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Hey, welcome to another version of KACE On the Go. Today, we're going to talk about software metering. My name is James Rico. I'm a senior sales engineer. Dave, do you want to introduce yourself?
Hey, I'm Dave Hunter. I'm the same as James. I'm a senior sales engineer with KACE, my focus on the West Coast. And yeah, thanks for having me today, James.
Yeah, no, great to have you. Hey, yeah, so we're going to talk about software metering and how KACE does that. For those who don't know, basically, KACE allows you to track software in your environment, track licenses against that. And we can actually kind of unique thing is track software is being launched or not. How often is it being launched? Who's using it, what machine it's on, so really help narrow down how software is being used in your environment.
Dave, I know you had a deal you worked recently that the customer specifically needed that do. You want to talk a little bit about that?
Oh yeah, sure, yeah, you betcha. Yeah, so I had a customer, James in a fairly large engineering firm. And of course, their software is typically very expensive in that space. They actually trialed a couple of competitive products, and they were almost ready to purchase. And then they found out that without naming competitors, they really couldn't do the job right. So my sales rep asked me to do a demo, briefly talking to the customer. And I was like, well, the demo won't really cut it. So let's just spin up a trial box up in Azure.
The same day, you could tell the customer was invested, they deployed 25 machines. And we spent a couple of weeks, just sat down, worked out from inventory. We have a fairly robust software asset management database in our software catalog, right? So once we discovered the software in the environment, we could single-click meter. So we collected that data for two weeks. And then we basically just had a wrap-up meeting with the customer to prove out, hey, we can do what you want, right?
So he was incredibly happy. And then once we got over that initial hurdle, we spent a little bit of time how else we can support their environment through the balance of the box. So we talked about software patching, third party patching including the engineering software is actually part of our catalog. Software distribution, how can we update, maintain, remove applications as well as the reporting and self-service user portal and things like that.
So it was an awesome experience. It's typically, it was a very short win for us hyper focused on what the customer needed. And then once we tick that box, we went through and how else can we compliment and make their day-to-day life easier and their environment more secure. As you know, our viewers probably don't. Our products come with Quickstart, so it's kind of a mandatory onboarding/PSO/training that covers most of the box, right?
So he wanted a little bit more in-depth training for his team. So I invited Mark Gonzalez as our PSO Architect Manager in. We wrote a statement of work for that as well as some custom reporting so that we could really dig deeper into his software license usage and put some polished reporting around that.
Yeah, and I think most the time, we see folks that are after software metering. They have those titles that are pretty expensive. And I think we're probably talking about an AutoCAD today. So for them, he said he needed metering, but what was his end goal, or why did he need to meter that software?
Yeah like you can imagine the cost of AutoCAD depending on what currency you're in. It's $6,000 $10,000, right? And for them, in particular, I think they had up to 1,000 engineers on the road. So it's a very sizable investment, right? So you could use software metering in various use cases. You know James is my new engineer. I just onboarded. He's asked for A, B, and C. I can actually look at my install base. I can see what I have.
Once I have a import from my portal as to my license ownership status, I can actually see what I own, who's got it, is it being used? So I can actually make informed decisions around do I need to go and invest more money in that software title? Or can I just reallocate a piece of software that maybe Dave's not using and give it to James, right? So there's lots of wins. I mean, we're talking about that.
But the software catalog can be used for simple things like standardization of off the shelf products like Google Chrome, Firefox, or Adobe Reader, right? Why am I supporting five versions of Adobe Reader in my environment, right? The catalog can give you very specific install bases and counts and monitor major software roll ups. So it can extend further past his use case. We also do application control in the catalog as well, so things like BitTorrent and stuff.
If you want to say, hey, I just don't want BitTorrent to ever be executed in my environment, we can also do that within the catalog as well.
Yep. I think one of the things I like about it is it helps people project their spend for next year. So when they're going for that budget hey, here's exactly what we need. Here's exactly what we're needing. I think another use case is maybe people are buying a suite of software. And then when they meter that, they find out, oh, they're only using two applications out of five. Why are we buying the whole suite? Maybe it's cheaper to pull that back and just buy the two individual components if it's cheaper.
Yeah, for sure In the good old days, we'll age ourselves here, but Microsoft Office was a great candidate for that, right? If you didn't need access, why buy professional, right? You could go back to a standard version and save a bunch of money. So yeah, there's definitely a lot of benefits to that catalog. And I think the thing with us is just ease of use. I mean, the customer couldn't believe how easy it was to simply search the catalog, find the product he wanted to meter, and it's just a tick box.
And even on the back end, if you're concerned about network performance and bandwidth consumption, all the agent stuff is configurable including metering, like how often do we want to upload the meter data from the local machine back to us as an appliance. So I think there was a few other things other than just the data we could get but also how we collect it and how we can transport it back, right, so.
Yeah, and I think, too, there's some products out there that if they're an asset product, you're going to pay extra for a software catalog to do discovery. And we basically just out of the box are doing that and keeping that up to date. No extra charge as part of the product, so.
Yeah, and I think the other cool part, too is like when we talk, we just talked about metering today, but that really goes into asset management as a whole whether it's hardware, software, asset management. It could be repetitive maintenance in data centers for [? Inogen ?] and UPSs and stuff, right? But any time that we import license counts or create an asset record, we do have the ability to assign maintenance end dates, maintenance start dates, what kind of software is it? What's the subscription? Is it a unit cost?
So all of this data we can attach to that record. We can then trigger automated reporting, right? So if for some reason yeah, you bought another five licenses of AutoCAD, but it's not confirmed in the first year for various reasons. Or maybe you're a new IT manager that's just come on, and you don't really know what your environment is. It can really help you stay on top of your licensing and especially when you have products that need maintenance for support that nothing slips through the gap because you're not really aware of what you have, right?
So I think there's way more to the box around than just simple metering that can really complement.
Yeah, and and I think, too, I know I talked to folks where they're getting their act together, gather around purchasing and asset management. And in the past, they had hey, anybody with a P card could go order software or order hardware, literally had companies, they would run down to Best Buy and buy a laptop when they had a new employee. Not ideal for sure, but you can easily with KACE, using our agent and our software catalog quickly understand what you have in your environment and be able to track it.
And I just want to circle back real quick, and then we'll wrap up on this. You brought our services guy in to help with that specifically around metering and/or assets and metering. What kind of things was Mark able to do for them to help streamline their process?
Yeah, so just obviously, , we collect a lot of data, right? And for most software titles, you have to restrict what data you present in the GUI because it would just be overwhelming, right? And our focus is ease of use mentality. So there was data around consumption of licensing, who's using it, how often is it used, execution. But actually putting it in a report that's digestible is probably a good word to use, right?
Yeah.
And then once we've created those reports, we can also trigger notifications based on those, right? We can say, hey, the first day of every month, I want a report sent to James as a PDF that tells him a summarized version of this. And maybe Dave needs a detailed version of the same report, right? So even though we do have a lot of canned reports around compliance and software metering usage, our TSO team can really dive a lot deeper into the database and give more granular information than perhaps a canned report could do,
Great, great information. So I guess if folks want to know more, they can go over to quest.com/kace and see our whole product line and give us a holler Dave, I appreciate you coming in today.
Yeah, thanks, James. It's a pleasure.
Thank everybody for watching.
Hey, thanks, [? for ?] [? that. ?]
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