Pomeroy’s presentation: Screenshot from the webinar
Reducing Customer Support Costs and Improving Service Quality with Remote Support

Summary of Remote Support Webcast

IT service and support leaders are under more pressure than ever before to tighten expenses, budgets and people. At the same time, service quality commitments are becoming the norm. A secret weapon that many organizations have today, but are not using to its fullest potential, is remote support. With the right remote support solution in place, you should reduce support costs by:

1. Improving the efficiency of your support team by eliminating costly on-site dispatches and reducing Mean Time to Repair (MTTR)
2. Gain respect for the IT support team by delivering on committed service level agreements (SLAs)
3. Consolidating the myriad of tools within your enterprise to one solution that can reach any both attended and unattended systems

Hear how remote support has a direct impact on support cost structure and perceptions around IT service quality in the enterprise. This presentation will focus on results achieved by customers in their environments and illustrate the relationship between service quality, cost control, and the customer experience.

• Lisa Erickson-Harris, EMA analyst
• Clay Guinn, GSD Operations Manager, Pomeroy IT Solutions
• Chris Watson, VP Strategic Alliances, Bomgar

This presentation began on April 03, 2008 at 01:00 PM Central Daylight Time.

You may join the live event or watch it on-demand later.

Novell’s new Volume License Agreement (VLA) maintenance program offers technical assistance and product support to Novell’s customers. I’m interested in the program because of the thoughtfulness behind their integration of virtual support for customers.

Novell has posted an online demo of the support request process at http://support.novell.com/online/demo.html. The demo is only a few minutes long. It’s definitely worth taking the time to view, especially if you’re wonder how best to to funnel support requests and move customers through the support process.

I’m repeatedly impressed by our customers. This is just another example. Thank you, Novell, for publishing such a well-planned example of integrating virtual support.

That was a nice-to-have. But most people already have internet access. Plus, since so many people have switched to broadband, dial-up speeds have gotten faster. With less bandwidth taken up by the folks who have switched to mobile phones and high-speed internet, the small segment of the population left on a land line is experiencing DSL-like speeds.

But this year’s feature release is a must-have! This year it’s a custom time stamp for Gmail. Unlike the internet, EVERYONE uses Gmail. Now mail sent through Gmail need never be late!

“The entire concept of ‘late’ no longer exists for me. That’s pretty cool. Thanks Gmail!”

Happy April First!

It’s 5:58 p.m. on a Friday, so this will not be a long post!

Windows IT Pro just published and article from an interview with Joel Bomgar and Nathan McNeill.

I find the title of the article interesting - “Virtualizing IT People”.

“Virtualizing” is a term that in most contexts only applies to hardware, so how does it apply to people? Glad you asked. I think that needs a little bit of unpacking.

So stay tuned. I plan on thinking through what virtualizing people means in my upcoming posts. Told ya this would be short!

Bomgar’s upcoming release, Bomgar 10.1, will include a Mac rep client. If you don’t want to wait till Q2-08, here’s an easy work-around.

Joel Bomgar, CEO and founder of Bomgar Corp., will present “Incident Resolution: On-site vs. Remote” at the Help Desk Institute (HDI) annual conference and expo next week.

As IT services are vital in business interactions, it’s more important than ever that organizations be able to deploy best practice technologies to help support its user base quickly, effectively and securely. Appliance-based remote support technology enables organizations to meet these demands by creating synergies across the service desk and support systems to streamline the incident resolution process. In using remote support technology to virtualize the help desk, organizations can better utilize resources to enhance the productivity and efficiency of IT personnel.

Bomgar Corp. is the leading provider of appliance-based help desk enterprise software designed to help companies virtualize IT support staff. Bomgar’s unified platform integrates with service desk systems to flag, track and log the tech support activity that takes place during the trouble ticket resolution lifecycle. By using Bomgar, today’s IT staff can be mobilized to work on any computer desktop, anywhere to resolve technical issues.

The annual Help Desk Institute Conference is designed to educate customer support organizations and IT service professionals on the latest trends and technologies for providing customer support. For more information, please visit http://www.thinkhdi.com/hdi2008/default.aspx

If a support rep can virtualize himself, he can overcome geographical limitations [driving, on-site visits] and help more people. Well, some Bomgar customers have found that to be a powerful value proposition. Here’s a testimonial from Liwicom, a B100 owner in Austria.

