Remote Support in 2007: Solution Requirements

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January 17, 2007

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Melissa Dent, VP of Marketing Communications, Bomgar™:
Good afternoon and Happy New Year. Welcome to today's webcast: Remote Support in 2007 Solution Requirements. My name is Melissa Dent. I'm the VP of Marketing Communications here at Bomgar™. I want to thank each of you for attending today on this cold day we're having across the nation. But, we have a session that we hope you'll find very beneficial for you. Nathan McNeill, our co-founder and VP of Product Management will be discussing how you can get ahead of the curve today with remote support. We're going to provide key evaluation points and criteria that will give you information for your organization to deploy remote support throughout your organization and benefit with this very powerful tool.

Our customers experience invaluable productivity and cost savings so it's a no-brainer that it's something you want to do the same. We hope to expedite the process for you by providing you with a foundation for evaluating remote support in the market today. We designed this information you're going to receive today to help you build RSPs, RFIs, for you to evaluate the products on the market and find the right one for you today.

Before we begin, I want to make sure that you're aware that we will have a question and answer session at the end of the period when Nathan is through presenting. At any time you have a question you can enter that into the field at the bottom left of your screen and click the submit question button. Throughout the presentation I'll be collecting these questions and we'll review those at the end with Nathan. If we don't have time to answer all questions we'll be sure and get back with you with any unanswered questions that we weren't able to get to through the session today. So, with that, I'd like to welcome each one of you and hope you enjoy the session. And, we're ready to go. Nathan?

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
All right. Thank you Melissa. Today we're going to be going through remote support solution requirements to give you the information you need to make an informed, educated decision about which remote support solution to choose. First though, I wanted to talk a little bit about why remote support and especially why now. Why in 2007 instead of waiting until later in the adoption cycle? Let me go through a few current trends and facts.

The first couple are from Network World. One is that 90% of employees work away from company headquarters. So, instead of having a big, giant, behemoth corporate headquarters which houses all the employees, you have multiple regional offices all over the country or different remote locations. All these employees need support. Again, you also have 40% working at remote locations. This includes teleworkers, it might include mobile salespeople, regional offices, or people working from home for maybe a day or two a week. All these people need support and they're all separate from corporate headquarters. Also, the number of laptops is currently one in three computers sold. So, out of the 60 million computers that were sold last year, 20 million of those were laptops. One of Wire magazine's predictions for 2007 is that laptops will overtake desktops to be more than one in two PCs sold in 2007. That would be 30 million new laptops that are entering the market.

You also have broadband penetration is exploding. Think about in 2000 you had less than 5% broadband penetration for adults with broadband in their homes. Today it's over 30%. So, you have a huge increase in the number of adults with broadband. Also, a huge increase in the places that you can get broadband. You can get it in hot spots, in restaurants, wherever you go you can always - you find broadband. There are whole cities looking to adopt it. and, those two things, mobility, being able to take your computer with you, and connectivity, broadband penetration, have allowed for a whole host of applications that allow for mobility. But, the question then is how to support that mobility because what this is also doing is it's creating a lot of technological complexity for the support organization.

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
Think about this as well, it used to be that when you were getting a support phone call it may have been for a single product. Today it's probably for your particular product along with the way it interfaces with other people's products or their overall network or system. So, support has become much more complex and this equals a lot of headaches for the support organization. And, it means the support organization is going to have to scramble to keep up with these trends.

So, how does remote support help? Well, remote support will allow you to decrease incident handling times by 30 to 70%. And, these are not numbers, by the way, that we made up. These are all numbers that we've received from our customers after they've had time to use the solution and see its benefits. You can decrease travel time by as much as 70% if not eliminating it all together for certain types of support. You can decrease call escalation by as much as 70% keeping calls resolved at lower tiers of support instead of having to escalate those to third or to second or third tier support which costs much more. You can help more clients. Obviously if you have more time you're able to help more clients which reduces wait times. It also means that, geographically, if you're having to go on-site for some particularly complex support incidents, you can support a broader geographic radius by not having to go on-site but still being able to offer a high level of support. You can also decrease repeat incidents by verifying that the incident was actually resolved.

When you're able to see and interact with the PC you can verify much more accurately whether the resolution is complete versus if the user's trying to communicate to you whether it's complete over the phone. Overall, this increases customer satisfaction and allows the support organization to do more with less. It means that, with the growing needs that we talked about on the previous page, when you compare those with the benefits that remote support offers, what you get is a huge adoption of remote support.

