UPDATED Amid a wave of consolidations in the management software sector, Boston-based software maker ManageSoft has rolled out its latest
edition, ManageSoft 7.0.
Three applications make up the automated IT software package: ManageSoft for Windows Deployment, IT Business Intelligence and Security Patch Management. Taken together, the software suite automatically deploys, updates and manages
the software running on a company’s desktop workstations, PCs and mobile devices.
The latest release for Windows, Linux and Unix platforms arrives after larger interests snapped up some of the company’s competitors.
For example, Hewlett-Packard purchased Novadigm (for
$121 million) and Consera Software last February. In October, ON
Technology sold out to Symantec for $100 million, and BMC
bought Marimba in April for $239 million.
Despite the shrinking number of smaller players, a company official is upbeat about its competitive position.
“I think its great, because A, it validates the market and B, we’re kind of like
the last independent company that focuses of this as a whole,” Tony Duarte,
ManageSoft director of worldwide business development, told internetnews.com.
New features found in version 7 include:
- automatically “discovering” new computers on the network and installing
agents on them to determine which operating system or application versions they
are running for possible updates. - dynamic network optimization to respond to changes in bandwidth at
different geographic locations — reducing consumption on stressed networks and
opening up bandwidth speeds on available networks. - Web-based status reports on every machine in the inventory for
administrators. - Software license management that tracks use at different business units and
locations.
Duarte said his company’s product stands apart from the competition because of
its client-based architecture. Most managed software providers, he said, are inherently flawed because a centrally-managed server introduces a single
critical point of failure to the mix. Under a server-centric operation, Duarte added, the client logs into the central server, which has to figure out what’s on
the computer and what needs to be on the computer then install it into the client.
“If you think about a company that’s got 50,000 devices across the world, in that scenario it means you’re going to have to go out and buy a bunch of hefty
servers to render and handle all the requests coming at it by those clients,” he
said. “Our notion is the complete opposite of that, what we do is put an
intelligent agent on the client and the device effectively manages itself, so
that the end-point handles the manageability and processes itself.”
The company’s technology has garnered a blue-ribbon list of customers who have
bought off on the client-based architecture, such as Tyco, the U.S. Army Materiel Command, Philip Morris U.S.A., T-Mobile and NEC.
Corrects prior version to reflect that the company’s main location is in Boston and corrects reference to reflect that the software is client-based, not server based.
