Managing Risk & Cost in Remote Support Product Selections
View or Listen to this Bomgar™ Webcast:
February 21, 2008Download mp3 | Read Transcript
Moderator:
Hello everybody and thank you for joining us for today's SSPA web cast, Managing Risk and Cost in Remote Support Product Selection. I'd like to introduce today's first presenter, SSPA's Vice President of Research, John Ragsdale. John, take it away.
John Ragsdale, VP of Technology Research for AFSMI, SSPA & TPSA:
Thank you Sean. Hello everyone and welcome to this SSPA webcast, sponsored by Bomgar Corporation. Our topic today is Managing Risk and Cost in Remote Support Product Selection. I've been doing webcast for the SSPA for almost two years now and we talked a lot about remote support in previous webcasts, and we always get a lot of questions in about security and risk and concerns from IT around data access. So I'm thrilled that we're going to be drilling down into that a little more today and I think that we'll be getting some lively questions in from the audience.
So my name is John Ragsdale, I'm Vice President of Research for the SSPA. I'm joined on today's webcast by Clarence White, CIO for the Salvation Army and Nathan McNeill, Vice President of Product Strategy for Bomgar Corporation. Thank you both for joining me today.
Before we get started a couple of housekeeping items for you. If you would like a copy of the slide used for the days webcast, please check back on our website later this week. We'll have the entire webcast available on demand in case you want others in your organization to listen in and we will also make the slides available for download. We encourage all of you to participate and there are two ways you can join in today. The first is by asking questions, and you will find a new question button on the ON24 panel. As questions occur to you go ahead and submit them. We'll keep them for the Q and A period later in the webcast. The second way you can participate is through polling questions. To join in the polling questions be sure to have your pop up blocker disabled. Okay, let's go ahead and get started.
John Ragsdale, VP of Technology Research for AFSMI, SSPA & TPSA:
As I said, we're focusing on issues around security and risk today and my theme is considering both internal and external security and privacy concerns. I'll be talking a little bit about that later, but I do think that it's important always to keep in mind both aspects, the internal issues around security and privacy, but also the external or your customer concerns as well. So these concerns do need to be front and center when you're making a decision about remote support technology decisions, I think you will find that your IT organization has a lot of standards or even legislation governering ... governing the way that they handled that, so you did need to involve IT up front and make sure before you even get started with product selection that you're meeting all their standards and practices moving forward.
So I wanted to get opening up here with a poll question for you. I know that a lot of you have indicated logging in that you're shopping for a new remote support solution. So I'd like to understand, to help me tailor some of my comments, when you're evaluating different products and I know there are a lot of products on the market, what is your biggest consideration or what are you looking or in one product to really know that it's the right product for you? So the first example is consolidating remote ... remote support tools. So I know that you may have multiple tools and use within the organization, so are you looking for something that will meet all of those needs and will scale to meet the needs of a larger organization.
Cutting operating costs, clearly that's one of the primary motivators and are you looking for a product with proven customer success in cutting operating costs. Your next option, supporting multiple platforms. I'm going to be talking a little bit about this today, but some of you may be surprised to find that remote support solutions don't just work for Windows PC's anymore. There's a much wider array of platforms and devices they support. Our topic today, security and risk. So are you looking for a vendor that you know can increase the security of the data that you have about customers and you're collecting about customers?
John Ragsdale, VP of Technology Research for AFSMI, SSPA & TPSA:
And finally, meeting those compliance requirements. We know that there's a lot more legislation governing this in different industries and different geographic regions, so are you looking for a vendor that has proven success in meeting those compliance requirements. So go ahead and think about that and make your selection. I'm going to close the poll out here one second and let's push the results out to the audience.
So it is no great surprise, I suppose that the operating expenses are really front and center in a lot of people's minds, 66% of you say that you're hoping to cut operating expenses, and I do know that that's one of the driving forces. So you know, different vendors approach this different ways and I do think it's important to look at their customer references and understand which vendors have a proven track record for saving costs. You're definitely, 22% of you are primarily interested in security. So depending on the industry you're in, that is not a surprise. And a few of you are looking for remote support consolidation, trying to eliminate having a dozen different tools and pick one tool that has the functionality you need, but also the scalability you need for larger organizations. So thank you very much for joining in on that polling question and I'm going to get ready with my next slide here.
So open with just a little bit of info on the return of investment from remote support solutions. I published a report last year, building the business case for remote support and we're going to send a copy to all of you for attending the event today, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this topic. I think you'll be hearing more about it from our panelist, but in general, I think it is safe to say that remote support technology has one of, if not the, best return on investment story for all the technologies within service support automation. The other close runner is knowledge bases, another technology it's hard not to get an ROI. But definitely remote support has a great ROI story. It impacts a number of metrics, including first contact resolution rate, average talk time, fewer escalations to level two and level three, and a big savings on eliminating remote visits or desk side visits or customer visits.
