IT software maker SpiceWorks just closed an $8 million in series B financing. The funding round was led by Shasta Ventures with participation from Spiceworks series A investor, Austin Ventures. Their series A was $5 million. Shasta Ventures co-founder and managing director, Ravi Mohan, and former Dell senior executive, John Hamlin, have joined the Spiceworks board of directors. The money will be used to support over 120,000 users as well as software development and sales and marketing.
SpiceWorks’ software is an IT Desktop suite, consisting of a Network Inventory, Help Desk, Reporting, Monitoring and Troubleshooting applications. Taking a page from a lot of the consumer applications we profile on TechCrunch, their software is completely free and ad supported. Ravi Mohan of Shasta calls the shift toward ad supported systems the “consumerization of the enterprise”.
The ads are served via Google AdSense along a sidebar as you use the application. The idea is that IT professionals get a free suite of the basic tools they need and advertisers get access to a targeted audience that spends a lot of time in front of those ads (lots of page views).
Are we going to see the ad-supported model spreading across enterprise applications? Not likely, considering the great support and set up costs associated with most enterprise installations. However, SpiceWorks’ free bundle of basic IT programs helps differentiate themselves in the highly competitive category of SMB IT tools.
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What’s wrong with Nagios, Cati or Zenoss? And do not forget RT. I forgot the name of the open source tool that we use for inventory, but it still rocks!!
nothing is “wrong” with them, what’s wrong with spice works ?
you should try it if you have’nt…
pro - you don’t need a book and little config files to make it work
We think what Spiceworks is doing is part of the evolution of IT. There is no reason why there is such a disconnect between end users and their every day tools. IT people should not be needed as much as they are today.
In a perfect world there would be a magic CD that an office manager would have that could repair a machine to various levels of cleanliness including wiping it out and restoring all apps and user data - all within an hour and all point and click and the whole process carefully monitored remotely by experts.
The hard core networking and WAN stuff will still need occasional attention by qualified engineers but machine setups and moves should be easy enough to do that it can be accomplished by office staff and interns with expert remote support if they get stuck.
And most everything else should be SaaS - except for local file serving.
Here at Sinu, we are working on these kind of solutions to the SMB IT problem and can’t wait to work with Spiceworks to help make knowledge workers more productive, their day more predictable and with fewer IT people under their desks.
great work Spiceworks!
Michael,
You said : “Are we going to see the ad-supported model spreading across enterprise applications? Not likely, considering the great support and set up costs associated with most enterprise installations.”
What are the inherent product differences between an subscription-based enterprise app for SFA or CRM and an ad-supported version of the same app?
Congratulations to the entire Spiceworks team! Their passion for building great IT tools is evident and I look forward to seeing how this round will help them grow their IT community.
woah - this will definitely shake up the enterprise applications market!
On one hand, MIS are always looking to cut costs in as many ways as possible, especially in cost centre items such as support and maintenance. But they also need to think about security concerns for allowing advertisements from “outside” the firewall into the corporate system.
And then you have the enterprise application vendors, who depend on the maintenance contracts to fund their product R&D. If this model takes off, they will have to quickly rethink their product strategy, embrace this or die.
I think this can really take off if companies like Spiceworks really pay attention to providing great customer support (which is why many companies play hostage to enterprise vendors anyway) and Google AdSense have rating systems for advertisers to ensure no security concerns to their ads.
Here’s to interesting times!!
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