Technology for Mortals

This week, I had the pleasure of speaking with Scott Abel, CEO and co-founder of Spiceworks. We caught up on what’s new in their latest release (version 3.5) of their network management software, and how the company is doing in general.

The last time I did a “hands on” with Spiceworks, I really liked the software. I also really like the company’s approach to things. They take feature requests from users and are very focused on what the users really want and need. They’ve managed to stay very focused on their market (small companies with about 250 or fewer network devices). They are successfully using Agile development techniques in a way that is working well. And the results show: they have a user base of over 600,000 active users (not 600,000 initiated software downloads). And this is purely through word-of-mouth marketing.

What I found very interesting in today’s conversation, is what Spiceworks’ goals and approach was to this release. They collected anonymous usage information of the application, and spent a lot of time talking with users. For the new version, they looked at the existing features that were underutilized, and tried to find ways to make them more useful. As Scott put it, “features that don’t get used are resources that are pissed away.” He’s right. One of the most frustrating things to a developer, is to get a feature request for something that the product already does. It means that we spent time and energy writing code that is going unused.

Scott told me that whenever they get a chance, they spend time on site with users seeing how they actually use the software. At one customer site, they saw a customer who did not realize that some settings could be changed, because the number was put on a label that needed to be double-clicked to go into editing mode instead of a text box. The settings pages now use text boxes. They have also added a few contextual tips throughout the application to help users see what they might be otherwise missing.

Aside from interface improvements, they have added a real time network traffic analyzer, to help users find out where the performance bottlenecks are. They have also changed the dashboard so that reports can be placed on it as widgets. There is also a new “timeline” feature to allow system administrators to see the history of changes on their networks, which has quickly become a popular feature.

Most importantly, they have opened up portions of their API to allow customers to write their own widgets and dashboards using JavaScript. Additionally, users can post their items to the Spiceworks community site. This means that users can also make their own mashups if they are so inclined. The thinking behind this move is simple. Spiceworks has always tried to keep their feature set contained to what is absolutely needed. At the same time, many users have particular needs. By opening up the APIs and providing a forum for users to share their code, Spiceworks lets the application do what users need it to do, without having to clog the core application up with features.

While Spiceworks has worked hard to keep their focus on small (250 or less devices on the network, 100 or so employees) companies, the application is scaling well, and they have loosened the restrictions on the number of devices it can manage. As a result, they are seeing ovet 3% of their users have more than 250 devices on the network, getting their foot into the enterprise computing door. Along those lines, they are adding Nagios integration, so that shops with existing Nagios deployments can monitor their devices from within Spiceworks.

J.Ja

Note: I have written content for Spicework’s community sites under contract in the past.