Image by cote via Flickr

Here’s a bit of good news: IT power management is coming to Spiceworks.

You really have to love Spiceworks. For the very minor distraction of a few ads and the odd e-mail offer, you already get a pretty robust little tool for network monitoring and management. For free.

That last part is probably why 800,000 IT professionals and 75,000 MSPs worldwide are managing 28 million desktops, laptops and servers with Spiceworks IT Desktop. But even being free wouldn’t get the tool very far if it didn’t do a fair job of discovering and cataloging inventory, monitoring and troubleshooting, churning out system reports, and organizing helpdesk functions.

Bonus: Spiceworks adds crowdsourcing capabilities. Because, after all, you really can’t get enough social interaction between IT admins, can you?

And come Monday morning, there’ll be a new reason to dig Spiceworks’ flavor. The company will release a downloadable module, co-developed with Intel, that will let administrators regulate the power consumption of their networked computers. Spiceworks officials estimate that if just half its global user baser deployed the new plug in, they’d shave a half billion dollars from their electric bills and keep three million tons of carbon emissions out of the environment.

The new power management plug-in includes:

• Remote power consumption management that allows users to track the electricity being used by PCs, laptops, and other networked devices. This includes the ability to use Wake On LAN and Intel’s vPro technologies to power devices on and off.
• A power management dashboard with a map of networked machines and devices along with their on/off status.
• A “Dollar Savings” view that displays estimates of costs per day and month based on current price/kwh and watts used by networked devices.

“Building more energy-efficient PCs and devices is only one step in making IT green,” Scott Abel, co-founder and CEO of Spiceworks, said in a statement. “The software that manages networked devices can also play a more active role in saving energy. With the help of Intel, we’ve tuned the Spiceworks IT Desktop software to do just that so our growing network of businesses can do more to save money and help the environment.”