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
We get hundreds of customers each and every quarter who are either adopting remote support for the first time or switching from a competitor. So, it's something that is expanding rapidly and you can expect to see a lot of companies adopting remote support in 2007 and beyond. The question is when should you? When's the best time? Well, obviously, we think the best time is now. Today remote support - implementing your remote support gives you a competitive advantage because most companies are not currently using remote support. Many are adding that to their support tools, but it's not across the board yet. So, there's still room to use the tool early on and gain a competitive advantage over other companies in the market.

However, waiting too long has disadvantages. If you wait until tomorrow, until 2008, 2009, 2010 to deploy remote support it will gradually become more and more of a business necessity versus a competitive advantage. So, the handwriting is on the wall. It's beginning to be adopted broadly and those companies that do not adopt it until later will have to adopt it because their competitors are growing more and more productive and efficient through the use of this technology. It's easier to keep pace than it is to catch up. So, what we want to do is help you to keep pace, implement remote support now and not have to catch up to your competitors later.

So, with that let me go through some solution requirements that we think are essential for any type of remote support solution. I'll go through some general requirements, some cost considerations, productivity features, security considerations, and integration points. The format is basically going to be that I'm going got go through the solution requirements. I'll highlight a couple of ways that our Bomgar™ product implements these requirements or addresses these requirements. I won't go through them point by point with Bomgar™. And then, I'll refer you to an RFP or Request For Proposal template that we are offering to you at the end of this webcast. And, we think that's going to really help you to jumpstart your evaluation of this technology.

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
So, with that let me go through the general requirements of remote control. Obviously, you want something that allows you full desktop remote control. Let the rep see and interact with the remote PC. Kind of a no-brainer. You also want something that allows you to have an observe only mode. So, instead of gaining full remote control of the remote PC, allowing you view only access to the PC. There's certain customers that may not be comfortable with you taking full remote control. For those, it's essential to at least be able to see their screen.

You also want a solution that offers an unattended connection option. With our Bomgar™ product we have two such options. One is if you're within the same LAN or WAN as the remote PC that you want to support, we offer a push and start feature that allows you, without having a preinstalled clients on those PCs, to push and automatically connect to the PCs on your network. We also have a separate product called AccessDesk that does require a client to be installed but does give you access to unattended PCs that are outside your network. You're also looking for a solution that offers a session transfer feature so you can transfer remote support sessions from one rep to another or share sessions so you have more than one rep viewing and collaborating over a single session. It can really help with workflow.

Some other general requirements for architecture are that it does not have a preinstalled client. It absolutely, positively, must be zero footprint. You don't want to have to install a client on all the PCs that you may or may not support. You don't want to have to maintain that client and you certainly don't want to have to license that client. It can get incredibly expensive when you think about the thousands of PCs that you may have to support, to have to license each of those PCs individually. You've gotta have something that's firewall compatible as well and that is completely transparent in the way it gets through firewalls, NET, proxies, etc. so that your end user does not have to configure anything. It's an extremely important consideration.

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
You're looking also for something that's vendor-independent so you're not tied to the vendor, whether us or anyone else, for uptime, for ongoing ... tied to them for ongoing costs, or for the liability. You're not tied to them from a liability standpoint. You're looking for a self-contained solution that you can deploy on-premise for cost and security reasons.

So, here's Bomgar's architecture. It is ... it does not require a preinstalled client so you can gain control of any PC anywhere in the world, any Mac or Windows-based PC, without having a client installed. And, it does work through any firewall, or NAT, or proxy, on standard web ports 80 and 443.

Bomgar™ is also deployed through the Bomgar Box™ which is a self-contained unit, has all the software and hardware you need for the solution. It's deployed on premise at your location. You hold the keys. And, it takes about 30 minutes for you to get it installed and up and running. We usually give our customers the pizza box challenge which is basically that, once you get the box, order a pizza. By the time the pizza gets there you should have the Bomgar Box™ up and running and be running support sessions.

Another general requirement is solution quality. And this is a little bit hard to peg but it's one of those things that you know it when you see it. There's different ways to determine solution quality. One is through internal evaluation. In other words, you trialing the product. The other is through third party assessments of the product. For internal, you're just going to have to do a trial. We can't cover that in the webinar but we do offer a trial on our site. We can get you an evaluation appliance or get you a trial site which gives you access to the back end interface.

