They say there's no such thing as a free lunch. However, it does appear that you can get free tools to track and inventory your IT assets, including mobile devices and software.

For example, would you like to know if there are any iPhones connected to your network? And, if so, how many? How about double-checking that you’re in compliance with your Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm, and BlackBerry licensing agreements?

Using open-source search technology from startup Paglo, you can reportedly run Google-esque type searches to find out the answers to these and many other questions about both your wired and wireless IT environments. Paglo, formerly Network Chemistry, is making available free software and services to help IT departments dynamically investigate massive amounts of information about their wired and wireless computing and networking environments.

Network Chemistry sold its wireless security technology to wireless LAN systems maker Aruba Wireless in July, then turned around and created Paglo. Now, Paglo has applied the intellectual property it retained to building a search engine that discovers and indexes IT assets. The company is throwing the open source software and service out there to see what users will do with it, then will determine what fee-based premium services it might offer down the road, says Brian de Haaff, Paglo CEO.

Using Paglo Crawler software on a PC coupled with Paglo’s Search Index service, IT managers could find out how many of a given device type, operating system and software configuration are on their networks. Once a user has created a certain search, he or she can save that search to a dashboard to repeat the search again in the future. The folks in the Paglo search community can copy the search type created by another company (minus the originating company’s private data, of course) and use it in their own environments.

Paglo says that more than 3,500 people and businesses have already registered to participate in the private beta test of the software and service. Visit Palgo’s site to sign up.

Joanie Wexler is an independent networking technology writer/editor in Silicon Valley.