Today, before an audience of more than 4,000 IT professionals and partners at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2008, Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft Corp., outlined the next phase in the company’s strategy to enable dynamic IT organizations. As part of this strategy, Muglia announced technology innovations that are designed to expand Microsoft’s virtualization capabilities and introduced its use of open source technologies and industry standards to broaden its ability to deliver automated management of heterogeneous IT environments.

Microsoft today announced the availability of a public beta for System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions, which build on the existing Operations Manager 2007 technology and capabilities and are designed to help customers extend the value of their Microsoft System Center investments. Providing customers with a comprehensive management solution, this new end-to-end IT systems monitoring capability incorporates industry standards and proven open source technologies, including Web Services for Management (WS-Management) and OpenPegasus, extending the capabilities across both physical and virtualized Windows and non-Windows operating systems and applications. Microsoft delivers the core foundational cross-platform support out of the box for HP-UX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Sun Solaris and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating systems so that partners can focus on adding their deep domain expertise in the form of management packs. Companies such as Novell Inc., Quest Software Inc. and Xandros Inc. have demonstrated their support by working to deliver monitoring abilities for applications made by organizations such as The Apache Software Foundation, MySQL AB and Oracle.

Further demonstrating support for its commitment to OpenPegasus, Microsoft also announced today that it will be joining the OpenPegasus Steering Committee and contribute code back to the open source community under the Microsoft Public License, an Open Source Initiative (OSI)-approved license.