Even in a recession, IT managers have to buy and maintain security and compliance software, and IT management software like IBM's Tivoli suite could be seen as replacing more expensive hardware alternatives.

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The good news for CIOs is that a growing amount of vendor investment has been drawn to this market, which Gartner has named Data Center Infrastructure Management. nlyte software, for example, provides a modeling, monitoring, and management suite for understanding power and cooling in a data center and optimizing placement and configuration of racks and servers.

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Its Rational Suite of software and information management software continued to suffer due to low demand and transactional rollover into the next quarter.

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