While at Spiceworks‘ “Spiceworld” User Conference in Austin TX, Aaron Booker from Varvid had a chance to chat with Spiceworks Co-Founder and VP of Marketing, Jay Hallberg.  Jay shares his vision of offering Spiceworks software for free and explains the birth of their annual Spiceworld events.  Stemming from a desire from their user base to get together and meet, Spiceworld events now take place 4 times a year throughout the country, including streaming webcasts all over the world for those who cannot attend.

Spiceworks desirability is due in large part to it’s very broad arsenal of management tools (network inventory, Help-desk, reporting, monitoring, assessments, network maps, troubleshooting tools, etc.).  Add onto this a very active community of SMB IT professionals, MSP’s and consultants all integrated into the Spiceworks modules themselves. Many small businesses are initially attracted to Spiceworks to specifically utilize one aspect of the software (i.e. technology assessments, inventory, etc).  Once they get a taste of how simple and effective the software is many businesses choose to delve deeper into the program.

What is particularly interesting about Spiceworks is their constant focus of on their users’ input.  They are constantly updating and improving the software using a roadmap driven directly by user feedback via a detailed forum.