First Cloud-enabled Service Catalogue in Australia

April 7, 2011 - PRLog -- Dowling Consulting and its parent company ASG Group have partnered with industry leader, newScale, to offer Australia’s first “service catalogue” cloud offering.  
As one of the first cloud offerings in Australia to bridge the gap between shared service centres and IT provision, it is fitting for Dowling and newScale to unveil the industry leading product in front of over 450 shared services professionals on site at the 14th Annual Australasian Shared Services & Outsourcing Week (www.sharedservicesweek.com.au ) taking place from 11-14th April in Melbourne.

ASG Group is a leading Australian provider of managed services and IT outsourcing and recently introduced a locally hosted private cloud to deliver managed business applications and services to its clients.  newScale’s self-service portal and service catalogue software complements ASG’s investment in IBM infrastructure for the cloud computing platform. Currently SAP is one of the applications offered on this cloud platform, and now newScale is available to allow clients to access the world’s leading software applications on-demand in a “pay as you grow” model.

Dowling Consulting’s strong track record in helping its clients to improve the relationship between IT and Shared Services and the business they serve has been the driver for developing this solution. An important aspect of Dowling’s  consulting engagements is based around clarifying the services provided, understanding business expectations and then improving the speed, efficiency and quality of service delivery with self-service ordering from a catalogue of standard offerings.

A key first step in such engagements is providing a menu of standard choices through the service catalogue. Making the service catalogue “actionable” through self-service is the next important phase in delivering business agility, cost reductions and improvements in customer satisfaction. Dowling has seen many customers over-simplify this step. Often they attempt to develop a custom self-service portal in applications like Sharepoint or use their existing IT operations tools only to find that the business is still dissatisfied.

Extensive consultation with  clients has shown that having a static catalogue of services or a simple portal is not enough. The real payback comes from automating that catalogue with service requests that span the IT department and beyond into their suppliers and the supplier’s suppliers across the lifecycle of the service and the entire service delivery chain. The ability to track and manage the interactions between often disparate provisioning processes will enable Dowling to provide transparent and meaningful information on service cost, efficiency and throughput in real time.

newScale  is the leading provider of self-service portal, service catalogue and lifecycle management software for cloud computing, traditional IT service delivery, and even non-IT services. Currently used by over 2 million users globally, newScale was a logical choice as a partner for ASG Group and Dowling.

“We are particularly excited about the possibilities that this new offering presents for our clients," said  David Dowling,  Dowling Consulting’s CEO.  “Cloud computing is redefining the way services are being delivered in terms of reliable, cost-effective, on-demand access to everyday applications.  With a service catalogue from newScale, we are in prime position to be able to deliver on the value of cloud computing to our clients.”

# # #

IQPC provides business executives with tailored practical conferences, large scale events, topical seminars and in-house training programs, keeping them up-to-date with industry trends, technological developments and the regulatory landscape.