Microsoft Management products made sexy
I was watching the Keynote talk at IT Forum yesterday, and listening to Bill Gates speak about our management products and his roadmap for the future. One of his many predictions was that in the future, mainframes won't be able to deliver the same performance that industry standard hardware will deliver (I'm typing this on a Dell Inspiron 5160 with a P4 3.2GHz hyperthreaded processor and 2GB of RAM so that's not too hard to imagine already). The overriding theme of the Keynote was how individual systems could be simplified and managed to give an integrated view of what's happening in the organisation. Management software would reduce complexity as a wave of developer tools would be introduced to provide a service oriented approach to management. The Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) would encourage a move away from individual systems to a resource allocation model where web services would use management protocols using web service standards.
I was watching the demo where 100 Dell XP Desktops were upgraded from XP Service pack 1 to XP service pack 2 with a single SMS script and I was standing with Eric Rudder, the senior Vice President for the Server and Tools division. "Wow!" he said. "That demo with MOM and SMS shows that Microsoft has made Windows management sexy!" I said I'd quote him - so here it is!