Partner Insight – Comm360

How bringing together hardware and software in a single offer for customers is a winning go-to-market strategy.

We sat down with Comm360, one of our main partners in Singapore, to understand their motivations in partnering with us, and to dive deeper into their go-to-market strategy of bundling rugged mobile devices, mobile applications, and mobile device management.

Comm360’s core product in their PTT360 mobile application, and web console. It is a modern push-to-talk solution which caters to frontline workers.

Can you quickly present the main use cases for PTT adoption, and the market verticals PTT applications can be found in?

Push-to-talk (PTT) applications are the modern version of “Walkie-talkie” applications, they answer the basic need for instant group communications. The main difference between PTT and traditional walkie-talkie devices is that PTT apps are independent from hardware, and can work on any mobile device. PTT applications provide instant communication worldwide using the internet and VoIP protocols, whereas walkie talkie devices use radio frequencies to communicate with each other, thereby allowing PTT apps to offer more features.

Our PTT360 app by Comm360 supports multimedia messaging using Text, Photo & Video, GPS location monitoring & tracking of field workers, and multichannel monitoring with 1-1 or 1-many push-to-talk features.

The market verticals we operate in are all markets where you can find frontline workers, for example shipping & transportation, hospitality, F&B, healthcare, security, construction. These are markets where frontline workers are on the field, and need to be able to communicate with other devices with the push of one button.

How does an EMM help you in successfully implementing PTT for your customers?

We always look to automate and maximise productivity in the implementation of our PTT360 app for our customer deployments, with little or no downtime for their daily operations.

We try to do the bulk part of it remotely, especially these days with COVID-19 limiting our customer physical interactions. This is where working hand in hand with an EMM provider like WizyEMM really shows its benefits.

With an EMM we can quickly deploy, configure and update our PTT application on the devices we are deploying, using the Managed Google Play store. Coordinating with the device manufacturers we work with, we can deploy these configurations to devices directly through Android zero-touch enrollment. We associate to each IMEI a specific configuration we have defined beforehand on the WizyEMM console. Once the end user turns on the device, the configuration is directly applied. So this really helps us in streamlining our deployment process.

There’s also a big advantage in locking down our devices into a kiosk mode, to create a simple user experience on the device, and to prevent misuse.

How has directly working with an EMM provider and device manufacturers been an accelerator of your business?

Working closely with several device manufacturers and WizyEMM, we have been able to create a vertical offer for the markets we operate in. It is a one-stop solution & single SKU, where we combine devices, apps and EMM. Customers can immediately sign up and deploy PTT devices for their operations. This Go-To-Market strategy has really helped in providing a complete solution for our enterprise customers, and has definitely been an accelerator for our business. Customers will always ask for EMM whenever we approach them with our PTT solutions, so this partnership has enabled us to also significantly shorten our sales cycles.