Systems managers and other IT pros have made their way to Las Vegas for the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2010, which kicked off this week. This year’s theme is “Manage the Future: Desktop to Cloud,” and Bob Muglia, president of the Microsoft Server and Tools Business, was on hand to discuss how the focus of the IT industry is shifting from servers to managed services — and to announce Microsoft’s new cloud and datacenter management products. Here’s the scoop.

Muglia’s keynote, available in full here, reaffirmed Microsoft’s commitment to the cloud, even as he extolled the virtues of their cloud platform. By taking advantage of the fact that all Microsoft products are “one platform, one development approach, one management solution,” as the Microsoft blog entry puts it, system managers can use the same resources to monitor the public cloud as the private. Muglia calls it “minding the gap,” and it has a lot to do with their new products.

Details on Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager V-next and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager V-next are scant, apart from the fact that they have a 2011 release date. But in his keynote, Muglia indicated that an on-site deployment of Operations Manager can monitor applications running on the Windows Azure cloud platform.

We’ve been promised updates this week on new Microsoft products like System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R3, System Center Data Protection Manager 2010, and, most interestingly, Windows Intune, Microsoft’s new cloud-delivered desktop infrastructure solution for SMBs, so stay tuned to MSPmentor for more.

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