Provision and Manage Devices at the Edge Faster and More Efficiently With Esper EdgeBox

How long does it take for you to stage, kit, and deploy each new device? How much Internet bandwidth does it require? How about when you update an app across your entire device fleet? All of this eats up time, money, or both. We’ve talked to countless customers who have run into bandwidth issues that can potentially slow or shut down critical other processes or have to fork up money to temporarily expand their bandwidth just to roll out an update. Esper EdgeBox is the answer.

EdgeBox is a managed service that runs on an on-premises gateway device. It allows you to provision and execute management operations to edge devices locally instead of making calls to the cloud.

Previously, customers could use Esper Local Cache to provision devices locally. Using Local Cache, customers can provision new devices 4x faster and use 10x less bandwidth. Now, with EdgeBox, which builds on the capabilities of Local Cache, customers can not only provision new devices but also perform device operations locally, such as deploying OTA updates, rolling out new application versions, or uploading new content to devices.

Customers with experience deploying large device fleets know that every minute of provisioning and every MB of data transferred per device matters. When you’re crunched for time to get thousands of devices out of the warehouse and into the end user’s hands, minimizing the time it takes to stage and kit — including provisioning —each device is critical. While exact provisioning times depend on specific device configurations and hardware specs, customers using EdgeBox have reduced device provisioning time from 24 minutes (traditional MDM) to 8 minutes (Esper without EdgeBox) to 2 minutes (Esper with EdgeBox) per device. For a fleet of 1,000 devices, that’s a savings of 367 hours or about 9 business weeks. 

Similarly, when deploying app updates, one customer was able to reduce bandwidth requirements from 240MB (traditional MDM) to 100MB (Esper without EdgeBox) to 3MB (Esper with EdgeBox) — a 98.75% reduction.

What are the benefits of Esper EdgeBox?

• Accelerate provisioning on every device, whether you do your own kitting and staging or leverage a 3PL service.
• Reduce Internet bandwidth requirements during provisioning
• Minimize Internet bandwidth requirements for management operations such as app deployment or content uploads

How it works

Customers can use their own hardware and install the EdgeBox software, or EdgeBox can be deployed on a pre-configured, Esper-provided gateway device. The gateway device running EdgeBox communicates directly with Esper Cloud. The local devices then communicate with the gateway device to pull data. For example, if you have 100 local devices requiring a 5 MB app update, without EdgeBox, you’d transfer 500MB from the cloud to devices. With EdgeBox, you’d only transfer 5MB from the cloud to your gateway device, and then your 100 devices could transfer 5MB each locally, a significant reduction in bandwidth required.

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If you have a large or growing fleet of devices and are looking to reduce time and bandwidth constraints, give us a shout.