I checked in with Dell’s end-user device management folks, KACE, recently and wrote up a report. Patching and all that isn’t exactly thrilling (but, as they say, necessary), however, it’s interesting to see the momentum the acquisition has had since 2010. Because we’d been collecting revenue from KACE over the years (thanks to Dennis), we could estimate what growing the business 5x looked like.
The full report which goes over recent updates, competition, etc. is up for clients. Here’s the 451 Take:
While end-user device management may seem one of the less glamorous sides of IT, it’s a vital ‘keeping the lights on’ function. If you showed up to work and there was no device to send emails from, everything would (perhaps delightfully!) grind to a halt. Nowadays, end-user device management is all about enabling employees to use different types of devices rather than straitjacketing them into outdated ones, and KACE seems to be keeping up with the times. We’re equally interested in KACE’s progress as an indication of how the vision for the Dell Software group is playing out. It seems to be going well, with KACE revenue having increased 5x to about $100m by our estimate. While this represents just 5-6% of Dell Software’s $1.8bn revenue, that growth should be viewed as good. Of course, as software, its margins should be far and away higher than Dell’s hardware business. John Swainson, Dell Software group’s president, has commented that he’d expect to see software contributing 25% of Dell’s profits, never mind the relative top-line. Indeed, as IBM has shown over the years, that’s the point of a software group inside a systems group – cash contribution.
As always, I like to get a sense of the numbers and the relative size of things. The KACE group was one of the first software assets (albeit packaged as an appliance) that caught my attention and impressed me about Dell ambling into software, back in 2011.
And, as always, you can apply for a trial and mention me to get a preview of the stuff we have behind the paywall.