SAN DIEGO — April 25, 2006 — Bob Muglia, Microsoft Corp. senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business, speaking to more than 3,000 IT decision-makers at the Microsoft Management Summit 2006 today, highlighted the power of people to drive business results through software innovation. Muglia reaffirmed Microsoft’s commitment to assist customers in keeping IT aligned with business priorities by investing in innovative ways to manage complexity to achieve agility. Muglia said Microsoft is delivering on the vision of self-managing dynamic systems today through work in industry standards, systems management solutions and infrastructure capabilities that will help drive down IT infrastructure costs.
Muglia specifically highlighted the progress Microsoft is making in its Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) — a commitment to help customers achieve higher business value through automation, flexible resource utilization and knowledge-driven processes — including the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) acceptance of the Web Services for Management (WS-Management) specification as a preliminary standard and the intention to build a service desk offering that will serve as a key foundational piece for the System Center family of solutions.
“Complexity in the IT environment is a fact of life as customers deal with increasingly diverse environments and interoperability issues that make it difficult to track changes to the system and respond to security attacks and other unanticipated events,” Muglia said. “Our push toward dynamic systems will have broad impact and help customers to not only manage this more efficiently but also harness the power of IT as a strategic asset and ultimately achieve the agility necessary to transform IT into a driver of business success.”
Interoperability — Working With the Industry to Manage Complexity
As enterprises look to reduce costs while improving flexibility, the movement toward self-managing dynamic systems will give customers the tools needed to manage complexity, drive costs out of the infrastructure and create an interoperable system. Today the DMTF announced that the WS-Management specification has been approved and will be published as a preliminary standard. An essential part of the efforts to make DSI a cross-platform initiative, the specification provides a common way for systems of all types to access and exchange management information across the infrastructure.
With Microsoft’s continued commitment, and with partner support and implementation of the WS-Management specification, Microsoft is leading the way in driving standardization that will help streamline how management and development tools communicate operational information across distributed systems.
Microsoft Continues to Invest in System Center
The Microsoft Management Summit marks one year since Microsoft reinforced its commitment to the System Center IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)-based family of management products, a highly integrated, modular family of systems management solutions. By embedding knowledge and process in the products, System Center aims to deliver a flexible and extensible solution for helping IT organizations gain control over today’s complex environments, moving IT toward being a more agile and responsive partner to the business. In his keynote address, Muglia highlighted continued investments in the System Center family of solutions.
Building on the strong foundation of existing System Center products, releases and updates over the past year included System Center Data Protection Manager, System Center Capacity Planner and Systems Management Server 2003 R2, as well as a set of new and updated management packs for Microsoft® Operations Manager (MOM) 2005. Microsoft also just released System Center Reporting Manager, providing integrated reporting capabilities across MOM and Microsoft System Management Server (SMS), and continuing to build additional value and capability for customers using System Center solutions today.
Signaling Microsoft’s commitment to the promise of System Center, Muglia also said the next version of MOM and SMS will be renamed to align with System Center. MOM V3 will be named System Center Operations Manager 2007, while SMS V4 will become System Center Configuration Manager 2007. When customers use two or more System Center products or solutions, they can expect interoperability, tight integration and incremental value above and beyond using the individual offerings. The products and solutions will continue to be offered in a modular fashion, providing customers with the flexibility to select different pieces while delivering the benefits of incremental cross-product functionality and a common usage paradigm when more than one System Center product is used.
Muglia announced the intention to deliver a service desk offering that will provide two key components to form the foundation for System Center: a workflow engine for facilitating industry best processes and practices, and the foundation for the Microsoft implementation of the configuration management database (CMDB). Consistent with Microsoft’s mantra of capturing knowledge in models, the System Center Service Desk solution will include workflow templates, following the ITIL-based best practices and processes, for a number of key customer scenarios. It will also deliver unprecedented integration with System Center Operations Manager and System Center Configuration Manager out of the box. By adding the asset and change management capabilities to the System Center portfolio and tightly integrating with System Center Configuration Manager, Microsoft is significantly extending the number of problem scenarios it can help solve for its customers.
“With System Center, Microsoft is delivering on a clearly defined strategy for systems management to reduce the cost and complexity of managing IT infrastructures for customers,” Muglia said. “System Center is a key component of the DSI strategy because it helps customers reduce the overall total cost of ownership of their IT infrastructure, while enhancing the ability for IT to be responsive to business needs.”
About Windows Server System
Microsoft Windows Server System™ is integrated server software providing the infrastructure for IT operations, application development, integration and information work. Built on the Windows Server™ operating system and designed with Common Engineering Criteria, Windows Server System is focused on making it easier for IT professionals to connect and manage their IT environments. Because Windows Server System products are integrated for enhanced manageability and security, they help organizations reduce complexity and lower costs. All Windows Server System products support open industry standards including those based on XML to promote interoperability with other platforms. More information on Windows Server System can be found online at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem.
About Microsoft
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