System Center Service Manager Delayed Two Years by Microsoft

Published: February 13, 2008

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft's System Center Service Manager has hit a rough patch and will be delayed at least two years, the company confirmed this week. The product, which is aimed at helping IT departments and help desks track problems from the moment they're reported to their resolution, was to have shipped by the end of 2007. But problems with the early beta have pushed the delivery date out at least until 2010.

Microsoft had high hopes for System Center Service Manager, which it first introduced under the codename "Service Desk" at the Microsoft Management Summit in April 2006. One of the key elements of the product was a SQL Server-based repository, known as a configuration management database (CMDB), that would capture and track information about the customer's IT assets and how they've been configured. On top of this CMDB would reside a workflow engine and a series of templates (based on the SharePoint Portal) designed to guide IT professionals through the steps they need to solve problems according to IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) best-practices.

Microsoft foresaw System Center Service Manager working closely with other System Center products, including System Center Operations Manager and System Center Configuration Manager, to simplify IT tasks in increasingly complicated environments. SCSM was also a key part of Microsoft's plan to compete with mature system management tools from CA, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM.

"We believe our customers will greatly benefit from the System Center 'Service Desk' entering the market starved for innovation," Kirill Tatarinov, who was then corporate vice president of the Windows and enterprise management division, said at the MMS 06 show. The new product would ship by the end of 2007, he promised.

That delivery schedule appeared intact at the MMS 07 show, when Microsoft released the first SCSM beta at the same time it delivered System Center Operations Manager 2007. However, as the end of the year came and went, there was no announcement from Microsoft about the state of SCSM.

This week Microsoft revealed that the product never shipped, and won't ship until the first half of 2010, at the earliest. The current development schedule calls for Microsoft to deliver a new beta, dubbed Beta Refresh 1, during the second half of 2008. A second beta is scheduled for the first half of 2009, before the product will be ready to ship.

Problems with developing the CDMB and slow response to queries are reportedly at the heart of the problem. The company will have to rebuild a significant portion of the CDMB to fix the problems.

"I know any delay is unfortunate," says Paul Ross, senior product marketing manager for System Center, on the The System Center Team Blog, "but we must ensure that the product is ready on day one, rather than deliver a product that has to be changed once it is deployed in customers' environments."

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