Nov. 2, 2009

Nov. 2, 2009

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IT At Your Ser vice C o n t e n t s

NewScale shined in our test of four service catalog

2 NewScale Shines

offerings: portfolios of services that an IT organization

5 Build Your Own Services

offers its end users. But the competitors--CA, PMG, and

6 A Service Catalog In The Clouds

Service-now.com--also have compelling strengths.

8 PMG Service Catalog Is Ready For Business 10 NewScale Makes The Work Flow

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NewScale Shines By Michael Biddick SIX MONTHS AGO, we set off on an ambitious review of IT service catalogs. Ambitious not because of technical complexity, but because service catalogs are an emerging market with a number of diverse software tools. We were excited about the prospect of classifying these products into neat containers and seeing how they stacked up against our testing scenario. Instead, we found a fractured market with a lot of confusion over even the most basic tenets of what comprises a service catalog. Some vendors bundled capabilities well beyond the service catalog, while others didn’t want us looking at their products or ignored us completely. In the end, we examined offerings from CA, Service-now.com, PMG, and NewScale—a cross section of delivery platforms and capabilities. Service catalog products started to emerge after they were mentioned in the ITIL v2 process framework. But ITIL v2 provided little guidance, so most vendors made their own decisions as to what functionality to include.

CA

Service -now

PMG

NewSc ale

ITIL v3 proposes that all IT offerings be thought of as services. An organization can collect the

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REAL-WORLD ANALYST ASSESSMENT UNACCEPTABLE Short List ✔, Editor’s Choice ✰

IDEAL

Technical functionality Supported platforms SLA, OLA, UC, KPI monitoring Reporting capabilities Analysis capabilities It’s hard to go wrong with any of these four products, all of which are innovative approaches to the service catalog. Specific features and capabilities will appeal to different organizations in different ways.We liked NewScale based on its easy workflow development, incorporation of both business and technical services, massive number of templates, and ITIL v3 roles already built into the tool. PMG has a lot of visual appeal. And for software as a service, Service-now is the choice. CA provides a lot of flexibility for large enterprises.

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services it uses into a portfolio, along with supporting business information about the services, including requirements and financial information. The portfolio includes a business service catalog that lets internal and external users order services and track order status. The portfolio also has a technical service catalog that includes technical components of services and underlying information about them. The technical catalog lets IT manage all aspects of services and report on demand, profitability, and performance. The portfolio contains complete life-cycle info on all services, including those being developed and retired, as well as ones available for use. While the service catalog could be paper-bound or a static intranet page, an interactive Web-based catalog provides more capabilities to users trying to get a handle on the ordering, demand, provisioning, and costs of their services. ENVIRONMENTAL MATTERS The biggest difference among the four service catalogs we tested was their installation platforms. CA works only on Windows and was accessed via a Web browser. Service-now was delivered as a software service. PMG offered hosted or customerpremises versions. And NewScale is built on a traditionOur SERVICE CATALOGS: al three-tiered architecture with broad underlying appliTake GOOD AND BAD SIDES cation support. Given this diversity, specific requirePros ments you have for how the product is delivered may > Give users control over ordering end your search. We didn’t find any performance differIT and business services ences among the various delivery methods. > Automate much of the mundane

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workflow involved in the processing and fulfillment of services > Help meet compliance and audit requirements, while cutting IT costs Cons > May overlap with service desk and IT service management tools > Can be difficult to configure > Many organizations aren’t mature enough to take advantage of all of a service catalog’s capabilities

PMG stood out in terms of look and feel. The dynamic menus and user-driven interface made it intuitive and easy to navigate. Users can authorize the provisioning of a service from a smartphone, a distinctive feature, although other vendors could replicate it with a little effort. PMG’s content management system was powerful, letting IT control the interface without custom coding. The graphical, Visio-like interface made for a pleasant design experience in terms of workflow. While complex workflow may be difficult to follow,

simple ones were quite user friendly. We were also impressed with NewScale’s service designs and workflow. Its templates were practical and provided a fantastic way to jump-start IT and business processes. The ease of workflow development and breadth of provided templates made up for the visual mediocrity of the

