Texas-Sized Support Remote Support at Texas A&M University
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September 19, 2006Download mp3 | Read Transcript
Justin Brock, Manager of eCommerce, BomgarTM:
Welcome to today's webcast: Texas-Sized Remote Support for Today's Campus. This is Justin Brock manager of E-commerce here at BomgarTM. I would like thank each one of you for joining us. Today we'll have Mike Gerst from Texas A&M. How are you Mike?
Mike Gerst, Information Technologist, Texas A&M University:
I'm doing fine Justin.
Justin Brock, Manager of eCommerce, BomgarTM:
It's good to have you with us today. Mike is an Information Technologist with Texas A&M Agriculture - Texas Cooperative Extension. And, he will be talking about BomgarTM deployment there at Texas A&M. We'll also have, speaking with Mike today, Nathan McNeill, co-founder and VP of Product Management for BomgarTM.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
Hello Justin.
Justin Brock, Manager of eCommerce, BomgarTM:
How are you today?
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
Doing well.
Justin Brock, Manager of eCommerce, BomgarTM:
I'd like to thank each one of you for joining us and Mike and Nathan. Before we begin today's webcast, if you're attending and would like to ask a question at any time, we will have a Q&A time at the end of the webcast. Please, though, don't wait until the end to ask your questions. You can ask them at any time. You can submit those - there's a submit question field down at the bottom left of your interface so encourage you to ask any questions you may have at the presentation. And at the end, I'll be sure those get presented to Nathan and Mike. With that said, Nathan I'd like to turn things over to you.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
Okay. Thanks Justin. I wanted to take a couple minutes to give you a brief instruction about BomgarTM. We were founded in 2003. We offer remote support solutions that allow you to connect to - remote control a computer pretty much anywhere in the world in just a few seconds without having a client pre-installed on that PC and also even if the PC is behind a firewall. Currently we have about 2,000 customers. Those are located in all 50 states and about 30 countries internationally. And, this represents about the third largest customer base in the remote support market.
We are also exclusively focused on remote support and on the support professional, those needs exclusively versus some of the other things you can do with our type of technology. We have a number of different customers within the education vertical. These range from universities. We also have a good many colleges, and then also K-12 institutions. University of Mississippi, University of Tennessee, Ohio State University, as well as Texas A&M which you'll hear about today. So, with that said, I wanted to turn it over to Mike Gerst. He is information technologist with Texas A&M Agriculture - The Texas Cooperative Extension. And, he's going to tell us a little bit about his support environment, some of the challenges that he faces in that environment, how he's addressing these things using BomgarTM and then some of the results he's seen from having used the tool. So Mike, you can take it away from here.
Mike Gerst, Information Technologist, Texas A&M University:
Thank you Nathan. Howdy from Texas to all of ya'll. This is Mike Gerst. I provide enterprise level support to the Agricultural program at Texas A&M University. My predominate people that I support are the IT faculty and staff that supports the actual teachers and students at A&M. The agricultural program is part of the Texas A&M University system. We're obviously not all that; there are engineering departments and there's math and sciences and health. And, we are customers of the Texas A&M University system LAN and Wide Area Network and we use the internet infrastructure to connect both on campus and to our off-campus clientele.
As a result, we control very little of the network infrastructure, especially at our county offices. And, we don't regularly handle student workstations except as they are employees of the agricultural program. Let me give you a picture of the A&M campus. This is one of several campuses. The main thing that I want you to get out of this campus is that the A&M campus is spread over a wide area. You're looking at about four square miles of area here. The main campus is at College Station. That's where I am at. And, even the regional airport, which you can see in the lower left hand corner of the picture, is part of our campus and serves the whole community here.
We have a number of offices that are in rented spaces that are off campus that are in the local cities. And, as you might guess, we do not have an IT staff member, IT support staff member, in every department or on every building on campus. There are many other A&M campuses across the state and remote access for our IT support people can mean across this campus, across other campuses, between campuses, and across the state to each of 256 counties.
