Technical support global partner program

Xceedium, a company providing security and compliance solutions, said it has launched the Xceedium Xcelerate Partner Program to expand its market presence.

The debut program is designed to enable partners to quickly tap into compliance requirements for the financial, utility, manufacturing and government markets, and to enhance their current security practices with products and services revenue.

"We're a high-growth startup that's been growing very rapidly, in a direct manner with our own sales people," explained Cheryl Traverse, CEO for Jersey City, N.J.-based Xceedium. "We've now reached the point where our volume demands to go and build a channel. So we hired Dave Ballard -- an experienced channel person from HP Opsware -- to basically build this channel for us."

Moreover, Xceedium identified its pain points and subsequently delivered new requirements for the estimated $15 billion (US) compliance markets, Traverse continued.

"Where we come in is the privileged (internal IT operations) user and external user (vendor, applications developer, or outsourced IT operations person)," she said. "Eighty-six percent of all internal attacks came from a current or former technical support employee and 60 percent of all companies do some sort of technical outsourcing . . . in the government (sector) that figure is 70 percent.

"Lay all the compliance regulations on top of that . . . and you've put the pressure on companies to come up with ways to take the privileged and external users and figure out a way to implement and validate controls for them."

"We are targeting a select group of partners with existing security practices that are looking for differentiators in key hot markets, such as PCI compliance, vendor access control, enhanced security for the Citrix environments and secure touch free support," said Ballard, the vice president of sales at Xceedium. "Most importantly, we've put together a solid team dedicated to enabling and supporting these partners."

The Xcelerate Partner Program includes:

Channel Commitment -- a dedicated team of partner resources to help partners quickly roll out and sustain their businesses.

Partner Portal -- an exclusive online repository of partner-specific sales, marketing and technical tools.

Dedicated Technical Support -- a separate 800 number and exclusive instant messaging link directly to technical support reps.

Opportunity Registration -- Partners can register their deals and receive all the support necessary to close opportunities; also provides partners with price protection and qualifies them for additional margin.

Maintenance Renewals -- Xceedium would work with partners on renewal tracking and alerting to ensure regular, up- to- date maintenance for their customers.

Education -- all the necessary training to sell and install Xceedium solutions from delivering pre-sales tools through to implementation.

Field Support -- Xceedium works directly with partners in the field to ensure clients receive the highest level of service and education both prior to and following their deployment of Xceedium solutions.

Joint Marketing -- joint press releases, seminars, tradeshow exhibits, conferences and webinars to increase their visibility in the marketplace.

Joint Development of Security Assessment Practice -- For solutions partners and systems integrators, Xceedium provides a comprehensive set of tools and services for risk assessment, policy creation and deployment, and reporting and usage data for privileged users.

Xceedium channel and solution partners benefit from a comprehensive training process, including sales training and pre- and post-sales technical training. Additionally, partners at the solutions partner and systems integrator level receive Xceedium Security Assessment enablement training. Xceedium also offers a Referral Partner Program for those organizations that would like to recommend Xceedium Gatekeeper and Xceedium services to their customers.

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Source : http://www.echannelline.com/usa/story.cfm?item=23303

GlobalLogic Speeds Software Time to Market with Open Source Application Framework

VIENNA, Va., April 16 - GlobalLogic, Inc., the leader in global product development, has introduced an open source framework, Velocity Objects, that can shorten a product's time to market by as much as 30 percent. Velocity Objects, based on the company's award-winning GlobalLogic Velocity(TM) Method and Platform for distributed agile software development (, combines J2EE components with best practices so that GlobalLogic's engineers can bring client products to market even faster.

"There is no need to reinvent the wheel each time a software product is developed," said Peter Harrison, CEO of GlobalLogic. "There are many components that are common across products, and code can be re-used. GlobalLogic has spent the last six years assembling a library of reusable components and frameworks that can accelerate the development of the next generation of software products and services."

Velocity Objects provides a sound architecture, framework and building blocks for developing high quality products swiftly. It ensures quality by integrating best-of-breed open source technologies and code components developed by GlobalLogic and its partners, which have already been used successfully in other commercial products. The offering speeds development by making components reusable and eliminating the need to write infrastructure code or research the hundreds of available frameworks to find the right one for a given product.

