Midrange IT Professionals Working Overtime, Bigtime

Published: July 20, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

When you sell appliances that help automate system and security administration and help desk operations, as Kace does with its Kbox appliances, then you have to bring on home the effect of such appliances on the everyday life of system administrators and help desk operators if you want to make a sale. And to that end, Kace has commissioned a study to see how much overtime IT employees are being asked to do on a regular basis.

The basic idea, of course, is that because you don't use the Kbox appliances, you have to work late, and that if you can get your company to buy such appliances, you won't have to stay late so much. (The Kbox appliances are, by the way, based on the open source FreeBSD Unix variant for X86 and X64 platforms, but can be used to manage all manner of PCs, servers, and network devices; it is targeted mostly at Windows, which dominates the SMB space.)

In any event, Kace commissioned a survey by King Research, which surveyed 249 customers who had a total of 760,000 computers that they were managing. For the purposes of this study, the terms small, medium, and large refer to the number of boxes under management, not revenue size or employee counts. Small means less than 100 nodes, medium means between 100 and 5,000 nodes, and large means more than 5,000 nodes.

About 87 percent of the IT professionals working at midrange shops said that they had to work outside of normal office hours--evenings, weekends, and holidays--to do normal, routine IT administration tasks that they should be able to do during normal business hours but cannot find the time to do. Only 66 percent of the executives at small companies said they had the same problem, but about 80 percent of those at large enterprises said that they, too, were working late. The survey, which was admittedly done on a very small sample even if it was on a large number of machines under management, also indicated that 82 percent of large enterprises had tools to automate the management and administration of their machines (imagine if they didn't have such tools), while only 54 of midrange shops had such tools and only 29 percent of small companies did.