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ON Technology relaunches in UK

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ON Technology has relaunched in the UK after a two-year absence, rationalising its product line and focusing on corporate customers.

The company once had a portfolio of about 17 products, including network management, e-mail and groupware, but has now focused on its two desktop management and configuration software products, ON Command CCM and ON Command Remote.

ON Command CCM is the only software distribution product on the market that can do a pre-OS installation. Its remote-access version is ON Command Remote.

Starting with a switched-off PC, with nothing installed, the administrator gets the MAC address of the network card so the software can use the Wake-on-LAN features of the motherboard to turn the PC on.

The software then loads a mini-system into the RAM, which formats and partitions the hard drive, installs the operating system and installs applications the user wants.

Robert Drew, UK manager for ON Technology, told PC Week: "ON Command CCM brings down the total cost of ownership because you don't have to send out an engineer every time. And Wake-on-LAN means you can boot up PCs overnight and do a complete re-install."

The system uses the native install programs that come with each program.

That flexibility, along with an accessible API and a command line interface, means that companies can tailor the software to their needs and policies, Drew said.

Among the company's customers in the UK are Racal and Bank of New York's British offices. It also has a global partnership with Dell for installing programs on new machines.

ON Technology's main European customer, Deutsche Telekom, uses the software to manage 100,000 PCs, which saves the German company £17.7 million a year in support costs, Drew said.

ON Command CCM runs on NT, Solaris, HP-UX and other flavours of Unix and is priced per client seat.

A typical 1,000-user installation costs roughly $100 (£63) a user.

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