Article

Software's remote control

Remote management software lets users monitor and manage their machines at all times from any point on the network and take action to solve problems before a kiosk becomes ineffective.

December 28, 2005

Editor's note: This feature contains excerpts from the newly available special report,"Benefits of Intelligent Device Management."The in-depth report, sponsored by TouchPoint Solutions, is available for downloading at no cost from KIOSKmarketplace.

One potential unknown in kiosk deployments is the cost of maintaining and servicing a network of devices. And that unknown can make deployers quite uncomfortable.

"Customers might shy away from kiosks altogether if they feel they cannot control service costs," said Marc Forsythe, president of Foresight Marketing Group Inc. "Downtime is the plague of this industry. But my customers don't have bodies around to watch kiosks."

Foresight Marketing Group promotes kiosks to the hospitality industry, including national and international hotel/resort chains, and amusement parks.

Forsythe said, "If one of my customers has 1,000 kiosks and has to pay a service organization to babysit all of them, it gets very expensive." Instead, he recommends that his customers use remote-management software that allows them to go online and actually see for themselves what is happening with each machine. They can receive alerts via email when attention is needed on a particular device, such as when paper is low or a media drive isn't performing properly.

"Having this capability helps customers get very specific with their service contracts. They know what they can watch themselves and what the contractors need to do," he said.

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Forsythe suggests Catapult software from Touch Point Solutions to his customers. Other software vendors in this area include Axeda Systems, Apunix Computer Services, Netkey, NetShift, Mosaic Software, St. Clair Interactive, and Working Solutions.

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Brian Anderson, director of product marketing at Axeda, said the benefit of having remote management software is saving costs by keeping as much uptime as possible.

"The reality is that companies can't afford to have field service people visiting kiosks every day." Anderson said he has heard from clients that a typical service call can cost between $500 and $1,000, depending on the service needed. If a technician is servicing a photo kiosk, for instance, he or she might need to carry many more parts than a technician going out to fix an information kiosk.

Anderson said that it costs the average enterprise about $250,000 to purchase remote management software.

Forsythe said a typical customer achieves return on his investment in the product within seven to eight months.

Doug Peter, president of St. Clair Interactive, said enterprise customers need to understand that they cannot use the same tool they have to manage cash registers and other "dumb" devices. "They use that management tool to update a new version of software once a year. With kiosks they need to be able to download dynamic content 24 hours a day."

Benefits of remote management software

Increased uptime
Uptime boosts revenue
Better customer satisfaction
More efficient allocation of IT staff
Reduced service costs
Control over content distribution
Added network security
Deployers proactive, not reactive
Helps deployments scale
Takes advantage of rich network applications

Dead or alive

Francie Mendelsohn, president of analyst firm Summit Research Associates, said deployers can't really put a price on the value of remote management software.

Her reasoning is that a dead kiosk equals a loss of revenue. Whether a kiosk is in an airport, a retail outlet or a mall, if it isn't functioning, customers can't complete transactions or get needed information. And likely the customer will see that the kiosk isn't working, walk away without informing anyone, and perhaps never approach that self-service device again.

Uptime, on the other hand, boosts revenue for companies with transactional kiosks like gambling terminals.

The software gives deployers a tool for monitoring and managing the health of their machines at all times from any point on the network; a tool that can intelligently take action to solve network problems before a kiosk becomes ineffective.

The kiosk industry is maturing, and as deployments grow, so does the need for intelligent monitoring and managing of the network. "If a project has one kiosk or 10,000 kiosks there is a need for management," said Mendelsohn. And with large deployments, the need for an enterprise-class product increases.

A kiosk is considered an intelligent device, or a computer-based system that provides users with a specific function. Other devices could be plasma display screens, point-of-sale terminals or PDAs. With the right software, a network of such devices is an easy-to-monitor, self-healing, "living animal," according toGrant Duxbury, technical sales manager at TouchPoint. "The network can react to its environment and adapt," he said.

Adding intelligence to the network means defining a set of business and technical rules that tell the devices how to operate, especially in emergencies like losing a network connection or when an application or peripheral does not work correctly.

Not just an IT benefit

As self-service technology is now a critical part of how retailers, banks and other organizations interact with customers and employees, the remote management software used has to meet increasingly rigorous IT standards.

"IT departments are by nature risk-averse, and good remote management software helps take the risk out of complex self-service deployments by providing a scalable and reliable platform for ongoing operations," said Bob Ventresca, director of marketing for Netkey, a provider of software for self-service.

"But the software needs to pass the IT 'sniff test' of being able to run on their servers and network infrastructure and meet their demanding requirements for performance, scalability and security. 'Enterprise-class' is more than a buzz-word; it needs to be proven in the field every day by offering value to the customer on a par with their other mission-critical systems."

