You know the old joke about IT, that support staff don't know what a weekend is because they're often in the office doing management or maintenance or backup or one of a thousand other tasks.

Well, as the recession bites and enterprises further tighten their belts, things are getting even worse, and IT is being squeezed to the max.

Bad enough that IT has to do more with less; but the demands of regulatory compliance are also kicking in, and some companies report that IT spends up to 20 percent of its time on compliance issues.

Now, compliance issues are serious matters, so they take priority over service and support.

Enter NTRglobal, a company that offers -- you guessed it, IT support as a service capabilities. If you want to automate some service processes, the company's NTRsupport product is a multi-platform remote support service that has customizable Bots to automate critical IT functions such as change management and searching for and eliminating malware.

Get your Bot, program it to do what's necessary, turn it loose and let it carry on, and it costs you a fraction of what a trained sysadmin would.

The company's NTRsupport is a remote support service that lets a company's support technicians remotely take control of customers' or employees' PCs, Macs or Linux devices to diagnose and fix problems over the Web, saving enormously on travel and other costs.

The company's major clients include Konica Minolta, Scandinavian Airlines and Lufthansa.

Support as a service? What's not to like?