Digi International Inc. (DGII) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. It's 10:35. So I say we kick things off. Over to you, Corey.

All right. Well, thanks so much, Randi. Definitely appreciate the banter beforehand, too. I think a nice little trailer for today's presentation. This, of course, is a webinar focusing on the power of remote management, and I'm Corey Brenner, Channel Marketing Manager for Digi International. It's been my pleasure to be the moderator for today's presentation, and I'm looking forward to definitely having some great conversations at the end, too. There should be time for Q&A. So definitely, if you do have questions, like we said, feel free to drop them into the chat and we'll answer them in the order they are received and kind of get to that in a [indiscernible]. This is, of course, the second in our ongoing global collaboration series with supply, and it's been a great series so far. What do you think, Randi? Are we going to have some more installations? I'm not sure if we're feeling a Lord of the Rings trilogy or maybe more of a Star Wars saga, what are you feeling?

I mean, just from the -- like you were saying the banter that we had, there's so many topics that can be discussed. There's so much going on in this space alone. I see this definitely being a Star Wars format, Episode 8, 9, bring it on to cover.

The [indiscernible] Absolutely. I think there's so much to talk about too. And like you said, there's really a lot of different topics that we kind of have at the front of our mind. But if other folks online do have something they'd love to have us dive further into, be free to pop some suggestions into the chat, and we'll take that into mind as we're starting to put together some next content. I know we do, like we said, have a ton of different ideas, and we're looking to continuing the saga here in the future. So we're also happy to really have you join us today. And in fact, all of the attendees will be registered to win a $100 gift card just for stopping in and hanging out. So stay tuned. Of course, I'm honored to be joined today by an incredibly smart and talented panel of speakers. From the Digi side, we have Brad Cole, our Director of Software Engineering; as well as Kim Griffin, the Director of Product Management for our remote management solution. And of course, Randi De Silva, the Technical Account Manager here at Sapply. In today's presentation, Brad will begin by giving an overview of remote management, current capabilities and potential value of looking into a cloud-based solution; then Kim will walk us through the secure capabilities of Digi Remote Manager and how comprehensive cloud management can save you and your business, time, money and energy; then finally, Randi will share how Sapply utilizes cloud management services and put our simple solution to the test with a quick demonstration. We'll wrap things up, like I said, with discussion and how you can get involved with Digi Remote Manager. And of course, we will have time at the end for some Q&A. So stick around. And with that, I'm excited to pass the mic over to Brad Cole to kick us off.