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
For the third party assessment I wanted to run through a couple of third parties that have looked at Bomgar™. Last year in February 2006 we launched Bomgar™ 9 which is the evolutionary upgrade to our Bomgar™ product. We launched it at DEMO which is the prestigious conference for emerging technologies in Phoenix, Arizona. There are over 700 companies that applied to launch their products at DEMO. Of those only 70 are chosen after a screening process by Chris Shipley, Executive Director at DEMO. Of those 70, only ten win the DEMOgod award and we were privileged to win that award last year in Phoenix.

So, we're one of the ten that won out of 70 that got in out of 700 which applied. Bomgar™ is a great product. And, Chris Shipley, the Executive Director, says of Bomgar™, "Bomgar™ is quite simply the easiest, most efficient, most effective remote IT support tool I've ever seen. Bomgar™ is the consumer support tool for 2006 and beyond." And, we couldn't agree more. Also, just a week ago on January 8, Bomgar™ received 4.65 out of a total rating - a total possible rating of 5 in a Network World clear choice test evaluation. This is huge for us. It's - the synopsis of it is that it's a very well designed Bomgar™ screen-sharing product. It supports Windows and Mac clients. This is telling us what we've know for a while which is Bomgar™ is a fantastic product. We've got over 2,500 customers located in all 50 states and over 30 countries that are using Bomgar™ currently. And, we get this kind of feedback all the time from our customers and it's nice to see it from Network World as well.

Some other requirements are related to platform support. It's obvious that you want something that allows Windows Desktop and server operating systems from '95 through Vista. You've gotta support the basics, you know, the over 90% market share that Microsoft has. One other thing that's important as well is Mac OSX Tiger and higher, to support that operating system. And, it's got about 5-6% of the market so it's not nearly as pervasive as Windows is. But, I don't know if you saw the MacWorld keynote by Steve Jobs but about 50% of new Macs sold currently are to non-Mac users. So, it is gaining market share. And, it was also recently named PC Magazine's Editor's Choice for the - the Mac Book Pro was named Editors Choice Laptop for the first time in history by PC Mag. So, whether or not that goes anywhere, you need to be prepared. You need to be ready to support those Macs that you own.

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
And, you'd be surprised, a lot of the corporations that we sell to, they end up finding out that they do have Macs whether it's in the creative departments or other departments at their company. They do support Macs even if it's not in the same numbers as their Windows machines. What you also know, if you're an educational institution, you're already dealing with support for Macs. And, we have educational institutions where Macs comprise 30-50% of their supported systems.

Now for total cost of ownership. This obviously you know you want something that license is based on the number of reps supporting versus the number of computers supported. If you're licensing per computer, if you've got 1,000 computers and it's $100.00 per license the cost can get outa hand pretty quickly. Whereas, with the number of reps, it's much easier to scale. If you're licensing based on the number of reps there's two different routes that can take as well. One is concurrency. The other is named seats. Bomgar™ is licensed per concurrent user. And this makes a lot more financial sense because it allows more people to use the solution and more people to have a unique account so you don't have to have generic accounts which also presents a security risk.

One other consideration is maintenance pricing. A couple things you want to ask. What is the on going cost and what does that cover? Does that cover support, software upgrades, hardware upgrades? You know, are there - what are all the components of the solution that could break or could need service? And, does the maintenance plan cover those things? The third is ownership. And, this is something that I want to camp on for a little while because, if you stop and think about it, it's impossible to have a total cost of ownership assessment if you don't own the solution. So ... and this is the question to ask: if you stop paying, does the product turn off? If it does, then you don't own the solution and it's going to be very difficult to calculate total cost of ownership. Like with a host solution where you're paying monthly, the total cost of ownership is infinite because you keep on paying year, after year, after year. And, if you don't, they turn it off.

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.

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
This is Bomgar's take on ease of use. This is how you get connected. User clicks and the rep gets control. It's usually around a ten to fifteen second process. You also need to consider what reporting capabilities the solution has. You want something that gives you reporting in real time so as soon as the data is in you're able to run reports on it. it gives you a lot of drill down capabilities so you can get really granular with your reports. That allows you to export the data into CSV or XLS format so that you can run further reports on it. And, this is interesting as well, there's actually competitors of ours that charge to have you download the data that you run through your remote control sessions. With us it's kind of ... since it's on the appliance, it's your data. You own the box as well as the data that it contains.

