Boston Red Sox fans waited four generations between World Series titles in 1918 and 2004, so local retailing fixture Jordan’s Furniture decided to take a bit of a chance in the spring of 2007. If the Red Sox won the title again in 2007, it declared, the retailer would fully refund the purchase price of items bought during a certain time period. What could go wrong?
As it turned out, the Red Sox swept the Colorado Rockies in four games to capture the Fall Classic — and Jordan’s Furniture had the formidable task of generating refunds on some 30,000 orders.

This remarkable undertaking was made more manageable by Jordan’s earlier decision to install the KBOX Systems Management Appliance by KACE. With a broad assortment of hardware and software being used to manage some 1,100 POS terminals, warehouse workstations and desktop and laptop computers across four stores, a warehouse and Jordan’s corporate offices, the KBOX appliance became an invaluable management tool.

“We were badly in need of a central systems management point for our mixed bag of desktops and terminals,” says Jason Cummins, information systems service manager for the furniture chain headquartered in E. Taunton, Mass. “We had to move away from manual IT processes to stay competitive and grow our business, all the while keeping additional overhead costs to a minimum.”

Prior to the January 2007 KBOX installation, “almost half of our IT staff’s time was spent sorting and triaging help-desk tickets in the queue before having to chase down the equipment, the problem and possible resolution,” Cummins says. “We were going through a tremendous growth spurt and challenging our technology system more and more with each passing day.”

The actual installation of the KBOX appliance was completed in a matter of hours, but “tweaking the system for our needs took a little longer,” Cummins says. Returns on the initial investment amount to $65,000 in annual savings in the form of reduced user downtime and a 60 percent reduction in time taken for software distribution, he says.

“While other products offered some of the technical capabilities of the KBOX, we found that alternatives were more complicated and much more cost- and time-consuming to deploy,” he says.

The KBOX appliance’s many features and functions represent something of a new solution for companies that have accumulated a variety of hardware and software applications over many years. Although Cummins says there may be similar products in the software distribution model, he notes: “The KBOX appliance is kind of unique in the way it handles so many functions. I’ve never seen a product that handles so many functions in one place.”

KACE describes its KBOX Systems Management Appliance as, “an easy-to-use, comprehensive and affordable computer management software alternative that fulfills all of the systems management needs of a medium enterprise.”

Functionality includes initial computer inventory and discovery, software distribution, configuration management, patch management, security vulnerability remediation, asset management, help desk, remote control and integrated application deployment.

Pepperoni not included
In slightly less technical terms, Wynn White, vice president of marketing for Mountain View, Calif.-based KACE, says the KBOX appliance is about the size of a pizza box, albeit a heavy one. “It’s a Swiss Army knife approach to systems management,” he says. “It’s a single blade that’s connected to everything else that you need” to manage “the guts of the data center, as well as all the remote systems on the network. It is the person on the back end who has responsibility for overseeing all the systems.”

Systems management “has been around for 15 to 20 years, but when you have 100 machines, complexity starts to run out of control,” White says. “You have to account for all the machines out there, and the software, and the applications, and patch management to keep systems up to date. And you have to have the ability to troubleshoot, along with the remote control capability to fix a machine on the fly.”

	KACE’s appliance is a particularly good fit for medium-size retailers, White says, because of variables such as the complexity of their IT, the number of stores and the sheer number of computers in their environment.

“Another aspect is the diversity of their IT environment, the different applications, their use of Windows, Mac and Linux,” he says. “We consider ourselves a heterogeneous systems provider.”

Retail clients offer challenges because “they have lots of remote locations, which is a great thing for KACE because it allows us to manage the client’s IT needs with a single central server from a remote location,” White says. “KACE allows an administrator to take control and ensure that the users of all those machines have the latest upgrades and the latest firewall settings, and to make sure the software gets removed when it doesn’t have to be there.”

Go Sox Still, dealing with so many refunds was a challenge. “We had two conference rooms full of machines, going through the returns,” Cummins says. “It was intensive, hands-on labor. KBOX definitely helped us out a lot on that.”

Jordan’s Furniture has committed to another promotion involving the Red Sox. For the 2008 season, however, the company is requiring that the team once again sweep the World Series in four games. Should they do so, customers who purchased certain types of furniture during a prescribed period in the spring will be eligible for full refunds.

Cummins says this year’s “Monster Sweep” program “was well received … it was positive for us. It’s the kind of situation where, if people were planning to buy furniture, why not buy it at Jordan’s?”

As to which takes precedence — the bottom line or the BoSox — Cummins says, “it would be nice if the team won again.”