This week KACE issued a press release about a new analyst paper published by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). The paper does an outstanding job of really highlighting the benefits of the KBOX – especially against our largest competitors: Altiris, LANDesk and Microsoft’s SMS. The conclusion of the paper makes me proud. As some of you may remember back in my first blog entry, I talked about how we founded KACE because we wanted to bring Tivo-like ease-of-use, rollout and cost, especially to organizations with less than 5000 computers. Well, just four years later, it’s nice to see outside recognition that we are delivering on that promise. Quoting from the conclusion of the report:
“Each of these solutions has different strengths and limitations, and each enterprise must meet its own requirements, but it is clear that KBOX appliances from KACE provide substantially equivalent—and in some cases superior—capabilities to Altiris, LANDesk, and Microsoft SMS in critical disciplines. It may not be suitable for all enterprises, but KBOX appliance pricing is very competitive, and as an appliance-based solution avoids the high hardware and software costs, and related maintenance effort, required by its major competitors. Factoring in these costs, a KBOX solution can cost as little as one quarter of its software-only rivals. With its ease of use and fast time-to-value, KBOX appliances present a very attractive alternative to Altiris, LANDesk, or Microsoft SMS.”
Now, some folks might be skeptical and think that KACE wrote this paper or controlled what EMA said in the paper. I went and grilled our marketing team, just to be sure. Here’s what they told me:
KACE did indeed contract with EMA and specifically with senior analyst Andi Mann to do the research and write this report. We asked that it be an apples-to-apples competitive comparison of the four vendor’s products. We have done analyst briefings with Andi over the past year about the KBOX and the value of an Appliance-based approach – the same briefings we’ve done with analysts from other firms. Beyond that, the paper was researched and written by Andi and others at EMA.
You may ask, why did KACE pay to have this paper written? It turns out that vendor’s who products are focused exclusively on the mid-market (or the Fortune 100,000 as we like to call it) have a tough time getting coverage from the larger analyst firms such as Gartner and Forrester. Those firms focus primarily on very large enterprises (Fortune 500) and the vendors that cater to those enterprises. For instance, to be included in the Gartner Magic Quadrant on PC Lifecycle Management a vendor has to support environments of >35,000 users as demonstrated by customer references. The only way KACE can get coverage is to commission a report. Of course, we’re not the only vendor that pays. A rather larger percentage of the reports generated by the analyst community are vendor sponsored. After all, they too have to earn a living!
However, even when a report is commissioned by a vendor, a reputable firm such as EMA will only publish what they independently have researched to be true. That’s why I’m excited about this latest EMA report. It really does recognize, in quantifiable terms, the savings that KBOX can offer and shows that we have, in a very short period of time, created a product that is on par with companies that have been around a lot longer then we have. I’m proud of what KACE has accomplished with the KBOX….and even more excited about what’s to come. So stay tuned!
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