IT Vendors Offer Technology- Enhanced Remote Support Services (Executive Summary) Executive Summary

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1 IT Vendors Offer Technology- Enhanced Remote Support Services (Executive Summary) Executive Summary Publication Date: 3 January 2003

2 Authors Tony Adams Bob Igou Ron Silliman This document has been published to the following Cluster codes: SEMC-WW-EX-0188 For More Information... In North America and Latin America: In Europe, the Middle East and Africa: In Asia/Pacific: In Japan: Worldwide via gartner.com: Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. Gartner shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The reader assumes sole responsibility for the selection of these materials to achieve its intended results. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice

3 IT Vendors Offer Technology-Enhanced Remote Support Services (Executive Summary) Introduction This Gartner Dataquest Focus Report examines the state of technologyenhanced remote support by reviewing the offerings and strategies of six leading technology companies. Technology-enhanced remote support services are defined as just in time (JIT)-managed services enabled by remote monitoring and communications technology but which may be carried out, in part, by humans. By the use of remote connection technologies, the support provider can create a "telepresence" to enable skilled support resources to be present at the customer site through virtual means. The resources that are thus enabled may belong to the provider, to the customer's own in-house IT organization or even to a third party. They may be either reactive or proactive in nature for either hardware or software. Finally, these resources may also be automated or may rely on traditional on-site human intervention to complete the service transaction. In this report, technology-enhanced remote support services are referred to as "remote service offerings." Companies interviewed for this report include EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Stratus Technologies, Sun Microsystems and Unisys. The focus of this research is the examination of offerings and trends for remote service offerings. Specific topics reviewed include the service offering, how technology is applied to deliver service, the benefits to the customer and support provider, customer acceptance and satisfaction with these offerings, and how support providers evaluated the investment in remote service offerings. This report profiles what each company is doing regarding these topic areas and should serve as a general guide to remote service offerings. This report does not evaluate the vendors or their offerings and is not intended to be a detailed review and critique of these vendors or remote service offerings. Key Findings The following are the key findings of Gartner Dataquest's research on technology-enhanced remote support services: Remote monitoring and diagnostics form the core technologies around a growing body of service offerings that can prevent as well as resolve problems. These offerings generally fall into three levels of service: monitoring, automated processes and active administration. The more tightly remote monitoring is coupled with support technology, the greater the potential for these offerings to improve both the availability and performance of the hardware and software technologies they support. Such remote technology should also feed into the design of future technology products. Effective remote monitoring and diagnostic capabilities must be based on a flexible architecture that allows easily extending its reach to other vendors' products and platforms. IT managers will grow weary of introducing new interfaces for each new technology purchase. Infrastructure information, such as product configuration, acquired through remote support services can be leveraged for use beyond support incident resolution to include proactive services, such as product migrations and upgrades. The value proposition to the customer of remote service offerings increases significantly as the connection becomes a synchronous real-time digital network connection. The scope of the benefit is multiplied when the solution encompasses both the horizontal (number of servers, database and applications) and vertical (layers of the stack) dimensions of the infrastructure Gartner, Inc. 1

4 2 IT Vendors Offer Technology-Enhanced Remote Support Services (Executive Summary) According to vendor interviews, today's "phone home" remote service offerings are, and have been, effective for hardware platforms for which the product can be pre-configured to connect to vendor monitor centers to provide real-time alerts related to the hardware's condition. Software is next; specifically, support for complex infrastructure and applications. Remote service offerings can become more effective when they not only create an entry in the ticketing system of the support organization but also automatically generate prioritized escalations to support personnel, product engineering and customer relationship management (CRM) personnel. Providing customers with a Web-based view into the support provider's CRM system can enhance effective customer relationships. Support providers can leverage the power of remote service offering networks by opening the infrastructure to third-party vendors, which can include managed service providers (MSPs) and resellers, to utilize the toolsbased service network for collaborative problem resolution or to provide the customer with services of the third party. Gartner Dataquest predicts that customers using such remote service offerings will see benefits in the form of reduced customer resource requirements for systems administrators as a result of not having to manually monitor the infrastructure internally. Effective remote service solutions enable support providers to manage a large, distributed customer base with fewer resources. By reducing the number of service events that need to be responded to with an on-site technician, effective remote service solutions enable support providers to manage a large, distributed customer base with fewer resources deployed across the globe. Remote monitoring and response tools placed on hardware equipment can, and sometimes do, make customers feel they are captive support customers of the original equipment provider (OEM), especially if the vendor is unwillingtomakeaccesstothesetoolsavailabletothird-partyservicecompetitors. These competitors can be expected to portray these tools negatively, which will only serve to magnify any customer dissatisfaction if the tools are not performing as advertised by the manufacturer. It is thus incumbent on the OEM to set realistic customer expectations and to rigorously monitor customer satisfaction regarding the use of these tools. Some providers view remote monitoring and resolution tools strictly in terms of call (and cost) avoidance. These providers have limited the use of the tools partly out of a belief that customer satisfaction flows from human contact and a sense that, if active administration generates human intervention anyway, such tools only delay the first person-to-person call without really reducing costs. Support providers holding this view are also more apt to fail to educate customers as to the cost implications in each human interaction along the service event chain. As these tools evolve, however, the range of issues that can be handled through automated processes will expand, and providersthathavedoneabetterjobeducatingtheircustomerswillgaina competitive advantage. System availability, customer productivity and the potential for sharing cost gains with customers are more-important reasons to deploy and develop these remote tools. Some customers resist such monitoring and remote support, especially on hardware, because they have become accustomed to relaying previously unreported support needs to the technician who responds to the call. Properly trained field engineers should know to take the initial reporting data if need be but to inform the customer that a service ticket will be generated so that the additional service need can be appropriately handled according to thetermsandconditionsoftheserviceagreement Gartner, Inc. 3 January 2003

