Remote Support in 2007: Solution Requirements

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
And, you'd be surprised, a lot of the corporations that we sell to, they end up finding out that they do have Macs whether it's in the creative departments or other departments at their company. They do support Macs even if it's not in the same numbers as their Windows machines. What you also know, if you're an educational institution, you're already dealing with support for Macs. And, we have educational institutions where Macs comprise 30-50% of their supported systems.

Now for total cost of ownership. This obviously you know you want something that license is based on the number of reps supporting versus the number of computers supported. If you're licensing per computer, if you've got 1,000 computers and it's $100.00 per license the cost can get outa hand pretty quickly. Whereas, with the number of reps, it's much easier to scale. If you're licensing based on the number of reps there's two different routes that can take as well. One is concurrency. The other is named seats. Bomgar™ is licensed per concurrent user. And this makes a lot more financial sense because it allows more people to use the solution and more people to have a unique account so you don't have to have generic accounts which also presents a security risk.

One other consideration is maintenance pricing. A couple things you want to ask. What is the on going cost and what does that cover? Does that cover support, software upgrades, hardware upgrades? You know, are there - what are all the components of the solution that could break or could need service? And, does the maintenance plan cover those things? The third is ownership. And, this is something that I want to camp on for a little while because, if you stop and think about it, it's impossible to have a total cost of ownership assessment if you don't own the solution. So ... and this is the question to ask: if you stop paying, does the product turn off? If it does, then you don't own the solution and it's going to be very difficult to calculate total cost of ownership. Like with a host solution where you're paying monthly, the total cost of ownership is infinite because you keep on paying year, after year, after year. And, if you don't, they turn it off.