Spiceworks, a startup that develops Web-connected social IT management software, has raised $16 million in Series C funding round led by Institutional Venture Partners with Austin Ventures and Shasta Ventures participating. This brings the startup’s total funding to $29 million.
Spiceworks develops a desktop software suite that helps a company’s IT staff collaborate with each other and manage “everything IT.” The IT management software, which is free and ad-supported, is currently being used by 850,000 IT professionals at small to medium businesses in 196 countries to inventory, monitor, troubleshoot, report on and run a help desk for their IT networks. Currently more than 25 percent of all businesses with greater than 100 employees rely on Spiceworks to manage part of their IT operations.
The compelling part of Spicework’s software is that it includes a social network for IT pros that they use to help each other out that includes a crowdsourcing troubleshooting platform. Its product roadmap is visible to all members, who can vote on which features they want to see next. The application features a network map that visually shows every computer and network device on a company’s IT network, along with their relationships and bandwidth consumption.
Spiceworks also recently added a host of plug-ins and social media widgets, letting users keep track track of alerts, tickets, new software, and new hardware, as well as inventory summaries. Spiceworks also lets users add themes and skins to the desktop, create customized user portals, and lets users drop in news widgets from RSS feeds and social networking widgets for Twitter, Digg, Facebook, and MySpace
Spiceworks gives its software away for free, and makes money from advertising and in-app purchases of IT products and services.
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Spiceworks. Sounds like a porn site.
Well, it turns out the name is easy to remember which helps spread the word among IT pros. When we started the company in 2006 someone needed to “Spice IT Up”.
maybe add some porn, like a widget or something, or tag each server with a porn star?
Yes, there is good $ in porn ads.
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And it’s an awesome piece of software.
+1 The BEST!
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I have a hard time believing this:
“Currently more than 25 percent of all businesses with greater than 100 employees rely on Spiceworks to manage part of their IT operations.”
Where does this number come from?
Right. At that point they might as well say that Spiceworks is used by the majority of businesses on planet Earth. It’s complete BS.
If this were true, they would probably not be raising a series C. There’s no way there’s an proof to this statement and if TC is reprinting such a statement based purely on the marketing bs coming out of spiceworks then they might as well just post spicework’s own press release and save themselves the time of repeating it.
Spiceworks would also do itself a favor by reporting on real usage. I’ve tried this product, it’s never worked reliably or shown me more than 30% of my network, but I still try each major release. I think I probably have 3 or 4 accounts with them. None used for more than the time it takes for their crawler to discover your network, which granted is enough time to raise a whale to adulthood, but in no way should a one-time trial be counted as a “managing IT operations” with Spiceworks, and yet to come to the fantasy statistic they did it surely must have, along with any IT people who happened to pass by me during the 23 hours the crawler was running. It should only be counted as downloading, wasting my time waiting for it to glacially crawl my network, and then being disappointed when it manages to find only a fraction of it. These BS stats are purely created to lure advertisers.
I use other open source tools that work in seconds and get 100% of my data, all more useful than seeing 30% of it a nice webpage. I’ll gladly give up the spice for accuracy when it comes to managing a corporate network.
Why do you keep using the product then?
Obviously, you work for a competitor, or something.
I don’t know…if it’s free, it’s free. Quite your bitchin.
Just because you never managed to get it working in your environment doesn’t mean the software doesn’t do what it claims. Did you post your problem to the community for help? Did you open the spiceworks server IP on the clients’ firewalls (WMI) and run the netsh command? Try it again. I don’t think the software is the problem. I use it in several environments and it runs flawlessly. And it’s free. Hard to complain once you know how to leverage it.
Right. At that point they might as well say that Spiceworks is used by the majority of businesses on planet Earth. It’s complete BS.
If this were true, they would probably not be raising a series C. There’s no way there’s an proof to this statement and if TC is reprinting such a statement based purely on the marketing bs coming out of spiceworks then they might as well just post spicework’s own press release and save themselves the time of repeating it.
Spiceworks would also do itself a favor by reporting on real usage. I’ve tried this product, it’s never worked reliably or shown me more than 30% of my network, but I still try each major release. I think I probably have 3 or 4 accounts with them. None used for more than the time it takes for their crawler to discover your network, which granted is enough time to raise a whale to adulthood, but in no way should a one-time trial be counted as a “managing IT operations” with Spiceworks, and yet to come to the fantasy statistic they did it surely must have, along with any IT people who happened to pass by me during the 23 hours the crawler was running. It should only be counted as downloading, wasting my time waiting for it to glacially crawl my network, and then being disappointed when it manages to find only a fraction of it. These BS stats are purely created to lure advertisers.
I use other open source tools that work in seconds and get 100% of my data, all more useful than seeing 30% of it a nice webpage. I’ll gladly give up the spice for accuracy when it comes to managing a corporate network.
Oh wait! I can add skins and tweet? Holy crap! Then forget being able to manage my network.
Mgt, sorry to hear the scan didn’t work so well in your environment. As you know networks are complicated and there are occasionally issues that can hinder the accuracy and speed of a scan.
