"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." - Mark Twain

For a few years now, there's been a lot of confusion about the future of System Center in the Microsoft product portfolio.  Updates had become less frequent and less impressive.  New product offerings on the Azure side seem to directly compete with classic System Center.  And a few products are clearly EOL (Orchestrator, most notably).

One big exception was Configuration Manager, which adopted a more frequent update cadence and in principle was not well-suited for the cloud (not that that has stopped Microsoft before).  Data Protection Manager (DPM) also stood out somewhat because it's 2016 release added a lot of long requested features, but it was still stuck in the long multi-year update cycle.

Well, it seems now Microsoft is getting back to showing System Center some love.  They are going to start pushing out the frequent update model to Operations Manager, Virtual Machine Manager, and Data Protection Manager.  This is great news for those of us with Hybrid and On-Premises deployments.  Azure is fantastic, and the new features which are rapidly rolling out are amazing, but not every workload can move to the cloud, nor should every workload move to the cloud (keep your tech stack diverse).  Plus, OpsMgr and DPM, in particular, are very useful in many Azure deployments.

As Microsoft makes this transition, they are also asking for feedback from OpsMgr users.  This is a good time to let them know the direction you want the product to take.