Remote Support in 2007: Solution Requirements

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
For the third party assessment I wanted to run through a couple of third parties that have looked at Bomgar™. Last year in February 2006 we launched Bomgar™ 9 which is the evolutionary upgrade to our Bomgar™ product. We launched it at DEMO which is the prestigious conference for emerging technologies in Phoenix, Arizona. There are over 700 companies that applied to launch their products at DEMO. Of those only 70 are chosen after a screening process by Chris Shipley, Executive Director at DEMO. Of those 70, only ten win the DEMOgod award and we were privileged to win that award last year in Phoenix.

So, we're one of the ten that won out of 70 that got in out of 700 which applied. Bomgar™ is a great product. And, Chris Shipley, the Executive Director, says of Bomgar™, "Bomgar™ is quite simply the easiest, most efficient, most effective remote IT support tool I've ever seen. Bomgar™ is the consumer support tool for 2006 and beyond." And, we couldn't agree more. Also, just a week ago on January 8, Bomgar™ received 4.65 out of a total rating - a total possible rating of 5 in a Network World clear choice test evaluation. This is huge for us. It's - the synopsis of it is that it's a very well designed Bomgar™ screen-sharing product. It supports Windows and Mac clients. This is telling us what we've know for a while which is Bomgar™ is a fantastic product. We've got over 2,500 customers located in all 50 states and over 30 countries that are using Bomgar™ currently. And, we get this kind of feedback all the time from our customers and it's nice to see it from Network World as well.

Some other requirements are related to platform support. It's obvious that you want something that allows Windows Desktop and server operating systems from '95 through Vista. You've gotta support the basics, you know, the over 90% market share that Microsoft has. One other thing that's important as well is Mac OSX Tiger and higher, to support that operating system. And, it's got about 5-6% of the market so it's not nearly as pervasive as Windows is. But, I don't know if you saw the MacWorld keynote by Steve Jobs but about 50% of new Macs sold currently are to non-Mac users. So, it is gaining market share. And, it was also recently named PC Magazine's Editor's Choice for the - the Mac Book Pro was named Editors Choice Laptop for the first time in history by PC Mag. So, whether or not that goes anywhere, you need to be prepared. You need to be ready to support those Macs that you own.