I just wanted to tell you that we are extremely satisfied with the B100 Appliance. It just works and we can perfectly customize it to our needs. We haven’t had a single case were we weren’t able to get a reliable connection. We were working over a broad range of internet connections starting from UMTS and EDGE mobile connections to classical broadband over a variety of firewall systems. Client side was from Mac OS X various versions to Windows in all incarnations including servers. The Jump Client feature is a real goodie for server maintenance we didn’t realize we would get it when we bought the appliance.

P.S. I’m finding that archived emails are a good place to go for overcoming writer’s block. Especially, if you can quote from the email for most of your content! ;-)

A while back, Chuck Deaton, IT Security Manager at Humana, joined us for an SSPA webcast entitled “Remote Support: How Secure Are You?”

Among the nuggets of wisdom in that hour was this one from Chuck Deaton: “Complexity is inversely proportional to security.” Deaton goes on to explain that for Humana, often the security question is not about how to keep hackers out, but how to give authorized users the ability to perform authorized tasks.

Humana’s answer to the problem, at least in part, has been to simplify access and control as much as they can. Deaton says,

“. . . you can have the most hardened system in the world, but if it has too many moving parts and pieces, it won’t take very long for it to become unsecure or unreliable. And so therefore, we try to keep things - and remote control’s one of those - we try to keep those solution sets as simple as possible in terms of the moving pieces and parts, also in terms of the number of people and companies that are involved, so that we can maximize our security potential, not only initially, but also throughout - ongoing throughout the use of the technology by various user communities. So the - this whole idea of the ratio of complexity and security is really how we size up our ability to secure information assets or systems in general.”

Chuck Deaton, IT Security Manager at Humana

Here’s an example: You can set user permissions in one place, LDAP for instance, and have those permissions apply for various applications. Doing that will better enable you to maintain security over time. If user permissions are localized, rather than centralized, you’re likely to run into a security issue when one user’s overarching permissions fail to apply to a specific application.

Simple is better. One place to set user access and control permissions.

Deaton has, of course, taken a TON of other measures to ensure security. I just wanted to point out the simple-is-better approach as a stroke of genius.

Unique to our licensing model is the concept of concurrency. From the research I’ve done, all of our competitors sell named software seats. That means if Joe works in the morning and Bill in the afternoon, you still have to have a separate license for each of them. We just ask how many reps will need access to the licenses at any given time.

Another unique approach we’ve taken is to have remote access baked into the core product. If you were a GoToAssist™ customer, for instance, and you wanted to control your web server, you’d have to buy GoToMyPC™ – Two different products; two different interfaces. With Bomgar, you can move seamlessly from remote support to remote access and back again. With our multi-session control, you can even check on your server while you wait for the progress bar to move on another remote desktop.

Companies have been switching to SaaS ostensibly to save money over server software. Server software was becoming far too complex and required too much maintenance, and this complexity was costing companies millions. SaaS moved the complexity to the vendor, but, as evidenced by massive capital spending, did nothing to reduce it. The cost of complexity just gets passed on to the customer. This means that when the wheel comes full circle, the customer may have gotten out of dealing with the problem, but he still has to pay for it in the end.

Nathan McNeill Comments on DEMO 07 Technologies

eJamming and the Importance of Context

This product enables musicians to “jam” with each other online in perfect sync. I highlight this product as an example of practical innovation. Innovations fall in basically two categories:

1.                  Innovations that change the nature of how we live, work, play, etc.

2.                  Innovations that change the context in which we live, work, and play.

eJamming is a great example of a product in the second category. Musicians have been playing together for thousands of years, and what eJamming offers does not promise to change the basic dynamic of musical interaction. What it does do, however, is extend the geographical boundaries within which that interaction can take place. Same instruments, same keys, same notes, same types of people, different context. This subtle change in context can have small implications (two band members spend an hour and a half practicing together vs. half an hour practicing and an hour driving), and huge implications (a Mongolian drummer jamming with a guitarist from LA).

I believe that this type of innovation is generally underrated until it becomes a cultural phenomenon. YouTube, eBay, Amazon, and many other companies did not change the nature of how we live, but shifted its context. Home video, auctions, and books were hardly new, but these innovations created a new context for each, sparking renewed consumer interest, and huge business opportunities.