John Ragsdale, VP of Technology Research for AFSMI, SSPA & TPSA:
You know, it can take up to 500 to 700 dollars to roll a truck out to a customer site, so anything you can do to eliminate that racks up the savings pretty quickly. Something I found doing that research report is that company's are also including a lot of soft metrics in their ROI analysis, primarily around increasing customer satisfaction, but also increasing agent satisfaction and some company's are even looking at reducing agent turnover by implementing remote support tools. So, as I said, you'll be getting a copy of that report in the next few days, and I hope you take a chance to read through it, it should really help you build that business case if you're trying to get some additional budget this year for remote support.
But talking about security and risks and concerns to think about, as I mentioned earlier I think it's important to look at both internal and external concerns around security. The internal concerns stemming from your IT organization, obviously security and privacy are much more legislated today then in the past. If you're in the healthcare industry, HIPAA governs so many things now, definitely financial services in North America has much more increased privacy legislation in the last five years. For European folks they've always had a lot of legislation there, things like Basil 2, I know we've got a couple European folks listening in on the call today. But corporate IT standards for security really need to be addressed up front, and I don't always agree with corporate IT standards on security. You know, for example there are a lot of company's that refuse to allow any on demand or hosted technology, which I think is kind of a drastic step to take. But you know, reality is it's fair and I talked to SSPA members who have that restriction. So on demand in particular is becoming a little let's say political.
Recently there have been a number of big news stories about Canadian companies who will not use hosted offerings from American vendors because their data is stored in America and therefore it is subject to the US Patriot Act. So they're insisting that they either have an on premise or an appliance based implementation, or that the company opens up a new data center in Canada so their customer information is not stored on the US side of the border. So a lot of things to think about there, a lot of issues that your IT organization and your CIO are worrying about that support management may not even be aware of. So as I say, it's great to involve them up front.
John Ragsdale, VP of Technology Research for AFSMI, SSPA & TPSA:
But on the external side I think we have to address this as well, and I always say, and I jokingly call this Ragsdale law, convenience overrides paranoia and historically customers are more then willing to give up control over access to their computers as long as they see that business value. It's faster and easier for them to get problem solved. But the truth is a lot of consumers and business customers have big concerns today. There are so many stories in the press about hacked in personal information or stolen hard drives. So for customers that do have concerns about remote access you've got to have that verbiage up front, make sure that your agents can explain to them why their data is safe, why no one will ever have access to their information because of the remote access session. So your agent training so address those, you may even want to have a little script that you provide. Some, I'll be really interested to hear our panel discuss that and see if that ever comes up on the situation that Clarence particularly has.
So on to evaluating remote support technology. It is one of the highest adopted technologies among SSPA members, 85% of the survey we're doing currently on our technology in use by our members, haven't quite finished that survey yet, but the preliminary findings say that 86% of members are using remote support. But we're finding that there is a lot of interest in replacing that technology and part of that is because something that I have been tracking.
There is so much interest in pro-active support among our members and they're looking for their remote support technology to do a lot more then just remote control. They want to be able to do more remote monitoring and there's proactive service, being able to tell what's going on and fix equipment for customers and so I think that you'll find that some remote support vendors, in particular, Bomgar, I'm happy to give them a plug for that, are starting to now even support unattended servers. So it's not just about PC's anymore. So the differentiation I think that you should consider when you're evaluating technology is the flexibility of supported platforms and devices, the feature sophistication, which I think you'll find has come a long way in the last few years, and the deployment model. So let me step through those pretty quickly here.
John Ragsdale, VP of Technology Research for AFSMI, SSPA & TPSA:
First on flexibility, I think it's really interesting to see the environments that are supported by some remote support platforms today and obviously Windows PC's but Mac is becoming much more prevalent for many companies, definitely the Linux world has taken off very well and the ability to support the growing percentage of people using Linux is important as well. One of the most, I think interesting developments is being able to do remote support for Windows mobile devices.
So considering that the wireless carriers tell us they're receiving three to four trouble tickets or phone calls from customers for every new device because the typical handheld device has now become so complex, being able to do remote support for those devices is really going to speed up things if your customers are using your software or hardware for these mobile devices. And as I mentioned, there is growing interest among our membership and being able to do more proactive service and remote monitoring of servers and I'm pleased to say that one of, if not the only remote support vendor able to do full access for the unattended Windows servers and Linux servers is Bomgar, so please to have them a part of this webcast today.
