Microsoft this week took the wraps off an ambitious multi-year plan for developing a self-managing computing environment. The plan begins with Windows Server 2003 and updates to System Management Server (SMS) and Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM). It continues with new technologies such as System Definition Model (SDM), an XML technology used by servers and applications to exchange management data, and Automated Deployment Services (ADS), technology for deploying software. Network World Senior Editor John Fontana sat down with Microsoft’s Brian Valentine, senior vice president of the Windows division, to talk about the company’s management plans (discuss the plans in our Microsoft management forum).

Describe Microsoft’s shift in management strategy.

There is a lot of momentum in the industry right now around general-purpose compute environments that then become workload-specific dynamically. Today everything is silo-based. You have these sets of applications that run on these sets of machines and you treat it as a silo application, and it is not really an integrated environment. Well, our strategy really turns that on its side and creates a computing environment that is an enterprise service that can be dynamically reconfigured to solve whatever business problem you want to solve at the moment. But it also says that to do it right, you have to be able to capture the entire lifecycle of the application, from architecture design all the way to end of lifecycle. You have to really take that and build it into the platform.

So, break down the architecture.

If you look at the management architecture in Windows today, it is not the world’s best, right? The event log - we know about that. The registry - we know about that. MSI [Microsoft Installer] - we know about that. WMI [Windows Management Instrumentation] is there and is probably the best part of the management architecture, but it is only a small piece. And then you take some of the services on top of that. I think Active Directory is pretty good. But some of the security infrastructure stuff is still clunky and hard to use. So there are a lot of things that are there that can be used as building blocks, but are they really truly fundamental architectural building blocks that you want to go forward with over the next 20 years? No. But the needed building blocks cannot be built by a third-party ISV to truly deliver on the vision of a managed operating system platform. So, taking a lot of what has been provided in the management industry so far, and integrating in the platform elements in the operating system is a big bold statement.

Does this initiative compare in scope to Trustworthy Computing in that it touches nearly everything?

Yes, everything in the enterprise. It is a bigger effort from that perspective. When you look at the benefit, I think it actually has a bigger benefit than Trustworthy Computing. Security is a huge issue. You’ve got to provide a secure solution, but that is pretty vertical and one-dimensional. This is a platform play across a lot of things so the impact of it can be a lot bigger. With this we can advance computing infrastructures dramatically, where security doesn’t do that. So it is different from that perspective, but this is a pretty big undertaking.

You haven’t talked about integration with other platforms. When you talk about the data center you need integration.

Our view is that there will be heterogeneous environments for quite some time - forever. So we want to have open interfaces, we want to have open protocols. People can go develop whatever infrastructure they want to develop on other platforms, and they can decide at that point if they want it to play within our environment or not.

How are they going to make it play in your environment?

SDM is an open thing. You can have multiple producers of it and multiple consumers of it. So it will all just play within that model. Is that infrastructure exclusive to Windows? No. There will connection points to that infrastructure. There has to be. We can’t go into a customer and say it is a Microsoft-only solution.

You have not mentioned Application Center or the acquisition of Connectix virtual server software. Where does all that fit?