Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “God helps them that help themselves.” Well, thanks to distributed and intelligent management, communications equipment is now becoming much more capable of “helping itself,” thus increasing the availability – or uptime – of applications. Major components in a system now provide sensors and intelligent management architectures to provide real-time feedback on the status of its operation. This article will show that the standards-based Intelligent Platform Management Interface, commonly known as IPMI, is at the crux of the management framework.