Hello everybody. Here we are in lovely Austin, Texas at the lovely Spiceworks World Headquarters. We have a guest with ourselves, as always. Would you like to introduce yourself? Hi, I'm Thabre Saeed. My title is Director of Products at Spiceworks. And what that means is I help figure out what kinds of features we're going to build and how we bring product out to the community of Spiceworks users. As we'll get into it, there's kind of a mixture of talking with the community and then also doing more classical product management, I guess, just figuring out what's going to be in the product. Right. In fact, when we get into details of it, you'll find that it actually makes my job in some ways really simple because we build what the community asks us to build. Right. And so that part of figuring out what it is we need to build and how we bring it out, that's not the hard part. Right. Just working with it to kind of get the right user interface and making sure that we can cater to every class of user there is because we've got such a large user base, you've got novice users, you've got advanced users. It's kind of how do we make sure that even if we add advanced features, the novice user feels comfortable and can get up to speed in Spiceworks very quickly and we still give the advanced users the features they want. For people who don't know, can you give us like a general overview of what the Spiceworks product is? Sure. Spiceworks is a comprehensive network management tool for small and medium businesses. So when you are an IT guy in a small and medium business, you will download Spiceworks. It will help you inventory your network so you have a full account of all the hardware, software, printers, networking devices on your network. You can also monitor your network changes. You know, somebody installed a piece of software they shouldn't have that's against your policies. Did a Windows event alert show up on one of the computers they need to monitor for? You can also do stuff like, you know, classic, you know, bandwidth monitoring. You're going to see how much bandwidth is being consumed by which of your users. But we've also incorporated a very easy-to-use help test right into the system. And what that allows you to do is keep integrated records on both the user requests that come in and the systems that are affected. So you can run reports that can tell you, hey, you know, we might need to upgrade that server because we get a lot of issues with it.
2:00And on top of all of this is this wonderful reporting engine that makes sure that you have all the stats and metrics you need to be able to do your job. And finally, we incorporate a great community, an active community of over 700,000 users who are all in the same boat. So basically, you can interface with other people and ask them, hey, you know, I'm in a healthcare facility here and we're trying to do VPN, but how does that affect HIPAA? Should I be worried about those kinds of things? And this community of users is one of the greatest assets of Spice Girls is that they're able to interface with each other and kind of bring the power of the network to help you do your job. Key points I forgot to mention, which is pretty important, is that it's a free network that's in software. That's right. So I have to make that point. Like you're saying, you guys sell into the small and medium area. But, like, what--so, like, how would you characterize the community exactly? Can I give you a background of the kinds of people it may be best to take examples of the folks who are active in our community? We have Scott Allen Miller, who's a managed service provider out of New York. And he, you know, works with, you know, customers all over the world because his company is distributed and they've got locations all over the world. We've got folks who work in a healthcare facility in Colorado. It's a two-person IT shop. And they're a nonprofit, so, you know, they're always trying to make the most of what they've got. And then we've got folks who run co-location facilities and data centers. And this one gentleman I was talking to, you know, he has to manage terabytes and terabytes of data. You don't necessarily think of them as small, medium business, but they run the gamut of everybody from a smaller shop all the way to some of the most sophisticated IT. What makes all of this interesting is that they come with a wide variety of backgrounds. So you have folks who have all the certifications you can probably imagine, including people who've written certification exams for other people to take. And you've got folks who are completely self-taught. So it's a wide, diverse, you know, background. And that's what makes the community interesting is because they not only help you answer questions like, hey, I see this error message. What do I do about it? But more importantly, they help you answer questions like, I don't have the resources. I need to solve this problem.
