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Application Center Goes Into General Availability

Microsoft Corp. announced this week at Internet World in Los Angeles that its first product for configuring and managing Web applications, Application Center 2000, has gone into general availability.

A Japanese version has also been released to manufacturing and will be available in a few weeks.

“We see the availability of the product as kind of a watershed moment,” says Bob Pulliam, Microsoft’s technical product manager for Application Center. “We think this is tipping the scales away from the big iron solutions for managing Web applications.”

Application Center is Microsoft’s tool for configuring and managing distributed Web applications in one place. The software includes Component Load Balancing, a new form of clustering that allows applications to scale by distributing their components across several application servers, and integration with Network Load Balancing.

Microsoft has the Web application business dominated by Sun Microsystems in its sights with the product, which it has been working on publicly since September 1999.

“The scale out option, has always been very scalable and very available, but the big problem is manageability,” Pulliam says.

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

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