Analysts
BoxTone – Analyst Views on BoxTone and Mobile Service Management
BoxTone software has joined other key enabling technologies fueling the mobility boom. Maybe it’s because our software gives IT management the confidence of a rock-solid mobile platform built for user and application growth. Or because it helps dramatically lower TCO while increasing service levels. Read what our experts and the analyst community are saying about where mobility can take your organization.
Forrester Hot Companies to Watch
"As the use of wireless email spreads deeper and deeper into organizations, IT managers will face increased pressure to support more mobile users for more critical business-related activities, without increasing personnel costs. Solutions like BoxTone mitigate this pressure by bridging the gap between the wireless email provider and the management requirements of the IT organization."
Monica Basso, Gartner
"Mobile workers may lose important e-mails with critical events or urgent client requests that would require a prompt reaction. Often, their responses will take days and arrive too late. We estimate that about 10 percent of today's e-mails are urgent, and the senders of these e-mails expect real-time response. They might lose the prospect of serving a client request, meeting a business opportunity or reacting to a threat from a competitor. Thanks to wireless e-mail, users may reverse this. Still, it is difficult to measure these benefits in quantitative terms, but overall, the enterprise may achieve extremely relevant qualitative benefits, such as improved customer service, quicker time to market, and improved sales team productivity and performance… By 2010, at least 20% of consumer e-mail accounts (that is, 220 million public accounts) and business e-mail accounts (130 million) will have wireless access enabled (0.7 probability)."
Tony Rizzo, The 451 Group
"Being at the right place at the right time with the right product mix - that's an apt description of BoxTone and its platform. Having chosen to focus on RIM, it has the platform capability to match the challenges large vendors need to tackle. With RIM's enterprise growth exploding, BoxTone is well placed. Tracking every individual user's experience (and problems when they arise) across multiple geographic locations, domains, servers (including BlackBerry Enterprise Server/MDS), internal enterprise networks and applications is nontrivial. Nor is the need to potentially scale to tens of thousands of users. These front-line services in turn feed back to help desks, IT operations, engineering and software development departments and, of course, to management (where the ROI is measured)... We think of the competition as being best defined as an odd lot... None of (them) offers a complete platform along the lines of the BoxTone platform."
Chris Silva and Benjamin Gray, Forrester
"In 2008, we will witness the dawning of the mobile operations era. The explosion in enterprise mobility will necessitate that enterprises form a centralized function within IT to act as the clearinghouse of all things mobile: investment decisions, testing, deployment, and support and management functions. Mobile operations — this emerging subset of functions and responsibilities within IT operations — will bring together the business, IT, security, network, application, and help desk operations with the goal of making mobility practical and secure... As enterprises streamline their applications, services, and devices, IT will increasingly need to reconstruct the management of its now-disparate mobile functions, making sure to avoid duplicating efforts and resources. Forrester predicts that mobile operations will evolve as a role, taking on the device choices, wireless services, and management and security of the multiple mobile devices distributed to users."
Kitti Weldon, Current Analysis
"For BoxTone, whose comprehensive software solution already proactively monitors the entire BlackBerry platform from smartphone to carrier to BlackBerry Enterprise Server to mail server, the addition of asset, expense and compliance management capabilities is a perfect fit. As the enterprise mobility market booms, the need for critical asset utilization information will only accelerate. But to support user and application growth, IT organizations should look first to software vendors like BoxTone who can do it all - alert to incidents, troubleshoot, engineer out chronic issues, empower the service desk, reduce costs, help ensure compliance and reduce risk."
David Williams and Debra Curtis, Gartner
"The use of alert notification products can reduce the mean time to repair (MTTR) by automating the delivery of alerts to the appropriate IT operations personnel through the most-effective communications channel, in support of availability and established escalation and outage procedures. Even though IT operations management product vendors focus on Web-based displays for alert notification (consoles, administration interfaces and information portals), investigate the use of specialized alert notification products for the times when IT professionals are not looking at the display….Alert notification products can lower the risk of critical issues being missed. Alert notification products increase IT operations efficiencies by enabling IT personnel to perform their other IT operations duties and still be notified of critical IT issues that require their immediate attention. Alert notification products can establish ownership and/or acknowledgement of an IT event, no matter where the alert recipient is located."
Stephen Elliot, IDC
"Enterprise management tools that identify and resolve infrastructure and application problems will increasingly have sophisticated correlation and modelling technology that assists IT and business professionals with downtime reduction and lower operational costs. A combination of staff expertise, process maturity, and the correct technology will have the best chance of driving business return."
Peter O'Neill, Forrester
"IT organizations are maturing their processes, culture, and organizational structures toward a true service management discipline, often through the adoption of ITIL best practices. The latest ITIL refresh emphasizes better integration between incident/problem management and other essential IT processes, such as change, configuration, and capacity management — or even data center automation processes, such as event management and provisioning… Today, there is widespread acceptance among larger and more complex organizations of a structure that follows the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) model for service management, and tool vendors have followed with products that assist in ITIL implementations. Smaller organizations and those not ready to make wholesale changes to structures and processes nevertheless want tools that are robust, simple to install and configure, and easy for technicians to use. For these organizations, incident and problem resolution remains a key focus, often with an additional emphasis on life-cycle management with — but not at the expense of — workflow, tracking, and reporting tools."