Throughout my career I have often wondered why IT staffs are often isolated and even marginalized in many companies. In fact, my observation has been that the larger the company, the more prominent the isolation. People who love to get their hands dirty with technology can be introverted, perfectionists and difficult to work with; but they can also be creative, innovative, and often brilliant.
So I was happy to meet with Jay Hallberg, co-founder of Spiceworks. This Austin-based company’s mission is to create an online community where IT professionals can not only find answers to technical questions, but also interact and socialize with each other.
Spiceworks was founded in 2006 by Scott Abel, Jay Hallberg, Greg Kattawar, and Francis Sullivan, and is backed by VC firms Austin Ventures and Shasta Ventures. These four partners have since found a spicy spot serving the small-medium business segment, specifically companies with less than 500 employees. IT professionals in companies of this size are expected to be jacks of all trades, and to come up with solutions very quickly to every technical issue imaginable.
Spiceworks offers an IT desktop as a free download on their website. It is a well-designed and intuitive console, which lets IT manage network inventory, reporting, help desk and troubleshooting. Jay Hallberg, who is also the company’s VP of marketing, is proud to be counting over 650,000 users, while adding over 1,000 per day.
The IT desktop is only one part of Spiceworks offering. The second part is the community of IT professionals, created to foster collaboration, connections, and discussions among IT pros. The Spiceworks community currently boasts reviews on over 12,000 products, and 37,000 distinct topics. It is accessible to everyone to see, although only members can post. Browsing through the community site, I found local Spiceworks chapters, called SpiceCorps groups, in Boston, NY, Denver and even London.
Spiceworks’ revenue is ad-driven. Some of their customers are vendors like HP, Dell and Cisco, while others are agencies. I asked Mr. Hallberg why an IT professional will choose the Spiceworks community for answers, over a Google or yahoo search. “IT pros trust other IT pros”, he said. And with large vendors like AMD and Xerox jumping in to offer a little (non-altruistic) hand to the IT community, Spiceworks is hot and getting hotter.
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