Over the coming months it's likely that you'll be hearing the phrase "Dynamic IT" with increasing frequency. It's the name of Microsoft's long-term strategy for a new generation of IT products and technologies, pulling together the company's Dynamic Systems Initiative and its Application Platform strategy.

Innovation Programs
So what does Dynamic IT actually mean? The best way to answer that question is to think of Dynamic IT as a destination that will be reached as the result of concerted programs of innovation falling under four key headings:

• Unified and Virtualized
• Process-Led, Model-Driven
• Service-Enabled
• User-Focused

Let's take a quick look at each of those headings.

Unified and Virtualized
By unified, Microsoft is talking about systems that have been designed from the ground up to work well with other systems – even ones it was never envisaged that they would have to work with. By building a unified infrastructure it will be possible to integrate disparate systems quickly and efficiently using a well-defined process, giving IT staff time to occupy themselves with higher value-added activities rather than the nuts and bolts of integration.

The objective of virtualization is to enable IT departments to free themselves from restrictions imposed by physical hardware, so operating systems, applications and presentation layers can all be managed consistently in a single, centrally managed virtualized environment.

Process-Led, Model-Driven
Process-led is all about providing tools and technology to help businesses optimize how their systems and people work together. This includes ways to facilitate information flow, reporting, governance and project visibility in an organization's IT department, particularly between the program management office, the operations team, and the applications development teams.

Model-driven infrastructure involves the capturing of processes and knowledge into operations models. When these models are defined and applied, it's possible to achieve a high degree of automation with state-aware, self-managing and self-healing systems.

Service-Enabled
Microsoft's approach to service oriented architecture focuses on enabling IT departments to work their assets in such a way as to derive maximum benefit, by making it easy to connect any system to any other, as necessary.

Microsoft's Software and Services vision builds on its web services strategy by encompassing SOA, Web 2.0 and Software as a Service with the same ultimate goal: helping IT departments supply the services that are needed, wherever they are needed.

User-Focused
This area of innovation is concerned with the development of tools and, particularly, applications that connect employees to the people, processes and information they need. Essentially, it's about helping people get their jobs done.

The focus of this is creating rich and immersive online experiences to make people's jobs easier, and to drive results. Technologies in this area include the new Silverlight, the Windows Presentation Foundation, the Office suite, and toolsets such as Visual Studio and Expression Studio.

Why Now?
Dynamic IT is a strategy that Microsoft is just starting to introduce, and an interesting question is why it has doing so now. To answer this question it's necessary to understand that its introduction has been part of a three-stage process.

Firstly, Microsoft introduced various programs which all involved listening to its customers to find out what their top priorities were as they transformed their IT departments into strategic assets for their businesses.

In response to what it learned, Microsoft made its commitment to four Customer Promises:

1. Advance the business with IT solutions. A commitment to delivering a trusted and scalable foundation that empowers development teams and IT pros to partner with the business to maximize opportunity -- the ability to drive the right efficiencies, customer connections, and value-added services for business growth.
2. Manage complexity, achieve agility. A commitment to reducing the complexity and TCO (total cost of ownership) of developing, deploying and managing applications so an IT staff can focus on delivering new business value.
3. Protect information, control access. A commitment to providing a comprehensive set of security and access solutions that enables IT pros to address the ever-changing landscape of threats and compliance demands while providing users access to business critical information.
4. Amplify the impact of your people. A commitment to delivering the tools and technologies that enable IT pros and developers to supply the infrastructure to meet and support the maturing demands of today’s mobile and collaborative workforce.

Dynamic IT is the third and final stage -- the technical approach that Microsoft has designed to help deliver and realize the benefits of those promises.

Heterogeneous environments
It's important to remember that although this is a Microsoft initiative, Dynamic IT is not restricted to businesses that are exclusively Microsoft shops. Even companies that operate homogenous Microsoft environments should not be restricted from introducing other systems in the future if those systems are most appropriate for their needs. That is, after all, what Dynamic IT is about. Interoperability between heterogeneous systems is critical to achieving a truly dynamic environment.

To this end Microsoft is introducing many products and solutions that are truly interoperable and that work with a broad range of open standards, including Service Modelling Language (SML), which provides a consistent way to describe system information about servers, networks, applications, and other IT resources, and System Center Operations Manager.

Evolution of DSI
Dynamic IT is a progression from an earlier initiative, the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), Microsoft's technology strategy for products and solutions that help businesses enhance the dynamic capability of its people, process, and IT infrastructure using technology. Rather than replacing the DSI, Dynamic IT is an evolution of DSI that includes a new layer designed for service-enablement and the development of what Microsoft calls user-focused applications.

It's this combination of DSI and Microsoft's Application Platform that is ultimately what makes up Microsoft's vision of Dynamic IT, a state in which an organisations IT resources are flexible and agile, enabling customers to realize even greater value across their entire IT environment.