Thanks, Corey. So Kim and I are the openers and Randi is the headliner. I get it. I get it. All right. Thanks, everybody, for spending some time with us this morning or afternoon, wherever you are. As Corey said, what we're going to talk about is remote device management by asking a few questions specifically. What is it? Like really, what is it? What do we really mean when we say remote device management? Why do you need it? So we'll look at some of the key fundamentals that people don't consider until it's possibly too late. And then lastly, we'll look at how to achieve a good remote device management solution. Now device management system is really the command center of your network of devices. So it provides visibility as well as control over your deployed fleet of devices. Now one of the biggest misconceptions that I've seen in the industry is that people often refer to device management as primarily the monitoring and analytics of remote devices. While that is part of the solution, it misses a key aspect, the ability to interact bidirectionally with those devices on demand. You need to have full control over your deployed fleet of devices in a very secure way. The device management application should allow you to organize your devices by location, by function, or really however you need to organize things to meet your business needs. Not only should a device management solution provide you with full control, a good device management system should do most of the work for you. So what I mean by that is you should only need to configure what you want to have happen, then the solution will make that happen on your behalf. From ensuring your devices in the field are compliant with configuration templates to ensuring they're all running consistent version of any custom business logic you may want to deploy. We'll get into these capabilities in a little more detail in a minute. A device management solution must also be flexible, meaning your application data, telemetry, device data, connections, et cetera, should not need to be tied to your device management solution. You should have the flexibility to manage your remote devices and application data in the way that best fits your business needs. We'll also get into this in a little more detail a little bit later on. Now let's look at some of the reasons why you need a remote device management solution. Let's break it down by focusing on some of the key components of device management. First, security. In the world of IoT, security is the #1 concern of most IT managers and managed service providers. You need to be assured that your deployed devices are secured from a cryptographic standpoint, but also from a compliance standpoint. For example, if you set up a specific configuration profile that you expect each remote device to adhere to, how do you know that no one has changed that configuration remotely, whether inadvertently or intentionally or locally for that matter. If there's a vulnerability discovered in components associated with your remote device, let's say, the firmware or your application logic, how quickly can you deploy a patch? Security is a constantly shifting landscape. So here, we like to think of security in terms of it's not if, but when. And are you prepared to deal with it? A good device management application should provide tools that allow you to make changes quickly and easily to address security concerns. And next is control. You should have the ability to make configuration changes, update softwares and commands and even access devices that are connected to or connected behind your remote devices. And if you have a large fleet of deployed devices, it most likely means that they're widely distributed in different geographic regions or even have different business purposes. So you should be able to organize your devices in a way that makes it easy for you to monitor and control them in a way that makes sense to you. You should never need to go visit your devices once they're deployed. So I like to think of devices as being similar to a Mars rover. They're on another planet and you can't get to it. So this goes for other devices connected to or behind your primary remote device as well. You should be able to access all of your assets behind or connected to your remote device without ever having to go visit them. And then insight is critical. So as I mentioned earlier, you do need to have insight into how your devices are performing. So you need to know how they're performing at a glance. You need to know which devices are working properly and which devices need attention. A good device management solution will provide detailed information about device health, but also be able to distill it down to simple green, yellow, red, alert status. And these data need to be persisted so that you can go back and analyze how things have performed over time. Now one of the other big reasons that answers the why question is financial. So let's take a look at a comparison of how much it could cost an organization to address critical security vulnerability or frankly, any required remote update if you don't have a good device management solution versus if you do. So these numbers are illustrative only, and they don't reflect any specific quotes from any vendors. They're also expressed in U.S. dollars, but I want to give you kind of order of magnitude comparisons. These points were also outlined in a blog post that is available here, the link and the presentation you will have access to once you download the presentation. So I encourage everybody to read that. We go into a little bit more detail on some of these points. But in this simple example, we've included estimates for what it would take to prepare a device for deployment to the field, then once deployed, updating firmware, deploying security patches, validating configurations and applying changes of other kinds, if needed. Now without a device management solution, the costs are orders of magnitude more than they would be if you had one. As you can see, you could easily get into hundreds of thousands of dollars just to deal with a couple of hundred devices in the field. Now compare that to about $9,600 with a proper device management solution for the same number of devices. This is because while you may be able to access each device remotely on an individual basis, you'll likely be forced to deploy a tech to visit each site or each device on-site due to any number of reasons, cellular APN connectivity restrictions or other challenges. But even if you're accessing one device at a time remotely, it still takes time. So this becomes extremely expensive very quickly. And if you're dealing with a severe security vulnerability, each hour your devices remain unpatched increases your security risk. And this is the type of thing that you really should be able to correct within minutes with a few clicks versus days or weeks by deploying service techs. Okay. So how do you achieve this? Is there a central application that does all of this? There are no widely adopted standards for device management or for IoT in general. We have another great article about this on our website, another blog post. And so link at the bottom of this slide that will be available to you. I highly encourage you to check that out as well. There are many protocols like MQTT, lightweight M2M, CoAP, et cetera. But while those are standard protocols, they are just part of the equation. Just like HTTP is a standard protocol used for websites. You can't take a website that was designed for a bank and use it for a music streaming service. Yes, both of those use HTTP but how and what they communicate over that protocol are completely different things. And the application at both ends of the conversation needs to understand those details. Device management is very similar. Each manufacturer will have different methods for how they handle configurations, firmware updates, other options like file system access, file downloads or remote control. With a Digi solution, device management is a key part of our value proposition. It's baked into the solution. Our goal is to provide you with ultimate control while both making it easy and flexible allowing you to integrate device management into your workflow and even into your own application if you prefer using our APIs. So the right solution should give you both the most functionality and provide the most flexibility. It should handle the day-to-day device management tasks, allow you to send your data to wherever you want to send it and allow you to control your fleet of devices from anywhere or any application. So things that you should act yourself. In addition to collecting data from devices, does a device management solution support firmware updates? Can you perform configuration changes? How about deploying Edge software to your devices remotely or send remote commands. And can it do all of these things in an automated way? In addition to those capabilities, Digi can provide various connectivity options, depending on your organization's security needs. The device management connection is fully encrypted and authenticated bidirectionally by default. So connectivity over the Internet is fairly secure. The bidirectional authentication, coupled with encryption makes it nearly impossible to compromise with attacks like man in the middle. But if you require further security options, Digi can provide that as well. For example, we can provide various connectivity options like a dedicated VPN tunnel, a web proxy for device connections. Even an in-region instance of Digi Remote Manager, if a business case warrants that. There are many -- there are multiple options, providing an added layer of protection if your security controls require that, even a lightweight on-prem solution should that be an absolute requirement. All right. So that's a lot in a short period of time, and that's basically the high-level overview. Now I'm going to hand it over to Kim for some real-world examples and getting into some of the details.

