Among the few technology areas that can actually thrive in tough economic times are management and automation technology. Vendors promising to reduce manual labor, cuts operational costs and improve services to the business could win IT budget dollars even in the midst of a recession.

That might be why so many management vendors have not only weaved talk of ROI and frugal investments in myriad press releases, but also have updated software licensing models to enable customers to get at their products faster, with less effort and at a lower upfront cost. Companies such as BMC, CA and HP have used the better part of 2008 to develop and/or improve their respective software-as-a-service product offerings and are now shouting from the rooftops about the quick deployment, ease of ongoing maintenance and low cost benefits SaaS can provide.

HP last week went a step further by introducing zero-percent financing via its HP Financial Services. Company officials say the option will offer more ways for customers to acquire HP software without budget worries.

"The 0% financing allows customers to procure the software or pay for services with creative financing options," says Ramin Sayar, senior director of Business Service Management products at HP. "It is a way to let customers take advantage of our software without having to worry about the economic crisis or the budget lockdowns they currently face."

Separately, NetIQ is offering its customers ways to more easily acquire its Aegis 2.0 IT process automation platform. For one, the vendor is embedding the technology across its four product portfolios to enable customers investing in AppManager for instance, to reap the benefits of Aegis automation technology via one process. The vendor also plans to make available a free version of Aegis - currently codenamed Nansen but expected to be called IT Automation Process Modeler - that will also mark the launch of a community around IT process automation.

NetIQ also adopted creative licensing to ease adoption of its automation platform. With a plan called "2 - 5 - 50," NetIQ says it will offer Aegis with 2 weeks of professional services (to lighten the installation burden on customers) to apply the automation to 5 processes in the customer environment for $50,000. This offering will help customers streamline manual processes and automate more tasks, and it will also enable NetIQ to continue to sell products during an economic downturn.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.