Today at the Microsoft Management Summit, Microsoft Corporate Vice President Brad Anderson introduced the new System Center 2012, which will enable IT managers to manage virtual machines in the cloud.

"Our IT customers have told us that their focus is helping their businesses deliver the critical applications that will strengthen their bottom line, while maintaining necessary control and compliance," Anderson said. "Virtualization and server consolidation are important steps toward cloud computing, but it's essential to have management tools that provide intelligence about how the apps themselves are doing, not just management of virtual machine black boxes. Microsoft's management solutions provide that insight, along with the needed oversight."

System Center 2012, slated for release later this year, enables IT managers to build private clouds with the infrastructure they know and own today - including other vendors' platforms and virtualization technologies. In his keynote, Anderson demonstrated the Virtual Machine Manager capability in System Center 2012, available today as a beta release at http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/try-it.aspx. Using this core component of Microsoft private cloud solutions, IT managers can standardize infrastructure and application services and delegate them to business partners for fast deployment of applications.

Anderson also showed code name "Concero," the new System Center 2012 capability that empowers department-level application managers to deploy and manage their applications on private and public cloud infrastructure while helping IT managers deliver greater flexibility and agility to their business teams.

System Center 2012 solutions will enhance the current Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud programs and offerings for private cloud computing, including the ability to manage virtualized workloads.