Microsoft is readying two new technologies that it says will provide the company with the same kind of self-configuration and -management capabilities that IBM has been touting for the past several years.

Microsoft is branding its autonomic-computing strategy as "Dynamic Systems Initiative." The company plans to fill out the details of its strategy next week at the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas.

"You need a very rapid infrastructure to bring system on line in real-time," explains Bob O'Brien, group product manager for Windows Server.

"But while other vendors are talking in 10-year timeframes, we are going to be providing this in half the time," O'Brien adds.

The Redmond software vendor is preparing a set of blueprints and code called System Definition Model (SDM) that it will provide to Microsoft's own tools and application groups — as well as to third-party software vendors and integration partners — for inclusion in their products. Those that use SDM will be able to generate code that is inherently manageable, Microsoft executives say.

Bill Veghte, corporate vice president in charge of Microsoft's Windows server group, foreshadowed the System Definition Model unveiling last month, during a Silicon Valley Speaker Series talk for press and analysts.

"In essence, the problem that we have in the IT industry today, where you've got management as an afterthought, where you've got vendors providing solutions but it isn't really bolted into the platform attributes — I think we have to invert that," Veghte said. "You have to bolt it into the platform so that I can consume this schema or this definition from application and then expose it for innovative third-party tools."

At the same time, Microsoft also is building Automated Deployment Services (ADS), code designed to provide customers with a way to respond to changing server, storage and networking demands in real-time. Microsoft plans make ADS available to customers an add-on to Windows 2003 some time later this year.

The first Microsoft products to start manifesting SDM support via ADM are still three to five years out, O'Brien acknowledges.

Microsoft is working with hardware vendors like Hewlett-Packard and Dell Computer to get them to support Microsoft's grand Dynamic System Infrastructure plan in future versions of their products.

"As we think about solving the issues of complexity and cost savings in the datacenter, our notion of a system definition model builds on the use of XML as a communication approach among infrastructure and applications," O'Brien told Microsoft Watch. "This allows the developer to build an application which is more manageable and fits into the server infrastructure of the datacenter system, rather than making management of the application an afterthought."

Microsoft, IBM and Sun are hardly the only players trying to find ways to automate provisioning, application deployment and management. Opsware (the company formerly known as LoudCloud), for example, is carving out a niche for itself as a datacenter-automation provider.