Q&A: Industry-wide Initiative Helps IT Professionals Reduce Complexity and Cost: At Microsoft IT Forum in Denmark, the director of Microsoft's Windows & Enterprise Management Division explains how the Dynamic Systems Initiative allows companies to simplify the way they manage their enterprise systems.

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Q&A: Industry-wide Initiative Helps IT Professionals Reduce Complexity and Cost

At Microsoft IT Forum in Denmark, the director of Microsoft's Windows & Enterprise Management Division explains how the Dynamic Systems Initiative allows companies to simplify the way they manage their enterprise systems.

David Hamilton, Director, Windows&Enterprise Management Division

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COPENHAGEN, Denmark, Nov. 16, 2005 — During his keynote address this morning at Microsoft IT Forum, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect, Bill Gates, highlighted the challenges IT professionals today face in managing increasingly complex computer systems.

In his address to the 3,000 gathered at Microsoft's premier European conference for IT professionals, Gates highlighted the company's long-term objective to deliver a technology platform that reduces cost and complexity. Central to this is the management of enterprise systems.

Under this umbrella falls the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), which is a Microsoft-led industry effort to dramatically simplify and automate how businesses design, deploy and operate their enterprise systems.

PressPass spoke with David Hamilton, Microsoft's director of the Windows and Enterprise Management Division, to find out where this initiative is now and where it is heading.

PressPass: Can you give us an overview of Microsoft's enterprise management strategy?

David Hamilton : Customers tell us that their existing management solutions for their IT systems are insufficient. They don't provide the return on investment customers expect to receive.

Traditionally the building of management solutions comes very late in the cycle, after products are released, and the management solution in essence is meant to cover over the cracks.

Microsoft IT First To Capitalize on the DSI Vision

While Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 was still in early development, the company's own IT group, Microsoft IT, began moving its network and management packs from MOM 2000 SP1.

Besides contributing to the product's development, Microsoft IT has to date reduced MOM sustainer headcount from five to three, increased management group scalability from 800 to 5,000 and decreased the number of MOM servers from 26 to 27, all key factors in a 40-percent reduction in total cost of ownership. The team can now monitor the entire corporate network of 6,000 servers worldwide through one location in Redmond, Wash.

"It's really about the enhanced knowledge in the management packs," says Bob Davis, general manager of the Technology Services Group at Microsoft. "For example, with the Exchange management pack, we are able to gather bits of information, like how quickly an e-mail opens, or how long it takes to change the view between e-mail and the calendar, which allow us to gain a much richer understanding for the entire user experience. That's an incredible advantage for us."

Davis' team is currently taking advantage of nine management packs, ranging from Exchange and SQL Server to System Management Server 2004 SP1. The group plans to add another five by early 2005, and an estimated 11 more later.

"We would rather be developing line of business applications than managing data centers. The management packs in MOM allow us to leverage knowledge of applications to free up our time for projects that move the bar for Microsoft and give our company a competitive advantage. This is the core of DSI," says Davis.

We took a different approach with the Dynamic Systems Initiative, which assumes that management information can be built into hardware and software right at development time. We believe that this will revolutionize the whole process of enterprise management.

PressPass: What is the overall goal of DSI?

Hamilton: We want to drive down the cost and complexity of managing and supporting hardware and software, while keeping the focus on delivering business values. To do this we need to build closer cooperation among developers and IT professionals because the design and support of new systems requires considerable time and cross-team coordination.

PressPass: Where does the initiative stand now?

Hamilton: We are still early in the initiative. We view DSI as a 10-year effort for Microsoft and its partners. We also see it as a multi-billion dollar effort to change the way we and our partners develop software and hardware.

Although we are early in the effort, there are some markers along the way. First, we've made efforts around MOM 2005 -- an event- and performance-management tool for Windows Server System -- to simplify identification of issues, streamline the process for determining the root cause of problems, and facilitate quick resolution to restore services or to prevent potential outages before they occur. These efforts are captured in the MOM Management Packs.

Second, I'd like to call out our work with Microsoft Visual Studio. The next version of Visual Studio, which ships in the middle of 2005, will have these models build into it.

With Visual Studio 2005 Team System, Microsoft is delivering a set of new designers that enable operations managers and application architects to collaborate early in the development phase to ensure systems are designed with operational requirements in mind.

Third is our ability to interoperate with other systems. The tools are designed to provide a great experience while managing Windows operating systems and to interoperate with the tools used to manage non-Windows-based environments.

PressPass: Is there a technology at the heart of DSI?

Hamilton: Yes, models are at the heart of DSI. We believe that you need models in hardware and software to change the way that management is done.

DSI is about designing software that has an inherent knowledge built into it. This can be knowledge of the designers' intent for those systems knowledge of the environment in which systems operate, knowledge of IT policies that govern those systems or knowledge of the user experience associated with those systems. This knowledge must be captured in software models. Today software models for hardware and software are found in the form of management packs for Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM).

PressPass: Where do industry partners fit in?

Hamilton: I'd like to mention our work with the industry in applying Web services standards. With AMD, Dell, Intel and Sun Microsystems, Microsoft recently announced the publication of WS-Management, a Web services specification that addresses cost and complexity of IT management by providing a common way for systems to access and exchange management information. Industry partners fit into this in a number of ways. Yesterday, we made an announcement with Dell related to DSI.

Dell allows us to extend the DSI vision all the way through to hardware so that the IT professional can get an end-to-end view of all their systems. We believe that hardware vendors focusing on making their systems inherently manageable is just as important as software vendors having the same focus.

Microsoft is also working with other software vendors to encourage them to build management applications. For example, Vintela, with whom we made a strategic investment today, enables our customers to extend the management of their systems beyond the Windows platform.

Finally, Microsoft is working with other management vendors to make sure that models can be shared and interchanged. This is through efforts such as WS-Management effort.

PressPass: What type of investments has Microsoft made in this process?

Hamilton: It is equally important that we take DSI to heart ourselves and make sure we build our software in such a way that it is inherently manageable.

We've first evangelized and then encouraged the various application developers around Microsoft to be early users of DSI.