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3 min read

MSD evolution and leadership

Hi, my name is Brad Anderson and I’m the General Manager, leading product development and engineering for Microsoft’s Management and Solutions Division. Many of you have heard that I recently assumed leadership for MSD after Kirill Tatarinov moved over to lead MS Business Solutions Division. Looking back at my four years with Kirill, I feel confident that Microsoft customers, from small business up to the enterprise, have much better managed IT environments today. During the last 4 years, we rolled out the Dynamic Systems Initiative, and delivered market leading products like SMS, MOM, instrumentation technologies such as Windows PowerShell and have evolved into the world of System Center with the recently released Operations Manager and coming this Fall, Configuration Manager, Virtual Machine Manager, and new release of Data Protection Manager (Service Manager is planned for release next year). Also, our annual Microsoft Management Summit has grown into a major industry event with thousands of customers and partners.
 
But today, I want to reach out to Windows Server customers and partners to share my enthusiasm about System Center management tools, and how these tools lead to better managed and secured IT environments for customers adopting Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008.
 
With today’s increasingly complex IT environment and ever-changing threat landscape, there’s a clear need for solutions that allow you to more easily secure and manage your infrastructure. To address this need and simplify the task of securing and managing IT, security solutions and systems management solutions must integrate more seamlessly. That’s why in May we outlined our vision for integrated security and management solutions and announced key product milestones under the Forefront and System Center brands. This is a key area of focus for our group moving forward. Today, Forefront and System Center products are optimized for Active Directory and other Windows technologies to enable policy configuration and enforcement. In the future, Forefront and System Center solutions will be unified through a common service management solution enabling workflow definition, process automation and comprehensive reporting across security and management. By doing so, security specialists and management specialists can standardize their processes for gathering and prioritizing incidents; assign resources to address issues manage changes and resolve problems.
 
Two weeks ago we announced that the 2008s [Windows Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio] would launch in February next year, with availability staged throughout the year. We’re in the process of building the best management tools so that developers can build knowledge into their codes and it’ll automatically execute based on that knowledge and policies. Visual Studio 2005 Team System introduced developers to SDM, and we’re working with the Visual Studio team to further connect software developers with architects and IT admin via Visual Studio 2008.
 
For Windows Server 2008, new management packs/agents for MOM 2005 and SC Operations Manager 2007 will be available in H1. Along those lines, we’ll also have a release of System Center Configuration Manager (formerly SMS) and a second release of Virtual Machine Manager to manage virtualized workloads enabled with Windows Server Virtualization. With VMM, System Center can manage the physical and virtual assets. We developed this technology as, increasingly, customers told us they want a single, unified solution for managing both. I’ve met plenty of customers with physical servers in the datacenter operating at only 15% CPU capacity. SC Virtual Machine Manager assesses and then consolidates suitable server workloads onto virtual machine host infrastructure; this frees up physical resources for repurposing or hardware retirement.
 
Our software design goals will continue to focus on our dynamic IT vision. With the release of SC Operations Manager earlier this year, and with broader industry partnerships, we’ve begun delivering on that vision.
The products we are releasing and those in the pipeline, together with the collaboration with our industry partners, will yield tremendous value for our customers in terms of management efficiency and agility. To be sure, my four years at Microsoft has seen some significant innovations in our software products, instrumentation and strategy. I’m excited to lead the teams that will create this software.
 
Brad Anderson
General Manager
MSD