NextNine Tailors for the Ecosystem

NextNine, in a move to provide support to a company's entire ecosystem, introduced its latest support automation solution, the NextNine Service Automation (NSA) Ecosystem edition. NextNine, which provides remote service and support solutions for business systems, designed NSA Ecosystem to extend its service and support capabilities to a company's entire ecosystem, including vendors, support service providers, resellers, and other third-party vendors. Ecosystem is based on NextNine's flagship product, the Virtual Support Engineer platform. NextNine's products are designed to support an IT staff by automating many repair and support processes necessary to prevent services like Internet connectivity or text messaging from failing. Such processes include proactive monitoring, preventive maintenance, inventory tracking, and software distribution, all from a remote location. NSA Ecosystem is a direct response to the growing demand across markets, including financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and telecom, for cost-effective support automation solutions, according to the company. Companies are often forced to deal with multiple service contracts and maintenance issues due to the large number of channel partners they interact with, says Gil Levonai, vice president of marketing. "Considering the growing importance and organizational reliance on these complex networks, systems, and business-critical applications, service and support have never mattered more," he says. "With Ecosystem we're offering a new solution that enables various entities within the service ecosystem to share the support automation infrastructure, and provide reliable, more effective service to their respective solution." Michael Maoz, Gartner vice president and fellow, writes in "Cool Vendors in Customer Relationship Management" that NextNine fills an important niche within a company's IT infrastructure. "A critical limitation of most support automation applications is that they are restricted to the system within an organization's IT infrastructure, rather than across the entire business, which often includes third-party support, data centers, or partners." One advantage of a product like NSA Ecosystem is its ability to reduce support and service costs while improving a company's service to its customers across the entire IT infrastructure, considering how expensive it can be for service technicians and engineers to diagnose network issues and develop solutions to the problems. Maoz told CRM magazine: "When service level agreements stipulate short time frames for the restoration of service, a system like this can automatically check connections, data availability, and system status. That can mean the difference between fulfillment of contracted obligations or incurring a service penalty." Related articles: Flying High on Service Automation Mobile Field Service Is a Priority in 2006