Microsoft System Center 2012 now available for purchase

At the Microsoft Management Summit, Corporate Vice President Brad Anderson highlighted how customers around the world are already using Microsoft System Center 2012, which is now available for evaluation and purchase, to create private clouds. Anderson also discussed how IT professionals can evolve their roles with cloud computing to help their businesses be more competitive.

2012 version available for purchase!

"Cloud computing gives IT professionals an opportunity to increase their strategic value to their businesses while building new skills," Anderson said. "Microsoft's private cloud solutions help IT professionals become cloud innovators for their companies, managing and delivering the applications people need to be productive across private, hybrid and public clouds." In addition, Anderson provided a preview of how Microsoft's private cloud will become powerful with Windows Server "8" and announced that the operating system will officially be named Windows Server 2012. The new "cloud-optimized OS" is due out later this year.

IT organizations that use System Center 2012 and Windows Server with Hyper-V for cloud computing eventually help their companies move faster, save money and compete better. Microsoft gave an example of a luxury car service named EmpireCLS Worldwide Chauffeured Services that has been using a Microsoft private cloud to reduce data center costs by 50 percent amid 30 percent company growth during the past 18 months. With more than 1,000 employees, EmpireCLS relies on the Microsoft private cloud to deliver a reliable reservation system to customers in more than 700 cities around the world. Using System Center 2012, EmpireCLS also used its cloud environment to create a new business with its BeTransported software as a service offering. The application is now in use broadly within the car service industry.

Similarly, The Walsh Group, a construction firm based in Chicago, switched to a Microsoft private cloud to automate delivery of virtualized servers and applications for 5,000 employees. In addition to business efficiencies, the company has been able to reduce hardware and energy costs by 20 percent.

"With Microsoft, we are moving beyond virtualization to cloud computing, so we can automate and manage our IT environment as a whole," said Patrick Wirtz, manager of Technology Innovation at The Walsh Group. "It's all about giving our engineers, tradespeople and software developers the computing resources they need to build roadways, bridges and high-rises."

More information on Microsoft’s System Center 2012 is available here.