KACE has just announced an upgrade to the original KBOX 1000 Series appliance. The new upgrade has a number of items but the big one that I want to write about today is our enhancements around IT asset management. Asset management is one of those phrases that can mean different things to different people – and is certainly thought of differently depending on the size of the organization managing those assets.
Many of the KBOX customers had no real asset management prior to their purchasing a KBOX – or if they did it was a spreadsheet that logged the hardware when it was purchased and who it was initially assigned to. For those customers, just having the KBOX report in real time the status of the hardware and software on their network was a huge step forward in “asset management”. However, as our customers became more sophisticated in their use of the KBOX and as we attracted larger organizations, we saw the need to bring in additional asset management features.
The new KBOX Asset Management module really provides the features needed to audit, track and reconcile traditional computer assets (hardware and software) as well as any non-computer asset you want to enter. The database includes the flexibility to add new asset types and relationships, custom fields and you can import data as well. Full vendor, contract and service information can be included. The computer assets are integrated into the real-time computer inventory of the KBOX. Unlike other asset management solutions, we do not have separate databases that have to be synchronized so all the information is always up-to-date. Complete asset history including asset relationship changes over time is now available with the KBOX (a feature that was requested many times by current KBOX customers). Of course, software metering/licensing and reconciling financial and asset data is now available. And, it’s all driven using a flexible built-in reporting engine - or export the data or use ODBC with your own reporting tool.
As CTO at KACE, I have to comment on another major technical difference between the KBOX implementation and others. Since we continue to be focused on the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) we never want to add complication to the rollout of the KBOX. Therefore, we don’t heap new agents onto client machines to add to the complexity and management. Instead, with the help of some of our really good engineers, we have an extensible KBOX Agent that allows us to add support for new functionality into one agent making for easier management and higher reliability. Oh, lastly, I almost forgot to mention that the KBOX Asset Management Module is fully integrated into the standard KBOX user interface – not designed by some other group and then bolted on at the last minute.
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