Remote Support in 2007: Solution Requirements

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
All right. Thank you Melissa. Today we're going to be going through remote support solution requirements to give you the information you need to make an informed, educated decision about which remote support solution to choose. First though, I wanted to talk a little bit about why remote support and especially why now. Why in 2007 instead of waiting until later in the adoption cycle? Let me go through a few current trends and facts.

The first couple are from Network World. One is that 90% of employees work away from company headquarters. So, instead of having a big, giant, behemoth corporate headquarters which houses all the employees, you have multiple regional offices all over the country or different remote locations. All these employees need support. Again, you also have 40% working at remote locations. This includes teleworkers, it might include mobile salespeople, regional offices, or people working from home for maybe a day or two a week. All these people need support and they're all separate from corporate headquarters. Also, the number of laptops is currently one in three computers sold. So, out of the 60 million computers that were sold last year, 20 million of those were laptops. One of Wire magazine's predictions for 2007 is that laptops will overtake desktops to be more than one in two PCs sold in 2007. That would be 30 million new laptops that are entering the market.

You also have broadband penetration is exploding. Think about in 2000 you had less than 5% broadband penetration for adults with broadband in their homes. Today it's over 30%. So, you have a huge increase in the number of adults with broadband. Also, a huge increase in the places that you can get broadband. You can get it in hot spots, in restaurants, wherever you go you can always - you find broadband. There are whole cities looking to adopt it. and, those two things, mobility, being able to take your computer with you, and connectivity, broadband penetration, have allowed for a whole host of applications that allow for mobility. But, the question then is how to support that mobility because what this is also doing is it's creating a lot of technological complexity for the support organization.