Quest KACE, formerly Dell KACE, is a company that specializes in

computer appliance A computer appliance is a home appliance with software or firmware that is specifically designed to provide a specific computing resource. Such devices became known as ''appliances'' because of the similarity in role or management to a home ap ...

s for

systems management Systems management refers to enterprise-wide administration of distributed systems including (and commonly in practice) computer systems. Systems management is strongly influenced by network management initiatives in telecommunications. The ...

information technology Information technology (IT) is the use of computers to create, process, store, retrieve, and exchange all kinds of data . and information. IT forms part of information and communications technology (ICT). An information technology system ...

equipment. It also provides

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...

for

security" \n\n\nsecurity.txt is a proposed standard for websites' security information that is meant to allow security researchers to easily report security vulnerabilities. The standard prescribes a text file called \"security.txt\" in the well known locat ...

, application

virtualization In computing, virtualization or virtualisation (sometimes abbreviated v12n, a numeronym) is the act of creating a virtual (rather than actual) version of something at the same abstraction level, including virtual computer hardware platforms, st ...

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

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the ...

with offices in

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located enti ...

and

Asia Asia (, ) is one of the world's most notable geographical regions, which is either considered a continent in its own right or a subcontinent of Eurasia, which shares the continental landmass of Afro-Eurasia with Africa. Asia covers an ...

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 Altiris Inc. is a subsidiary of Symantec specializing in service-oriented management software which allows organizations to manage IT assets. They also provide software for web services, security, and systems management products. Established in ...

Novell ZENworks ZENworks, a suite of software products developed and maintained by Micro Focus International for computer systems management, aims to manage the entire life cycle of servers, of desktop PCs (Windows, Linux or Mac), of laptops, and of handh ...

, 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 Managemen ...

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

Dell Dell is an American based technology company. It develops, sells, repairs, and supports computers and related products and services. Dell is owned by its parent company, Dell Technologies. Dell sells personal computers (PCs), servers, data ...

. KACE family appliances were then sold by Dell. In 2012, KACE became a part of the

Dell Software Dell Software was a division of Dell with headquarters in Round Rock, Texas, United States. Dell Software was created merging various acquisitions (mainly Quest Software and Sonicwall) by Dell Inc., the third-largest maker of PCs and now a pr ...

group. On November 1, 2016,

Francisco Partners Francisco Partners is an American private equity firm focused exclusively on investments in technology and technology-enabled services businesses. Founded in August 1999 and based in San Francisco with offices in London and New York City, Franci ...

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 ...

. 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 The PowerEdge (PE) line is Dell's server computer product line. Most PowerEdge servers use the x86 architecture. The early exceptions to this, the PowerEdge 3250, PowerEdge 7150, and PowerEdge 7250, used Intel's Itanium processor, but Dell ab ...

servers with

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Ope ...

technologies. All appliances are available as virtual appliances that can run on

VMware ESX VMware ESXi (formerly ESX) is an enterprise-class, type-1 hypervisor developed by VMware for deploying and serving virtual computers. As a type-1 hypervisor, ESXi is not a software application that is installed on an operating system (OS); ...

VMware ESXi VMware ESXi (formerly ESX) is an enterprise-class, type-1 hypervisor developed by VMware for deploying and serving virtual computers. As a type-1 hypervisor, ESXi is not a software application that is installed on an operating system (OS); ...

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

Hyper-V Microsoft Hyper-V, codenamed Viridian, and briefly known before its release as Windows Server Virtualization, is a native hypervisor; it can create virtual machines on x86-64 systems running Windows. Starting with Windows 8, Hyper-V superseded Wi ...

. Trial versions of the appliances can also run on

VMware Player VMware Workstation Player, formerly VMware Player, is a virtualization software package for x64 computers running Microsoft Windows or Linux, supplied free of charge by VMware, Inc., Archived version; the page as of 2016 is about VMware Workstat ...

. The appliances are currently not available as physical appliances. KACE uses

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

, and all collected data is stored in a number of

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

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 Companies acquired by Dell 2010 mergers and acquisitions Software companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Companies based in Mountain View, California Software companies of the United States