Dallas, TX – NTRglobal will further consolidate its commitment to the managed services industry as a sponsor of MSPWorld 2011, a premier managed services and cloud computing event that addresses the most pressing channel and end-user issues facing managed service providers (MSPs) and their customers.

The event will feature NTRglobal’s CEO Gilles Samoun, who will join a panel of industry experts to explore managed security services in the cloud. Samoun explained, “Enterprise-level businesses adopted managed security services years ago, but now more small and medium-sized businesses are seeking this service to keep up with the growing number of regulatory requirements in place to protect personal data.”

Since Samoun’s appointment in 2009, NTRglobal has shifted its focus toward modular cloud-based solutions that deliver proven ROI while guaranteeing enterprise-class security and privacy through multilevel security safeguards. Recent developments include technology partnerships with leading managed service software providers including BMC, ConnectWise, N-able and Spiceworks.

Samoun added, “NTRglobal has worked closely with MSPs since 2001 to provide secure remote support and chat technologies designed to accelerate problem resolution and optimize overall support costs.”

MSPWorld will be held in Austin, Texas on September 13 and 14. NTRglobal will exhibit in Booth 1416.

TAMPA, Fla.  –– ConnectWise, developer of the leading business management solution designed exclusively for IT service providers, VARs and MSPs, today unveiled ConnectWise Chat & Remote Control. ConnectWise Chat & Remote Control provides chat, clientless remote control capabilities and automatic ticket generation within ConnectWise PSA.

A joint development of ConnectWise and NTRglobal, a pioneer in cloud-based remote support and IT automation software, ConnectWise Chat & Remote Control enhances client experience, increases profitability, and improves help desk employee performance by enabling technicians to assist multiple clients simultaneously. Features include:

Check out these stats derived from a survey of NTRglobal enterprise customers...how do your metrics compare? Do you want to improve your operational efficiencies and reporting?

• 30% of a contact center’s cost defined by FCR
• 50% of customer dissatisfaction stems from being passed from agent to agent
• 85% increase in repurchase intention from customers who are dealt with quickly and effectively

Why is First Contact Resolution Important?

“FCR is a driver for excellence in any support organization and has a powerful, positive ripple effect and impact on all of the other performance and financial metrics,” said Pete McGarahan, consultant at McGarahan and Associates. “Service organizations can create loyal, profitable customer relationships by quickly turning a problem into a solution on the first contact. NTRsupport is the tool utility belt for today’s help desk who is working hard to deliver quality services to happy customers cost-effectively.”

Increase First Call Resolution and Enhance New Business

"NTRsupport has changed the way we do business at Northbrook Consulting Group,” said Donald L. Joseph, president of Northbrook Consulting Group. “We are able to be more responsive to customer needs; reduce on-site sales and support visits, increase first time call resolution, improve customer service, and achieve our goal of using NTRsupport to gain new customers."

Using NTRsupport, IT support and help desk professionals can connect with customers and employees in seconds to resolve -technical support issues without the need for pre-installed software. NTR Cloud offers fully loaded support tools with advanced diagnostics, collaboration and reporting tools to accelerate problem identification and resolution on PC’s Macs or smartphones on-demand. These tools also include:

• Quality and silent monitoring for all media to enable optimal training and service delivery.
• End-of-call customer polling through agent script for specific incident review.
• Automated survey and follow up after customer contact to ensure customer satisfaction.

NTRsupport helps technicians virtually resolve more issues remotely, thus reducing backlog, level 2 escalations or worse, costly equipment returns.

Find out more about how NTR Cloud can help you enhance enterprise help desk metrics...

And don't just take our word for it, compare it free with your current solution: www.ntrglobal.com.
Then tell usabout the ROI...

We want to have bragging rights that you are "boring" your CIO with ROI.
Let us help you enhance your help desk and service desk quality and efficiency while cutting costs in 2011!

NTRglobal is a ConnectWise partner. Joe Panattieri just published this interesting article about his visit with ConnectWise CEO Arnie Bellini on 20 January 2011. Thanks for the mention!

"Provin says more and more support inquiries are shifting to online chat. The system leverages technology from NTRglobal…”

Read the whole post here:
http://www.mspmentor.net/2011/01/20/six-surprises-inside-the-halls-of-connectwise/

In a recent call with NTRglobal CEO Gilles Samoun, Gartner analysts discussed their views about the Service Desk Market and the release of NTR Service Desk. In fact, Gartner is hearing from clients like you that 2011 is an important year, if not THE year, for a closer evalution of the benefits Service Desk SaaS. They report that the service desk market is poised for rapid growth in SaaS because traditional premise-based solutions are difficult to deploy, take too long to integrate or beg a rip approach which often relegates the project to ‘shelfware’ status. Gartner analyst David Coyle stated: “SaaS IT service desk tools are the viable alternative to traditional on-premises models. Integration between the SaaS IT service desk tool and other IT service management (ITSM) tools in the enterprise environment are key selection criteria. Moreover many IT departments defer essential upgrades to on-premise solutions because of the difficulty and cost of upgrades.”

