Dell management app to help firms
Dell Software has announced the latest version of its KACE K1000 management application, which now includes integrated software-asset management to ensure licence compliance, while helping lower IT costs.
A flagship product in Dell Software’s endpoint systems management portfolio, the K1000 adds automated software asset identification, tracking and optimisation to its list of capabilities for managing the deployment, operation and retirement of an organisation’s critical software assets.
The rapid adoption of virtualisation, cloud computing and BYOD (bring your own device) further complicates software-licensing structures, which can increase a company’s risk of non-compliance.
BSA Software Alliance, a global advocate for the software industry, settled unlicensed-software cases with 12 different companies between January 2012 and May this year. These settlements, valued at an estimated US$3.3 million, reveal the costly consequences of non-compliance while reinforcing the critical need for highly reliable, accurate reporting of all software licences.
With this latest release, the K1000 simplifies the increasingly arduous task of responding to software audits by tracking, assessing and ensuring software-licence compliance across multiple versions, as well as inconsistent package and component names.
Additionally, the K1000 eases the burden of determining software usage, which is difficult because of complex software-licensing structures. As a result, Dell Software can empower organisations of all sizes to identify software licences with great accuracy while making it easy to reclaim and reallocate under-utilised software.
David Kloba, general manager of endpoint systems management for Dell Software, said constant market changes such as mergers, acquisitions and product end-of-life (EOL) announcements often increased an organisation’s risk of exposure to non-compliance fines or software overspending.
“By extending the K1000’s capabilities with automated and integrated software-asset management, Dell is making major strides in helping our customers improve software compliance, reduce unnecessary licence costs and accelerate software migrations,” Kloba said.
In addition to its software-asset management enhancements, the new release of the K1000 enables information-technology administrators to capture and report new hardware characteristics to gauge organisational readiness for operating-system and application migrations and upgrades. For any company planning an imminent move to Windows 7 or Windows 8, the ability to produce an accurate inventory of hardware and software assets is an essential first step in the migration process, Dell says.
Dennis Drogseth, vice president of Enterprise Management Associates, said Dell KACE K1000 brought a unique combination of knowledge base, inventory, usage analysis, and full life-cycle management to help ensure that licence management is both effective and can provide improved integration into broader asset and service management concerns.
