Remote support appliance play Bomgar is poised to boost its share of the market with new releases targeting businesses using Linux and Windows Mobile.
Today, the company released Bomgar 10, the latest in its appliance-based remote control solutions designed to let companies provide technical support worldwide via the Internet. The new release adds versions for SUSE, RedHat, Ubuntu and Fedora Linux distros in addition to Windows Mobile, plus new language support for Spanish, German, Japanese and French.
“A lot of products stop at Windows, which we support all the way back to Windows 95, and also Mac,” said Nathan McNeill, Bomgar’s co-founder and vice president of product management. “We think it’s a big advantage to be able to support all the different OS’s including the folks running Linux or the creative department that might be running Macs.”
Bomgar also announced a technology alliance with BMC Software that promises to automate the incident resolution process. BMC certification enables Bomgar to integrate its incident resolution software with BMC’s Remedy Action Request System for managing and monitoring service management business processes.
Using an integrated system lets IT support personnel launch and record secure remote sessions directly from the BMC Remedy system.
“Remote control support is all we do and this is a huge release for us,” company founder and CEO Joel Bomgar told InternetNews.com.
Bomgar 10 is something of a rarity in the field of remote support, where it competes with solutions that are software-based like GoToAssist and NTRglobal. That fact gives it something of an advantage over rivals, the company’s CEO said.
“They’re Software as a Service,” he said of the competition. “We’re the only ones that let you own every session of what happens,” Bomgar said.
For instance, using an appliance instead of a service means that less data leaves the enterprise, which can prove a major selling point for some businesses.
“You can be reasonably sure the other vendors are going to protect your data, but with Bomgar, the data is only maintained in your data center,” said IDC analyst Matthew Healey. “Some companies do not want to share this kind of data with anyone else, regardless of how many safeguards are in place.”
Bomgar offers three different versions of its “Bomgar Box” appliance, for individuals, small businesses and enterprises. The “Box” works through corporate firewalls and doesn’t require any pre-installed software on the remote computer.
Healey said Bomgar is one of several companies to ride a recent wave of “clientless” support tools that don’t require the user to have specific support software pre-installed or downloaded as part of the support call.
“It’s a great mid-market (100 to 5,000 employees) solution for companies that don’t have strong IT support practices,” Healey told InternetNews.com,. “These clientless solutions allow companies to provide a legitimate tech support solution to a growing geographic workforce who aren’t ever on-site.”
He said the market for clientless support products is running at about $100 million today, and said it’s likely to grow to $250 million annually during the next five years.