Thanks, Brad. Hi, everyone. So as Brad said, I am going to expand on the topics that he just covered by going through some real-world scenarios and use cases to show how remote management, specifically Digi's Remote Manager application, helped you and your team get the most out of your responsibilities in managing your IoT fleet? Okay. So for the purposes of today's webinar, let's just pretend that I work for the [indiscernible] city of Dundee and I'm responsible for the city's traffic management network. Now the city of Dundee has a network of cellular routers, pretty much at all of their main intersections. Connected Edge devices include traffic cameras, speed limit sensors, pedestrian traffic [indiscernible]. So of course, the most important fact is that I'm a Digi customer. And I am using Digi traffic management solutions, which include the cellular routers as well as the device management platform, Digi Remote Manager or you may hear me refer to it as Digi RM. Okay. So we're going to start with a situation where vulnerability has been announced, outlining that a common encryption algorithm has been compromised. So I'm feeling a little nervous because, look, any time a security vulnerability is announced, you know, if you're a network manager, you might get kind of that feeling deep in your stomach going, oh, no, I hope this isn't the one. But look, before it can grow into a [ global ] panic, Digi is already on top of it, right? So they immediately announced their awareness of this vulnerability and they've even published an updated formal release, which contains an updated encryption library, which addresses this vulnerability. And I know this because I've received the notification via e-mail, and also from within the Digi RM app via its notification center that a new firmware is available. And I know that this new firmware has security updates because if you can see those red arrows, that indicates that it's a critical update, and Digi always prioritizes all security updates as critical. Okay. So now I need to get that firmware update with that security patch that [ way ] to my network of routers. So how am I going to do that? Well, I'm going to use Digi RM's configuration manager to create new -- to create a new configuration for my devices with that new firmware. Now I need to test it first. So I treat a test group with the new test devices. And that only takes me a few minutes. Now that's critical because -- there's been urgency here, right? I'm in a bit of a hurry because the last thing I need is a security breach of our traffic network. So once I complete the testing, I'm ready to push it out to all of my deployed routers. So in order to do that, I choose to create an automation that will update the router config and remove the router. And then I set a schedule to kick off that automated update overnight when traffic is minimal. Now just to make sure that I didn't overlook any devices, I enabled the auto-scan feature to ensure that all of the routers have the correct firmware configuration settings and files on the file system based on that new configuration. And I set this to scan and run on a daily basis. So what happens is if the device is not in compliance with that configuration that I said, I have the flexibility to auto remediate or just alert so that someone can take a further look into it. It just all depends on what your business practices are and what your network needs are. And this is such a valuable service because it gives me the assurance that my devices are secure and if something isn't right, I'm either going to be alerted or it will be fixed automatically by the rules that I set. So Digi RM provides a lot of flexibility with standard device and management services like monitoring and configuring, but it also integrates automation to make it easier to keep my network secure. Okay. So the important thing is I was able to do all of this from the comfort of my home office. All of my devices were upgraded and not a single truck had to be rolled to get it done. So I'm going to say this again, right? I was able to upgrade my entire network all from the comfort of my home office and not a single truck had to be rolled. So look, the value of having a platform like the Digi Remote Manager is that I can be prepared. I can create a plan, set a schedule and execute without having someone physically touch each of those devices or even individually log in to upgrade them. So I'm saving time, money and I'm getting peace of mind that my devices can be updated in a timely manner and I'm keeping my network secure, and my device is compliant with that configuration that I've tested and I designated. Okay. We're going to -- we're just going to leave the city of Dundee here for just a minute, right? So we're going to talk about Telstra's plans to sunset 3G in June of 2024. We did a webinar previously on general 3G sunsetting and upgrading your fleet to 4G. So hopefully, some of you were able to attend. But if not, we will provide the link to that reporting. Here, and this presentation is going to be made available to you after the webinar. Okay. So I pulled this directly from Telstra's website. And it has this nice little countdown board. You see there 25 months, 135 working days, right? 25 months. Have you thought about how this is going to impact your network? I mean are you really prepared to update all of your cellular devices. The bottom line is do you have a plan? And I know that 2024 seems a long way off, but it will sneak up on you. I mean we recently went through this with AT&T, right? AT&T had announced their 3G shutdown years in advance. So basically, customers get to update their cellular modem firmware and have configuration updates deployed to the routers. So of course, the customers that were using Digi Remote Manager, they were able to start planning and executing well in advance, and they can do things like create automations that would update the cellular modem firmware and even issue required [indiscernible] so that the router would not try and connect on a 3G connection. But we did have some customers who contacted us literally days before the shutdown, asking if they could purchase licenses so that they could remotely upgrade their devices. And you know what -- it was just panic and chaos and it was not fun for anyone. And unfortunately, some customers had outages as a result of not planning and being prepared. So again, after going through that, it just highlights why having the right remote management solution is so critical. And let's just put something as big as a 3G shutdown