NextNine Service Automation

• Discover Your Next Technical Problem Before Your Customer Does

  If you are like most service and support professionals of business critical systems around the world, your life is not getting any easier. The increasing complexity of supported systems, coupled with an unprecedented demand for reliability from customers, requires support organizations to adopt innovative technologies to scale efficiently, keep support costs in check and maintain customer satisfaction.

   

  Imagine Having Your Best Support Engineer at Every Customer Site

  NextNine Service Automation (NSA) is software platform that enables technology vendors to automate the delivery of service and support. NextNine’s patented, Virtual Support Engineer™ allows support organizations to proactively monitor and service their products at the customer site and automate the discovery, diagnosis and resolution of problems before the customer is disrupted. 

   

  Offer Superior Service at Lower Costs

  Many of the world’s leading companies in several industries use NextNine to deliver superior service to their customers, while keeping supports costs low. Some of the benefits of support automation include:

  • Reduced support costs
  • Increased customer satisfaction
  • Increased service revenues
  • Superior customer insight

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  Automate Your Support Workflows – Every Step of the Way

  Built from the ground up for support organizations – NextNine Service Automation includes all the functionality and flexibility required to automate your entire support process – from ongoing maintenance to root cause analysis and even self healing, all in one support platform.
  

  • Service Automation

    Automate and schedule ongoing product maintenance and service.

    • Software distribution
    • Inventory management
    • SLA tracking

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  • Assisted Support Automation

    Diagnose and solve problems faster by quickly analyzing every component of your system at the customer site – instantaneously and without disrupting your customers.

    • On-demand diagnostics
    • Remote access

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  • Proactive Support Automation

    Proactively monitor your systems 24X7 and discover potential problems at the symptom stage - before they impact your customers and cause disruptions.

    • Preventive monitoring
    • Self-healing

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• NextNine Remote Service Automation incorporates NextNine’s collective experience of working with support organizations of the world’s leading firms. All of the features required to automate your support tasks, from ongoing maintenance to proactive monitoring, can be found in this powerful software platform.

   

  Remote Service Automation

  With remote service automation, many of the tasks associated with ongoing maintenance and service can be automated. Manual, lengthy and error-prone activities, some of which may require field service, can be programmed and remotely executed instantaneously, at the click of a button

  • Preventive Maintenance - schedule maintenance routines to ensure systems are at peak performance and to eliminate recurring issues
  • Software Distribution – schedule and execute complex software upgrades and patches to your customer sites
  • Asset Management – Get a clear picture by taking inventory of all components in use at each of your customer sites. Use this information to correct inaccurate billing or up-sell new products and services
  • Configuration Management – Track and audit product configuration changes at the customer site and take corrective action to ensure correct product configuration

   

  Assisted Support Automation

  Assisted support automation allows you to respond to problems quickly and more efficiently by automating many of the tasks associated with diagnosing and resolving technical issues. Substitute lengthy information gathering calls and manual directives with fast and efficient automated workflows.

  • Automated Diagnostics - perform predefined automated diagnostics remotely including scanning log files, configuration analysis and database queries, providing a comprehensive picture of the system status and speeding up root cause analysis
  • Secure, Remote Access - Provide multi-session, multi-protocol remote access to each of your customer sites.

   

  Proactive Support Automation
  

  With proactive support automation, you can discover problems before your customer does, and often automate the resolution of problems at the symptom stage.

  • Proactive Monitoring - monitor systems 24X7 to discover problems at the symptom stage. Develop complex rules and thresholds to make sure support engineers are only alerted on issues that truly impact your system
  • Self-Healing - Resolve problems automatically by creating rules that fix recurring issues without the need for intervention by your engineers or customers

  
  

• NextNine Service Automation allows technology vendors to turn their customer support organizations into a competitive advantage. Our customers have transformed their support organizations and achieved fast, measurable results - while keeping support operations running efficiently. In fact, our typical customer has witnessed a return on investment (ROI) within 6-12 months of initial deployment!

