(Editor's Note: This article refers to a video interview shot at Interop 2010. To view TMCnet's entire library of videos from Interop and other industry shows, demonstrations and interviews in our in-house studio, visit our Video News home page.)
Recently at the Interop 2010 show in Las Vegas, TMC's CEO Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) had a chance to sit down and talk with Spiceworks' VP of Marketing and company cofounder Jay Hallberg.
It's a four year old company that "gives away, completely free, network management software," Hallberg said. It's designed for IT professionals in companies with "typically fewer than a thousand employees." It does network inventory, monitoring and such functions, and has an integrated help desk, which helps tie the whole inventory workflow together.
It's free, Hallberg noted, and what else is beneficial is the active community, which has, he said, led some to call it "the Facebook (News - Alert) for IT." The company's typical user, he said, is totally alone as the IT professional for an accounting firm or something like that, maybe in a small team of just a few people, and they can be part of a community where they can find expertise in areas they need help with - "I might be an expert in databases but not really know that much about networking," he said by way of example, "but I'm still responsible for it." In that situation he'd turn to the community for help.
Hallberg said over a million people are currently using Spiceworks (News - Alert), with "about 96 percent of those from companies with fewer than a thousand employees."
He said they base their business model on Google, and Google search. "There are over 200 companies, from Microsoft (News - Alert), Cisco, Dell, Intel," companies like that advertising to the Spiceworks community: "Exactly the same model that works for Google and Facebook, we've made work for a business application."
View the full video interview below (Apple (News - Alert) users click here):
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David's articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Patrick Barnard