The New Reality of Support Do more with what you have?
April 23, 2009NATHAN McNEILL:
Good afternoon, everyone and thank you for joining us for this webinar, The New Reality of Support. I'm Nathan McNeill, VP of joined today by Matt Healey, Research Manager with IDC for Software & Hardware Support Services and by Rich Surace, the SVP of Operations for PlumChoice PC Services. Before I go through the agenda of what we were going to cover today, I did want to do a couple of housekeeping items. You should have an option-I think it's on the lower right hand portion of your screen-to expand the slide decks so it should make it easier to read. Find that and do that and it will make your life easier during the webinar. Also, if you have questions, please ask them now versus at the end. We'll be taking those questions and then prioritizing those and then asking those at the end during our Q&A session.
I was going to mention as well that after this introduction, Matt Healey is going to be leading us in some sort of open ended discussion, totally different format than we've done in past webinars. We think it should provide for some good insights. So with that, let me go through some of our agenda. We'll be discussing today, "Today's Internal Help Desk Challenges", the external help desk support challenges-so, internally, if you're supporting users, externally if you're supporting customers-some solutions on the market currently, Bomgar being one of them, for clientless remote support and then the benefits those provide, and then we'll provide some conclusions at the end in the use of these technologies. Now I'm going to let Rich Surace provide an update or an overview of PlumChoice and then I'll give a little more information about Bomgar before we get started with the discussion.
RICH SURACE:
Thank you, Nathan. Good afternoon, everybody. A little bit about PlumChoice, we are a remote service support provider that was founded in 2001 with, as you can see by the slide, we have delivered over 3.1 million client transactions in our SAFElink delivery platform. A couple of items that are very important, as you can see, that we take into account is our customer satisfaction is at a 95% rate of satisfaction, our net promoter score-which is another form of quality-is at 79%, and first incident resolution is over 92%. We currently have over 900 agents based throughout the United States that are certified individuals in the following disciplines as you can see displayed on the screen. One of the key features that we use within the Bomgar platform is the recording of transactions and the remote transactions are very important to us as we 100% record all of our transactions and all transaction types whether it's voice, remote, chat, or email. We also have nationwide dispatch services and we also have the ability to dispatch on a 24/7/365 basis in which we are also open on a 7/24/365 basis for remote support. I'll hand it back to Nathan and we'll go forward from there.
NATHAN McNEILL:
Okay, and a little bit about Bomgar. We are focused exclusively on remote support and we tend to also focus on the enterprise end of the remote support market. We're an appliance based solution, so you own the solution. You put it in your DMZ normally. We have over 4500 customers in all 50 states and about 40 countries internationally and last year we were ranked as one of the ten fastest growing software companies in North America by the Inc. 500 list and then the Deloitte Technology Fast 500. Just a sampling of our customers, we do have a lot of customers in highly regulated industries like finance and health care, as well as in a range of industries across numerous verticals in manufacturing, nonprofit, media, and higher education. I will let Matt lead the discussion from here through a series of topics.
MATT HEALEY:
Okay, thank you Nathan. I'm Matt Healey and I cover the software and hardware support service program here at IDC, which basically means I spend all of my time looking at how end users in technology get supported. So, the topics of internal and external help desks and supporting-the new realities of support-is something that is very top of mind for me all the time.
I want to start with a little bit of IDC research that kind of sets the stage for what we think is going to be happening in the next three to five years. Now, this stat is from a report we published in 2007. It's currently being updated, but I don't expect it to change that much, but the gist of this is that worldwide, we expect to see about a billion people working remotely in 2011 and that's going to be a little bit north of 30% of the total workforce. So as organizations start thinking about how they're going to support those employees or even how you're going to support customers, the concept of just being able to do everything on-site is going to go away because organizations are going to need to support this very large number of remote employees.
So with that as a back drop, let me set the stage a little bit for some of the challenges that I see people having on their internal help desks. The first is-and this is one of those things that if this were a live webcast, I'd ask for a show of hands that said, who here has heard the mantra that you must do more with less, especially in these tough economic times. Well, if I was asking for this live, I would imagine that every hand in the room would go up because that is the way IT is right now. So what does that mean in terms of do more with less? Well, you're seeing shrinking on-site support-remember my mobile worker stat-it's becoming harder to do on-site support. You're looking at demands for increased productivity. Your employees, both IT and your end users, have to be more productive in order to be able to continue to meet the needs of the business. Right now, given the fact that we're in somewhat of a tight economic time, everyone is looking for how can I increase my focus on profitable projects and stop spending as much money or time providing basically "keep the lights on" support services? Against that "do more with less", we have to distribute it in the mobile workforce. We are seeing increase remote employees. The stat that I just provided is true and it's going to keep going that direction.
