That's a central reason 24 Hour Fitness, a $400 million chain of health clubs, is considering outsourcing custody of its network as the company expands through acquisitions. Director of IT strategic planning Geoffrey Singer says he's looking for an "umbrella package" to manage thin clients at the company's 230 clubs through a browser console. The company expects to open another 70 U.S. locations by year's end, and Singer says he wants to troubleshoot degradation in network performance on the company's sales and sign-in application.

"Outsourcing allows you to try before you buy," he says. "I'm sure there's a break-even point to buy a package. This is a good way to cover ourselves during that growth."

Others are more skeptical. Kim Orumchian, VP of product development at Fatbrain.com Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif., an online technical bookseller that expects $30 million in sales this year, says the company recently took internal control of its network from an outsourcer to improve quality of service and uptime. "We are still unwilling to put all our eggs in one basket, because even the largest service providers are not completely fault-tolerant," he says. "They're not up all the time."

Demand for monitoring Internet traffic and forecasting demand to plan capacity is rising as Fatbrain. com rolls out its eMatter product, which lets customers post reports, articles, and books on the company's site. In October, Fatbrain.com plans to begin letting customers download these texts, leading the company to purchase more bandwidth.

Customers and analysts praise off-the-shelf packages for alerting network managers to potential problems and reducing the time it takes to repair faulty equipment. Spottier are the products' reputations for identifying the root causes of problems. Vendors are working to repair those shortcomings.

HP this week will unveil the ability to use its OpenView Network Node Manager, priced at $5,000 for up to 250 nodes, in conjunction with its ManageX server and application monitoring tool to pinpoint event causes. For example, if a user loses E-mail access because of a router problem, OpenView can tell an IT manager to look there, instead of at the application server. HP says the upgrade will be available free via the Web this month, and included in Network Node Manager 6.1, due in November.

Novell, meanwhile, plans to let users of its small-and-midsize-business ManageWise product configure servers through Novell Directory Services by next year. Samm DiStasio, director of product marketing, says customers will be able to store optimal configurations in the directory, then associate those objects with servers on the network.

Microsoft is also betting on enhanced directory services. Jim Allchin, senior VP of Microsoft's business and enterprise division, says Systems Management Server for smaller companies will eventually shed its network-management features as those functions flow into the operating system. "People are interested in remote management; an ISP can install the server and do total administration of that server remotely," he says. "There are great quality-of-service hooks in Windows 2000."

MicroAge's Picarello says vendors' attention to providing smaller companies more stable networks is boosting customer confidence, and service providers' business. Says Picarello, "There's a lot more reliability, measured and perceived."

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