You want something as well that allows you to track closely client side changes. This protects your company from liability. Because, if there is any ambiguity about what a customer or what a rep did during a support session, you need to be able to go back and conclusively determine whether or not something took place.

Data transfer also needs to be logged and be reportable so you can know if there's any files or folders that were transferred. You also want something that allows you to get customer feedback and to track that over time. And, something that allows you to track incident resolution rates. After all, that's kind of one of the key performance indicators about how well you're doing in your support department.

Here's just a screenshot of our session recording feature. This let's you get a complete video session recording of each and every session. So, you can see exactly what happens during a session. Not only that, you can also see who performed the action. So, if it was a rep that clicked a file or deleted something, or changed the setting, you know it was the rep and not the customer.

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
From an administrative standpoint there's a few considerations. One is that you have a single interface per solution administration. You don't want to have to be going from rep consult to rep consult to figure out the solution. You want to make the settings in a central location. In addition to that, you want to be able to set group policies so you can set permissions based on a global level for a multitude of reps versus individually one after the other. You want something for user management which is role based so you don't just have to set a blanket administrator role that includes all the privileges. You can set it at a granular level.

This is again another snapshot of the way Bomgar™ allows for this. You can set group policies so you can have all reps that are within that group have a certain set of privileges. And, you can set privileges based on membership in that group. So, just add them to the group and they automatically inherit the privileges and settings of that group.

Some collaboration features that are important are file transfer, absolute must that you can do text chat. Reboot-automatic reconnect is a feature that is often misinterpreted or misunderstood. Basically, there's some competitors in the market that offer a feature that allows you to reboot, but then requires the user to click something to enter back into the session after completion of reboot. From our standpoint that's a complete waste of time because it still requires user intervention to get them back in the session. With automatic reconnect you want something that gets you back - that automatically gets the rep back in control of the PC without user intervention. It's extremely important for a solution provider or systems integrator where you may not want to have your customer sitting there watching everything you do for the entire duration of the session.

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
Another useful feature is to be able to set a restore point in Windows directly from the rep console. This basically ... this will be a feature in Bomgar™ as of the end of this month and it protects yourself from mistakes. The control-z button, or keystroke combination, for your session. So, if something goes wrong you can revert back to a previous setting and move on from there. Push URL is another useful feature to go ahead and navigate your customer directly to a needed URL without having to walk them through it.

Some security considerations, we believe that it's an absolute must to have the solution third party security audited. You need to be able to get from someone else's perspective whether or not the solution is secure. It needs to be using a strong encryption method and not give third party access to either the data or the data stream. Not even the vendor. Even the vendor needs to be excluded from that. You want a solution that does not increase the scope of your company's liability. So, for instance, using a hosted solution where you're routing company data through a third party, you're basically responsible for that data. You're responsible for how that third party uses that data. And, what that effectively does is expands the scope of your liability outside your walls, outside your control, but it is not outside your responsibility and your liability.

You want something that stores reporting data locally at your location. You want something that is server mediated where each session goes to the server and is not point-to-point. If you have a point to point solution where you just have a rep-client and then an end user-client that connects the two together, your ability to administer, to control, and to audit that solution goes way down because it means you're going to have to go from rep-console to rep-console figuring out what happened. You also want something that requires the end user give approval before remote control is initiated. It needs to be always off, on only by request. On only with the user request control or requests that ... requests support.

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
Bomgar™ offers a few things. One, is that we did have the entire solution, the appliance, and the software running on it audited by Symantec Corporation. They did a product penetration assessment on our product. It uses 256-bit AES/SSL encryption which is industry standard, actually a little bit above industry standard. We offer you the benefit of ownership which basically is that you can take the appliance, deploy it behind your existing security measures, within your compliance posture, and you are not exposed to any additional liability. And, it does require the end user give approval for each and every session.

Yes, let's see. This is the URL to the Symantec™ document. Some other considerations for security are: does it give the end user overriding control over their own mouse and keyboard? In other words, if the rep is moving the mouse and the customer wants to move the mouse, when the customer moves their mouse, does it take back control from the rep? We think that's really important because it keeps the customer in control of their own desktop.

The solution also needs to be zero footprint so you're not leaving software installed on the remote PC. It needs to integrate with LDAP. LDAP has security implications. We talked about it primarily from the standpoint of being able to create and administer users. But, it's also important from a security standpoint because, if you delete a user from LDAP, you want them automatically deleted from the appliance. You don't want to have to go back in and manually delete them from the appliance.

