While I believe that Microsoft will certainly have impact in the system management market, their announced plans are still not going to help solve the real issues facing Operations teams in managing the performance of mission critical IT systems. The announced plans are a "me too" play in a changing environment. It is well established that the complexity and size of today's data centers have led to huge labor costs for performance management because Operations teams continue to take the approach of throwing more bodies at the problem. They are using static-threshold based monitoring and tribal knowledge-based, human correlation to solve problems in an environment with thousands of devices and hundreds of thousands of performance metrics. The problem is humanly unsolveable and more and more IT Operations executives have realized this and are looking at a new approach. Real time analytics solutions are now available that can automate much of the manual effort that goes into performance management and even predict performance problems so that they can be prevented before they occur. If Microsoft had announced plans to provide this type of capability (which has been ignored by the Big 4, with the exception of BMC's acquisition of Proactivenet) in addition to standard monitoring, I would have been much more impressed with their foray into heterogenous system performance management.