The book that we wrote four years ago can help you in that journey. This special edition will help you. But first some context is needed. When Troy DuMoulin, Bill Fine, and I wrote the book, “Defining IT Success Through the Service Catalog” , our focus was on helping customers along three sets of related concerns: 1. Help IT organizations transform themselves into competitive service providers. 2. Help rationalize costs and quality by defining a standard portfolio of services, with clear communication of business value. 3. Help enable a more agile operation by introducing self-service underpinned by a service catalog and standard delivery workflows. That’s exactly what people are trying to do with cloud services. This is why this book is still relevant to anyone creating a cloud or thinking of using one. But adoption of the cloud operating model means that some aspects are even more important today. Updating the Service Catalog for the Cloud Era The next section covers what has changed and will help you get more out of the book. First, standardization, which we discussed, turns out to be even more important than we imagined. Standardization of computing and datacenter models enables a whole new way for customers to consume services and for providers to design and charge for services. Essentially, it’s a lot easier and cheaper to make a product if they are all the same. It’s not that standardization drives costs down, it does; but it allows an industrialization of IT where higher order services come into being that A complementary eBook edition of “Defining IT Success Through the Service Catalog” from Cisco © 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. “A funny thing happened on the way to IT service management Nirvana: Cloud computing became the most important and disruptive force in IT services in the last 10 years. The service catalog is now the cornerstone of cloud computing and ‘IT-as-a-Service’ is the new vision for the evolution of IT to an on-demand, self-service, and metered utility.” — Rodrigo Flores (co-author)