The second thing that we see is skilled personnel shortages. It may not be a great problem right now, but over time one of the things IDC is seeing is the amount of skilled people that you're going to have in your IT department is shrinking and you're going to need to adapt strategies to make your IT workers more efficient and thus be able to attract more highly skilled people. That's what's facing the internal help desk.
I also want to take a look at the external help desk. The market for services and the market for products have become very highly competitive and as a result of that highly competitive market, people are looking for ways in which they can grab and hold onto customers. Initially looking at providing support services by outsourcing the help desk, I personally believe that most of the benefit people have gotten out of outsource help desk has already come and it's becoming commoditized. Organizations are looking to increase the margins on their support while maintaining their footprint in this highly competitive market and you must be able to scale in order to grow. You must be able to support more customers more effectively or you will not be able to grow in these tight economic times.
Secondly, I think that your customers are becoming more demanding. People need fixes for technology solutions very quickly and they need them-you know, "I'll get to you in a couple of days," or "I'll get to you in a couple of hours," is just not good enough. It might have been good enough five years ago, ten years ago, but now we're seeing the need to solve things immediately. So against all of these backdrops and what I'm seeing overall in the market, I'm going to turn this over to Rich, because Rich, in your business, given the fact that you're supporting a lot of customers, you must deal with a lot of these issues and a lot of these challenges, so I'd love to hear your perspective on this.
RICH SURACE:
Absolutely, Matt, and it actually is-what your research is showing is what we're currently working with today in the current business challenges that we're facing. The national economic climate and uncertainty that we have out there, the clients and businesses that we currently support in the OEM ISP and ISP spaces are truly asking us to do more with less. There is price pressure to do that with, plus, when you have that combination of increasing the customer experience and proving productivity, while at the same time cutting cost, there is a lot of emphasis in all of those areas today because customer retention and acquisition are two big items that companies are forcing the support providers to actually ensure that these types of challenges that we're having to overcome relate and help either improve attrition in a consumer base while at the same time being large enough and scalable enough to accommodate new types of services and support requirements.
What we're also seeing, too, Matt, as well, is today IP network-based converges has accelerated. What's happening is all of the roads are leading to the internet. All different devices today have either an internet-type of service to acquire them whether it's netbooks, whether it's PDA's, whether it's smartphones and what you're finding is that these roads all lead back to the internet. What's happening is with the enablement of smart home technology which on top of all those devices, you have a convergence, if you will, that all of these services are accessing the internet and they're all cross-enabling devices now that allow you to take so many different devices and link them to your home today as well as on the road.
So what's happening is people are taking their PDA's, bringing them home, plugging them into their networkable machines, delivering their data throughout their home, delivering their media, delivering their entertainment while at the same time they have what is known as an on-demand lifestyle and that's because they've increasingly become dependent on the technology in the home. This fosters a couple of problems at the same time and one of those problems is the knowledge divide that exists within devices that are smart, but yet still have the basic tenets of assumption around customers' knowledge and how to use them.
What occurs here is a support quandary that both businesses as well as, as Matt mentioned earlier, people working from home or people becoming more home based as far as offices are concerned. You're finding the bleed-over effect of technology dependence both on their in-home devices as well as their business devices as they try to enable them in the home office environment which, because of that knowledge divide that exists with the customer having to know more about their product sets and customers, frankly, that knowledge divide is just going to get larger. They're finding a lack of quality support out there that can address all of these cross-device products that currently exist.
