Microsoft Tuesday said it plans to become a major management platform vendor to battle the likes of CA and HP and said it would extend its System Center software to encompass Linux and Unix-based machines.

The company plans to open up its annual Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) by laying out new pieces of its management platform that it says will transform a five-year-old mission to create a platform for Windows into a strategy for a cross-platform, distributed enterprise management system.

"We think we are a serious player in this game,"said Larry Orecklin, the general manager of the Windows enterprise and management division. "We want to become the systems management platform [in the enterprise]."

To build toward that goal, Microsoft plans to extend its System Center software, which includes Configuration Manager and Operations Manager, across platforms and add application management to its current infrastructure capabilities.

Microsoft plans to move across the divide using the OpenPegasus project, which is an open source implementation of the Distributed Management Task Force's (DMTF) Common Information Model (CIM) and Web-based Enterprise Management (WBEM) standards.

The project is run by the OpenGroup, and Microsoft announced Tuesday that it is joining the steering committee of OpenPegasus.

Linux vendors Novell and Red Hat have incorporated WBEM or its derivatives into their Linux operating systems and Sun and HP have done the same with their Unix-based operating systems. Microsoft has its own implementation of WBEM called Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).

WEBEM is a set of system management technologies, including CIM, for unifying management of distributed computing infrastructures.