Dan Griffin's Blog
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Ad-supported IT management software
December 8, 2009
Was just reading about Spiceworks: free, ad-supported IT network management software (thanks to the SBS Diva blog for cluing me into this one, although looks like The Diva raised some concerns about Vista support in an earlier post).
I haven’t tried the software yet myself, but it includes features for monitoring and help desk. What’s more, they claim to have 750K users. Those features, with that level of adoption: pretty cool.
This page on the Spiceworks site mentions that, if you don’t want to see ads, you can pay $20 per month. That’s actually still not bad for a product version that doesn’t have any artificial CPU, user, or node limitations.
On the other hand, at first blush, it would seem to imply that they value the current total of their usage-based ad impressions at $15 million per month, which sounds like an awfully big number. But then, these have the potential of being well-targeted ads, so maybe certain big IT advertisers value it that highly.
Could the ad-supported model work for Restorify? The answer, I think, is: maybe. For one thing, users of the Spiceworks app are depedent upon its GUI/console for much of the key functionality. In other words, getting good value from the app pretty much implies that you’re going to be seeing the ads (unless you pay the opt-out, of course).
In contrast, while Restorify doesn’t have a good server console yet (it’s on the TODO list), the product can be used effectively without one. After all, automated backups don’t require a console, just a warning (emailed, for example) if something’s going wrong (to a certain extent that would apply to Spiceworks as well; I guess the lesson here is that if your app is ad-supported, you want to implement your features in such a way as to make the GUI as sticky as possible). Ditto for restores.
Restorify’s new reporting - both real-time and periodic/monthly - features could benefit from a console. My conclusion is that, if I’m going to be dependent upon users viewing the console as often as possible, making the reporting feature as pretty and informative as possible is the best way to do it.
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