Hewlett-Packard Co., Fujitsu Siemens Computers GmbH and IBM are each turning to system and network management software partners to help move their respective utility computing initiatives forward.

Each company's goal is to enable customers to create utility computing environments that can be viewed as a single pool of resources for easy management and dynamic provisioning and deployment.

HP, of Palo Alto, Calif., and Salt Lake City-based Altiris Inc. this week will announce HP Client Manager Software 6.0, which will allow customers to manage HP clients remotely through a single console and automate system health monitoring, patch updates and diagnostics.

Through a Wake on LAN feature that Altiris brings to the HP upgrade, users also will be able to start up HP PCs remotely during off-hours.

A second product to be unveiled, Altiris Connector for HP SIM (Systems Insight Manager), integrates the Altiris 6 management software with HP's SIM server management software. The connector enables administrators to manage PCs and HP ProLiant servers in a single console.

For IT outsourcer CenterBeam Inc., improved management capabilities such as those due from HP and Altiris are useful for its IT environment, which includes HP PCs and ProLiant blade servers, said spokesperson Brian Johnson. But they're also important for CenterBeam's business of managing other companies' IT resources, Johnson said.

"Any way that we can get our hands deeper and more tightly clasped around the systems we manage, we're all for it," said Johnson in San Jose, Calif. "It leads us farther down that path of more automation, more remote control."

The HP offerings follow similar announcements last week by Altiris and Fujitsu Siemens, of Munich, Germany. The duo unveiled DeskView 10.1, which lets users monitor and manage Fujitsu Siemens client devices from a central location.

For its part, IBM, of Armonk, N.Y., this week will announce plans to offer RouteScience Technologies Inc.'s ANS5 (Adaptive Network Software Version 5) network virtualization software on some of its Intel Corp.-based xSeries servers.

The WAN management software is targeted at distributed environments such as businesses with branch facilities. ANS5 manages all the paths in a WAN as a virtual pool, with the software directing traffic to whichever path is best-suited for the task, according to RouteScience officials in San Mateo, Calif.

Check out eWEEK.com's Infrastructure Center at http://infrastructure.eweek.com for the latest news, views and analysis on servers, switches and networking protocols for the enterprise and small businesses.