FAQs

On this page we list Frequently Asked Questions by prospects and clients about Inforonics and its services - and provide the answers. If you think of a question that is not answered here, please send it to us and we'll get an answer back to you - and maybe add it to this page. You can use the form on the GetHelp page.

General

How long have you been in business?
Where are you located and is Inforonics US-based?
What services do you provide?
Who are your clients?

Technical & Customer Support

What programs do you offer for a start-up with low, unpredictable call volume?
How do your agents learn to support our applications and customers?
How long does it take?
What coverage hours are available?
Do you control my support phone number?
Do I have to use your ticket or CRM system?
Can I trust you with my customers' data and personal information?
How reliable is your infrastructure?

IT Infrastructure Management / Managed Services

What is IT Infrastructure Management?
What do you mean by Service Warranty Assurance Solutions?
What is APM?
What is Total Web View Monitoring (TotalWeb℠)
What is End-user Experience Management?
What are Service Dashboards?
What is Incident Management (IM)?

 
How long have you been in business?

Nearly 50 years. Inforonics was incorporated in 1962 by founder Larry Buckland. Earlier in his career, Buckland worked in the MIT Servo-Mechanism Lab studying and developing input and output devices for computers. Later for ITEK, his work on the CORONA project dealt with processing intelligence information and data from U2 and satellite photographs, producing microfilms that aided the intelligence community (CIA/USAF/NSA/RAFL.) Throughout the mid 1990s, Inforonics built, hosted, and supported over 7,000 online catalogs and companies.   Read More Here

 
Where are you located and is Inforonics US-based?

Inforonics delivers its services from its headquarters in Littleton MA, and all of its people work from the Littleton offices.

 
What services do you provide?

Inforonics specializes in ITIL®-based IT service management including IT monitoring and management, branded, white-label customer and technical support, system and application performance optimization and an extensive array of educational and training services that drive value to business.

 
Who are your clients?

Inforonics clients come from a broad range of industries that all have one common thread - the need for managed services whether they be 24/7 technical support, managed hosting, custom monitoring or application maintenance. Clients have included such business powerhouses as Apple, Pfizer, BusinessWire, McGraw-Hill, Johnson & Johnson and ThomasRegister.com.

Inforonics' target market is technology companies, primarily Software as a Service (SaaS) providers, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), and corporate IT departments. We focus on the small-to-midsized business (SMB) segment, especially those companies that are entering their growth phase as it's at that critical point that our services can be of the greatest value. A sample of our current clients can be found here.

 
What programs do you offer for a start-up with low, unpredictable call volume?

Well, we'd really need to better understand your actual requirements to recommend a program that will work for you. But, as an example, we offer an entry level customer support program that looks like this:

 
How do your agents learn to support our applications and customers?

You teach them. Our technical support agents are IT generalists with a solid foundation of Internet protocol and computer skills. We hire people with a natural talent for investigating and troubleshooting and for helping people solve problems. With our help guiding your documentation and training agenda (using a proven set of standard implementation plans tailored to your unique needs), you teach our agents to support your customers just as you would. After that, we keep them fresh and train new agents as needed.

 
How long does it take?

A typical tech support engagement can be live in as little as 8 weeks. Some straight-forward customer support engagements can be ready quicker; some complex Tier 2 support can take longer - usually dependent on the length of training and testing and the availability of training windows for our agents. We have to take them off line to train them and we have to bring in backup agents to take their place. We have to be respectful of everyone's schedules and work and family commitments.

 
What coverage hours are available?

Whatever you need: 24 x 7 x 365; business hours, off-hours, or custom coverage to fill gaps in your internal support coverage.

 
Do you control my support phone number?

No. You acquire and control your own support phone line - toll-free or not. You forward your line to one provisioned here for you (standard PSTN forwarding). If ever you need to leave us, just point the line back to your own support team.

 
Do I have to use your ticket or CRM system?

No. We do offer an Inforonics ticket system to capture and manage support issue workflow, but we also use our clients' systems. We have experience with many systems including: Salesforce™, Siebel CRM (Oracle), Vantive (PeopleSoft), Onyx (Consona CRM), Fogbugz, Magic, Remedy (BMC), Quintis (Avaya), TechExcel Customerwise, Jira (Atlassian), ZenDesk®, RightNow, Kayako, Microsoft Dynamics® and more.

 
Can I trust you with my customers' data and personal information?

Absolutely. In addition to delivering technical support services, we are a leading IT Service Management company. We are SAS70 Type II certified. We enforce confidentiality agreements with our clients and our employees. We adhere to strict physical and data security processes in all aspects of service delivery and we are audited every six months to make sure we follow our own best practices.

 
How reliable is your infrastructure?

Very. On the technical support side, we use Cisco Unified Communication equipment and software. We have redundant instances in our Littleton headquarters and in a secure Savvis data center in Waltham, MA. We have redundant power and back up diesel generators. Our agents use the latest soft phone technology that allows them to work from anywhere, with no loss of service quality. For managed services, some clients we host at the Waltham data center. For others we deliver our IT infrastructure management and monitoring service remotely at our clients data centers. In our data center we use fully redundant, enterprise class routers, switches, firewalls, load balancing, and DDoS protection. In addition, we hire and develop the very best people in the industry to manage and continually improve our services.