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user interface. CA also provided solid service templates, but their breadth and depth were dwarfed by NewScale’s offering. NewScale also lets IT easily manage objectives. You can use a third-party app or the interface itself to set and manage SLAs, operating-level agreements, and other business objectives tied to services. EASE OF USE A challenge for all four products is balancing ease of use with complexity. Service-now’s interface was easiest to use and highly accessible, but demand management and service performance monitoring capabilities were limited. Users need a firm handle on their processes and workflow designs before tackling Service-now, because it doesn’t provide a lot of documentation and guidelines. However, its common user interface was appealing and could lower administrative overhead once it’s up and running. In contrast, CA provided a wealth of flexibility, customization, and integration capabilities, but the interface was the most complex. Integration hooks into other CA products may make the move to its service catalog an easy decision for IT organizations that have already invested in CA technology. CMDB integration, for instance, lets you easily link technical and business service catalogs, reducing the need for administration and maintenance. CA’s tab-based navigation was the most difficult to use, and its Service Request tab was very cluttered and made it difficult for us to get where we wanted to go. CA’s default reports, on the other hand, were very useful for managing the key aspects of our services. Another factor to consider is whether you need other IT service management components or just a service catalog. Several vendors we tested provided capabilities well beyond the scope of our service catalog review. If you need a CMDB, configuration management, change management, or other module, take a hard look at vendors’ companion offerings. BOTTOM LINE Performing an apples-to-apples comparison was difficult because these are four very different products. For our test environment, we would select NewScale based on its powerful workflow engine, ability to manage objectives, and number of service templates. Its architecture and design also would let it scale and change along with a business. NewScale did well based on our criteria, which included ease of use, administration, and integration capabilities. Its ability to track the status of requests and analyze cost metrics also was superb. That said, the other products also performed well. You won’t go wrong using PMG for its flexible delivery model and intuitive interface. If you need a SaaS offering, go with Service-now. If you need flexibility and have a complex enterprise environment, CA may be best. 4 Nov. 2, 2009

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EMC declined to submit its Ionix SM for our review. Amdocs, Digital Fuel, Oblicore, and Telcordia didn’t respond to our invitation. Michael Biddick ([email protected]) is CTO at Fusion PPT in Northern Virginia. June 22, 2009

Build Your Own Services By Michael Biddick and Phil Murnane CA’S SERVICE CATALOG PROVIDES FEATURES that help IT teams communicate their offerings to users and customers, while helping to manage the balance among which services to offer, the quality of services offered, and the costs of delivering those services. CA Service Catalog is the first in our IT service catalog Rolling Review, and it delivers. The offering includes about 100 examples of service options and services out of the box, well organized in logical folders. The examples provide valuable guidance to organizations struggling to identify actual services offered, instead of IT processes or infrastructure required to deliver their services. This is a major asset for the product and reduces the barrier to entry for organizations that may be struggling with documentation around this area. Our biggest knocks on CA Service Catalog are that it’s supported on Windows only and, as a Java-based Web application, the product suffers from the disadvantages inherent in a Java platform—including potentially deep stacks of dependencies and less-than-agile performance.

Rolling Review

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IT SERVICE CATALOG PRODUCTS

Business value We’re testing service catalog products for ease of use, administration, and integration; how well the product facilitates tracking status; and overall costs.

Reviewed so far > CA Service Catalog: Offers great flexibility and ease of use, but it’s limited to Windows and suffers from Java’s inherent quirks.

Vendors invited Amdocs, CA, Digital Fuel, IBM, NewScale, PMG, Service-now.com,Telcordia

Up next Service-now.com More about this Rolling Review informationweek.com/1230/service.htm

Templates for service definition, inheritance, and copy-and-paste capability are pre-built and fully customizable. System configuration can be approached from a business concept level, in that service contracts, service/operational-level agreements, request processing, approval routing, etc., can be considered objects, and dealt with as such. The catalog’s Administration Quick Start, basically a short-cut menu, on the home page of the administration tool is a nice touch and makes it easy to get started. Customer access to services is controlled using a very flexible permissions model that supports

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Our Take

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CA’S SERVICE CATALOG

> CA Service Catalog’s services are described in business terms, including function, cost, and quality. > A flexible and comprehensive workflow orchestrates delivery; outof-the-box best-practice service templates provide a rapid ROI. > CA’s offering stands up well as an IT service catalog, with rich integration into other applications that can be leveraged for an overall solution.

multitiered access levels across business units, accounts, users, and various structures of the catalog. CA’s use of a browser-based client cuts the cost of installing and maintaining an operating system-specific client. Be aware, though, that Java version conflicts can arise when implementing differing browser-based products.The administrative interface is well designed, and we had no difficulty navigating the various administrative sections. The sample content is invaluable for learning how to use the product and also as source material. We built our simple portfolio of business solutions in minutes by copying and pasting similar services and touching up as needed.

