Managing hundreds or thousands of servers and desktops is a daunting job. System and network administrators need to be able to quickly load new machines, install applications, coordinate backups, balance network loads, and troubleshoot outages. They are constantly under assault by viruses, cyber criminals, and their own budgets.

As computing power has increased, administrators have increasingly relied on automation (computers monitoring and managing computers) to help keep users up and running.

Operating messaging type servers, such as Voice over IP (VoIP), have become especially tricky, given the near real-time and distributed nature of the data flows. Short downtime tolerance of the users, call quality, and customer support have added to the burden.

Fortunately, over the past few years, companies have been springing up with software solutions that help enterprises with their large scale system management needs.

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