KF: What specific features are in System Center Essentials as a result of the customer feedback you mentioned?
Tatarinov: Specific feedback was around breadth of functionality. MOM
monitors operations. It doesn't do anything in Change and Configuration Management
(CCM), software distribution, and patch management. With Windows Server Update
Services (WSUS), we have good technology for that domain in the midmarket. WSUS
has an easy-to-use interface designed for the mid-market, but it wasn't integrated
with MOM. We are bringing the two together in System Center Essentials.
KF: System Center was originally announced as a product that would combine MOM and SMS, but last year you announced that System Center will brand Microsoft's family of management products instead. However, System Center Essentials sounds like something of a marriage of MOM and SMS capabilities. Is it?
Tatarinov: You could call System Center Essentials an evolution in that
direction. We clearly see the emergence of a "versatilist" persona, as the Gartner
Group calls it. This is the midmarket IT professional who manages broad IT infrastructure
as opposed to just one discipline. This is the persona System Center Essentials
addresses. In larger organizations, we still see specialists focused on operations
management and CCM or data protection management, and we address those specialists
with unique products designed for them. We will continue to evolve with the
market.
Management Pain Points
KF: What do you consider the biggest management
pain points for IT?
Tatarinov: I'd say deployment is the worst. Although Microsoft and others have deployment technology, deploying applications and updates, making sure people have the right software, making sure the software is compatible with other versions of other soft-ware—that whole area still requires a lot of work. Improving deployment still requires innovation and a lot of technology.
KF: I think one of the biggest pain points is errors and events. What are your plans there?
Tatarinov: Historically, neither Microsoft nor non-Microsoft products
have done a particularly good job designing errors so that they're intelligible
and actually tell you something. So in Windows Vista, we have made a major effort
to revamp both event management and the error reporting system itself, but also
the actual errors and events. Every group inside Microsoft has done a scrupulous
job going through all of their event messages, building event manifests, and
making sure that when an event gets triggered it actually gives the administrator
or the end user some intelligible information about why it happened and what
needs to be done. We're also making sure that this event manifest is connected
with Tech Centers on TechNet so people can automatically connect back to our
Web site and find a Knowledge Base article or whatnot to help them diagnose
or troubleshoot. And of course, we take all event and alert information and
use it in the construction of MOM management packs to make sure we can further
automate event management for organizations that run MOM or System Center Essentials.
So yes, it's indeed a big problem. We've invested heavily in solving this problem
and I'm sure hoping this problem will go away.
KF: How does error and event management fit into WEMD's priorities?
Tatarinov: It is definitely a core part of the management business here.
We provide all the infrastructure, we also drive and program-manage all efforts
across the company to revamp events and make sure events are much better manifested
and errors are intelligible—just like we drive similar efforts for creation
of MOM management packs and desired state models. A variety of management efforts
are done across the company but are led from the management group.
Designed for Operations
KF: DSI is a huge initiative for Microsoft, yet 84.5 percent of Windows
IT Pro readers surveyed said they were not familiar with DSI. What should
IT pros think when they hear "DSI"?
Tatarinov: Well, we obviously want them to feel great when they hear DSI. It makes their life easier, gives them control, finally puts them in charge of IT infrastructure, gives them visibility across the ecosystem and across the life cycle of the application.
KF: When I spoke with Eric Berg, he told me that Microsoft is setting
the example with its own products. He said, "In Visual Studio, we're working
to make applications more designed for operations. And we're taking the applications
we deliver—Exchange, SQL, BizTalk—and making sure the models for
operations are designed into them. We're both helping people who have to develop
their own applications and then making sure that the applications we deliver
are designed for operations. On the platform side, we're making a lot of investments
in Windows itself, as well as the virtualization infrastructure, to make sure
Windows is the right platform for these dynamic systems." Do you want to add
anything to that?
Tatarinov: The most important, critical piece of DSI is the concept we call Designed for Operations, which means developers have to build things in a manageable way. We want to explain to people that this is really how we built Vista. Specific examples include manifesting events and making sure everybody builds health models for every single component and that those health models can be automatically moved into MOM management packs. This whole concept of building manageable applications and systems, including models, at design time and then being able to link those models to the operational side is essentially what DSI is all about.
Radically Simplify IT
Like IBM, Microsoft has always understood the value of a unified and integrated
platform. That value was the idea behind the late BackOffice Server bundle (not
to mention its descendent Small Business Server—SBS—as well as the
upcoming Centro) and also was
the reason behind Microsoft's recent messaging about how the WSS products (e.g., Windows client and server, Exchange Server, SQL Server) are "better together." The argument is that you can build a Linux-Apache-MySQL-Perl/PHP/Python (LAMP) stack, but you don't get the optimization and integration that Microsoft's stack provides.
What Microsoft hasn't been able to do up to now (not least because of its siloed
corporate structure) is to provide a consistent management UI and experience
throughout its stack. It looks to me that Microsoft has realized that by integrating
IT knowledge and skills with a consistent management UI, the company has a way
to hold off open source advances into Microsoft's customer base—and that
realization has finally provided sufficient motivation for Microsoft's various
product teams to work together on an overall management strategy.
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