On the future side, very basic remote control is available from a lot of places, but as I said these technology platforms have become much more sophisticated in the last few years. I'm not going to touch on all of these today but as part of the technology survey I was just looking through those results this morning and interestingly our members who are using web chat in collaboration with their customers are primarily using a remote support platform for that web chat collaboration, not a third party chat specialist, which was what I thought. So great to know that you guys are starting to leverage more capabilities with that remote support platform. Some other things I think are really cool here, flash session recording allows you to do a lot more quality monitoring, but also training. You know, you can record the perfect interaction with the customer and then allow other agents to see how to do it. So that's a great training tool available now because of the support of flash.
John Ragsdale, VP of Technology Research for AFSMI, SSPA & TPSA:
Satisfaction surveys, also integration is always key to pulling all that great data you're doing into customer history and having and XML integration means that it's a much faster and easier integration to do and hopefully will never have to be rebuilt when you upgrade, as with some of our old APIs. So a look at the technical sophistication that's available with features and functions. I would really encourage you to read the brochures, see some of the cool new features that are available and as long as they're going to be embedded for the same price in that platform, you might as well pick a platform that has all the bells and whistles that you're looking for.
The final way to differentiate is on the deployment model, and there are three basic approaches to deployment. The first is the software as a service or hosted model, the next is the traditional on premise where you install and own the software onsite and the third is a hybrid which is something you're going to hear more about from Nathan today in our webcast. But that is appliance based remote support and appliance based means that you get the security of having the data on site and behind your firewall, but you don't have the added expense of installing and maintaining that software because the appliance takes care of that for you. So it's an interesting option, it's unique to Bomgar and something you really should consider when you're evaluating complete ownership costs for an implementation.
So let me close out here with a few recommendations and I'll turn it over to our first panelist. As I've said make sure that IT is involved up front. They probably have a lot of security concerns and regulation they're dealing with that you may not be aware of. So make sure that you're involving them early in the process. I think that first contact resolution is one of the biggest wins that we get from in solving remote support. Speeding up those calls and handling them on the first interaction is great for your support metrics and cutting operating costs, but it's also a key way of increasing customer satisfaction. So it's really a win-win situation. Hard and soft metrics when you're modeling that ROI, as I mentioned, and you'll see in the report you're going to receive, that more companies are including those soft metrics like agent satisfaction and customer satisfaction. So while it's hard to put a dollar amount on those, I think it's great to include those when you're building that ROI story as well.
John Ragsdale, VP of Technology Research for AFSMI, SSPA & TPSA:
So let me skip on down here, train incent and reward to promote adoption of remote support tools. If you're going to make the investment in any support technology, make sure that your agents know about it, that they're well trained on how to use it, that you're monitoring who's using it and the folks that aren't making great use of that technology pull them aside for some additional training and coaching. Because you simply cannot get return on investment if no one's using the tool. So something to keep in mind about remote support and any other support technology that you implement.
Well I've eaten up a sizable chunk of our time here and I know that you tuned in to day primarily to hear from our panelists, so I'm thrilled to turn it over now to Clarence White, the CIO for the Salvation Army. Welcome, Clarence.
Clarence White, CIO, The Salvation Army:
Thank you John. It's good to be here.
John Ragsdale, VP of Technology Research for AFSMI, SSPA & TPSA:
We were having a conversation before we started today that a lot of technology companies look to non-profits because you know, you guys have so much visibility and transparency around how you spend your funds and your cost cutting approaches. So I know that we're all very interested in what you have to say and I'm going to turn it over to you now.
Clarence White, CIO, The Salvation Army:
Well thanks again, John. Well I'm Clarence White and I'm the CIO of the Salvation Army, and my territory is the Western United States and I have responsibility for the 13 western states plus Guam and Micronesia. So it's a large geography. The Salvation Army's been around for a long time and measured by public support, we're proud to often be called America's favorite charity. Our faith based humanitarian service is well known domestically, but it's also known around the world. People know us for programs that assist addicts and the homeless, the elderly, prison inmates, people in crises, unemployed, and we do that through our network of community centers and shelters, housing facilities and rehabilitation centers. People also know us through our network of thrift stores and our familiar red kettles that you see at Christmas time.
And people know us whenever there's a disaster. A disaster particularly that requires fast acting boots on the ground, willing to do whatever is needed to meet the needs of people in crises. And people know us because we serve more then 35 million Americans a year. But with all that knowledge of us people don't generally think of the Salvation Army as a highly technologically sophisticated outfit. The fact is though, that we do make strategic use of technology to maximize our efficiency and to make the absolute most effective use of the funds that we receive from the generosity of big-hearted Americans.
