Games Publisher Upgrades Device Management to Support International Expansion

You run a tight IT team in New York, and your company is rapidly opening offices overseas, with dozens of new Mac users? Not a problem.

The challenge facing Dominic Rosario, IT Ops and Technical Support Manager for games publisher Tilting Point, was a big one: Support ongoing international expansion, with dozens of new employees in other countries coming onboard, all speaking different languages, all needing Mac computers. The extra wrinkle: At the start, he was an IT team of one.

Managing Devices Internationally

Dominic came to Tilting Point having worked with larger IT teams, at a point when his new company was expanding rapidly, and bringing IT support fully in-house for the first time.

“From an infrastructure standpoint, unifying toolsets was messy, deploying workstations was messy,” he says. “And we were growing really, really fast.”

Without a device-management solution in place, deploying a new Mac meant talking people through the installation and setup of a remote control application, then using that app to configure the computer himself remotely.

From an infrastructure standpoint, unifying toolsets was messy, deploying workstations was messy.

Dominic Rosario IT Ops & Technical Support Manager

Complicating that further: The company was expanding internationally. It had opened an office in Spain in 2018, the year before he was hired. “We’d operated in Manhattan for our entire lifecycle," he explains. "Now all of a sudden we're in Europe, with more than half the company speaking Spanish.”

When it came to onboarding employees in that office in Spain, Dominic initially used a white-glove workflow of personally setting up each Mac before shipping it overseas, then providing personalized walk-throughs for its new user.

“It was like, ‘Hey let's book two hours on X date. That's the middle of the night for you? No problem. Oh, wait, did your internet cut out in the middle of the setup? Now we have to reschedule for tomorrow.’”

He knew he needed an enterprise-grade solution that would help him streamline the onboarding process as the company kept growing and bring everything under one device-management umbrella. And that’s what led him to Kandji.

Zero-Touch, Liftoff, and Security

For one thing, he knew he needed a solution that was built specifically for Mac computers. Tilting Point had some Mac users in America, but everybody in Spain was doing creative work, with Mac their platform of choice. He needed a deployment solution to match.

He also needed a solution that was clean and uncomplicated, that wouldn’t require individualized hand-holding for deployments or ongoing management. And it needed to work in an international setting. Kandji checked all those boxes.

“The zero-touch deployment process and Liftoff allows our users to set up the computer in their own language. They get a guided solution, based on the parameters that we've set up ahead of time.”

Kandji also enables him to brand that onboarding experience, so people in newly acquired offices know who they’re working for now.

“Our company is exploding and we really want people to feel like they've made a good decision in becoming a part of this team. We want them to feel appreciated, to feel like our culture is already their culture. It's not just an MDM solution. It's an extension of what we want our employees to feel when they join our company and as they continue working with us.

The zero-touch deployment process and Liftoff allows our users to set up the computer in their own language.

Security was also a concern that Kandji helped allay.

“Between ransomware, state-level bad actors, you name it—security is on the forefront of everything that we're trying to do right now,” Dominic says. With Kandji, if something goes wrong, he can click a few buttons to lock out devices. That ease of use really appealed to him as a solo practitioner.

“I was sold in minutes. Not only do you have that WYSIWYG experience when you're setting up Blueprints, Auto Apps, custom apps and scripts. There’s also the ease of integration with Apple Business Manager, where all I have to do is sync those tokens and, boom, all the devices I buy from the Apple business portal are automatically enrolled. But you still have an interface and ease of use that took literally hundreds of hours of setup off my plate.”

Time to Refocus

Kandji has given Dominic a way to quickly and efficiently deploy Mac computers to users all over the world—which is handy because Tilting Point continues to expand. In the last three years, the company has added offices in more cities such as Boston, Kyiv and Seoul, as well as recruiting remote employees in Miami, LA and beyond.

“We're at a point now that, if we wanted to grow to 1,000 people or more, we could. The solution we have in place makes that possible.”

With the breathing room that Kandji gave him, he’s also had time to focus on other goals—including expanding the IT department. He now heads a department of three, with one person in Spain and another in Russia.

“There's very little that you can do about management if you're mired in small support tickets; you need a team for that. So it's given me enough bandwidth to be able to step back enough just to look at the big picture more effectively and build and run a department instead of just being an army of one.”

He can now focus on things like shoring up security, updating internal documentation and policies, and standardizing global best practices.

“It's really all about setting up that scaleable infrastructure. I had no bandwidth for it. Now I do.”

About Tilting Point

Tilting Point is an award-winning free-to-play games publisher that empowers independent developers to grow and accelerate, recognized as one of the top mobile game makers in the world by PocketGamer.biz in 2021.

Tilting Point has grown to a staff of over 400 people in offices in Boston, Barcelona, Kyiv, Los Angeles, New York, Seoul, San Diego, and St. Petersburg. Their partnerships with development studios and licensors extend their reach to over a dozen countries.