Painless Helpware Upgrades
NewsNovember 8, 2000
infraActive, a web-centric helpdesk application, is being released later this month in New Zealand by distributor Delta Software.
Launched in the United States late October and immediately generating 600 sales leads there, InfraActive is already drawing strong interest In New Zealand, Delta managing director David Gandar says.
An indication of this is Unisys NZ's interest in InfraActive, he says.
"We are launching an ASP (application server provider) service and last week we started the accreditation programme with Unisys so it can market this as an ASP component of Unisys's FirePower."
The Infra suite product manager for Delta, Jo Hansen, says Delta has implemented InfraActive internally and is soon to start migrating InfraActive to customers currently using predecessors InfraHelp and InfraWeb.
"All customers licensed for Infra Help and Infra Web (a web- enabled version of Infra Help) will be migrated at no cost," Ms Hansen says.
"Quite a few have not implemented any web middleware yet and of course they will have to purchase InfraActive as they would normally."
Delta has operated as a client-server software consultancy since 1994 and has some 40 customers, mostly medium to large corporates, including Auckland Health Care, Health Waikato, Clear's IT service, Ministry of Economic Development and the Dairy Board.
Mr Gandar believes competitors will take at least a year to come to the market with a web-centric application of equivalent flexibility because InfraActive's installation, implementation and management is performed entirely through a web browser. The significance is that the cost of upgrades will be almost zero, and user training can be carried out with the immediacy and accessibility that is available through online seminars and tutorials.
"The message that comes with InfraActive is that organisations can expect to implement fully functional processes using the Internet - and web-centric will become as mandatory as Windows has become," Mr Gandar says.
"This is probably the most major revision of software in the last five years," he says.
Unlike InfraWeb, a Windows application that's been web-enabled, InfraActive is built from the ground up on an Internet Architecture as a full browser application.
While it offers the full functionality of Infra's helpdesk and change management application, it does not require complex installation or configuration of client machines.
All (ActiveX) controls required by InfraActive are downloaded once only, when a user first logs on to the system, and they are automatically updated with new releases or upgrades.
"Once InfraActive is configured on the server at a single site, all the resources of the support database are immediately available to any new site without additional configuration," Mr Gandar says.
With InfraActive, "follow-the-sun" support environments can implement one central database, and so benefit from pooling resources to provide 24-hour support. Within a single system, each individual support centre can retain its own management and processes, as well as administer, configure and report on the system.
Its application benefits include system setup and administration, escalation, partitioning and time zoning, search and reporting accessed and managed from any site in the support operation.
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