Cisco Jasper has released a new platform to help enterprises automate the running of employee smartphones and other devices.
The Control Centre for Mobile Enterprise helps enterprises add the likes of travel plans, track devices and allocate costs to the right internal department automatically.
The company said the platform strips away the need for companies to handle these kinds of tasks manually, reducing total cost of ownership.
It said: “Enterprises have provided their employees with mobile devices like smartphones and tablets for well over a decade now, yet the management of these devices and services remains largely reactive and manual, with little use of technology and automation. The result is anything from delayed services, surprise telecom charges, high operational and support costs, and a poor employee experience.”
Cisco Jasper said the platform, an extension of its Control Centre IoT service, can manage and monitor the connectivity, data consumption and operation of mobile services instantly, and deliver more predictable bills.
Jeff Orr, Research Director at ABI Research, said: “In the next two years, business smartphones will grow to over one billion subscribers globally. There is an immediate market need for solutions that help enterprises automate device connectivity, usage accounting, and service management, to curtail unnecessary mobility expenses.”
As well as the real-time monitoring of usage and control over costs, Cisco Jasper said the platform can handle the likes of adding features, suspending subscriptions, changing SIMs and upgrading devices across an entire workforce.
Marc Austin, Head of Mobile Enterprise Products at Cisco Jasper, said: “Management of any connected device consists of common challenges like unpredictable service costs and inefficient management processes, and this is especially true for business mobile phones and tablets. Cisco Jasper has partnered with over 50 service providers worldwide to enable enterprises to automatically connect and manage their IoT services, and now we are extending the same proven capabilities to business mobile devices.”