There is a return on investment in the solution because we have our devices secured. Also, we have discipline in working. In addition, they address security patching as well.

Customers can achieve some cost savings using SOTI. For example, SOTI can keep track of things like data consumption and roaming. Say there's a truck driver out on the road playing Pandora over his phone and it's adding up all these roaming charges to the company, they can get the data on stuff like that, then configure the devices to not allow roaming.

We really haven't had that much time with it yet. It's working well. We have more flexibility with the solution, but there isn't really a fixed number that I can give for ROI at this point.

Time is money. I have a truck out there, a $450,000, 5,000-gallon steel truck that's automated out there, and I'm paying a very qualified driver to run it. These guys have commercial driver licenses, and every hour they're not pumping is an hour of cost.

For every shift, there are five or six hours man-hours we have to have put aside to process those customers, to get them into our system, so their information is available, and that, of course, is manual time. If a truck's not running, not moving, not pumping, it's costing us something.

If you're running around with a half-million-dollar asset, or even a $350,000 asset, it needs to make money. It needs to be pumping fuel to make money. So, yes, we have return on investment with this solution.

We have witnessed an ROI while using this solution. 

In terms of ROI, it's all soft costs. It's cost-avoidance, it's efficiency. There isn't really a hard ROI that you could point at. It saves us time for expensive labor representatives and in pushing out applications and updates and getting what our customers need to them quicker. We couldn't manage our mobile inventory or our mobile applications without it.

It has saved us money because the manpower needed to manage all the devices, without an MDM, would be a lot. But I can't give any specific numbers.

I don't see those numbers and I don't think about it that way. But let me give you an example of something that happened since we deployed SOTI.

We've had a couple of instances where tablets have gone missing or stolen, but we had one really interesting case where we had a driver who was carjacked at gunpoint. They took his vehicle, with the tablet installed. And thank God we had some good local resources who could pick up the phone and call me immediately and tell me what was going on and ask if there was a way we could track that vehicle and I said, “As long as the tablet is on, I can tell you everywhere this guy goes.” We were actually able to not only recover the vehicle but, because this gentleman who decided to take the vehicle, and everything inside it, actually took the tablet out - it looked like it was "off" because the screen was asleep - he put it in his backpack and he continued on his way that day. He was arrested a few hours later because I was on the phone with LAPD talking about where this tablet was moving to.

It was the most exciting Monday morning I've had in a long time.

The transportation vehicle was a minivan but it had been highly customized. It had a wheelchair lift in it, the seating had been done, the chassis was built up. It was a very expensive vehicle. So being able to recover that $100,000-plus vehicle was one big thing.

Also, having the technology to say, "Hey, let's stop this guy from doing this to somebody else," that sent us over the moon. That one case - and I've told this story many times - has allowed us to put our foot in the door, and say, "Look, with our company not only are you getting this great technology and great service and everything else we provide, but we have these tools that allow us to  succeed and be better than our competition." This is just an example of that.

If any organization has this struggle - devices in vehicles, devices given to employees, that do go missing from time to time - we're probably at a 50 percent recovery rate, where we have been able to recover such devices. That's all because of SOTI and that we're able to track those devices through locating methods.

It's really a time-saver. It allows our plant to keep moving. If we have an issue, I don't have to recall all the devices. It allows things to keep flowing, whereas before, everything had to stop, wasting time and money.

For us, the solution is part of the overall business cost. It's required. It's not about saving money. It's about supporting the users' security.

The ROI is US$4 for each US$1 invested.

That was not an investment at all. Just a tool to manage some mobile devices so it will be hard to calculate "return".

We probably wouldn't see the savings until everyone is actually on the MDM. We were hoping that we wouldn't have to have people come in for us to push out apps or iOS updates. But I do have to have them come in at the moment to switch from the current MDM to this one. It will be a little while until we see any type of savings.