Gartner Names Spiceworks One of Six 2008 ''Cool Vendors in IT Operations''

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Spiceworks™, Inc., the provider of the industry’s first free ad-supported IT management software, today announced it was named a 2008 “Cool Vendor in IT Operations” by Gartner, Inc., a leading information technology research and advisory company. Released on March 31, the Gartner report highlights six breakthrough technology vendors that address challenging issues or produce new business models to satisfy customer demand. Gartner recognized the Spiceworks IT Desktop as: “…an innovative solution, particularly useful for SMBs that attempt to solve the IT Operations Management problem.”

“Being recognized by Gartner as a ‘cool vendor’ is a great honor”

“Being recognized by Gartner as a ‘cool vendor’ is a great honor,” said Jay Hallberg, co-founder and vice president of Marketing for Spiceworks. “We specifically set out to create a powerful and useful IT management solution for the underserved SMB market. It’s exciting to garner praise for our work from industry experts and to see our application being rapidly adopted by users around the world.”

The Spiceworks IT Desktop is the industry’s first free IT management application and collaboration platform. Designed for SMBs with up to 250 employees, Spiceworks is currently used by more than 250,000 IT professionals in 194 countries around the world to manage their technology operations. The Spiceworks IT Desktop allows IT users to discover, inventory, monitor, track, report on, troubleshoot and repair the hardware and software running in their networks. It also provides a built-in help desk and a community of users that can collaborate with each other to solve pressing IT problems and share news and advice in their daily workflow.

The free Spiceworks application platform is supported by displaying relevant, non-intrusive ads on topics that are useful to IT professionals. According to the Gartner report: “This business model enables technology vendors to extend their reaches in this challenging area of the SMB market by providing them with an opportunity to cost-effectively increase their presence and businesses.”

More than 40 top advertisers – including HP, Intel, Rackspace, Microsoft, Brother, Symantec, McAfee, Netgear, Sony and TrendMicro – have experienced success with campaigns to the Spiceworks user community, which now supports networks with over 11 million devices and more than 7 million employees. For more information on Spiceworks, visit www.spiceworks.com.

About Spiceworks

Founded by network and systems management software pioneers, Spiceworks develops the industry’s first free IT management software designed to meet the unique needs of small and medium businesses. Spiceworks helps IT organizations easily manage their networks, solve IT problems and find the products, services and information they need to do their jobs. Spiceworks is a privately held company headquartered in Austin, Texas with funding from Austin Ventures and Shasta Ventures. For more information visit www.spiceworks.com

Spiceworks is a trademark of Spiceworks, Inc. All other names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.