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St. Hilda’s School Learns Management Lessons with KACE™

KBOX™ System Management Appliances simplify IT administration and help UK school to save £30,000 in first year of deployment

Reading, UK – 14th January 2009 - KACE™, the leading systems management appliance company, announced that St. Hilda’s Church of England High School in Liverpool has selected its KBOX system management and deployment appliances to simplify the management of the school’s growing IT environment and deliver better IT support to pupils and staff. Overall, two KBOX appliances replace five separate software tools that had previously been used to manage the school’s IT resources.  The solution provides St Hilda’s with a full suite of system management tools that accelerate the speed of IT administration and drive down associated support costs.

St. Hilda’s School has around a thousand pupils and staff, all of whom require access to IT resources as part of their day-to-day work and studies.  St Hilda’s network manager Lee Ellis is using the KACE appliances to manage more than 480 desktop and laptop computers that are in use across the school, along with over 50 applications available on each machine as standard.

Following the implementation, the school has achieved cost savings of around £30,000 driven largely by the KBOX’s ability to reduce the time involved in critical administration tasks such as security, application and system upgrades and desktop maintenance.

“Using KACE, we were able to provide a better level of support to the school’s pupils and close IT-related issues faster and more efficiently. More importantly, we can ensure that updates to applications were applied consistently across our desktop machines without resorting to manually checking each one,” said Mr Ellis. “Previously a large scale desktop update project would take us around three weeks over summer to complete and check; now we can achieve the same results automatically within two to three days.”

With the KBOX, St Hilda’s is also gaining savings through reduced power consumption; by automatically turning off machines after normal school hours and powering them back on in the morning, the school expects to see potential savings of £8,000 per year.

“Schools and colleges now have ever larger numbers of IT assets to cater for and want the ability to simplify the key processes involved in managing their computer environment,” said Dan Power, European Sales Director at KACE.  “With the KBOX our customers can use their IT resources more efficiently, maintaining tight control over their growing networks and driving down associated IT support costs.  As a result, IT can concentrate on high-value activities and projects that will really make a difference to the user community, rather than struggling with mundane tasks and disparate software utilities.”

KACE is attending the British Education and Training Technology (BETT) show from the 14th to the 17th of January, demonstrating its appliances and how they can help education organisations to manage their networks effectively and automatically.  KACE will be at stand N49 during the event.

About KACE™
KACE™ is the leading systems management appliance company. The award-winning KBOX™ family of appliances delivers easy-to-use, comprehensive systems management capabilities. KACE customers usually install in one day and enjoy the lowest total cost compared to software alternatives. To learn more about KACE and its product offerings, please visit http://www.kace.com.

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Editorial contact:
Mark Kember / Claire Chapman
Goode International
Tel : 01491 873 323
mark.kember@goode.co.uk / claire.chapman@goode.co.uk