Service Catalog Thought Leaders Announce
Open Service Catalog Specification Industry Consortium
The SPACL (Service Portfolio and Catalog Language) Consortium
Delivers First Draft of a Service Catalog Interchange Specification
San Mateo, CA - December 15, 2009 - BMC Software, CA Inc., FrontRange Solutions, IBM, and newScale today announced the formation of the Service Portfolio and Catalog Language (SPACL) consortium and delivery of the first draft of the SPACL specification. It is the intention of the SPACL consortium to submit the specification to an industry standard group once it is matured.
The SPACL consortium is a collaboration of companies that have joined to develop a vendor-neutral open standard definition for Service Catalog offerings, and for exchanging service requests between Service Catalog systems. These definitions are key to enable service request operations between IT consumers, internal IT organizations, and external service providers - including cloud computing providers.
Founding members of the SPACL consortium include:
- BMC Software
- CA, Inc.
- FrontRange Solutions
- IBM
- newScale, Inc.
"An actionable Service Catalog is key to both cloud computing and ITIL®. If it's not on the menu, you can't order it," said Rodrigo Flores, chairman of the SPACL consortium. "SPACL provides a simple language to create recipes for IT services. With this common language, these service recipes can be viewed and ordered in a variety of systems including Service Catalog as well as financial, CMDB, provisioning or other IT management systems and the portals from cloud computing and other service providers."
IT organizations are looking for guidance on how to define their portfolio of services and publish them in a Service Catalog. With version 3 of ITIL, the Service Catalog and service definition are central to a successful ITIL program. Until now there hasn't been a common definition that can traverse the multiple IT systems which are typical in most large IT organizations.
"A Service Catalog helps make the services that IT offers easily available and understood by its customers. This is a relatively new concept for IT, and the emergence of cloud computing has made this transparency more important than ever before as companies continue to migrate to operating models that enhance performance visibility - regardless of whether services are provided internally or externally in a cloud or via an outsourced provider," said Jack Bischof, a contributing author of the ITIL v3 Service Strategy book and senior manager at Accenture. "Through the work of SPACL, IT organizations and service providers now have a common service taxonomy to enable this communication and interoperability."
The SPACL Specification
The SPACL specification provides a clear set of XML-based schema definitions, content and data structures so that IT organizations and service providers can succeed at implementing and exchanging Service Catalog and Service Portfolio definitions. SPACL is designed to be extensible so that customers and vendors can add new elements and attributes while maintaining interoperability.
The SPACL Consortium is actively working to build:
- An open definition of Service Offerings and Service Requests that is vendor- and tool-agnostic. The goal is to provide sufficient rigor to guide service definition, with a clear set of content and data structures .
- A definitional model so Service Catalog development is decoupled from operations, allowing services to be defined independently of how they will be used operationally. This will simplify Service Catalog projects and enrich the usability of the catalog.
- A rigorous, normative schema that enables automated exchange of definitions. For example, this schema would enable self-service for IT services ordered within an enterprise and provisioned by an external cloud computing provider. It would also facilitate shared service definitions between Service Catalog, CMDB, provisioning, finance, HR, billing, project portfolio management, and other systems.
Today, the SPACL consortium is making the following resources available to the public:
- A draft definition and object model for Service Offerings, Requestable Services and Service Requests.
- A white paper describing the SPACL initiative and process.
- A website to elicit comments and participation from the broader IT community at: http://www.spacl.info/.
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About BMC Software
Business runs on IT. IT runs on BMC Software. Business thrives when IT runs smarter, faster and stronger. That's why the most demanding IT organizations in the world rely on BMC Software across both distributed and mainframe environments. Recognized as the leader in Business Service Management, BMC provides a comprehensive and unified platform that helps IT organizations cut cost, reduce risk and drive business profit. For the four fiscal quarters ended September 30, 2009, BMC revenue was approximately $1.88 billion. Visit http://www.bmc.com/ for more information.
About CA
CA (NASDAQ: CA), the world's leading independent IT management software company, helps customers optimize IT for better business results. CA's Enterprise IT Management solutions for mainframe and distributed computing enable Lean IT-empowering organizations to more effectively govern, manage and secure their IT operations. For more information, visit http://www.ca.com/.
About Front Range Solutions
FrontRange Solutions develops software and services that growing mid-size firms and distributed enterprises rely on every day to build great customer relationships and deliver high-quality customer service. The company applies a unique combination of innovation and automation with a standards-based approach to simplify core business processes, including: IT service management; customer relationship and sales force management; and infrastructure management. More than 150,000 users and some of the world's best-known brands use FrontRange offerings to quickly improve their interactions with external and internal clients and achieve better business results. For more information visit www.frontrange.com
About IBM
For more information about IBM, please visit: http://www.ibm.com
About newScale, Inc.
newScale, Inc. is the leader in IT Service Catalog and Service Portfolio Management software solutions, with more than 1.7 million users worldwide. newScale solutions enable IT organizations to catalog their portfolio of services, govern demand for services, manage delivery of services, and optimize service quality. newScale customers - including more than twenty percent of the Fortune 50 - benefit from increased operational efficiency, reduced costs, improved service levels, and greater IT/business alignment. For more information, please visit the newScale web site at www.newscale.com or call 650-403-7700.
ITIL® is a registered trademark, and a registered community trademark of the Office of Government Commerce, and is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. IT Infrastructure Library® is a registered trademark of the Office of Government Commerce.
For newScale:
Lisa Sheeran
Sheeran/Jager Communication
+1 510-724-2267
press@newscale.com
Editor's Note: All newScale brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of newScale Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. All other products or company names mentioned are used for identification purposes only, and may be trademarks of their respective owners.