I suppose it's not surprising that people don't think of us as technologically advanced. We're a non-profit organization after all and we're old. We're over 100 years old and we exist all over the place, and seemingly we've been in most places for as long as anybody can remember. It's not a typical environment for technological excellence. Well in my territory in the Western United States we've organically grown over those years and developed small regional IT organizations in support of our regional humanitarian activities.
Clarence White, CIO, The Salvation Army:
Well, a few years ago we realized that we had grown 13 distinct little IT systems in my territory, each little system representing the various geographic and line of business divisions in our organization. And as CIO I discovered that this federation of little IT departments was leading us down a road of duplication of effort, of fragmentation of IT standards and it gave us an inability to meet the level of sophistication required in each locale. You see everyone on a small IT team has to be a generalist in order to cover all that is happening and no individual little system was deep enough to specialize to any significant degree. Thus, I discovered we were all to use the phrase a mile wide but only an inch deep in terms of our understanding of technology.
So we tinkered with IT governance and have reorganized IT into one virtual department for the needs of the entire territory. Our staff, our IT staff still live and work all around the territory in those 13 western states, but we've formed into virtual teams and we're now able to specialize and develop true experts and specialists. We support our users remotely in that new governance model whenever possible and thus we needed better tools to make our new virtual department successful. Well, we knew we needed to provide remote support but we also knew that none of our existing remote support tools were ... that were previously used in our little federation of mini IT departments would work in our new virtual department. We had several tools deployed. For example we had PC Anywhere, we had several flavors of VNC, we had LapLink, even had an old remote control software from a company known as Funk Software.
For those of you who have been in the business a long time will remember from the Lotus 123 days. While all of those remote support solutions required some kind of local client installation, or they required that the support specialist be on the same LAN as the users they were supporting. Well, in our new organization, in our new IT organization, our virtual department, we didn't have time to fix the infrastructure or install new client software on all 6,000 of our PC's before we could begin providing support.
Clarence White, CIO, The Salvation Army:
So we needed something clientless that we could deploy quickly. And whatever we chose it had to work on all of our PC's regardless if they were in our facilities, if they're at our headquarters, if they were used by road warriors or even if they were used on site in disaster relief situations. Whatever we chose would have to be easy for our users to use since a typical Salvation Army user is generally not too technically sophisticated. You know, our users, they're all about human relationships and they're generally only interested in using technology as a tool. People is their real focus, not technology. So thus, any technology we deploy has to be easy or it's just not going to work in our user community.
Well, so of course we chose Bomgar. Not really. We're a Citrix shop, so GoToAssist seemed an excellent fit for all of our requirements, and it was. It was a reliable product for IT specialists and our end users and it helped us make that transition from IT systems to a unified IT department. There was only one problem with GoToAssist, and that was it cost more then we felt we could afford as a non-profit organization, which of course, is supported by public generosity. So we used GoToAssist for a year, and as I said it was reliable, excellent product that served us well. But after that year, we learned from our Salvation Army cousin in Canada of a company they were using calling Bomgar and we decided to evaluate Bomgar.
Well, as I said, at the time we were in love with GoToAssist. But we found to our surprise that Bomgar was every bit as good, but because of their licensing structure, it was much more affordable to us. GoToAssist required that we have named users, and with more then 75 IT specialists any of whom, including me as CIO, are expected to provide support services when required, it was extremely burdensome to purchase named users, you know, in the GoToAssist model. Especially since some people, like me for example, would probably only use the product a few times a year. So that cost was too much for us, so we decided to switch to Bomgar after one year of GoToAssist.
Clarence White, CIO, The Salvation Army:
Well after making the switch we learned that we actually liked owning our own remote control appliance. We felt a certain independence, that we were self sufficient. If you didn't know already, GoToAssist is a totally outsourced service, whereas Bomgar is an appliance-based solution. And we came to like that better. You know not that we're a highly confidential environment, you know, the Salvation Army, but it's nice to know that your remote control is all in house, not done on someone else's server with unknown people potentially peering over your shoulder. Not that we felt it was a risk, but we have a certain comfort in having our own appliance. And as well, we learned to appreciate some of the unique features in Bomgar. Like, remote support of Mac users, and unattended remote support capabilities, for example.
We feel like we didn't lose a thing switching from GoToAssist to Bomgar. On the contrary we feel as if we gained valuable features that we didn't expect and we did so at much lower cost. So it was a big win as far as we're concerned, particularly in an environment where cost and value is a very important factor for us. Well, we made the switch and our users barely noticed. They were used to using remote support by then because of course we had that collection of products before we reorganized IT and then we had GoToAssist and now we have Bomgar. So they were used to remote support and our IT specialists were used to using a client list support tool from their experience with GoToAssist and a switch to Bomgar literally happened overnight and we didn't miss a step.