How does the SaaS delivery model play into your 2011 plans?
What is top of mind about aligning ITSM process?
What are your main concerns, roadblocks to acomplishing ITSM audits such as?

• Growth and value, which involves tracking revenue growth against investment and utilization.
• Budget adherence, which involves optimizing the use of available funds and avoiding unnecessary expenditures.
• Risk impact, which involves identifying and evaluating the consequences of risks taken or avoided.
• Communication effectiveness, which involves examining customer feedback and gauging customer satisfaction and awareness.

What tools are you using or want to use to get the job done more efficiently?

NTR Service Desk addresses Gartner's recommendations, offering enterprise IT departments a new game plan with a modular approach. Check out the new release here: www.ntrglobal.com/service-desk. We'd like to hear from you. Contact me at hwieland@ntrglobal.com.

How NTRglobal solutions turn support operations into lead generation machines!

NTRglobal and ConnectWise are hearing from managed service partners small and large that customer acquisition is the top business priority for any IT service provider working in managed services today. In fact, according to research firm, AMI Partners, North American businesses want to add managed services at the CAGR of 28% over the next five years. What are the kinds of services you can easily add to take business growth to the next level?

On-demand remote support enables easy and affordable delivery of optimized help desk services – on platform or off. With full-featured online web chat and the power of clientless remote control, MSPs are bringing huge cost-savings to enterprises, boasting:

• Over 93% of issues resolved on first contact.
• More than 58% calls deflected by chat.
• 20% boost in operator productivity after a single month of usage; more than 50% in eight months
• 98% customer satisfaction ratings

Big customer service value, right? But what does is have to do with lead generation?

MSPs tell us that delivering break-fix (reactionary) support is still one of the leading revenue drivers for most MSP business. NTRglobal Service Desk and Help Desk solutions enable MSPs to use the break-fix support exchange as a new business-generating platform. How?

Four ways to transform simple problem resolution into business growth

1. Upsell. Deploy Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) agents on remote platforms and nontraditional devices while upselling proactive support services
2. Integrate. In less than a day NTR solutions can be integrated with:
   • Ticketing systems
   • Professional Services Automation tools (PSA)
   • Remote Monitoring and Management Services (RMM)
   • CRMs
   • ERPs
3. Cross-sell. Deliver training and sales presentations and live demos via outbound screensharing
4. Resell. Fast, effective problem resolution instantly wins fans, so NTR technology is an easy sell to downstream channels who can rebrand it.

By integrating NTRsupport with world-class partners such as ConnectWise, solution providers gain access to a breakthrough growth strategies. Partners around the world are expanding IT services at an affordable price while delivering services that keep clients happy.

What is helping you to grow your business? What are some of the issues? What other kinds of solutions would you like to integrate into your practice? Endpoint Security? Storage services in the Cloud? Are you able to accurately keep track of your work even when you are working off-platform?

Let us know by commenting here, tweeting us or sending me your thoughts at hwieland@ntrglobal.com

You can hardly blame IT support teams for feeling beleaguered these days. The world that IT service management has to support has irretrievably broken through the enterprise firewall. No business today can afford to be an island and IT support can no longer function on the assumption of a single internal network infrastructure. But many ITSM tools were designed for precisely that use case and thus they have no framework for safely delivering support beyond the internal corporate network.

Fortunately there are ways around this. But first of all let’s be realistic at the scale of the change that’s taken place in the past few years. Any hope of containing or limiting the activity that takes place beyond the firewall is misplaced. The world is moving to the public Web and most of the business processes and interactions that matter to an enterprise – with customers, prospects, employees, partners, suppliers and outsourced resources – already take place beyond the corporate firewall.

Users today are working out of the office, accessing IT resources over the public or mobile Internet and often from their own personal smartphones, home computers or touch tablets. The devices they rely on are becoming more diverse and more sophisticated with every product cycle. They’re capable of holding a ton of data and their capacities are increasing day by day.

If resistance is futile (and it is) then all of this has to be acknowledged and supported. Users must be supported and the data and applications they use must be protected, even though they may be deeply embedded in the public Internet and running on devices that they’ve acquired off their own bat. What’s more, they demand a response as soon as they encounter problems and expect you to help them wherever they are – on the road, at clients, at home.

What are the strategies enterprises can adopt to meet those demands? What has worked for you? What are you seeking? I'd like to hear from you.

“The resolution time for delivering on-demand remote support with NTRsupport to a mutual customer a continent away, inspired our channel partner to adopt NTRglobal.”

The heat is on for IT support to manage if not “put out the fires” of the often escalated “back to business and back to school” service requests. With the increased workload, these challenges are especially unwelcome in today’s economic climate, when IT support teams are somehow expected to deliver a more responsive service while under constant pressure to reduce costs. But enteprise IT is finding a better way with on-demand IT automation and remote support. NTRglobal customer, Ken Schmidt, technical support manager at ExpeData, a global enterprise digital writing software company stated that though support to customers and partners worldwide is a challenge, NTRglobal software-as-a-service (SaaS) allows him to “virtually just do IT support, anytime, anywhere.”

