To understand the impact of unlocked smartphones on your business, ask yourself, where does your profit come from? This is certainly a question that every member of the IT channel has asked themselves many times.
Has a computer — whether it be a desktop, laptop or tablet — ever been your primary source of profit? Unless you’ve been in the IT industry since before 1985, that answer is a resounding “No.” You’ve never made extraordinary profit on any computer, or most any other hardware device, or software. That’s not where your profit lies.
That’s why you became an integrator. As a services provider, you realized that you could generate far more profit for you and your stakeholders by performing valuable services. That’s where your profit comes from.
Unlocked Smartphones Expand Applications
How do smartphones differ from other computers? Like desktops, laptops and tablets, smartphones compute. Today, you can run most productivity and business applications on a smartphone. That said, the core functions of the cellphone — making calls and sending texts — can now be done from the desktop, laptop and tablet, too. So what’s the big difference?
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The most noticeable difference is in size. Smartphones are small enough to take with you anywhere, thus offering many benefits for a variety of use cases.
- If you’re walking a retail floor as a store sales representative, you can take out your smartphone to answer any question posed to you about products, promotions, prices and more. You can check a customer’s credit for them, and you can close and process a sale.
- Nurses or other healthcare practitioners visiting patients in their hospital rooms can use smartphones to view their records, record their medications and other procedures, and note any concerns the patient may have.
- Architects or contractors on job sites can photograph work in progress, consult plans to make sure things are being done correctly or contact the client to give them an update.
- If you’re supervising a manufacturing floor, you can check production schedules, note delays, interact with smart equipment and manage overall progress right from your smartphone.
While only a few of the activities mentioned here resemble making a call, it’s obvious that smartphones are much more than just phones: They are information access and management devices.
Unifying Your Service Offerings
If you’ve served customers with many geographically distributed locations, you’ve experienced the challenge of contracting and coordinating with multiple carriers serving each locality to provide mobile equipment.
Now you get to bring those services back under your roof, simplifying these processes and bringing in another revenue opportunity.
The Unlocked by Samsung line offers fully unlocked mobile devices, such as the flagship Samsung Galaxy S8, S8+ and Note8. They’re available for you to sell directly to your customers as client endpoint devices for integration into larger solutions. Suddenly, you’re back in the integration business, handling all the services for these phones.
With these accounts, you can choose the applications your clients need to have integrated into mobile devices for the most productive work imaginable. Defense-grade Samsung Knox security is built in at the hardware layer into every Unlocked by Samsung device. Additional management solutions like Samsung Knox Configure allow your customers to control exactly which applications will and will not run on these devices.
Design and deploy innovative managed mobility solutions to give your clients complete control over the content, the connectivity and the complete solution from end to end.
A Holistic Approach to Smartphone Integration
As with any integration project involving larger client endpoints, smartphone projects feature service opportunities at three major points in the solution life cycle: before, during and after.
Before the smartphones are procured, you’ll be busy consulting with your client, designing their applications and the other components of their solution, and determining which cloud services will optimize the outcome.
During the procurement process, you’ll be configuring the devices, preparing them for specific users with specific applications, and provisioning them for the carrier or carriers of your choice. All you’ll need to do is add a SIM card from the chosen carrier. Or perhaps these will be Wi-Fi only devices. In that case, you’ll be deploying access points and the network that supports them.
After users have their mobile devices, you’ll be the one resource they turn to for complete service and support of their device, their applications and their data.
Samsung offers comprehensive training on many vertical applications for mobile devices to get you started, along with all the training you’ll need to sell and support. With unlocked devices, you can not only expand your offerings to your clients, but give them the flexibility to configure their device infrastructure to their exact needs.
The Partner Marketing Hub has a wealth of resources for solutions providers. Visit the Samsung Partner Portal today to learn more.
