Spiceworks expands to the UK and the cloud

Spiceworks is setting up a UK presence for customers of its free IT management platform, and plans to expand its capabilities to support cloud-based applications, while a collaborative helpdesk feature will allow IT professionals to get assistance from other members of the Spiceworks community.

The firm announced on Thursday that it has set up Spiceworks Europe Ltd to better serve users and partners in the region. About a quarter of the company's global user base is already in Europe, and the UK represents the lion's share with 135,000 registered IT professionals, Spiceworks said.

The company also detailed some improvements it expects to deliver during 2012, including discovery of cloud-based applications, extensions to its helpdesk capabilities to enable IT professionals to get help from others, plus expansion of the Spiceworks knowledge base.

Scott Abel, Spiceworks founder and chief executive, told journalists at a London event that the company is looking to make better use of the online community that customers of Spiceworks join when they start using the tool.

"The big focus is to move from just presenting data to giving users more information to solve problems," he said, adding that Spiceworks customers are often working alone as the sole IT professional in a small business.

The collaborative helpdesk will thus enable customers to "share a support ticket with any IT pros you have 'friended' on the Spiceworks network, and get their help with solving a problem", Abel said, adding that this is a "highly anticipated" feature.

Meanwhile, Abel explained that many of the most important applications are moving to the cloud, and that customers will want to be able to do the same kind of discovery and licence tracking in Spiceworks as they do with local IT resources.

Spiceworks is also looking to introduce online tendering for IT products to customers in Europe.

Already available in the US, this lets IT professionals put out a tender for requirements via the Spiceworks network to vendors that are also members, and has proved a popular feature.

"It's US-only right now, but we're signing up vendors for the UK, so users should stay tuned as we expect full support here soon," said Spiceworks vice president of marketing Jay Hallberg.

Spiceworks is a cross-platform systems management, inventory and help desk platform which is free to use but displays advertising from the company's IT vendor partners.

A major part of Spiceworks is its social networking capabilities which allow IT professionals to swap tips and product recommendations.