Diane Prescott, Product Manager, System Center: Hello – I wanted to provide a quick update on some changes we have coming regarding the System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise (SMSE) and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) later this year. In Q4 of 2008, we’re excited to be providing customers with additional value and functionality in the SMSE by releasing the next version of our VMM software, VMM 2008. One thing that’s new with the release of VMM 2008, is that we’ll be making it available to customers and partners as a standalone product; VMM 2007 was only available as part of the SMSE. While the feedback from customers on the synergy of the products in the SMSE has been exciting over the last 8 months, we also wanted to offer customers the choice of VMM 2008 standalone as well, as we do with the other products in the System Center family including Configuration Manager 2007, Operations Manager 2007 and Data Protection Manager 2007.

As far as how we’ll offer VMM 2008 standalone in Q4 of 2008, it will follow the licensing model set forward by the SMSE. It will be sold as a per-device enterprise server management license (ML) and will include rights to the management server. Because we’ll be selling the VMM 2008 enterprise server ML on a per-device basis, which makes sense in the context of virtualization, we’ll be targeting a price which will be approximately 10-15% less than the SMSE at that time it’s generally available. Additionally, because of the new value and functionality being added to the various System Center offerings over the next year, including VMM, Operations Manager and Configuration Manager, we will be implementing a price increase to the SMSE of approximately 10-15% in the same time frame. We’re still working on the specifics regarding the pricing and licensing of VMM 2008 and the SMSE and we’ll have further details to share in early August.