Building an Agile ITSM with Cisco ACI/CliQr and ServiceNow

Part 2 of 2

In the first part of my IT Service Management (ITSM) blog, I summarized how digital transformation is profoundly changing IT service delivery operational model and causing tectonic shifts in top three ITSM market segments. Today, the second part of my blog will focus on how to build future-proof ITSM 2.0 with cloud based service model & life-cycle management tools running on top of agile Hybrid IT infrastructure, so that IT organizations can quickly and flexibly deliver services to create operational differentiation for businesses.

In the midst of multi-dimensional digital enterprise disruption, ITSM stakeholders – service catalog modernizers, legacy ITSM transformers and ITSM 2.0 mavericks – are asking themselves the following question

How do I create a unified operational model for next generation ITSM which:

Brings new products and services to marketplace faster

Provides on-demand and self-service marketplace

Streamlines multiple organizations, users and roles – Private and Public Clouds

Converges on single pane of glass – financial controls, usage metering, reporting, multi-tenant governance

Mixes and matches application services with vertical industry services

De-couples business service value from infrastructure dependencies

Focuses developers on solving customer problems – not Infrastructure

Provides unlimited scalability on-demand and deploys “as a Service”

Enables simple and non-technical e2e service design and programming environment

Creates a single system of record and consistent operating model in multi-vendor or hybrid cloud environments

Enhances agility of public clouds while addressing standardization, cost and security issues

Provisions private clouds and virtualized environments on demand, making them as fast and easy to use as public clouds

Addresses not just cloud infrastructure, but complete business services that run in the cloud

To address these requirements comprehensively, the common denominator is the integrated Cisco business centric enterprise services stack consisting of Cisco ACI, Cisco Cloud Center (CliQr) and ServiceNow ITSM suite. Now, let us take a look at what is under the hood.

Cisco Cloud Center is an enterprise cloud management platform that provides IT visibility between tenants, users and applications offering a common management experience across public, private and hybrid clouds. With Cisco CloudCenter, IT organizations can model applications using an application profile only once and they can then deploy these applications in any cloud, without re-writing the application once for the Private Cloud, another time for Azure and third time for Amazon AWS. In addition, CloudCenter’s built-in decision making tool provides real-time analysis of cost and utilization rates across multiple public cloud environments allowing end users to balance platform performance and cost efficiency.

Cisco ACI, on the other hand, provides an application-level policy model that abstracts the infrastructure details all the way up to service requirements so that the underlying infrastructure can be automatically configured based on application requirements. With ACI integration, CloudCenter is now an extension of Cisco’s ACI automation capabilities – automating network placement, end point groups, policies and security settings.

ServiceNow is a leading enterprise service management suite that offers applications in the areas of Service Management, Business Management and Operations Management (ITOM). ServiceNow’s service management suite provides critical service modeling capabilities including service/application discovery, service dependency mapping through configuration management database (CMDB) and visibility into increasingly complex IT infrastructure across server, storage and networks.

ServiceNow, Cisco ACI and Cisco Cloud Center together automate and orchestrate service provisioning & activation workflow by completely hiding complexities of infrastructure from IT or LOB end users through software defined abstraction. Using this powerful integrated solution, IT organizations can achieve accurate service mapping and extremely fast service provisioning, while having automated coordination between dynamic Hybrid IT infrastructure and relevant business services.

If you want to see how the Cisco ACI/Cloud Center integration with ServiceNow works and allows end users to create new services and deployment workflows in a completely automated multi-cloud environment, please watch the following video

Digital disruption can be a frightening! IT leaders and LOB executives can better understand the threats they confront in rapidly evolving ITSM 2.0 space and search more proactively for their own opportunities by exploring their options in building a solid business centric enterprise service stack. Cisco ACI/CloudCenter together with ServiceNow ITSM Suite provides complete business centric platform that profoundly changes the game and converts digital service disruption into a competitive advantage in the digital enterprise service revolution.

If you are attending the premier ITSM event of the year, ServiceNow Knowledge16, the Cisco CloudCenter and ServiceNow solution will be showcased at Booth # 1627, please make sure to stop by to check it out!

For further details about Cisco CliQr Cloud Center and Cisco ACI, please see the following resources:

Cisco ACI Solution Details

Cisco CloudCenter

Cisco ACI Eco-system Partners

Cisco ACI Eco-system Partner Solution Overviews