Company's 10-year plan likely to yield fruit, but product alignment will be key
Microsoft’s strategy for building a management platform has changed significantly in the past five years.
It took no more than a few cases of miniature, toy flying pigs being handed out at Microsoft’s annual management conference in April to dramatize how significantly the company’s strategy for building a management platform has changed in the past five years.
The pink, soft-foamed, winged swine were visual confirmation that the company had answered the snarky question, “When will Microsoft support non-Windows platforms.” (Answer: When pigs fly.)
At its annual Microsoft Management Summit (MMS), the company unveiled extensions to System Center Operations Manager 2007 that pull Linux and Unix operating systems in under Microsoft’s monitoring software. More significantly, however, the move highlighted a major shift from March 2003; that was when Microsoft, starting with some point products and monitoring software from OEMs, announced that management was no longer an afterthought and a comprehensive platform for managing Windows was at the center of a 10-year plan called the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI).
Microsoft told users it finally would provide a well-managed Windows platform that supported modeling so network nodes and applications could communicate their needs to a management system that could plug into larger management frameworks
Fast-forward five years. Microsoft has tuned its message and turned its ship, lining up to go head-to-head with such giants as CA and HP; re-architecting its Operations Manager and Configuration Manager foundation tools; incorporating enemy platforms; and promising new tools for such tasks as managing virtualization, building models and providing workflow for automated problem resolution.
Gone from the 2003 vision are the Windows-only limitation, the single focus on the data center and a proprietary modeling language, in favor of standards, the DSI moniker and sideways glances at a company that once left management to its partners.
On track or not?
Now the question is whether Microsoft will complete its 10-year plan during the next five years.
Probably not, experts say, because the type of platform it wants to build now must evolve constantly to keep up with such advancements as virtualization. “Five years ago they started with nothing,” says Kerrie Meyler, an independent consultant, Network World blogger and lead author of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed. “I don’t know if they are halfway finished, but they have come a long way.”
Others agree that advancements have been made, but they might foreshadow the pace of what happens next, given that Microsoft still has major tools to update and rewrite to align all its core management software. “Operations Manager is a world-class monitoring tool and Configuration Manager is a quality software-distribution tool, but it took Microsoft way too long to get there,” says Darren Mar-Elia, president of SDMSoftware, which develops tools for Microsoft group-policy.
Clearly, the past five years have been ones of development and learning for Microsoft, including some fits and starts. In 2003, Configuration Manager was called Systems Management Server (SMS). Operations Manager was known as Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) and had been on the scene since 2001 as part of a licensing deal with NetIQ, which had acquired the software when it bought Mission Critical.
Microsoft rallied DSI around those two products, saying they would be integrated and called System Center. By 2005, however, the project was deemed too expansive, System Center became a brand name, SMS and MOM stayed separate and were renamed, and other System Center features became individual products including reporting services, data protection and capacity planning.
In addition, Microsoft was developing a proprietary modeling language called Systems Definition Model (SDM), which eventually was integrated with Visual Studio development tools. Just as developers were getting SDM into their hands, however, Microsoft, reacting to criticism about SDM being proprietary, turned it over to a standards body where it eventually became the Service Modeling Language (SML).
The automated data center
Kirill Tatarinov, who in 2003 was the corporate vice president of Microsoft’s newly formed enterprise management division, said the goal of DSI was “to enable customers to have a fully automated data center that self-adjusts to changing business priorities.” That broad goal has not so much changed as evolved, mainly because of the explosion of interest in virtualization and Linux, neither of which was part of Microsoft’s management plan in 2003.
Now virtualization is integral to Microsoft’s quest to manage what it calls the dynamic data-center and the dynamic desktop, where virtualized environments will allow IT administrators to provision resources automatically or supply users with their desktop no matter what device they are using.
Users say Microsoft is showing significant progress and a bright future. “They have done some good foundational work, and the next iteration is going to be very significant,” says Curtis Smith, solutions architect for Clear Channel, a global media and entertainment company. “I see the products being pulled together like what happened with Office and its common code-base and common [user interfaces].”
Smith put his faith in Microsoft two years ago, moving from HP OpenView to Operations Manager, and he is not looking back.”I think Microsoft is uniquely positioned to provide the entire [management] life cycle that a lot of [other vendors] cannot do,” he says. Microsoft’s reliance on models used by developers and embedded in systems and applications to provide intelligence for management tools is powerful, he says.
“Microsoft is also starting to be more open and engaging partners to help figure out how to manage complex systems,” Smith says. The company is using the open source OpenPegasus project to help build a bridge to Unix and Linux systems, and its Oslo modeling tools under development will use the SML standard.
Smith agrees, however, that to reach its goal, Microsoft still has to make its tools look and act like a single product family. Observers say that without that alignment, complexity will remain. A case in point: Microsoft rewrote Operations Manager for System Center Operations Manager 2007, creating an entirely new architecture that meshes with System Center’s modeling philosophy. “When they went from MOM 2005 to 2007, they wrote the new software from scratch,” consultant Meyler says. “It really is a Version 1 product.”
Despite being a painful upgrade for users, System Center Operations Manager 2007 is lauded for its programming model, interface design and ease of using management packs to add features. It doesn’t match with Configuration Manager, however, which still uses the old Microsoft Management Console interface and has a different programming model. In addition, Microsoft has yet to keep a four-year-old promise to integrate Configuration Manager’s management model with Active Directory.
Those capabilities should come in the next version, expected to ship in 2010, which will be a confluence of another round of potentially challenging upgrades.One highlight of the next round of upgrades is expected to be a critical missing piece — a workflow and service automation tool called System Center Service Manager, which will help Microsoft compete with the big boys and that originally was slated to ship in late 2007.
That delay happened because Microsoft had to re-architect Service Manager, notably its configuration management database, to align with System Center Operations Manager 2007 and the next version of Configuration Manager. “You can’t manage something without being able to manage service tickets within the products used to mange the infrastructure as a whole,” says Nelson Ruest, a noted speaker and co-author of Microsoft Windows Server 2008: The Complete Reference. “And until Microsoft catches up, we can’t say that it has the breadth of coverage that is required for an enterprise management infrastructure. And when they do catch up, then we’ll have to see how they innovate.”
The coming Configuration Manager and Service Manager updates point to the difficulties Microsoft is having integrating its own platform, let alone adding support for Linux and Unix platforms. Those difficulties paint a big picture for the coming years that includes a number of upgrades and integrations for users, a lot of work on technology development and innovation for Microsoft, and efforts to dispel any notions users have about whether Microsoft can build a holistic management system.
“Honestly, this will be an ongoing process,” says Steve Brasen, an analyst with Enterprise Management Associates. “The goals they set out initially five years ago are attainable in the next five years. But when you starting talking about unified support for the entire IT infrastructure, that is going to be an ongoing process. New technologies are always being developed. Virtualization is hot now, but in five years the hot technology is going to be something else. And Microsoft will need to be able to grow with that.”
