New Microsoft System Center Offerings Extend Management from Desktop to Datacenter |
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Press release date: November 12, 2007
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BARCELONA, Spain, Nov. 12 -- Today at Microsoft TechEd IT Forum 2007, Microsoft Corp. announced the general availability of three new products within the Microsoft System Center suite of IT management solutions, a simplified and comprehensive licensing model for server management, and an expansion of alliances and investments, all of which help provide organizations with the solutions they need to achieve more dynamic IT systems.
Now available to customers are System Center Configuration Manager 2007, System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007. The solutions complement Microsoft's other enterprise System Center offerings, which include System Center Operations Manager 2007 and System Center Capacity Planner 2007, released earlier this year, and the recently announced System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008, which will be available in the first half of 2008. In addition, Microsoft is launching the System Center Alliance program for partners who want deeper engagement with Microsoft and plan to deliver solutions building on Microsoft's IT management tools, while also providing a method for increasing the awareness and availability of those solutions to customers.
"Customers look to Microsoft for solutions that help them manage their IT environments in cost-effective and efficient ways, freeing them to focus more on transforming their infrastructure into a strategic and progressive asset for their business," said Brad Anderson, general manager of the Management Solutions Division at Microsoft. "With this new wave of System Center products and the broad support of our partner ecosystem, organizations have the enterprise-strength management capabilities required to unify and optimize their physical and virtual IT environments, enabling them to improve the overall bottom-line value and contributions to their businesses."
New Offerings Extend Management in the Datacenter and Deliver Improved Economics.
With this wave of product releases, Microsoft is building on its strong desktop management foundation and making additional investments across the portfolio to further System Center's capabilities in the datacenter. These efforts expand Microsoft's ability to effectively address customers' needs and have helped the company rise to be one of the top four distributed system management software vendors by revenue, as tracked by IDC in its report Worldwide Distributed System Management Software 2007-2011 Forecast Summary and 2006 Vendor Shares.*
Customers making the investment in the new System Center portfolio will find the offerings help improve the economics of managing their infrastructure while delivering significant new benefits in core areas that are top of mind with IT today, including the following:
o Client and server deployment and update. As customers look to ease the deployment, upgrading and management of desktop clients and servers, System Center Configuration Manager 2007 builds on its proven strengths in desktop management, found in its predecessor, Systems Management Server 2003, by improving and enhancing those existing client capabilities and adding new server-specific requirements to extend into datacenter environments, including automating the deployment of server operating systems for bare metal and delivering updates to existing servers.
o Server virtualization management. Customers interested in benefiting from the significant economic and infrastructure advantages offered by virtualizing their datacenter environments also require the right tools to manage those dynamic new configurations. System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 enables IT departments to rapidly provision new virtual machines and centrally manage their virtual infrastructure. With the System Center suite of offerings customers have a comprehensive solution designed to monitor, protect and update virtual machines.
o Line-of-business applications monitoring. Ensuring that line-of-business applications are at peak performance is critical to any business; downtime equals a loss of worker productivity, causing ripple effects throughout an organization. The System Center suite, including System Center Configuration Manager 2007, Data Protection Manager 2007 and Operations Manager 2007, provides IT organizations with the tools they need to help effectively manage, protect and monitor their business applications and databases to ensure optimal service delivery and performance.
o Data backup and disaster recovery. For any business, data loss means loss of revenue, increased expenses and potential damage to customer relationships. Whether the data is centralized or located at branch offices, the System Center Data Protection Manager 2007's backup, restore and recovery capabilities provide the peace of mind IT organizations need by helping ensure their data is protected and available when they need it.
"The new System Center offerings provide broad management capabilities that will help Carnival realize greater efficiencies across our organization, enabling us to not only manage the environments of our end users, but also have the powerful new tools we need to easily and quickly deploy and manage servers in our datacenters," said Rodney Orange, Wintel Server Engineering Team, Carnival Cruise Lines. "The products we're using and evaluating -- including Data Protection Manager 2007, Configuration Manager 2007 and Operations Manager 2007 -- are already providing improvements in productivity and reduced cost of IT operations. With the System Center products Microsoft has demonstrated its understanding of how to address the breadth of management needs of IT organizations."
In addition to this new product functionality, Microsoft is providing a simplified pricing and comprehensive licensing model, the Enterprise Edition of the System Center Server Management Suite license, which allows customers to manage the entire life cycle of their servers -- including an unlimited number of guest operating system environments on a virtualized server -- with one low-cost purchase and provides economic value for managing physical and virtual environments.
Industry Alliances Drive Broader Customer Solutions
Today Microsoft also launched the System Center Alliance program, which establishes an online community to help technology partners more easily collaborate on and create offerings that extend the management capabilities of System Center solutions to Microsoft and non-Microsoft applications and platforms. It also provides customers with a diverse directory of offerings that can help them reduce their overall IT management costs, improve application availability and enhance service delivery.
The list of partners delivering offerings for System Center today continues to expand rapidly, with more than 40 partners' software and hardware solutions available, including those from 1E, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., AVIcode Inc., Bocada Inc., Brabeion Software Corp., Brocade Communications Systems Inc., Citrix Systems Inc., Computer Sciences Corp., Cristalink Ltd., Dell Inc., Dimension Data, DudeWorks Inc., Enterpris Certified Corp., EMC Corp., Emulex Corp., EqualLogic Inc., F5 Networks Inc., FujitsuSiemens Computers, FullArmor, Getronics, HP, IBM Corp., Intel Corporation, Intrinsic Technologies LLC, Jalasoft, Macrovision Corp., NEC Corp., Nokia, Odyssey Software Inc., PS'Soft, Quest Software Inc., Sanbolic Inc., SCCM Expert, ScriptLogic Corp., Secure Vantage Technologies Inc., Silect Software Inc., Spectra Logic Corp. and Tidal Software.
"At Dell our mission is to simplify IT. Working with Microsoft, we intend to simplify enterprise manageability and the protection of customer data," said Rick Becker, vice president of solutions, Dell Product Group. "Dell is the first partner to deliver server update catalogs and to begin integration of server deployment packs for System Center Configuration Manager 2007, delivering on our promise to reduce the number of tools customers need to manage their infrastructure. We're also developing a continuous backup solution based on Data Protection Manager so customers can simplify the backup of their data and restore a lost day in, literally, seconds."
Customers interested in finding more information on the System Center offerings or in evaluating them through trial offerings can visit http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/evaluation/trial/default.mspx and the System Center blog at http://blogs.technet.com/systemcenter. Additional information about the System Center Alliance program and community can be found at http://www.systemcenterpartners.com/.
About Microsoft TechEd Europe
In its 14th year in Europe, TechEd is Microsoft's definitive European conference for building, deploying, securing and managing connected solutions. With a strong mix of developer, infrastructure and messaging content, Microsoft TechEd Europe is Microsoft's premier technical training conference for a wide range of technology professionals. TechEd Europe, held this year in the Centre Convencions Internacional (CCIB) in Barcelona, Spain, encompasses both TechEd Developers (Nov. 5-9) and TechEd IT Forum (Nov. 12-16).
About Microsoft
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o IDC, Worldwide Distributed System Management Software 2007-2011 Forecast
Summary and 2006 Vendor Shares, Doc # 208325, August 2007
Source: Microsoft Corp.
CONTACT:
Rapid Response Team of Waggener Edstrom Worldwide +1-503-443-7070 rrt@waggeneredstrom.com Microsoft Corp.
Web site: http://www.microsoft.com/
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