This is where PlumChoice actually comes in and actually has the ability to service these arenas, but at the same time, what also is occurring out there is a new security front for families and business in the virtual world. We're finding in our service of customers, across the different divisions that I mentioned earlier, things such as new forms of identity theft popping up through web intrusions and virulent malware. If you look at the recent Conflicker malware that was distributed, very aggressive forms that are going after information from customers and trying to steal identities, while at the same time we're also finding families that are trying to protect their families from internet predators and social websites and all of these pervasive challenges that are out there both at the business level and also has transitioned at the home level and that's where these challenges are going to continue, as Matt mentioned earlier, to increase because the device manufacturers are going to continue to create the latest and greatest type of services and products. At the same time that knowledge divide to understand those devices is also going to continue to be there.
So these challenges are not going to go away is the point that I wanted to make and from that perspective I'll hand this back to Nathan who will describe further where Bomgar can help relate and understand these challenges as well.
MATT HEALEY:
Right, thank you, Rich. Nathan, there were a couple of things that Rich kind of brought up there that I think I would absolutely like to hear you touch on, specifically around some of the security issues, some of the mobility, and some of this increased complexity that we're seeing, not only from his perspective on the consumer side, but where you guys see as potentially on the enterprise side for some of those internal help desk challenges.
NATHAN McNEILL:
Yeah, sure, and you know what's interesting is, even though PlumChoice is supporting the digital home-so it's a lot of times consumers and direct support of those consumers-the business environment is not really all that much different in today's technology environment because a lot of times you're sending an employee home with a laptop. They're plugging that laptop into a host of other technologies. They're using that laptop for other uses beyond just work usage. I mean, just be realistic, it's happening no matter how much you've locked it down. So the environment for an enterprise help desk, an enterprise support center supporting their employees, is actually looking pretty darn similar to just consumer support where you're supporting a whole range of applications and here's the way that works.
First off, you do have that pull of mobility and geographic dispersion which is, if anything, exaggerated by the enterprise where you have a range of different mobile offices and tele-workers and salespeople all over the country. That mobility is what creates the need for platform complexity because if you've got everyone in one building, if you can lock them in the chair, you can mandate more closely what technology they use. You may say that everyone has a standard laptop or a standard desktop, but as soon as you give them technology they can take out of the building, it begins to multiply. You start getting more platforms in play, more technologies in play, and less distinction about what technology you support and what technology you don't support.
So for instance, as soon as you start using like a web application, if you're using salesforce.com, then whether the salesperson is accessing salesforce.com on his company-issued, patched, security-screened laptop or whether he's accessing it via his daughter's new MacBook is not going to matter as much. Now you may still say we're not going to support you, but guaranteed, if he's got a big enough deal on the line and he needs to get in, then you're going to have to fix that problem.
So that's what's happening is the mobility is driving the need for more platforms, for more technological complexity, and that's creating havoc for the help desk both in the enterprise sector as well as in the consumer sector because those two are kind of merging anyway as you see the consumerization of IT in general and then that further conflicts with the emerging counter trend of security compliance because if you compare these back and forth, mobility and geographic dispersion and security and compliance are almost like sparring partners. You know, they fight together a lot because you have the IT guys who want to lock everything down and you have the employees who want to open everything up. So you've got to find a middle ground or some way to balance these two where they're not in constant conflict because neither one of these things is likely to go away. It's not likely that we'll get to a place where everyone is using technology and security is not a concern.
It's not likely, either, that security is going to have its way and everyone gets locked back in the office. So these two sparring partners are going to have to learn to get along at some level and that's going to have to happen both in the enterprise support sector where you're supporting employees where you "should" have more control over what they do or what technology they use as well as on the consumer side where you absolutely have no control if you're an application vendor or if you're a company like PlumChoice that is supporting a broad range of consumers. So that's basically how we would see the market laid out and the challenges that are emerging in that market.
MATT HEALEY:
Great, thank you, Nathan and against that I wanted to bring up a comment that I heard. As an IDC analyst, I talk to a lot of organizations about how they're supporting their end users and one of the things I've heard from a large professional services company-and please excuse, I know I put it in quotes, but it's probably a paraphrase because I heard this about three to six months ago-is they're having to investigate every aspect of how they're supporting their employees because all of these counteracting forces, the security and compliance, the need to do more with less, the platform complexity, you start ending up in situations where a senior vice president has decided to move from a PC to a Macintosh, and because he's a senior vice president, somebody is going to support them.
Well, this particular large, professional services firm determined they had to look at their end to end processes and so what they ended up doing was taking a look at what were the most common tools. Well, the most common tools that organizations use to support their internal employees, remote control software is one of them and in that we're thinking about the traditional client-side remote support.