You also want granular authorization for each and every rep. So, being able to set that from a group level, group policy level, and also individually so you're not giving each rep just a basic set of privileges, you can administer that granularly to set different tiers so they don't have more access than is necessary. And, the solution needs to be easily auditable that any client side changes and any support rep activity is logged.

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
From an integration standpoint you need to have directory integration with LDAP so you're not having to create hundreds of users and you're not having to administer those users outside of LDAP. It needs to have an API to allow you to connect to other systems that you may be using. It needs to be stand-alone as well. It needs to be able to integrate but it needs to be self-contained also and self-sustaining, and not dependant on Active Directory for operation. Bomgar™ meets that criteria. It does integrate with LDAP, which not many solutions in the space do, but it does allow you to create users directly on the appliance and even add group policies to those users created on the appliance as well, even if it's not pulled from LDAP. It's stand alone but it can be integrated via the API.

From a customization standpoint, you want something where the web interface is completely customizable with your brand and your company messaging where the customer client is customizable and where the customer dialogues. This is a feature that a lot of solutions leave out, which is the dialogues, the text the customers read in order to agree to certain privileges or to allow the rep to gain remote control. You want to be able to configure and customize those dialogues to meet your company's needs.

And also, the exit survey, if that's applicable, if there is an exit survey, that needs to be customizable to allow you to ask the questions that are most relevant for your business specifically. So, for Bomgar™, it does allow you complete control over how the web portal looks. Also, the dialogue boxes, you can customize ... there's a couple of dialogue boxes that you can choose to have or not have so those notification thresholds that I was talking about earlier you can set, you can also decide what is in the dialogue boxes, what they're agreeing to. And, beyond that, you can set what the customer client looks like, what the logo looks like within the customer client, and what the uninstall dialogue box says.

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
For the exit survey you can add up to ten completely customized questions. You can decide what the questions are and also what kind of questions you're asking. So, whether it's a radio button, or a check box, or a drop down box, you can set that and get exactly the information you need in order to make decisions for your business.

So, with that information, we want you to kind of get going. Here's the RFP template. It's an Excel spreadsheet that offers all these things that we've talked through today along with a few others, along with detailed explanation of how Bomgar™ meets these requirements and room for you to add other vendors to your evaluation. We think this is going to be a huge timesaving template for you, get you a head start on evaluating remote support solutions for 2007 and get you further down the road toward jump-starting your support initiative.

This should push it to you. Otherwise, you can type in the URL into your browser and get to that template. It's at bomgar.com/resources ... excuse me ... /documents/samplerfp. There it is again. And, at this point I wanted to see if there was any questions.

Melissa Dent, VP of Marketing Communications, Bomgar™:
Yeah, thanks Nathan. That was some great information. And, we do have some questions from the audience. You talked a lot about how remote support can be used for diagnostic and troubleshooting. One of the questions we have from a participant is: can it be used to ... for situations such as training or even for a webinar where you're trying to push the screen, maybe the user has, to an audience or reverse the screen?

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
It's a great question. We actually ... we do not have like a webinar tool, obviously, or else we would be using it today. And, we don't intend to go that direction. We want to stay focused on our support products. However, we do have a feature in an upcoming version of Bomgar™, end of this month, which will offer the ability to flip your screen so you can show your screen to the customer as well as see the customer's screen through remote control. So, that would be a way of showing them your screen and possibly training them on a particular application or helping them in installing an application.

Melissa Dent, VP of Marketing Communications, Bomgar™:
Okay. One other question that's come up is: how much training is really involved to get support reps up and going on the product?

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
You know, we have a lot of customers who are completely shocked when they get the solution in-house to find that it really does not require a lot of training. Usually their reps get it. It's intuitive. They know how it works right out of the box and it doesn't really require any training. However, we have offered training sometimes to customers if they request it. But, honestly, it's usually a really intuitive, simple process to get up and running and doesn't require any training.

Melissa Dent, VP of Marketing Communications, Bomgar™:
Great. One other question we have is related to when a support rep actually pushes out our client to the user. Explain a little bit about how does that actually work? What browsers does it use? How can it be downloaded? What are the different ways to actually get a user up and running with that?

