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.

NTRglobal Invites You to make 2011 a year of Help Desk change for the better

Many enterprise help desk organizations still struggle with their legacy remote control tools and "cobbled together" approaches to 24/7 global help desk support. But most of these tools are not designed to meet the needs of today's IT help desk or the mobile workers that need remote support on demand. These legacy tools may not integrate into other systems. Incident reporting may be inaccurate. Time spent on incidents may not be properly accounted for...and in times when every resource is already streteched to the max, further budgets cut due to a lack of accurate reporting is a very real threat.

Today, the help desk needs a better way to manage to the realities of today's enterprise dynamics:

• Mobile and remote workers using a multitude of computing devices and operating systems including smarthones
• Leaner budgets than ever for help desk operations, yet business demands for greater help desk productivity and service quality.
• Varying, yet ever stricter security and compliance mandates for data management by region, by country

Legacy tools are simply not effective solutions for resolving technical support problems for the worker on the go or the remote-office teams. What if you could try a risk-free way to make 2011 the year you make help desk change for the better? We'd like to invite you to testdrive NTRsupport Ultimate software-as-a-service Free Trial, http://www.ntrglobal.com/ntrsupport fully loaded with diagnostics, workflow support, management and reporting capabilities. No training required. No capital expenditure or new hardware required.

We'd like you to prove to yourself how NTRsupport can provide instant measurable return on deployment...

Goodbye Legacy Remote Control! Happy Change for the Better in 2011 from NTRglobal!

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.

According to recent Gartner statistics focused on traditional Service Desk metrics, the cost to Customer 1’s company for traditional phone support for an eight-minute call costs the company between $18 - $23, and increases 75% in total cost as it is escalated to different technical levels for resolution within the organization. This does not include:

• The cost of losing customers due to wait times, frustration with service availability, and lack of support options.
• The cost of buying new customers to replace lost ones, which may run up to five times as according to American Management Association figures.

The business impact of having a long queue, long wait times and long times to resolve are in decreased customer satisfaction, customer defection and a bad reputation for providing ongoing service and support to your customers. This will eventually hurt your business especially based on customer referrals and word of mouth. Businesses have to look at the cost in losing a customer as well as the cost to attract a customer and the cost to retain a customer

Even worse, in 73% of cases, Customer 1’s organization makes no attempt to persuade dissatisfied customers to stay, even though 35% said that a simple apology would have prevented them from moving to the competition. The company’s support center does not have the ability to provide self-support, submit a ticket, Chat, or request the support agent view or take over their machine. They not have the right tool set to meet the customer’s expectations for providing world class support. They do not have NTRsupport.

Customer 2 contacts his service provider, who is able to validate the customer with the integrated CRM interface and quickly assess the situation. The agent asks permission to run a diagnostic, can share the customer’s screen to visualize the situation, and take remote control of the machine to administer a solution. He determines the root cause, applies the fix with a file transfer, reboots the machine and tests the functionality while the customer is on the line. The problem has been resolved quickly, seamlessly, and satisfactorily.

Another benefit to the company is that the interaction is recorded and stored for auditing and training purposes.

The cost to Customer 2’s company is less than $12 (based upon the remote agent cost per hour of $21 plus some overhead for tools, bandwidth, etc). The overall first contact resolution could have been accomplished in 15-20 minutes.

The rapid, successful interaction reduces customer defections and can boost profits anywhere from 25-85% claims Bain & Co. consultant Frederick Reichheld and Earl Sasser, Jr. (Harvard business professor and author of “Putting the Service-Profit Chain to Work”).

Questions? Comments? Talk to us on Twitter @NTRglobal or send me your thoughts directly at hwieland@ntrglobal.com

NTRglobal showcased new NTR Service Desk at Interop 2010 to resounding success and more news coming in daily! Interop was well attended and vibrant. We met customers and potential customers excited to see the preview of NTR Service Desk's modular "Grow as You Go" approach to adopting a more ITIL-based process. CRN publishers named NTR Service Desk one of the yearss top products! During one of the demos, Informationweek set up a camera outside our booth and engaged in an interview with NTRglobal Gilles Samoun!

