Earlier this week I interviewed Brad Anderson, General Manager of the Management and Services Division at Microsoft, to ask him about some of the news that will be coming out of the Microsoft Management Summit 2009 (MMS) this week in Las Vegas. We've posted the first half of this two-part interview below.
Jeff James: What is the role of the Management and Services Division at Microsoft? And what are some of the things you'll be talking about at MMS this week?
Brad Anderson: At Microsoft what my team is really responsible for, if you think about manageability and management at Microsoft, that's actually what my team does. So a significant portion of my team works on Windows, works across both Windows client and Windows Server to ensure the appropriate manageability is built into the system, so Windows out-of-the-box is manageable. And then we build the products and services of desktop optimization package--System Center. So really everything from the underlying protocol we use--our implementation of WS-Man, PowerShell, Windows Update, Group Policy, through the application virtualization, all the way through our monitoring tools with Ops Manager, Configuration Manager, Virtual Machine Manager.
So here at MMS 2009, on a high-level our theme is "Physical -- Virtual -- Powerful." So we really think about this as a continuation of the conversation we started a year ago at MMS with customers and the industry about dynamic IT and very specifically the long-term mission and vision we put in place around delivering what we call the service-centric data center and user-centric client computing. So really what we'll hear this year being talked about is trends. There are some really interesting trends with the economy and everything that's happening, how that's impacting customers and organizations. We'll talk about the things we're delivering in the short term, so literally in the next couple of months, delivering on the commitments we made a year ago. And then we'll really talk about the tangible progress that has been made on these long-term visions around the service-centric data center and the user-centric client computing. We really just think about it as a continuation.
So a couple of high-level things to help frame it to begin with. As you're, I'm sure, acutely aware, what an interesting economic time to be able to work in. And in this economic time what we are seeing is that the technology and products we are shipping to the market are being rapidly adopted by the market. The market is embracing what we're doing. I'll give you a couple data points on that. And as I'm giving you the data points, think about what the competition to Microsoft's offerings are doing, where at best they're flat. What we are seeing, number one we are seeing all of our overall management business up 20 percent. If you take a look at our business around managing servers, not desktops, that business is going up faster than 40 percent. Over the last 90 days, we have had 1,000 new customers purchase the all-up System Center suite for managing their servers and data centers.
If you think about it, 20 percent all-up growth and 40 percent all-up growth in server management, those are phenomenal numbers in a healthy environment. In a challenging environment, I think that those are phenomenal, and the customer and folks really want to spend their dollars on the technology--that's what they're going to make their long term bets on. So we just have an incredible amount of momentum and wind on our backs right now.