ASSYST SERVICE CATALOG AND DESIGNER LAUNCHED BY AXIOS SYSTEMS
Edinburgh – Axios Systems, the world’s leading provider of IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions, has recently launched its assyst Service Catalog offering, which can be fully integrated with the assyst ITSM toolset. The launch comes in response to an increasing interest in Service Portfolio Management. The assyst Service Catalog offers end-to-end lifecycle management of services and is directly linked to the assyst CMDB – providing clear relationships between the CMDB and business services., UK, October 19, 2009
The assyst Service Catalog can reduce costs to the business through standardization of services and streamlining the fulfillment processes. This also reduces risk through governance and controls, thus ensuring compliance with corporate policies. These factors have become increasingly more prevalent for organizations in recent times.
Analysts have been advising businesses on how to approach building a Service Catalog. They are concerned that organization’s will rush ahead to build the Catalog, which can be used by the end-user quickly, without fully considering the full lifecycle management of all business services. A recent report by Debra Curtis and Kris Brittain at Gartner stated that it is imperative for organizations to properly define the portfolio of business services before creating a service catalog.*
A key differentiator in the Axios offering is the assyst Service Designer, which is a powerful and intuitive design tool to quickly model services and offerings in line with industry best practice and the ITIL V3 Service Portfolio guidelines. The Service Designer empowers organizations to consider the lifecycle of a service from the outset. As it is linked directly to the CMDB, a graphical representation through the Impact Explorer can show the mapping of relationships between services and the underlying infrastructure, offering a fully integrated CMDB and Service Catalog. The library of pre-defined templates within the Service Designer facilitates the creation and rapid deployment of new services. These services can then be bundled together to simplify the ordering process for customers, which ties in with Gartner recommendations to “bundle related service components into whole service catalog offerings that make sense to customers, thus resisting the temptation to confuse your customers with a list of hundreds of technical subservices in the customer-facing IT service catalog.” *
The UK Ministry of Defense, an Axios customer, comments, “The Service Designer will allow us to easily and quickly design and manage our portfolio of business services.”
The assystNET self-service portal acts as the user-request catalog within assyst and offers an intuitive and progressive retail experience, where customers can easily understand the services available to them. Axios’ new tool is a one-stop-shop for end users and provides a familiar retail ‘shopping cart’ style experience, as is used by companies such as Amazon, as well as the ability to track the progress of requests throughout their lifecycle. The enablement of faster provisioning from initiation of request through to delivery is an additional benefit for the end user as they receive their request much quicker than previously. Once a request is submitted by the customer, a Request Fulfillment process is triggered, which handles authorizations and interaction with multiple teams, through to delivery of the request.
Ailsa Symeonides, Sales & Marketing Director at Axios Systems states, “The new assyst Service Catalog has been developed following demand from businesses to have clearer service-based metrics and faster provisioning of key business services in all areas from IT to HR and Facilities Management. Service Delivery is transforming how it interacts with its customers and the new assyst Service Catalog helps them to do this, while providing full integration with the assyst solution.”