I make a distinction between client-side and clientless remote support. Specifically, traditional remote support requires that the end users have something pre-installed and configured on their client's device in order to enable remote control whereas with clientless remote support all you need is a web connection because there is an applet downloaded or something downloaded that gives the tech control of the PC or to the client device. They are slightly different in that because you don't have to pre-deploy something, I believe it gives the clientless solutions greater reach. There is also phone support, there is IM chat, and then there is what I've just been talking about, the clientless remote support. That's the most common tool.
Well, in addition to this mobile worker population, I also want to talk a little bit about branch office because I think what is going on in branch right now mirrors what is going on in mobile. According to a recent study, only about 38% of branch offices have dedicated IT support. So if you were to add on the number of employees who are working at remote branches that don't have dedicated IT support, add that to my mobile worker number, you've got a lot of people who are basically out in the field or out away from someplace where somebody could come by and visit them as a desk-side visit or something along those lines. I think that really does exacerbate the problem.
In addition, what I'm seeing in terms of how people are supporting them is remote control and phone support are currently the most common that everyone is using. When we asked to select all, remote control and phone came up the most. Then we asked, what is the most common, it's traditional remote control software, but we've already started talking about some of the problems with traditional remote control software and some of the problems in terms or reach, in terms of security, in terms of a lot of different things. So I'm not necessarily sure that if I asked these questions in three to five years I would get the same answers. With that, I think I want at this time turn it over to Nathan because Nathan, you've got some pretty interesting ideas on what's going on with the traditional methods and why this new clientless breed of software, breed of tool really is, in your mind at least, superior to some of the other approaches.
NATHAN McNEILL:
Yeah, sure and before we get into the newer alternatives, it is worthwhile to kind of go through life before the alternatives, life before remote support or clientless remote support because in our experience, a lot of the companies that we talk with are using-not exactly like this, but it's pretty close-a patched together combination of VPN's plus VNC or plus other types of point-to-point remote control. So you've got a client piece that's on the instance and you want to control, you've got a piece on the rep's computer and those communicate peer to peer and you get a connection and of course that's not going to work if you're off the same network. So you have to get the VPN up before you can support the user and if the VPN is not working, you're up a creek. You get delegated down to phone support or on-site support.
So, numerous problems with that, just the connection issue of not being able to connect outside the firewall caps it off, but underneath the surface there are also a lot of security issues with the ability to audit that channel. So if you're doing remote control, you really should be able to know, not just how many sessions took place, but what they're connected to and what information was exchanged with that connection, just basic audit requirements these products don't really address.
Then think about it, too, from a productivity standpoint, you've got the VPN plus VNC combination which can be very time consuming. A lot of times you have to have the IP of the computer you connect to, so add in three minutes for some users. You have phone support which is notoriously ineffective for anything beyond basic technical troubleshooting and you have on-site support which can range between $50 for an on-site visit-it may not be that much. It may just be a rep walking three floors fifty times a day to fix problems.
Either way, you're wasting a lot of time and the alternative to that from our standpoint is-and this is kind of a simple approach to it but I'll explain a little bit about what this means from a utilization standpoint in a second-is clientless remote support where you have a centrally managed remote support solution like Bomgar, lets all of the problems be on one screen for the rep so he can work on wherever the problems are. He can get those on one screen and begin to troubleshoot them there instead of having to go on site. So it instantly means that you're replacing the three minutes that it takes to get the user's IP address, you're replacing the frustration of not being able to connect outside of the firewall, you're replacing phone support and trying to get an idea in your head about what the screen looks like and actually being able to see the screen and, of course, you're replacing a whole host of on-site visits that are caused by a miscommunication over the phone about what's on the screen.
So just putting the rep on the screen has some real impact and here is basically why that is. Think about it this way, the whole concept behind the clientless remote support can be simplified in this manner. Problems from the user standpoint happen on a screen. From a technology standpoint there may be a problem with a network, there may be a problem with the application the client piece is connecting into, there may be a problem with the person who has turned some setting off, but from the user standpoint, all of their problems happen on their screen. The screen is broken and they want to get the screen fixed and the question really is how you get the screen fixed and so for a support rep to be effective, he needs to see the screen.
