Remote Support in 2007: Solution Requirements

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
This is one of those lessons that we pretty much learned in housing that it's usually cheaper over the long run to purchase versus rent. We've also learned it in our automobiles it's usually cheaper to purchase versus lease. The rules are not really different for remote support. It makes better financial sense to purchase the solution and, over time, it presents a lower total cost of ownership. Ownership is a requirement to having a lower total cost of ownership.

So, here's a graph comparing Bomgar™ to our two competitors based on total cost of ownership. Sometimes in certain circumstances renting makes sense. If you look at the graph, this is not one of those times. Let me go through productivity, and one of the key aspects of productivity is ease of use. It's easy to use for your reps, if it's easy to use for your customers, it's going to make them a lot more productive. You don't want to be spending a lot of time getting connected to your clients. You want to spend that time supporting your clients. This has to do with how big is the download, how many clicks, how many prompts does it require and is it ... is the process completely transparent to your end users?

You want it to be informative to them as well so they're not wondering what's going on. They need to be aware of the decisions they're making if they're granting remote control, if they're granting file transfer, or other privileges to the rep. It's also useful to have an administrative control over notification thresholds. So, for instance, sometimes in certain circumstances in certain industries or companies, you may require more dialogue or more prompts for a customer than certain other industries. And, as an administrator, you need to be able to control that. Not too many and not too few.