At the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas this week, the Redmond software giant is expected to show off a brand-new management tool.

Code-named "Indy," the new management product is a capacity-planning and performance-modeling tool. Indy simulates an enterprise datacenter by modeling a customer's hardware, software and server systems.

Indy was developed by Microsoft Research and is now being commercialized by Microsoft's enterprise management division, sources close to the company said. So far, there is no public information on when Microsoft intends to deliver this technology to its customers.

Microsoft is on tap to demonstrate Indy during the course of the management summit, sources said.

Microsoft officials confirmed that the company plans to demo Indy during Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's keynote address on Wednesday. David Hamilton, director of Microsoft's enterprise management division, said the Indy technology will likely be rolled into version 2.0 of Microsoft's System Center suite. He said the company has yet to pin a date on Version 2.0. But Version 1.0 of the suite, which is officially named "System Center 2005" and is comprised of Microsoft Operations Manager 2005, Systems Management Server 2003 and reporting services, will ship some time in calendar 2004.

Hamilton added that Indy will be one of the first Microsoft products to incorporate Microsoft's System Definition Model (SDM) technology. SDM is at the crux of Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), which is its grand plan for autonomic computing.

According to information on the Microsoft Research Web site, "Indy provides a framework for a modeling expert to develop custom model applications using pre-existing core components and services. Users can plug different hardware models, workload descriptions and external performance components." The site notes that "this lets Indy grow and adapt to the needs of its users."

The site also says Microsoft researchers have used Indy to do capacity planning for e-commerce platforms and model PC clusters for optimization studies.

Microsoft is expected to position Indy as a performance-modeling tool for the masses, rather than for high-end, specialized administrators.

About 2,000 IT professionals are registered to attend the Microsoft Management Summit. At the conference, Microsoft is updating its DSI roadmap; rolling out new betas of its management products; and releasing a new beta of its Software Update Services 2.0 patch-management technology – which the company has renamed "Windows Update Services."

Note: This story was updated after initial publication to include official Microsoft comment.

(This is an edited version of an article which appeared in the March 11, 2003, issue of the Microsoft Watch newsletter.)