Microsoft last week shipped one of the first tools in the company's wide-ranging portfolio designed to create a comprehensive platform for managing computing resources.

The company made available for free its Automated Deployment Services (ADS), which supports the automated and simultaneous installation of Windows 2000 and 2003 on networked servers.

But ADS is just the beginning of an ambitious multi-year, multi-stage plan Microsoft unveiled in March called the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI). The plan is designed to create a platform for a self-managing environment built around applications that can communicate their management needs to the network.

Experts say if Microsoft fulfills its DSI plan, the company will become more competitive in corporate data centers. The company has committed $1.7 billion in research and development this fiscal year for DSI-related technologies.

The software giant is trying to keep pace with rivals HP, IBM and Sun. All three have evolving complex strategies to create management environments that would let systems adapt to change by dynamically allocating resources and installing software.

"ADS is a small piece of DSI, but Microsoft is headed in the right direction," says Paul Wimmer, lead system developer for Rackspace. A San Antonio, Texas, company that hosts servers for corporate customers. Wimmer used ADS to replace some homegrown scripts for automated deployment of the Windows operating system, which shaved 40 minutes off the time it takes to roll out a server. "Anything that means our administrators have to touch our servers less and makes us more efficient, we are all for it," he says.

Wimmer says he is on track to roll out DSI as it evolves and he hopes it makes his Windows environment easier to manage.

The road to DSI, however, is a long one.

"Microsoft is trying to develop a management mindset with its utility model, but a lot of the pieces are missing," says Audrey Rasmussen, vice president of research for Enterprise Management Associates. One of those pieces is support for non-Windows platforms. "There is a lot of functionality that you need in managing the network, managing servers, capacity planning, and when you move to the utility model the link between those management systems will be more critical. It all has to be integrated. Microsoft will start to get there as they develop SDM."

SDM is the System Definition Model and is DSI's linchpin.