But while Anderson noted that customers are using "multiple clouds," so far System Center manages only Azure, although it does so in a way that lets customers manage internal side by side with cloud-based Azure deployments.

Anderson says Microsoft is "not seeing the demand" for support of Amazon EC2, but System Center, however, is "architected in a way that we can literally plug in a provider for any cloud. It's just a matter of prioritization."

Clouds that use VMware on the back end can easily slide into System Center, he also said. "VMware's working with Google and Salesforce on public clouds," Anderson notes. "The majority of the work we've done to incorporate VMware into System Center will be applicable to those environments."

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