Bob Muglia, Microsoft Corp. senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business, speaking to more than 3,000 IT decision-makers at the Microsoft Management Summit 2006 today, highlighted the power of people to drive business results through software innovation. Muglia reaffirmed Microsoft�s commitment to assist customers in keeping IT aligned with business priorities by investing in innovative ways to manage complexity to achieve agility. Muglia said Microsoft is delivering on the vision of self-managing dynamic systems today through work in industry standards, systems management solutions and infrastructure capabilities that will help drive down IT infrastructure costs.

Muglia specifically highlighted the progress Microsoft is making in its Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) � a commitment to help customers achieve higher business value through automation, flexible resource utilization and knowledge-driven processes � including the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) acceptance of the Web Services for Management (WS-Management) specification as a preliminary standard and the intention to build a service desk offering that will serve as a key foundational piece for the System Center family of solutions.

�Complexity in the IT environment is a fact of life as customers deal with increasingly diverse environments and interoperability issues that make it difficult to track changes to the system and respond to security attacks and other unanticipated events,� Muglia said. �Our push toward dynamic systems will have broad impact and help customers to not only manage this more efficiently but also harness the power of IT as a strategic asset and ultimately achieve the agility necessary to transform IT into a driver of business success.