Today’s keynote speaker is Krill Tatarinov, Corporate Vice President, Windows Enterprise Management Division formerly with BMC and PATROL Software.  There was not a whole lot of new information in this speech it was more of the same from yesterdays keynote but with a little more detail.  A couple new announcements below.

 Microsoft Promises - Second round

• Ensure your business is always running
• Eliminate unnecessary complexity - making products easier to use
• Establish responsive infrastructure - being able to rapidly respond to requests and needs from your business.

ANNOUNCEMENT: System Center Reporting Manager 2006 is now publicly available for purchase.

Inventory Tool for Custom Updates (ITCU) – This is the tool that will allow you to deploy updates and patches to 3rd party apps with SMS.

Citrix will be the first company to use ITCU to deploy updates to their product.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Microsoft purchased AssetMetrix - Asset management company.

http://www.assetmetrix.com

This will replace the asset tracking in SMS instead of looking at the header files or Add or Remove Programs

During a demo Microsoft mapped their software inventory data to AssetMetrix’s data to clean up reporting in SMS, eliminating all the different point versions of products and the different names that you get from vendors when you inventory the header info from an exe.

It will be six to nine months before this new feature will be available in SMS.

Built in compliance report based on what is inventories and compared to EA numbers.

Next up…What’s new in R2