4:01And this is my situation. What are the options for me? And that's where some of the beauty of the community comes up because it's less about prescriptions that say you should go buy vendor X's product and do Y. It's more about, well, here are the five solutions that can kind of get you there without breaking the bank. Right. Here's how you can make the best of it. And so in that sense, the best practices of doing IT in small and medium business, which is just challenging in an endeavor, not only because you're balancing like the technical requirements, but you're also balancing what the resource levels and kind of the commitments from your management are. Again, pulling that off is going to be very complicated. And that's what I find amazing about the community is how they work. So speaking of the community, we were talking about some of the new, or some of the enhancements in 4.0, which recently came out. And it sounded like, you know, at some time, at some points the community gets to be so active that you're sort of, you have to kind of put back in features that you guys have removed, right? There's a pretty strong pull from the community for things that they really like. The things we do at Spiceworks right from the beginning to the end is we involve the community all the day at various phases. So for example, in 4.0, all said and done, in the Spiceworks 4.0 group, there were about 3,000 people involved. And what basically happened was we started, even before we wrote a single line of code, kind of putting out our ideas and mock-ups and stuff like that. And it's amazing the level and the, you know, the strength of feedback we get back. One example was, in one of the mock-ups, we had kind of moved a feature so it wasn't just one click away, it was like two clicks away. And then we got all these responses that said, you know, I'm in Dallas and Austin's not that far away, I'll drive down and kind of camp out until you guys will, you know, put that feature back one click away. Right. And it's that level of engagement because it's a tool they use every day. And it's great for us because we know exactly how strongly they feel because it seems like a good aesthetic move to move it, but the workflow implications come out best when people kind of look at it who use it every day. And so we have involvement right from the beginning in defining mock-ups
6:02to even some of the earlier alpha builds, you know, builds that are just kind of barely tested by internal tests and we get this build out and people test it all the way through beta. We get great responses before we release the actual software. So in this 4.0 release, like, you know, speaking of the way you sort of farm features, I guess, what are the major features that you got and things that you guys have put into this 4.0? So Spiceworks 4.0 is definitely the latest and greatest of the Spiceworks desktop versions. And what we did in this release is we've expanded the feature coverage in some areas that our users have already been using. For example, in Help Desk, one of the things our users wanted is the ability to collaborate with multiple users on a ticket. So essentially, you know, you get a request from somebody that says, "I need an upgrade." Well, now you can include their manager on the same ticket, get their approval recorded so you have one comprehensive way to be able to do that. So we've added the ability for you to collaborate with other users on Help Desk. Another big request was the ability to work a Help Desk ticket when you're on the go. So, you know, you were working with the user, and then you headed off to the remote office, and then a response comes back. You still should be able to work the entire ticket. And so now you can drive a complete ticket over email. You have those little hash commands. That's right. So any email client, BlackBerry, iPhone, whatever, you get a ticket back. You just reply and say, "Okay, I work five minutes on this, reassign to this person, and close it as this." And you can drive the entire ticket directly from the phone. Along the Help Desk line, what we did was we also extended our user portal. So the user portal is where users will go and interface with the Help Desk system to submit tickets or see the status of their tickets and those kinds of things. So in this release, we expanded the Help Desk to actually make it like an IT intranet. So now you can have multiple pages, you can start writing knowledge articles, or you can have stuff like, you know, top things to check before you ask a VPN question. All of that kind of mini knowledge base stuff will start to show up. You can also customize it extensively to match your company's brand. You can host widgets in there from Google to, you know, whatever widget you want to find.
8:02Wherever widgets may come from. Exactly. And so you can do all of those kinds of things. And now you can, you know, get some of the benefits of having a full intranet very easy to use. So you don't have to go install a comprehensive solution for it. You can just get started with the Spicebook solution. Another highly requested feature that we released in beta was the network map. Right. So with the network map, we give you a visual overview of your network. We also show you connections between the different devices and allow you to kind of find the bandwidth consumption within the various links. And so that's our first version of the network map showed up in Spiceworks 4.OS. We also cleaned up the UI quite a bit. What we did was continually at Spiceworks, our goal was to make sure that everybody from the novice users to the expert users can find the information quickly. And so the UI was also re-geared so that you can get to things very quickly and it's a lot cleaner and it can allow us to scale into some of the other features we'll be adding in the future. Right, there's a certain grouping around sort of working with the rest of the company. You know, working with the users of the IT that Spiceworks users are managing. So it's kind of, you know, there's an interesting theme of taking care of the user's users, if you will. A lot of it kind of falls out naturally from where the product is because basically what users do is they show us how they're using it and we go, well, we get it. So, like, the user portal we had previously was all about kind of working tickets, but users were using it for a lot more. Right. They were sticking chat widgets in there and communicating with their users. They were trying to create, like, these fancy JavaScript stuff to put a little mini knowledge base stuff in it. And it's like, that makes sense. That's where the need is. Let's kind of help you get there. And so that's kind of our philosophy and it works pretty well. Right. That makes sense. Well, great. Well, let's check out a demo of this stuff.