We’ve tried to make Spiceworks as easy to use as possible but we can’t solve all issues. As such we’ve published extensive help articles and videos and offer free webinars. Our community of users is here to help other IT pros get up-to-speed so you can ask for help any time there as well. And we offer free support to anyone who asks. You can read more about that from a happy SpiceHead here: http://bit.ly/5xRZmf
Hopefully, you’ll give our free support a try and let us help you get up to speed. You can see opinions of just a few of our happy users here: http://bit.ly/6RVw8t
Thanks Jay. You make posting a comment about article on Spiceworks like playing ping-pong with Spicework’s marketing department.
I know you can’t solve all issues, I guess my point is it seems you can’t solve most issues, or really any issues–but you’re right, technically saying you can’t solve all issues is true when it is also true that you can’t solve any issues.
I get it though, it’s free, it kinda sorta works some of the time and if you have no money and like playing with a browser-based app with pretty pictures of a third of your network it’s a nice app. If you actually manage a real network though there a multitude of superior tools that are also free, faster, and do a complete job.
As an IT person I view Spiceworks the way a professional designer might view an Etch-a-Sketch.
Not really interested in trolling your community to figure out why your app doesn’t work. I’m sure you have plenty of happy spiceheads. My 2 year old also loves his etch-a-sketch.
Sounds like mgt might work for the competition. Wonder who he works for?
Never get into a discussion/argument when the other person doesn’t have any skin in the game (aka anonymous).
They always have something to hide.
Man up mgt!
How would you know if they do or don’t listen/solve issues if you never go to the community? I’m glad you don’t manage my environment. “Oh I’m too good to RTFM so when it doesn’t work after just clicking next through the install this stupid software doesn’t work. I better not ask any questions…” So what are all these wonderful free apps that are so much better than spiceworks that are also completely flawless and idiot proof? Seriously. Do tell.
mgt seems to have a few issues, and not with spiceworks.
when i first installed it on our work network we had loads of problems, turned out to be the way my boss configured the network, once sorted it worked brilliently, mainly the helpdesk and inventory features, sure theres sometimes issues, but you can’t get cheaper than free.
keep up the good work guys
I used Spiceworks every day and have years. I have met most of the members of the Spicework's team members including Jay and I am always impressed with their knowledge of the industry and the way they are bring Spiceworks into the forefront of help desk and IT management applications.
I agree with likes_spice and will take it a step further… if you have problems with Spiceworks working correctly on your network then guess what… your network properly isn't configured properly!
Congrats on the funding!
- SPICEHEAD
850000 IT ppl?
i bet 85.00000?
Jay, it’s a damned shame all the infants showed to post today. These are the fellas that have to support mom & dad’s computer, not a business.
I’ve been using Spiceworks for less than a year. I showed up at SpiceWorld and was totally impressed. I cannot live without the HelpDesk.. that feature alone is worth the install.
I would never be able to afford a Tivoli but the free SpiceWorks stuff is giving me very good information to help me manage my business.
To not blow too much positive smoke, I do have a criticism…
As a Canadian, I would like to see the ads a little more relevant. I get what you are trying to do with the targeted ads but I buy HP and all I ‘ever’ see is Dell. I thought you were going to use scan data to post ads that are totally relevant to the things I manage day to day. Are there no Canadian companies wanting to advertise?
Thanks Eldon. Dell and Microsoft are big sponsors of ours in Canada. They effectively help make Spiceworks free in Canada.
As our team grows thanks to this funding we’ll be able to work with more advertisers internationally (we already have over 175) so you should see the variety go up over time.
Hi Jay,
We have 400+ network users and are currently using Track-IT version 9.
We don’t have any Help Desk employees, but with Track-It our employees can enter their own service requests (work orders) and our IT Team leaders can assign them to our IT Techs.
Does Spiceworks have the same or similar functionality?
Thanks, Carl
Proof that Venture Capitalists will blindly throw money into any company with the phrase, “social network” attached to it.
We use Spiceworks for 250+ PC’s and it works great for the price. We have TrackIT 9 and Spiceworks is so much better and every adding with TrackIT costs money and it’s not web based. If you set it up right it will get all your hardware. 2 facilities and had SW at both and eventually ditched the in house product running before.
Sharepoint integration makes it nice, an iPhone app would rock!
Spicework is been used for most of he business right!!!
Social network definitely through the business to you…no doubt about that….
Social network always the great source to engaging users all around….
I use Spiceworks daily it works great, I have had no problems with it.
The community has been a great resource for me and being able to pull off quick reports on my iventory works great.
The main thing i use is the helpdesk, its so clean and easy to use.
If you do have problems pop over to the community and someone will be over to help.
I am a long-time Spiceworks user (since 2007). Each upgrade has made the application better and has focused on features asked for by the community. I have had problems with the product but they have always been resolved by other members of the community or Spiceworks support itself.
The community is a great resource for all things IT, and some things not. There are spirited discussions on different tech as well as consice, easy-to-follow instructions to fix problems. I rarely see a post go unanswered.
I have just implemented the helpdesk in the last 30 days. My users have already voiced their approval at how easy the portal is to use. One of the partners remarked on Monday: “This is pretty cool, I type a short message and a couple of minutes later here you are to fix the problem.”
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The last version is currently running in our network and I really like it. I had tried it a couple times previously but a "do all" scan of our network combined with shutting down our image runner printers for entirely the wrong people made this a "do not touch" for me. Last version though, I love it. It is intuitive and even lists the warranty for our Dell servers and workstations. I'm impressed. The free part is nice and smart even. Keep up the good work. As it stands now I'd probably put it in future networks.