aside, there are many other reasons that you might need to be making network-wide changes, right? For instance, IP address changes, password changes, routing policy changes. And I mean, if you're a network manager, there are probably other things that you're maybe painfully aware of. So a platform like Digi Remote Manager provides you with those things that Brad had highlighted earlier, like security, control, productivity with literally a few clicks, and you can implement network-led changes across hundreds or even thousands of devices. So just make sure you have a plan. All right. So let's get back to my position as a traffic management -- network of traffic management for the city of Dundee. So back through that security vulnerability, and we didn't have any outages or any negative impact as a result of that vulnerability. So yes, right? Life is good, and my traffic management network is running smoothly. But -- okay, so 1 day I'm reviewing my weekly device metrics via Digi RM data stream capabilities. And I noticed that there's a particular device that keeps rebooting at the same time every day. And you can see that here in this data streams graph. And I love this data stream capability because it allows me to collect and visualize my time series data for [ quick ] use into my network and connected devices. I mean I can create data streams on any data that comes from the device and even from devices connected to my radar. So it's super insightful. Okay. So based on that [ regrouped ] graph that we were just looking at, I decided that I need to take a deeper look at some additional health metrics that I am collecting via the data streams [ service ] and I find that the memory utilization on this router is increasing over a 24-hour period to a point where the device has to reboot in order to keep functioning. And that's indicative there of that chart you're seeing. So -- all right. Look, I need a little extra help trying to troubleshoot this memory leak. So I call into Digi's technical support desk, and they were able to help me troubleshoot this device by looking at that -- some historical Digi RM data, like what you see here, these are device event logs. So I enable the collection of device events in Digi RM. And this is really helpful in troubleshooting because often, the first thing that I look at in troubleshooting is what happened on the device, and I can find it here in the device event. And with that data as well as the data stream information that we were looking at previously, Digi support was able to help me pinpoint the issue and they walked me through how to resolve it. Now also, Digi RM lets me create custom alerts. So they have a really nice setup wizard to walk me through that process. So lessons learned from just what just happened, I created alerts for issues that might cause outages, right, like the memory utilization, high temperatures, CPU spikes, signal strength fluctuation and even power brownouts. So again, whatever data is coming from the device or devices behind the router to Digi RM, they can be monitored and tracked via data streams. So I mean, I'm feeling even better that I have safeguards in place to make sure my network continues to run smoothly, and I have a way to know if trouble might be coming, so I can be proactive. Okay. As a result of the constant rebooting and this often happens, the pedestrian traffic [indiscernible] connected to the Digi router became nonresponsive. Now Digi RM has this cool feature where you can establish a terminal session to the router and then console to the devices connected to that router. So I'm able to access that pedestrian traffic monitor via out-of-band access. And so I'm able to reboot it from the console all through Digi Remote Manager, and I'm able to bring it back online. So not only does that pedestrian traffic monitor help control the crosswalk sides, we push pedestrian traffic data from that box to a customized application in AWS and the city uses that to model traffic patterns during rush hour. So with remote manager, I have several options of getting that data to a third-party application. So it can be through Digi RM [ in-band ], or it can go directly from the device to a third-party application. So with Digi RM, I have access to the file system on the routers. So I can push Edge application logic to the devices like a Python script to set up the data path from the device to my application in AWS or any other cloud platform or I can set up push monitors using our web services APIs to get data from Digi RM to my application. And look, the Digi RM APIs are quite extensive and everything that I can do from within the UI, I am able to programmatically do with the APIs. So if I have my own custom-built management application where I was managing other platforms and other systems, I can use the remote manager APIs to pull data from my Digi devices into that application and I'm able to manage my devices, all of my devices as well as my other platforms and my other systems from there. So I hope you've seen kind of the incredible flexibility that exists with Digi RM. Okay. Well, we're savvy at the end of my job with the city of Dundee. But hopefully, you've learned a few things about remote management and our platform that maybe you didn't know before. And of course, we couldn't go through everything Digi RM has to offer. But if you would like a more in-depth demo, please let Randi and the team at Sapply know, and we can certainly get something set up. But I do want to circle back to something that Brad said earlier about remote management. And what you should be looking for. So remember, the right solution should give you both the most flexibility and functionality, right? And it should handle the database device management tasks. And you should also be able to send your data to wherever you want to send it and allow you to control your fleet of devices from anywhere or from any application. So I just -- I hope you keep those things in mind as you are looking at options for your remote management solution. And then finally, to wrap up, I know that we focused this conversation on traffic management, but Digi Remote Manager has a wealth of innovative features that really can add value across numerous industry verticals. So thanks to Randi and the talented team at Sapply, we've seen a number of these solutions implemented in Australia, New Zealand, Rest of World, and we are looking forward to working with you on future opportunities as well. So with that, I'm going to turn things over to Randi for a demonstration of some remote managers' capabilities.

