Microsoft rallied DSI around those two products, saying they would be integrated and called System Center. By 2005, however, the project was deemed too expansive, System Center became a brand name, SMS and MOM stayed separate and were renamed, and other System Center features became individual products including reporting services, data protection and capacity planning.

In addition, Microsoft was developing a proprietary modeling language called Systems Definition Model (SDM), which eventually was integrated with Visual Studio development tools. Just as developers were getting SDM into their hands, however, Microsoft, reacting to criticism about SDM being proprietary, turned it over to a standards body where it eventually became the Service Modeling Language (SML).

The automated data center

Kirill Tatarinov, who in 2003 was the corporate vice president of Microsoft's newly formed enterprise management division, said the goal of DSI was "to enable customers to have a fully automated data center that self-adjusts to changing business priorities." That broad goal has not so much changed as evolved, mainly because of the explosion of interest in virtualization and Linux, neither of which was part of Microsoft's management plan in 2003.

Now virtualization is integral to Microsoft's quest to manage what it calls the dynamic data-center and the dynamic desktop, where virtualized environments will allow IT administrators to provision resources automatically or supply users with their desktop no matter what device they are using.

Users say Microsoft is showing significant progress and a bright future. "They have done some good foundational work, and the next iteration is going to be very significant," says Curtis Smith, solutions architect for Clear Channel, a global media and entertainment company. "I see the products being pulled together like what happened with Office and its common code-base and common [user interfaces]."

Smith put his faith in Microsoft two years ago, moving from HP OpenView to Operations Manager, and he is not looking back."I think Microsoft is uniquely positioned to provide the entire [management] life cycle that a lot of [other vendors] cannot do," he says. Microsoft's reliance on models used by developers and embedded in systems and applications to provide intelligence for management tools is powerful, he says.

"Microsoft is also starting to be more open and engaging partners to help figure out how to manage complex systems," Smith says. The company is using the open source OpenPegasus project to help build a bridge to Unix and Linux systems, and its Oslo modeling tools under development will use the SML standard.

Smith agrees, however, that to reach its goal, Microsoft still has to make its tools look and act like a single product family. Observers say that without that alignment, complexity will remain. A case in point: Microsoft rewrote Operations Manager for System Center Operations Manager 2007, creating an entirely new architecture that meshes with System Center's modeling philosophy. "When they went from MOM 2005 to 2007, they wrote the new software from scratch," consultant Meyler says. "It really is a Version 1 product."

Despite being a painful upgrade for users, System Center Operations Manager 2007 is lauded for its programming model, interface design and ease of using management packs to add features. It doesn't match with Configuration Manager, however, which still uses the old Microsoft Management Console interface and has a different programming model. In addition, Microsoft has yet to keep a four-year-old promise to integrate Configuration Manager's management model with Active Directory.

Those capabilities should come in the next version, expected to ship in 2010, which will be a confluence of another round of potentially challenging upgrades.One highlight of the next round of upgrades is expected to be a critical missing piece -- a workflow and service automation tool called System Center Service Manager, which will help Microsoft compete with the big boys and that originally was slated to ship in late 2007.