SupportSoft, Inc. - Help Desk Software - Category Directory

575 Broadway

Redwood City, CA 94063
(650) 556-9440
www.supportsoft.com

Sales

$53 million

Business Description 
We are a leading provider of help desk software, support and service management software designed to accelerate and automate enterprise technical support, customer service and end-point management. We refer to this as real-time service management software. Our software solutions are utilized by enterprises to service customers, partners or employees either directly or as part of an outsourced solution from managed service providers, and by consumers and businesses through digital service providers. We believe that our real-time service management software, including its self-healing and mass-healing capabilities that preemptively diagnose and resolve software problems, allows organizations to keep up with the growing complexity and cost of IT infrastructure and related

support and service problems. Organizations can benefit from our software by reducing costs and improving productivity and customer satisfaction by keeping key software and technology-based services operating and accessible on devices when using the Internet, or cable, wireless and wireline networks.

Our software suites and component products offer organizations automated alternatives to phone support or on-site visits by technical professionals. These traditional approaches are typically labor intensive, time consuming and costly methods of resolving support, service and end-point management problems. Organizations can utilize our software to help preempt, respond to and resolve support problems for their employees, customers or business partners. IT departments can use our software to proactively address technical problems before they occur, to respond more effectively to their employees when problems do occur through our self-healing and mass-healing capabilities, to enable knowledge-based self-service and to help the ongoing management of their technical resources and computing assets through automated discovery and management functionality. Similarly, broadband and other digital service providers utilize our software throughout their customer networks to help acquire subscribers through automated installation and self-provisioning of services, retain subscribers via enhanced technical support and grow their business relationship with subscribers over time through automated provisioning of new added-value services such as home networking, virus protection services and patch and update services.

Enterprises that have purchased our products and services include: ADP, Inc., Bank of America Corporation, Cisco Systems, Inc., IBM Corporation, The Procter & Gamble Company, Siebel Systems, Inc., Sony Electronics, Inc. and Thomson Financial Inc.; managed service providers that have purchased our products to provide outsourced services to enterprises include: Accenture Limited, Affiliated Computer Services, Inc., CompuCom Systems, Inc., Computer Sciences Corporation, IBM Global Services and Perot Systems Corporation; and digital service providers incorporating our software into their service offerings include: Adelphia Communications Corporation, BellSouth Corporation, Charter Communications, Inc., Comcast Corporation, Cox Communications, Inc., SBC Communications, Inc., TeliaSonera, AB, Time Warner Cable and UPC Nederland.

Products

Our software products enable enterprises and digital service providers to automate the delivery and management of technical service and support. Our real-time service management products automate the traditionally manual operations of technical support, customer service and end-point management. Our software provides self-healing capabilities by recognizing, diagnosing and resolving potential problems prior to an impact on the user either with or without user involvement or the user requesting assistance. The architecture of our products are built on a common software platform. This platform, based on a set of patented technologies, serves as the foundation for SupportSoft’s software products.

We sell our software to enterprises and digital service providers as comprehensive suites and as component products. Our comprehensive suites offer customers integrated solutions to address a broad range of service and support issues, whereas our component solutions enable customers to address specific pain points.

SupportSoft Suites

We have three comprehensive software suites, Resolution Suite, Service Automation Suite—Broadband and Knowledge Center Suite, to address the unique needs of different market requirements. We also intend to release a fourth suite in 2004, which will be known as Service Automation Suite—Video.

Resolution Suite. Resolution Suite is our principal product offering for corporate enterprises interested in providing support automation to their employees. Resolution Suite enables organizations to reduce support costs and increase user productivity by automating the support of employees and devices through self-healing and mass-healing capabilities. Resolution Suite can decrease the volume of calls that a help desk receives, increase call resolution rates, minimize issue escalations and prevent costly desk-side visits by IT professionals.

Resolution Suite works across a wide range of software applications, hardware platforms and mobile devices. The suite utilizes the User Center and Support Center application modules, which are described in detail in “Technology.” Furthermore, Resolution Suite is not dependent on preloaded software or agents on the end-user’s machine, and consequently it can be deployed via browser plug-ins that are downloaded when the end-user first requests support.

