Remote PC Support Space - News from CES

I had my eye on new entrants and updates from existing players in the remote PC support space at CES last week. We hosted a panel at our CONNECTIONS Summit at CES last week titled Digital Home Customer Support: From Troubleshooting to Upselling? The panel included representatives from Affinegy, PlumChoice, Radialpoint, support.com, and Telcordia.

Last year saw some significant changes in the digital home tech support space, with Cisco acquiring Pure Networks, Radialpoint buying HiWired's assets, and iYogi getting funding. It makes it an exciting time to be watching the space.

The CES announcements were interesting. I discovered two more remote support providers while at the show. Symantec is offering NortonLive, which is a PC tune-up service (going for around $70). GoToAssist from Citrix is a tool that companies in the CE space and independent consultants can use to provide remote support services.

After writing about Intel's vPro solution awhile back, I figured that it wouldn't be long before we would see some partnerships emerging between Intel and players in the remote PC support space. It was nice to see that first parternship come in with PlumChoice. PCs equipped with Remote PC Assist Technology can be remotely accessed and have diagnostics and troubleshooting services performed, even in certain "out-of-band" situations (like a flaky or crashed operating system). This seems that it will open up some new opporunity for remote vendors to grow and create some new businesses.