CA Technologies announced a new version of its service catalog that integrates with CA Virtual Automation and CA Oblicore Guarantee, designed to enable the automatic provisioning of physical, virtual and cloud services based on the cost and performance criteria of the service request.
With these new additions, companies can now employ use CA Service Catalog 12.6 to enable private and hybrid cloud provisioning, service automation, user self-service, IT costing/financial management, and provisioning role-based security. This single point of contact, says CA, is intended to support a customer's journey to an increasingly virtualized service environment. CA Service Catalog also bridges the gap between current IT operations and the challenge of moving existing services to private clouds.
IT organizations have had the ability to automatically provision services for some time, from identity access to file access to virtual machine provisioning, Eric J. Feldman, senior principal product marketing manager at CA Technologies, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "What has been missing is the connection between the technical capability and the user who needs the service ultimately." There is always a business purpose behind provisioning as service and that business aspect of services is often lost within enterprise IT, emphasizes Feldman.
CA Service Catalog 12.6 adds a number of new capabilities that enable IT organizations to fulfill the complete service lifecycle. The new version of CA Service Catalog makes that connection between what the user needs in their language, their terms from their perspective and the capabilities of IT, Feldman explains. By defining, publishing, and providing financial insight into the usage of the services in business terms, CA says the Service Catalog 12.6 can transform an IT organization into a strategic business partner.
The new offering now includes CA Virtual Automation, which provisions resources across physical, virtual and cloud environments through integration. Users can automatically invoice for virtualized resource consumption based on a variety of usage based, tiered rate, and flat rate pricing and costing plans. Version 12.6 also enables integration with CA Oblicore Guarantee allows service level contracts to become part of the service definition to enable service delivery and fulfillment to be aligned to expectations. There is also mobile support.
Among the benefits of this approach is a reduction in the manual touch points from IT, freeing up IT staff members for more strategic tasks, and from customers' perspectives, it gives them higher satisfaction and lowers the number of calls to IT help desks for support. "All in all, it really ties together the entire self-service lifecycle of delivering a service from the end user perspective, the business end, and IT," says Feldman.
CA Service Catalog 12.6 is available now for Microsoft Windows Server with Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle database support.