Resolution Times Decrease 75 Percent with
Appliance-Based Remote Support

John Ragsdale, VP of Research, SSPA:
We're talking about optimization, and optimization is always a hot topic with customer service and support. When I'm doing presentations and conferences I usually ask for a raise of hands for anybody with a bigger budget next year and typically very few hands, if any, go up. I know that everybody out there right now is working on 2007 budgets and so far I haven't found any member that has an additional head count coming in 2007. So, clearly finding new ways to streamline and raise productivity within your technical support operation is really important. So, we do talk a lot about optimization but I have three points here that I want to make that are really driving optimization to be a much more critical issue than it has been in the past. And, the first is this move toward proactive service. For those of you who were able to attend our conference in Washington, D.C. last month, you heard J.B. Wood, our CEO, talk about service delivery in the future and the importance of proactive service. And, it's really becoming an issue that customers are aware of and customers really just don't want to invest the time in having their problems solved. They would love for the problems to be solved with little or no involvement from themselves. It's very irritating to have to sit on a phone call for an hour being walked through recovery procedures.

Next we have concerns about security and privacy. And, I've been using this phrase "convenience overrides paranoia" about remote support. For a lot of years now, when it first started in IT support test using it to support their employees, there was a big outrage from a lot of employees saying, "Oh my God! IT is looking at my desktop and reviewing what I'm typing on the screen," and quickly they realized that there was such a value added to them that that convenience definitely was overriding their paranoia. And next, we saw the remote support going out to external customers using PC products, peripherals, and software. And, the same thing. At first they were a little uncomfortable with it until they saw the value and that they could trust the technology. And, I think that this paranoia issue has come to a different point now because we have a lot of legislation that is really making us all - we have to be aware of these issues whether it's in the healthcare industry with HIPAA compliance or even the financial services industry has a lot of new privacy legislation, and Sarbanes-Oxley in general is actually driving all companies to be much more concerned about data integrity and privacy. So I think once again it's important that we show the business value around the remote support and prove that we are not letting any security loopholes come into our operations with this technology.