5 IT Vendors Offer Technology-Enhanced Remote Support Services (Executive Summary) 3 Conclusions The fundamental purpose of these tool-based services is to reduce costs involved in all levels of service delivery while enhancing customer support. The user saves time, and the vendor can expand the efficiency of the workforce by compressing the time required for each incident, reduce costs associated with escalation to higher levels of support and remove redundancies from the support value chain. Gartner Dataquest Perspective Linking customers through a system such as HP's Instant Support (IS) indirectly offers these benefits: An incident with broad impact (in the sense that it might be common to dozens, thousands or all deployed technology devices) may need to be experienced by only a few nodes of the deployed technology before the problem is rectified by the vendor's action. A support provider can demonstrate the factors surrounding a high-impact issue repeatedly to several escalation points within an internal support chain, similar to a video replay, without waiting for a customer to randomly experience the same random alignment of events that may trigger the event again.theissuemaybeplayedbackandmaybeusedtodescribetheissue. Technology-enhanced remote support offerings are built around a series of tools with varying degrees of maturity. Ordered from most to least mature by the computing segment that they address, these tools and the offerings they enable focus on the network, servers, storage and client. Implicit within all these tools and offerings is an assumption that support vendors, especially when they are the software publishers or hardware manufacturers, can aggregate experiential data concerning performance, reliability and problems of thousands of customers into usable information that will enable them to efficiently predict, prevent or resolve problems that might otherwise impede the customer'suseofthetechnology.thetoolsthemselvesautomatetheaggregation of such data through passive or active monitoring, with events sent back to either a network operating center (NOC) or similar service desk. Some of these tools go further and also automate responses to relatively simple problems that can be resolved without direct human intervention. The limits of such tools have to do with the complexity of data required to address any given technical issue. When a problem entails only one product hardware or software remote monitoring, diagnosis and, in some cases, even resolution can be completely automated. However, when multiple products from different vendors are potentially implicated in an issue, remote technologies are constrained by a general inability to access relevant data from other vendors' commercial-off-the-shelf products. Presently, external service providers offer such services, usually on a custom basis, but Gartner Dataquest believes that remote support tools will ultimately incorporate these capabilities. As the focus of remote monitoring, diagnostic and response tools moves away from centralized functions and applications that are tightly managed by an organization's IT department, a second limitation becomes apparent. Many CIOs and IT managers are reluctant to permit vendors unmediated access to end-user equipment. Based on averages provided by several vendors, Gartner Dataquest estimates that approximately 40 percent of the remote monitoring, diagnostic and resolution tools being shipped on desktop systems today are being "wiped off" by end-user IT organizations before being distributed to the 2003 Gartner, Inc. 3 January 2003

6 4 IT Vendors Offer Technology-Enhanced Remote Support Services (Executive Summary) Recommendations end-user's desktop. This process is creating what amounts to a two-tier system of client systems in the corporate environment: one group of systems that may be accessed and serviced remotely by vendors and another group that cannot. The second group creates unnecessary support costs for vendors when problems that could have been resolved remotely require on-site hands-on service. If vendors can make use of these time- and cost-saving technologies, they may need to invoke penalties for those organizations that wipe these tools from systems. Gartner Dataquest makes the following recommendations: Hardware manufacturers and software publishers need to leverage the efficiencies of support structures, such as remote service offerings, to focus on customer satisfaction through product improvements. The company's entire organization must be focused on product improvement by connecting product engineering to the customer through feedback. Support providers for technology must develop remote monitoring and diagnostic solutions so that they can be easily extended to include products and platforms beyond those of the company, encompassing infrastructure provided by independent software vendors (ISVs) and hardware OEMs to provide enhanced one-stop support coverage for their customers. Vendors need to bolster and market the relatively low-cost or no-cost versions of connected service offerings they produce as part of the self-service paradigm, as part of the value proposition of owning a product's intellectual property. Software vendors will find this is less important, although Microsoft is an example of a company that expends tens of millions of dollars on no-cost intellectual capital available free to support customers on its Web site. Enterprise IT managers must make a choice between secrecy and service when asked to give vendors access to their systems. Vendors report that a majority of customers are choosing the added value of support over privacy. Hardware vendors, in particular, need to educate customers about the unnecessary costs created when end-user organizations erase remote solution technologies from client systems. Hardware vendors should explore the option of invoking penalties for such behavior, whether charging for "avoidable" dispatches or by canceling warranty entitlement altogether. Customers that choose to wipe off such tools on incoming equipment should accept this as a legitimate cost of security. Vendorsemployingsuchtoolsneedtomakecustomersawareofallthe problems pre-empted every month. If they don't, customers will not see the value of either the tools or support in general. For the full report, see the Gartner Dataquest Focus Report, "IT Vendors Offer Technology-Enhanced Remote Support Services" (ITPS-WW-FR-0122) Gartner, Inc. 3 January 2003