In the past few weeks I’ve been getting my first close look at HP / Peregrine software’s ServiceCenter Service Catalog module in the 6.2 release that’s just out, and frankly it’s changing my standard opinion about Service Catalog tools, and “ITIL software” in general.

My old stock answer to “which software should I use for ITIL?” is that you could “do” ITIL with almost any of the toolsets out there advertising. I’ve personally worked with Remedy, Peregrine, Mercury, some of IBM’s Tivoli stuff, some of CA’s products, plus other niche or point products like NewScale. And the painful honest truth was, you still had to do a bunch of “make your own” integration and customization to make any or all of these products really work in an ITIL environment.

But, with HP’s acquisition of Peregrine and Mercury, things are already looking much better. The 6.2 ServiceCenter suite has a really strong, “straight out of the box” Service Catalog module that allows easy configuration for your unique set of IT Services and Products (and doesn’t require Admin skills to build the Services and Products), it’s tightly integrated with other modules like Service Management, Incident Management and Change Management, and frankly I haven’t been able to find a big hole in the product at all.

So, I’m usually very reluctant to talk glowingly about any software vendor’s product, because I know from painful experience that they all have holes and quirks and time-consuming workarounds. And I’m sure that’s true with the new ServiceCenter suite. But, I haven’t found any yet.

It’s looking like I may be managing a project to use ServiceCenter 6.2 ServiceCatalog soon, so watch this space and I’ll keep you posted.

Also, check out our new White Paper on “How To Develop a Service Catalog”.

Till next time, keep up the good work.

Scott Braden

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