This week in Las Vegas, Microsoft came out with some strong, confident direction in their IT Management portfolio. There were numerous products announced in beta or GA’ed and endless nuance to various stories like “what exactly is a Microsoft-based private cloud?” Rotating in my head though are three clusters of important offerings and concepts to keep track of, whether you’re a user of IT Management or a vendor looking to compete of frenemy with Microsoft:
- IT Management delivered as SaaS – thus far, success has been the exception, not the rule in delivering IT Management as a SaaS. Service-now.com has been the stand-out success here, driving incumbents BMC, CA, HP, and IBM to start offering IT Management function as a SaaS. Others have had rockier times getting IT heads to move their tool-chain off-premise. The common sentiment as told me by one admin last year was: well, if the Internet goes down, we’re screwed. Windows Intune, GA’ed at MMS 2011, is a SaaS-based (or “cloud-based,” if you prefer) service for desktop management – keeping the Microsoft portions of desktops up-to-date for $11-12/month/desktop. It’s not hard to imagine that Microsoft would want to extend this to servers at some point, as Opscode does now. The System Center Advisor product line (covering SQL Server, Exchange, Windows Server, Dynamics, and SharePoint) is knowledge-base served up as a SaaS – something klir (RIP) and Splunk have played around with – to make this kind of collaborative IT management work, you have to layer in a strong community like Spiceworks does, something that seems missing from the Advisor line at the moment. The feel I get from this momentum is that Microsoft would like to (after a long, multi-year “eventually”) move much of its portfolio to SaaS delivery. Admins can be “special snow-flakes” when it comes to moving their tools to SaaS, but at a certain point of cost & hassle avoidance vs. the risk of the Internet going down, it starts to make sense. And, really, if the Internet goes down, many businesses would be dead-in-the-water regardless of the IT Management tools available.
- Private cloud is what you need – while the focus on “Cloud and Microsoft” is often the public Azure cloud, Microsoft is also amped up to provide companies with the technology needed to use cloud-based technologies and practices behind the firewall, creating private clouds. Microsoft’s Project Concero is the spearhead of this, but there’s some interesting training wheels towards cloud that Microsoft wants to do with its virtualization management product. Strapping on the recently released System Center Service Manager and System Center Orchestrator (formally Opalis), and you have the self-service, highly-virtualized view of “private cloud.” The troubling aspect for Microsoft is the hardware layer. Time and time again, Microsoft executives rightly pointed out that “true” clouds need standardized hardware – at the same time they pointed out that most IT shops are far from “standardized.” When I asked them what that transformation would mean, being a software company, the answers weren’t too prescriptive. One hopes that the answer is more than “keep your eye on those Azure appliances we mentioned awhile back.” The issue is this: if private cloud means rip-n-replace of your existing hardware to get “standardized” hardware…then we’ve got some rocky budget hijinks ahead for anyone considering private vs. public…