Mike Gerst, Information Technologist, Texas A&M University:
We have divided the state, you can see in this colored picture, into six regions and the size is about 800 miles from end to end in both directions, East, West, North, and South more or less; and there are six there. And, they are responsible for the IT infrastructure in each of the counties which is denoted by small square or rectangular object in each of those regions. Each of those regions also have research and extension centers that they have responsibilities to. Many of them are stationed at one of the research centers. And, oftentimes, there's two or more research centers in each of those areas. Some of those county offices that you have in there have their own county IT support staff and they administer their own LAN, and others connect directly to the Texas A&M University system. Some have broadband and a very few, way out there in West Texas near El Paso, are still on dial up.
This diagram shows you something about the Texas A&M University wide area connection. And, we're customers on this connection and it connects all these campuses, all the research centers, and our very large county offices like Dallas, Houston, Austin, and El Paso. And, as you can gather, we have got quite a diversity of connections and we go to the internet, you can see three clouds on there. You can't read them but each of those is a connection from the Texas A&M University System to the internet. So, if one is down we can get two others. And, one of the important things about any remote control product that we're looking for is that we don't have to know how all these folks are connected. Once it's set up and the firewall is set, then you don't have to figure out this network and you don't have to worry about these diagrams. And, that's something that we really like.
Mike Gerst, Information Technologist, Texas A&M University:
In the previous slides I've shown you some of the scope. Take a look at this. We've got 256 counties which are supported by six people. There are 12 off campus centers, and not all of those 16 departments have people that they can depend on locally. And then, yesterday, I got a new study in that was released that said that the 6,000 PCs that are reported on there is an underestimate. If we count the notebooks we have somewhere on the order of 8,000 PCs. And, we also have researchers, scientists, administrators, and others who travel worldwide. I've actually connected to people in other portions of the world due to BomgarTM and A&M has got facilities in Japan and Qatar. And, we are tasked with the job of providing timely support to any of our users at any of these locations when they need it. And, those of you oversees know that scheduling some of those can be very difficult since the time zones can result in us being up at 2:00 am in the morning when it's actually early in the morning for someone else.
Technical hurdles with about 8,000 PCs, many department locations, there is no uniformity of what the PC hardware is or how they're connected except that every one of our systems are able to connect to the internet. Also, we have no centralized requirement for purchasing and set up. So, a workstation can walk through the door that none of us knows about and we have to figure out how to connect it, get it set up and running, and often times we can use remote control software to actually provide the initial set up on that machine. In addition, many of the county offices have their own IT department and obtain their PCs that way. So, as you can imagine, we have very little control over the infrastructure or over the PCs that we're asked and tasked to support.
Mike Gerst, Information Technologist, Texas A&M University:
And, lastly, the users control their own desktops. It's an educational environment, free will and control is very important to our researchers and administrators. And so, users can control and set up their own desktop, and we frequently encounter a new and interesting software and set ups. And, as many of you know, users don't always tell you accurately what they're seeing on the screen. And, being able to see what's on the screen overcomes a number of those hurdles for us. Lastly, we control none of the firewalls. A&M University system controls the firewall. We'll talk a little bit later about setting up the appliance. That's the only thing that we had to set up. But, basically, the system connects in client server mode and so we don't have to worry about firewall issues and a fragmented network; the topology makes, as far as we can tell, no difference over how people connect with BomgarTM. In addition, we support users working from home.
Got to have TCP/IP. One of the issues that we had when we were looking at a solution was that it had to be able to use TCP/IP. It had to not care about what software was already installed on a machine or how the machine was connected to the internet. The other thing is that our users do not really care for resident software that's running on their machine that let's us connect when they don't know we're doing it. And, this was an important security feature for us. That's why we said must not be resident on a client's PC. There is one exception in the whole A&M University system that I'm aware of where they're using a remote control product that is resident on their PC. New PCs arrive from a variety of sources. And, many of our users when we're working on them are freed up and they can't stand by while we're working on their machine. So, we have to be able to use a product that acts just like we're sitting there. The only thing we can't do is hit the power switch. But, we can remotely reboot it and it automatically connects back to your representative's client. In addition, if you have a network outage and it lasts a short enough period of time, 'cause we have a time out set on our sessions, then it will automatically connect back up if there was a network outage. It's very robust in that and we needed that capability to walk through all of our different network configurations.
