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The trend in the IT industry of spinning out business units and putting them in the hands of private investors has claimed another software entity in the small and midsize business space.
Intuit Inc.s Blue Ocean Software Unit, which provides help desk and asset management software for SMBs, earlier this week relaunched itself as Numara Software Inc. along with the release of Track-It 7.0.
The flagship Track-It help desk and asset management software, installed at some 45,000 customer sites globally with 12 million desktops under management, can now automatically discover desktop assets upon installation.
The 7.0 release automatically populates an inventory database with discovered asset information.
That capability allows help desk technicians to know whats installed on the network and “provides them with better information to solve a problem, or makes them aware of things they didnt know were on the network,” said CEO David Weiss, in Tampa, Fla.
Numara extended the asset management function to incorporate non-PC assets such as printers, routers, switches, hubs and any network device with an IP address.
The new release also adds new software license management functions to help users better manage license compliance and “optimize your purchasing,” Weiss added. The software license management addition provides automatic notification of subscription expiration dates.
A purchasing module in the software license management function can be used to generate purchase orders for IT components that can correlate what has been bought to what is already installed.
Despite the fact that the Blue Ocean Software unit was growing faster than Intuits overall growth, Intuit chose to spin out the unit because it did not relate to the rest of Intuits business and afforded no leverage with the rest of the company, Weiss said.
As an independent company, Numara intends to be “at the forefront of market consolidation,” Weiss said. In the SMB space, product “breadth is more important,” he said, and toward that end, Numara intends to make complementary acquisitions and expand its international business. He would not say where such acquisitions would be.
Track-It 7 is available now.