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Cisco Prime Service Catalog

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Introduction

Today's end users want self-service and easy access to IT tools and services. Simultaneously, organizations are seeking ways to extend their cloud management platforms beyond self-service delivery of virtual machines and infrastructure resources, while increasing their use of cloud-based solutions to enhance business agility and effectiveness. Cisco Prime™ Service Catalog offers tremendous benefits to organizations that want to unify the ways in which all types of IT services are ordered and fulfilled, not just infrastructure requests.
Employees in organizations today order phones, laptop computers, account access, software testing environments, and more from independent virtual storefronts and online catalogs. Each request is separately created, received, verified, and fulfilled, duplicating efforts, wasting resources, and consuming time. Further, this trend is growing as businesses add new computing devices and complex applications at an increasing rate. Regardless of the number and types of requests, however, IT must track each one to meet compliance requirements, manage decommissioning at the end of a lifecycle, and manage costs. To operate more efficiently, IT is seeking a solution to standardize and unify the processes by which orders are placed and fulfilled.
A multitool, multiprocess approach is a clear contrast to the current typical online shopping experience in which consumers place diverse items in a single shopping cart and check out in a single transaction. Employees want an up-to-date way to order data center and workplace services, and IT wants to provide such a tool that also allows IT to deliver and manage services more easily. The answer is a unified, standardized solution.
Cisco Prime Service Catalog provides the unified solution that IT departments have been seeking. It gives users a portal to a unified catalog with a comprehensive menu of standardized self-service options and a modern, role-based interface. The interface can even be customized with your organization's brand design.

Product Overview

Cisco Prime Service Catalog is a self-service portal, service catalog, and lifecycle management software solution for any type of IT service, from the data center to the desktop. Rather than presenting services individually or within an individual technology silo, Cisco Prime Service Catalog offers groups of related services together as solutions, giving users a clear and easy way to find and order what they need.
With Cisco Prime Service Catalog, end users access a self-service portal through which they can view a catalog of standard choices. End users can then choose from the menu of available services and place requests for the services they need in a shopping cart for checkout. Both administrators and users have complete visibility into each request's lifecycle, from the status of the initial order to the decommissioning of the service.
This solution can help your organization:

• Offer a menu of options in an easy-to-use, web-based service catalog

• Provide a consistent way to request all IT services, including physical, virtual, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud application services, through a standard self-service portal

• Make it as easy for end users to order IT services as it is to buy items online

Cisco Prime Service Catalog also provides IT departments with greater control and enhanced governance through capabilities such as:

• Policy-based controls and approvals

• User entitlement and role-based access control (RBAC)

• Service lifecycle management and tracking

• Finance and demand management

Organizations can give end users a single interface for requesting IT services, such as desktop and mobile devices, communications and collaboration tools, and data center and cloud computing resources. Cisco Prime Service Catalog can support Cisco® architectures as well as multivendor and heterogeneous IT systems and infrastructure.
With built-in service design tools, the software provides the flexibility to:

• Easily create and add new services across multiple IT silos

• Update and manage existing services over time

• Maintain the service catalog as an organization's IT portfolio changes

The full range of capabilities in Cisco Prime Service Catalog helps organizations significantly shorten the service delivery cycle and reduce costs, while improving productivity, agility, speed, and efficiency. As shown in Figure 1, end users access a single self-service portal to request and track all their IT services in a modern, next-generation, user-centric interface.

Figure 1. Cisco Prime Service Catalog Lets You Order Services and Review Requests from a Modern User Interface

Features and Benefits

Cisco Prime Service Catalog can help organizations simplify and automate ordering for a diverse range of workplace IT and cloud computing services. Whether users want to request a new laptop or an entire Q&A testing environment within the data center, this solution can help simplify the ordering and service-delivery processes for IT-as-a-service (ITaaS). IT departments can define, control, and track all services through a unified management solution. Moreover, the interface is built to be user-centric, providing users with choices using formats and terminology that they understand, and allowing IT to manage demand proactively using a business-policy framework.

