DELL | KACE

 Before I go into what the KACE product is, I want you to close your eyes and go back to when you were an tech who once every x number of years spent 3 weeks in the basement imaging machines with ghost, or think back to when you had to install Microsoft Office 97 via sneakernet or think to when you had to go around to every machine and inventory the hardware and software.  For some of you this might sound like years gone by and the smell of static dust would bring it all right back, for others you are saying that this sounds like what I do today, don't pick on me.  In either case, we have all spent blue-bar time (that long period of time that you wait while an application / OS installs) wishing that there was something that would just do this for me so I could do real project work.  Well, whoever designed KACE had those same experiences; just they were more motivated than us to build it. 
 
 KACE isn't the first solution to do Inventory, Asset Management, Software Distribution, Patch Management, Software Distribution, Patch Management, Service Desk, Network OS Install, Disk Imaging, Centralized Deployment Library, and Inventory Assessment, however it is the first one that does it all in one set of appliances (physical or virtual), without breaking the bank.   The thing that surprised me the most was the cost.  Now every sales book you read (don't you read those?) says to sell on value not on cost, well I know that when you go to your CIO / CFO they look at cost, it doesn't matter what the value is.  That being said, the value is ridiculous compared to a software only package (think Unicenter), and KACE comes with hardware.  This is a very tight package that is designed to fit into an organization under 10,000 seats and provide a single administrator (or group) the ability to manage, maintain, deploy, report, patch, and monitor. It is designed to remedy the "Too Many Hats" syndrome that plagues many IT specialists in the age of "Do More with Less".  What I found ingenious was the fact that they offer this as a set of virtual machines, or a set of physical appliances.  Either way it is the same features, functionality, price, etc. without any add-on costs.  Everything is out of the box included.  I highly recommend viewing one of their 3 demos they put on every week.  Click to Sign Up for Demo