I would ask, however, why a cheap-ass educational
establishment has so many expensive UPSes, but can't pay for
their monitoring software. ;)
Spoken like someone who doesn't know how university
budgets work. ;)
Generally university budgets are done on a year-to-year
(or biennium-to-biennium) basis. There's no guarantee money
you have now will be there next year, and in fact anything
you don't spend in a given budget year disappears. The
result is it's often easy to get money for one-time
purchases, but arranging regular payment for things like
software subscriptions is nearly impossible.
This is how budgeting works in just about any organisation. That
doesn't take away from the fact 100 GBP is... 100 GBP :) Make sure
to budget enough Cisco rack ears ;-)