ManageEngine makes admin tools for corporate IT, and is now offering a social network for the engineers and administrators that use them.

Social enterprise is big these days.  Jive just updated its popular platform with a bunch of new features and a 30-day trial, and the many offerings out there seem to share at least a few similarities. Catering to the same audience of business users within the enterprise is one of these common denominators, and that’s exactly what ManageEngine’s newest app does differently.

ITPulse is a networking tool designed specifically for IT, and that applies even beyond the marketing.  The platform features several unique aspects that qualify it for the description, including a single ‘everybody follows everybody’ style wall that replaces traditionally profiled status’ updates.  ITPulse is meant to be a communications channel that can accommodate the IT work culture, whether it’s the upholding of mundane synergy or a midnight server outage to lose sleep over (or rather not, as ManageEngine heartily promises).

“We’re bringing the famous, Facebook-style, multi-threaded cascading wall to IT,” said Dev Anand, ITPulse product manager for ManageEngine. “In addition to its day-in, day-out advantages, IT Pulse can serve as a secure, critical line of communication during emergencies — especially for large enterprise IT teams that have to collaborate overseas or across multiple locations.”

The company is offering ITPulse as a standalone SaaS, or as a module that natively integrates with two of its other offerings.  The social network’s wall can be set to display alerts that are set by OpManager, and also to sync user requests received via ManageEngine’s help desk app.

Panaroma9 is another cloud firm that’s looking to make engineers’ lives a little bit easier, and it recently made its own SaaS available in the U.S.