Supporting the New Reality of the Remote Workforce
with Clientless Remote Desktop Control

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Cost-Effectiveness

Often the first problems for support managers to solve are financial. According to the supportindustry.com survey, 77% of IT executives experienced an increased demand for support services in 2005, but 42% of budgets stayed the same or decreased.¹³ In this atmosphere, the more you can do to define and measure costs, the better.

How should you determine a remote support solution's cost-effectiveness? A true evaluation measures both apparent and unapparent costs. Apparent costs are stated pricing and fees. Examples include the cost of initial deployment, licensing fees, and license sharing (the number of technicians able to use each license).

Unapparent costs are more elusive. Slow or unreliable connections, for example, can double or triple the length of each support session, thereby increasing the number of support personnel required to handle the workload. This also results in slower resolution of the problem and the consequent lost productivity and lower end-user satisfaction ratings.

The number of concurrent sessions each tech can handle also comes into play. A support rep with the ability to handle multiple sessions at once can gain control of every system involved in a technical problem and troubleshoot all of them from his desktop. If one support rep can handle more remote workers simultaneously, the result will be faster service, more satisfied employees, and higher productivity on both ends.

The best approach is to measure apparent costs as concretely as possible and then add to this measurement what you can assess from the unapparent costs. To measure the concrete costs associated with an application service provider (ASP), use the following formula:
Initial setup fee + (license amt. x license cost x time) - discounts

The majority of remote support solution providers are ASPs, and, with perhaps slight modifications, the equation above will allow you to determine the hard costs for all of them.

One remote support solution provider, Bomgar™, is not an ASP. Its solution, the Bomgar Box™, is an appliance-based solution you can host yourself. Evaluating Bomgar's™ cost involves measuring the initial cost together with a yearly Maintenance Plan that covers support and upgrades.

To enumerate the hard cost of the Bomgar Box™, use the following equation:
(Bomgar Box™ + license amt. - discounts) + (20% maintenance x time)

The ASP model, based as it is on monthly fees, has a low initial cost compared to the Bomgar™ model. However, IT managers who plan to use remote desktop control for more than 12 months will want to look at total costs over time.

The chart below delineates the cost trajectory over a 6 year period for 5 support licenses from the following providers: Citrix® Online GoToAssist™, WebEx™ Support Center, and Bomgar™ Bomgar™.

Chart | Six Year Cumulative Cost Analysis

An estimation of unapparent costs will take into account the possibility of license sharing between reps, the speed of connectivity, and the ability for a single rep to handle multiple concurrent sessions.

Table 1 | Other Cost Considerations

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13. SupportIndustry.com, 2006, Service and Support Metrics Survey

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