Managing devices (and customers) manually has its place at the start of the journey, but quickly runs out of steam

Manual is a great way to start: During R&D and early trials, when you’ve deployed perhaps tens or hundreds of devices to friendly test-customers, providing support to your customers by throwing lots of customer-support people at the problem can be an excellent way to iterate your design, to shake out the bugs in your tech and your proposition. After all, the value of those early customers is more about what they teach you, rather than what they’re paying you – trials are about discovering the unexpected and humans are the ultimate flexible solution to the variety of unexpected problems you’ll discover at this early trial stage.

But ... humans don’t scale! Which is to say that even if you could afford the astronomical cost of scaling-up your support and operations teams in direct proportion to your number of devices (which you can’t) the results would still be poor for your customers. When problems happen (and they will) customers want the problem fixed right, now. The only way to do that is to automate as much as possible of your operations, from visibility to management – and that’s what DevicePilot does.