Unified Self-Service Portal

With Cisco Prime Service Catalog, organizations can provide an intuitive "one-stop shopping" experience for their end users. The solution includes a highly configurable, flexible, self-service portal interface that makes it easy for end users to find and order the IT services that they require.

• Self-service ordering and tracking: Whether requesting a laptop computer and phone for a new employee or data center infrastructure resources, end users can get on-demand updates on delivery status.

• Branded, personalized user interface pages and portlets: Cisco Prime Service Catalog can be branded with your organization's logo, colors, and images. It can be personalized with portlets that display the most relevant information for each user, including data from third-party systems.

• User interface personalization: End users can configure their own portal views based on their individual preferences, which reduces reliance on IT and increases customer satisfaction.

• Intelligent order forms: Ordering is expedited through prefilled user information, guided configuration, comparisons of service options, and dynamic pricing based on end-user selections.

• Unique use cases: Cisco Prime Service Catalog can be licensed for cloud computing and data center use cases on a per-server basis, for workplace IT use cases on a per-user basis, or for both.

Unified Administration and Management

Cisco Prime Service Catalog dramatically shortens time-to-value from the initial order to the service delivery, while maintaining the policy-based controls and governance required for enterprise-class IT management. It gives IT full control through capabilities such as:

• Policy-based controls and approvals: During the ordering process, IT can enforce compliance with operating policies, security controls, and cost constraints. The automated approval engine helps streamline end-to-end service delivery time and eliminate or discourage nonstandard requests that may require multiple levels of approval.

• User entitlement and RBAC: By synchronizing with enterprise directories and using single sign-on (SSO), organizations can manage entitlements across different roles, functions, and geographies for end users across multiple business units. IT administrators can determine, based on roles and functions, who sees particular services in the portal and who can order particular services.

• Standardized IT services: IT can provide a menu of standard service offerings, including descriptions, service levels, images, pricing, business rules, service request workflows, and other important attributes. This content is reusable, so you can easily apply common attributes to other services in the catalog.

• Simplified maintenance: Cisco Prime Service Catalog eliminates expensive, time-consuming custom programming by providing reusable components, point-and-click service design, and tools to expand your catalog in response to business demand for new services. Even nontechnical IT staff can design services and make changes to the ordering and provisioning processes, dramatically reducing maintenance time

Service Lifecycle Management

IT administrators can track and manage each service throughout its entire lifecycle. This capability provides transparency and control and helps IT reduce costs and optimize the use of existing resources through such attributes as:

• Accountability: The catalog provides a record of all requests for physical items, such as end-user computing devices and physical servers, and intangible items, such as desktop software and virtual machines. Visibility into these proliferating items can simplify maintenance, governance, and asset management.

• Subscription management: Although most service-request systems focus on ordering and fulfillment steps, ongoing subscription management is equally important. With Cisco Prime Service Catalog, you can effectively govern and manage the items associated with each service request, and end users can track their orders online and make changes or updates.

• Recovery and decommissioning alerts: Cisco Prime Service Catalog allows you to track ownership and expiration dates for requested service items, so that you can recover or decommission them at the appropriate times. For example, you can return computing devices and turn off access to systems when employees leave the organization. Effective management at the end of the lifecycle process can reduce security risk and save millions of dollars.

Financial and Demand Management

Cisco Prime Service Catalog allows organizations to manage costs and demand:

• Flexible per-tenant pricing: Pricing can be configured according to the tenant's level of entitlement, helping with the control and monitoring of resource consumption.

• Pricing showback: The solution can be configured to show end users the prices of their service requests.

• API integration with billing engine: Cisco Prime Service Catalog can be integrated with existing financial systems to display relevant billing information in a unified API, eliminating the need for costly, redundant provisioning and billing systems.

Flexible Policy Frameworks

Cisco Prime Service Catalog offers flexible policy frameworks:

• Capacity monitoring: View shared resources and allocate them among users as necessary.

