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.