At Interop in New York City this week, we are pleased to premier NTR Cloud Service Desk, the first of a series of ITIL-based SaaS modules for IT automation, system management and remote support. Offering a new game plan for slashing maintenance costs by up to 70 percent while extending secure reach to manage assets on demand, NTR Service Desk delivers a "go as you grow" approach for companies to adopt and extend what they need for augmenting process into the Service Desk when they need it.

With open APIs and integration connectors to hundreds of existing enterprise systems for CRM, HR, Ticketing, ERP, Accounting systems and central reporting, NTR Service Desk helps IT rapidly scale, manage and configure 1000s of assets with on-demand multi-browser, multi-platform support inside or outside of the corporate network. Fast, flexible, proven SaaS from the leading IT Cloud Services provider, NTR Service Desk offers IT a new platform-as-a-service to rapidly deploy, integrate and manage enterprise assets today with automatic cloud readiness for updates on demand.

Celebrating 10 years of service excellence delivering SaaS for the service desk and help desks for 17,000 large enterprises around the world...

NTR Service Desk is the next evolution...more than SaaS...now you have a platform that flexibly integrates in days with any enterprise application or system (ERP, SAP, HR, CRM, etc.) to give you the complete picture of your enterprise assets...all from a central web console.

• Reduces ITSM costs by more than 70%
• Built on ITIL with flexible integration hooks (via Pervasive) and open API's
• Fast time to production and deployment...auto upgrades and updates
• 10 years of proven, consistent SaaS
• Modular Go as You Grow Approach to the ITIL Service Desk

Free Trial: http://www.ntrglobal.com/service-desk

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.

Exceptional customer service must be the backbone of businesses in today's tough climate. But the good news is that innovative technology and communication processes are available that are easy to adopt and require no capital outlay. Now the challenge of providing high touch customer service has never been easier while also dramatically reducing operational costs and enhancing customer satisfaction. These next generation support solutions add the vital "human element" to communication with customers and create a new level of attention that ultimately improves client retention and loyalty. The right remote support solution can make this possible.

NTRglobal is a worldwide SaaS company that is making it easier for help desk and IT managers to deliver instant remote support to customers and their employees, including mobile workers, employees in satellite offices, Web commuters at home and teleworkers in the extended enterprise. NTRglobal provides the highest level of security (AES 556-bit encryption) and reliability for on-demand remote support and on-demand remote systems administration across more platforms than any other solution currently available, including Windows Vista, Windows Mobile, Mac Leopard and Linux. NTRsupport breaks down the barriers of communication and helps build a better customer experience.

Today, technology is pervasive in all aspects of most people's professional and personal lives. The dramatic increase in the adoption of devices, laptops and other computing devices has allowed increases in productivity and efficiency. However, these increases have not come without a cost. When a problem occurs, customers, employees or partners generally are not able to fix it themselves and must turn to professional support for help. And because of today's on-demand economy, technical issues are underscored with a sense of urgency to resolve the problem quickly or lose valuable business opportunity. The pressure is magnified by the increasing challenges that support staffs face coupled with the dramatic rise in the number of mobile workers over recent years.

The convergence of these forces increase the complexity and challenges IT faces. With ever tighter compliance and security mandates you are probably trying to prioritize better ways to "manage the seemingly unmanageable" diversity of network connected devices and applications.  And perhaps concerns about security, performance and the unknown-makes it seem too daunting to take on one more thing.

But SaaS for remote support and customer service offer benefits that have evolved beyond the initial target market of IT service and help desk support services to deliver profitable value added services.  According to IDC's research director, Matt Healy, the benefits of the solution come from being able to geographically decouple IT personnel from the task they need to complete. By doing this, organizations can effectively "virtualize" and "automate" repetitive tasks in their IT departments and see a wider range of benefits.

