Quest KACE, formerly Dell KACE, is a company that specializes in computer appliances for

systems management Systems management is enterprise-wide System administration, administration of distributed systems including (and commonly in practice) computer systems. Systems management is strongly influenced by network management initiatives in telecommunic ...

information technology Information technology (IT) is a set of related fields within information and communications technology (ICT), that encompass computer systems, software, programming languages, data processing, data and information processing, and storage. Inf ...

equipment. It also provides

software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

for

security Security is protection from, or resilience against, potential harm (or other unwanted coercion). Beneficiaries (technically referents) of security may be persons and social groups, objects and institutions, ecosystems, or any other entity or ...

, application

virtualization In computing, virtualization (abbreviated v12n) is a series of technologies that allows dividing of physical computing resources into a series of virtual machines, operating systems, processes or containers. Virtualization began in the 1960s wit ...

, and systems management products. Established in 2003, KACE was headquartered in Mountain View,

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

with offices in

Europe Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east ...

and

Asia Asia ( , ) is the largest continent in the world by both land area and population. It covers an area of more than 44 million square kilometres, about 30% of Earth's total land area and 8% of Earth's total surface area. The continent, which ...

History

KACE started in 2003 when Rob Meinhardt and Marty Kacin founded and self-funded the company for over two years. KACE subsequently received venture capital funding from Sigma Partners,

Norwest Venture Partners Norwest Venture Partners (Norwest) is an American venture and growth equity investment firm. The firm targets early to late-stage venture and growth equity investments across several sectors, including cloud computing and information technology, ...

, and Focus Ventures. KACE developed appliances designed to help IT personnel more efficiently provision, manage, secure, and service network-connected devices. In 2007, their competitors included Altiris, Novell ZENworks, BigFix,

LANDesk Ivanti () is an IT software company headquartered in South Jordan, Utah, United States. It produces software for IT Security, IT Service Management, IT Asset Management, Unified Endpoint Management, Identity Management and supply chain mana ...

, as well as, products for other larger companies. On February 11, 2010, KACE announced its acquisition by

Dell Dell Inc. is an American technology company that develops, sells, repairs, and supports personal computers (PCs), Server (computing), servers, data storage devices, network switches, software, computer peripherals including printers and webcam ...

. KACE family appliances were then sold by Dell. In 2012, KACE became a part of the Dell Software group. On November 1, 2016,

Francisco Partners Francisco Partners Management, L.P., doing business as Francisco Partners, is an American private equity firm focused exclusively on investments in technology and technology-enabled services businesses. It was founded in August 1999 and based in ...

and Elliot Management acquired the Dell Software Group, which was re-launched as

Quest Software Quest Software, also known as Quest, is a privately held software company headquartered in Aliso Viejo, California, United States. Quest provides cloud management, software as a service, security, workforce mobility, and backup & recovery. The co ...

. KACE products are currently part of the Quest Software portfolio.

Architecture

Since before the company's acquisition by Dell, KACE appliances were sold as physical Dell PowerEdge servers with

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

technologies. All appliances are available as virtual appliances that can run on VMware ESX, VMware ESXi or

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

Hyper-V. Trial versions of the appliances can also run on VMware Player. The appliances are currently not available as physical appliances. KACE uses

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free-software Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable ...

, and all collected data is stored in a number of

MariaDB MariaDB is a community-developed, commercially supported Fork (software development), fork of the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS), intended to remain free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. Developm ...

databases. Although, all management of the device and the data in the system goes (only) via the web-GUI, users have developed their own interfaces with other management systems by accessing the databases directly. It is also possible to integrate a KACE appliance in third party IT management suites.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Quest KACE System administration Remote administration software Configuration management Software companies established in 2003 2003 establishments in California Quest Software Dell acquisitions 2010 mergers and acquisitions Software companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Software companies based in Mountain View, California Companies based in Mountain View, California Software companies of the United States