This new release of newScale PortfolioCenter and newScale DemandCenter will give business unit customers and CIO’s more visibility and control over Information Technology spending. This can transform the perception of IT.newScale Inc., maker of IT Service Catalog and Service Portfolio Management software solutions, today announced that the era of business frustration and mistrust resulting from the “black box” of IT spend is about to end.
The release of the newScale PortfolioCenter™ 2008 and newScale DemandCenter™ 2008 solutions brings a new level of transparency and control to the services provided by IT, allowing – for the first time – business and IT leaders to share a common understanding and ability to control how IT impacts the efficiency, effectiveness and ultimately profitability of the business.
“In many organizations IT has a lower approval rating than Congress. And like Congress, the problem for IT is most people don’t understand what they do, why it costs so much, and how to get their IT spend under control,” said Scott Hammond, president and CEO, newScale, Inc. “The new releases of newScale PortfolioCenter and newScale DemandCenter take these problems head on by transforming the mystery of the IT function into business-relevant language, by giving IT and its business partners new capabilities to explore alternatives, and by creating accountability for delivering what was promised – at the cost and service levels expected.”
The 2008 release of newScale PortfolioCenter provides new capabilities to make it even simpler to create and analyze your IT Service Portfolio. This new version provides tools to align IT service offerings with the priorities of the business, allowing relationship managers to inventory business initiatives, associate them to their service offerings, and score the health of that alignment.
The solution also includes new tools for creating visually appealing service offerings using Web-based marketing templates to articulate the value of the services provided by IT, in a language and format that resonates with the business.
The 2008 release of newScale DemandCenter offers enhanced planning and agreement capabilities. The business unit executive or relationship manager can create what-if scenarios before committing to the variables of an agreement, providing both IT and the business with options to fine-tune the agreement – to reduce costs, choose a higher tier of service, or opt in/out of optional service components.
Relationship managers, IT financial managers, and service owners now have more control over their agreements and budgets with new features to delete, copy, update, and trigger notification events.
newScale PortfolioCenter and newScale DemandCenter provide answers to some of the fundamental questions the business has of IT. For instance, to answer the question “How can the business get more transparency into the services offered by IT?” With this latest release, newScale provides the ability to:
- Identify, inventory and componentize the services IT provides to the business
The newScale PortfolioDesigner™ module of newScale PortfolioCenter lets IT managers define and organize the portfolio of services IT offers the business today and in the future. Unlike the traditional spreadsheet or Word-document based approaches to listing the portfolio of services, newScale PortfolioDesigner provides a best practice structure and pre-defined templates to create a dynamic and meaningful view into the business services your customers care about. - Publish an actionable and professional “marketing brochure” of IT services
The new newScale Dynamic Marketing Templates™ feature in newScale PortfolioCenter makes it easy for IT product managers to publish the services IT offers with the consumer experience of Amazon.com, the high-touch of an Apple store, and the comprehensiveness of a managed service provider. These pre-packaged dynamic HTML templates add sizzle to the Service Catalog, improving IT’s image without requiring programming skills.
- Compare similar or duplicate services to facilitate standardized offerings
The newScale Advanced Service Reporting™ module for newScale PortfolioCenter allows service owners to compare similar service offerings to identify the best and worst performing services, allowing for consolidation of duplicate services and standardization of service components to reduce costs by as much as 45%.
- Articulate the cost drivers of each service offering in business terms
The newScale RelationshipManager™ module addresses one of the major sources of business unit frustration – the inability to understand how business behavior drives service costs. With newScale, business unit executives and IT relationship managers can model how changes in business demands will impact costs, giving business control of the “knobs” that dial costs up or down. And by targeting the previously untouchable “keep the lights on” spend of IT operations – more than 80% of IT budgets in many organizations – the savings can easily reach the tens-of-millions of dollars. - Federate the budgeting and demand forecasting process
The newScale DemandManager™ module in newScale DemandCenter provides the ability to track unit cost trends and analyze demand – highlighting deviations between forecasted IT demand and actual consumption. Traditional spreadsheet-based budgeting approaches require a complex command-and-control structure to keep track of all the moving pieces; in other words, there only a few people in the enterprise who know how it works. newScale allows forecasting and budgeting to be federated and tracked by the people who know the business best – business unit executives and their IT relationship managers.
“The new versions of newScale PortfolioCenter and newScale DemandCenter provide tools to improve IT credibility and significantly reduce IT spend through consolidation and standardization of IT services,” said Paul Burns, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). “In this current climate of economic volatility and IT budget cuts, newScale delivers a suite of Service Catalog and Service Portfolio Management solutions that can both reduce IT cost and improve control over IT spending – for rapid ROI, greater financial transparency, and immediate business impact.”
newScale PortfolioCenter and newScale DemandCenter are part of the newScale FrontOffice™ Suite, the only complete Service Catalog solution that enables key ITIL v3 functions including request fulfillment, service portfolio management, demand management, and continual service improvement. For an analyst review of the newScale FrontOffice Suite 2008 release, you can download a copy of the new EMA Impact Brief at: www.newscale.com/FrontOffice_2008.