Esper

Esper provides device management for dedicated device fleets, publishing Esper Deploy for device management, Esper Foundation for custom Android operating systems and Esper Firebolt for Windows, with a published State of Device Management report.

Building a custom operating system is the capability that separates this from ordinary mobile device management, and it addresses what dedicated devices actually require.

A company phone is a general purpose device that happens to belong to an employer. A kiosk, a point of sale terminal, a delivery scanner or a digital menu board is not: it exists to do one thing, and everything else the operating system offers is a liability. The settings menu, the browser, the app store and the notification shade are all routes for a device to end up displaying something it should not, or being taken home.

Locking that down with policies applied over a standard operating system works imperfectly, because the policies sit above a system designed for a general user and there are usually ways around them. Building the operating system for the purpose removes the capability rather than restricting it.

The commercial consequence is significant at scale. A retailer with two thousand tablets in stores loses staff time to every device that leaves its intended state, and a device that must be collected and reimaged costs far more than the incident that caused it.

Remote management is the other half, since dedicated devices are deployed in places without technical staff, and someone must be able to fix, update or replace the configuration of a terminal in a shop three hundred miles away.

Pricing is published from $2 per device with $4 published for building a modern scalable fleet.