Okay. Thanks, Kim and Brad. I appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedules and evenings over there in the States to do this webinar. And thank you to all who have joined us this morning for Digi and Sapply's second installment of what will hopefully be a nice long series as Corey hinted. So both Brad and Kim have done a great job explaining the whats, whys and hows of remote management. So I wanted to do a walk-through of Digi's own remote management platform live essentially with a few prerecorded videos of what I prepared earlier. So this should give you a feel for all the features and functionality already discussed during this morning's session as well as really highlight the benefits of a top-shelf, single pane of glass central management platform such as Digi Remote Manager. Now obviously, due to time constraints, I won't go through every single page and feature available on this platform. But I'll cover the big-ticket items. And as Kim mentioned earlier, if you require a more in-depth demonstration, we'd be happy to arrange something at a later date. And as always, if you have any questions, feel free to shoot them through on the chat, so we can address them at the end. So let me go to this screen here, and we'll do here and share that to you. So the first case that you see upon logging in is a dashboard that shows you a live high-level status of your network. Now this was just a demo account we've established purely for the purposes of this webinar. But as Brad pointed out, you can straight away see the value in having a traffic [ like ] view of your network performance when you're managing tens, hundreds or even thousands of devices. This page is obviously customizable as well. You've got a few different widgets that you can add here and you can rearrange anything to suit your needs best. So then next up, we have the devices' page, listing every single device that's been added to remote manager. Now you can see -- just on this page, it contains quite a bit of information on each of your devices with the added benefit of being able to customize the columns in a way that works best for your needs. So if we go to the little menu here and select columns, you can see every single parameter that's available. And that's just on this front page without having to drill down into specific devices. So it really is flexible and allows you to really tailor DRM, Digi Remote Manager to what you need most out of it. So once we click on a device -- sorry, no, I'll go back a step. Just to add a device is really quite simple. It's as simple as entering in the device ID, MAC address, or IMEI and really Digi Remote Manager does the rest. Now depending on the size and complexity of your network, there are many ways to organize your devices be it sub accounts, groups and tags, as you can see here. You can even import large numbers of devices using the multiple devices page and a CSV import file. So we'll just cancel that for the moment and click into the device. So clicking on the device will let you drill down into that device and access additional details and features. You can view in-depth system and network metrics. You can manage individual conflict in the settings tab, which I've prepared a short video on in a second and even log in to the device's local CLI or command-line interface using the console tab. Now this feature is especially handy should you ever need to troubleshoot on Edge assets that's connected to or behind the device rather than sending a tech out in the field, you can do this straight from your remote manager platform. So this is a router that's obviously sitting on the test lab. And with any luck, we should be able to get some output from it. Yes. So that just [indiscernible] out the current running config of the device. Now just as another example, we can see that the router is on 20.75.101. So let's try and ping another device that's on that same LAN network. And you can see here a pretty much instant response, and it really does take out the need to go on-site to do your initial diagnosis. And I think that's just such a cool feature. Instead of having to mess around with [indiscernible] and public IP addresses or VPNs, straight from RM, you've got access into everything that the router is connected to. So I've also prepared a video of some of the real-world examples that are working for the city of Dundee already mentioned. Let me just bring that up. Can we see the pin happening guys? Cool. So let me just get that started. Now you can see I'm currently pinning it on .101. But if you go into the Settings tab, as you can see, all I do is browsed through the config tree and eventually get to the Ethernet setting, I change the value and hit Apply. And from the pings I left running once I've hit Apply, you can see it's almost instant that it goes from .101 into 201. So it really is, as if I'm sitting next to the router, connected with the LAN cable and doing it in person, but I'm not -- so that's fantastic. So on the same page -- has it already started? Yes. So on the same page, I've got -- let me do this one, you've got the ability to upgrade firmware of the device which you can also do on a group level using the configuration page, more on that later. Now anyone that's attempted to update firmware of a network device knows it can be quite an arduous temperamental process even when you're sitting in front of it, let alone attempting it remotely. However, as you can see, the steps required by our Remote Manager were completed essentially quicker than I could actually talk about it. The rest is a waiting game. And while I was doing this particular one, I just went out, I made myself a coffee. So I'll set up most of the weighting, but while it goes through that, I wanted to quickly touch on Brad's cost comparison of Remote Manager versus truck rolls. Now while the tech on-site is the worst-case scenario for remote devices, having skilled network engineers go through the tedious and time-consuming task of manually and individually upgrading hundreds of devices one at a time, even if it is remotely, it's quite a costly exercise. And frankly, not a great use of such a valuable resource. So I have slowed it down here to show that Remote Manager is slowly but surely uploading the required firmware filed to the device. And the beauty of the system is that the time it's taken me to do a simple single firmware upgrade is the same as if I was doing hundreds. A simple few clicks of a button and Remote Manager will take care of the rest. You can even stagger, as Kim mentioned, and schedule upgrades overnight. So it doesn't overload the network or occur at critical times where you need your network up and operational. So I'm just going to fast-forward that a little more as well. And you can see it has completed. And once I've logged into the device, it helps if I refresh, which I'm going to do now. And it's crawling across. You can see it's on the new firmware of 8.3.1. So I'm just going to pause that for the moment. Now we'll go back to the actual live page, and we've got data streams. Now Kim did touch on this, but I really want to get more into it because the data strange page gives you the -- all the historical statistics of a device you could ever need. And I do want to emphasize the historical info captured without any sort of manual intervention from a person. So if any sort of issue occurs, the data will be here for any sort of troubleshooting and diagnostics or fault finding. And the reason I make such a point of having that historical data is to especially fault find on intermittent issues. Now anyone that's had to troubleshoot intermittent issues knows it's a terrible experience having to go on site or send a tech out on-site and visit this remote device only to find that the issue is no longer occurring. And the tech might have to sit there for hours just waiting for the fault to occur again just so that it can be captured in real time. While with data streams, it's no longer an issue. It's already there for you to fault find. So just having a real quick look at it, you can go through and sort of see all the different issues that do arise. Now you've got things like let's have a good one. So you've got memory, that's utilization of your memory. You've got signal strength here as well. That's a nice little graph. You've got signal quality, there's all sorts of various parameters. You can even have a look at things like network type that tells you not so much in a graph, but in the table, what technology it's connecting to. So you can see whether it's being kicked off 4G and going down to 3G at any time. So next up, we've got the configurations page. Now this is really the powerhouse of Digi Remote Manager because as Brad already emphasized, this is the page that separates Remote Manager from simply monitoring devices to having that bidirectional interaction. So this page allows you to create config profiles for each group of devices you have out in the field or even for the devices that you have on your test bench so that you can test and prove your config before rolling out to the wider network. Now I've created another short video demonstrating how simple it is to create that config profile. So there you go. That's the one. So you simply select the group you wish to apply this config to, the type of devices that this config profile will be for, along with the firmware you wish to use. Now Remote Manager is actually clever enough to import config from an existing device as a template, at which point you can change individual settings as well as import device-specific settings from a spreadsheet. So you might want to have specific IP addresses for each site. You might want a different host name. All of that can be customized on a per-site basis and still maintain that config profile. So the scanning feature allows you to audit all devices that are associated with this config profile to ensure the network stays compliant. Now to start off with, we'll leave it as [indiscernible] only, but this next video that I should have going on, let's skip ahead, will show the device that had a noncompliant IP address was immediately changed to the correct IP. So we've enabled Remediate Now, and I'll hit Save and I'm going to prompt a scan of that config profile. So essentially, it will scan all the devices associated with that config profile and remediate automatically any devices that are shown to not be compliant. So let it do its thing. And we can see there that it has pretty much straight away changed from 201, which is the noncompliant IP and taken me back to .101. So I'll stop that there. Now that's just the taste of the power of remote management and the ability and functionality it provides to any network administrative. So thanks again for the opportunity to show off all these great features. And I think now is as good a time as any to hand back to Corey to go through any questions that have come in over the course of this session.

