From Product to Brand: Microsoft System Center Changes with the Times

At the Microsoft Management Summit 2005 on Tuesday, Microsoft revealed that it was canceling plans for a product called System Center, which would have combined future versions of Systems Management Server (SMS), Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), and reporting tools into an integrated suite of management products. However, the System Center name will live on as a brand Microsoft will use to label its management products. Those products will continue to be sold separately. Microsoft recently renamed Data Protection Server as System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM); it was the first product to be branded with the new System Center name.

"System Center is [now] a family of management products,' says Kirill Tatarinov, Microsoft corporate vice president of the Windows and Enterprise Management Division. "It's a suite of modular products. The technology is integrated in modules so that customers can preserve their current investments in SMS and MOM."

In lieu of the System Center product, the System Center reporting module will now be released separately. Now called System Center Reporting Manager 2005, it will ship in May alongside a Community Technology Preview (CTP, apparently Microsoft's new name for "public beta") of System Center Capacity Manager 2006. Capacity Manager will help customers predict how to best deploy resources for Exchange Server 2003 and MOM 2005, Microsoft says. A fourth System Center product, an as-yet-unnamed data center-oriented management console, will follow.

Microsoft also showed off SMS version 4 and MOM version 3 at the show. These major upgrades will ship sometime in the Longhorn "wave" of products in 2006 or 2007, the company said. SMS V4 will feature a much-simplified software deployment interface, while both SMS V4 and MOM V3 will integrate with the roles-based management scheme used by Windows Server.