Two Waves of Support: Balancing Security & Mobility

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management:
So, what do all these trends mean for the support professional? A couple things. One is that support of the enterprise means support of a distributed mobile user base. You can't just send a guy on site and have him support everyone within a monolithic central corporate headquarters. You could be - even for supporting enterprise, you may be supporting a guy on the road in Tokyo. Another factor is that support of the consumer is now system support versus merely application support.

What I mean by this is, when you think about it, for a vendor supporting a product you're supporting the product and the interconnected systems that assist that product in doing what it does. And, as you get more and more devices for like a home network connected to that device or to that application, you're troubleshooting more and more of a system of these interconnected applications versus just a stand-alone product. So, support complexity in that greatly increases. And, this is true whether or not you're supporting employees or customers. If your customer's an enterprise you might be supporting someone at home. If your customer's a consumer, they may have a pretty intricate home network that still is fairly complex and requires something close to yesterday's enterprise support.

So, we have our first wave for support. The first challenge that support faces is how to support this new mobile and connected workforce. How do you support all the people in the field doing their work from wherever they plug up? But, that's not the only one. There's also an additional trend that is beginning to emerge.