Microsoft recently set its sights on becoming a dominant enterprise management vendor, yet both experts and users say the company first has to define the scope of its goals, improve the platform, and prove that it can be the caretaker of non-Windows systems. Microsoft announced its plans at its annual Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) for a cross-platform enterprise data-center management infrastructure that includes hooks into Unix and Linux systems. Microsoft now intends to climb the ladder and compete with the major vendors to manage desktops, distributed systems, and data-center automation, regardless of the logo on the assets. Steve Brasen, an Enterprise Management Associates analyst, said that the shift was made to support heterogeneous environments, and the question that arises is how well will they support them. Brasen explained that Microsoft's offering is not as comprehensive as those of the major four vendors--CA, HP, IBM, and BMC--but over time, he expects Microsoft's heterogeneous support to improve; the question then will be to what extent. Clearly, Microsoft is accepting the fact that corporate IT now has many management systems in place to keep operations alive. Observers generally think that Microsoft will probably win over Windows-centric shops that have a few Linux servers to manage and desire to utilize familiar Microsoft management tools. The proof will rest in Microsoft showing what it can do. Microsoft is also putting faith in the open source area in order to align its products with other platforms, tapping the OpenPegasus project to build a bridge to Linux and Unix systems. Microsoft has its own implementation of Web-based Enterprise Management (WBEM) known as Windows Management Instrumentation. However, some management vendors do not support OpenPegasus in their management agents, which could create integration problems.