Spiceworks CEO on the Future of IT Jobs and His Company

Got me thinking Unoffiicial Spiceworks hasn’t done anything on our thoughts about the funding?

The funding has been talked about a lot recently from when it started on TechCrunch which lead it to be mentioned on twitter over 500 times as well as all the other smaller blogs then twitting about it.

Spiceworks have said they will be adding new staff to the current team which is at the moment 45 strong. The new team will be split over marketing and development.

The new marketing team are from what I have seen mentioned going to be looking for new fun and exciting ways to market Spiceworks.

The marketing team have always had a funky way of advertising like the IT Comedy videos the new team will have to find new and cool ways. They will also be working on getting more vendors and people to attend SpiceWorld’s but its the development team I’m most interested in.

I think the enlarged development team will start looking at two main things:

• Real time monitoring – We have already started to see this with the SQL monitor plugin, and just released the Device Uptime Plugin this will bring a new set of users into Spiceworks and start to compete on a better level with tools like nagios. In doing that there will have to be some major stability changes, everyone knows about how stable nagios is when started but Spiceworks does have a small reputation for being unstable at times.
• Making it more mobile – This is reinforced by gigaom.com and some Spiceworks staff in conversations about how the community will become more mobile with a simple version for mobile access and maybe the possibility to update topics via email… We have also seen a lot of rumours in the past about apps for blackberry and the iPhone so hopefully we will see these come true.

Once or probably during those are being made the Feature Request section is going to be hammered and new features pulled out, probably starting with ones like Merge tickets to break them into how the codebase and database works before diving in and building things like the much wanted Knowledge Base.

These are only my thoughts from conversations I have had with some team members, its Spiceworks, nothings confirmed. What they think is good at the time they will roll with… For all we know we could see version 5.0 be rebuilt from scratch.

Hmm… Im not the best at article writing really am I…

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The ups and downs of working with social media my experiences with Spiceworks

First off… This isn’t really all Spiceworks related but just had the idea for a post along these lines and Spiceworks-News is about the only place I could put it. It is however all based on my experience with Spiceworks.

So everyone knows what social media is now days? And that big buzz word of “web 2.0” and companies like Spiceworks are starting to exploit it to market there products and IT conferences like Spiceworld. Places like Skype, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Digg and Ustream are regularly used.

So what do I think are the advantages and disadvantages of Social media and networking…

The ups (Advantages)

There are many pro’s to social media and well they do outweigh the downs.

A great example of this was at Spiceworld 2009 Austin, I (akp982) was about to receive a Spicies award when Justin Dorfman (from Frugal IT) had the idea of using Skype to allow me to give my acceptance speech. I ran around and got a microphone ready and he ran off to the Spiceworks Staff to hand him his laptop which got pushed onto stage. This was great, I was watching the live stream though Ustream and also talking live to the presenters. It was a very weird feeling I was in the UK and talking and watching people in the US. Without the Ustream chat to get me on skype with Justin and without skype for allowing us to make a “call” it would not have been possible. It was organised so quick the presenters were shocked to hear that I was ready to talk to them.

Social media mainly things like twitter can really help promote your products very quickly by telling lots of people instantly. When Spiceworks 4.1 was released it was mentioned by over 100 people on twitter and Spiceworks are expecting more people to spread 4.5 when it comes out. From this people will quickly write reviews to jump on the back off this and give their blog or website a boost in traffic and hope for some regular readers. Frugal IT is and example of a site that did well at this with there Spiceworld 2009 coverage (http://fr.ugal.it/spiceworld-2009) they were able to get multiple people to tweet, blog and just share their link. With this link spread all over the world, people would then visit the site pickup on the ads and information around the Spiceworld page and may then come back in the future. I know we (Spiceworks-News) jump on even the oddest of things. We often pickup on blog posts about or mentioning Spiceworks and re post the first paragraph in hope for a ping back. Posts like (Getting IT spicey at your church) got a ping backs out there and we may have got another 1/2 visitors (they all add up over time to now around 300 people looking at Spiceworks-News on a daily basis according to Google analytics… if only some of them posted comments).

If you get a good social media and build up your presence with something like the Spiceworks community forums you will find people will want to help you out. The Spiceworks community brings all sorts of people together from all over the world. A lot of these people are willing to help Spiceworks out in there spare time, things like the Spiceworld 2009 poster contest, there were around loads of good designs and the winner is shown on the right designed by Denise Parrish. Companies like Experts Exchange (BOO HISSSS) and the Spiceworks community (well recommended lets make it bigger than experts exchange…) have managed to grab onto the fact that people in IT are often willing to help out others with IT problems. In my case this is mainly because its better than doing my normal job. This gives the helpers a good feeling that they are doing something with there time and the people being helped managed to get the job done quicker.