Ventresca said that the experience learned by Netkey in providing software to Fortune 500 customers who are operating thousands of kiosks each day shows that the remote management system quickly becomes a vital part of how companies interact with their target audiences.

"The worth to IT of remote device management is clear in maintaining kiosk uptime and reducing the cost of operation. But there is enormous value to other departments in the organization as well." He said marketing can support sales efforts or product launches by quickly scheduling and downloading new content, video or other rich media assets to kiosks in sync with advertising campaigns or special promotions.

In the case of kiosks used for human resources and employee communications, the system can be used to deliver company or benefit information in real time to empower and train workers, according to Ventresca. In return, important data about trends, product preferences, and employee needs have been uncovered by their customers through the reporting function of the remote management system.

Lots of potential

Anderson said Axeda DRM software offers deployers diagnostic information on the computer, such as CPU function, disk space and configuration; stats on the hardware, such as temperature and voltage; information from sensors on any peripherals; and data on consumables such as paper, film and chemicals.

Checking the state of health of networked devices and checking on supplies at the unit is a critical, yet vanilla function of management software, said Mike Bengtson, vice president of product strategies at Mosaic Software.

He explained that once customers have the management infrastructure in place, they can leverage the technology platform to perform other cost- and time-saving functions, like managing content, security features and applications from a centralized, remote location.

"In the kiosk world there is a rich set of applications, from setting screen flow to changing services based on the time of day," said Bengtson. "In the past, a service technician would have to configure these apps in person."

He said that reporting tools in the software let users track application usage. "Customers want to know at the end of the day who used the kiosk, for what purpose and at what time."

"Downtime is the plague of this industry. But my customers don't have bodies around to watch kiosks."

-- Marc Forsythe, president of Foresight Marketing Group Inc.

Reducing people power

Companies can save money in several ways by managing their devices from a single point. The primary saving is in "man hours," or being able to better allocate valuable IT resources.

Managing a network "by hand" is very labor - and cost -- intensive. It could mean everything from having to send service technicians out to reboot machines to having employees sitting at a console watching red and green lights flash to see how devices are functioning.

"Take a company with 500 devices. Chances are they are paying a net manager $40,000 per year to manage the network, and a third-party company $500 per device per year to manage content," said Duxbury. "With management software, a single person can do all that."

And that person could have any level of expertise with networking principles. Andy Pinkard, chief technical officer at NetShift, a manufacturer of kiosk software, added, "We can stop a rookie from demolishing the network by having the user interface be very intuitive."

Peter estimated that 95 percent of the people using remote management software do not have a technical background.

Remote management

Sylvia Berens, vice president of kiosk-software manufacturer Apunix Computer Services, said deployers often overlook remote management. "They assume that the devices themselves are reliable and robust, but they forget that problems can happen on the back end." Those problems include network connections that fail, databases that go down or peripherals that stop working.

And not only does the software "know" the condition of devices, it can act on problems. "When a network connection comes back up, for instance, it can automatically connect the kiosk," Berens said.

She said software facilitates the "care and feeding" of devices. If a money receptacle is full, someone should be alerted to empty it. If the paper is low, someone should be alerted to fill it."

Berens said the system should keep pinging someone until an issue is resolved. And if the resolution doesn't take place in a timely fashion, the system might have to move higher up the chain of command.

Pushing content

Another layer of kiosk management is the control and distribution of content. With management software, customers can create content one time and push it out through the network to update all devices simultaneously.

The benefit of content management is that a company can send out one consistent message that helps with branding.

Without remote management software, Anderson said, companies would have to create a CD with the desired content, ship it to every kiosk location and then count on someone reliable to get the information correctly installed.

Pinkard warned that the task can get complex. "The customer wants to send a consistent brand message, yet it won't look the same on all displays. There are different sizes, different resolutions. The software has to be able to select the correct image for each device." He said it is important that the management software embrace this complexity and filter it so the end user is not aware of any challenges.

Another bonus is that remote management software adds security to network content and machines. The software makes data unattainable to anyone that does not have rights and ensures that content cannot be duplicated. The customer sets these rights, so even the software vendor cannot access content.

Learning curve

Often management software vendors have to explain these benefits to customers upfront.

Bob Gallner, director of sales at TouchPoint, said he has seen far too many kiosk projects that have not been planned properly. "I can see that issues like management and content distribution weren't even thought of when the project rolled out in beta."

Problems become visible, he said, when the deployer tries to scale from 10 units to several thousand.

"They have to know the cost of scaling before they start the project," said Gallner.

He said kiosk deployers often just don't understand the need for intelligent device management until they have a crisis. "We come in after they get a sense of failure. We can sit in the background and manage existing applications that were developed outside the Catapult environment."

[Editor's note: Info Touch Technologies became Tio Networks in April 2006.]