First Cloud-enabled Service Catalogue in Australia


Thursday 6th April, 2011: Sydney: Australia:


Dowling Consulting and its parent company ASG Group have partnered with industry leader, newScale, to offer Australia’s first “service catalogue” cloud offering.

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 thatt 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.”

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	ASG is an Australian owned IT business solutions provider, offering IT management and consulting services, business intelligence and thought leadership. ASG built an enviable reputation as a capable Managed Service Provider in the Australian market place and offers a state-of-the-art Cloud Platform to power reliable and cost-effective Software-as-a-Service solutions. www.asggroup.com.au
	Dowling Consulting is a management consulting firm servicing a global portfolio of blue-chip commercial and government clients by providing practical solutions to complex management problems. With practice specialisations in Strategic Business Analysis and Service Transformation, our depth of experience across a broad range of industries, combined with our proudly entrepreneurial spirit, allows us to deliver on a world class offering of professional services. Dowling Consulting is part of the ASX-listed ASG Group. www.dowlingconsulting.biz
	NewScale is the leading provider of self-service, service catalog, and lifecycle management software for enterprise IT and private/hybrid cloud computing. With more than two million users worldwide, newScale helps organisations and service providers offer a self-service "storefront" for IT and non-IT services. www.newscale.com

Go to www.servicecatalogue.com.au for more information