Managing Cloud Services with your Existing Service Catalog

Most VMware customers use the vCloud Automation Center service catalog to request and manage their IT services.  However, some customers already have  an existing service catalog  The last thing they want is yet another service catalog.  vCAC has been designed and purpose built to deliver and manage IT services.  vCAC has automation and governance capabilities that general purpose service desk solutions just can’t match.   Many of our customers’ existing services catalogs have been designed and optimized to deliver a wider variety of services than vCAC.   These products have strengths and capabilities that we can’t match.   Rather than try and replace their existing service catalog with vCAC, sometimes the more prudent approach is to call vCAC services from their existing service catalog. 

Today this is not done with out of the box functionality.  It does require some customization.  VMware is investing in making it easier call vCAC services from existing service catalogs and management tools.  One of those capabilities is the vCenter Orchestrator plug-in for vCAC.  This allows vCAC services and actions to be invoked via VCO from other applications.  Other interfaces including APIs, CLS and Java SDKs will be coming in the vCAC 6.1 release in Q3.  This will provide our services team, partners and customers with several options for calling vCAC services from other applications.

Jennifer Galvin, a senior architect from VMware’s Center for Excellence, recently completed a project invoking requests for vCAC services from an existing ServiceNow catalog.  This post looks at what options customers have for consolidating their service catalogs, things to look out for, and the real world example of Jennifer’s project.  If you are looking to consolidate your service catalogs, or call vCAC services from other applications, this post is a must read.  This post will help you to better understand how VMware’s cloud management and automation capabilities can be invoked from other catalogs and applications.   

Managing Cloud Services with your Existing Service Catalog  by Rich Bourdeau

Every Cloud Management Platform comes with a service catalog.   In my last blog post I discussed what differentiates cloud service catalogs  and how to  distinguish the best from the rest.  However, what if you already have a service catalog?  Some VMware Cloud Automation Center customers already have an existing service catalog. This new post looks at what your options are and provides a real-world example of invoking vCloud Automation Center cloud service from an existing service catalog.   More >>