Mike Gerst, Information Technologist, Texas A&M University:
Another thing is our users don't always have administrative control over their PCs. Frequently they do, but if we need to be able to reload BomgarTM as an administrator or remote control product, we need to be able to do that. The other thing is that we were looking at a product to allow one of our technicians to sit at a centralized location and actually support customers in different locations within his region or across regions. This way he can be, you know, electronically in two places at once and it can be in counties at different ends of his region. And then, of course the supporting file transfer to and from, we can install software, we can move patches up from the reps workstation. These were all important things for us to do and our IT people need to be basically able to help any customer, at any time, from anywhere.
As you might guess, we looked at a number of products and BomgarTM met all of those products. It doesn't have any problems with firewall except the one here at A&M where we installed the appliance and we set that once and we forgot it. There's no resident software client. It's installed as you go. It reboots just fine. We can log in as an administrator. And, the most number of multiple PCs that I know that one of our people had in session at one time from his one workstation was six. They haven't reported to me having done more than six.
The appliance base - they'll talk about this but we wanted the server here. We didn't want to use the hosted version because we wanted complete control over the client-to-server based connection. And, we'll talk a little bit more about lower cost of ownership.
Mike Gerst, Information Technologist, Texas A&M University:
Essentially the way we do BomgarTM - there's more than one way, but we basically have a website that we direct people to go to and it says remote PC support. They click on that. And, as we get their telephone call in, we initiate this with a telephone call, and our rep has connected to the Bomgar BoxTM. That rep shows up as a user in that list and we direct the people there. They click on it. It downloads the software for connection to that rep, and it's a no-brainer. Even with some of the new and advanced settings in Internet Explorer and Firefox and others, we're able to talk people through over the phone connecting up for the first time. Once they've connected up, before they usually ask us if we want to use the BomgarTM session, which is a real benefit. They know we have the capability now. Basically, with BomgarTM you can do anything that you could do if you were physically sitting there in front of the PC except swapping out components and hitting the power switch yourself.
A couple unusual applications - they asked me for a couple unusuals. Once we had a Blackberry - we have a Blackberry enterprise server - we had a problem in El Paso with an individual and I actually helped him and installed the Blackberry desktop software on his desktop from here in College Station. I had him hook up his Blackberry, do a few commands on his Blackberry. We resolved his problem, backed up his Blackberry, and then restored his email system. And, I did that all remotely and that was using a PDA.
Mike Gerst, Information Technologist, Texas A&M University:
The other thing that's not on this list is we have used BomgarTM in performing a security audit on select PCs at the request of administrative faculty. Our people out in West Texas used to have what we call quality windshield time driving from one location to another. And, although they have cell phones and even wireless PCs, they're not fully productive as they drive down the road. It's not fully wasted time because they can help people, but now our IT people can provide more timely resolution at more sites with BomgarTM. It used to be that some of our problems could not be handled over the phone and our users had to wait until our IT person could drive onsite. Oftentimes that has to be scheduled. Not anymore. If they have a working internet connection then most often that problem can be remotely resolved. And, this includes even some tricky problems with viruses and worms that might require several reboots in order to get it to work.
I have some of our IT faculty who are scheduling multiple BomgarTM sessions with the county so they can work remotely on all the PCs. And, the way they used to do by having to drive on site, but they now do it from their office and they schedule several counties to be done on the same day. They used to not be able to do it. They'd get one county done one day and then move over to the next. Lastly, the clientele have learned that we have this capability. They used to let the problems stack up and when our IT people walked in the office, they were there to resolve a problem they knew about, but quite a few would be presented to them after they got there. Sort of a list - a laundry list of problems to be solved. Now that our clientele recognize that we can solve the problem when it occurs they will call it. We remotely fix that problem. We may look for other maintenance issues and we typically do. We look to see if their virus definitions are updated or not. But, we have found that when they call us as soon as the problem occurs and we need to fix it, it decreases one of the ripple effects that an unresolved problem might lead to another, and another, and a more serious problem.
Mike Gerst, Information Technologist, Texas A&M University:
And, of course, they're happier. We fix their problems a lot faster and they're very happy to recommend that we use the BomgarTM product. In general, we have dramatically reduced our travel costs. Texas is a big place and I even have a few people that walk from one building to another here on campus, but once they started using BomgarTM they're no longer walking over there because they can solve those people's problems right there. We estimate that during the first year of our operation we recouped the cost of the appliance and of the licenses. And, one of our major values is that we can fix something in five minutes when it used to take several days before someone could be on site. Now, how we might estimate the value of timely service as it impacts on our clientele's productivity is a really tough question to ask. But, when they ask us to use the product, we know we're getting somewhere.
