Microsoft recently announced how we will be expanding our online services for the desktop and datacenter.  Building on the current strategy, we announced several advancements which will compliment our existing on-premise offerings:

• The Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit for Enterprises, a new service offering to help customers create private clouds, and a Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit for Hosters, which provides the ability to deploy on-demand managed services and virtualized servers powered by System Center and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.

• System Center Online Desktop Manager, an integrated security and management tool that will provide desktop management capabilities in the form of an online service. Designed to help businesses keep their IT environments secure and up-to-date using a Web-based subscription service to monitor, troubleshoot, update, configure and secure desktops, this new service will be available in beta by the end of this year.

• Microsoft Forefront Online Security for Exchange, an online service that helps protect an organization’s messaging infrastructure from spam, malware and e-mail policy violations.

• The availability in coming weeks of a second beta of a new set of technologies, code-named “Geneva,” that makes it dramatically easier for customers to build more secure access and multi-company collaboration into software and hosted services.

• The availability of the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), which delivers enterprise-class communications and collaboration software as subscription services to businesses of all sizes, for purchase in 19 countries worldwide.

• System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2, which delivers end-to-end service management across Windows and non-Windows environments. A final release within 60 days is planned.

• Partner support, including the HP Insight Control suite for Microsoft System Center, which delivers a comprehensive set of infrastructure management capabilities for managing HP ProLiant and BladeSystem servers, as well as support for the PRO feature from Dell and others.

 

This announcement also included the idea of ‘public’ and ‘private’ clouds, the former being the idea of hosted cloud computing, the latter around organizations hosting their own clouds for their internal business.