Microsoft and JBoss are taking contrasting approaches to deploying and maintaining systems, in moves that may weaken the grip of giants such as IBM, HP and CA on firms’ IT operations.

At its TechEd conference in Boston, Microsoft detailed several management tools under the System Center brand.

System Center Operations Manager 2007, the rebranded update to Microsoft Operations Manager 2005, is now in beta. It is the first Microsoft management program to use the System Definition Model (SDM) – an XML-based blueprint for defining hardware and software behaviour — to help gauge utilisation and reliability of services such as Exchange Server, Active Directory and applications. It can also manage Windows Vista and XP clients.

Systems Management Server (SMS) R2 has been released to manufacturing, including a vulnerability assessment tool and aggregation for third-party software updates. A deployment pack for SMS 2003 has also gone into beta with tools to roll out Vista and 64bit XP.

The ability to deploy Vista via Microsoft tools could be important for early adopters as some Vista testing releases have not worked with other deployment tools, according to experts. “If you are a LanDesk or ZenWorks customer it’s been a problem,” a source said.

A week after completing its sale to Red Hat, open-source middleware firm JBoss has its own scheme to broaden its reach through plans to open-source the systems management agent in JBoss Operations Network, letting third-parties build their own agents.

But JBoss argued that it does not intend to compete with giants. “These systems management companies don’t compete on the base framework but on added value,” said Sacha Labourey, JBoss chief technology officer. “We want to build a network of partners --it’s a multivendor play.”

Meanwhile, HP plans to integrate Voyence technology in a new product called OpenView Network Configuration Manager that monitors routers, hubs and switches regardless of brand. IBM also announced it was donating datacentre self-healing code to the Apache Open Source Foundation.