From monday 22 January through friday 26 January, Microsoft is organizing the System Center Airlift in Bellevue, WA. Microsoft Partners will get level 300 and level 400 sessions from the various product teams as the launch of the new 2007 versions of the System Center products are coming closer. During the keynote on monday, Larry Orecklin, general manager for the Windows Enterprise and Management Division at Microsoft, gave some deeper insight in the coming System Center portfolio of products. Larry noted that Operations Manager 2007 will RTM on the Microsoft Management Summit in San Diego in the last week of March.

Larry also told that System Center Virtual Machine Manager is slated to RTM at the end of Q3 and that their new product codenamed "Service Desk" will have a public beta at the end of this quarter. One of the things that showed from his keynote is that System Center will be a brand-name and not so much one giant integrated product. Larry told that Microsoft will launch a $30 million System Center brand campaign starting February 4th worldwide, called "Designed for Big". The supporting website will be http://designedforbig.com. One other new detail Larry mentioned, was that Microsoft will start focussing on Remote Managed Services and will be providing a framework to partners to manage client environments smaller than 500 clients as a "hosted solution". Larry closed the keynote by explaining that "System Center Online Services" will be an addition to the current product portfolio, where the former AssetMetrix' web portal is the first to go under the new System Center title.