Desktop management suites are a dime a dozen, and if you listen to the Altiris’s and LANDesks of the world, are simpler and more economical than ever. But nobody going to be simpler or cheaper than the $1 or less per machine, per month price points that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) desktop management provider Paragent LLC provides.

Paragent’s tools are pretty basic: the most common use case is simply maintaining up to date audits of software licensing. It does so though a SaaS offering that is designed to be attractive to the types of companies with 25 – 100 machines whose idea of an IT technician is somebody who probably also doubles as property manager. It works with agents that are dispatched form its hosted services, which monitor what's on your machines.

You don't have sophisticated functionality like blasting out standardized desktop or laptop images, or fancy troubleshooting probes. But then again, its target SMB market probably couldn't take anything more sophisticated, and probably relies UPS to ship their PCs back to HP or Dell when something goes wrong.

The new version adds literally a couple bells and whistles.

First, it adds remote desktop support, so if you are in the office but your IT tech (or whoever passes for one) is at Starbucks, they log in to assume control. In itself, this is not a revolutionary feature; for instance, if you call Dell desktop support, through a clunky process they can pull off something similar to reconfigure or reinstall some software on your machine. Secondly, Paragent has added a rudimentary trouble ticketing system to track service incidents.

On the horizon (not in this release), the company plans to add reporting on which applications are utilized the most and which websites are visited the most. Also, the company will add some trend reporting that can help clients identify which machines may be candidates for replacement based on parameters like utilization and disk capacity. You can build these reports today; in the future, Paragent will pre-build them. “We’ve been looking at [software] push, as existing products do not do that well. But that’s a sticky area,” said CEO & CTO Tim Rithchey.

Given the company’s positioning as a commodity service provider, it has decided to open source its technology with goals getting the offering ported to Linux.

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