This installment of our Rolling Review of service catalogs looks at Service-now.com's Service Request Catalog. Service-now set itself apart because its catalog is delivered in a software-as-a-service model via the Web. Because IT doesn't have to deploy software, the labor costs around installation, upgrades, and maintenance are negated. Although we reviewed only the Service Request Catalog, Service-now offers many pieces of the ITIL v3 framework, including asset, change, and configuration management modules as well as a CMDB.

Service-now elegantly resolves one of the most challenging aspects of service delivery management: alerting customers to what the service delivery organization does, and how its offerings interrelate. Basic products and services, called catalog items, are organized into categories. Subcategories may be nested within categories, and items may be placed into more than one category. Using a mature, browser-based Java application, administrators configure information, such as end-user names, groups, catalog items, approvals, and delivery workflows. Every form that holds information can be customized by adding fields and automation.

The impressive Order Guide feature will ably assist customers purchasing related catalog items. This is a challenge for most organizations: Service bundles provide basic help but often have built-in assumptions that may or may not meet real-world demands. Order Guides provide an easy way for users to walk through purchasing related items. For example, a customer can select a Web presence package that includes domain name, e-mail, and cloud storage with Web hosting, then exclude Web hosting if it's not needed.

Gaps in the product include a lack of features to help IT understand which services its customers are interested in purchasing, and how efficiently IT delivers those services. The company also could do a better job helping IT with best-practice guidelines and documentation. A wiki substitues for traditional product documentation.

One of the clever things Service-now has done is to build only one user interface into the system, with access to administrative or user features determined by group memberships. Many software products have attempted this approach with varying degrees of success, but Service-now has produced a very usable combined interface. We easily created catalog items and an order guide and rearranged the default service catalog view to our liking--the latter task was practically effortless thanks to the Web 2.0 nature of the app.

Given the a SaaS delivery model, you'll need to do your homework around service-level agreements and data access and security. In addition, the full service costs $175,000 per year for 200 service catalog administrators and process owners; à la carte pricing isn't available, so if all you want is a service catalog, you'll need to look elsewhere. However, for those in the market for a full IT service management suite, Service-now.com has taken intuitive Web 2.0 technologies, ITIL V3 standards, and a SaaS delivery model and packaged them into a scalable enterprise application.

Michael Biddick is CTO at Windward IT Solutions, and Phil Murnane is a principal consultant.