“Using a remote support solution has become less a “nice to have” and more a mandatory part of business,” said Schmidt. “Difficult to describe problems become impossible to address when language barriers meet technology issues. Additionally, with time zones creating smaller windows, and with the expense of international calling, iterative processes can take days rather than hours. Providing a decision tree can be tedious, confusing, and overly complex. Being able to virtually just do IT support with NTRglobal more than halves the time to deliver support and provides better customer service.”

“A specific example of this”, added Schmidt, “is supporting our channel partner’s customer in Europe. They were having an issue installing our client application. Without a common language, remoting in was the only viable option. I used NTRglobal to take control of the customer’s computer. I then shared my screen with our channel partner. We used the chat functionality to tell the customer what to do with hardware for testing. We found out that the customer had an older version of our client software, so I used the FTP functionality to provide the update. I installed our app, triggered a reboot, reconnected, and then chatted with them to try the operation again. We were successful and spent less than an hour resolving our mutual customer’s issue. Interactions such as this actually inspired our partner to also become an NTRglobal customer.”

Our customers tell us that one of the main motivators for change to NTRglobal is cost savings and cost containment, which underscores the interest in using SaaS for remote support and IT systems management where travel is virtually eliminated. The second reason is that cloud computing allows our customers to do things that they otherwise couldn't do. For example, IT managers and channel partners can collaborate, deliver customer training and participate in reviews using NTRglobal cloud-provided applications that would have been otherwise cost- or prohibitive.

IT, MSPs and Device OEMs alike are grappling with the challenge of delivering effective IT services to their end-users, a majority of which are remote or mobile workers using a multitude of computing devices. End-users can be internal employees located all over the world, external clients and customers, business partners and contractors alike. But all of them are relying on IT for highly secure, always on, 24x7 services.

Add to this the mandates to "optimize productivity" with tighter budgets, reduced staff, and ever more stringent compliance issues. Any downtime in today's global economy is "mission critical" and the "break-fix" reactive mode may seem inevitable as the "only way."

Finally add the expectation from business managers to show the money. Where are the metrics to show how IT is contributing to profitability? The business case for automation is clear.

IT automation is a proven solution to help meet IT management challenges, markedly reducing operational costs and boosting productivity. Many tools exist. While these "point" tools may help with specifics, today IT needs a better approach with an integrated solution that can:

• Remotely monitor and manage their network and all devices using a single, easy to use dashboard
• Use remote control to securely connect to - and gain control over - any Windows or non-Windows device on the network in seconds for real-time issue resolution
• Deliver remote support to single or multiple PCs --allowing IT to control Internet connected PCs and deliver support via concurrent remote sessions.
• Navigate, discover and organize the complete network infrastructure in minutes with Advanced Search capabilities recognizing highly specific criteria for any devices located anywhere on network and beyond
• Use automatic deployment which enables IT to easily deploy to multiple machines automatically.
• Show reporting to justify the needs of the IT infrastructure

NTRadmin from NTRglobal meets these requirements. NTRadmin is SaaS for IT systems management with a completely integrated platform for on-demand automation and remote support SaaS. Moreover NTRadmin integrates seamlessly with other systems administration solutions, CRM, Help Desk, billing, alerts and backup. NTRadmin offer fully customizable procedures called NTRadmin Bots that enable IT to schedule jobs on Web-connected assets whether devices are online, offline, or only accessible after-hours. They can inventory assets, perform upgrades, defrag, deploy patches and file distributions without end-user coordination or disruption or it can offer the option to show a dialog box to a remote user, automatically launch a browser and more.

With NTRadmin IT can move from purely a reactive, break-fix mode of operation to become increasingly proactive and show the value of their IT infrastructure.

To learn more about NTRadmin from NTRglobal, watch this video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QogzaanXqNY and to test a free version of the solution, please visit www.ntrglobal.com/ntradmin

Curtis Franklin, Jr., senior contributing editor to the InfoWorld Test Center, recently named new NTRconnect remote access as one of the ten great iPhone apps for business users. Dropbox, Evernote and Documents to Go are other "top-notch" apps he reviewed among many others.

He wrote, "As a member of the nomadic business class, I appreciate how Apple has managed to make a device as small as the iPhone a truly useful enterprise tool..."

Change is truly at hand...ok I couldn't resist. But seriously, the diversity of devices used by webworkers and the remote workforce is daunting and accelerating for IT managers. Business users want their favorite devices and apps running on iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, smartphones, desktops, laptops, netbooks, iPads...But IT needs to keep these remote systems running and ensure critical security, compliance and the achievement of environmental goals. How to be flexible and secure?

With the advent of cross-platform, proactive management tools, on-demand automation and remote support delivered via SaaS, do you see 2010 as the year non-Windows platforms will make serious inroads in the enterprise?