Would-be entrepreneurs should take note. Many CPU cycles can be wasted trying to come up with something that changes the way people live when the same creative energy could be put into simply watching how people already live and coming up with a way to extend or enhance it…to change its context.

More Comments to Come from Nathan McNeill

Too Little Too Late

I have officially given up trying to blog about each and every company that I saw at DEMO 07. I have gotten about halfway through the 70 companies, and run out of time and energy. I’ll continue to comment on the latter half of the list on a much more selective basis.

Nathan McNeill Continues His DEMO 2007 Commentary

SplashCast

Yet another video syndication mechanism which will, presumably, be driven by advertising. You never can never tell with products like these, and it could just be that I am out of touch with the “MySpace generation”, but it sure seems like the space is a little crowded for all of the players that have launched here at DEMO.

SharedBook

This product allows users to aggregate (presenters were paid $25 every time they used this word) content from the web and publish it as a physical book. The user can customize the book any way they want. Sort of interesting.

OurStory

The consumer products on the web (and those launched at DEMO) can be grouped loosely into two categories: 1. Products that enable users to create all sorts of new content and spew it all over the web (you can probably catch my bias already), and 2. Products that allow users to compile content into a cohesive end product…something that can actually be digested. Given the fact that most of the content on the web is junk and even if it was not, you would not be able to digest even a miniscule fraction of even a day’s worth of content, I generally favor products in the latter category. I believe that OurStory is in the latter category. This product allows families or groups to enter content and media into an interface that then organizes that content into a timeline. The users are then able to browse through the timeline of recorded events interactively, like an online scrapbook. You can even publish the timeline as a physical book to be used as a gift for grandma’s birthday or a wedding. Not necessarily revolutionary technology, but I believe a good example of how collaboration, aggregation, and other buzzwords can be used to create something meaningful vs. more junk.

Nathan’s Comments Continue

Magnify.net

Easily create a video channel, and then aggregate content from the web related to the channel’s topic. Great presenters; not sure of the business model.

Yodio

This product provided an easy way to create a podcast and share it with an online community. You could also pair the podcast with photos. Good presenters. Good demo.

ThePort Networks: Blerts

This product lets you prioritize your RSS feeds so that you don’t have to sift through all of your feeds to find out if the ones you think are important have new posts. I generally like any concept lets users filter the amount of noise and get to the good stuff. A lot of new products at DEMO just seem to be methods of creating more noise. Of course, this product will be driven by advertising.

Remote Support DEMOgod: News from DEMO 2007

SupportSoft

This demo showcases a new service by SupportSoft that offers tech support to consumers. They claim that the product can automatically optimize a PC in under 6 minutes. Maybe in the lab or on the DEMO stage, but what about in the real world?

Triumfant: Resolution Manager

This product claims to automatically “heal” an ailing PC. I’ve seen several products like this. They all promise a lot of capabilities, but have yet to deliver in a production environment. Bottom line: NetworkStreaming’s market will be here for the long term.

SOASTA

Means of testing applications

Browser based testing tools

Create tests and then manipulate when they are run (like garage band)

Sort of confusing

Read their script

This seemed like a pretty cool product. It lets you create scripts for testing websites and then manipulate those scripts in a “Garage Band”-like interface. Pretty good product if it works as advertised. The demo should have been practiced longer.

Integrien Corp: Alive

This product promises to self-learn what are optimal levels or settings in enterprise applications and then alert IT administrators if levels are changed or exceeded. By capturing the building pattern of abnormal events, the administrator is able to prevent total failures.

SailPoint: ComplianceIQ

This product enables the security or compliance officer to monitor and adjust employee risk based on roles, responsibilities, and access to applications. Risk is usually a big amorphous cloud that companies don’t really understand but are willing to spend a fortune to get rid of. ComplianceIQ breaks down the risk cloud into bite-size chunks that can be mediated or remediated one by one.

Panjea

This product lets you embed your own or other’s personalized video “channel” into a website. Like other products that I saw in this space, I failed to grasp the distinctions that will allow them to garner an audience and make money. Seems cool,..but a lot of stuff on the web does. They had a decent demo with a few technical difficulties. This company got a DEMOgod.

Nathan McNeill continues his live coverage

The search for DEMO 2007 DEMOgods continues:

Mission Research: SalesWorks

I didn’t really get the point of this product. I don’t think they practiced the pitch enough and it didn’t really capture what made the product unique or compelling. He said something about a “Hybrid Web” where you had both desktop and online functionality, but never really made it clear what he was talking about.

