into HR to start. You guys get queued that a new employee is starting. That device just shows up at their house ready to go, totally set up with everything they need, and they’re, rocking and rolling day one.

Commitment to Channel Partnerships

So I I I love that from an employee, experience standpoint. Last slide here, Avi. If there are a couple of things I know you wanted to highlight on this one, before we get into our q and a. Obviously, a lot of awards you guys have won.

Most a lot of the folks on this call, I know, know you guys well. But anything here you wanna particularly highlight before we move to our q and a?

I didn’t even know the slide was in there, but, this is usually the wrap up slide. We’re not quite at the end, but, you know, look, I think everyone, hopefully, has experience with AirSpring.

We are fully committed to the channel. We’re a hundred percent, channel focused. We do not have a direct sales force.

And we have been, at the forefront of driving really the channel, evolution and, maybe revolution, whatever you wanna call it. We do value the partnerships. And, and really, what I believe is the key message here is whether this is wireless or managed services or security, the technology is not necessarily different. The technology stays the same. I think what really differentiates AirSpring is our, extra effort that we go through to deliver a higher level of support and service to our customers. We call it the AirSpring Advantage, and you can see some of the awards we’ve won over the years because of this. More importantly, I think, or maybe as importantly, is that, we find that, we make it, important for our partners to be able to reach out to us, escalate.

I think those who’ve worked with, AirSpring and the AirSpring team know that, yes, things do go wrong in this industry. But when something, doesn’t go the way it should, partners and customers have very quick ability to escalate, all the way up to me as the CEO so we can get things back on track. So I’ll leave that message as we go into the next steps here.

Love it.

Transition to Q&A Session

Doug, we’ve got a lot of questions out there, I know. So, over to you if you wanna help sort of guide us through some of these. I know we’ve got a couple of competitive type questions. Looks like a pretty good range of stuff out there.

It is a pretty good range. Terrific presentation, Graham, Avi, Felix. Thank you all very much. I’ve learned a lot here today as well.

First question really incorporates several that we’ve received from the advisors and that has to do with how this type of service is billed and commissioned to the advisors. In what way do they present that? What are the criteria involved?

I’ll cover it at a very high level, and Felix can jump in. Look, we’re highly competitive in this business. And as you know, the way it works for these types of, opportunities is we really need to analyze the customer’s current invoices. So that’s step one in the process. And, generally, we will take that to provide a custom offer to the customer depending upon how many wireless carriers they’re using, what the mix is of their utilization, you know, how many devices they have. Then we work with the customer to understand what are they looking, what what what is it what is the pain points that they need to achieve and overcome.

Is it a device issue? Is it the plans? Is it, overages? Is it lines not being utilized? And we come up with a a custom usage plan, including taking into account devices.

And then we do offer the full MDAS or mobile device as a service offering.

That offering is pretty complete, and, we we will be able to share some documents of everything included in there. One of the cool features that I think we offer that I like and I think is, a differentiator in the industry is our ability to, re re not only retrieve current devices being utilized by customers or the, customers’ employees, but we will restock those devices, basically set them back up and and depot those devices for our customers so they can be put back out into, utilization at a later date. So to give you a quick example, let’s say for whatever reason, ten devices are returned because of offboarding or whatever the reason is, our MDES process will, take those devices back, fully refurbish them or whatever else is needed to get them back in into utilization, restock those devices, re inventory those devices, and then when the next ten team members or employees come on, the customer is not having to buy brand new devices. So that is a pretty cool feature there.

And that, you know, we can go over those fees, obviously, probably with they are custom per deal or per opportunity.

So that’s a very high level. With regard to, commissions and, and spiffs, those are highly competitive. We’ve always been partner focused, and, we’d love to have some, discussions, with, partners who wanna find out how that works.

Understanding Device Fees and Services

But I think they’ll find that those are market leading.

So just in general, the usually, the way this is is the customer are gonna pay a per device fee based on the level of service they want. Right? So if you just want bill management, for example, it may be a lower level.

But if you want the full, you know, full Monty, as they say, the full everything managed, that’s, you know, that’s gonna be a higher fee, and it’s paid on a residual based on the amount the fee they pay per month per device. So if it’s just wireless expense management, it you know, it’s gonna be couple bucks a device typically. Whereas if you’re doing the full mobile device as a service, replacement, procurement, etcetera, etcetera, It’s gonna be a little higher depending on, as Avi said, the actual, needs of the customer and how many devices, etcetera.

So Well, one thing I should add to that, Graham, and you’ve you’ve you’ve summarized that well is if you were to utilize just a pure, you know, let’s call it WEMs or TEMS model, The our partners are gonna be earning only on essentially the WEMs portion of that. The way we package it up with usage, there’s gonna be an ongoing recurring commission for the life of the customer, not only on the the MDAS part, but on the usage plan itself.

Recurring Commissions and Revenue Opportunities

So, really, it’s a it’s sort of a a bigger bite at the apple if you wanna think about it like that because you you’re getting not only just the stand alone MDESP, but the entirety of the use usage, package and getting an ongoing recurring commission. As you know, ongoing commissions are not as common on the u on the usage side, so we’re we’re happy to be in that place.

Yeah. Cool.

The, second group of questions that we’d had, really discussed the differences between MDM, mobile device management, and then MDAS.

And my understanding has always been, and I think many of our advisers as well, is that MDM was really more of a, software approach to managing, these devices. Whereas with MDes, you have much more of a comprehensive full service and customizable sort of solution for, any type of organization. And I wanted to throw in Felix’s comment earlier as well because I liked it so much, this idea of privacy without compromise, a real benefit to the employees bringing these devices as well.

