The U.S. Coast Guard is deploying the BelManage IT management system from Maynard, Mass.-based Belarc Inc. on its 40,000 desktops, servers and laptops, the company announced today. The system has already been implemented on 23,000 machines.

The Coast Guard is using BelManage to help track its software license contracts, hardware replacements, security patches and hot fixes. Both IT staff at headquarters and local administrators have immediate access to updated information by using the system, Belarc said in the statement.

"The Coast Guard is very geographically dispersed -- they have stations from Florida to the Aleutian Islands," said Sumin Tchen, Belarc"s chairman. "They"ve never had a good way of tracking all their hardware, software, hot fixes, security patches, all that sort of thing."

BelManage is ideal for the Coast Guard because it runs automatically over the agency"s intranet, with a single server that sits in West Virginia and a single Oracle database, Tchen said. Information from the entire network is updated daily.

"All the local administrators log into (the system) via the Web, see the kinds of reports that they need for their local machines -- headquarters has direct access also via the Web -- to do their software license compliance, their hardware upgrades, their security patching," Tchen said.

Previously the Coast Guard handled those tasks manually, Tchen said.

"They had systems that were controlled locally by administrators," he said. "They had a lot of disparate products, each run by its own local regional administrator. This (deployment) is part of USCG"s plan to centralize information so they have more control over what they have out there. They"re trying to get away from local administration, where everything is done differently from region to region."

Officials at the Coast Guard could not be reached for comment.