Microsoft's Dynamic IT

While visiting Microsoft's STB (Systems and Tools Business I guess) meeting in Orlando, I had a chance to sit in an audience composed largely of industry analysts. Bob Muglia, Sr. VP of Microsoft's STB presented Microsoft's Dynamic IT vision. The vision, by the way,appears a bit more refined than when it was presented a year ago at a similar event.

First of all, let me say that Mr. Muglia is a very engaging speaker who doesn't seem to be in the typical Microsoftie (employee of Microsoft) habit of using words such as "super", "enthused", and/or "experience" in every sentence. Instead he laid out Microsoft's view of the problems that an IT executive faces and Microsoft's very comprehensive and very hard to describe vision of how to best address those problems. He also seemed unable to help himself - he had to take a swipe or two at Linux during the presentation of Microsoft's view of the world.

The vision is, of course, heavily biased towards environments that are either all Microsoft or have Microsoft products in a primary role in the organization. If your organization fits that description, Microsoft has a plan for you. I don't know why the vision of Indiana Jones popped into view saying "Trust me" while I was writing this.

If your organization uses Microsoft's products along side of products from other major software suppliers, such as CA, HP, IBM, and Oracle, you're going to find that once again Microsoft's products are going to try to grab management power over other vendor's products.

I guess that Microsoft doesn't know or doesn't care that these people already have processes, people and software products in place to do these things. They don't realize that they're trying to create technical an political battles within the hallowed halls of their customers' executive suites when they already have tools in place for those functions.

Furthermore, Microsoft is only moving forward to manage a few of the things found in a typical large organization datacenter. They really don't have a comprehensive set of tools for virtualization (including access, application, processing, network and storage) or management of virtualized environments that would encompass workloads on mainframes, midrange machines running UNIX, Linux or a single-vendor operating environment, or even industry standard systems running other operating systems.While the limitations of the Microsoft approach may not matter to some, they will be seen as "show stoppers" for others.

All in all, Microsoft has a very powerful, very comprehensive set of tools that cover nearly every area of virtualization described in the Kusnetzky Group Model. At this point, however, Microsoft relies on producs from partners for network and storage virtualization products.