In an online broadcast today from Microsoft
headquarters, Satya Nadella, president of Microsoft
Server and Tools Business, announced System Center
2012, Microsoft's private cloud solution.
Nadella highlighted how companies, such as webcast
participants Lufthansa Systems, T. Rowe Price and
Unilever, can use Microsoft System Center 2012 to
build and operate private clouds for the delivery of
business applications across both private and public
cloud platforms. System Center 2012 is available today
in a Release Candidate as a single, integrated private
cloud management solution for the first time.
"IT leaders tell me that private cloud computing
promises to help them focus on innovation over
maintenance, to streamline costs and to respond to the
need for IT speed," Nadella said. "We are delivering
on that promise today. With System Center 2012,
customers can move beyond the industry hype and
speculation, and progress into the here and now of
private cloud."
System Center 2012 integrates eight separate component
products into one unified solution, streamlining
installation and reducing the time it takes to deploy
from days down to hours. The number of product
versions has also been simplified, so Microsoft's
customers will be able to choose between the Standard
and Datacenter editions of the product, based on their
virtualization requirements. And because System Center
2012 Datacenter edition licensing covers unlimited
virtual machines, customers can continually grow their
private clouds without additional licensing costs for
virtualizing their infrastructure and applications.
More information is available at the
Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform website.