network

Ready-to-wear network management

One of the most overused clichés in the English language may very well be ‘give the shirt off my back’, as in I would do anything I can to help you out or lend a hand. This hasn’t stopped people from casually throwing it around (like an old shirt), or prevented enterprising companies from bending over backwards (whoops…there’s another) to use it as the centerpiece of a marketing campaign.

This is the case with Uplogix, Inc., a Texas-based provider of automated network management solutions that recently launched a promotion campaign that offers a free t-shirt to promote its technology that reportedly extends network management capabilities to the very edge of your wired and wireless architectures. The solution claims to reduce the cost and complexity of managing networks by offering the ability to automate the process of remote management and recovery even when the network is down. The promotion debuted late last month at Cisco Live! in San Francisco (Uplogix is a Cisco partner).

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Color my (IT) world…green

The Great Recession apparently hasn’t put too much of a damper on corporate green IT initiatives. The reason? Most likely because these efforts can dramatically cut costs (by reducing the number of servers in an organization’s network, for example), and environmentally-sensitive efforts can generate positive PR in a rising tide of negative economic news.

While spending on green IT projects has slowed, along with everything else, these efforts are still top of mind when it comes to project priorities, says market researcher Gartner, Inc., noting that 2009 will most likely be a ‘gap year’ for initiatives. This is a term familiar to Europeans that refers to a period of time taken by a student before attending university to reflect on life, get involved in volunteer services, and oh yeah, have a bit of fun.

In the corporate sense, however, it means keeping a low profile to avoid short-term cost cutting and hopefully survive to budget another day.

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