This is kind of like his native habitat. He can fix stuff on the screen and then once he fixes stuff on the screen, then it's fixed from the user standpoint. If he can't fix it on the screen then it's not fixed from the user standpoint because the screen is still broken. I know it's kind of an over simplification, but I think from the user standpoint, that's what they do is they make things-it's very simple, it's either broken or not from the user standpoint.
Once the rep is on the screen, that's where things get really interesting because then you can act as if you're right next to the user and one of the things we do at Bomgar is we allow you to get on the screen of not just one operating system, but multiple. So whether you're on a Windows system or a Mac or a Linux system or we support one that is mobile and also BlackBerry. So sometimes the rep may not even know what operating system he's supporting until after he sees the screen and can begin troubleshooting and that saves a whole host of time. It means he's not trying to guess what form of BlackBerry the user is using and which button he needs to click based on which model he has. It simplifies that practice and the same process is employed with all of these operating systems where you take the user to a website, you have them click on a link, and then instantly, magically, you get the user's screen and can begin working and that's where the productivity benefits of remote support really start to kick in.
Yesterday you couldn't see the screen and you were kind of winging it, you were trying to work through the user's brain, into their hands, onto the keyboard and then today you're able to see the screen and work directly and you kind of eliminate the need for the middle man. So that's how we see the world is if you can put the rep on the screen through firewalls, no matter what the operating system, securely in a way that you are auditing what happens on that screen, then the world can be a better place. Then you can help the rep get more done. If you can put him in his natural habitat where he's working on the screen directly versus working on the user, you can save a lot of time.
MATT HEALEY:
Well, thank you, Nathan, and I want to reiterate this because in one of my interviews around the help desk-this was with a large manufacturing company that had recently deployed a clientless remote support solution-they really discovered that the efficiency of their helpdesk went up dramatically. What they had done was they had moved from the traditional phone and IM and chat support into the clientless solution. What they discovered, which was really pretty interesting, was that they could dramatically increase both the effectiveness of the rep in terms of reducing the number of minutes it took to solve an L1 all the way up to an L3 problem, and also it allowed those reps to multitask.
Before when you were looking at phone support, you're really looking at a one to one type relationship where the end user calls the technician. That technician really can only deal with one end user at a time whereas on some of these clientless tools, with the ability to actually monitor and kick off processes that will start for a while, the technician can start to support multiple end users and multiple either employees or customers. I think that dramatically increases the efficiency of the helpdesk personnel and, as I said, this large manufacturing company really found that there were some dramatic improvements once they migrated towards that.
So what I've done after talking to a bunch of these end users and actually looking at the solution and doing some internal work here at IDC is I've come up with what I think the main advantages of this approach are. The first one really is from an analyst perspective. I see that I think this provides a dramatic ability to reduce costs. Basically, what you can do is you have no more need to travel to visit a client to either end up providing support to them and the reduced travel costs really come on the external support, so organizations that have to support external customers. I mean, I'm going to ask Rich a somewhat unplanned question. How efficient would your business be if you couldn't remotely connect into your customers and you had to go out there?
RICH SURACE:
It would reduce it dramatically. The on-site experience versus the remote experience is a very different environment because as Nathan mentioned earlier, it's not about what they can't see. They can see everything and with the remote on-site visit you still have to do the troubleshooting basis at a user level versus having the information in front of you to be able to work it effectively. So our effectiveness of our agents and our productivity is dramatically more user based because of the remote aspect of our service. Bomgar has helped make that more efficient by driving the productivity and also at the same time, reduce the on-site visits, Matt. So we've actually seen the result of it in action where we have had problems that typically would have necessitated going on site to fix that we've been able to remediate remotely.
MATT HEALEY:
Yeah, and sorry to call you out there somewhat unprepared there, but the fact is, having studied PlumbChoice and your business model, I'm not sure that you could be profitable if you could not remotely connect to your customers because your customer base is way too distributed. Now, you're an extreme case because you're supporting the end consumers, but when we get back to my data before about a billion remote workers, I don't know whether or not in a couple of years you're going to be that extreme. You are going to be typical of everybody. The cost associated with providing on-site support to customers is just going to keep going up and it's going to continue to eat into profitability.
