News September 1, 2005: HelpSTAR wins Readers’ Choice Award for BEST Help Desk Software.

Our major Competitors include Numara’s Track-It!®, and BMC’s Remedy®

Track-It!® (www.ITSolutions.Intuit.com)

• Low entry point price
• Popular – especially for smaller help desks that are centered around keeping track of equipment, as compared to optimizing work flow.
• Entry level – limited customization capabilities, limited security model
• Used to support 250 workstations or less (Quote from Intuit, Inc.)

Remedy® (www.remedy.com)

• Highly regarded in the industry
• Virtually unlimited customization flexibility
• Aimed at larger organizations
• More expensive than Track-It or HelpSTAR
• Requires a significant ramp-up (consulting, set-up, training) time

HelpSTAR is aimed at the mid market.

The majority of our clients:

• support between 100 and 10,000 employees
• have between 10 to 100 support reps
• are mid-size corporations, or divisions of large enterprises

Our clients aim to manage and optimize their problem resolution processes, rather than merely tracking equipment and logging problems. Thus they require more sophistication than is offered by lower-end solutions.

At the same time they cannot afford to spend months and hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees to implement their help desk. Many of our clients find that ‘enterprise solutions’ are an overkill for their requirements.

The success of HelpSTAR in striking this balance is evidenced by McGraw-Hill’s selection of the software for inclusion with a textbook for teaching a one-semester college course. HelpSTAR is sophisticated enough to teach best practices methodology, and has a sufficiently short ramp-up time so that does not take a major portion of the course just to install, set up, and learn the software.