On the back end of the business, Service Catalog provides good reporting—including dashboards—to let business units understand utilization of services offered, how critical the options are within services, and other summary data that let the service organization intelligently manage operations. Michael Biddick ([email protected]) is CTO at Windward IT Solutions, and Phil Murnane is a principal consultant at Windward. A longer version of this article is at informationweek.com/1234/ca.htm. Aug. 17, 2009

A Service Catalog In The Clouds By Michael Biddick and Phil Murnane THIS INSTALLMENT OF OUR ROLLING REVIEW of service catalogs looks at Servicenow.com’s Service Request Catalog. Service-now set itself apart because its catalog is delivered in a software-as-a-service model via the Web. Because IT doesn’t have to deploy software, the labor costs around installation, upgrades, and maintenance are negated. Although we reviewed only the Service Request Catalog, Service-now offers many pieces of the ITIL v3 framework, including asset, change, and configuration management modules as well as a CMDB. Service-now elegantly resolves one of the most challenging aspects of service delivery management: alerting customers to what the service delivery organization does, and how its offerings interrelate. Basic products and services, called catalog items, are organized into categories. Subcategories may be nested within categories, and items may be placed into more than one 6 Nov. 2, 2009

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category. Using a mature, browser-based Java application, administrators configure information, such as end-user names, groups, catalog items, approvals, and delivery workflows. Every form that holds information can be customized by adding fields and automation. The impressive Order Guide feature will ably assist customers purchasing related catalog items. This is a challenge for most organizations: Service bundles provide basic help but often have built-in assumptions that may or may not meet real-world demands. Order Guides provide an easy way for users to walk through purchasing related items. For example, a customer can select a Web presence package that includes domain name, e-mail, and cloud storage with Web hosting, then exclude Web hosting if it’s not needed. Gaps in the product include a lack of features to help IT understand which services its customers are interested in purchasing, and how efficiently IT delivers those services. The company also could do a better job helping IT with best-practice guidelines and documentation. A wiki substitutes for traditional product documentation.

Rolling Review

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IT SERVICE CATALOG PRODUCTS

Business value We’re testing service catalog products for ease of use, administration, and integration; how well the product facilitates tracking status; and overall costs.

Reviewed so far > CA Service Catalog: Offers great flexibility and ease of use, but it’s limited to Windows and suffers from Java’s inherent quirks. informationweek.com/1234/ca.htm > Service-now: Suite eases many aspects of IT service management, and scalable SaaS model will suit some companies— but you’ll have to decide if you need all the “extras” provided.

Vendors invited Amdocs, CA,Telcordia, IBM, NewScale, Digital Fuel, PMG

More about this Rolling Review informationweek.com/1230/service.htm

One of the clever things Service-now has done is to build only one user interface into the system, with access to administrative or user features determined by group memberships. Many software products have attempted this approach with varying degrees of success, but Servicenow has produced a very usable combined interface. We easily created catalog items and an order guide and rearranged the default service catalog view to our liking—the latter task was practically effortless thanks to the Web 2.0 nature of the app. Given the a SaaS delivery model, you’ll need to do your homework around service-level agreements and data access and security. In addition, the full service costs $200,000 a year for 200 users; à la carte pricing isn’t available, so if all you want is a service catalog, you’ll need to look elsewhere. However, for those in the market for a full IT service management suite, Servicenow.com has taken intuitive Web 2.0 technologies, ITIL V3 standards, and a SaaS delivery model and packaged them into a scalable enterprise application. Michael Biddick ([email protected]) is CTO at Windward IT Solutions, and Phil Murnane is a principal consultant. 7 Nov. 2, 2009

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Oct. 26, 2009

PMG Service Catalog Is Ready For Business By Michael Biddick

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Rolling IT SERVICE Review CATALOG PRODUCTS Business value We’re testing service catalog products for ease of use, administration, and integration; how well the product facilitates tracking status; and overall costs.

