* Report from Microsoft Management Summit
Last week, I attended the Microsoft Management Summit, where Microsoft gave an update on progress toward its vision of the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) and clarified its intentions in management for the next three years or so.
Kirill Tatarinov made it clear that the DSI is alive and well. DSI is Microsoft’s plan to enable self-management in the Windows environment. Knowledge about applications is expressed in models (called System Definition Models, or SDM) across the lifecycle of the applications.
Microsoft last week also announced several products – System Center Reporting Manager, System Center Capacity Manager and Data Protection Manager. The Reporting Manager product, which goes into beta tests soon, provides reports based on a data warehouse that uses data from Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) and System Management Server (SMS). The Capacity Manager product is a sizing tool, in its first release, for Exchange and MOM. Data Protection Manager is Microsoft’s first entry into the back up-and-restore market. It is a disk-based backup for servers.
In addition, the Microsoft partner program is going strong. Among those I visited with on the show floor were Jalasoft, Argent, Reflectent, HP and Configuresoft. In fact, Microsoft demonstrated during a keynote the integration of MOM 2005 with partner product Xian from Jalasoft, which pulls into MOM network device information from devices made by Cisco and F5.
Two years ago, Microsoft announced its intention to create a product called System Center that would combine SMS and MOM. This year, Microsoft’s intentions have changed; instead of a combined product, System Center will be a family of integrated but modular products. This makes sense for Microsoft customers that don’t have both products installed. It allows current customers that only have MOM to keep moving on that path, without including SMS. And the same is true for current SMS-only customers.
Microsoft is beginning to deliver on its DSI, with products slowly evolving toward it. The products will become more model-based, with full SDM capabilities coming in future releases. In addition, the company is expanding its partner ecosystem, as well as increasing the breadth of its System Center product line, with the introduction of software for trend reporting, capacity planning and back up/restore. These new products add to the core of SMS and MOM that Microsoft already had.