Best of breed support for customers and employees, including cost-cutting solutions such as remote support, enables small business to act on par with large enterprise on a global scale and perhaps differentiate based on service quality. Large organizations can benefit by automating repetitive lower level tasks to redeploy valuable engineering hours to focus on core competencies and issues that contribute to the bottom line.

Remote support via SaaS provides a free evaluation trial for you to actually utilize the service before you buy. Test for yourself how IT support and service capabilities can work for your organization, and perhaps discover innovative revenue-generating profitable services that transform into competitive advantage.

To survive in today's tough economic climate, many businesses, whether established, new or global, will be looking to drive efficiency and reduce costs in the months ahead. Coupled with budget cuts, staffing challenges and dwindling resources, operations will be impacted more than ever before. But, at the same time, keeping your customers satisfied is more critical than ever.

The emergence of virtual support

During the last recession, technology was in its infancy with the Internet being used as a place for email, chat and ecommerce. Now it offers business software on-demand for the same price or less then your monthly mobile bill, meaning that company size no longer determines the reach or rate of business growth.

With virtual, anytime, anywhere, internet-based applications businesses can prioritise which geographic markets to sell to that were previously unreachable and unprofitable in the past. Even small companies can now deliver services to customers and partners in distant places. Communication can increase and training and technical support can all be provided remotely over the web. All of these are real capabilities that can reduce or eliminate onsite travel, minimise downtime and optimise productivity for customers and overworked IT staff. Importantly, the web is all changing the way customer support is delivered.

12 Words you can never say in office (sounds very much like a George Carlin list)

Great article that brought back some of the nostalgia of spending a career in technology. Here are some observations from the list;

4. OK, how many people downloaded PointCast when it came out? We all did till it crashed the network. But it was fun for a week.

5. ASP. From the article.....During this decade, the term "Application Service Provider" evolved into "Software-as-a-Service." Both terms refer to a vendor hosting a software application and providing access to it over the Web. Customers buy the software on a subscription basis, rather than having to own and operate it themselves. ASP was a hot term prior to the dot-com bust. Then it was replaced by "SaaS." Now it's cool to talk about "cloud computing." .

We think it is still very cool to get "SaaSy"

8. In a very short time we have gone from a couple paragraph blog to a 140 character tweet, a tiny URL. What will a micro tweet consist of? A short acronym? OMG

10. RBOC.  1984= ATT.  2009=ATT.  Can someone say "Deja Vu".

12. How many of you still tell someone the "www" part of your website? Come on be honest......

What are some of the other terms that you remember?

With next-generation Internet capabilities, companies can now demonstrate and sell product, deliver virtual training and service customers almost anywhere in the world. IT infrastructure services such as remote support, network system management, on-demand storage and IT automation tools, not just point solutions such as CRM, are available as subscriptions via software-as-a-service (SaaS). This is a game changer that helps IT enhance support services "on demand" and automate repetitive time-sinking functions while enhancing security because updates can now be done automatically as scheduled. Deployment is as quick as a few clicks of the mouse because the application is available on the Internet and requires little if any training or manual deployment. Best of breed complement and easily integrate with existing products and are also easy to customize for your unique business needs. No new hardware is required. CAPEX is a non-issue.

Traditional premises IT management software deployments are time-consuming and expensive, with significant capital costs. Quoting Jeff Kaplan, Managing Director of ThinkStrategies.com,  " 31% of software projects are cancelled before they are completed. Of those software projects, over half (52.7%) have taken twice as long or have cost twice as much as originally expected."

SaaS deployments are cheaper and faster and the best of breed have significant investment in complimentary dedicated professional services and training, integration services, security protocols and redundant server systems with robust service level agreements. This helps eliminate the need for specially trained IT staff to handle the maintenance, monitoring and software updates.