I’ve pointed to Spiceworks marketing a few times before as something worth checking out for other IT Management folks, big and small, old and young. Their product is interesting as well: essentially, a free, ad-supported product you download to do basic asset discovery, management, and then monitoring on your behind-the-firewall networks. Over the past year, they’ve been adding in more and more collaborative IT management features. First, forums where users could ask questions and trade advice. Then there was tighter integration to asking questions related to different IT assets and events.
Now, as the below preview shows, they’re working on ways to figure out applying crowd sourcing ideas to IT management:
Spiceworks has been around for pretty much as long as I’ve been at RedMonk - longer while they were in stealth mode - so I’ve been able to watch them “grow up,” more or less. Their mix of a targeting a small, underserved market, a price of “free,” and the ongoing community gardening they’ve done has grown them to over 325,000 “active users.” That’s a pretty good metric for success, and an excellent figure to shop around to Spiceworks “paying” customers, advertisers. I’d wager even people like Microsoft could figure out using Spiceworks as a channel for the System Center line without getting in the weird worry lines of competitive offerings. For example, Spiceworks still doesn’t do provisioning and updating - though it’ll tell you when you need to do it - an IT management task the Windows-heavy user-base of Spiceworks would probably look towards Microsoft to solve.
More interesting from my seat, though, will be seeing what and how Spiceworks does with their collaborative IT management efforts. There’s definitely a large pool of data to work with there and, even better, a passionate and interested community of users.
Previous Topic