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
Yeah, it ... again, there's multiple ways to connect to a user. One of the ways that I mentioned earlier is the push and start feature using Bomgar™. And, with that feature you have to be on the same LAN or WAN as the PC that you want to push and start to. And then, at that point, you'd either type in the host name of the PC or navigate to the PC through the Windows network and then push the client in that manner. You would have to have privileges or credentials on the PC that you wanted to connect to. Beyond that there's a few other methods that you can connect to a PC that is not on the same network as you. You can have them click your display name. You can have them enter a session key which you provide, or have them enter the support rep queue through the support request form on the website. You can also send them email with a link in it which they can click and give you control.

Melissa Dent, VP of Marketing Communications, Bomgar™:
Great. And, how large is the client and what browsers does it run on?

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
The client is under 400K. I think it's around 389K and it will ... can be downloaded through any browser whether it's Firefox or IE.

Melissa Dent, VP of Marketing Communications, Bomgar™:
Nathan, we have another question. Relating to sharing sessions. Can you invite and share a session with a second support analyst?

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
Yes, you can. You can have multiple support reps viewing and controlling a single session. And, the person who initially shared the session would still retain control over that session. But, you can have multiple people collaborating over that session. It's really useful. Especially if you wanted to invite someone from second tier but not necessarily relinquish the session. So, you could have the second tier person come in, explain what was going on, and resolve the issue. And, it's a great training tool for your first tier support reps.

Melissa Dent, VP of Marketing Communications, Bomgar™:
Great. One other question we have is related to how can appliances be used in a failover situation? Are there ways you can cluster them together or have a fail, a backup appliance?

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
We have several customers who are using like a backup appliance. Usually the way that would work is they would simply configure the appliance with the same settings as the initial appliance or the production appliance. And then, when it's needed, they would transfer over the DNS name to the new appliance. Now, our Bomgar B300™ will allow up to 400 reps to be connected to customers at any given time so it does have really high capacity.

Melissa Dent, VP of Marketing Communications, Bomgar™:
Okay. One other question related to the differences. There are LAN-based control products out there that work within a LAN. What are some of the main differences between Bomgar™ and the LAN-based products that already exist out there today?

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
Yeah, I mean there's two primary differences. One being, as I mentioned in the webcast, that they normally require that a client be preinstalled on the PC that you want to control. So, for instance, if you want to install like a pcAnywhere type solution you would install a client on each and every one of the PCs that you wanted to control. And then, as well, they usually do not work through firewalls, so you would have to configure the firewall in front of each of the PCs you wanted to control if they were not within your same network.

Some of the other differences are that usually they are point to point, meaning you'd have a rep client and then a customer client, but you would not have any sort of server mediating that session. And, because of that, it is a lot harder to administer and maintain that solution. And, it doesn't give you the same audit trail of what exactly happened when the support rep supported the PC.

Melissa Dent, VP of Marketing Communications, Bomgar™:
Okay, we have time for a few other questions. Retrieving workstation information or information, perhaps diagnostics, about a desktop – what's the best way for doing that? Is there a way that we can push a script to the workstation to retrieve information or what tools are recommended for viewing workstation information?

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
Well, obviously you would have access to all of the Windows tools available through Windows and you could take that and, either through screenshots or copy/paste, you can pull all of that information into, you know, from the remote PC and use that as a means of troubleshooting.

Melissa Dent, VP of Marketing Communications, Bomgar™:
Okay. Great. And, I think we have time for one more question. How many end-user devices can an appliance control at one time?

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
Well, it depends on the appliance. We actually have three appliance models. One is our Bomgar B100™, which is designed for individual professionals and that allows up to two licenses so you can have up to two people who are controlling up to five remote workstations. So, you could have one-person controlling maybe two and another person controlling three at maximum. The Bomgar B200™ model you can have up to 25 concurrent sessions. So, you can have 25 reps connected to and remote controlling 25 users' PCs. And then, for the Bomgar B300™, you can have up to 400 reps controlling up to 400 PCs simultaneously.

Melissa Dent, VP of Marketing Communications, Bomgar™:
Okay Nathan. Well, thanks. I hope that addressed most all the questions that we had today. If there's any that we did not answer we will follow up and get answers to those. I hope everybody found some very valuable information and be sure to check out the URL for the RFP guidelines and that will be very helpful to all of you.

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
Yeah, let me put that up there one more time so you can type that in your browser. www.bomgar.com/documents/samplerfp.xls.

Melissa Dent, VP of Marketing Communications, Bomgar™:
Okay. Thank you to everybody for joining today. Have a great day.

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
Thank you much.