Want to Consult on System Center 2012? Then You Cannot Avoid Service Manager or Orchestrator

In the “2007” generation of System Center (how I refer to the last generation of the suite including the 2010 and 2008 R2 products), I quite happily avoided Opalis (which I was quite vocal about not liking) and Service Manager (which was quite rightly a niche product).  I put my focus on VMM, ConfigMgr, OpsMgr, and a little DPM.

Folks, the game has changed.  It’s one thing to hear MSFT marketing talk about it, or to hear it for 5 days straight at a conference.  But it’s something completely different when customers are demanding it.  Organisations want a service centric IT department with self-service, automation, governance, deep monitoring, and …. and … you get the picture. 

That means 2 things:

• You need System Center 2012 Orchestrator for the automation and deep integration into the rest of System Center, AD, and 3rd party products
• You need System Center 2012 Service Manager as a portal to the IT department and the service catalogue that it provides

At MMS we just had one session after another that illustrated how some business scenario could be dealt with using some component(s) of System Center in combination with the above two products.  Every time, the user would request a service in Service Manager, Orchestrator would orchestrate the tasks, and the rest of System Center would implement the desired changes, possibly requiring some manual approval via a service ticket.

With this huge increase in demand, I’ve come to the conclusion that I cannot avoid Service Manager or Orchestrator anymore.  They’re very different to the “2007” generation of the same products, and people are aware of the need for solutions that do what these products do.  With those two products gluing the rest of System Center together, you can have an incredible service delivery from your (or your customers’) IT organisation.  I will have to learn these two products.  Damn you Microsoft!  Now I need to learn:

• Windows 8
• Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V
• Pretty much all of System Center 2012
• And let’s not forget that Office wave 15 beta is around the corner

Ugh!