Thanks, Randy. That was an awesome demo. Well, it seems like people are maybe a little shy sending some questions into the chat. We can answer them in the reverse order here because I think the second one may be a little quicker. I -- looked like you had a ton of data pulling up on some of the issues and things you were troubleshooting as you're walking through the demo. Is that customizable? Or how far back does that historical data go?

I can take that one. It depends on the addition that you've signed up for, for Remote Manager. It is customizable. And so -- in a lot of cases, the data may be 31 days. In other cases, it might be 93 days, 31 times 3. And so if there are circumstances where you need more data, we could work out a deal where we could sell additional data. But it really is configurable. And so if, for example, you had 3 months of data and you didn't want that much, you can configure it to store less data. So for each data stream, you can go in and customize it.

Brad, I know we talked about different custom solutions and obviously, a ton about the convenience and capabilities of Digi Remote Manager as a secure cloud solution. And I think especially now with the increasingly remote modern work environment that a lot of us find ourselves in, definitely can make a lot of sense to look at that remote management capability, but to the first question we have in here from John, could you talk maybe a little bit more about Digi RM for an on-prem hosting?

Sure. Yes. So did you Remote Manager, as you've seen demo here is not available as an on-prem solution, and that's basically just due to the complexity of the application and keeping it running it was really designed for a multi-tenant scalable environment that we have a staff of operations folks who operate it. However, we are coming out with a lighter-weight version, like I mentioned earlier, that would be an on-prem solution. So a lighter-weight device management application that's designed in a little bit easier way to have somebody run on-prem themselves. So that is something that we're coming out with a little bit later this year that we would be able to offer.

And question in coming from an e-mail actually. We talked a little about some of the connections, and I think during the demo as well. I know that obviously, whether it's U.S., Australia, New Zealand, many different devices have different connections. Are there multiple different ways to connect with Digi Remote Manager as well?

Sorry, repeat the last part of that question.

Just looking at connecting with Digi RM, are there -- I'm thinking it sounds like the question is more about different digital or analog ports with the ethernet or physical connections. Can you talk more about the ways to connect their devices to Digi Remote Manager.

Sure. And that might tie into another question that I saw come in on the chat. So yes, for Digi devices, I mean, the Digi device will connect to Digi RM automatically over whatever is the default route. So if you're connected via ethernet, it will connect in via that port if your default route has switched to cellular. So let's say, you have your primary as ethernet and you're using some hardwired connection and you lose that hardwired connection, the router will fail over to its cellular connection and your Remote Manager will immediately reconnect. So I don't know if that answers that question. But once the device is connected to Remote Manager, then as Randy demonstrated and as Kim outlined, you have access to all of the ports on the device. So you have access to data that's coming into various ports, and there's different things you could do with the data natively, but you could also download something like a Python application to the device to do more custom things with that data. And then -- so I don't know if this is related to the question about bringing third-party devices into management and Digi Remote Manager. And so the question is, can you bring third-party devices into Digi Remote Manager? The simple answer is yes. And now like I said, there are common protocols for device management, but each router kind of does things its own way. We actually -- we have customers who are using some competitor routers within Digi Remote Manager. They've loaded some custom logic onto the router that will allow it to connect to Digi Remote Manager and then we can talk to it. I will mention that the connection clients, so what we call the Cloud Connector, it's the piece of software that resides in the firmware. Years ago, we actually made that available online for anyone to download and embed into their own embedded firmware, their embedded OS. It's something that we still could make available. If somebody had access to the firmware and they wanted to integrate the cloud connector into their firmware. That would allow the device to connect natively to Remote Manager and be managed just like any Digi device. We do have a number of customers that use it in that way. But even if you don't have access to the firmware, there are ways to get the device connected. You may not have all of the full functionality but pretty close to it. So there are definitely ways to manage third-party devices and Digi Remote Manager.

