Last issue, I talked about RADIUS and reminisced about the days of telecommuting via 2400-baud modems. After writing that newsletter, I had a telephone interview with David Manks, NetIQ's new senior director of product marketing and Scott Hollis, NetIQ's not-so-new senior director of product management. I was immediately struck by one of the slides David used, titled "Challenges Customers Face," which stated that NetIQ's corporate IT clients were concerned to:

* Meet business objectives of Line Of Business customers.
-Align IT and business objectives.
-Align IT service delivery with user expectations.
-Ensure the availability and performance of the infrastructure.

* Manage increasing complexity.
-Growing complexity and sophistication of applications.
-Skyrocketing costs of downtime and incidents.
 
* Stretch decreasing resources.
-Pressure on budgets and personnel.
-Availability of skills.

It was déjà vu all over again.

It seems that for 10 years, at least, I've been writing about how IT managers, in order to take their rightful place at the corporate table, needed to align the interests of the organization with their own while giving users the best available technology and doing it for ever decreasing expenditures. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same, first written by Alphonse Karr in "Les Guepes" back in 1849 and is just as relevant today).

We know what we ought to do, we know what we have to do but we're still reluctant to take the steps necessary to accomplish what needs to be done. Admittedly, we've come a long way in the past 20 years since the PC first showed up on an enterprise desktop. But too many people still think of the IT manager as a quirky propeller-head who is more interested in technobabble than the language of the business marketplace. The NetIQ slide shows that.

NetIQ does want to help you through its products, which include the latest version of its core management product AppManager 6.0, part of the AppManager Suite.

The suite also features a vastly improved AppManager Diagnostic Console 2.0 with added support for Exchange Server. When this is used in conjunction with the suite's other components AppManager Analysis Center 1.5 and AppAnalyzer 3.0, the products could go a long way towards satisfying your users' needs. All this while reducing outages and downtime through pro-active planning, management and monitoring, and all at reduced costs in both money and headcount as, after all, automated consoles run 24-7, hardly ever get sick and never take a vacation nor do they need fancy offices, trips to conferences or ergonomic furniture.