Making The Kace For Affordable Client Management In The Midmarket

Client management for mid-market customers shouldn’t require heavy lifting. At least that’s the message one startup hopes will resonate with partners as it recruits for its new channel program.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Kace doesn’t want to sell direct anymore. It’s goal is 100 percent channel sales, said Sheila Baker, vice president of marketing at the company.

To help reach this goal, Kace is recruiting for the new Kace Partner Program launched last week.

Currently, Kace has just five or six partners signed but is looking to add as many as 50 more as the vendor transitions its inside telesales team to the role of lead generation for partners, Baker said.

The Kace KBox IT Management Suite is the vendor’s lighter-weight midmarket alternative to management products from vendors such as Altiris and LANDesk, which are heavily saddled with enterprise-level baggage, Baker said.

Broadly targeted at businesses with between 100 and 5,000 employees, the KBox suite comes on a rack-mountable 1U appliance that performs an equally broad range of tasks. Be it PC or server monitoring, system and patch management, inventory and licensing audits, or security and compliance configuration, the KBox can deliver—and without a lot of fuss, Baker said. “From the get-go we have wanted to build a product that is the easiest to use in the market,” she said. “And we have.”

The KBox enables Paul McCarthy, principle at The 4Sight Group, a solution provider in Wilmington, Del., to more effectively assess the needs of his SMB clients.

“Historically, the products that have been out there have been hit or miss, have had a higher cost of entry, and most of all weren’t meant to be portable,” McCarthy said. “But with Kace, a true plug-and-play solution, we can walk into a customer environment and, if we want, start working with the client looking over our shoulder,” he said.

Steve DeNato, sales manager at solution provider Vega Business Technologies, San Diego, said the KBox has helped many of his customers bridge critical gaps in an affordable manner. For example, customers have complemented 3Com’s TippingPoint virtual patching with Kace’s patch management tools, DeNato said. Likewise, customers guarding their network with Juniper Networks end-point security products added KBoxes to update quarantined devices with the required antivirus code, DeNato said. “[KBox] opens a lot of doors.”

Buying Kace’s KBox IT Management Suite begins the program enrollment and training process for solution providers that want to join, Baker said. A one-year reseller agreement is required, as is technical training for the KBox, which takes place over the phone and usually requires about two days, she said.

Typical partner margins run in the 20 percent range, and partners that register deals get 10 extra points on top of that, she said. KBoxes start at about $8,850.

Kace knows it faces an uphill battle against well-entrenched competitors, Baker said. “One customer was looking at us and at Altiris, and his thinking was Altiris is bigger and better. So he went that route, started doing an evaluation and found he had to get 12 different application packages and make them work together. At that point, he called us back and bought a KBox,” she said.

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