We do more proactive workstation maintenance, as I talked about. And, in this case, how do we value what we did not have to do at a later time? Our people are putting out less fires. And, when there is a fire or a problem with a PC, it gets solved quickly. Lastly, we consider remote PC control really as an investment in our IT infrastructure because it results in reductions in travel, a reduction in long-winded telephone talk-throughs, and increase in our clientele productivity. In other words, their machine gets fixed so they can get back to work sooner. And, of course, the increased productivity of our staff.
And, Nathan, I'm ready to hand it over to you sir.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
All right. Thank you Mike. Thanks for walking us through that. I'm going to take a little bit of time now to work through how the BomgarTM product works at a little bit lower level of detail. Explain some of the features of the product. So, first of all let me forward to the next slide. The Bomgar BoxTM - we are the only appliance-based vendor of this type of solution. It allows you to connect, as I said before, to any computer anywhere in the world in just a few seconds. Again, this is through firewalls regardless of what configuration the PC does or does not have. We also include file transfer and chats so you can transfer files back and forth between the PC you're connected to. And also, this is true reboot/auto-reconnect. Meaning that the user does not have to intervene in order to give you back control after the reboot. It's extremely useful and it means also that you don't have to tie the user to their chair while you continue to troubleshoot their issue.
We also have the ability to transfer sessions from rep to rep. If for some reason one rep is not able to resolve the issue you can transfer it up the line. You can also share it between reps so you can have multiple reps collaborating over the same issue. You do have the ability, as Mike mentioned, to handle multiple sessions pretty easily. He mentioned six. It's actually not a cap but probably at some point it gets a lot more difficult to keep track of six PCs. That's just kind of up to the rep as to how many PCs they can handle simultaneously.
One other thing is with the appliance, it's about a 30-minute instillation. Because it's a self-contained unit, contains all the services you need to run the application, there's no configuring stuff on a server in order to get it up and running. We usually tell our clients to take the BomgarTM pizza box challenge which is, you know, when the box gets there, order a pizza. By the time the pizza gets there you should have your appliance up and running and running your first few remote control sessions.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
Let me walk through a little bit of just how it works. As Mike said, it only uses standard ports 80 and 443 for the rep and for the customer you normally install the client in the DMZ or demilitarized zone. And then, from then on you don't have to worry any further about firewall configuration or anything like that once you've made the appliance accessible initially. Which means that, whether you're supporting the guy down the hall on the same subnet or the guy in Tokyo on a Wi-Fi hotspot connection, you don't have to worry about what firewall they're behind, whether or not it's been configured correctly, or any other specifics about the system itself.
So, this is just a little bit about how you would initiate a connection. With our latest version, the support rep monitors the queue waiting for incoming sessions. And then, the user would initiate a session. There's three different ways for the user to initiate a session. I believe that Mike and his team are normally using the first way which is to click on a display name. There's a second way which is to enter a session key which the rep would provide. And, we've also introduced a third method which is for the customer to send a support request ticket. And then, that ticket is entered into a queue that is monitored by your reps and so they can take it off the queue and address that issue. And, all of these are configurable by the administrator as to which ones appear and which ones don't. So, you can use one or more of these initiation methods.
So, once the user initiates the session. They would then grant the remote control session to the rep. This is always user initiated so there is no way for the rep to gain control of the user's PC without the user's express permission. And, that's important also once the session is ended, to have the solution completely removed from their system. This also means from the administrator's perspective that you don't have to maintain a client-based software instillation across hundreds or thousands of PCs. That you're only installing that little piece of software for the duration session and then it's completely removed so you're not worried about whether or not something's installed or configured appropriately.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
Moving on, once the user is connected, the rep can do anything on that system that the user could do locally. So, it's just the same as an onsite visit except you can't talk and swap cards. That's about it. One thing we also add is if the user only has user-level rights, the rep can escalate those rights, as Mike had mentioned, to administrative rights so they're able to do a little bit more on the user's PC. And, this really eliminates a lot of ambiguity about what's happening in a troubleshooting session, what the user's seeing, what the user's supposed to be seeing, what problems are occurring, and all those sorts of things. So, it really simplifies issue resolution and can speed that up significantly.