Yeah. That was a really good one, and I’m gonna let Felix kind of expand on on a couple of the points here. But just to kinda clarify, MDM is an element of or potential element of mobile device as a service. So mobile device as a service is it’s a range of services that are in there. It it it can be everything from the full procurement all the way through management, but, it and it includes MDM. So MDM can be an element of it. And, Felix, I’ll let you expand on that a little bit more because I think, as Doug said, that was a that was a good little, takeaway note there.

Praise of the day.

Yeah.

There you go. Yeah. No. No. Happy to. And I think you’re you’re correct. And Doug, I think you you eloquently put it way better than I could in terms of the the definition of the two.

I think that was well said and stated. And you’re a hundred percent correct. Right? I think there’s there’s great things when it comes to the full gamut of a managed device as a service offering.

And it really is encompassing and bringing in that missing key component of mobile device manage, which is the end user or the end endpoint sort of software that goes on to a device to ensure it is secure, compliant, and all those things. And with a managed device as a service, you’re essentially bringing an entire ecosystem of the device depot where we can store a device together for a customer, whether it’s a new net new device that they’re ordering or an existing. The ability to do what’s called this triage process where we can take a device back, wipe it, you know, erase it, reset it up for a shelf where it can be pulled again and and store it for redeployment for another user, and then go through the full staging in getting where we can reset it up using a customer’s existing mobile device management application versus it being a standalone product on its own, right, where IT has figured that out.

We bring that back in so that we can do it all together before it even ships out to the end user. So it allows us to bring in, again, all of these components of efficiency, operations, scalability, privacy, all those things essentially within our managed device as a service as opposed to breaking each one of these components up individually and letting IT sort of figure it out where mobile device mobile device management really is on its own a very different layer just focused on security on those endpoint units.

I think MDM is a great sort of Trojan horse to get in on accounts to talk about mobility. Right? It’s a good way to get in the door. You can use MDM to sort of with the FUD.

Right? Fear, uncertainty, and doubt and kinda Yeah. You look. You know, you throw that seventy three percent stat in, whatever you wanna do, and that kinda gets you in the door.

And then as you start having the conversation about outsourcing that MDM, inevitably, it’ll start to grow into a lot of these other elements of the mobile process that your customers are often not keen about doing. Right? So if I’m gonna outsource that, bring someone in to help me with MDM, you know, maybe I should look at helping me with a bunch of this other stuff that goes with the mobile process as well. And I think that’s where you start to get into a sort of more lucrative conversation from a TA standpoint.

Product Availability and Market Scope

Yeah. Third group of questions had to do with the availability of this product. Is this strictly a domestic offering or is it also international?

And, any other, caveats that advisors would have to be aware of, in terms of type of industry or other agreements, direct carrier contracts that Steve just brought up, before offering this to any of their clients?

I can give a little bit on that and then Felix can jump in. As of today, the offering is a domestic US offering. We have had a few, partners and customers ask about, international capabilities.

We haven’t got that nailed down because there’s additional work to do on logistics.

So that’s one part of it. You know, I see a question here as whether MDAS replaces direct carrier contracts.

It can or it may not. So, you know, obviously, on the one side, we do offer, service for our, where we have direct relations with the carriers, and that can replace, what you would what you would order directly from the carrier. Or, alternatively, there is the possibility to just get the stand alone MDAS piece, which is the mobile device as a service.

In terms of, what was the last part of your question, Doug? I think just what are the caveats they are?

Yeah. Any of the caveats, and there was a portion of it that had to do with just, integrations with existing services as well.

Right. So, again, we work with, many of the MDM providers out there. I I don’t know which services are being discussed, but, if there are any specific, we’ll look into it. Usually, these are all fairly easily able to be managed.

Felix, anything you wanna add to that?

Yeah. I I I think the only other caveat is it when we look at, let’s say, quantity of environments or number of lines that you guys are currently discussing with customers, you know, we’re open to anything that’s really twenty five to fifteen above. Usually, what the reason why I say that is fifteen fifteen above is where we start seeing a lot more complexity need of our managed device as a service environment. Anything below, there’s not much of a need unless they are a brand new startup or it’s a brand new sort of go to market approach that they’re trying to get their hands around and they don’t have a capability.

Definitely, we can work with that and become a really good fit and and solve a lot of those future growing pains that they may not be ready for at the at the time. So we can definitely support those. And I think those are one of the couple of things that I want to clarify when it comes to that as well too.

Yeah. And I think it’s important to just quickly distinguish here. We’re talking about number of devices, not necessarily number of employees.

Right.

Right? And I think we kinda mix that a lot. For example, the pest control guy who comes and does, our lawn, he’s got his phone, he’s got a tablet, and he’s got probably some kind of a GPS tracker on his car because we get the updates when he’s about to show up. So that’s one employee, three devices. So you gotta think in terms of devices that are being managed, not necessarily employees.

Conclusion and Future Outlook

Excellent clarification. Guys, I am out of time, but this is a phenomenal presentation. Graham, last word to you.

No. Just really excited that, we’ve got, AirSpring jumping into this, arena full scale.

You know, for those of you who know, we do have a couple of other folks in the portfolio that do mobile device as a service. It’s a very popular product growing in popularity, so it’s great to have a company with the reputation of AirSpring getting into the arena, and we’re excited that we’re able to launch that here for you guys today.

Graham, Avi, Felix, wonderful to have you on the call today. Thank you so much for the information. We look forward to having you back soon.

Thank you so much. Thank you. Appreciate it.