Using Cloud Computing to Build Your Technical Service Catalog

Cloud computing can be extremely useful to help build your technical service catalog.  I read this short but very illuminating blog post by Gary Orenstein, The Enterprise Impact of Cloud Computing that supports this viewpoint.

Cloud computing brings two major aspect of a service catalog to light: Price transparency and how our customers will interact with our Data Center services. 

A couple of quotes from Gary's post. 

Pricing Transparency — Prepare Your Pencils
Whether businesses jump into cloud computing right away or later on, the pricing transparency from cloud providers completely changes enterprise practices for benchmarking IT costs. Companies routinely spend big bucks to understand IT expenses and effectiveness.
...
Now you can understand exactly how much it costs to rent an x86 server, a terabyte of storage, or a content delivery service with just a few clicks to Amazon Web Services or a host of other providers.

Which is exactly what we hope to achieve with a service catalog, have the customer understand what they are getting and the unit costs they are incurring.

And as to how our customers will interact with IT from now on, Gary writes:

It used to be that deploying a new application meant days or weeks of research, approvals, budgeting, planning and setup. Now it means that individuals outside the enterprise IT domain can pick a service offering of their choice, select a plan, and pay for it themselves. The barriers to start are low, the benefits of scale are high, and the decision gets boiled down to the simplicity of a free trial or impulse purchase.

I agree except that it's not days or weeks, but rather months and quarters. 
How long does it take to get a server into production?  Most enterprises it's 3-4 months, many even more?  How long to configure? Months?  How easy is it for the customers to order, track, understand options, costs?  Very difficult.

This is why I say the IT service catalog is CENTRAL to the next generation data center whether it's virtual, a private cloud or a public cloud.

Without a catalog that defines standard environments, allowed configurations, easy ordering, some sort of provisioning and self-service, customers are going to go their own way, as I've written before on 16 digits to freedom and Amazon has written your technical services catalog.

What do you guys think?  Is it all new, all old, or is there a nuanced view between hype and cynicism?

Cloud computing can be extremely useful to help build your technical service catalog.  I read this short but very illuminating blog post by Gary Orenstein, The Enterprise Impact of Cloud Computing that supports this viewpoint.

Cloud computing brings two major aspect of a service catalog to light: Price transparency and how our customers will interact with our Data Center services. 

A couple of quotes from Gary's post. 

Pricing Transparency — Prepare Your Pencils
Whether businesses jump into cloud computing right away or later on, the pricing transparency from cloud providers completely changes enterprise practices for benchmarking IT costs. Companies routinely spend big bucks to understand IT expenses and effectiveness.
...
Now you can understand exactly how much it costs to rent an x86 server, a terabyte of storage, or a content delivery service with just a few clicks to Amazon Web Services or a host of other providers.

Which is exactly what we hope to achieve with a service catalog, have the customer understand what they are getting and the unit costs they are incurring.

And as to how our customers will interact with IT from now on, Gary writes:

It used to be that deploying a new application meant days or weeks of research, approvals, budgeting, planning and setup. Now it means that individuals outside the enterprise IT domain can pick a service offering of their choice, select a plan, and pay for it themselves. The barriers to start are low, the benefits of scale are high, and the decision gets boiled down to the simplicity of a free trial or impulse purchase.

I agree except that it's not days or weeks, but rather months and quarters. 
How long does it take to get a server into production?  Most enterprises it's 3-4 months, many even more?  How long to configure? Months?  How easy is it for the customers to order, track, understand options, costs?  Very difficult.

This is why I say the IT service catalog is CENTRAL to the next generation data center whether it's virtual, a private cloud or a public cloud.

Without a catalog that defines standard environments, allowed configurations, easy ordering, some sort of provisioning and self-service, customers are going to go their own way, as I've written before on 16 digits to freedom and Amazon has written your technical services catalog.

What do you guys think?  Is it all new, all old, or is there a nuanced view between hype and cynicism?