Management Roadmap Revealed

The current crop of Microsoft management products will give way to two integrated products in three to five years, according to Windows Group Vice President Brian Valentine. Valentine has outlined incremental changes to the current products (Systems Management Server [SMS], Microsoft Operations Manager [MOM], and Application Center) and indicated that they will eventually merge into a pair of products: one specifically for servers and the other for clients. Although the news will help customers plan for short-term system management upgrades, Valentine said little about how Microsoft’s management technologies will evolve over the medium-term or how they will take advantage of .NET.

Valentine also made clear that Microsoft does not plan on expanding into management of non-Windows or heterogeneous systems. Other vendors, such as BMC, Computer Associates, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM, will still need to provide the tools to manage such systems.

Management Important but Not Integrated

Valentine delivered his remarks at the Microsoft Management Summit on May 3, noting that manageability is a key part of the company’s Trustworthy Computing initiative. (For background, see “Trustworthy Computing a New Priority” on page 25 of the May 2002 Update.)