The old reach out and touch someone slogan from the phone company means, in the technical support business, to reach out and touch someone's computer. Doing so in person takes expertise and patience. Doing so remotely takes expertise, patience and special tools. Those special tools have always been software, whether run from your own computer or servers, or provided by a hosted service provider. The Bomgar Box family (Appliance-Based Remote Desktop Access) uses a hardware appliance rather than software.

Check the multi-product review I did last year for an overview of the software-based market (Remote Control: the long arm of support gets more fingers).

Joel Bomgar, Founder and CEO of Bomgar started the company because he couldn’t find a software tool he liked when he went out looking for an answer. “I was a senior system engineer at a support company for engineering,” Bomgar says. “We looked at the major software players and didn't find anything we liked [that would let us] reach out over the Web for instant-on support and go through corporate firewalls without causing a problem. So we started a company around the technology we developed to do our job.”

Ah, another instance of an employee coming up with a great idea on company time, then stealing the idea? Bomgar laughed at that. “Not only did the CEO at my old company take a minority interest in our company, we incubated our company in the old company.”

Using hardware rather than software isn't the only difference between Bomgar and other remote support companies. Rather than charge for licenses for each remote computer, Bomgar charges by the number of concurrent support sessions the appliance is supporting at any one time. The entry level unit, the B100, allows a single support session ($1,995). The B200 for small businesses allows up to 20 support connections ($1,995 for the hardware with one license, $1,995 for each additional concurrent user license up to 20). The B300 supports up to 50 concurrent support connections.

Basing the product on an appliance makes it possible for Bomgar to do some unusual things. For instance, it keeps session log files on the internal hard disk, out of the reach of the support techs. This makes auditors happy, and lately, happier auditors drive lots of business decisions.