System Center Guide

This just in:

Dell announced today it has signed an agreement to acquire Kace, a leading systems-management appliance company with solutions tailored to the requirements of midsized businesses and public (government, education and healthcare) institutions.

Kace provides comprehensive and affordable solutions through the award-winning KBOX systems-management and deployment appliances which carry a wide range of capabilities including:

• Device discovery, PC and server inventory, and asset management;
• Configuration management, including operating system deployment, software distribution, application virtualization and scripting;
• End-point security via patch management, security-policy enforcement and vulnerability scanning; and,
• Service management through integrated service desk, user portal and alerting.
Dell channel partners will be able to resell Dell / Kace products, but the channel integration plan is not yet final. In the interim, we welcome our Channel Partners to go directly to the Kace Team to set-up a reselling agreement at http://www.kace.com/partners/application.php. Learn more at http://www.kace.com/partners/channel-partners.php

KACE has been successful in selling to midsized customers in every industry vertical, but has been particularly successful in K-12 and higher education, as well as state and local government. For a sampling of KACE customers by vertical and size see the KACE customer pages at http://www.Kace.com/customer

If you have additional questions on our recent acquisition, please read the Press Release located at http://content.dell.com/us/en/corp/d/secure/2010-2-11-Kace-Acquisition.aspx or contact your Dell Account Team.

Learn more about Kace products at http://www.Kace.com/products

I received this today from a colleague at Dell. Please forward to any mid-sized companies that you may know.

Hi All

The enterprise design and usability group at Dell is looking to get out and learn more about systems management in medium-sized IT shops (around 100-500 employees or 20-250 servers) It doesn’t matter if you a Dell customer or not and this isn’t related to sales or marketing in any way.

Our goal is learn more about the key scenarios and pain points that sys admins in medium sized IT shops have, how they juggle roles, what tools they use, how we can make their lives easier, etc. We are looking for groups that will let about 2 usability guys come out on site, meet some people, and see what it’s like.

If you think your group would be interested, please contact ryan_west (@) dell (dot) com.