So, once the session is over, the user's going to basically uninstall the little client and then they'll be directed to a feedback form where they can enter feedback about the rep and about the session to help you gain information for later. What this all boils down to is that it lets you connect effortlessly and on demand to your clients whenever you need - whenever they need your support. No more waiting for on-site visits. No more long phone conversations. So, it can increase support rep productivity, increase your first call resolution rates. One periphery benefit is that it not only increases the first call resolution rates, it also decreases repeat incidents. A lot of times once you trouble - you're working through troubleshooting an issue, at the end of the issue the rep thinks it's probably resolved but since they can't see it they can't always tell for sure. And, with the remote control session it lets you tell for sure. The rep can see and determine conclusively whether or not the issue is resolved so we don't get the person coming back in after the first time didn't work.
It decreases call-handling time. Reduced travel. Again, Mike purchased almost two years ago I think at this point. Since then, gas has gone from $1.50 a gallon to about twice that and their travel expenses have actually gone down. So, that's a real testimony to the reduction in travel that this product can offer. And then, also, this is a solution that you can own and host yourself easily without worrying about how it configures or how it integrates with other applications you may be running. So, the results of all this, as Mike has mentioned, are basically two-fold. You reduce travel time and allow your reps to do more. And, that's what BomgarTM is designed to do.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
So, at this time I want to see if there were any questions that we could address from the audience. Justin?
Justin Brock, Manager of eCommerce, BomgarTM:
Thank you guys. First I'd like to apologize to everyone. We had a sound issue somewhere in there. I appreciate your patience. We will have an MP3 of this webcast and we'll send everyone a link to that so you can go back and catch the parts you missed. The first question I'd like to ask is how many end user devices can one appliance control at one time?
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
And I can take that one. We have two different appliance models. Our B200 model which I believe Texas A&M is using will allow up to 25 concurrent sessions. So, 25 reps controlling 25 PCs. And then, our B300 model will allow about ten times that. It's going to be dependant somewhat on what they're doing within the session. So, if they're watching DVDs of a remote control session it will use the resources more quickly. But, that should be the ranges. For the larger appliance between 250 and 400 concurrent sessions, 400 reps, 400 customers. And then, for the smaller appliance the B200, would be 25 concurrent sessions.
Justin Brock, Manager of eCommerce, BomgarTM:
Okay. Is there a way to know what's happened during the session? Like you connect to someone and then you're disconnected, how do you know what's happened during that session?
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
We have a logging and reporting interface. So, it's going to tell you who you're connected with, their IP address, user name, internal and external, as well as the duration of the support session and then chat transcript, files that were transferred, names of the files, and also - just to give you a sneak peak. Coming up in our 9.1 release at the end of September, so in about ten days, we're actually releasing full session recordings so you'll have a video file of the session. So, you could see not only what happened in the session but also who did what within the session.
Justin Brock, Manager of eCommerce, BomgarTM:
Okay. This is a question for Mike. Are there ever times where you need to support a Mac user?
Mike Gerst, Information Technologist, Texas A&M University:
Yes there are. But, we have not done that at this point in time. Our shop is essentially a Windows workstation shop and we're working at eventually getting to be able to support both Lennox based workstations and Macs, but our Macs are really localized within one communications department here on campus and they aren't really spread around. And, they have their own IT person that's a Mac expert. My expertise in Mac is pretty low. The way I got my Mac was to have him surplus me a Mac so I could test it. o we're really limited to PC support and I direct people to him. But, he is a BomgarTM user.
Justin Brock, Manager of eCommerce, BomgarTM:
Nathan, could you address Mac support with BomgarTM?
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
Sure can. And that, again, is another teaser. But, in the end of September that release will also include support for the Macintosh OS - OS 10. So, a lot of our education customers have been requesting that. We've responded to them by adding Mac support. So, that will be available in a couple of weeks.