So in summary, Bomgar gives us everything that we had with GoToAssist, plus more, we think, at lower cost, at much lower cost. And in fact, you can see in my slide the fees to purchase GoToAssist would have cost us over $150,000 annually and our concurrent usage with Bomgar is much more modest then that. Yet, you know, we're not dependent on Bomgar. We own the appliance, we can keep using it, even if we don't like Bomgar's future directional releases. Although, frankly, we enjoy the support and the continual upgrades that we receive by keeping our appliance under maintenance.
Clarence White, CIO, The Salvation Army:
Now as you know from my comments already, we have used client based remote support tools for years in the Salvation Army. So the business case we're using remote support tools is really a no brainer in our environment and if you are similar to us, widely dispersed, decentralized organization, you're not using such tools already, they really and truly offer an incredible opportunity to make IT support more effective and efficient, particularly for supporting users in far flung locations. And if you listed carefully on my opening slide I mentioned that we support users in Guam and Micronesia, which you know, are on the other side of the dateline. Those locations are indeed far flung and using remote support tools is really the only way we can effectively support them. And of course, if like me, you have that other job, that is tech support for your mother-in-law, I've learned Bomgar's an excellent tool for that as well. Further proof that remote support is a better alternative than on site support and if you mention that to my mother-in-law I will deny it.
Well, as far as we're concerned Bomgar has been great for us. I think it's an excellent product. It offers an excellent value and we're very pleased with the organizational results that we have achieved using remote support and using Bomgar in particular. And with that, John, I think I'll stop talking and I'll turn it back to you.
John Ragsdale, VP of Technology Research for AFSMI, SSPA & TPSA:
Well, thank you very much for that and I see we do have questions coming in from the audience for you. If you have a question for any of the panelists you can go ahead and submit those and we'll get to those just a little bit later in the webcast. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to our next speaker, Nathan McNeill, Vice President of Product Strategy from Bomgar. Nathan, take it away.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Strategy, Bomgar Corporation:
Alright, thank you, John. You know, one thing that is very interesting about the story at the Salvation Army is they've taken the technology, which is just kind of bits and bytes and used it to change the way they've done business, used it to changed the way their support group is structured. I was talking to Clarence a couple of weeks ago and one phrase that stuck out in my head was they're sort of centralized decentralized model. That even though their support reps or support groups are decentralized they have a sort of centralized or virtual support model that allows them to be more responsive to their customer base. It's a really interesting story.
One thing, I wanted to give you a little bit information about Bomgar. I'm not going to take too long because I want to have time for question at the end. But Bomgar is ... we are 100% focused on remote support solutions, it is all we do, and these solutions are designed to give you two things. One is complete access and the other is complete control. These kind of work hand and hand. We do give you access to a whole range of different operating systems, Windows, Mac, Linux, Windows Mobile, even network devices. We'd allow you to have command line access to some network devices.
But access in and of itself is not enough. You want to be able to control who has access to what and what they do when they have access. So you want that kind of level of manageability over that access. We are integrated with BMC Remedy Service Desk. We also have an open API and we are configurable to your clients ITIL-based processes, particularly in the area of the transition from incident management to problem management. Because Bomgar is logging, it's storing a lot of information about each incident that comes in, it provides much more robust information to our clients and to the support reps to then allow them to transfer that information over to problem management for root cause analysis.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Strategy, Bomgar Corporation:
We have a proven scalable enterprise solution within the fortune 100. A lot of very small clients, a lot of very large clients. We have about 3,500 customers using Bomgar world wide, and we are in BMC's certified technology alliance partnership zone and then also we're a member of the Market Zone single sale group as well. So if you are a BMC user we allow some good ways to work together there. We've had a few awards, you can see on the bottom in a number of the different publications in the last year, Network World, Clear Choice, CRN Test Center, we got five stars and then PCMag as well, we got four stars for our different appliance models. And we're one of the fastest growing technology companies in North America. We were named a Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Rising Star, which means we're in the top 20 young companies in North America that are in the technology market place.
