Intel to Prioritize Motherboard ...

Computerworld -

Dave Taylor, vice president of marketing at LANDesk Software Inc.

... management with the advent of its Active Management Technology. AMT is specialized flash RAM that Intel Corp. is adding to a line of PC motherboards it plans to ship later this year. The semiconductor behemoth says the new memory will support system management functions that can occur before the operating system boots the computer. A few companies, such as Intel spin-off LANDesk Software Inc., will get dedicated real estate on the flash chips. According to Dave Taylor, LANDesk's vice president of marketing, the South Jordan, Utah-based company will likely use agent technology running underneath the operating system to assess security. For example, the agent could conduct an inventory of installed software to ensure that no viruses have sneaked on board, so to speak. If problems are detected, LANDesk could isolate the infected machine on a virtual LAN so it couldn't cripple other systems before it was fixed. The agent will work with the LANDesk Management Suite, which can already block applications outlawed by companies and conduct networkwide security threat analyses, among other functions.

Gary Griffiths, CEO of Everdream Corp.

Forget PC management and ...
... let your service provider worry about it. Sure, you can watch over thousands of PCs on your network. But Gary Griffiths, CEO of Everdream Corp., asks, "Why would you want to?" Indeed, that's a reasonable question when you can hand the job over to his Fremont, Calif.-based managed services company for as little as three bucks per desktop each month. And given that Everdream Control Center 6.0 becomes available tomorrow with new features such as network scanning across multiple subnets, Web-based remote control of Windows PCs and an end-user portal for workers to check on the status of service requests, it may be an even harder question to answer.
Distributed operations challenge IT ...

FineGround's application monitoring appliance

... to guarantee application delivery to remote sites. That's the contention of Nat Kausik, CEO of FineGround Networks Inc. in Campbell, Calif. He claims that most global companies house only a small portion of their employees at headquarters, while the vast majority work at numerous sites around the world. With the vagaries of all the different systems and networks that stand between the corporate applications running at HQ and end users scattered hither and yon, IT's service-level agreements with business units are always in jeopardy, Kausik says. Hence FineGround's planned shipment later this month of a new dashboard module as part of its Enterprise Application Delivery Suite, a