Mike Gerst, Information Technologist, Texas A&M University:
Hey, can I add one thing? We have looked at that, and one thing about the recording of the session, we are also tasked with the job of doing training and producing training tips for our clientele. And, we're looking at that feature as being a way to enable us to capture during an actual session a training tip.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
It can be a great way to do that because it basically, you know, as soon as you get a session that's resolved well on a standard type of issues, you've got that record of kind of a template about how it was resolved that you can share with other reps or other users to help them solve their own issue. Just follow the steps. Do what's shown on screen.
Justin Brock, Manager of eCommerce, BomgarTM:
Well, thank you both. This question can be for - there's probably an experiential way Mike would want to answer it and then maybe a technical way that, Nathan, you might want to answer. The core differences between the BomgarTM technology and traditional LAN-based remote control products.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
Mike, do you want to take a stab at that first?
Mike Gerst, Information Technologist, Texas A&M University:
I'll take a stab at it. Experientially, it's a client server connection and it's very interactive on first setting it up so it's not resident. With other products you can actually go onto the machine and that person doesn't' know you're there. And, we have found that there are firewalls and firewall settings that we have no control over that foul up every other remote control than one that is based on client server. Peer to peer remote control will break down in a lot of network topologies because of firewalls and NAT tables and all kinds of things like that. And so, by having the appliance here, we can control the ports that are open on it. We can direct our clientele to it and they really don't have to think too much about it. And, we don't have to install software like VNC, or open up Windows Remote Desktop, or any other product on their machine like proxy, and others. And, they basically can be going from a machine that has never been seen by us before. And, we have quite a few like that.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
Yeah, and I think Mike you kind of hit it on the head. It's two things basically. It's one, most traditional remote control tools do not work through firewalls without configurations. Either port forwarding to the machine that you're going to remote control, and that's also require a pre-installed client. So, you'd have to install the client and then configure the firewall before accessing that machine. And, it really comes down - well, one other thing as well is that most of those, because they do require a pre-installed client, are licensed per client node. So, if you've got 8,000 PCs you're looking at 8,000 software clients that you're going to have to purchase, deploy, and maintain in order to allow remote control of those PCs. Not only that, you're going to have to configure the firewalls of whatever firewalls they may be behind. So, for Mike that's a lot of regional offices, a lot of mobile workers, people working from home, etc.
Whereas, with ours, you don't have to worry about what firewall they're behind. You don't have to maintain a client and it's licensed per support rep - per concurrent support rep at that, so that you can have - if one rep gets off you can have another rep get on and have multiple users who have access to the same license. So, it's a really - makes a lot more sense for a licensing scheme when you're looking at supporting a large user base. Again, you may have users call in who you've never heard from before much less maintained or supported their PC.
So, with our product, you can get on quickly and go ahead and support them in a matter of seconds whereas with most traditional products you'd have to go thorough the process of configuring their firewall and configuring the client on their PC.
Mike Gerst, Information Technologist, Texas A&M University:
Let me add one more thing to that you made me think about. We have a number of counties where we worked with the county IT people and configured their firewalls and got them set up and they're working just wonderfully for us. Then they got a new firewall administrator or they decided to outsource it and the next thing we know our connections are all broken. We have never had that happen with the BomgarTM session because the client from behind the firewall is the one that's initiating the conversation. You don't have to have particular ports open on it that are specialized for any application. And, we have found in a number of cases that, since we don't control that route, we wanted a product that will go through those uncontrolled routes.
Justin Brock, Manager of eCommerce, BomgarTM:
Okay. This - a couple of questions from Idaho. First maybe to Mike. How much training effort did you have to put for your support reps to learn to use the application?
Mike Gerst, Information Technologist, Texas A&M University:
Well, there was a couple of them. The training rep actually downloads the rep client on the workstation that they work from. And, they can download that on as many workstations as they want. They have to remember their user ID and password. Most of them are pretty good at doing that. That was one of our issues. The other thing is that we have the ability through the appliance to go in and terminate a session if someone stays on there too long. Some of the training has to do with us having five licenses and at least 30 people that can share those five licenses. So, when someone is through using it, then they need to log out of the BomgarTM. There's really not much else training. These people are already fairly competent PC users and like Nathan said, depending on the number of screens that they can handle, they'll handle one or maybe all the way up to six. The technology is not difficult for them to grasp from their end and it was very easy for them to do the "run as administrator" and they like the way it's robust and connects back through when you lose a connection.