The second thing that we really see is improved customer retention. Customers that get good tech support and get good support for a solution they've purchased generally tend to come back to the same vendor. So using a tool like this that can help assist the support services and allow you to provide excellent support to your customers will really, I believe, enable you to have a better customer retention and as Nathan mentioned earlier, customer acquisition and customer retention are very critical things, especially in today's economy.
I also like some of the security features that have been included in these solutions, specifically in the one that I'm personally interested in and the one that I think is going to be very powerful is the ability to record the sessions. If you can record the sessions, you can see what the technician did. Once you can see what the technician did, I'm sure that some of you are in heavily regulated industries, the ability to demonstrate to an auditor exactly what you did, exactly what the permissions were, who could get in and have that audit ability, that traceability in terms of what tech at what point was in what computer and they did what and here is the recording of it. I know we have some people here in financial services, some people in health care, those are highly regulated industries and being able to demonstrate that, critical to the solution. The last thing you want to do is get into regulatory problems.
The final, real advantage that I see, and Nathan started touching on it earlier with the ability to support multiple platforms, is the greater flexibility. Traditional remote control is great if everyone is locked down and on the same platform, but how many people, in terms of help desks there, discover that all of a sudden you're supporting netbooks even though netbooks aren't an approved platform? Somebody bought one because they thought it was great and it was so much lighter and they could do their job just as effectively with it and then that sales rep who bought one calls you and says, it's not working right and I have a customer presentation and by the way, help desk, you have to support it. Well, with a traditional tool you're reduced to phone support which nobody likes. With a tool like the clientless solution, I think you really have an intrinsic advantage over that. So that's kind of why I like the tools.
Now, I'm going to turn this over to Nathan because I think that, Nathan, you have some interesting approaches to how you are catering this tool specifically to the enterprises.
NATHAN McNEILL:
Yeah, you know, from our perspective the enterprise is not completely unique as I mentioned earlier, but it does have some unique challenges and the challenges you find under most support are exaggerated in the enterprise. So we talked some about security and we sort of-we developed an acronym, as all vendors are supposed to do, around SIMPLE. So we talk about Security, we talk about Integration with your other components, your other applications like service desk-we're a partner with HP and BMC for that-Manageability for managing hundreds of reps versus just a couple of guys, Platform support-I've already spoken of that-Lower cost and then obviously Enterprise focus because we needed an E to complete the acronym, but this is how we see the world. This is what the components we would see as a part of a complete solution for the enterprise.
This has not really been looked at as an enterprise application heretofore and that's caused a tremendous amount of problems in the industry both from a productivity standpoint and a manageability standpoint as well as from a security standpoint. I mean, in 2008 there was a Verizon study that found that remote control or remote access was used in about 42% of all data breaches in the 500 cases they site between 2003 and 2007. So it's a real problem if it's not addressed as an enterprise problem and as an enterprise solution and so we would just use the acronym as a way to kind of remind ourselves of the components that need to be addressed.
MATT HEALEY:
Okay, great, so I want to turn this over at this point to Rich because I think, Rich, some of-and have you go into some of the reasons kind of that the Bomgar solution and the clientless remote solution has really started addressing some of PlumChoice's needs. Now I know I called you out earlier on the reduced cost, but if you could expand on that and some of the other advantages, I think that would be very interesting.
RICH SURACE:
Absolutely, Matt, in looking at a remote support tool, where Bomgar really has differentiated itself is, as Nathan and Matt have described in prior slides, is the ability to increase functionality while at the same time controlling cost. There is a predictable price model that is built into the Bomgar solution that allows us to grow and scale our business effectively knowing what our costs are going to be and not from a fluctuation standpoint. One of those things in remote tools in general or in software or SAS models is named seats versus concurrent seats. Named seats are very difficult versus concurrent, which allows you to diversify over multiple shifts. It allows you to use more of the licenses for the time that you need to use the licenses for so you can spread them out over your shifts better.
Matt and Nathan have spoken a tremendous amount about security. We're a very-we support customers today, we also support small business today and the biggest, what I call, moment of truth is how secure is it and the Bomgar tool and Nathan's explanation on how secure it is, being that it has enterprise class qualities to manage HIPAA-type regulations as well as some of the providers in the telecom and cable space that we provide service to today have very strict requirements around remote access security. One of the reports that Nathan had just mentioned, you know, intrusions, the fact that the Bomgar tool has automatic recording of sessions and interactions, it's not about what your agents would do, it's what the agent did and what you can do to remediate or resolve those issues when you have those issues come up.