Reviewed so far > CA Service Catalog: Offers great flexibility and ease of use, but it’s limited to Windows and suffers from Java’s quirks. informationweek.com/1234/ca.htm > Service-Now: Suite eases many aspects of IT service management and the scalable SaaS model will suit many companies’ needs—but you’ll have to decide if you need all the “extras”provided. informationweek.com/1238/service.htm

THE PMG SERVICE CATALOG SUITE uses a Web 2.0 platform to deliver Ajax-based dynamic menus that make it easy to navigate and select items without a lot of clicks. And unlike some competitors, PMG ties business process management into the tool by including capabilities, such as approval processes, that go beyond simply ordering services. The PMG Service Catalog Suite also provides a full scope of IT service management process disciplines, such as provisioning and configuration management, though these weren’t reviewed. The downside: While you don’t have to use all the features of this suite, you will have to pay for the full package. Price as tested is $100,000.

SELF SERVICE The PMG Service Catalog platform places much of the request/ordering process in the hands of users by providing > PMG Service Catalog Suite: A flexivisibility into the status of requests and the ability to tweak ble,Web 2.0 interface and all the bells and whistles you would want in a serthem as needed. While IT will be a big consumer of the vice catalog offering. Service Catalog, other parts of the organization can use this More about this Rolling Review tool to automate any business process, workflow, or request informationweek.com/1230/service.htm that requires multiple levels of approval, steps, or actions to complete. For example, a business unit that hires a new employee might request a BlackBerry, and that request has to flow through telecom, IT, accounting, and other departments. Requests can be centrally managed and tracked against service agreements. Another smart feature is the ability to bundle services. Using the new-hire example, users can tie together requests like phone and laptop provisioning into a single service. While PMG can integrate into many service desk and ERP applications, it also can act as a standalone app, which provides a lot of deployment flexibility. Within the reporting page,

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for example, you can monitor key performance indicators and service-level agreements and examine the profitability of services, useful if you’re a fee-for-service provider or deal with chargebacks. In addition, PMG has hooks into the major enterprise management vendors for coordinating with a configuration management database and will operate in a federated environment. While PMG says it will be adding more support for other IT systems, the biggest barrier for organizations will be around workflow. Often, there’s a gap between the desire to automate requests and the maturity of the process that needs to be automated. For instance, if your organization’s process to provision a new server is “Go ask Joe, he’ll take care of it,” you’re not ready for a service catalog. On the bright side, PMG can be a catalyst to document the request process in a way that doesn’t produce dusty binders that are rarely referenced. For organizations with mature processes, or ones that are looking to automate parallel processing involving both people and systems, PMG may be a dream come true. When we logged into PMG as an admin, we could control the overall layout via an integrated content management system, without the need for any coding. The workflow design is done via a Visio-like interface, with hundreds of actions embedded within the application. The software integrates with Active Directory to provide for user- and role-based security. PMG provides a lot of deployment flexibility. We tested the multitenant software-as-a-service version, but the company also offers a hosted version that runs on dedicated hardware, as well as a version companies can run on their own premises. Licensing for the premises software is based on the number of CPUs running the application and either named or concurrent users. An express edition also is available that lets organizations create a catalog with a limited number of services. PMG’s suite has a strong alignment toward being a business service catalog, similar to competitors Service-Now and NewScale. By contrast, DigitalFuel’s and Oblicore’s catalogs focus on IT operations. We’re impressed with PMG’s ability to replace many of the very IT-centric runbook automation capabilities while at the same time elevating incorporating business process management functions that go beyond IT systems. Michael Biddick is CTO at a federal systems integrator. You can write to us at [email protected].