This brings a very wide range of people who have many different skill sets into one place doing this brings community, sharing, and connecting. I have used the Spiceworks Spicecorps to meet new people in my area that work in IT and Spiceworld London will help me expand my network of offline friends.

Building up social networks you can give you great feedback on your products. Just look at the Spiceworks community, the 4.5 and feature request sections all the Spiceheads have given feedback on the latest beta version to help make it better and there are 100’s of feature requests of things people want to see in Spiceworks all peppered up (voted for) by the people who use it. Spiceworks have harnessed this power and on many occasions got feedback on there ideas like the HTML emails they just added. They have also managed to get ideas from the community like a dummies guide to Spiceworks in which the community will start to build over the next few months. The community has proven to be a very powerful tool and lots of companies have there own community. Like the smoothwall forums. Spiceworks has managed to grab the market by making a multivendor forum where any question can be asked no matter what its about or how complex someone will be around to help from either the community of the vendors themselves. Microsoft, IBM, CDW and many more have active members of their staff in the community.

The downs (Disadvantages)

The main downside and the reason for writing this post is that news is easily leaked before you want it to be known publicly. My example of this is when Myshell was going to leave. Spiceworks-News managed to get wind of this and got it up on twitter and our wordpress blog around a month before Spiceworks wanted to announce it. Needless to say we quickly got moan at for this has had to delete it. For larger companies multiple sources can leak the information and it becomes hard to stop rumours being made and make covering up a difficult job. (Was a sad day when the famous Myshell (Spiceworks community manager) moved on and left Spiceworks, she did a great job and it does appear from time to time Spiceworks are still finding it hard to fill her boots.)

Information and pictures were published before the release of both the iPhone and the Blackberry Storm, both apple and Blackberry then found it hard to stop people reposting these leaked images even setting up websites about the leaked information. From there people will start rumours about what features the phones will have, this can damage the company if the end product does not have x feature that everyone was getting so excited about. Then again this can help with marketing, I remember stories about when Windows7 was first leaked people believe that Microsoft did this on purpose to get feedback and start all the excitement about the product around a year before it was going to be released. This allowed them to get a wider base of “testers” with different hardware even if they didn’t know they were testing it for them.

Anonymity… well there always has to be one or two people who want to ruin a company. Anyone can setup a website very quickly and with new sites allowing you to register domains without giving your details out to the public you can become even more invisible. This makes it easy for people to moan about products and services of a company without feeling as under threat. Finding people who want to be anonymous can be hard and companies will normally give up trying to hunt down the producers.

With websites so easy to make and publish we can end up with a information overload, it because hard to keep track on the information you want to. Say you want to keep a eye on Spiceworks there are loads of people to follow on twitter… @spiceworks, @spiceworksnews, @jdorfman, @dscammell etc etc etc then you want to follow windows 7 stuff you have to follow loads more people. This distracts from your real job and offline life. You always want to be in the know, for me its so that I can do this sort of thing and repost about 4.5 releases or the latest Spiceworld information even though I wasn’t there. So ok after writing that one I can see positives and negatives…

Social media can however be time consuming, its a Saturday at 14:03 and I’m writing this… I was up till 11 last night watching and taking part in Spiceworld and often find myself being distracted at work by the Spiceworks community all my lunches are taken up by it. If I don’t go out I’m on the community. On the right you can see my Spiceworks Community stats, 3000 odd contributions (these are not all my posts, you get 1 contribution per topic you post in or create) and 6000 odd posts. Ive spent time and written 6 how-tos and 5 plugins for the members off the community. All time I could have spent doing something else like walking the dogs or being in the outdoors enjoying the sun rather than the light bulb above me while sat in a room on my own on my laptop, or even just playing cod4… *must get ring of death on xbox fixed*

Things like twitter and sky player are coming to devices like the xbox making it easier for companies to share information with users in all sorts of forms but this brings another problem for companies that they may not care about us much… their real life morals, is it really right to give people ways to just write 120 words to each other? My anglish isn’t the best as you have probably noticed already and I don’t just blame myself, using word for spell checking and social media where people don’t always mind if you get it wrong. The community allows me to post words that are stupidly wrong and no one seems to care. Its just a fact of life on forums. This is not always something that companies need to care about either, people should have more control and if they don’t do it someone else will so I can’t blame them.

Most of the downs for social media are out of the control for companies like Spiceworks, even if they didn’t take part people would still post the information, but being in the know about what’s being posted can help you can control the impact it has on your products and or services.