Service Automation Suite—Broadband. Service Automation Suite—Broadband has been designed to address the unique needs of broadband service providers, whether the broadband delivery is via digital subscriber line, DSL, or cable. It is a fully integrated, comprehensive solution designed to automate all aspects of subscriber assistance, from connection through the ongoing support during the customer lifecycle. Service Automation Suite—Broadband can decrease the volume of calls that a service provider receives, increase call resolution rates and minimize issue escalations and prevent expensive customer visits, or truck rolls.
 

Service Automation Suite—Broadband is not dependent on preloaded software or agents on the subscriber’s machine, and consequently it can be deployed via browser plug-ins that are downloaded when the subscriber first requests support.

Service Automation Suite—Video. Service Automation Suite—Video is designed to expand our product offerings to the digital service providers market. We expect to release the new suite in early 2004. We have announced an alliance with Scientific-Atlanta’s SciCare Broadband Services to bring this product to market. We expect that this new suite will offer many of the same benefits as our existing Service Automation Suite—Broadband, except that it will be targeted at the digital video providers.

Knowledge Center Suite. Knowledge Center Suite is a knowledge automation solution that provides web-based access to an organization’s various knowledge bases to enable users and support analysts to help themselves. The Knowledge Center Suite allows employees, customers, partners and support professionals to gain self-service knowledge access through a natural language search engine that can provide them with precise answers to their questions based on a personal profile of their software or hardware characteristics. Support professionals can gain more advanced personalized access to a company’s various repositories of information to assist in resolving their own problems or those of other users. This support resource can reduce the number of phone calls and other manual processes typically associated with knowledge retrieval.

Knowledge Center Suite is designed to allow an organization’s support professionals to easily and rapidly author new content with powerful but easy-to-use personalization. Knowledge Center Suite also includes reporting capabilities that track the effectiveness of the content, allowing service and support professionals to update ineffective answers within their knowledge base, so that only precise answers are readily available to questions posed by requestors.

SupportSoft Component Products

In addition to our software suites, we provide component software products that can be purchased individually or in combination with our other offerings. These products are generally available at lower price points than a comprehensive software suite and address specific needs for enterprises and digital service providers. Our component products are designed to work together easily.

Auto Discovery and Metering. Auto Discovery and Metering is a component product designed to discover detailed information about an organization’s personal computing software and hardware. It can remotely and automatically gather hundreds of details about a computing device, populate a central database with information about user devices and report on what is being used, by whom and how often. As a result, the product allows organizations to manage personal computing resources, monitor the utilization of their software applications and determine whether such use is in compliance with applicable licenses. Using the product’s reporting feature, organizations can determine when they should re-deploy software licenses for optimum usage, remove unlicensed software from users’ machines and better allocate hardware to individuals or departments. The information generated from the software can help an organization cost effectively manage its technology assets through more efficient deployment and higher license utilization.

RemoteAssist. RemoteAssist is a component product designed to enable IT support analysts to remotely take control of a user’s Microsoft Windows computing system, with the user’s permission, to speed problem resolution. By remotely managing and controlling a device, a support analyst can diagnose problems in detail, including whether the problem is at the application, hardware or operating system level, determine the necessary action to resolve the problem and implement the resolution. No complex software installation or re-boot of the computer is required and a complete audit trail of all remote sessions is retained to expedite resolution should the problem be encountered again.

Request, Resolve and Notify. Request, Resolve and Notify (RRN) can help companies speed issue resolution, increase customer satisfaction levels, and reduce service and support costs through efficient, timely and reliable management of support and service requests.

For IT support analysts, RRN provides for logic-based routing and queuing of requests, and the automatic collection of pertinent, permission-based technical information, such as hardware and OS information from employee or customer PCs. These capabilities, combined with an intuitive Web-based user interface, can provide analysts with more accurate and personalized information about user problems, so the issues can be resolved more quickly

SmartAccess. SmartAccess is a component product designed to provide digital service providers with the capabilities to automatically determine if a subscriber’s computing system is adequately qualified for a broadband connection and, if so, enables self-installation and activation of high-speed Internet services. Once connected, SmartAccess also allows subscribers to easily order, install and configure additional value-added services such as home networking. SmartAccess complements the functionality of the Service Automation Suite—Broadband.

HomeNet. HomeNet is a component product designed to offer digital service providers a wide range of capabilities to streamline the entire home networking process for broadband subscribers including installation, configuration and ongoing support.

LiveAssist. LiveAssist is a component product designed to provide high-volume call center organizations and IT help desks with the ability to service online customers with a scalable, interactive chat solution.