Micro Focus Operations Orchestration (OO) is the ultimate enterprise-orchestrator. It’s also the orchestration engine in our AIOps and ESM solutions.

With low-code/no-code authoring and advanced orchestration logic, OO automates with refreshing ease and superior control. It integrates with almost anything, made possible by APIs, RPA robots, and thousands of out-of-the-box operations and workflows. And it stands up to the most demanding use cases—disaster recovery being one of them.

We asked OO users—the automation experts—how they’re using OO, why they chose OO, and what their orchestration best practices are. Here’s what they told us.

Using OO—Common Use Cases

For OO users, orchestration is essential to automation and enterprise efficiency. Automating end-to-end processes is their goal. And orchestration helps them achieve total integration by seamlessly connecting and coordinating across teams, tools, and technologies.

“Micro Focus Operations Orchestration is at the heart of the automation solution. It enabled us to integrate our entire ecosystem. We have a varied set of systems, across different technologies from many vendors, and we needed an orchestrator that could integrate everything. We reduced the time for cloud upgrade requests from two months to an incredible eight seconds.”—Head of cloud management, telco OO customer

OO users are automating a broad range of processes. Here are their top use cases:

• Process automation
• Service request fulfilment
• Infrastructure automation (on premises and cloud)
• Event and incident remediation
• Application deployment
• Change management
• Network automation
• Orchestration for DevOps pipelines
• Disaster recovery
• Robotic process automation (RPA)

Let’s briefly talk RPA. Increasingly, OO users are incorporating robotic process automation (RPA) into their orchestration workflows. OO offers native RPA capabilities, which means you can automate processes typically completed by humans or ones that require human intervention. RPA is also perfect for automating quickly. For example, writing code for complex interfaces takes time— RPA takes a simpler path to get things done.

Choosing OO—10 Big Reasons to Love It

There are many reasons why customers choose OO over other vendors’ solutions—extensibility, support for multiple automation technologies, and rich out-of-the-box content are the top three.

According to customers, “You can automate everything [with OO].” It has “awesome flow debugging, multiplatform capabilities, reliability, and security.” It’s also “developer friendly” and makes it easy to “integrate across systems” and “develop robust automation.”

 “OO workflows read like a story and offer reusable building blocks for everyone to use—from creating change to updating incidents, sending emails, and managing configuration.”—Automation specialist, ICT consulting and services OO customer

Here are the top 10 reasons that users choose OO:

1. Interfaces with many technologies (it can be invoked from anywhere)
2. Supports multiple automation technologies (REST APIs, SSH PowerShell, Python, UI automation with RPA)
3. Comes with rich out-of-the-box content
4. Makes it easy to create new content (low-code designer, debugger, API wizards)
5. Makes it easy to orchestrate across hosts
6. Is an enterprise platform (scalable, high-availability architecture, access to secure zones)
7. Has advanced orchestration for decision making, error handling, and parallel processing
8. Supports hybrid authoring (graphical and textual)
9. Is vendor agnostic
10. Supports multi-authoring

Saving with OO—Fast TTV, High ROI

For every operation, every integration, and every use case, OO delivers fast time to value (TTV) and high ROI. In a typical month, OO users can save more than 2,500 human hours. Some save a lot more.

“We saved an average of 5,000 human hours per week in 2019. The savings soared to 15,000 human hours per week dur­ing remote working periods due to COVID-19 in 2020.” —Senior vice president of IT Operations and Systems Support, banking OO customer

The highest-ranking benefits achieved by users include:

• Reduced manual effort/intervention
• Lower operational costs
• Higher quality of service delivery/reduced errors
• Faster service delivery

Higher IT staff productivity, improved collaboration between cross-functional teams, and higher customer satisfaction follow.

Succeeding with OO—Best Practice Tips

Here are useful best practice tips—curated from OO users and Micro Focus product experts—for orchestrating with success:

Start small. Start with simpler use cases for everyday operations like resetting passwords, cleaning files, and restarting services. You can take on more sophisticated use cases later.

Know your processes. Know your processes before you start automating. The toolset is an extension of defined processes, not a substitute.

Know your teams. Build collaborative relationships with teams whose processes you’re automating.

Make friends with ROI. Estimate ROI before starting your automation. If you don’t first quantify the value of your automation with metrics (including human hours you expect to save), you’ll find it difficult to appreciate your savings or build a business case for future automation needs.

Identify quick wins. Generate immediate business value with high ROI use cases.

Design reusable subflows. Insert subflows inside other flows and parallelize when possible. They are simpler and faster. By creating templates and reusable content, you can also ensure common standards across OO development teams.

Avoid spaghetti flows. How do you organize a flow that doesn’t fit on a big screen? You don’t! Split them into microflows.

Make your error-handling workflows reusable too. Error-handling workflows help you manage exceptions consistently and simplify your troubleshooting.

CI/CD your process orchestration. Automate the automation! Save time by automating the testing and deployment of your orchestration workflows. By integrating the process orchestration lifecycle into a CI/CD pipeline, you can reduce errors and release faster.

OO is available on SMAX SaaS. Now SMAX SaaS users can tap into powerful orchestration capabilities for all things ESM and ITSM without the hassle of installations, maintenance, and upgrades. Find out more on the SMAX product page.

To learn more about enterprise-scale orchestration, visit the Operations Orchestration product page or download our latest e-book: Enterprise-Scale Orchestration—A Practitioner’s Guide.

Are you an OO user? We’d love to hear from you. Take the OO user survey.