You also might just replace those same party devices and get some Digi routers. That sounds like it could be a good solution as well. A lot of questions are starting to come in, though. Can we talk about on being able to store some of the data and looking at sovereignty issue as well as latency?

Absolutely. Yes. That's one of the reasons we wanted to highlight the flexibility of Remote Manager and Kim spent some time showing you the different data paths, the data can flow. So our #1 mission is to allow you as the -- the end user of the application to control where your data goes. So if your device management data is coming into Remote Manager, and you have control over how much of that data comes in and how much doesn't. So you can configure the data streams that Randy was showing, you could shut those off if you don't want those data to come in. If you want just on-demand stats, you could get stats that way. but you can have the device report that data on a periodic basis. And the time period is configurable as well. So let's say you want that data instead forwarded to some application or some database on-prem. So a number of ways you could do that. So Kim mentioned push monitors. So it's sort of a store and forward method. Remote Manager at the top end of the API set has the ability for you to configure sort of a webhook. So Remote Manager will push that data to wherever you configure it to push the data. And if your application is behind a firewall, we have a TCP connection option, so you could actually establish the connection to Remote Manager, once that connection is established it will push the data over that TCP socket. So a number of options there. And you can disable the storage of that data in Remote Manager. So all it does is forward the data once the router sends the data to Remote Manager. It won't store it, but it will forward it to you and then you store it locally. Another option, as Kim mentioned, you could configure the router to just send its data completely out of band of the device management connection to your own database. So if you were using Remote Manager to manage routers that were in a private APN that only had access to your corporate enterprise network, you can have Remote Manager configure the devices to send data just to your local database or a local application. And so that data would never even come into Remote Manager. There's a number of different ways of doing that. We won't go into the details here, but we do have a number of customers doing that. So they'll use Remote Manager purely to manage the devices, do firmware updates, manage configurations, all things that Kim highlighted and that Randy demonstrated, but any of their sensitive telemetry data, customer application data, all of that stuff never touches Remote Manager. So that's designed that way intentionally so you can decide which data you want to go where. [indiscernible]

Go ahead. Yes, keep going.

Well, there is a follow-up on latency. So if Remote Managers in a foreign data center. And so we do actually -- we have a number of customers worldwide. So we have a number of customers actually in Australia, another set of customers in Europe, some in South America, even some in South Africa. And so what we found, there certainly are Internet latency issues. I'm not going to try to cover that over. There are Internet latency issues. What we've typically found is with device management data, it isn't -- it doesn't have that much of an impact. So like I mentioned, if there's a need, we could spin up an in-region instance of Remote Manager. If we had enough business or a business case oriented it. But we haven't had the need to do that so far. And even with latency issues. And I'll tell you South Africa, there's some pretty significant latency between South Africa and the rest of the world. But it doesn't seem to impact the functionality of what a device management application is trying to do. So if you have some real latency sensitive data, again, kind of leading to the previous question. you could have that data stay within region or even on-prem while you're using a Remote Manager to just do firmware updates, config changes and monitoring the health of devices.

Yes. I think on that note, too, looking at the city density and device management, certainly seeing success from South Africa to New York City and kind of around the world with some of these big city capabilities. Can you expand on the functionality Digi Remote Manager provides when connecting to traffic signals?

It depends on the application. So what Remote Manager does is it provides you the capability of connecting to that network. And so in a number of installations, customers may have their own application that's going to talk to the traffic controller. So what Remote Manager does will set up, let's say, a VPN tunnel between the router and the traffic management center. So there, again, the traffic management data never touches Remote Manager. There are other cases where they might use the Remote Manager APIs to access data from the traffic controller. So they might load a Python program on the router that is able to talk to the traffic controller. It understands the protocols in the language, the traffic controller speaks. And then what that does, you can actually build a Python app to register callback functions, and you can access the Python application from Remote Manager APIs. So two ways of doing things. You can have -- you can configure the router to establish the tunnel completely out of band for Remote Manager so that your application can talk directly to the traffic controller over a secure VPN tunnel or if you want to just use API as a Remote Manager, you can talk through Remote Manager through the router to the traffic controller. So we've had some customers that might have traffic cameras on intersections. And so they'll set up a VPN tunnel typically and just have that data stream directly to their application in the traffic management center.

I suppose, to add to that, if we're referring to the sort of outrage controllers question, the point is it's almost been done in a vendor-agnostic way, where, as Brad mentioned, it's more about the protocols that are enabled. So if you've got access to that controller or whatever it is that you're trying to access and typically could do it remotely just by a standard CLI or console or cereal, whatever it is, that can be programmed into Digi Remote Manager given the right skill set and ability, I guess.

And we can help with that. So we have a professional services department that has done a number of custom applications. And so they'll work with you and learn those protocols and you basically figure out what your needs are. So if it's a capability that you don't possess within your organization, that's something that we can help you with and we're used to doing.

