MMS 2006 - second Keynote

WOW - that was pretty good.

Kirill Tatarinov (Corporate VP, Windows Enterprise Management Division) covered off System Center - current & future.

He positioned System Centre as the vehicle to deliver the "Manage Complexity, Achieve Agility" part of our People Ready message.

We'll be doing well if we help you to Ensure Your Business is Always Running, Eliminate Unneccessary Complexity and Establish a Responsive Infrastructure.

He covered off Infrastructure Optimisation (https://www.microsoft.com/io) - which is all about getting from where you are now to an eventual destination of Dynamic Systems (it's all about implementing Best Practices).

So System Center is Microsoft's branding for our 'knowledge driven management solutions family', which are Enterprise Ready, Flexible & Extensible.

He covered off what we have delivered so far (Data Protection Manager, Capacity Planner, Reporting Manager, SMS, MOM, etc and betas of some new stuff).

"SMS is dead - long live System Center Configuration Manager 2007" (previously known as SMS v4).

"MOM is dead - long live System Center Operations Manager 2007" (previously known as MOM v3) - public beta due in May/June.

The roadmad of future products is pretty exciting.  The big investments are around Deeper Knowledge, a Self Service Portal, a CMDB and Workflow.  Also products that cover Operations Management, Incident & Problem Management, Asset Lifecycle Management, Change Management and Configuration Management.  Products are: SMS R2 (soon), System Center Operations Manager 2007 (this year), System Center Essentials 2007 (MOM & SMS & Reporting Manager in one box for small organisations - early 2007), System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (early 2007), System Center "Carmine" (Management of a Virtualised environment - late 2007), System Center "Service Desk" (late 2007) and System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 (early 2008).

Some fantastic demos of all this, including one of SMS and AssetMetrix (a recent Microsoft aquisition) that enables "real" business level asset management - it showed how to report on what's installed side by side with what you own (licenses) - excellent..

Too much information in too short a time - there was definately more (but I can't remember it all).  Must dash, I'm late for the next session.

More later, Dave.