I wanted to kind of walk through some of the distinctives that are around the competitive landscape. They kind of fall in a few different categories. The first is you have a lot of IT systems management vendors, this is the IBM Tivolis of the world, Microsoft SMS, Symantec, Altiris, LANDesk, and a few others as well. And these are good products, they do a lot of different functions, from configuration management to patch deployment, etcetera. But in doing a lot of different functions they don't necessarily have very robust functionality for remote support. So they may have the feature, but it's usually sort of in an infantile stage. It's not as robust or as developed as with Bomgar. So you have limited or no support functionality, limited operating system and device support. A lot of times it's LAN only, because it's based on a client server kind of architecture. So you have a client at each PC that requires support and then you would access that only if it's with the LAN, within the local area network.
You also, in the second category have Software as a Service companies, like WebEx Support Center, and Citrix GoToAssist that Clarence was mentioning. Some of the distinctives here between these products and Bomgar, one of the obvious ones is that these normally go on a named user basis. Which is basically that if you got 100 reps you would give a license per rep. With Bomgar we have a concurrent license model that allows you to only license the number of people who'd be using the product concurrently. Monthly fees, sometimes there could be overage charges with these products.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Strategy, Bomgar Corporation:
Also, depending on your needs, you may need multiple applications to support each of the devices or systems within your business. So for instance, if you do need to get access to unattended systems then no ... neither one of these products as a stand-alone solution would work. There are other products that you would need to add to that. Sometimes there's platform limitations. Bomgar supports more platforms then either or these products, and then the last point, securing compliance risks. The point here is these are risks. It's not that you cannot use a service. It's not a showstopper. But as with using any service where data's going to be passed through a party that is outside your company there are risks, and we'll talk more about those in just a few minutes.
Then this last category of heavy client is you normally have like a client on the support rep side and then a client on the end system side. And with that you have a point-to-point connection, which means you don't have any sort of management in the middle. Because you don't have anything in the middle you don't have a very auditable product either. You may have some sort of log on either the customer side, the user side or the rep side, but you don't have anything in the middle that's capturing that data as it happens. And then again, you usually require a preinstalled client of some sort.
So in terms of these current offerings, there's a number of different considerations. I'll focus in on cost considerations and security risk considerations, compliance considerations. So if you look at your budget with a product like ours it is basically a cap X purchase. Where you're purchasing it once with an ongoing maintenance fee versus an ongoing NUT. Also, we are licensing ... because of our license model it ties it a little bit closer to the actual value you're getting from the product versus the number of systems you may have or the number of reps you may have regardless of which systems you're going to access or which reps would actually be using the product. And then, again, it's one solution versus multiple solutions. On the security side, you have the issues of unmanaged access, lack of audit trail that goes along with that, and then a lack of control about your data. I know John mentioned the Patriot Act where the US government actually has the capability to take that data if it deems necessary, even if it's from outside the US.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Strategy, Bomgar Corporation:
So we're going to go through these individually in a little bit more detail. We'll start with cost and there's a big point that needs to be made at this point. And that is that Bomgar is a premium solution. We are selling to some of the world's largest organizations. Again we have 3,500 customers. About three of the seven Fortune 1000 IT services firms use Bomgar, two of the top ten healthcare companies use Bomgar, we have a Fortune 10 financial services firm using Bomgar, the most prestigious management consulting company uses Bomgar and we recently added the most prestigious technical university in the world, arguably, using Bomgar as well, with MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
So these companies ... none of these companies are going to be making cost-based decisions. They're evaluating the product, they're evaluating the functionality, the depth of operating system support, a myriad of other considerations as well. The cost is always one consideration. So we're going to kind of walk through that. And the reason Bomgar is usually less expensive is that our licensing model with concurrency, instead of being based on the number of systems you have in the field or the number ... total number of reps is tied a little bit closer to the value you see from the product, and that value is when your reps are actually using it.
So, I'm not going to go through this in detail, but basically what it says is that ... this is kind of a snapshot of our ROI model. The first part being kind of a comparison of like a software as a service based competitor, bottom part being Bomgar. And usually Bomgar comes out less expensive, even in the first year. It's not always less expensive in the first year but because it is a one time expense versus an ongoing, it is nearly always, almost 100% of the time less expensive over a three year period. And one thing as well, we are going to be offering an ROI tool at the end of this webinar, so you can kind of plug in your own numbers, I'd be happy to work with you on that and kind of see what the numbers look like for yourself.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Strategy, Bomgar Corporation:
From a security standpoint, and getting back to the point I made earlier, this is kind of ... this kind of begs an explanation. So here it is, any time you're using an outside service provider, you're responsible for that service provider. So this is from the FFIEC outsourcing technology services security bulletin. If you've read the whole thing it's incredibly fascinating from a geeky point of view. So basically what the FFIEC does is it audits financial services companies for the FDIC, which is like basically an insurance company for banks, federally based, to ensure that they are sound from a security standpoint. And the FFIEC can actually shut the bank down if it finds that they are not sound and they can log an incident more or less or log an exception with the bank as well they have to address.
