IT management software vendor Spiceworks recently announced the 100,000th download of Spiceworks IT Desktop, its free, advert-sponsored admin suite, which has just been updated. The news should give suppliers of paid-for software something to think about, observers said.

Spiceworks co-founder and marketing vice-president Jay Hallberg said the UK, with 13,000 downloads, is the second-biggest market for Spiceworks IT Desktop, and that the package now has 100,000 users worldwide managing 4.3 million desktop systems. “Reaching 100,000 downloads is kind of a psychological marker, and hitting that number of users in under a year puts a stake into the hearts of the pundits who said that people wouldn’t stand for adverts,” he added.

Spiceworks IT Desktop is a highly customisable package that performs network inventory and monitoring and includes an integrated helpdesk system. The system can be installed in under five minutes and has most of the features needed to manage the IT needs of a medium-sized business, Hallberg said. It can report on and monitor desktop systems and installed software automatically, without the need to install agents on each individual machine, while support requests are submitted to the web-based helpdesk.

The package was written using the open-source Ruby on Rails – normally shortened to Rails – web application framework, which was mainly developed by David Heinemeier Hansson and released in 2004. According to Hallberg, use of Rails is growing faster than Java did in the 1990s.

In IT Week tests, the Spiceworks software performed well, so should its popularity set alarm bells ringing in the headquarters of the big three enterprise IT management vendors – CA, HP and IBM? Gartner research vice-president Milind Govekar said the Spiceworks model poses little threat in the enterprise market, but has the potential to disrupt the big three’s plans for the small to medium-sized business (SMB) sector.

“Spiceworks is really targeting firms with between 20 and 250 employees, with the sweet spot being 50-100, but there’s no reason why these features cannot be used by some of the larger firms,” Govekar said. However, he added that systems such as Spiceworks tend to suffer major availability and performance problems when applied to larger enterprises where “the complexities are pretty huge”.

Govekar said Spiceworks would be well advised to stay out of the way of the bigger vendors. “There’s plenty of money to be made in the SMB market and vendors like CA and the rest are desperate to get into this. The big danger to Spiceworks is Microsoft, which is investing very heavily in management tools,” he explained.

One of the key limitations of Spiceworks from a large enterprise perspective is that it cannot be used to manage systems over WAN links. Hallberg said the firm has no plans to directly target the high end of the corporate market, but he added that it is making modest inroads into larger enterprises, claiming that one company is managing more than 2,000 devices with Spiceworks, and six percent of installs are on networks with over 200 devices.

“There are cases in larger enterprises where IT managers would use our package for specialised scenarios rather than spend £10,000 on something they wouldn’t get full use out of,” Hallberg added.

The latest update – version 1.6 – adds several features that could appeal to IT managers, including the ability to control desktops remotely over the LAN. It also now supports 21 versions of seven antivirus packages, and improvements have been made to the “compare” feature, which allows IT managers to check configuration differences between apparently identical systems.

With the new remote control feature IT managers can now connect and manage desktops using either Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) or the platform-independent, open-source Virtual Network Computing (VNC) tool. “With Windows systems, we turn the remote desktop feature on and when IT managers have finished ‘driving’ the desktop and disconnect, we turn it off for security reasons,” said Hallberg.

In our tests we found the software to be quick and easy to install, while the adverts displayed by Spiceworks, which fill a vertical section that takes up around a third of the screen, were not too obtrusive.

There are six tabs on the startup screen: My Spiceworks, Inventory, Helpdesk, Reports, Community and Settings. The screenshot above shows the Spiceworks feature request list, which allows users to post feature requests to the Community – a forum for all Spiceworks users.

Currently, the most requested feature is one that can be found in most IT management packages, namely software to produce a network diagram showing switches, routers, firewalls and other network devices, and the desktop systems attached to each switch.

One of the most useful features is the My Spiceworks page, which allows users to configure the content viewable on the page as a “virtual desktop”. Users can set up the page to display alerts from Spiceworks, RSS feeds, helpdesk requests or “tickets”, and even the most current Microsoft security bulletins complete with a link direct to those bulletins.

Details of new hardware or software discovered by Spiceworks when it scans desktop systems can be automatically posted onto the My Spiceworks. Users can also set up a My Notes section on the screen, where they can keep to-do lists, for example.