Gates: I'm going to make life easy for IT managers

Bill Gates used his keynote at the Microsoft IT Forum in Copenhagen to say that complexity needs to be removed from IT to free up budgets and help companies move forward. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, he said that software was the answer.

"The investment in research and development is at record level at $6bn," said Gates. "We see most of the take-up in the consumer space. Yet we find the pace of implementing is not as fast in the business space. This is because there is the need to make it not nearly as complex."

"How can we take software to eliminate complexity? This is what software is for. This can be done in an automatic way. We've set ourselves an ambitious goal to simplify IT. And we have to take advantage of hardware resources," said Gates.

Gates said that 64-bit processors were soon to take over from 32-bit ones as chip manufacturer Intel was not planning on selling them at a premium price. He added that the company's accounting division had been using a beta 64-bit version of Windows for some time.

In his keynote speech, Gates said that by using high-level technology, companies could bridge the gap between business and development and change the level of IT complexity. He added that this could make room for more innovation.

Gates was building up to a launch of a several Microsoft Windows Server System products that were being promoted in the company's dynamic systems initiative (DSI) -- an approach that aims to simplify and automate IT jobs.

Among the products, Gates announced the launch of Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 -- a software tool the company demonstrated to automatically upgrade 100 computers running different versions of Windows to XP SP2.

Virtual Server 2005 was also announced. The package is intended to improve the spread of work between servers and to assist with the testing of patches before their deployment.