BoxTone Announces Industry's First Modular Platform for BlackBerry Mobile User Management

Chicago, IL (PRWEB) March 5, 2008 -- BoxTone(R), the award-winning expert in mobile user management, today debuted the powerful next version of its management, monitoring and support software for the BlackBerry(R) Enterprise Solution at the Gartner Wireless and Mobile Summit 2008.

To help organizations drive the maximum ROI from their rapidly growing BlackBerry deployments, at a lower cost, BoxTone version 3.1 brings together two key industry innovations:

? advanced BoxTone SmartMP(TM) technology for true user service-level management through real-time transaction flow monitoring; and

? the first modular platform based on IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) industry standards, creating a comprehensive Mobile User Management solution.

"For nearly a decade, BoxTone has delivered proven enterprise systems management and monitoring technology," said Alan Snyder, CEO of BoxTone. "BoxTone software version 3.1 for the BlackBerry Enterprise Solution is the culmination of hundreds of man years of development, shaped and enhanced by deployments at more than 110 enterprises and agencies representing more than 260,000 licensed BoxTone users.It is a major evolution, driven by our customers, based on BoxTone's ground-breaking SmartMP technology core enhanced by a series of plug-and-play functional modules (http://www.boxtone.com/smart_start/modular_platform.html)."

With a focus on the mobile end user experience and user service levels, the innovative BoxTone SmartMP technology uses high-volume data collectors, analyzers and mobile pattern-specific rules engines to instrument the actual performance of each individual BlackBerry smartphone user within an organization 24x7. The unique SmartMP agent-less technology automatically measures user transaction flow hop times across all nodes for every user and group, correlating in real time with infrastructure metrics, learned baselines, and logged error events. SmartMP stores all this highly processed data in the BoxTone database for historical trending, benchmarking and proactive problem prevention.

Compared to other approaches, BoxTone's Mobile User Management approach delivers a fuller picture of overall performance and utilization, faster alerting and incident resolution, better root cause, fewer chronic problems, and deeper insight to isolate hard-to-find issues while optimizing performance and capacity. BoxTone also scales -- from management of a single BlackBerry Enterprise Server domain, up to highly distributed BlackBerry deployments involving multiple domains and SQL databases, handling peak loads beyond two million transaction flows per hour.

"BoxTone is helping enterprise customers manage, monitor and support their rapidly growing BlackBerry smartphone deployments in a cost effective manner," said Jeff McDowell, Vice President, Global Alliances, Research In Motion. "We are pleased to work with companies like BoxTone through the BlackBerry ISV Alliance Program to build on the unique benefits of the BlackBerry platform and help customers achieve even greater value from their wireless investments."

Leveraging the core SmartMP technology and shaped by growing application of ITIL best practices, BoxTone version 3.1 is a plug-and-play platform with key modules that enable IT operations, engineering, service desk, compliance, procurement/finance and management to deliver a higher quality service at a lower overall cost (http://www.boxtone.com/Products/announcingV3.aspx). BoxTone modules include:

? BoxTone Asset, Expense and Compliance Management - BlackBerry(R) Enterprise Server administrators, messaging, service desk, asset tracking/audit teams, and the finance department rely on this module to unlock important asset inventory, utilization, lifecycle, and audit compliance information from their BlackBerry smartphone deployments through a series of data collectors, analytics and reports.

? BoxTone Service Desk Management - Designed specifically for the service desk, this console is the one place to go for Tier-1 personnel to deliver faster, first-call resolution, with real time user status and flow performance graphs, active diagnostics for root cause, testing tools, and an integrated knowledgebase of recommended answers suitable for front-line skilled staff.

? BoxTone Incident Management - Designed for fast, efficient incident identification and resolution by the BlackBerry Enterprise Server administrator, this module includes proactive baselined alerting with root cause and recommended answers, the BoxTone OpsDashboard for at-a-glance overall system health, and detailed drilldown data consoles.

? BoxTone Problem Management Module - For the BlackBerry Enterprise Server administrator and the engineering teams, this module focuses on proactive problem prevention by delivering time-based performance analyses of long-term historical data - providing overall system health information, identifying trends, isolating hard to find problem areas, and identifying root cause anywhere across all the communication links through consoles, analytics and reports.

As a result, BoxTone version 3.1's modular platform aligns IT and support processes to address essential user service-level requirements at each of the three key phases of the enterprise mobile maturity curve: pilot phase, departmental phase and enterprise phase.

Said Snyder, "An IT organization's needs when provisioning a small number of users differ dramatically from the challenges of supporting, for example, a field sales group with a few hundred mobile users. These needs in turn differ from the requirements for supporting an enterprise-wide deployment running into the thousands and tens of thousands of users. BoxTone version 3.1 moves well beyond tactical troubleshooting tools and is the first comprehensive, modular platform to address the entire enterprise mobile maturity curve, from the smallest to the largest BlackBerry deployments. The common denominator is that no matter what the phase, the enterprise considers the platform mission-critical."

Added Snyder, "And with our Mobile User Management approach, BoxTone has a proven roadmap for long term manageability of the BlackBerry Enterprise Solution."

In order to help rapidly growing BlackBerry deployments, BoxTone version 3.1 adds a new BlackBerry user provisioning and tracking capability threaded through all modules. BlackBerry Enterprise Server administrators, messaging teams and service desk teams can easily see current status of each newly activated BlackBerry smartphone; be notified immediately of, and then quickly troubleshoot, any activation problems; and review the history of all activation activities through consoles and reports.

Added Snyder, "Most impressive is BoxTone's accelerating ROI. When BoxTone version 3.0's proven track record is combined with results from early version 3.1 deployments, we're consistently seeing 70% reduction in troubleshooting time and 60-70% reduction in support escalations." (http://www.boxtone.com/aboutboxtone/customers.aspx)

For example, The City of Atlanta provides BlackBerry smartphones to everyone from the mayor, executive cabinet members and department heads to inspectors. Using the BoxTone solution, the City of Atlanta has been able to gain visibility into individual BlackBerry user experience and the platform as a whole (http://www.boxtone.com/City-of-Atlanta/City-of-Atlanta-mid.html). Said Mark Campbell, Interim CIO, "BoxTone reduces troubleshooting from hours to minutes. We've also cut the number of resources required to perform troubleshooting in half; previously we needed two people for troubleshooting, one on the platform side and one on the wireless carrier side. Now we only need one person to do the job."

About BoxTone:

BoxTone software is trusted by more than 110 of the world's leading enterprises and government agencies, including 40 in the Fortune(R) 1000, to manage, monitor and support their BlackBerry platforms. Built on patented SmartMP technology and conforming to industry standard ITIL practices, BoxTone's comprehensive modular platform and role-specific consoles enable IT and services organizations to collaboratively reduce support costs, accommodate rapid device growth, and guarantee the high quality of service that mobile users demand. Learn more from the expert in mobile user management at www.BoxTone.com, call +1.410.910.3344, or email us at BoxToneSales @ BoxTone.com.

BoxTone and the BoxTone logo are trademarks of BoxTone. The BlackBerry and RIM families of related marks, images and symbols are the exclusive properties and trademarks of Research In Motion Limited. RIM assumes no liability and makes no representation, warranty or guarantee in relation to third party products or services. All other product or company names mentioned are used for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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