Microsoft System Center Feedback Request

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Microsoft has reached out to my company to invite us to participate in a series of interviews and surveys around System Center, specifically targeted at the Service Provder space.  Here’s the request we got:

We are conducting research to help shape future releases and pricing models for Systems Center.   As you are aware, System Center  is an enabler of cloud services, managed services and more for hosting service providers of all sizes.

As a key hosting partner of ours it would be great if  you could participate in this research to make System Center more compelling for you.

We need your insights around:

 

  • How  you manage your  infrastructure today, the tools and applications in place?
  • What are the key unmet needs?
  • How do you prefer to acquire those tools and applications?
  • What are the most preferred payment models?
  • What is the long term role of systems management and infrastructure management in a hosting environment?

The information you provide will be held confidential.  We are  interviewing a small number of key  hosting partners, so each interview is very important and will have a major impact on System Center’s roadmap.

We will provide you with a summary of  key findings from the research.

Looking forward to your assistance in helping shape Microsoft’s products for  the hosting industry.

 

Especially with some of the…issues…we’ve had around hypervisor billing models lately, this was an interestingly timed vendor request.  I’d like to solicit any comments from the general public around the SC platform that you’d like me to bring up in the discussions.  If you’d like to comment below, please leave an e-mail address I can get back to you on, or you can e-mail me off-line at jeramiah at jeramiah (dot) net.  It’s good to see Microsoft being proactive on the licensing front.  I’m interested to see what happens here, because it will be the height of irony if Microsoft can succeed at the licensing side of their Service Provider initiative considering all of the issues they have had with licensing in the past.  We are big fans of the SPLA program, maybe this will fall into the same model.