Spiceworks’ IT desktop tops 4 million devices
1 min read
Less than one year since it launched the industry’s first free (advertising supported) IT management desktop software for SMEs, Spiceworks has reached 100,000 downloads in more than 185 countries, with some 4.3 million devices managed.
Jay Hallberg, co founder and VP marketing at the company reports that the UK is now number two for uptake, with 13,000 users. He also says that current growth is 10—15,000 new users every month.
Spiceworks’ 100,000-user milestone announcement coincides with the introduction of v1.6 of its IT Desktop, with important new troubleshooting capabilities. Top among there is a remote control feature that allows users to analyse and fix PCs and servers on their networks without leaving their desks.
Says Hallberg: “With one click, IT managers can launch Microsoft remote desktop to any PC or server. But we’ve also added a configuration comparison feature so they can compare, for example, any two PCs or servers to see where performance problems are coming from.”
Beyond those, he points to support now for 21 versions of anti-virus packages, with update detection for most of the majors, including Norton and McAfee. And there’s now a dashboard for network information that can also point to Internet sites.
“One of those is aimed at showing them the latest security bulletins because Spiceworks users are frequently in there so it’s another avenue to learn about those and check to see if they’ve got appropriate patches installed from within the Spiceworks environment.”
He also points to a new problem solving web space, where IT managers can post questions to their 100,000-plus IT colleagues around the world. “Mostly, they can expect to get answere within five to 15 minutes,” he asserts.
Spiceworks works best on Microsoft-predominant networks, although the system is said to discover any IT-based device and any PC or server running Windows, Linux, Unix and OSx (Apple).
