Dell’s brought its line of system management appliances for SMBs to India. By Prashant L Rao
Enterprise management frameworks have never really sold in India except to the biggest organizations. That’s why, even the purveyors of these frameworks nowadays talk about smaller and simpler solutions. If that’s the case with products aimed at the enterprise segment, just imagine what SMBs have to go through if they want to automate their systems management process.
Enter Dell with its KACE appliances that address this issue. KACE was acquired by Dell back in 2010. The product line has apparently taken off in a big way in ANZ and the vendor’s bringing it to India in a hope of repeating its positive experience in that geography.
“Growth’s been explosive in Australia & New Zealand (ANZ), albeit on a small base. After we acquired KACE, Quarter-on-Quarter growth has been extremely strong,” stressed Jon McBride, KACE Regional Sales Manager, Dell.
Systems management for SMBs
It’s clear that Dell expects much the same in India as well. The product seems compelling and the price points are manageable for larger SMBs. It will be interesting to see how the traditional enterprise management specialists react to this one.
“The first port of call is going to be the mid-market. It’s targeted at those companies that find a conventional enterprise management suite to be unaffordable and complex to boot,” said McBride.
Initially, Dell KACE expects demand to come from the education sector where private schools and engineering or MBA colleges have a substantial IT set-up. The other key sector is going to be IT/ITES. These are the sectors in which the vendor has found success in ANZ where these products have been available for several years now.
“We will start small and build on that with channel partners and our in-house sales team,” said McBride outlining his go-to-market strategy.
What KACE does
These are appliances that facilitate system management and deployment, tasks handled by the K1000 and K2000 respectively. The K1000 takes care of IT asset discovery & inventory, asset management, software distribution etc whereas the K2000 is for recovery, creating a central library of images, etc.
Both are deployable in a few days and there’s not much of system integration required as compared to a full-blown enterprise suite. These attributes make KACE well-suited to the needs of mid-sized companies that need the capability to manage their hardware assets—PCs, laptops, servers et al—but lack the IT know-how or the financial muscle to roll out the full enchilada of enterprise asset or system management.
The K1000 appliance comes with a service desk and it has strong patching capabilities supporting as it does platforms including Windows, Mac OS, Red Hat Linux and VMs on VMware or Hyper-V. Support for Ubuntu is in the works.
The K2000 can import images from other management suites and lets you create a library of images. It links to Dell’s Open Management Essentials (OME) software and, if a company is using OME for monitoring its hardware, then OME can talk to KACE for ticketing.
You manage the appliances using a browser-based GUI. The appliances integrate with Active Directory. There are pre-formulated reports and, for those who want to play with the reporting formats, you can roll your own.
The GUI lets you set the frequency of patching and even lets you decide on which bunch of devices get the patches. As KACE was an independent company before being acquired by Dell, the appliances support a wide variety of hardware.
The K2000 supports file-based imaging which lets you dedupe images. “You can drag and drop pre- and post-install tasks in the GUI,” commented McBride.
Pricing & future direction
The K1000 starts from $12,000 supporting up to a hundred devices. The K2000 starts from $19,000, again supporting up to a hundred devices. Both appliances can scale up as required. McBride stressed that the cost per device dropped as the number of devices rose.
Later in the year, Dell KACE will bring out a new appliance that will handle Mobile Device Management (MDM) and support both iOS and Android on smartphones and tablets. All in all, for companies with a fairly large set-up that haven’t quite got into the big leagues yet and don’t have the IT staff or can’t afford an enterprise solution, KACE promises to be an interesting option.