"We needed a cutting-edge technological solution for meeting our aggressive automation needs. The solution needs to scale linearly and at the same time be extensible enough to cater to future requirements," explained Ashish Sharma, Manager Technology at iYogi, a VC-backed company in the technical support industry. "GlobalLogic's Velocity Objects helped iYogi craft a product by assembling the 'best-of-breed' components available in the open source world. Sound design principles, along with reusable frameworks and components, helped us reduce the time to market. Additionally, the flexible architecture served well to seamlessly incorporate our growing demands."

GlobalLogic Velocity is employed across a growing number of the company's 140 technology client software product development initiatives Objects is particularly applicable to the company's newly announced Version 1.0 service offering, which helps both entrepreneurs and established technology companies rapidly launch new products and enter new markets without the need for an engineering team Velocity Objects is already helping these clients accelerate quality products to market.



source : http://news.thomasnet.com/fullstory/543200

Digital Support Technology Releases New Computer Support Automation Utility

Menlo Park, CA May 2, 2008 -- Digital Support Technology, Inc. a pioneer in automated computer support over the Internet, announced the release of PC Fixer, a proprietary computer technical support automation utility today.

With an innovative Reverse Search Engine and a comprehensive knowledgebase of support procedures, Digital Support Technology has the ambition to empower individual computer user to diagnose and fix problems on a computer. By downloading and installing PC Fixer, a computer user connects the computer to the Reverse Search Engine, which not only detects problems on the computer but also explains the problems to the computer user. After going through details of the computer problems, the computer user may decide which problems to be fixed by PC Fixer. At present, Digital Support Technology fixes the majority of computer problems for free and charges a nominal fee for some specific fixes.

Since the beta release of the automation utility, thousands of computer users have tried the simple, secure, fast and easy-to-use tool and provided enthusiastic feedback. One user of the tool acclaims, "Great job in fixing my problem. I only wish I had discovered your service sooner, I could have saved myself a lot of time and frustration. Kudos to you!"

Although the online computer support landscape is already crowded with established players like Geek Squad and Firedogs, and new comers like iYogi and Support.com, Digital Support Technology intends to differentiate itself as the most innovative and the most cost-effective online technical solution provider for millions of computer users. In addition, the company commits itself to protecting privacy and security of computer users and builds its software on the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).

source : http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/05/prweb908264.htm

'Consumer Reports': Apple technical support is aces

The surveyed its readers to gather their experiences with technical support for personal computing, and Apple's organization far outpaced its rivals in the PC industry. Readers assigned the company a score of 83 for its computer technical support, which translates to "very satisfied" on Consumer Reports' rating scale. You have to be a Consumer Reports subscriber if you want to access the articles and graphs on its Web site.

Lenovo and Dell ranked second and third, respectively, with scores of 66 and 60, or "fairly well satisfied." Hewlett-Packard, , received the lowest score and the worst rating for its technical support staffers. Apple also led the desktop technical support pack with a score of 81, trailed by Dell and Gateway with scores below 60.

Apple has also ranked well on the , a yearly measure of consumer taste in various brands. The company solves problems quickly, especially for customers who take their Mac to one of the company's retail stores for service. But if you don't live near an Apple Store, the company offers the shortest amount of free telephone support of any of the PC companies.

When it comes to the number of problems that appear, Apple's record wasn't as stellar. The company was ranked last in the number of defects that cropped up in its notebooks between 2003 and 2007, although the margin of error in that survey meant that all the surveyed manufacturers essentially tied with defects found in between 20 percent and 23 percent of their notebooks.

source: news.com/8301-13579_3-9937231-37.html?tag=nefd.only

SCC Soft Computer Improves Customer Service With Knowledge Management Module Of Soffront CRM

the leader of mid-market CRM software, recently announced that SCC Soft Computer (SCC) has implemented Soffront Knowledge Management System (KMS), a module of the company's popular Soffront CRM solution. SCC, a leading Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) vendor and one of the largest LIS programming houses in the world, is using Soffront KMS to improve customer service and save time.

"We needed a better way to organize, maintain, and reuse knowledge," explained Mary Ann Cavener, Knowledge Base Administrator, Team Leader. "We found it difficult to provide customers with timely technical data in our manuals alone. We stored important data in notes, documents, and emails--resources that were unavailable to customers. Additionally, if a knowledgeable employee left SCC or documents were misplaced, our resources were negatively impacted."

