LAS VEGAS – Microsoft this week set its sites on becoming a dominant enterprise management vendor, but experts and users say first it will have to define the scope of its goals, improve the platform, and prove it can be the caretaker of non-Windows systems.

The company laid out its plans this week at its annual Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) for a cross-platform enterprise data-center management infrastructure that includes hooks into Linux and Unix systems.

It’s a major shift from five years ago when Microsoft announced at MMS that management was no longer going to be an afterthought and a comprehensive platform to manage Windows was at the center of a 10-year plan called the Dynamic Systems Initiative.

Just five years later, Microsoft plans to climb the ladder and attempt to compete with the major vendors – CA, HP, IBM and BMC – to manage desktops, datacenter automation and distributed systems regardless of the logo on the software.

"The shift they made was to support heterogeneous environments, and the question becomes how well will they support them," said Steve Brasen, an analyst with Enterprise Management Associates. "Initially [Microsoft's offering] is not as comprehensive as the big four, but over time I would expect their heterogeneous support to improve but the question then will be to what degree."