News

System Center Coming This Year

• By Scott Bekker
• March 18, 2004

LAS VEGAS -- Microsoft is forging ahead with plans to offer its two flagship management products, Systems Management Server and Microsoft Operations Manager, in a package called Microsoft System Center later this year.

Called Microsoft System Center 2005, the foundation of the product will be Systems Management Server 2003, which shipped last fall, and Microsoft Operations Manager 2005, which is also expected to ship later this year.

"You can think of System Center kind of like Office. We'll have MOM and SMS together with new tools over time," said Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Windows Server Division.

Like the Office components, Microsoft plans to continue developing and selling SMS and MOM as individual products. The first new tool for Systems Management Server 2005 will be a Reporting Server, which will combine data stored by both SMS and MOM into a single set of reports. "We'll be using SQL [Server] and OLAP. The results of these first-generation reports are fairly remarkable," Muglia said.

While Microsoft must wait for MOM 2005 to ship Systems Center 2005, the company will also be waiting on some enhancements to Systems Management Server 2003 before delivering the bundled product. Microsoft plans to ship System Center with the Service Pack 1 version of SMS 2003 and two forthcoming feature packs for SMS 2003.