Digital Restrictions Management (DRM)

Software vendors invest a significant amount of money into Research and Development to produce a mature product, once produced, protecting its integrity feels imperative. However, Digital Restrictions Management can take this too far; restricting consumers from using the products they’ve purchased in perfectly legal ways. For example, consumers might not be able to lend an e-book, back-up certain files, or combine music files together that have been purchased legally. DRM can even affect a customer’s ability to repair equipment they own in the event that the manufacturer’s business fails.

“Electronic goods are therefore often built to be defective, forbidding the full capacity of the technology to be used, forbidding uses that were entirely uncontroversial before technological progress gave businesses the means to prohibit them.” – drm.info

There are several versions of DRM but the focus of this article is DRM that directly impacts our M3 Platform: DRM in chargers.

A battery charger is an AC/DC transformer that provides a specific voltage with certain protection circuitry. A battery charger with DRM is exactly the same, only it blocks every other electrically compatible charger from working.

Why use a device management solution that is DRM independent?

With the M3 Platform, even if your laptop uses DRM for charging, our hardware bypass those restrictions. There are 2 key benefits to this:

1. If device hardware (change of tablet or laptop model) are required, no update to the internals of the M3 Hardware Platform is required
2. No need to purchase multiple chargers

Although these might seem like small benefits, they are benefits born from significant R&D investment that help every one of our customers – especially when device management is at scale.

The M3 Platform is much more than a charging station: it is a universal charger, a tool for the physical control of enterprise resources, a system of automated IT procedures that streamline device readiness with less staffing costs, and a solution that allows converting a one-device-per-employee model to a shared device model. With that in mind, if devices came out of our platform with depleted batteries it wouldn’t be a particularly useful solution.

Our customers gain efficiencies and improvements that wouldn’t be cost effective to develop in house. What’s more? Being backed by a team of engineers with expertise in technologies that might not be relevant to your business, such as: nuances of USB charging and communication, analytics, reporting, enterprise device management, deep understanding of iOS, Android & Windows device management, development, configuration, linux system administration, network security, the design of embedded systems, and even artificial intelligence.

In Summary

M3 is a technology solutions business providing the expertise without all the costs of having to do it in house. With the M3 Solutions Platform, the hardware is backed by a team of engineers who spend $10 of R&D to save your business $1, because it is done at scale. Device management is complex, we make it simple.