Rob, we talked about some traffic management solutions, looking at some of these implementations at a massive scale. Can we sort of dial it into a more micro level, looking at the potential for data usage and a smaller telemetry plan, it looks like a question is coming in from?

Yes. This is a great question. This is -- I love this question. I'm glad somebody asked it. So kind of during my part of the presentation, we talked about different protocols that are used in the world of IoT and different protocols have different levels of overhead associated with them. Some might refer to some of them as pretty chatty or relatively chatty. So with some of them, there's quite a bit of overhead when you add it up over the course of the month. Some of them are pretty lightweight as implied by lightweight M2M, the Digi device management protocol is intended to be very, very lightweight. And in fact, the data that's transmitted between the router and Remote Manager is binary. So it's converted into binary and it's highly compressed. And so you can do a configuration refresh of what would end up being a few 100k of data, and it ends up being a few hundred bits of data, maybe a 1k of data. So in a normal operation, the amount of data that's used or the data overhead, and it's tunable. So I'm going to give you some ranges. The main thing that happens is when a device connects to a Remote Manager, and this is how you can have a bidirectional connection even when your device is behind a firewall or behind in NAT. The device establishes the connection to Remote Manager, and then both sides will send a heartbeat packet. It's very small to a couple hundred bytes, that's with the TCP overhead. It's 4 bytes of data. And so the frequency -- the default frequency for those heartbeat packets over a cellular connection is about every 5 minutes, a little under 5 minutes. And the reason we kind of started with that as a default, given the way different cellular infrastructure -- components within the cellular infrastructure behave. So what you don't want is you don't want that TCP connection to time out because if it times out, then you can't send commands from the server side, down to the device, but it's tunable. So if you're on a cellular network and you think the infrastructure is going to keep this TCP connection alive for an hour. So you might dial it back to once every 15 minutes or even once every half hour. And so you can experiment with that a little bit. So with the 5-minute default, the overhead of data is going to be on the order of about 10 megabytes per month just for the keep-alives. Now if you're doing the configuration scans. Again, those happen once a day, and it's just maybe 1k of data. So the overhead is very little added to those heartbeat packets that keep that connection alive. Now we do have other options if you don't want the device connected all the time. So if you are on a really skinny telemetry data plan, we do have devices that maybe connect once a day, for example, so they're disconnected most of the time. And Remote Manager can handle that. You can basically queue up operations to be stored basically offline and waiting for the device to connect in and then it will do whatever you told it, it needed to do. The configuration manager works that way, the automations, all the different features work that way. But if you're on, say, a transit application where you're providing passenger WiFi then maybe the 10 MB of data overhead is not that big of a deal or you might even want to crank the frequency up and maybe it's 20 MB of overhead. But if you're on a 10-gig plan, it's in the noise. So hopefully, that answers that. But there are a number of options for tuning that data overhead to kind of meet your data plan needs.

And just to add, I think we actually do have some documented metrics of ranges that we can provide. And we do have [indiscernible], our Product Manager of Dow on. And I know he's been working closely with engineering to actually compile some of that data. And we can certainly make that available if you would like that.

This is Nate. Just to provide a quick answer like teaser on it. So average usage on cellular is around 4 to 5 megabytes per month per device. So I mean that's very low usage. Someone mentioned a target of 15 megabytes a month and that's well below that. And as Brad mentioned of tuning that down, have the device checking a little less often, we got it down to 154 kilobytes per device per month. So I mean you can be sipping on data and really conserve that data you suggest needed.

Maybe more from Nate Pleasant, Digi accelerated Linux and data management on the next installation possibly. I know we are on the other side of our time here. There's looks like 1 last question to mention databases. Maybe could we talk in conclusion about database support?

Sure. The simple answer is really any database. So we don't connect to the database natively from Remote Manager. I mean you could from a device, I suppose, you'd have to program that into a Python application or in the future, we'll have some other capabilities on devices that you could load from Remote Manager. But what -- in Kim's example, for the city transit solution. We have a number of customers that will send data from Remote Manager using that push monitor feature into applications like -- or into the providers like AWS or Azure or Google. And so we'll use web services to push the data and then they can hook that into whether it's Amazon Redshift or Azure CosmoDB, I think, and there's a number of different databases. I mean, MS SQL within Azure or MySQL. So Remote Manager itself uses -- I think it's the 3 different database technologies that it uses under the covers to provide the data stream functionality, the device and customer management functionality and things like that. But in terms of integrating with your own database, it's really up to you. So if you have a really simple web service application on the front end of that, then you can push data from Remote Manager into that, that will translate it into whatever database you want to store your data in.

Perfect answer to have things up, Brad. And Randy definitely appreciate you having us here. I know that we're, again, wrapping up on time. But we appreciate everyone stopping by and sharing some conversation and looking forward to next engagements and continuing the Saga next time.

Absolutely. And I will just mention 1 last thing. Brad and Kim and Cory have both alluded to it, the road map that Digi has on Digi Remote Manager and the features and functionality that's constantly being added is incredible. So whatever has been discussed here, it's only going to get better. There's a lot of features that Kim's got that grin on her face that got in the pipeline. So we're all really excited to see what else they've got installed for us.