The product began as a network management system called SeNTry ELM, which was developed by the British company Serverware Group plc. In June 1998 the intellectual property rights were bought by Mission Critical Software, inc, who renamed the product Enterprise Event Manager. Mission Critical Software merged with NetIQ in early 2000, and sold the rights to the product to Microsoft in October 2000. System Center Operations Manager 2007 was designed from a fresh code base, and although sharing similarities to Microsoft Operations Manager, is not an upgrade from the previous versions.