Introduction
Your data center is more closely aligned to your business success than ever before and it touches more aspects of your business than ever before. In a world where speed is a key to success, you need to deliver applications, data center, and business services much more quickly and efficiently than ever before. The way you deliver and manage services must be agile, responsive, and proactive to meet the rapid pace that your business requires.
How you define agility depends on your role within the organization:
● Project or line of business managers want to order applications using the familiar consumer model of menus and self-service shopping carts, and they want delivery within minutes.
● Application developers need automated delivery of standardized infrastructure resources to develop, test, and deploy applications.
● End users want to extend automation beyond data center infrastructure to include self-service delivery of IT workplace services, such as BYOD, mobility, and virtual desktop services.
Automation alone can’t always meet the needs of the consumers of IT resources. What’s needed is a simple way to more easily order IT business and data center services and track the lifecycle of these services.
Product Overview
The Cisco Prime™ Service Catalog is an innovative ordering solution for organizations that need to deliver data center, workplace, and application services in an on-demand, automated, and repeatable method. The Cisco Prime Service Catalog offers users a simple process for ordering, delivery, and tracking, and a clear method for resource management.
In the Cisco Prime Service catalog, multilevel solutions can be easily ordered by end users, application developers, or IT professionals. All users across the enterprise will have clear and full visibility into each service request lifecycle - from initial order to decommissioning of services.
Organizational benefits of Cisco Prime Service Catalog include:
● Providing users with a unified menu of services that appear in categories creating an easy-to-use service catalog
● Coverage for an extremely diverse range of services including data center infrastructure resources, cloud applications, platform application or general business services such as BYOD or device services (Figure 1)
● Easy-to-use interface increases acceptance and adoption of self-service ordering by the organization increasing agility and flexibility
Features and Benefits
The Cisco Prime Service Catalog gives IT departments more control over governance through:
● Policy-based controls and approvals
● Dashboards to quickly establish user entitlements and role-based access to services
● Lifecycle management and tracking throughout the service existence
● Financial and demand management with pricing, quota, and lease management established at the time of service order
The Cisco Prime Service Catalog allows administrators, developers, and end users to become more efficient because it lets them:
● Shop and order data center and IT workplace services quickly just by clicking through a menu
● Track open orders or access order history (Figure 2)
● Use built-in analytics on current active services to complete lifecycle operations such as maintain or upgrade services (Figure 3)
To be an agile business, you need to be able to define and offer new services quickly. The catalog’s embedded design tools enable your IT staff to add new services and customize or refresh existing services quickly and easily (Figures 4 and 5).
For organizations looking to IT to gain business agility and speed, Cisco Prime Service Catalog helps the enterprise shorten its time-to-value for service delivery while reducing costs. Designed to deliver services across a broad range of applications, workloads, and user types, Cisco Prime Service Catalog is a valuable self-service ordering platform for your entire organization.
Cisco Process Orchestrator Automation Packs
Included with the Cisco Prime Service Catalog license is a license for a number of Cisco® Process Orchestrator automation packs. These packs are designed to further enhance Cisco Prime Service Catalog’s automation capabilities as well as integrate with available workplace and data center services. Cisco Process Orchestrator can help with IT process automation processes and tasks that IT staff would otherwise perform manually. The integration of these two solutions greatly improves alignment with best practices and security, quality, and productivity functions when integrated with other IT automated processes.
Available extensions are listed here. All extensions are single instance unless indicated otherwise.
● Cisco Process Orchestrator Core Functions Adapter
● Microsoft Windows Adapter
● Microsoft Windows Automation Pack
● Microsoft Active Direction (AD) Adapter
● Microsoft AD Automation Pack
● Email Adapter
● Core Automation Pack
● Common Activities Automation Pack
● Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) Adapter
● Terminal Adapter
● Cisco Service Portal Adapter
● Oracle Database Adapter (two instances)
● Microsoft SQL Database Adapter (two instances)
● DB2 Database Adapter (two instances)
● Generic (Object Linking and Embedding Database [OLEDB]) Database Adapter (two instances)
● Web Service Adapter (five instances)
● VMware vSphere Adapter (five instances)
● VMware vCloud Director Adapter (five instances)
For More Information
To learn more about Cisco Prime Service Catalog, visit http://www.cisco.com/go/service-catalog.