Back in June, Microsoft announced a change to the release cycle of System Center - where customers with an active Software Assurance license will see two new version releases a year. This change follows a similar track to how Microsoft now offer Configuration Manager - which has moved to a three-times-a-year release model - and it also brings the release cadence for System Center in line with Windows Server.
In the original announcement here of the new release cycle, you might have noticed that there was plenty of talk about how SCOM, SCVMM and DPM would be invested in but no mention of anything related to Service Manager (SCSM) or Orchestrator.
Over the last year or two, all of the messaging coming out of Microsoft has been that both SCSM and Orchestrator are essentially an abandoned ship - with no development or investment love coming their way as the move to cloud-based alternatives accelerates their demise.
Well, if you're currently working with SCSM and Orchestrator (or have a valid reason to not look at the cloud-based alternatives), then you'll be happy to know that Microsoft have recently clarified their position on their support and investment for both products in their 'SCSM Roadmap and Future' blog post here.
An encouraging quote directly from the blog post reads:
"System Center Service Manager and Orchestrator are still being developed and are part of this new release cycle along with the rest of System Center. Some semi-annual updates will only have fixes and some will have additional functionality. The features that get added to the entire suite each cycle will depend on customer demand and will be prioritized as such. The products which receive enhancements will likely vary each time. All products are therefore still fully supported.
Like many on-prem product groups, the SCSM team is currently working on incorporating more Azure and cloud service components into SCSM."
This should help allay fears that SCSM and Orchestrator are completely dead in the water but in the spirit of innovation, if you haven't yet looked at and tried out solutions such as Azure Automation, Azure Logic Apps and the ITSM integration with Azure Log Analytics, then you're missing a trick and need to check them out sooner rather than later!
