Kace In Point: The KBox 1000

On September 12, the Mountain View, Calif., vendor will introduce the KBox 1000, a fortified version of its original client-management appliance that extends a comprehensive set of management and automation tools to devices running not just Windows but also Mac OS X and Red Hat Linux operating systems, Baker said. The upgraded software in the KBox 1000IT Management Suite 2.1enables security policy enforcement and auditing, policy scripting, process automation such as storage backup and software distribution, and help desk ticketing, she said.

Two flavors of the KBox 1000 will be available, one for networks with between 100 and 1,000 clients, and a second for counts between 500 and 7,500, said Lubos Parobek, director of product marketing. For a KBox that manages 1000 clients, the cost to the solution provider is $26,000, which equals one year's worth of licensing for $26 per desktop, he said.

If you compare the price of a KBox to rival desktop management software, what you get is a roughly similar feature set, equal to or lower in price, and a product that will continue to deliver long-term savings because of how simple it is to manage, Parobek said. Some comparable examples to KBox include the LANDesk Process Manager, which starts at about $35,000 for fewer than 1,000 employees, or $35 per seat; HP's OpenView Client Configuration Manager, which starts at about $25 per seat for about the same seat count; or components of IBM's Tivoli Express midmarket desktop management software portfolio, which range from about $25 per user to around $200, according to each of the separate vendors.

Price matters in this market because it can be difficult for solution providers to get customers to allocate the budget for desktop management products, said Paul McCarthy, principle at The 4Sight Group, a solution provider in Wilmington, Del., who partners with both Kace and HP.

"If you go to a management-level person and ask them how much pain PC management is causing, they will probably say 'not much,' so the justification for toolsets like these tend to start in the IT department, where resources really do get sucked into making sure things are copacetic at the desktop level," McCarthy said.

Kace has added about 20 new reseller partners since October, and is staffing up its national field support to assist new partners interested in coming on board, Baker said.