Quest Software Enhances Kace Systems Management Appliance

Quest Software, liberated from Dell Software about two years ago, on Monday announced general availability of the Kace Systems Management Appliance (SMA) 9.0, with major release enhancements.

The global systems management, data protection and security software provider spent 2018 getting back to its roots, with the motto — Kace is Back. Kace SMA 9.0 features improvements to workflow and infrastructure, and updates to service desk, asset management, endpoint communications and security functionalities. Quest Kace SMA allows IT administrators to manage network-attached devices – such as notebooks, PCs and printers to Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile devices – from a single pane of glass.

“Partners are telling us that our mutual customers are facing challenges when it comes to the complexity and growth of endpoint and asset management,” Ken Galvin, senior product manager, told us. “Kace SMA 9,0 helps them automate, proactively manage and secure and service their growing endpoint environment.”

Quest Software moved to a 100 percent channel strategy in the first quarter of this year.

“We did that to extend our reach. Partnering with regional experts within certain disciplines, it adds more value to Quest partners who don’t currently have a Kace practice,” Galvin said. The Quest Partner Circle is a multilevel partner program with rewards based on a partner’s level of commitment. The company added new web-based training this year as well as other enablement for partners.

Ken Galvin

One of the key new Kace SMA 9.0 features is a single console for comprehensive management of the endpoint environment. The “single pane of glass” management capability is good for both midsize organizations with generalist-type IT skills or companies with disparate management systems, Quest said. It helps businesses proactively provision, manage, secure and service their growing endpoint environments.

Through a single-pane-of-glass view, businesses can easily manage devices, mitigate security risks, address service tickets and audit for compliance. IT admins can also ensure that software licensing is being used efficiently to avoid waste, and to reduce time and resources required for troubleshooting errors. Additionally, KACE is future-ready to manage next-generation technologies such as IoT.

Kace users will also see new dashboards for service desk, asset management, and endpoint communications that put widgets, links and new feeds all in one place.  A SysTray application has also been added to show the connection status of the agent for Windows and Mac and allows for easy restart of the agent or a forced inventory with just the click of a mouse.

“We’ve always had dashboards, but now users don’t have to waste their time looking around,” said Galvin.

Here are some other Kace SMA 9.0 features:

• Service Desk and User Console: Automated service desk ticketing allows certain alerts to automatically create new service-desk tickets. Users can approve or reject tickets right from email, without having to revisit the SMA interface.
• Software License Asset Management: Software License Harvest Assistant allows users to quickly and easily detect and act to remove seldom-used software, a powerful function for improving efficiencies. Software catalog customization allows users to restrict which items are considered licensed software in license compliance (for example, NET, Facetime, Spotify, Solitaire, vSphere Client) and only see what is considered important to the organization.
• Endpoint Communications: Added support for Raspberry Pi/Raspbian Linux Agent enables users to perform inventory, scripts, managed installations and other actions just like other Linux distributions. Additionally, remote machine actions allow the Agent Relay Tunnel to start a custom machine action via a designated computer in a remote subnet.
• Platform and Infrastructure: Two-factor authentication provides an added layer of security, and a common calendar offers a global view of events such as managed installs, patching, scripts and OVAL scanning.