Support.com will launch on Monday a new version of its Web-based technical support system, which is used by Cisco, JCPenney, General Electric and other large companies to provide personalized, automated help desk support to their employees.
The Support.com system, which includes client and server software, can be configured to automatically reach out over the Internet to a remote employee's computer to perform various tasks, such as changing IP addresses or network settings. The system supports self-healing, which involves automatically returning a computer system to an earlier functioning mode.
The system also supports self-service by walking an employee through the steps required to solve his own problems. If a problem can't be fixed, the employee can use the system to connect live to a specialist in the company's support center.
"What's really key here is that you can take a complex, manual, multi-step process and automate it," says Paul May, senior product marketing manager at Support.com. "You can automatically grab lots of information from the user's system and very quickly get to what's causing their pain."
Version 4.0 takes all the technical support and computer information gathered by the system and packages it into XML-based forms -- dubbed SmartIssues -- for faster processing and automatic entry of trouble tickets. The latest version also supports six different languages for global corporations.
"Where we need to go is intelligent, Web-based dialogues. We need to provide the right information to the right support resource to enable a higher level of support," explains Gary Zilk, product marketing manager at Support.com. "That's what we do with Version 4.0."
The Support.com system includes four components:
A typical configuration costs more than $100,000, including $75,000 for the Support Portal Hub, $20 per end user per year, and $2,500 per support specialist per year.
Founded in 1997, Support.com went public in mid-July. Support.com has more than 60 customers including enterprises like Bear, Stearns; ISPs like Excite@Home; and support outsourcing firms like Computer Sciences.
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