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Oct. 30, 2009

NewScale Makes The Work Flow By Michael Biddick THE PREMISE OF A SERVICE CATALOG IS SIMPLE: Provide an online shopping experience where business users can order IT services and track the status of those orders. A wellimplemented service catalog can reduce help desk calls and gives the business a way to identify the services that are most relevant and determine if the delivery of those services meets SLAs. The service catalog provides all of the underlying elements of the service so IT can ensure that provisioning is optimized and IT is able to deliver the services at the lowest possible costs. Rolling IT SERVICE Review CATALOG PRODUCTS NewScale divides its service catalog product into three packBusiness Value: ages (Request Center, Portfolio Center, and Design Center). We’re testing service catalog products This allows organizations of varying levels of operational for ease of use, administration, and integration; how well the product facilitates maturity to take advantage of a service catalog. The packtracking status; and overall costs. ages are augmented by five services libraries, with more Reviewed so far than 1,200 service templates that help organizations get > CA Service Catalog: Offers great flexstarted with the potentially daunting task of setting up and ibility and ease of use, but it’s limited to Windows and suffers from Java’s inherautomating services. Service templates range from provisionent quirks. ing virtual servers to ordering business cards, and include informationweek.com/1234/ca.htm just about every IT service an organization could dream up.

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MANAGING BY OBJECTIVES We focused our tests on NewScale’s Design Center package. While not as visually flashy as some of the other products we have seen, Design Center still packs a lot of punch. The software has a tab to set up business or technical objectives, such as an SLA, time to provision a service, or profitability around a certain service. NewScale offers integration adapters, or uses an API, to apply data from enterprise management systems, databases, or any other accessible source to provide service-centric reports. These reports illustrate how well those are objectives are met. The reports are also not flashy, but contain much of the illusive data that is required to transform an IT shop into a service-centric organization. 10 Nov. 2, 2009

> Service-Now: Suite eases many aspects of ITSM and scalable SaaS model will suit many companies’ needs—but you’ll have to decide if you need all the “extras” provided. informationweek.com/1238/service.htm > PMG Service Catalog Suite: A flexible, Web 2.0 interface and all the bells and whistles you would want in a Service Catalog offering. [[need redirect, this review is running in the Oct. 26th issue]] informationweek.com/1245/pmg.htm

Vendors invited: Amdocs, CA,Telcordia, IBM, NewScale, Digital Fuel, Service-Now, PMG

More information about this Rolling Review: Informationweek.com/1230/service.htm

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NewScale also includes a powerful script-free workflow engine that allows you to create either simple or complex steps that need to occur for the services to be provisioned. We were a little surprised at the lack of a visual workflow—all of the tasks resemble a MS Project interface, which works fine but takes some getting used to. The workflow may be scheduled serially or in parallel, and it may be grouped to execute multiple tasks in a particular order. If you have a large organization with numerous approval processes, note that while NewScale can support e-mail approvals, each user needs a NewScale account to log in and approve a task. NewScale says this requirement is for auditing purposes. We understand how having a simple e-mail approval can be easily hacked, but requiring users to log in to a separate system is also problematic (think Our NEWSCALE’S SERVICE lost or stolen passwords, for example). However, NewScale isn’t Take CATALOG alone in that most applications that include approval automa>> NewScale provides tools to tion—from service catalogs to business process management automate the service request software—require a user account.

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process and allow organizations to move toward a selfservice IT organizations.

SERVICE BUNDLING It was a piece of cake to design service kits that comprise multi>> 1,200 service templates are ple services. Underlying service elements can be priced, and the available to speed set-up of bundle will calculate the price as well as the cost. The forms the catalog designer was also very powerful. Services may subscribe to >> Workflow automation will form components, allowing organizations to create small, help mature organizations reusable parts. This means that if they need to change the save time and money by rerequest form, they don’t need to update every service they creducing manual, error-prone ated, just the original form component. The forms were entirely repetitive tasks wizard driven and easy to create. NewScale says that a typical implementation takes 90 days, depending on the complexity of the services and the maturity of the organization’s IT and business processes. The software also includes pre-defined ITIL role templates. From business relationship manager to tester to service designer, you have the ability to leverage the ITIL v3 defined roles and customize access permissions from the templates. Working within ITIL practices will reduce the time it takes to create a complex hierarchy in large organizations, so we were pleased to see this feature included. The price as tested for DesignCenter is $100,000. Michael Biddick ([email protected]) is CTO at a federal systems integrator in Northern Virginia.

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