In October last year at the Device Management Conference in London, I delivered a presentation together with Blyk, one of our customers, about the day-yo-day difficulties in device management. During the conference, the consensus emerged that a best in class mobile provider cannot achieve an OTA success rate higher than 60%. In other words: at least 40% of all OTA settings attempts fail! We think this is clearly very poor performance, for all good reasons, but still. Based on that discussion at the conference, our customers’ experience and our own experience, we have put together a Top 10 of device management challenges. Or, device management headaches if you will.
Top 10 device management challenges:
1. Over-the-air settings require user acceptance
2. Some devices do not support OTA, require manual configuration
3. New handsets coming to the market through different channels
4. Remote access to a device requires mobile internet
5. End-users are confused when settings arrive
6. Each handset has a different user interface
7. Call centre support is too costly
8. Second hand devices are preconfigured incorrectly
9. Network operator settings get preference over MVNO settings
10. New IMEI ranges and handsets without an IMEI number
More details about this Top 10 can be found here.

The good news if of course that with Qelp’s web based application, most of these issues can be addressed. As Harri Väyrynen from Blyk stated at the Device Management Conference: “Qelp self service application helps us close the gap of those 40% of end-users struggling with settings on their mobile phone.”