Interest In Patch Management Rises Following Slammer

Shavlik Technologies, St. Paul, Minn., last week released the first major upgrade to its Microsoft patch management product, HFNetChkPro, while BigFix, Emeryville, Calif., recently rolled out a tool that enables IT administrators to create their own patches.

Patch management took center stage earlier this year following the SQL Slammer worm, which spread quickly by exploiting a known vulnerability in Microsoft SQL Server 2000. Microsoft had released a patch for the flaw in July.

"We saw patch management increasing in the fourth quarter, but with the SQL [Slammer] worm, demand really went up," said Mark Shavlik, president and CEO of Shavlik Technologies.

Patch management is "on everybody's list," said Paul Stith, principal consultant and owner of the SUM Group, a solution provider based in Scotts Valley, Calif. Events such as the SQL Slammer worm help make patch management technology a high priority for companies, he said.

"It's usually lessons hard-learned that spring people into action," Stith said.

Shavlik Technologies created HFNetChk in 2001 and licenses the tool to Microsoft. HFNetChkPro, with its additional features, is aimed at enterprise customers and allows administrators to scan systems and deploy patches without installing agents, Shavlik said.

The new version has features that streamline and automate the patching process to make an administrator's job easier, he said.

These new features include templates to manage groups of systems, drag-and-drop patch management, support for patch testing, an automated tracker that provides realtime information on patch status, offline support and third-party threat analysis that provides research on patches.

Pricing for HFNetChkPro 4.0 starts at $23.75 per server or workstation for 100 managed CPUs.

"This tool really helps out a lot," said Mayling Liang, vice president of Norland Group, a Redwood City, Calif.-based solution provider that sells the product to government agencies.

Patching Microsoft systems is time-consuming, particularly for large organizations with hundreds of systems, she said. HFNetChkPro saves a lot of manpower and also has strong reporting capabilities, she added.

In related news, San Diego-based St. Bernard Software recently launched a formal channel program to help boost sales of its patch-management software, UpdateExpert, as well as its Open File Manager backup software and IPrism Internet filtering appliance.

Benefits of St. Bernard Software's SuccessNet Partner Program include product and technical training, priority technical support, qualified leads, preferred pricing, comarketing programs, demo units and incentives.

St. Bernard Software offers margins ranging from 25 percent to 35 percent, said Jeff Graham, channel development manager. The company has about 250 solution provider partners in the United States.

"There's not a glut of resellers representing our product, and it's not our intention to have every reseller selling our product," Graham said. "We are allowing our resellers to hang onto that margin."

The SUM Group's Stith said a key element to UpdateExpert's success is that it maintains an independent database of patches instead of relying on Microsoft's patch list.

The SUM Group is a St. Bernard Software partner.

"Most vendors just feed off [Microsoft's list] and live off what Microsoft says is the way the world is," he said. "That's terrible because Microsoft goofs up often. To have a vendor that's testing and validating and keeping a clean database away from Microsoft is a big advantage."

Also, Gibraltar Software, Sunnyvale, Calif., unveiled Everguard System 2.0, the second version of its cross-platform patch management tool.