Although the concept of device-as-a-service (DaaS) has been gathering industry buzz in recent years, it took the global events of the past 18 months to move it centre stage.
As lockdown restrictions caused companies to clamour for devices and kit to enable their employees to work from home, and now as hybrid working is set to become a popular working model, DaaS offers businesses a cost-effective, scalable solution that addresses a distributed workforce and outfits employees quickly. It provides organisations the ability to mitigate the costs of new hardware by offering it on a subscription basis.
Analyst house Gartner predicted that the number of users for DaaS will grow by 150 percent between 2020 and 2023, driven by this insatiable appetite to establish cost-effective secure remote working spaces for employees working remotely.
Jonathan Harris, Chief Strategy Officer at Aura, told UC Today that by adopting a DaaS approach, organisations allow themselves to future-proof their business for uncertain times, as well as allowing them to hit sustainability goals they have set themselves.
“Companies not realising the true value of their tech investments is a huge problem,” he stated.
“Generally, the people making those decisions are techies who go for speeds, feeds and look, not usability and manageability. It’s now a completely different conversation than what it used to be, and a lot of it is about education and budget expectations.”
“For example, for customers who have a green emissions target, buying 80,000 bits of plastic with a CO2 footprint of billions of tonnes is probably not what they want, so there’s lots of ways we can change that impact. These are interesting times, but the biggest problem we have is that people don’t budget properly for devices”
But it is not enough for organisations to just have these devices on hand, they need to be able to track their use and efficiency to ensure they are realising the true value of their investment, according to Harris.
Customers need a platform that provides comprehensive, real-time analytics and reporting that can keep up with the constantly changing user demands and technology adoption.
“When you roll out equipment and services you need to make sure it’s all working as expected and that the user experience is acceptable,” Harris elaborated.
“For example, our Aura Insight solution allows us to be proactive, so rather than waiting for people to complain, we can see who’s having good and bad experiences with their tech. It allows us to home in quickly and try and solve the problem before it starts.”
What’s unique about Aura’s DaaS solution is that it offers customers the ability to transact globally and through multiple currencies.
“We can procure all of the equipment and manage the distribution and rollout,” Harris explained.
“A lot of DaaS offerings do not allow the equipment to leave the country. For example, if you’re a UK business, that equipment can’t leave the UK, but at Aura we have the partnerships and global capability to deliver on a truly global scale.”
“We also provide flexibility in that they can return the equipment, reduce the contract, cancel it, or up the contract. With us, it’s true flexibility and with the added ability to do it globally.”