   

  Here are some of the benefits provided by NextNine Service Automation:

   

  Reduced Support Costs

  • Fewer support calls – reduce the number of support calls by automating the discovery and resolution of known issues
  • Faster problem resolution – on-demand diagnostics and built-in remote access allow you to quickly discover the root cause of complex problems
  • Reduced field service dispatches – prevent costly field service calls by automating ongoing maintenance tasks such as software upgrades or inventory management. Field visits can also be made more efficient by collecting data to diagnose the problem and determine the required activity before a technician is dispatched  

   

  Increased Service Revenues

  • Increased contract renewal rates – leverage proactive support and superior service to close more service contracts at higher margins
  • Premium Offering - package proactive support as a premium offering to generate additional service and support revenue
  • New products and services – leverage data collected at customer sites to create and up-sell new products and services

   

  Increased system uptime

  • Prevent revenue loss - minimize loss of revenue resulting from downtime by proactively monitoring your systems 24x7
  • Improve SLA compliance rate – avoid costly SLA penalties or litigation resulting from downtime or lengthy problem resolution. Track and measure asset uptime to demonstrate compliance

   

  Increased Customer Satisfaction

  • Increase customer satisfaction scores - Discover and fix problems at the symptom stage, before disruptions or downtime impact customers
  • Develop closer partnerships - use collected data to better understand your customers' usage patterns, proactively solve issues and become involved in their success

   

   

• NextNine Service Automation (NSA) was designed from the ground up to meet the unique needs of technical service and support organizations. Our technology is truly cutting-edge, was awarded several patents, and received industry-wide recognition for its innovation.

   

  Technological Advantages

  Architecture

  Security

   

  Technological Advantages

  • Automates workflows – NextNine Service Automation is not a standard monitoring platform, but rather a solution that aims to automate the workflows a support organization goes through to efficiently support and service its products at each customer site
  • Flexible – NextNine Service Automation technology is easily customizable so it can be tailored  to suit the specific needs of any system quickly
  • User-Friendly - NextNine Service Automation allows lesser skilled support professionals to carry out complex support tasks without the need for complex coding or configuration
  • Scalable – NextNine Service Automation is easy to deploy, and scales to support the largest of organizations

   

  Architecture

  NSA is a distributed software system. At the heart of the system lies the Virtual Support Engineer (VSE), a lightweight JAVA application which resides at each end-customer site. Multiple VSEs securely communicate over the internet with the NextNine Service Center, a web-based application used by support engineers and executives to support and gain valuable insight about customer product usage.

   

    

  Virtual Support Engineer Features

  • Agent-less – A single Virtual Support Engineer can support an entire system. This eliminates the need to embed the VSE into each component of your product. The VSE communicates with software, hardware and network components using both standard and proprietary protocols
  • Flexible – the Virtual Support Engineer can be “taught” to perform any support related task, including monitoring, diagnosis, remote command execution and scheduled software updates.

  Service Center Features

  • Single View – gain a single view of all customer sites. Support engineers can view alarms, diagnose problems, take corrective action and monitor the overall health of each customer site using an intuitive, web-based interface
  • Robust Reporting – create powerful reports and dashboards to track SLAs, KPIs and gain valuable insight about your product and customers
  • Integration with Enterprise Systems –integrate the service center with existing enterprise applications including ERP, CRM and Knowledgebases to provide a seamless experience for the entire organization
  • Flexible, Intuitive Rule Development – create both standard and unique monitoring and diagnostic routines required to support your system with the service center’s intuitive and flexible knowledge builder

   

  Ironclad Security

  Security is designed into every aspect of the NextNine platform. NextNine Service Automation incorporates the security measures that ensure complete integrity of both your customers’ and your vital systems data, applications and network communications.
  Here are some salient features that make NextNine Service Automation secure.

  • Complete end user control – Your customers are in complete control and can authorize every interaction between supported systems and the support organization
  • Secure Communications – all communications are outbound only and use port 443 and SSL encryption. The protocols used are firewall friendly and do not require security modifications
  • Complete Audit and Traceability – All activity, including actions, usernames, passwords and access is tracked and audited on both the customer and vendor side. These detailed log trails provide all necessary data to enable compliance with industry regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley, HIPAA, and more

  With full end customer visibility and control coupled with the highest standards of authentication and encryption, it's not surprising the Virtual Support Engineer has passed some of the most stringent security audits in the world.