Disrupting Simplicity: Cloud connected Remote Access and Automation

Most of the business tools we use on a day-to-day basis are in the cloud. Whether it’s a CRM for sales and customer management, multiple different online accounting packages, collaboration tools, webinars, mail, documents and meeting minutes, source repositories, etcetera, it makes us wonder if we have any local files anymore!

As the cloud has become more ubiquitous, we expect it to always just work. And for an administrator of these tools we expect to be able to trivially change, add, delete things for our team without any hassle.

This leads to a recent frustration we wanted to share. While using a (massively successful) cloud tool as its administrator for our organization we needed to simply bump up a service for a user. This extra service unfortunately was “pay-walled” behind a subscription upgrade.

We tried to apply this upgrade to one user and got the dreaded "you need to talk to sales; please call..."

After leaving a message and waiting a day we finally got hold of someone. Explaining that we simply wanted to add this extra service to an account, we received a further dreaded: "No: you can't do that. You can only upgrade everyone". After considering the implications for a moment and after deciding we just need to keep: "Fine we'll upgrade everyone. But, can we pause some users that don’t really need the service at this time". To answer to this was: "I’m not sure we can pause users like that, but I'll get back to you"…. And so it continued for another week.

What’s interesting is that we just wanted immediate gratification for what we considered a simple change. We didn’t want to have to wait/speak to a human for something so trivial. We didn’t want any complexity. But we were left with frustration, wasted time, and a solution we did not want… and now we are certainly open to making a switch in technology for this service.

This is what we want to avoid with Gearlinx ZERO, we want experiences like this to be better. First, we won’t paywall features. If you have ZERO you have ZERO. The end. As we evolve in our market and add incremental and powerful new abilities, we won’t paywall them behind “upgraded” edition. We will make sure the customer is in control. Need to pause a device? (cold spare? Making some changes?) One click. Need to pause 1000 devices? One click. Done. Easy. No: “please call sales”.

We’ll look after the remote access and connectivity. And by minimizing human frustration and increasing customer self-service and automation we vastly increase customer operational resilience and let their IT staff and administrators just get on with other business outcomes.