 
What is IT Infrastructure Management?

Simply, it is keeping an eye on your IT systems, anticipating and planning for risk, and restoring service outages as quickly as possible. We create and leverage technology and IT service management best practices to proactively manage risk and quickly identify problems in client applications and infrastructure, and prioritize resolution steps based on defined service impact. This approach optimizes efficiency in resource utilization, and ensures that essential IT resources that impact business processes experience maximized uptime. Inforonics IT infrastructure management can give key executives and managers the insight they need to understand the business impact of availability and performance and act on it quickly.

Read more about our Guardian™ infrastructure management services.

 
What do you mean by Service Warranty Assurance Solutions?

You've built a product or service of value (Utility). It's useless if it's not available or too slow to satisfy customer needs (Warranty). Inforonics is renowned for its exceptional levels of customer service, technical expertise and ability to deliver customized solutions to its clients. The company's current offerings are a culmination of many years of experience and deliver on Inforonics' mission to remain a step ahead of the changing business needs of its clients.

GetAware™: Enable your businesses to deliver the highest level of customer satisfaction with Inforonics' monitoring processes and tools. IT operations are empowered with clear visibility into the health and operation of the environments they support.

GetControl™: Bring order to complex organizations. With Inforonics controls in place, projects and tasks won't turn into chaos even in the midst of today's fast and furious business pace. Our solutions bring visibility into the impact of decisions so that time, efforts and dollars are spent on key business initiatives.

GetInformed™: Optimize and enhance decision making capabilities. Informed decisions are the key to successful business operations and our services are built to empower decision makers with knowledge quickly and accurately.

GetResults™: Inforonics strongly believes in the expression that "if you do not measure, you cannot improve." Bringing results that benefit the business is priority for the CIO. Maintaining an acceptable level of service has to be balanced between cost and responsiveness. We bring decades of service management experience that assure results.

Watch a video about SWAP

 
What is APM?

Application Performance Management (APM) focuses on the performance of online and corporate IT applications. Business success depends on the performance of these applications. When services delivered by applications perform poorly, clients' revenue, productivity, customer satisfaction and reputation suffer.

In the face of increasingly complex and interconnected IT environments, comprehensive APM helps clients monitor and manage the performance of complex applications, detect problems in time to manage the impact to business services and let you resolve performance issues quickly and collaboratively.

 
What is Total Web View Monitoring (TotalWeb℠)

Inforonics Total Web View Monitoring is a browser-driven system to check, analyze, and measure the availability, functionality and performance of web content as experienced by an end-user from various geographic locations with emphasis on Web 2.0 content including video, AJAX-sourced and other dynamic content, Flash components, and third-party/CDN-delivered content.

Most end-user experience monitoring breaks down when AJAX and/or Flash is involved. Standard monitoring server scripts are not able to interact with the Javascript (ECMAscript) in the application and cannot measure the validity of the Document Object Model (DOM), as there is no Javascript interpreter or DOM model available within typical monitoring scripts.

TotalWeb℠ measures user experience from within a browser by testing and interacting with elements in the DOM. Business logic, inserted into transactions, help accomplish complex analysis of a web page to answer questions such as:

 
What is End-user Experience Management?

As more businesses become dependent on web-based applications, it is crucial to get visibility into the quality of service from the user's perspective and the business impact associated with that experience. Your end-users / customers are the first people to be impacted by outages and degraded performance in your SaaS or Corporate IT environments, but they may not be the first to call and tell you about it. They may just abandon their shopping cart transactions or cancel their subscription to your SaaS application, or recommend to their management that they change vendors.

Leading companies realize that they must predict and manage problems before customers and service level agreements are negatively affected while giving business and IT managers the visibility they need into the business impact of performance problems for end-users.

End-user / Customer Experience Management involves monitoring and managing end-user experience, proactively, in real time, and identifying availability and performance conditions in time to deploy the right IT assets and resources to minimize or prevent the risk of business impact.

 
What are Service Dashboards?

Dashboards are a key element of effective Service Availability Management (SAM).

With a custom designed dashboard, decision-makers at all levels in an organization have 24x7 access to the actionable information they need. Keep in mind, however, that the dashboard is just a way to display data acquired from monitoring and management tools. Designing an effective dashboard solution requires upfront Business Service Modeling and thoughtful and informed selection and translation of the data provided by monitoring and management tools in order to clearly communicate the business impact of the conditions being monitored. Inforonics has the technical skills, experience, and business expertise to ensure the right information is displayed to your stakeholders when they need it.

Dashboards are just one important element of a comprehensive SAM solution that includes Service Modeling as well as Tool Selection and Integration.

 
What is Incident Management (IM)?

IM is the process by which service outages are monitored, escalated, and restored as quickly as possible. Service disruptions happen. Successful Incident Management depends on how quickly service is restored and what you learn from the incident. Effective IM is key to customer satisfaction and business success. Inforonics' staff, infrastructure, and ITIL®-based process with continual service improvement gives our clients the confidence they need to send all their alarms and alerts to us, knowing that we'll manage them using best practices, two-way communication, and accountability based on our clients' desired business outcomes.

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