SCC evaluated many KMS solutions before selecting Soffront. "Soffront offers robust features, such as a powerful search engine, category assignments, and hot topics," continued Cavener. "Soffront has all of the features we needed at a lower price than other leading KMS solutions."

Cavener noted that their favorite feature of the software is its data storage structure. "Soffront KMS categorizes data and multi-assigns articles to different areas of interests, thereby streamlining the information. The robust search engine and advanced search options also enable SCC to organize the data by interests and categories. These features allow customers and employees to find data quickly."

Soffront has helped SCC meet the needs of both their internal users and customers by improving the documentation available to them. "Since deploying Soffront KMS in 2007, our computer Technical Support Center Resolution rates have improved dramatically," concluded Cavener. "We resolve issues faster, which saves us time and money."

source: crmmarketplace.com/content/news/article.asp?DocID=%7B83CB8A49-0A73-41B1-8FB6-038FAFDD23B6%7D&Bucket=Current+Headlines&VNETCOOKIE=NO

Amazon LaunchesTechnical Support For EC2 Developers

Customers of Amazon Web Services can signup to get questions answered or to receive TECHNICAL SUPPORT for operational issues during development, testing or integration of applications running on Amazon's infrastructure. The service covers an unlimited number of technical support cases and is available through a monthly subscription with no long-term contracts.

Amazon leases processing power and storage on its giant data center over the Web. The retailer's Elastic Computer Cloud is the development and deployment environment; storage is through its Simple Storage Service, or S3; and the Simple Queue Service, or SQS, covers storage, computing and query processing. The new technical support plans cover all of those services.

Amazon is offering two premium support plans, a Silver and Gold. The former offers response times ranging from four business hours for high severity issues to two business days for less serious problems. The cost is the greater of $100 a month or 10% of total monthly usage of the applicable Amazon services.

The Gold plan provides 24-hour phone technical support and response times of one hour for urgent issues. Pricing is the greater of $400 per month or 10% to 20% of total monthly usage of the applicable services.

In addition to the support plans, Amazon launched a Web-based dashboard that provides information on the operational status of each of its services. The dashboard uses green, yellow or red indicators to display the health of services with additional information "provided as relevant," Amazon said. Customers have access to this service at no charge either through the status page on the Web or via an RSS feed.

For developers who don't want to pay for support, Amazon offers online forums, FAQs and a resource center. Amazon has launched a site for customers who want to sign up for the premium service.

Source: informationweek.com/news/software/development/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207400320

Chaos as bank computer crash wipes out ATMs

Tens of thousands of people were feeling short changed last night after a massive system failure wiped out all the Northern Bank's ATMs.

Throughout the province yesterday, frustrated people found themselves unable to withdraw money from hundreds of machines.

Customers trying to use Northern Bank debit and credit cards also faced misery as their transactions were refused, leaving many embarrassed and unable to make purchases.

The problem - which arose after the Danish- owned institution's central system crashed - affected all of the Northern Bank's 94 branches nationwide, including 25 in the greater Belfast area.

Speaking to the Belfast Telegraph last night, a spokesperson for the bank apologised to customers and blamed a glitch in the ATM network.

"This issue is the result of a technical problem with IBM who support this network," she said.

"We are working closely with IBM to restore service to our customers as soon as possible.

"We apologise unreservedly to any customers who are being affected by this situation."

Last night, the Belfast Telegraph tried to withdraw money from cash points at two of the major branches in the city centre, but found them still 'temporarily out of service'.

The spokesperson, however, stressed that engineers were making every effort to repair the fault and said the network would be up and running again as soon as possible.

"Any customer who urgently needs to withdraw cash can still do so at any Northern Bank branch or can use their chequebook," she added.

Messages outside the Northern Bank's headquartwers in Belfast yesterday alerted customers to the problem.

But it is understood that the system crash went wider than Northern Ireland, also affecting machines in Europe owned by the Northern's parent Danske Bank.

This is the second time in recent months that the Northern Bank has been at the centre of a problem with cash machines.

In February, it emerged that Nationwide customers using Northern cash machines were not having pay-outs debited from their accounts.In that case, however, the error was not linked to Northern Bank technology, but to Nationwide's.

source:belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/article3598167.ece