Service Catalog 101

newScale and Steve the Server Guy Featured at VMworld 2009

From August 31st to September 3rd, an estimated 11,000 attendees will converge on San Francisco's Moscone Convention Center for the virtualization event of the year: VMworld.

newScale and our market-leading Service Catalog solutions will be there with bells on, showcasing our newScale FrontOffice Suite for the Virtual Data Center.  We're really looking forward to telling as many system administrators, enterprise architects, server operations managers, and application development project managers how our "VDC" solution provides the perfect "operating model" to complement VMware's market-leading virtualization technology. 

No longer do users or project managers have to guess about where to request servers and how to track those requests over time.  No longer do server delivery teams need to kill themselves with relentless "back-and-forth" to capture all necessary user requirements.  And when app dev starts going through VMs like candy, server ops no longer has to feel like PEZ dispensers without knowing SQUAT about who wants it, why, and for how long -- and how this can create an unmanageable VM "sprawl" problem that costs real money and poses real business risk. 

BUT WAIT . . . THERE'S MORE

When you thought it couldn't get any better, now newScale is allowing interested parties to try the Workgroup Edition of this solution for FREE FREE FREE!  Stop by the Innovators Pavilion in the Solutions Exchange Expo and request one as fast as it takes to get a free wad of PEZ from our giant PEZ dispenser.

And you can learn even more about newScale's Service Catalog for VMware solution by looking for Steve the Server Guy.  Yes, poor Steve had a dickens of a time managing his overworked and under-managed virtual data center.  He'll be at the show in many places, looking a lot like he looks below: 

So if you see him, make sure you say "Hey Steve the Server Guy, how are you doing?"  And he'll tell you and will invite you to come by the Solutions Exchange Theater at 4:30pm on Wednesday, Sept 2nd -- for a 30-minute multi-media presentation entitled "newScale and Steve the Server Guy:  A Journey from Virtual Chaos to Virtual Stardom". 

You'll hear about Steve's plight, the outcome of his journey was, and you might just win a Flip Video HD Camcorder or other great raffle prizes - if you, of course, you are present to win.

If you aren't going to be at VMworld this year but want to learn more about newScale's Service Catalog for VMware free trial offer, set a spell right HERE and you'll learn all you need to know.

Hope to see you in San Francisco!

Secrets to Service Catalogue Success Seminar at PinkWeek UK 2009

Pink Elephant is hosting PinkWeek from 14 to 18 September in the UK.  It's a week-long series of ITIL and ITSM events for IT professionals focused on service improvement.

newScale is pleased to co-present a unique one day seminar entitled "The Secrets to Service Catalog Success" during PinkWeek.

The Service Catalogue seminar will be held on Tuesday, 15 September, from 9:30am to 4:30pm. 

This information-packed event will feature “How To” advice from leading authorities in Service Catalogue Management - including newScale founder and CTO, Rodrigo Flores.

According to ITIL version 3, “The Service Catalogue is an important tool for Service Strategy because it is the virtual projection of the service provider’s actual and present capabilities... It serves as a service order and demand channeling mechanism... It acts as the acquisition portal for customers, including pricing and service-level commitments, and the terms and conditions for service provisioning.”

Wherever you are in your ITIL initiative, a Service Catalogue is the foundation for defining services and communicating with business customers and users. Yet to be effective, the Service Catalogue must be understood, embraced, and used by the business.

Attend this seminar to hear a step-by-step approach to designing and rolling out a successful IT Service Catalogue based on ITIL v3 principles. You'll learn from real-world Service Catalogue examples and walk away with tools, templates, and practical advice you can use in your IT organisation.

If you're working on an IT Service Catalogue, it's a great opportunity to learn from the experts. More details about this exclusive seminar are listed here or on the PinkWeek UK site.

Click here to register and reserve your seat before the seminar is sold out!

 

Q&A: "How to retrospectively create a Service Portfolio?" Discussion ensues

Interesting discussion in the community

How to retrospectively create a Service Portfolio?

Hello All, Over the past 3 yrs we have run a program of change to transform our internal IT division into a "Service Oriented" organisation. We have created new roles and knocked down the boundaries between divisions to create more effective and efficient ways of working. One of the outputs of this program is our service catalog, which now contains 51 services providing the business with complete transparency regarding the total costs of the IT division and all of the service attributes you would expect in a service catalog.

...more of the question at the site.

To which my very smart and talented colleague Carol, answers:

1. Take inventory of business priorities. I found there are a few ways to approach this. We circled in on critical business process (for which we include several as out-of-box content) and business initiatives (or objectives) to define value. Arriving at that inventory is often (not always) the responsibility of Relationship Managers or IT Product Managers.

I ran a series of interviews with CIOs several months ago and asked pretty much the same thing you’ve asked here. I came out of that with some ideas about how to organize a service portfolio with the angle of business value. Before I continue I’ll point out that I do work for newScale, but I’ll try to avoid a blatant product pitch here. There were several things I learned from those interviews that we subsequently designed into our Service Portfolio product, but I’ll just mention some general learnings here. (Feel free to contact me separately if you’re interested in more info.)

2. Create relationships. Once your inventory of business value is online, we link the business value to service offerings in the portfolio. You can tie many service offerings to one or more business initiatives and business processes. This linkage can persist throughout the lifecycle of the service. It’s used to make critical decisions about the health of the service portfolio, in addition to simply showing that a relationship does exist between the specific services and, for example, your critical supply chain processes.

.... continue reading....

Control Self-Service VM Requests

Exciting news today: Now you can try newScale's market-leading service catalog for free!

In the words of every shameless infomercial promoter, "But wait, there's more!" The trial version is packaged specifically to address the growing number of management challenges surrounding virtual environments.

Check it out and request a free trial: Control Self-Service VM Requests and Reduce Virtual Sprawl with newScale for VMware®.

We interviewed VM admins and heard a number of painful stories; too many of them over and over again.

• Not sure who owns what
• Can't keep track of new requests
• Too many "temporary" VMs
• Too many custom VMs
• No idea what's running on VMs
• ... and so on...

It just so happens that a service catalog is perfectly positioned to solve these problems. And while we'd like to take all the credit for this idea, the fact is that we've had customers putting our service catalog solutions in front of their data centers for years. All we did was listen closely and package up a free trial. Oh, and we developed an integration to VMware that ships out-of-the-box and ready to go.

So what does the solution look like? To touch on a few points:

• Highly configurable self-service portal
• Capture business-centric and other meta-data
• Link VMs with owners
• Automate approval/authorization process
• VMware integration to create, modify and manage VMs
• Import data from existing VMware environments

The great thing is that you don't have to believe me at all. You can download a free trial and check it out yourself. The trial includes a virtual machine with our service catalog pre-installed and configured. "But wait, there's more!" It also comes with a series of self-paced guided activities to walk you through everything you need to know to get started. There's also an online community if you're one of those quick-learner types; and I suspect most of you are.

View the official press release here: newScale Announces New Virtual Appliance and Free Trial of Service Catalog Solution for VMware

Check it out and let us know what you think!