Centro aims at mid-market IT needs, Microsoft exec says

Microsoft last week unveiled its Centro product plan, which is intended to make it easier to administer networks in midsize businesses. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill interviewed Steven VanRoekel, director of Midsize Business Solutions Strategy at Microsoft, about Centro.

IW: What’s the significance of Centro for Microsoft?

SV: Centro is significant in that it’s [geared] toward the midsize company and, more specifically, the IT professional in the midsize company. It’s the first infrastructure product specifically designed for them. We’re kind of at a unique position in that we’re able to -- with this customer -- design a specific product to meet their unique needs. With most products at Microsoft we have to focus in a very horizontal way to meet the broadest set of customers. For this product, we have a laser focus on the needs of this customer. Their needs are very similar to an enterprise customer in that they need all the computing power; they need directory, e-mail, security, line of business apps, etc. But they’re very limited from the perspective of their IT resources. And so Centro is designed in such a way that it will meet needs by automating common tasks, by giving them kind of an all-up view of their network through a new management console that we’re building and just make it easier to run core infrastructure and to manage the network.

IW: A new management console is part of Centro?

SV: That’s right. We’re taking a lot of the technologies we have today, we call it kind of the system center family of products for software deployment, server monitoring. Products like SMS [Systems Management Server], like our patching technology, things like that, and we’re bringing that all together into one user interface in a new management console.

IW: Who are you competing with on this? HP OpenViewor CA Unicenter?

SV: Nobody’s really doing the kind of all-up product, where all of these workloads are included in one product, and most of our competitors are [providing] mostly the point solutions that people do today. [There are] things like Linux-based e-mail systems and Novell with GroupWise and NetWare. IBM is probably the closest comparison from a platform perspective, but they define the mid-market much larger than what we look at as the mid-market. Because what IBM would call a small business, we classify as mid-market.

IW: What does Centro mean?