• Lease expirations: Set, initiate alerts for, and enforce lease expirations to avoid unauthorized access to decommissioned resources.

• Quota management: Set quotas per tenant and per department to manage resource consumption.

Automated Service Delivery

To promote even greater operation efficiency, the catalog can be combined with other Cisco solutions for automated provisioning across a broad range of IT services:

• Support for bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiatives: Cisco Prime Service Catalog can be integrated with the Cisco BYOD, mobility, and virtual-desktop architectures to offer self-service request management capabilities for these initiatives.

• Orchestration and cloud management: This service catalog software is packaged with Cisco Process Orchestrator as part of Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud, a cloud management platform for private or public cloud solutions.

Solution Extensibility

Cisco Prime Service Catalog offers extensibility:

• Business model adaptability: Cisco Prime Service Catalog can be used across all industries and supports diverse business models. For example, the solution can be deployed by the internal IT departments of enterprises and public-sector organizations or by service providers offering IT services to their customers.

• Cisco Process Orchestrator extension: Included with the Cisco Prime Service Catalog license is a license for a number of Cisco Process Orchestrator automation packs, which further enhance Cisco Prime Service Catalog's automation and integration of available workplace and data center services. Cisco Process Orchestrator can help automate system-provisioning processes and tasks that IT staff would otherwise perform manually. This feature greatly improves alignment with best practices and security, quality, and productivity functions when integrated with IT systems.

• Extensions include Cisco Process Orchestrator Core Functions Adapter, Microsoft Windows Adapter (single instance), Microsoft Windows Automation Pack (single instance), Active Directory (AD) Adapter (single instance), AD Automation Pack (single instance), Email Adapter (single instance), Core Automation Pack (single instance), Common Activities Automation Pack (single instance), Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) Adapter (single instance), Terminal Adapter (single instance), Oracle DB Adapter (two instances), Microsoft SQL Database Adapter (two instances), DB2 DB Adapter (two instances) and Generic (OLEDB) DB Adapter (two instances), Web Service Adapter (five instances), VMware vSphere Adapter (five instances), and VMware vCloud Director Adapter (five instances), plus Cisco Service Portal Adapter (single instance).

• Cisco and multivendor support: This solution can be deployed to complement other Cisco products, services, and partner technology solutions for communications, collaboration, data center, cloud computing, and other IT services. The service catalog also offers the flexibility for organizations to manage service requests in a multivendor, cross-platform environment.

• Third-party systems integration: The solution can be integrated with third-party systems, including help desks, configuration management databases (CMDBs), automation tools, and operation support systems, to build on other existing software investments.

Solution Deployment

Customers can deploy Cisco Prime Service Catalog themselves or take advantage of Cisco Advanced Services and our partners to expedite and optimize the deployment with their expertise, tools, and best practices. Services range from training and consulting to systems integration and implementation.

Cisco Process Orchestrator Licensing

Customers who have licensed the Cisco Prime Service Catalog per user or per server receive Cisco Process Orchestrator licenses for the following functions: Cisco Process Orchestrator Core Functions Adapter, Microsoft Windows Adapter (single instance), Microsoft Windows Automation Pack (single instance), AD Adapter (single instance), AD Automation Pack (single instance), Email Adapter (single instance), Core Automation Pack (single instance), Common Activities Automation Pack (single instance), SNMP Adapter (single instance), Terminal Adapter (single instance), Oracle DB Adapter (two instances), Microsoft SQL Database Adapter (two instances), DB2 DB Adapter (two instances) and Generic (OLEDB) DB Adapter (two instances), Web Service Adapter (five instances), VMware vSphere Adapter (five instances), and VMware vCloud Director Adapter (five instances), plus Cisco Service Portal Adapter (single instance).
If additional licenses are required beyond these quantities, a separate purchase of Cisco Process Orchestrator adapters is required.

For More Information

To learn more about Cisco Prime Service Catalog visit: http://www.cisco.com/go/service-catalog.