Kirill Tatarinov, vice president of Microsoft Corp."s Windows and enterprise management division, said customers weren"t thrilled about the company"s plans to integrate its Systems Management Server (SMS) and Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) software into a product called System Center. So Microsoft scrapped those plans and is now using System Center as a "family name" for a set of management products -- including three new ones due out in the second half of the year, Tatarinov told Computerworld during an interview Tuesday.

Tatarinov discussed the System Center decision and provided an update on the Dynamic Systems Initiative that Microsoft launched two years ago at its annual Management Summit. Excerpts follow:

What happened with the change in your System Center strategy? Today it"s not one product, as we originally announced two years ago. It"s a family name. Let"s think about individual customer personas in enterprise IT. There are individual roles -- desktop administrator, server monitoring person, change-configuration person, help desk person, backup person. Most of the people are accustomed to individual products, and they like those products, and they invested in knowledge in those products. Those people want to continue to use those products. The last thing those people want is the vendor of their choice -- and in this case, the vendor is Microsoft and the products are SMS and MOM -- to come to them and say, "Hallelujah. The world has changed. It"s one big blob for everything." They didn"t like it, and that"s what they told us. ... And we changed our approach to follow customer needs.

When did you make the decision? Approximately a year ago. ... We probably didn"t communicate it as crisply and clearly as we should have. ... We had a plan. We made a decision to change the plan. It took us time to regroup and come out with a new plan, and through the process, we didn"t want to publicly communicate until this plan was completely baked and fully solidified.

Will there be a System Center suite that customers can buy? Currently there is no plan for that.

There"s no licensing plan for the whole group of products? There is no licensing model. There are some promotions that will be offered to our enterprise customers. If they own Software Assurance -- whether it"s [through] an Enterprise Agreement or separately purchased -- they will get a promotion for a period of time. ... And as we get closer to the rollout dates and announce pricing for those individual products, we will announce the exact promotion.

So customers will purchase System Center Reporting Manager, Capacity Manager and Data Protection Manager as separate products? You buy them separately. ... All these products come out in the second half of this calendar year. So a month or two before they roll out, we will communicate pricing and promotions.

Users tend to be concerned with their immediate needs and may not have Microsoft"s Dynamic Systems Initiative on their radar screens. What"s new with DSI? One of the core premises of DSI is it is designed for operations, basically [driving] the vision that systems need to be designed to be manageable. And in the last year, we have delivered Microsoft Operations Manager 2005, and through the management packs that Microsoft and our partners deliver with MOM 2005, we actually enable that aspect to DSI to help customers today. In MOM 2005, we defined a health model for applications that MOM 2005 manages. Those health models are packaged in management packs, and they"re available with those applications.

The significance of MOM 2005 is in the fact that we"re bringing in the discipline to Microsoft developers and also third parties on the need to deliver manageability from the get-go, from the time their technology is available to market.

Isn"t that vision predicated on the System Definition Model, which isn"t ready yet? SDM is technology that will suddenly help make the model-based management approach much more pervasive. But it"s important to understand that the model-based management approach is what"s the core of the DSI. SDM is technology that will help get us forward. But the model-based management approach is achieved with MOM 2005 and with the health models that are available with MOM 2005. SDM, when it becomes available, will take it to the next level.

Why does the model-based approach matter for IT professionals, and how will that work in comparison with prior approaches? One example that we demonstrated at this conference is how to take advantage of the model-based management approach in the System Center Capacity Manager tool. Basically, the Exchange team in Microsoft defined the capacity model for Exchange 2003 in making it available with the Capacity Manager. The end user is able to define the model of their environment.

It"s basically your ability to manage, based on the models, by mapping what you model, what you defined as [the] desired state to the actual physical state. And it also allows you to manipulate models and see the predictive responses from the models of the physical environment as opposed to the physical environment itself. An example that we showed to the attendees of the conference [is] we added a significant group of users to an existing Exchange environment and we modeled the response time that those users would get from that configuration. We also modeled the extra load that we would put on Exchange Server to see and still keep our service-level agreement.

Will there be a big push this year to get developers to adopt the System Definition Model (SDM), which is due for release in the second half of the year with Visual Studio 2005? It is absolutely the goal to attract developers to Dynamic Systems Initiative, and it will be big push at the [Professional Developers Conference] in the fall.

What kind of developers are you trying to attract? We"re trying to attract two prime categories of developers. First of all, we"re trying to attract ISVs [independent software vendors] and encourage them to build systems ready for operations. The second category of developers is enterprise developers that build applications for large enterprises, large financial institutions.

Do you have any indication from partners that they"re going to be supporting SDM? Are you going to make SDM an openly available specification? We"re still in discussions both internally and with partners on a select one-on-one basis on how we want to move forward.

Once developers can use the SDM, what will they be able to do that they can"t do now? They could generate an application that comes out with operational characteristics defined in a highly automated fashion. As a result of that, that application would be much easier to deploy, much easier to monitor and much easier to administer. As they create their application, just like today, they"re encouraged to enter debugging information. They are encouraged to enter some statements within their application to follow certain guidelines and certain programming techniques. In a similar fashion, they would be encouraged to enter information about the health of the application, information about the tasks that can be performed on this application, information about how this application can be discovered and manifest itself in the environment. The System Definition Model defines how this application is supposed to work.

Essentially, is it just an XML document? Think of it as an XML document that gets generated with an application. And it basically accompanies the application through its life cycle. ... It"s eventually used by SMS and MOM. It helps SMS; it tells SMS how this application needs to be deployed. And it tells SMS the dependencies of that application, so those dependent components are either deployed or made available. It also tells MOM how that application is to be monitored, what is the hierarchical topology of that application so it can be visualized for the operational stack and the probable root-cause analysis.

Is this vision ultimately what will make you a big player in the management space? MOM 2005 is a highly scalable product. We see customers using MOM 2005 as their enterprise console today. That"s what we use internally at Microsoft. The network operations console that runs this large conference is powered by MOM. I think we"re ready now with this product. These products are enterprise-class.

Microsoft is taking steps to provide the ability to manage a heterogeneous environment, including support for Web services management standards. But aren"t those standards a ways off? Web services and WS-Management is the ultimate goal in interoperability and dealing with heterogeneous environments, when everybody speaks the same language, when there is no need for systems management agents per se to be placed on managed devices. It just talks the language that you can understand and gives you the data that you need. When that becomes a reality, the problem will be solved. I"ll be the first to admit that it will take two years for WS-Management to become completely pervasive in the industry. And until that happens, we will continue to work with the partners to bring non-Windows data about non-Windows devices into Microsoft management products.

Will that be soon enough for your customers? It is a few years off. Our heterogeneous solution today is not predicated upon WS-Management to be there. It"s partner-based, and it addresses the needs of many of our customers. Some customers may desire to get one complete solution for all of their platforms from one vendor, and typically those customers would be predominantly Unix-centric enterprises, where a majority of their investments went into non-Windows platforms. Until those customers migrate to Windows, it will be hard for us to convince them to run our management technology, because the bulk of their investment is in non-Microsoft, non-Windows domains.