New KACE Appliances Deliver Enterprise-Class Systems Management Capabilities at a Mid-Market Price

Business Wire, Oct 15, 2007

Latest KBOX Releases Empower Mid-Sized Companies to Achieve the Security, Control, and Scale Previously Only Reserved for Large Enterprises

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- KACE, the leading systems management appliance company, today announced the latest release of the KBOX Systems Management and KBOX Systems Deployment Appliances, the industry's first appliances to provide "enterprise-class" functionality at an affordable price. The new features of KACE's award-winning KBOX family of appliances provide medium enterprises the scalability, security, and control previously only known by large enterprises. Focused on saving customers time and money, KACE has added new functionality and several key features to its appliances to meet the needs of the largest medium enterprises.

Also today, KACE announced a partnership with Lumension Security[TM], formerly PatchLink Corporation([R]), to provide customers with enterprise-ready patching and remediation capabilities seamlessly integrated into the KBOX appliance. (Editor's note: please see "KACE and Lumension Security Forge Partnership to Deliver Comprehensive Patch Management for the Medium Enterprise" press release at http://www.kace.com/about/releases/10_15_07_lumension.php)

"KACE's new vision for its systems management and deployment appliances truly brings enterprise-class functionality at a medium enterprise price point," said Marty Kacin, KACE president, CTO, and co-founder. "The pain points of the mid-market grow as the size of the enterprise grows. The largest medium enterprises require similar support and scale as any large enterprise would and now KACE can help them to achieve true, enterprise-class security, control, and scale."

Medium enterprises have the same systems management and deployment challenges as the largest enterprises, but usually with more constraints -- smaller teams, limited budgets, and an IT staff required to wear many hats throughout the day. With the release of the latest versions of the KBOX Systems Management and KBOX Systems Deployment Appliances (1200 and 2200 Series), medium enterprises can now achieve the same security, control, and scale as Fortune 1000 companies by leveraging "enterprise-class" features such as higher security through robust role-based permissions, industry leading patch management, and the ability to scale to manage thousands of nodes on a single appliance.

Highlighted new capabilities of the KBOX Systems Management Appliance (1200 Series) include:

* Industry-leading patch management technology through a new partnership with Lumension Security, seamlessly embedding PatchLink's assessment and remediation engine to provide enterprise-level patch management, as well as access to the world's largest vulnerability metadata database, alongside the full range of KBOX systems management capabilities from a single appliance, and single agent, significantly improving security and ease-of-use.

* Policy-based Help Desk functionality complete with queues, ticket workflow rules, and email-based ticket management, significantly improving administrators control and management over the help desk process.

* Role-based permissions and change auditing, significantly improving the control and security systems administrators have over systems management activities.

Among the new features of the KBOX Systems Deployment Appliance (2200 Series) are:

* State Management, which allows system administrators to manage both physical and virtual computer "states" across thousands of nodes from a single appliance and UI. The technology uniquely allows customers to re-provision or reconfigure both virtual and physical machines based on a centrally defined system manifest, saving valuable time and money when managing large numbers of mixed-environment workstations.

* Improved Image Editing capabilities, significantly improving the control system administrators have over the deployment process.

* iSCSCi support, enabling higher scalability by allowing the KBOX Deployment Library to be deployed off-board to any iSCSI SAN.

"Our IT infrastructure is complex and requires a variety of toolsets to manage it," said Jason Cummins, I.S. Services Manager of Jordan's Furniture, Inc. "KACE provides us with everything we need through one easy-to-use interface. We'll no doubt be able to provide immediate value to our organization by leveraging the enhanced Help Desk, role-based permissions, and change auditing capabilities of this latest KBOX systems management appliance release. Additionally, we'll harness the power of the new, intuitive interface for patch management, based on the strength of the Lumension platform--The KBOX truly is our Swiss Army Knife of systems management."

KACE's KBOX Family of Appliances saves customers both time and money. Systems managers from medium enterprises are often forced to wear many hats throughout the day to work on a myriad of IT functions. KACE helps consolidate these functions providing a single appliance for all of their projects, while delivering easy-to-use, comprehensive systems management that is affordable. KBOX Systems Management Appliances fulfill all of the systems management needs of a medium enterprise, including initial discovery, distribution, patching, configuration, security, asset management, helpdesk, and reporting. KBOX Systems Deployment Appliances fulfill all of the systems provisioning needs of a medium enterprise, including inventory assessment, OS deployment, application distribution, configuration, and recovery.