Microsoft's System Center family of software competes with HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, CA Unicenter and Novell ZENWorks, among others.

The public beta of Operations Manager 2007 will be available by early June, with a final version shipping by year's end, Tatarinov said.

The final version of Configuration Manager 2007 will ship in the first half of 2007, along with Microsoft's upcoming virtualization manager product, currently code-named Carmine.

Service Desk 2007, which Microsoft announced yesterday as a new product to help ease the management of help desk calls, will be available in late 2007. R2 of Operations Manager 2007 will ship by year's end.

Tatarinov also noted that Reporting Manager, another new member of the Systems Center family of products, is now available. The product provides business analytical capabilities built on top of the SQL Server database and can help firms meet compliance and service level agreements.