Ceelox: Scram

A pretty cool idea allowing you to embed sensitive information into a picture, thereby encrypting it for all but the intended recipient. Both the sender and the recipient have to have the Scram client. The monetization method is to have advertisers supply the graphics used to encrypt the messages. Interesting concept. Pretty good demo.

Serendipity Technologies: Work Light

This product basically lets you create “feeds” from enterprise applications like ERP and CRM systems and have those feeds show up in what amounts to a widget. This will supposedly allow knowledge workers to be able to work more effectively because they are not constantly hunting for info amid screen after screen of cryptic dialogue boxes. Kind of a cool idea. Not sure if I’m totally convinced. They had an ok demo, but could have been much more practiced.

Symantec: Identity Initiative

“On the internet, nobody knows that you’re a dog”. This was the introduction for a cool product that Symantec is introducing to help internet users protect their identity and reputation. The technology informs you about a site that you are considering doing business with based on site security and reputation.  You can choose to go ahead and take the risk, cancel, or let Symantec create temporary contact information for you that forwards to your permanent information so that you can protect your identity. Cool product, ok demo.

6^th Sense Analytics

This was a very cool product that allowed an engineering manager to automatically measure metrics about work done in a software project. My big question about this product is whether or not the metrics that it is measuring are an accurate indicator of productivity. I think that measuring the level of distraction is good, but measuring the amount of time spent on certain sections of the code seems like it might just measure number of keystrokes rather than work accomplished.

More evaluations from a remote support DEMOgod

Nathan continues - live from the DEMO conference:

Eyejot

There were several video startups at DEMO. This was the first one, but they are all starting to run together for me now. This was basically a way to send video more easily, you can embed a video in a MySpace page or send it to a mobile device. I failed to see a lot of differentiation among this crowd. I don’t doubt that each has its unique advantages, but I think that they will have to do a lot more work to communicate those differences to the public.

Honeypitch

Ostensibly, this product is supposed to help you stand out from the competition by letting you create a “pitch” online that your customer can log into and review. You can add video and other multimedia along with the standard Power Point presentations. After the pitch, you can present the customer with a contract and have them agree to it online.

The demo had multiple problems. To start with, the CEO had a gal from his PR agency help with the demo. This is a major mistake. A good PR firm is there to coach you, and to set up interviews with press targets. They should be a strong supporting role, but be invisible to the watching world. Otherwise, they are stealing the glory for themselves, undermining their purpose in life, which is to get the glory for their clients. Having the PR person help with the demo sends the message that you don’t have anyone else in your organization who is presentable enough to put on a stage. This may in fact be true, but you don’t want to advertise it.

Secondly, they did a skit…not just any skit, but one with a blond wig. Skits are almost always a bad idea. It was sort of cheesy and included a lot of hyperbole about the product from the “customer” that you would never hear in real life.

As for the product, I fail to see why anyone would be more impressed viewing a Power Point and a video of a salesperson online than they would be by a phone call or an in-person visit. It seems like automating the pitching process would reduce rather than increase close rate by taking out a level of human interaction.

Wyse Technology

The basic gist of this product is that you can use the Wyse thin client (which is cheaper than a normal pc) to do things like watching video that you normally would not be able to do on a thin client. This heralds in a future of computing where no one has to have a full PC; they can just access their computing environment from the server. The demo started out with a video of industry luminaries talking about the possibilities of thin-client computing.

I get the concept (lower cost, easier administration, greater security), but I’m not sure that people are going to be willing to give up offline access to their files and/or applications.

Adobe Apollo

Speaking of online/offline access, I thought this product and demo were great. It basically allows software engineers to develop applications using web languages (Flash, Flex, Javascript, HTML) but be able to deploy them on the desktop using the Apollo runtime environment (RTI). The result is basically web applications that can reside on the desktop for online and offline access. The demo was clean, the presenter was polished but not “stagey”, good stuff.

I think that Adobe is in a good position to enable cross-platform interoperability. They have two of the most ubiquitous standards: PDF and Flash, and seem to be working on creating a third with Apollo. A comment in the closing journalist panel was that Flash has fulfilled the promises that Java has made.. . Maybe not quite yet, but getting close.

