News

Microsoft Reshuffling Server and Tools Org

• By Kurt Mackie
• May 28, 2010

Microsoft plans to enable closer ties between its systems management and endpoint security teams. In addition, Microsoft will move its identity and federation security efforts closer to its online services efforts.

Effective on July 1 (the start of Microsoft's fiscal year), Microsoft's Forefront team responsible for endpoint security protection will become part of the System Center development team. Specifically, the endpoint protection team will be part of the STB's Management and Services Division overseen by Brad Anderson.

Anderson was promoted to corporate vice president of the Management and Services Division in July of last year. However, Microsoft's bio now lists him with a different title: Corporate vice president of the Management and Security Division. The change, announced on Wednesday in a Microsoft blog, is a little confusing since Anderson is still described in the blog post as leading the Management and Services Division.

At the 2009 Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas, Anderson described what the Management and Services Division does and the technologies involved.

"You should think about our group as responsible for all of the manageability and all the management technology that comes out from Microsoft," Anderson said, in a keynote talk transcript. "So the underlying technology in Windows, that's PowerShell and WMI and WS management, group policy, Windows update, all the desktop optimization pack and System Center. We think about this as one cohesive set of capabilities."

The endpoint protection team is currently led by General Managers Amnon Horowitz and Vinny Gullotto. This team has been working on integrating Microsoft's Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 product with its System Center Configuration Manager solution. Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 checks for security threats at the file, application and network layers within a Windows environment.

Microsoft plans to release Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 in the second half of this year. A beta is expected to appear in the third quarter of 2010, but Microsoft plans to describe more about the product at its June Tech-Ed North America event, according to this blog.

Microsoft also plans to bolster its STB efforts by moving the development team associated with identity, access and application security to the STB's Business Online Services Group. Lee Nackman, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Identity and Security Division, and his development team will join the Business Online Services Group. That group is led by David Thompson, corporate vice president of Microsoft Online.

This latter organizational move aims to address the use of identity and federation technologies with Internet cloud-based services, according to Thompson.

"Security and identity are core to Microsoft's efforts to help customers realize the benefits of cloud computing," Thompson explained in Microsoft's announcement. "Today's changes better align our engineering teams so customers get better experiences with Microsoft online services."

The announcement of the organizational changes was attributed to Bob Muglia, president of Microsoft's STB.