So this is what the FFIEC says, outsourced relationships should be subject to the same risk management, security, privacy and other policies that would be expected and their financial institution who are conducting the activities in house. The point being that you can't outsource liability. This goes for financial institutions, it goes for public institutions under Sarbanes Oxley and also for healthcare institutions under HIPAA. Anytime you're using a service provider you're expected to have the same due diligence process that you would for an internal application. And so with a service provider it's the application, but it's also the company and the way they do business, the controls they have in place, and you're responsible to monitor and audit that to ensure that it's meeting your industries regulations. Again, it's a risk, it's not a showstopper, but it is something to consider as you're choosing solutions.
So if you would like to learn more about Bomgar we have a couple different ways to do that. We do have our ROI assessment where you can plug in the numbers and we'll kind of help compare the different solutions you may be evaluating once you get numbers from both of the vendors. And also we have a security white paper you can download as well with that second URL, which is a audit that we had done by Symantec Corporation that went through our source code and kind of gives an assessment of Bomgar. And with that, I think we're ready for Q and A.
John Ragsdale, VP of Technology Research for AFSMI, SSPA & TPSA:
Thank you, Nathan. We're going to go now to the Q and A section. If you have any questions for myself or Clarence or Nathan go ahead and submit those into the cue. The first question I have is for you Clarence. Tom wants to know if you were previously offering on site support before you started using remote support?
Clarence White, CIO, The Salvation Army:
Well yes, we did offer onsite support and we still do. You know, it's not possible to do everything by remote support. So our philosophy is and was even before we reorganized IT, that we do as much as we possibly can without making a personal visit to the user, 'cause of course, in some cases making a personal visit to the user in our environment involves getting on a plane. So you know, you want to avoid that. But you can't always avoid it. So still we do make probably more on site visits then we want to, but not as many as we would if we didn't have a good set of tools.
John Ragsdale, VP of Technology Research for AFSMI, SSPA & TPSA:
I was interested that you're supporting so many global locations, is it a 24 x 7 operation?
Clarence White, CIO, The Salvation Army:
It's not. We officially offer support from 6 A.M. Pacific time till 9 P.M. Pacific time Monday through Saturday. After those hours we do what we call best effort support, and that is if there's an emergency we will take care of it or if somebody's available we'll take care of it. But beyond that we don't offer support. But you know it is a global outfit and you know, with locations that I support that are on the other side of the date line it requires a big effort, using things like when you're communicating with people in Guam or Micronesia and you can respond and say I received your email of tomorrow.
John Ragsdale, VP of Technology Research for AFSMI, SSPA & TPSA:
I have a number of questions in the cue for Nathan. The first one is around your platform coverage. I'm going to push out to the audience that slide where I was talking about the importance of flexibility. Cathy wants to know if you support Mac as well as Windows, and I thought it would be helpful if you could talk a little bit about your platform coverage.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Strategy, Bomgar Corporation:
I want to explain a little bit more as well, when you think about ... 'cause it's not merely that this is more efficient, it's not merely that if the rep works on the screen he'll save time, it's also going to improve the customers experience. It's also a more premium form of support in a lot of ways. Because for a lot of us, because we're involved in all the details we understand all the factors, and so we can think about a lot of different areas and how they affect customer experience.
Yeah, absolutely, and we do support Mac, we support the last few versions of Mac OSX. We support all versions of Windows from '95 through Vista. We support four different versions of Linux: Fedora, Ubuntu, RedHat, and SUSE. We also allow the representative to use SUSE Enterprise Desktop. We support Windows Mobile versions 5 and 6. We support most Windows server platforms and are working on some Linux server platforms as well and we also allow you to do command line access using telnet or SSH once you've accessed another of the operating systems we support directly.
One other note as well, and you got this on the slide, is that instead of having two different products, one for unattended support where the server may not have anyone in front of it, and then one for attended support where you have a user present, with our product it's within the same interface and also within the same licensing scheme. So regardless of the number of systems that you have either unattended or attended, regardless of the number of operating systems you're supporting, it's all just based solely on the number of concurrent users that you have.
John Ragsdale, VP of Technology Research for AFSMI, SSPA & TPSA:
I'm very happy to see you offering that and I think that you're quite a bit ahead of the curve on that one. So, I have a couple of questions here, Nathan, about the size of the companies that you support and you didn't mention anything about the different sizes of appliance. But I ... when you first launched that B100 box, I did a blog post and that blog post continues to be in the top read most ... most read postings of mine and it's been gosh, almost a year now. Would you just talk a little bit about the different size boxes and the different size companies you support?
