All possible alternatives to System Center Orchestrator

what are you using Orchestrator for as there will be different solutions depending on what you are trying

Not sure what sorts of usages you are questioning about. Do you wonder what technology I want to work with or what practical tasks I want to accomplish?

I don't really have a plan yet other than to perhaps automate tasks and do so via runbooks that supply reusable steps. I am really only wanting to collect information I don't have related to this type of technology, so I might see what else is out there.

thats closer to the details i was looking for...

The kind of use i would expect orchestrator to be put to is something
SCSM (Service Manager) has a Service request for a user account, it kicks off an orchestrator process which steps through a work flow which will end up creating that user account i.e. powershell commands to create an AD account, create a mailbox, create a skype account etc etc

If you are looking to "collect information" can you be more precise i.e. AD query on expired user accounts, mailboxes over quota

System Center Orchestrator can be used to automate whatever you want to automate. Either by scripting steps in a runflow or using integration packages written in C#. It doesn't come any more specific then that. There is no particular task at hand that I could give an example of. My question is purely for informational value. Are there other systems out there that can be compared to SCO and are there any that are free?