Esevel is a technology company based in Singapore that delivers an end-to-end IT management platform to customers in the APAC region, including businesses in India, Australia, and Indonesia. The company, which was founded in 2020 and is a member of the JumpCloud Partner Network, caters to small to medium-sized organizations that don’t have large internal IT teams and want to partner with trusted providers for IT management and procurement services instead.
Providing secure IT solutions for remote teams in APAC
After working long hours regularly for years and developing back pain that made it difficult to focus, Yuying Deng began to think about how she could use technology to build a better workplace — the kind that enables employees to reach their full potential and do their best work without harming their bodies. This is when the idea for Esevel was born.
Though the company didn’t start with a focus on IT, it quickly shifted in that direction in response to customer needs.
“Our customers, which were startups and distributed teams based around Asia, started asking us to provide IT devices and peripherals,” Deng, Esevel’s CEO and founder, says. “Looking into it more, we discovered that meeting the IT management and support needs for distributed teams was a huge pain point for fast-growth startups.”
A client headquartered in Singapore, for example, might set up and ship laptops to team members in Indonesia and the Philippines.
“These laptops were caught up in customs for months, taxed heavily, and resulted in delayed onboarding,” Deng explains. “So, we decided to go into provisioning laptops and IT peripherals, as well as providing last-mile services like laptop setups, retrievals, redeployment, storage, repairs, and disposals, which was a tremendous help to our clients.”
Though Esevel was launched during the pandemic, the rapid transition to remote work meant that the company’s services were absolutely in demand.
“We actually started during COVID, which was not an easy time to start a business,” says Deng. “But we saw the opportunity with remote work — that people were going to need a lot more solutions for their distributed teams.”
Adding JumpCloud to their IT platform for secure mobile device management
Though the pandemic forced teams to begin working remotely, many companies were hesitant to take the plunge. Ultimately, they had no choice. Fortunately, lots of organizations experienced relatively smooth transitions to remote work, and the idea of working with folks from all over the world quickly became normalized.
Even so, there were still some major issues that the Esevel team needed to address to help its customers unlock the full value of its comprehensive IT management platform.
“One thing still hadn’t been solved: the security implications of having someone overseas working for you,” Deng explains. “And this is exactly where JumpCloud comes in.”
As the Esevel team began to build its core product, they were impressed by JumpCloud’s reliability, feature-rich nature, and deep API integrations. Before they made a final decision, Deng met with JumpCloud’s founders, and those conversations convinced her to join forces with JumpCloud.
“I felt that there was a very keen interest in learning and knowing more about what their customers wanted. I felt it was very genuine,” Deng explains. “It’s the same way we approach our own customers, so it really resonated with me and I knew that JumpCloud was the right partner for us.”
Enabling APAC customers to securely support distributed teams
By joining forces with JumpCloud, Esevel has been able to solve the aforementioned security issues while helping customers operate more efficiently and more securely, even when their teams are highly distributed.
“Now, customers don’t have to worry if an employee in another country loses their laptop,” Deng says. “There’s a way that we can actually ensure that customer data doesn’t go missing.”
1. Trusted device procurement
Shortly after launching their business, Esevel’s customers and prospects approached the company asking for help getting machines to employees in other countries.
“We dug a little deeper and actually found there was very little reliability in terms of the supply chain, knowing that you got your device from an authorized seller, and having to transfer money,” Deng continues.
As an example, a company headquartered in Singapore, with team members in the Philippines, Malaysia, and India, might have a hard time equipping those folks with trustworthy devices.
“We felt that there was a good opportunity and a very strong pain point that we could help with, so we used JumpCloud to add device management and security into the full stack of IT services that we’re building up,” Deng explains.
2. Mobile device management
When you’re managing a team spread out across different countries, it’s difficult to handle IT responsibilities because you’re not in the same physical location — and perhaps not even in the same country — as your employees.
Before engaging Esevel, most customers had their tech leads (e.g., CTO or director of engineering), HR managers, or an in-house, one- or two-person IT team in charge of mobile device management (MDM). “You’d have one person who’s trying to manage maybe 400 people throughout the region,” Deng says. With JumpCloud, Esevel is able to bring the first mobile device management experience to these firms.
“With our collaboration with JumpCloud, we started to offer device management and device security support,” she continues, adding that JumpCloud makes it easy with real-time visibility into the status of each device. “We’re trying to give customers an end-to-end simplified offering that gives them everything they need in one platform. Our solution has the capabilities IT needs but is designed to be simple enough that other people can use it as well.”
To ensure their customers are able to get the ideal IT solution for their circumstances, Esevel packages MDM with Cloud Directory, Password Manager, and Identity Lifecycle Management for organizations wanting more robust access controls.
3. Onboarding and offboarding
“Onboarding is supposed to be a process that marries information and data from both the HR and IT side,” Deng says. “But for many companies, it’s a disjointed process.”
Using JumpCloud, Deng and her team help customers seamlessly procure devices across the eight countries they operate in. Each device comes from an authorized distributor, and Esevel sets them up with either zero touch via JumpCloud or through people on the ground in each country.
“We then manage the laptop, onboarding and offboarding, and even physically retrieve the devices when employees leave. We also give customers reports on each device and redeploy them to another worker,” Deng says. “Previously, all of these processes were done manually. Now, we can skip many labor-intensive steps, which saves us time and makes the process a lot faster for our clients as well.”
4. Redefining IT services
The way Deng sees it, the IT services industry has remained largely unchanged over the last 20 or 30 years. “It’s very service-oriented,” she says. “Traditional IT managed service providers are mainly selling their time and reselling software products.”
With the addition of JumpCloud into its IT management platform, the Esevel team has been able to bring a modern, intuitive, and powerful solution to market that meets the needs of small and medium-sized enterprises — setting a new standard of what IT services can look like.
“We’re productizing this very traditionally service-heavy industry into something that our customers can easily implement and use at scale,” Deng concludes.
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