Industry pundits roll their eyes when Bill Gates says that IBM, not Linux (or Google), is Microsoft's biggest competitive threat. Those pundits assume Bill is being disingenuous or diversionary with such statements. But I think he's not. Open source in itself doesn't endanger Windows' march toward being the predominant business-computing platform. Rather, the danger lies in the potential availability of a standardized stack of integrated and easy-to-manage open source core applications emulating the Windows Server System (WSS) family—and IBM is the purveyor of integrated open source solutions.
At least since the late 1980s and the AS/400 platform, IBM has understood the power of a unified platform that seamlessly integrates essential applications (e.g., database, networking, and messaging) and reliably serves end users' needs while—most significantly—simplifying development and operations. Today, IBM's business thrives on deploying its skilled and knowledgeable services division to bring such unification and integration to the diversity of Linux offerings. By spreading open source skills to IT organizations, IBM is an ever-present reminder of the need to keep a competitive edge by further integrating theWSS application stack and continuously simplifying and unifying the management experience throughout the stack.
Assimilate IT Skills and Knowledge
Microsoft is addressing this threat by incorporating IT knowledge and skills
into its products while simplifying management of a better-integrated Windows
stack. A company wide strategy focuses on the complete life cycle of application
development, IT operations, and end-user productivity. The elements of this
strategy are the .NET Framework, the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), Trustworthy
Computing, and the Digital Workstyle for the New World of Work.
The piece of this strategy that directly speaks to capturing Windows platform
skills and making them widely available is DSI, with its promise to "radically
simplify IT" by reducing complexity and total cost of ownership (TCO), thus
evolving IT from cost center to strategic asset. The key to DSI is expressing
systems and IT knowledge and policy as models that connect the requirements
of developers, IT pros, and end users. The goal of DSI is to produce self-managing
systems by enabling developers to write "operationally aware" applications with
Visual Studio (VS) on the "operationally aware" platform of Windows Server (and
Virtual Server). Microsoft's System Center management products are the tools
that capture IT knowledge and skill and make IT's life easier.
In a recent briefing on DSI, Eric Berg, a director of product management in
Microsoft's Windows Enterprise Management Division (WEMD), told me, "The key
with DSI is thinking about all of the information and knowledge about the application
that resides in the heads of customers. Take a typical distributed application:
Our customers have a lot of knowledge about the complexity of that application
and the interdependencies of the application's components. Administrators are
deeply steeped in the black magic of running their applications and maintaining
them. So how do we take the knowledge, capture it in the software, and let the
software automate it? We're capturing that knowledge in software models. A consistent
theme is to make sure that everything we're doing includes not only operations
or not only development, but connects them throughout that life cycle."
With this background on the DSI initiative, I talked with Kirill Tatarinov,
Microsoft corporate vice president of WEMD. We discussed the System Center management
solutions that Microsoft is developing according to the overall company strategy.
Connecting IT with Business
KF: The DSI strategy is bringing some major
changes to Micro-soft's management products. What drove those changes?
Tatarinov: Management was historically thought of as occurring after the fact. People would build systems that were unmanageable and then try to manage them after the fact, approaching them as black boxes, and it just didn't work. You can't manage the unmanageable.
Organizations increasingly realize that IT needs to stay very closely connected with business, and IT agility comes to the forefront. At the same time, the drive to reduce cost continues to be prevalent, as it has been since the late 1990s. It's a conflict for organizations to reduce cost on the one hand and increase agility on the other hand. To do that, you have to really connect your processes, products, and people.
KF: What are you doing differently now to accomplish that?
Tatarinov: Starting with the process, we're helping IT managers understand
how they should drive incremental improvement and how they should drive standardization
and rationalization of their organizations to the point where they both reduce
cost and achieve agility through implementing the process, implementing the
product, and getting their people trained in both products and process.
Fundamentally, it's about connecting IT with business, about being able to
dynamically respond to business needs, to quickly implement new processes and
new business applications, and really to keep IT under control.
System Center Products
KF: How does your strategy for the System Center
products and other management tools support this overall initiative?
Tatarinov: We have a very strong product lineup coming out through 2006
and the first half of 2007. This will be the time when we ship the next version
of Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), which we currently call MOM Version 3.
We will ship the next version of Systems Management Server (SMS) with new features
such as configuration management and a completely revamped UI. We will roll
out model-based management, where you will be able to manage services end-to
end in MOM and model services end-to-end with SMS. People increasingly want
to manage their services, as opposed to individual components. Customers want
to see something like their messaging service managed end-to-end and presented
as one entity, as opposed to Exchange here, Active Directory (AD) here, DHCP
there. That's the direction we're taking with our management products. You'll
see a lot of that in MOM Version 3. You'll see concepts of that in SMS Version
4, rising out above the infrastructure components to infrastructure services.
[See "System Center Product Roadmap" for details about upcoming products and
new releases of SMS and MOM.]
KF: SMS and MOM are tools for larger enterprises. What about management in the small-to-midsized business (SMB) space?
Tatarinov: As far as management is concerned, small and medium business has been grossly underserved. In studying this market, we saw a tremendous number of people trying to roll their own applications or downloading open source applications to build solutions themselves. We're addressing this lack of tools.
Our first entry into this market was MOM 2005 Workgroup Edition, a simplified
version of MOM that is priced for that market and simplified in terms of deployment
and customization. We learned a lot. Based on customer feedback, next year we're
introducing a product called System Center Essentials, which combines all the
capabilities IT generalists need for managing their organization in terms of
software update and distribution and patch management, as well as traditional
MOM functions like event management, alerting, and monitoring.