SSPA Welcomes NextNine, Leader in Support Automation, as New Vendor Member(email this article)

San Diego, CA, Tel Aviv, Israel, and New York, NY, October 30, 2003 – The Service & Support Professionals Association (SSPA) (Company Profile, Past Stories, Case Studies), the leading industry association for IT support professionals, and NextNine Inc., the leading provider of service automation solutions for automating the remote service and support of business critical systems, today announced that NextNine has joined the SSPA Vendor Member program, a membership dedicated to bringing IT support service buyers and sellers together online.

“We are excited that NextNine, whose innovative technology has already enabled members of the SSPA to remotely automate the service and support of their business critical systems around the world, has joined SSPA as our latest Vendor member,” said Bill Rose, SSPA Founder/CEO. “Automation of remote service and support is an important addition to the customer support toolset, and NextNine brings unique value to the tech support industry through their innovative easy to implement and deploy solution.”

“Many of our satisfied customers are already members of the SSPA,” said Adi Dulberg, Founder and CEO of NextNine, “We share the same values of quality, innovation and service as all the members of the SSPA and are therefore excited to join the SSPA family. We believe we can contribute to the development of these values together with the SSPA and its members, and gain more knowledge and insight into this important and growing industry”.

The “Virtual Support Engineer”
“Imagine that you could duplicate your best customer support or service engineer at every customer site worldwide,” said Michael Coden, President of NextNine Inc in New York. “Imagine that ‘Virtual Support Engineer’ could proactively monitor complex multi-platform software/hardware systems 24x7 to ensure that they work perfectly, take corrective actions when necessary, do preventive maintenance, install patches and upgrades, and automatically alarm and create trouble tickets on any detected problem. The NextNine software solution enables you to setup, deploy and maintain a “Virtual Support Engineer” at every customer site. The NextNine software is extremely innovative in its ability to do all this, without requiring any agents to be installed on any of the equipment in the field, and to do all this with Telco carrier/HIPAA-grade security. Moreover, NextNine ‘Virtual Support Engineers’ can be easily configured, through a graphical user interface, by a support engineer, without any need to know programming, and without needing to involve product R&D engineers.”

The NextNine Solution
NextNine Support™ is a distributed software solution that enables support organizations to automate service and support processes. Service routines can be easily created at one or more locations using web interfaces and then distributed to an unlimited number of customer sites worldwide. At the customer sites, these routines may be executed manually, periodically or upon system events. These routines can perform virtually any tasks that an engineer sitting next to the equipment could perform, such as: proactive system monitoring, preventive maintenance, corrective actions, configuration analysis, software patches/upgrades, and best practice analysis. This opens the door to a whole new range of support and services that can be provided securely without a persistent connection to a customer’s network. These services can greatly reduce service and support expenses and the enhancements they add can bring additional revenues to service plans, all while greatly increasing customer satisfaction.

About NextNine
NextNine is the leading provider of service automation solutions for business critical systems. We provide a distributed software solution that enables automation of service and support processes, proactive monitoring, preventive maintenance, system audit and best-practice analysis to maximize the availability and performance of business- critical systems. We let manufacturers and system integrators of business critical systems deliver better, proactive service at lower cost, maximizing customer satisfaction and return on investment. The NextNine solution is deployed globally at leading enterprises and service providers. NextNine is a privately held company headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel with an office in Riverdale, New York. NextNine's investors include Morgan Stanley Private Equity, Redwood Venture Partners, Yozma Venture Capital Group, Ofer Brothers Hi-Tech and a group of technology investors.

For more information, please visit us at www.NextNine.com, email info@nextnine.com or in the Americas call 914-262-1591, and in EMEA call +972.3.767.3000.

About SSPA
Founded in 1989, the Service & Support Professionals Association (SSPA) was formed to focus on the specific needs of service executives who are responsible for support centers and overall customer relations. Today, the SSPA represents over 22,000 service professionals at 2,500 support centers worldwide. These executives look to SSPA to provide insight into the future of support services, a road map of best practices within our industry and access to the best service and support vendors. SSPA has become the center of support providing a reliable and comprehensive resource for news, research, benchmarking, standards and collaboration.

SSPA was created for professionals, managers and executives that make their living in the IT support services community. It is not a generic, one-size-fits all website where nobody ever feels like they belong. SSPA is dynamic, interactive, living resource specifically designed for the unique needs of support professionals. This exciting virtual community creates a forum for constant interaction with peers, industry experts, technology vendors and much more. For more information regarding the SSPA and other related divisions, log on to www.thesspa.com or send an email to info@thesspa.com.