That’s it…

Not the most interesting post I know but was mainly posted for the downsides… the big one being the Myshell leaving being announced before Spiceworks told everyone.

Social media does have its up’s and downs but I would suggest any company try to use social media. It doesn’t cost much if anything, but does take up your time.

Hope this helps someone? ok maybe not but hay it was nice to do my first real article the rest of my posts are normally very short and not very sweet.

Sorry about the spealing or grammer’s mistakse, I’m not the best.

And please leave a comment and let me know what you think

I hope Spiceworks don’t mind me using them as examples

Feel free to quote from the above if your going to link back

Again any comments would be lovely

Don’t know what Spiceworks is?

Spiceworks is the complete network monitoring and managment system, it includes a helpdesk, PC inventory, software and hardware reporting and a network map. Its the solution to manage everything IT in  small and medium businesses.

Its coming, its going to be big. Its Spiceworld London, it all kicks off in:

Spiceworks-News will be there!

Will you?

Lets make Spiceworks want to come back to London by making it a great event for everyone. Lets big it up on twitter lets get it up on google and spread it though the globe with facebook.

We can do this!

We can make Spiceworld London famous world wide.

Get your ticket and read more here

I know a bit tacky but hay… Got a better countdown we could use? Use the contact form to get in contact with us. I don’t have a great deal of Spare time so using something like above was quick and easy

Click here to checkout all our Spiceworld2009 posts

Missed Spiceworld 2009? Why not checkout all off Spiceworks-New’s Spiceworld 2009 posts.

There are so many cool things going on, we tried to post about them, from the live streams to just funny tweets we got abit of everything.

Spiceworks-News is already setup ready to start posting about Spiceworld London (http://www.spiceworld2009.com/london/) want to help us out? Well be there but we want some extra tweeters and posters to try and make it bigger and better than Spiceworld Austin.

Some people on twitter said the virtual event was just as good as being there thanks to the tweets and chats. Lets do the same for London and make Spiceworks want to come back.

Our Spiceworld2009 posts

Checkout some of the feedback

“Not only were the sessions very informative and fun, I also enjoyed the opportinuty to meet so many amazing people. Coming to Spiceworld truly gave me a better understanding of how close our community is. Scott Abel’s welcome keynote gave me goosebumps and motivated me to want to be even more active.” merlinpr in the community

“Loved it! Great info, great food, great “peer interaction”. I loved getting to meet so many SpiceHeads in person. I have noticed that when I read posts now I do so in the voice of the person that wrote it. Definitely worth more than the price I paid to go. ” SCAdmin in the community

More feedback on the community here

So many names to mention. It was also great to see some vendors there and the talks they gave were great.

Have fun on the unofficial piss up

Time to get the plans ready for Spiceworld London

Jun 18, 2009 (Close-Up Media via COMTEX) — Spiceworks, which provides what it called the first free social IT management application for small and medium businesses, announced the release of the Spiceworks IT Desktop version 4.0.

Spiceworks stated that the new version has several enhancements that make it easier for small and midsize businesses to manage “Everything IT.” They include the ability to visually map a company’s IT network and the addition of 3rd party management plug-ins from Microsoft, LiveOffice, Intel and Trend Micro. In addition, Spiceworks now integrates with Twitter and allows users to turn Windows events into social media alerts for collaborative problem-solving and to share real-time SMB IT trends with the world’s largest network of IT professionals.

Read more

Fredric Paul

The latest version of the popular free IT management tool for SMBs adds the ability to visually map your company’s IT network, Twitter integration, and 3rd-party management plug-ins from Microsoft, LiveOffice, Intel, and Trend Micro.

bMighty has long been a fan of Spiceworks. The company sponsored the first bMighty SMB Theater and Pavilion at Interop in New York last year, and I moderated a couple panels at the inaugural SpiceWorld user conference in Austin, Texas last fall.

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Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca has posted up on http://www.it-analysis.com/ about Spiceworks and the social media size.

Can social networking actually be useful? There are plenty of claims made about Twitter’s usefulness for getting concise messages to a broad audience or using LinkedIn to track down old colleagues who may be able make an introduction to a new prospect. But what about direct benefits—such as finding quick solutions to problems or getting better deals on products?

It seems that the lesson from systems management vendor Spiceworks is—yes it can. Spiceworks has a business model that sounds very bubble 2.0. It provides a set of systems management tools for free and makes its cash by other means. But can Spiceworks actually return a profit where Facebook, Twitter and many others have not? Spiceworks is a private company with VC backing and does not disclose its profitability, but having gone through two rounds of capital raising, it says it has no need for a third.

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Join over a million businesses saving time and money! Learn how switching from Microsoft Exchange saves cost and reduces IT hassles.

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