Using Component Services in Your Service Catalog

Yesterday we launched our hosted free trial. Over the next few postings, I want to enrich the discussion of service catalog beyond the static documentation and talk about how newScale customers work with a service catalogs.

Component Services comprise the most common service requests, technical and subscription services used or consumed by a larger Service Offering. Componentization, sometimes called Service Decomposition, is critical to maintain a useful viable catalog. It allows new services to be developed out of common parts.

For example, you will find an offering Tier 1 Development System in the free trial.

Tier 1 Development System is made up of several service components. These are reusable – a component service that you use in one Service Offering can be used in many other Service Offerings.

This is essentially a detailed "bill of services" which provides IT with a actionable way to tie a customer's consumption and usage with the performance of said service. By the way, a component service can also be a bundle of other components.

In our free trial, we have included over 300 common component services. Look at tutorial #2 for the complete step by step guide.

For example, here are a few descriptions of these components.

1. New Small Web Server Bundle – IIS. Which includes other services necessary to deliver and operate an IIS Server.
2. New Small Database Server Bundle – MS SQL.
3. Development System Support Bundle – which includes a bunch of professional services necessary to support a developer.

Some of these have a price, so they will show up in the larger list with prices. Those without price, will show up as included.

Since the number of component services can be large, we provide a way to present them in service categories within the service bundle.

I've highlighted in red, Development System Support Bundle to indicate this is a bundle.

And finally, every single one of these may have prices, service tiers, graphics, descriptions, and if they are requests they include forms and workflows.

What this allows you to do is to quickly edit components that are roughly the same across companies, and assemble them in your unique configuration. 

More on that next post.  Meanwhile, you can request your free trial from newScale.