Last week, you had the opportunity to hear many interesting stories, insights, and ideas at our annual conference resco.NEXT 2021 Virtual.  

If you couldn’t make it or would like to refresh some of the topics our speakers covered, here are the highlights from Keynote. You can read insight from our CEO, Miro Pomsar, Juraj Mojik, Head of Product Management, and Andrew Lorraine, Strategic Partners Manager. They kicked off the conference to discuss what they don’t like about enterprise mobility and the year’s biggest challenges and successes.

1. Enterprise mobility needs a change

Dead tree businesses stuck with 300 different paper forms. Mediocre mobile apps without regard for user experience. Management systems that only want you to feed them data but don’t offer any help. And signing a signature on a… laptop? Miro Pomsar has a few enterprise mobility pet peeves, and these are some of them. 

Companies go through many challenges when trying to digitalize their processes, improve management, and make sure their partnerships are not eating them alive. Striving for better results, they often buy more and more products and hope they will stick around. For these struggles, Miro emphasized these three points during Keynote:

• Don’t buy custom development if it’s not a tiny, well-defined component. 1/3 projects fail, 50% of the rest is roughly twice as expensive.  
• Be wary of off-the-shelf products. Are they working for you? Do they understand your local market, industry, processes, and systems?  
• And if you go for a good, configurable, service mobility-oriented platform, make sure it’s also a good partner.

2. Human-centric software is the future

The future is computing everywhere with solutions that understand what you mean.

That is the underlined message from Miro, pointing to ambient computing. For those who don’t know, ambient computing combines hardware, software, user experience, machine and human interaction, and learning. Such technology performs computations for users without a direct command, often without realizing they are using a computer. “Connected systems that work in the background and go where you go. Intelligent robots: drones, cars, buildings. They do their own thing, wait for our commands and learn from them. You don’t have to explain all the steps.”  

However, he also emphasized the need for the human factor in the process – knowledge, drive, creativity, and cooperation. These are important in creating software that empowers workers and makes today’s and future devices work for them. He closed his presentation with these words: “We need people who are hungry. Hungry to create innovative experiences for new types of users. We need people who build human-centric software… Not just one solution but a declarative platform. Where experts can design what should happen, not programming how. We need all of them working together as partners.”  

3. Developing new opportunities for customers and partners

Juraj Mojik joined Miro Pomsar on the stage to walk us through our accomplishments for the past year and the new things we have in the works for our customers and partners. He shared some of the most notable ones, such as: 

• Improving user experience in the field by optimizing routes with AI, making more adaptable questionnaires, or putting mobile payments on our roadmap. 
• Introducing our Service Platform built to support service companies and field work with pre-built modules to address everyday operations, such as preventive maintenance, incident management, and asset hierarchies. 
• Focusing on workforce knowledge management and launching resco.Guides – a dedicated product enabling harvesting knowledge, creating guides, and remote AR calls. 
• Unveiling Integration with Dynamics Business Central– by integrating resco.Field Service with Business Central, we hope to bring our best-in-class work order execution experience.  

However, Resco has so much more in store you can look forward to in the upcoming Winter Release. For now, you can check out the preview here. 

4. Tailored business solution for Key2Act

Here at Resco, we like things to be configurable so that you can assemble them into any number of solutions – just like Lego blocks. In his presentation, Andrew walked you through some great new business Lego blocks we added in 2021 to help our partners achieve their goals. 

Key2Act, Resco’s long-time partner specializing in building optimization and field service, wanted to add Resco Inspection into their custom MobileTech app with 11000+ users. It would consolidate a range of mobile forms tools being used by their clients into a single app. However, the challenge was to convince busy, traditional-minded customers to embrace a new subscription product. That’s why we came up with some business Lego blocks that would allow the new product to settle right in, such as:   

• Academy courses to enable customers to quickly master the Questionnaire Designer,   
• Internal sales trainings to help Key2Act sellers optimize their Inspections demos,   
• And friendly licensing to help ease the transition to a subscription-based license.   

Key2Act embraced the possibilities of our business platform and had a successful rollout of Inspections with positive reviews from both back office and field workers. And so can you! A tailored business is Resco partnership in action. 

5. Exciting new partnerships

2021 brought many exciting new partnerships. One of them is with RealWear, which provides voice-operated headset computers and assisted reality wearable solutions. We partnered with RealWear to design a unique build of Inspections that’s optimized for the HMT-1 headset. We see this as a very practical step for our partners, so they can start addressing the next leap forward in mobile work solutions with the very same Resco platform tools. It is also a great chance to reimagine software licensing and work out creative new business models. 

We are also looking forward to our work with Zebra. Their line of rugged devices not only offers Resco partners a complete solution combining powerful hardware and software in one package, but also showcases the variety of partnership types we’re developing. Systems integrator, distributor, value-added reseller – simply pick the Resco partner plan that suits your business goals and you’ll have our full support.  

Couldn’t attend resco.NEXT 2021 Virtual? We have good news for you!

In case you missed the live conference, we invite you to watch it on the virtual event platform, where you can access the entire recording for a month. You can reach the platform by clicking on the link in the confirmation email you received after registration. In case you have trouble accessing the recording, please contact us at events@resco.net. 

And even if you didn’t register before the event, you can still do so and enjoy the best resco.NEXT 2021 Virtual has to offer.