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Strategy, Bomgar Corporation:
Yeah, absolutely. We have a B100, which is what you mentioned, which is our one man IT shop box. We found that we had a lot of companies that wanted an appliance model, one they could own, but were still very small shops, either a one man outfit within a small company or one man IT shop out of someone's garage. So we have the B100 for those folks. We have the B200 that goes ... these are all appliances, the B200 and the B300 are rack mounted and the B100 is just a regular form factor. The B200 supports up to 20 concurrent licenses and the B300 supports up to 300 concurrent licenses and if you need more then that you would simply purchase additional B300s. Like we have one client, they have several thousand licenses where they've got over 20 B300s that they're using.
Clarence White, CIO, The Salvation Army:
Wow. Clarence, question for you. I talked to my presentation about how some of our members are saying that there is an impact to employee satisfaction or agent satisfaction as a result to these tools. I'm curious how you encourage your agents to use the tools and if you've seen any feedback from them that, you know, they actually are enjoying their job more because they have it at their disposal?
Clarence White, CIO, The Salvation Army:
Well, you know, as I mentioned our support specialists have been using remote support tools for a very long time. The client based tools of the past, you know the pcAnywheres and whatnot. So they were very customary to using these tools. Where satisfaction has increased for them is the ease at which they're able to use the newer clientless tools like GoToAssist and Bomgar. They don't have to worry anymore about the configuration of the end users desktop. You know, do they have the right version of the client installed? Is it configured correctly before I'll be able to take control of it? Or are they on an network that I can reach, you know, using the client tools that seem very delicate and difficult to use if you weren't on the same network. So in that way I think just the ease of use and the ubiquitous nature of these clientless tools has really helped with end user satisfaction or technician satisfaction.
The end user side is very convenient for them too, because they can simply surf to a website and see a list of technicians who are online, you know, and they can simply click a name and someone can help them out immediately, taking control of their PC or you know, or simply looking at what's going on in the PC, you know, immediately and our end users really like that.
John Ragsdale, VP of Technology Research for AFSMI, SSPA & TPSA:
I just received another question in from Tom. I'm going to read this, I haven't processed it yet. I know that the next release is going to offer support from a Mac. I understand that this is currently working well in Beta, when is the new version going to be available to clients? Sounds like Tom is an expert on Bomgar.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Strategy, Bomgar Corporation:
Letting the cat out of the bag, huh? We are working on that for the early part of Q2. So we should have the ability to support from a Mac at that point.
John Ragsdale, VP of Technology Research for AFSMI, SSPA & TPSA:
Wow. Huh, that's really interesting, I haven't heard that. That's going to be a cool differentiator, I think. Well gang, we are getting very close to the top of the hour. There are a couple questions left in the queue that we didn't get to, and I promise we will follow up with all of you after the event with a written response to those questions. Before we go I'd like to give our panelists an opportunity to have the last word. Clarence, do you have any final take aways for the audience?
Clarence White, CIO, The Salvation Army:
Well, just to reinforce the message that I think remote control is a game changing technology. When you're -- when you're supporting users and you know, users are difficult to satisfy at the best of times and I think with tools like this the way that they've improved in recent years, it really is a differentiator and gives you the ability to support in new ways that will actually make your users more satisfied then they've ever been before.
John Ragsdale, VP of Technology Research for AFSMI, SSPA & TPSA:
Fantastic. Nathan, what final words do you have for the audience?
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Strategy, Bomgar Corporation:
Well I was going to mention that to your point about improving the satisfaction of the reps themselves. I was actually speaking with another customer a few weeks ago who was saying that they started implementing something called virtual trips, which allows them to do deployments and things virtually versus going on site, and that's really been a big hit with their support groups particularly, because it doesn't require them to travel nearly as much as they did before. So the road warriors that you might have before going from client to client are now able to work whenever they want from wherever they are without having to disrupt their family life as much.
John Ragsdale, VP of Technology Research for AFSMI, SSPA & TPSA:
Wow. Well, as a frequent traveler anything to keep us off an airplane is a good thing.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Strategy, Bomgar Corporation:
Absolutely. The aisles aren't getting any wider, huh?
John Ragsdale, VP of Technology Research for AFSMI, SSPA & TPSA:
That's right. I am however, so it doesn't make flying fun. Alright, so I'd like to thank Clarence White from the Salvation Army and Nathan McNeill from Bomgar Corporation for joining me today and thanks to all of you for tuning in. This has been John Ragsdale for the SSPA, I look forward to seeing all of you at our next SSPA webcast. Have a great day and goodbye.