Nathan McNeill Comments from the DEMO Floor

Opening Remarks

In her opening remarks, Chris Shipley made the point that amid all of the acronyms and buzzwords like “SaaS” and “Web 2.0”, the real theme of DEMO 07 and the new technologies that are arising around it is that of the empowerment of the user in choosing applications and conforming the technology world through those choices.

I can see the principle she articulated at work even in evaluating the products and companies launched at DEMO. For every one that turns out to be wildly successful, there will be several others that never really catch hold. It’s a rough world, and a company has to really differentiate and push hard to have any chance of success. With that as a first thought, I’ll launch into my take on the DEMO presenters.

Shipwire

I didn’t really get the aha moment with this demo. The CEO said that it is a means of simplifying shipping and distribution to the US market for overseas vendors. Maybe I was not paying enough attention. The demo worked fine, but I don’t think that the problem was outlined clearly enough, so the solution was hard to pin.

Kauffman innovation Network: iBridge Network

The iBridge Network is a means for researchers to find innovations from educational institutions. The main benefit of the site is aggregating and organizing innovations from a variety of institutions and formatting it for easy searchability and consumption.

I think that the idea has promise. It does seem to make educational research and innovation more accessible. It’s competing with Google on some fronts (like everyone else), but cuts the clutter. Was a pretty good demo. Clean and simple. Nothing stunning, though. It’s one of those products where you’re not sure if you could actually find tons of other sites offering similar services.

Zink Imaging

Zink (Zero Ink) is a very cool product. Probably one of the two or three top presentations of the first day. Through a special type of paper, Zink enables you to print without ink. This means that the printer can be significantly smaller and doesn’t require all of the toner and ink cartridges mess. They printed a full-color photo print on a printer the size of a paperback novel. Really cool.

The company is going places. The initial plans are to license the technology to mobile device manufacturers, but it looks like the sky’s the limit. Bottom line, great technology, great demo, and everything worked flawlessly. I think they will get a DEMOgod.

Qtech Inc

This company offered a product called ReQall that basically allowed you to call into a service and leave reminders for yourself. I failed to see how it was better than leaving  yourself a voicemail or a voice note. They also violate the No Skit rule to their detriment. The word “synergies” was also used…twice: once live and once in accessing a voice reminder.

I don’t see this technology going anywhere.

Watch this blog for Nathan McNeill’s take on the 2007 DEMO technologies

This week, I’m thrilled to be back at the DEMO conference, this time in Palm Desert, California.  DEMO is the launch pad for emerging technologies where products like JAVA, Palm, and TiVo got their start. Last year, NetworkStreaming launched SupportDesk 9 at DEMO in Phoenix, Arizona, and received one of only 10 DEMOgod awards out of a field of 70 companies (which had already been trimmed down from over 700 applicants.

The DEMO stage is possibly the most electrically charged place on the planet for four days a year. Fortunes can be made or lost here, and it gives those looking on a glimpse into 70 possible futures for the technology industry.

This year, I’m a spectator only, which gives me a unique opportunity to speak my mind without any obligation to perform. I’m going to try and comment on each of the 70 DEMOs that I attend, although you can probably count on the posts getting shorter and less descriptive as the demos pound on. I’ll be evaluating the products being presented, the presentation itself, the people behind the innovation and finally giving my opinion of what its possibilities are for the future.

Here goes…

NetworkStreaming’s Remote Desktop Support By-Passes the Security Concerns of SaaS

In a recent article in Network World, Herbert Thompson explains how the software as a service (SaaS) delivery model brings with it inherent security concerns. Among the most compelling example is Thompson’s point that SaaS providers present a tantalizing target for hackers. The reason is the same reason that Microsoft is a much more appealing target than Mac. If you’re going to go to the trouble of hacking someone, you might as well get the most bang for your buck. In Microsoft’s case, you get to infect 95% of the computer market instead of 3%. In the case of SaaS, you get access to the data from a thousand companies instead of just one. When you think about it, a SaaS provider is sort of like a storehouse for their customer’s data. Hundreds or thousands of customers use the same SaaS company and enter reams and reams data about all sorts of things, from the shipping address of their cola vendor to the social security numbers of all their employees. The companies using a SaaS provider don’t have to be that big for the amalgamated storehouse of data at the SaaS datacenters to be enormous. For this reason, it is a pretty obvious target for a would-be hacker.

Don’t try to hack all thousand companies individually, just hack their SaaS provider. You can save a lot of time.