KBOX Systems Management Appliance from KACE
Saving IT Time and Money with KACE at Truliant Credit Union
Information Management Magazine, July/Aug 2009
REVIEWER: Jason Allen, Technical Support Analyst II for Truliant Federal Credit Union.
BACKGROUND: Established in 1952, Truliant Federal Credit Union has come a long way from our humble beginnings when we had 2,000 members and $100,000 in assets. Today, we are a $1.1 billion credit union serving over 180,000 member-owners, including employees from more than 850 companies across four states.
PLATFORMS: Windows and Linux.
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PROBLEM SOLVED: Our small IT department was tasked with monitoring and deploying upgrades to more than 500 machines. Making things especially difficult was the fact that our company is spread across four states so IT help and maintenance tasks have to be done remotely making routine maintenance or tasks such as software updates deployment of applications challenging. Our previous system wasn’t handling the job so we looked for a help desk solution that was easier to use and more reliable. We stumbled onto KBOX from KACE. It had so much more to offer us. With our KBOX Systems Management Appliance, we are able to run maintenance tasks and software updates in a snap. We can do remote administration, automated software distribution, license and regulatory compliance, and also help desk support with the technology. And what’s great about KBOX is it scales to readily meet our growing needs. We figure KBOX saves our 10-person IT team over 7,000 hours, or $170,000 annually so in the end KBOX paid for itself in less than two months.
PRODUCT FUNCTIONALITY: With KBOX, we are able to manage PC updates and patches very efficiently. Also we’ve been able to get rid of some support applications and allow six other departments to instead use this software for their specific uses. Another benefit of KBOX is the ability to automatically set up queues of specific software to run for each department, regardless of where it is or what the department needs. We plan to roll this out soon. We know this will save time and money because we’ll be able to easily share software instead of buying and configuring separate copies like we had to do prior to using KBOX. Being able to customize the software to fit our needs is another big benefit. And for software license compliance management, KBOX automatically logs and updates software from the back-end so end-users do not notice any program slow-down. KBOX quickly highlights which end-users have outdated versions of software running on their system so our team can easily deploy current versions of software. Just this capability saves a week of work each time updates occur. The KBOX is able to make the updates in a matter of minutes.
STRENGTHS: The exceptional ease-of-use of KBOX is key. Deployment and staff training took less than a week and the appliance was rolled out in just a day. Also automated remote administration and software distribution capabilities, along with help desk support, are key strengths.
WEAKNESSES: We found out a future update of the help desk queue will allow you to pick which fields you can require on a ticket, but as of now this isn’t possible.
SELECTION CRITERIA: The bang that we got for our buck made our decision to go with KACE easy. We looked at several other help desk products that were more expensive than KBOX and they don’t compare.
DELIVERABLES: KBOX enables us to develop reports that are very easy to use. And, the reports offer several outputs (HTML, PDF, CSV, TXT, XLS) that we can choose from. What’s more, the reports can be automatically scheduled to be sent to different individuals.
VENDOR SUPPORT: We’ve had great support from KACE pre- and post-implementation, they were with us every step of the way.
DOCUMENTATION: The documentation was extremely easy to use and understand; we were out of the gate in no time. Deployment and staff training took less than a week and KBOX was rolled out in a single day.
KBOX Systems Management Appliance from KACE
KACE
1616 North Shoreline Blvd.
Mountain View, CA 94043
(650) 316-1050
Product reviews are customer testimonials. We thank the author of this review for taking the time to share his or her expertise.
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