Any HR manager can tell you that the bain of all modern businesses employing computing technology in a networked system is that system crashes happen. Work is lost, employees become frustrated and productivity time is lost.

More frequently however is the situation where a fault in the network causes a number of different faults and failures to occur without crashing the whole system.

The result for the network manager is that time has to be spent investigating the root cause of a whole string of faults and discrepancies.

Vnunet are reporting that American software company Riversoft have now tackled the problem using IBM and Hewlett Packard network management platforms with their own software OpenRiver.

The result is that savings of upto 90 per cent of the time lost in fault finding can be made. Fed through to the whole business, there is an enormous potential for many companies to save money. The HR manager could be the key to explaining how.