Network management technology isn't always considered the rock star of IT systems, but when money is tight, industry watchers argue many seemingly mundane tools can take the lead and offer myriad fixes to common problems.

According to Rob Meinhardt, Kace co-founder and CEO, IT managers investing in the vendor's appliances will find multiple uses for the one box. For instance, a customer might purchase a KBOX to perform inventory or software distribution and discover the appliance's help desk capabilities also address the organization's needs.

"A common progression we’ve seen time and time again: a customer buys the KBOX for inventory/asset management purposes. An organization might already have a help desk in house that they’ve been using, but if they’re already using the KBOX for inventory, then tickets created in the KBOX help desk automatically inherit the asset information, including what software is installed on a particular machine, in what order, etc," Meinhardt says. "The result: the organization finds greater value in the integrated solution than the stand-alone tool and it adopts the KBOX help desk solution for their internal use."

Also, even though vendors need to sell products, they realize it isn't always possible for customers to re-invest in technology during tough economic times. For instance, Charles Thompson, product manager at Network Instruments, says existing management products can be tapped for more uses.

"New technology doesn't mean new monitoring tools. When implementing new technologies, wireless 802.11n or video-conferencing applications for example, see if you can leverage existing monitoring tools rather than purchasing a new point-solution. Network analyzers are constantly evolving to support new protocols and network technologies," Thompson says.

Russ Elsner, application performance management technology director at Opnet, says optimizing existing applications can go a long way toward saving cash.

"Optimization is time well spent. When times are good, people don't spend as much time on that, but right now going into an application and squeezing out a couple more percentage points is valuable," Elsner says. "It means existing hardware in place has more headroom and you can go further using existing servers. Rather than adding a couple more servers from the server farm you can squeeze more performance from the boxes you already have."

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.