Instead of doing a lot of data mining or looking up or trying to recreate the issue, the Bomgar solution allows the session data to be consolidated within the firewall. It also has the automatic recording of sessions, especially across the operating systems that Nathan mentioned earlier, that this has the ability to record those sessions and their actions across multiple operating systems within the same time. The recording and archiving of data allows you also to keep a history of that data because of the customer requirements. As Matt mentioned earlier, people are looking for more records and with today's audit and security trails you have to have those records available due to regulatory requirements.
Never mind that, one of the real pieces of Bomgar's ability is the fact that they have open API's and that they seamlessly can integrate within your existing ACD and CRM and web platforms today. Their integration team has built a platform, if you will, that allows you to take multiple toolsets that you already have over the preexisting platform and overlay this enterprise remote solution on top of that. From a functionality perspective, as I mentioned before, Linux, Macintosh, PDA, Windows Mobile CE's, multiple operating system types, the quality and the features that I've mentioned earlier transition across those platforms, so it allows our organization to actually be able to enhance our services and build our products very effectively to address a multitude of client dependent as well small/medium business dependent users and their tools that they have and their products that they have while at the same time administrative capabilities, whether they're client based, whether they're internal or external based, it allows your customer or yourselves to actually monitor the agent behavior to see what the agents are doing within a given point in time.
Matt mentioned the ability to know what your workers are doing in the field. Well, Bomgar allows that same type of enterprise view without having to have a lot of heavy installation or pre-installation of product on that particular desktop. It allows you to reach in and be able to see what is actually occurring from a productivity standpoint. At PlumChoice, we have a diverse workforce that is based remotely. It's actually based from their homes. It's not based in brick and mortar locations and what this allows us to actually do is be able to provide the secure environment and monitor that environment in a live capability while at the same time maintaining the speed of the remote tool as Matt and Nathan have mentioned that the productivity side of that, maintaining the speed, allowing people to do multiple pieces of work at the same time also increases productivity.
Last, but not least, I cannot go without saying the reliability pieces of this. We needed a tool that we could count on from a reliable standpoint, the five nines that everyone is looking for, and it truly allows us to enhance our products and our services and our platform as a result of what Bomgar has created here for a remote support too.
MATT HEALEY:
Great, thank you, Rich. We're coming up towards the end of the hour, so I want to see if we can move ahead a little bit here and get to some of the benefits of these solutions. One of the things that I've heard in multiple situations is that organizations have been able to take this tool and extend it beyond just providing tech support and really been able to turn it into a revenue generating tool where it's either through paid support or whether it's through better customer satisfaction or even for some technology organizations, the ability to remotely deploy software, the ability to virtually go on-site and provide upgrades and install upgraded software. I think that's a very interesting solution or way in which some of the organizations are using this tool.
So kind of in conclusion, I'm not going to read through all of these because I think we've discussed most of them, you know, better resolution, better call times, decreased turnover, reduced head count, etcetera, but I think that really, the way I like to sum this up as we're coming to the end of this webcast is that it is my belief as an analyst that organizations that have not investigated using this tool or a tool like the Bomgar solution or any of the clientless solutions by the end of this year really should look at it because I think that they will end up in a real competitive disadvantage going forward if they're not investigating this type of a tool.
I'm going to turn this over to Richard for final conclusions from PlumChoice's perspective.
RICH SURACE:
From our perspective, the reasons why we went with Bomgar from a needs perspective, we needed a remote security tool that was predictable in being able to drive costs. We also needed leading edge functionality and also flexible integration and reliable up time. What the Bomgar solutions allowed us to do is increase our service platform and increase our serviceability of clients, being able to have hundreds of service offers built around being able to reach out through the diversification and the functionality that exists within the Bomgar platform as well as the leading edge capabilities that Bomgar helps bring to the table as far as they're not satisfied with accessing just one device. They want the ability to go across platform and to go across operating systems and to go across multiple devices.
