KACE announced that its KBOX family of appliances are now available as virtual appliances through the VMware virtual appliance marketplace at www.vmware.com/appliances/. The Virtual KBOX appliances offer customers an innovative way to deploy and manage critical IT resources.

"KACE customers have long relied on our KBOX physical appliances for ease-of-use, fast deployment, and quick return on investment, these same benefits apply to our virtual appliance offering," said Rob Meinhardt, CEO and co-founder of KACE. "Today, KACE continues its tradition as the most innovative company in the systems management market by offering the first and only virtual appliance for desktop and server systems management, yielding additional and complementary value-add from both the appliance and virtualization fronts."

Announced earlier this year, the Virtual KBOX family of appliances allows organizations to take advantage of the benefits of virtualization in a new way. Virtual KBOX appliances deliver the benefits of hardware appliances - fast deployment times, low costs, and extreme ease-of-use - while providing all the benefits of virtualization, including improved resource utilization, reduced energy consumption, cost savings, improved maintainability and support, and the ability to quickly scale. The Virtual KBOX family of appliances supports management of physical and virtual machines across Windows, Macintosh, and Linux environments.

"The Virtual KBOX family of appliances from KACE allows customers to deploy and manage virtualized environments with ease," said Dan Chu, Vice President of Emerging Products and Solutions for VMware. "Validation is important to companies as they look for trusted solutions to help them consolidate hardware, improve application availability and reduce costs through a virtualization strategy. Virtual KBOX is a great addition to the more than 800 virtual appliances available from the VMware virtual appliance marketplace."

Virtual appliances are pre-built software solutions, composed of one or more virtual machines, which are packaged, maintained, updated and deployed as a unit. Virtual appliances are fundamentally changing the way software is developed, distributed and managed, providing greater simplicity and accelerating time to value. By purchasing a virtual appliance that is certified for VMware virtualization, customers know they are obtaining a solution that is reliable, secure, ready-to-run in production and optimized for a VMware virtualized environment.

KACE helps customers save time and money. Systems managers are often forced to wear many hats throughout the day to work on myriad IT functions. KACE helps consolidate these functions by providing a single appliance for all projects, while delivering easy-to-use, affordable and comprehensive systems management. The KACE family of appliances fulfills all of the systems management needs of a mid-sized enterprise, from initial computer deployment to ongoing management and retirement.