Justin Brock, Manager of eCommerce, BomgarTM:
So, you didn't have difficulty training your IT staff to use it?
Mike Gerst, Information Technologist, Texas A&M University:
No, I have one person that keeps forgetting his password and he calls me up routinely and I have to clear a session. And since I don't - we'll get back into - since I don't get in to the administrator very often, I've got a utility called key pass that keeps passwords secured on my workstation. I have to go in there and look at the administrator password for the BomgarTM appliance because I can go in and clear that out. That might be a training issue on my part because I don't have to get on it too much. And, he mentions that we've had about two years. I can't remember the last time the appliance was down where we didn't have a problem like a power outage in the building or something like that.
There is a training issue with people who want to move the appliance from one rack to another. We had an opportunity to do that, and on two different occasions two of us spent 30 minutes looking for the mouse and keyboard. It doesn't have a mouse and keyboard. It has an on/off button at the front. And, if you can train your technical people to press that button when they're getting ready to move it, it shuts down nicely. But, if they forget it doesn't have a mouse and keyboard, you got to spend a while looking for it.
Justin Brock, Manager of eCommerce, BomgarTM:
Could - Nathan would you mind speaking to the security of the Bomgar BoxTM?
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
Sure. That has kind of two aspects. One is a technical aspect dealing with the bits and bytes and acronyms we've thrown at it. The second is an information security aspect which a lot of our healthcare and financial customers are very concerned with. So, the first aspect we do use 256-bit AES SSL encryption for the entire data stream. All traffic is passed through the appliance and then stored. And then, the record of that session is on that appliance as well. And then, in terms of other security threats and the mitigating strategies, we've had the whole solution Bomgar BoxTM which is software, hardware, etc. go through a source code enabled product penetration assessment by Symantec Corporation and we have study available on our website with - I'm not sure which page it is but it should be easily findable. So, you can work through that and it will give you more detailed information about the security components of the application.
Bottom line was they reviewed the source code and tried multiple penetration tests on the different interfaces of solution and it came through very well. So, it covers that aspect very well. The other aspect which is the information security, it's important for a lot of our clients, again especially in financial and healthcare sectors, to have the record of the session hosted internal - their organization. And, not have session data passed through a third party or especially not be stored at a third party. With remote control you are passing potentially sensitive information in terms of screenshots or whatever else and so it's very important that that remain at your organization.
Additionally, under a lot of the new regulations, and I'm not sure if any of these affect education as much, but under a lot of the regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley or HIPAA, or Gramm-Leach-Bliley, it's actually a pretty significant liability to have the data stored at a third party because the organization is still responsible for that data and how it's used and whether or not that's in a manner compliant with their industry's regulations.
Justin Brock, Manager of eCommerce, BomgarTM:
Thank you. One more. This will be the final question. And, if you've asked a question and it hasn't been answered we'll try to get back to those via email. But, this is the last one we do have time for. Paul asked, "Can it be integrated with a call tracking system like Remedy for example?
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
We have, again with the 9.1 release coming out in a few days, we've opened up the database so you do all have access to all the data that's logged on the appliance including the session recordings. And so, that would allow you to attach it to like a ticket tracking system like Remedy or some other system. It would require some programming on your part but that would be possible.
Justin Brock, Manager of eCommerce, BomgarTM:
Okay. Thank you. Well, thank you again for attending today's webcast. Mike, thank you especially for taking the time with us today.
Mike Gerst, Information Technologist, Texas A&M University:
Glad to do it.
Justin Brock, Manager of eCommerce, BomgarTM:
We're glad to have you anytime. And, Nathan, appreciate your time as well.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
Enjoyed it.
Justin Brock, Manager of eCommerce, BomgarTM:
We will, again, if you were here earlier and noticed the sound issue, we will have an MP3 of this webcast available on our site soon and we'll be sure to send you an email to remind you of that so you can get the full cast without any sound issues. Thank you again for attending and if you have further questions or want to know more about BomgarTM, please visit our site bomgar.com. There is a free trial available of BomgarTM and come back especially toward the end of this month as the new release, BomgarTM 9.1, goes out. There'll be a lot of information on the site about that. Thank you again and have a good rest of your day.