This has allowed us to increase our service offer while at the same time, the redundancy factor, the fact that we have the five nines, the fact that when implemented into our service delivery platform, it allows us to increase the redundancy that we have because of the recording of all issues that we have whether it's voice based or chat based. The ability to reduce on-site visits, you have the, as Matt mentioned earlier, being able to actually take an on-site visit, which is the highest form of support and being able to reduce that truck roll while at the same time maintaining customer experience and customer satisfaction. We do charge for what we do. We are a fee based support operation and in doing that we're also very cost conscience and reducing cost to the consumer as well as the small/medium business and then beyond that, extending support beyond the Wintel platform. Again, I can't overemphasize the fact of the diversification and flexibility of the tool and the accessibility of the tool as well as the scalable and cost effectiveness of it. It allows us to grow with our clients. It allows us to actually be able to scale more effectively than traditional remote support platforms where you're either hindered by extra server-based equipment or extra services to be brought into the mix to continue the scale and then last, but not least, increased capability within our SAFElink delivery platform.
MATT HEALEY:
Great, thank you, Rich. It sounds as if you've really done pretty well with the Bomgar solution. We're coming up to the end of the hour and I suspect we have quite a bit of questions for the audience, so I think I'm going to turn this back over to Nathan who I think will moderate the Q&A. Nathan?
NATHAN McNEILL:
Sure thing, and thank you, Rich, thank you, Matt, for that discussion. We do have a few questions. It seems that we were maybe a little bit ambitious with the number of slides, but hopefully it was informative to you. The first question we have is how this integrates with the dual monitor and I'll answer that one. The way Bomgar integrates with the dual monitor is basically if the user has dual or even multiple monitors, you have a little button in the screen sharing tab, you would click that and select which monitor you would like to see. So it gives you both the number of monitors, you can kind of see which monitor, it also shows you the layout of those monitors so you can choose which one you want to see.
Another question we have is-this is related to the stat on one of the first slides of what percentage of the workforce is mobile today compared to expected 30% in 2011. Matt, I'm not sure if that report has been updated since the 2007 publish date. Do you know where that stat stands now?
MATT HEALEY:
I don't know where it is today. That report is in the process of being updated, but once I get that percentage and once we have that report updated, I'll take the action item to email that number out. I'm not sure I want to actually give out-and the 2011 number is pretty solid at this point, but where it is in 2009, I have to-or at the end of 2008, I'm going to have to take an action item to email it back once we get that number finalized.
NATHAN McNEILL:
Fair enough and I have another question for Rich which is how are netbooks impacting the market for paid support. I know we've had a couple of mentions of netbooks through the discussion, are you seeing that come up?
RICH SURACE:
Absolutely, Nathan, we're seeing more help requests now. The nuance of the device versus the laptop or desktop, we're seeing a lot of usability type of inquiries and it's going to take a little while for the netbook to continue to be more pervasive, but we're getting the support requests every day today and they're continually coming in around usability and functionality of the device itself.
MATT HEALEY:
One of the things that I want to add into that about how netbooks are impacting the cost of support is, I'm really kind of unsure from a consumer perspective who is going to end up supporting netbooks because they're clearly at such a low price point that it's going to be challenging, I believe, for a lot of the technology vendors at the price point of a netbook to be able to support them. So I think from that perspective, they may open up the door for organizations like PlumChoice or the telecommunications companies or third party maintainers to actually be able to support them.
What I find is really interesting about netbooks and the challenge that they're placing on the enterprise is that they are a symptom of the larger problem of device proliferation and device complexity going up and that is not staying in the consumer space that Rich understands so well, but talk to any enterprise help desk, whether you are officially supporting netbooks or not, whether you are officially supporting Macintoshes or not or BlackBerries or iPhones or whatever the device is, you're going to have people who are going to bring these devices in and expect them to work in their office environment. So the challenges that Rich is facing in terms of supporting a completely uncontrolled environment where consumers could have anything installed on their machine or any type of machine, I think in a few years is going to be the reality in the enterprise environment and people that haven't grappled with it and haven't grabbed that bull by the horns just yet, I think you're going to have to because when so and so whose title is senior VP calls up, they're going to want it solved.
RICH SURACE:
And Matt, to dovetail onto this again, one area that really-netbooks are really going to impact is if you don't support them or if you don't find a way to support them, the return factor of the point of distribution or the dissatisfaction that will exist of where they were distributed from will be compounded as well.
MATT HEALEY:
Yes, I would agree with that in its entirety.