Ask any military tactician (or your local RTS buff), and they'll tell you that one major factor any fighting force needs is a good communications link - and lack of it will leave any group, no matter how well armed or well trained, dead in the water.

The same can be said for a strong company, and with that in mind, we're happy to report that Atari won the 2006 InfoWorld 100 Award, given to companies that make use of the latest in computer 'tech to expand their business goals.

Atari's bid for this awards is their IT outsourcing project, which improved total cost of ownership by outsourcing their Linux infrastructure. What's that mean?

Atari had allocated most of their key systems to Rackspace Managed Hosting, a global provider of managed hosting services, the electronics equivalent of a secretary/housekeeper...or media manager (for the PSP buffs asking).

By doing this, and building much of their in-house systems on the open-sourced Linux OS, Atari achieved much in the way of simplifying their overall spending and human resources - the space freed up by streamlining their system allowed their in-house IT teams to focus on more important tasks like game development.  

"We realized that hosting our backend applications internally was not strategic to our core business," said Jim O'Keefe, head of IT for Atari. "With Rackspace handling our entire IT infrastructure, we have now implemented systems that are more cost efficient."