New Open Source Software Relieves Technical Support Center Scalability Pains

RAMAT GAN, Israel, November, 27, 2007 – With too many new software releases and gadgets on their hands, technical support centers around the world are having a hard time coping with the ever increasing complexity of current day computing environments. A new open Source software called SupportMatrix™, which might be just be what the doctor ordered for those support center growth pains, was announced today by Codefidence ltd., an expert in Open Source commercialization.

Walk into the operations room of any big technical support center and you will find a large plaque on the wall with the listing of all supported hardware and software combinations. An HP LaserJet 6000 printer on English Vista? Canon XH H1 camcorder attached to Windows 2000 SP3 Japanese? Each of these is a single combination out of hundreds which technical support center operators need to become knowledgeable about. Lately, however, there are just too many of them.

Solutions to difficult problems crop up in the darnedest of places, it seems. New software called SupportMatrix™ and released under an Open Source license by Israeli Open Source commercialization specialist Codefidence Ltd., may prove to be the answer to the technical support industry scalability pains: SupportMatrix™ uses virtualization to let technical support center staff interact with a simulation of the customer’s computer, right down to the operating system version, language and peripheral devices.

“SupportMatrix™ is innovative because there is no software that needs to be running on the customer machine and no connectivity is required. So an ISP, for example, can use it to solve customer connection problems, unlike traditional remote control software. ”, tells Gilad Ben-Yossef, Codefidence CEO and co-founder. “In fact, half of our current user base support customers via email. And since it is based on virtualization technology, teaching the system about new software is an easy as installing that new software on a regular PC.”

Released as Open Source software, the first version of SupportMatrix™ is available as a free download on the web site www.support-matrix.com, but Ben-Yossef does not expect many support center operators to download it and put it to use by themselves: “The IT industry have grown up: It’s not about the bits and bytes anymore, it’s about servicing customer needs. SupportMatrix™ is enterprise software. Our customers need guarantees and SLAs, they want it to talk with their CRM systems and there must be someone to call if there are issues. IT departments can download the bits and bytes from the web site for evaluation, maybe run a pilot, but for production use they will want to get a support contract with us. It’s the way the enterprise IT market works now. We’ve grown up. ”

SupportMatrix™ is already being used in support centers in Asia and is immediately available for purchase via resellers in EMEA, with additional regions planned to be added during Q1 2008.

Codefidence Ltd. is a privately held company specializing in productizing of Open Source components. The company was founded in 2003 as a response to the growing need of OEMs which make use of Open Source components as part of their products and services for a independent and professional support organization.

###

For more information, please check out our web site at http://www.support-matrix.com/ or contact:

When the ancient Greeks went out to wage war against the hordes of who ever it was turn to slaughter, they made a point of burning the boats they came in the minute all the soldiers were on shore.

They didn’t do it because the boats were not valuable any more. In fact, when landing on enemy shore boats become more valuable, not less. But the value of these boats where in their ability to carry you back home, even if you didn’t manage to slit the throats of all those other people.

That value proved to a bit too distracting. Better burn the boats and make sure all the men understand that there really isn’t any way to turn back, unless it’s on the broken backs of the enemy soldiers.

Releasing your commercially developed software, the one you spent the last two years designing, writing and debugging and you really really hope to be able to generate revenue from again, as Open Source software, works in almost the same way.

We destroy the value of the bits and bytes, the precious intellectual property so dear to companies of old, venture capitalists and lawyers. We make a big mound of it and torch it all up.

Because the value in the software itself proves to be too distracting. When you’re proprietary you can kid yourselves that all you have to do is be better then the competitors in your niche. You can lull yourself to believe that the customers will buy because they don’t have a choice. You drink the KoolAid.

But the IT industry have grown up. It doesn’t work this way any more. If you want to succeed, you need to understand that bits and bytes don’t matter any more. Only customer satisfaction does. Competition does not matter any more. Knocking your customer socks off their feet with amazing service does. And you have to do it again and again and again.

When you know that you have to build your business so that your customers will pay even though you are giving the bits and bytes for free, when your worst competition comes not from some other company down the road but your own creativity and genius and sweat and blood and tears, when you are faced with all that - you realize you have no other choice: excellence is the only option and so succeed you will or die trying.

Open Source does that. I’m not the first to realize it, I know. Matt Assay from Alfresco said it before me. That is how and why RedHat wins CIO Vendor Value awards two years in a row, way ahead much bigger and stronger companies.

But you know what? it’s something else entirely when you can smell those burning ships and hear the locals shouting.

Burn, baby burn. We launch in two days.

Gby.

Burning ship picture courtesy of chatigirl, the Creative Commons and flickr.

The last mile of DriverMatrix 1.0.0 was developed during summer 2007. Like every year, I spent the whole summer in the Austrian alps with the Austrian part of the family. This required some preparations. The major resource needed for me to continue working on the development was bandwidth as the protocol by SupportMatrix to display user sessions is VNC and multiple VNC sessions are bandwidth-wise expensive. There were also other traffic needs.

Before the summer began I took care to have good connection in both ends of the pipe: The Israeli office (upgraded to 5M/0.5M which was the maximal ADSL in Israel then - thanks Limor), and the Austrian alps office (upgraded to unlimited 3M/384k - thanks Martin). That was already enough to overcome the distance and feel like next door. OpenVPN eliminated the fact that I was in a foreign network, and I just had the whole office, including the printer and the phone system (thanks to asterisk) at my fingertips.

This luxury followed me also to internet cafe (where I met other nice people working with django while drinking good coffee), when I was away from the office. The laptop connected via wireless, activated the VPN and using a cross cable, a VoIP phone just connected normally with SIP over VPN to the office phone system. I had the local extension, so I could call using 3 digits number to all the other colleagues, and this way managed the project like I was just there. Of course I was reachable also via the Israeli office number for all those left behind in the boiling country, so some people don’t even know that I was away.

Being far had absolutely no disadvantage. Even when a need for technical meeting popped, we just did it over the phone (the VoIP one), while sharing the screen (using  GNU screen). This way, all parties could see the screen and type on it at the same time. Such a virtual meeting was also held with non-Codefidence people, like with Meir Kriheli which consulted us regarding some Django issues that popped up, and they got solved over the phone (well, 4 hours phone call). Thanks Meir.

Whenever I needed a break, instead of going to drink a coffee (what I usually do in the Israeli office), I took a short walk breathing mountains air and watching the scene around, drinking fresh alps water, and practicing my German. This combination generated a far better code, with much higher efficiency.

A challenge was to help test the system with massive amount of sessions as part of the development. This could not have been done directly over the VPN, because of the bandwidth limits. For this we used many virtual machines with many sessions each, and they were controlled using a single vnc session at a time. It was encapsulating multiple vnc sessions within a single one, with time slot modulation. Each time few such virtual machine were active in the foreground, while others were doing their job in the background. While we slept, automatic test scripts (written using xmacro) were on shift, so the 8 CPU cores machine with 16 GB memory were almost constantly busy. There are better ways to do it, but this one did the job simply enough.

The bottom line, it worked and we delivered the beta on schedule. This coding environment is highly recommended.