Gates expands on Microsoft’s IT management vision

Microsoft Corp. is set to provide more details on Tuesday of its vision to simplify IT management and to announce the first public beta of its Windows Update Services (WUS) patch management product.

WUS is a free Windows Server add-on that allows users to download and deploy patches for a host of Microsoft products. A technical preview was released early this year. The WUS predecessor, Software Update Services (SUS) 1.0, only handles patches for Windows clients.

While speaking to an audience of IT professionals at Microsoft’s IT Forum event in Copenhagen, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates also plans on Tuesday update attendees on the company’s ambitious Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), a plan to reduce IT complexity by improving manageability.

In one of his first public presentations about DSI, Gates is slated to expand on what has thus far been an abstract vision of software and hardware with built-in manageability. He is expected to define three technical pillars of DSI: models, knowledge and life cycle, said David Hamilton, director of Microsoft’s Windows and Enterprise Management division.