Microsoft next week plans to introduce a limited beta of a tool for capacity planning that will be one piece of a broad suite of tools designed to help companies model, deploy and manage network resources.

The news is scheduled to be announced at the company's annual Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas, where some 2,600 attendees are expected to gather.

The suite of tools is a departure from Microsoft’s 2-year-old plan to offer a single product called System Center 2005, which was slated to ship this fall, that would integrate System Management Server 2003, Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005, a reporting engine and a modeling tool for capacity planning code-named Indy.

Users can expect a cache of individual tools under the brand name System Center that will perform tasks such as change and configuration management, asset management, application management, IT process orchestration, performance trending, reporting, backup/recovery and capacity planning. The original plan was to build it all into a single infrastructure.

“Microsoft insisted that it is important to develop a management brand that can compete with the likes of Tivoli and Unicenter,” says Peter Pawlak, an analyst with independent research firm Directions on Microsoft. “I think you will eventually see that name [System Center] applied to SMS and MOM.”

Microsoft officials declined to comment on the company's System Center plans.

The first pieces of the System Center brand trickled out in March with the beta release of the System Center Reporting Manager 2005, a tool that collects data from SMS and MOM and lets users generate reports that combine information from the two, such as configuration and overall performance. Reporting Manager was originally called Reporting Services and was slated to be an integrated part of System Center 2005.

This week, the second System Center-branded tool emerged when Microsoft introduced System Center Data Protection Manager, a diskless back-up and recovery server that was previously called Data Protection Server.

And next week, Indy is expected to take on the System Center moniker when independent software vendors are given the first feature-complete beta code at the Management Summit. The Indy modeling technology was developed by Microsoft Research. It lets users model a server deployment based on characteristics such as the number of offices and users. A simulation of user workload can be run to determine system capacity, letting users experiment with different hardware, software configurations and user behavior before deploying anything on a live network.