CIOs have a tough job nowadays: they have to make sure the various applications, services and solutions consumed by users all fit together, and work in the best interests of the organisation.

There is a wealth of services available to users, and CIOs need to ensure they are thoroughly tested, secured and managed, and that the right users get access to the right services when they need them.

The CIO has to juggle the on-premise environment with the offerings from various service providers while offering users a seamless experience that is secure, fits governance imperatives and doesn’t let costs run out of control.

As a service provider, you know your customers and users are spoilt for choice, so you have to achieve the best possible visibility and market positioning for your own offerings.

You also have to make sure it’s easy for customers to book and use your services, so you want provisioning to be pretty much automatic.

We know it’s a multi-cloud world out there, and customers want to consume services from various different service providers, together with their on-premise services, so you need to ensure that the solutions you offer are interoperable and compatible with other offerings out there.

There’s a solution that eases the pain experienced by both CIOs and service providers, and lets them give users secure access to a range of both on-premise and multi-cloud services.

Fujitsu Software Enterprise Service Catalogue Manager provides a self-service portal for enterprises and service providers to automate the delivery of their software services, infrastructure services, or platform services to their employees and customers.

Fujitsu Enterprise Service Catalogue Manager has as continually growing set of pre-packaged adapter that seamlessly integrate many types of hybrid cloud services. It provides functions for calculating usage fees based on actual usage and for generating reports.

Services can be integrated into the portal with small effort because all the necessary business enablement features are already in place – including user registration, user and subscription management, service provisioning, reporting, and functionality for processing payments and invoicing.

By using Fujitsu Enterprise Service Catalogue Manager, companies can raise their IT operational efficiency and enhance the convenience of hybrid cloud services.

Reudiger Frikenschmidt, head of EMEIA xSP and IoT at Fujitsu, describes it as the “app store” of service management.

“Service providers are battling with increasing complexity and falling margins, and need to differentiate themselves from their competition,” he explains.

“With the Fujitsu Enterprise Service Catalogue Manager, we can help you change from being a service provider to being a service integrator. Now, you can move up the value chain to focus on digital transformation and digital competence.”

Fujitsu takes some of the risk out of this journey, he adds. “We help to reduce risks like shifting capacity needs, unacceptable downtime, vendor lock-in, slow time to market of a dependence on a single platform – whether that’s your own platform or a public cloud.”

The self-service portal in Fujitsu Enterprise Service Catalogue Manager allows for an “app store-like experience”, Frikenschmidt says. “Customers can order services from a centralised menu; and they will be automatically deployed, either on-premise or in the cloud.”

In addition, in a multi-cloud scenario, multiple services can be deployed he adds. “As a service provider, you have complete flexibility to manage and pricing, services, billing and reporting for each customer.”

In fact, Fujitsu Enterprise Service Catalogue Manager can be thought of as self-service for the hybrid cloud, Frikenschmidt says. “It’s a single portal that allows you to easily solve customer needs for any cloud.”

Customers get their own bespoke layout, with lists of their specific services in their own branded menu. Different services are listed, along with their options and pricing, with straightforward and easy-to-understand descriptions.

“Selection is easy and, once the customer has selected a service, further deployment is automatic,” Frikenschmidt explains. “No further action is required from the service provider.

“We call this automatic deployment the Connector, and it is available for software as a service (SaaS) or infrastructure as a service (IaaS) – and it allows for connection to the data centre or to a cloud platform.

“Connecter lets the service provider define the services offered to the customer, while hiding much of the technical complexity and leaving the most relevant choices for the customer to see.”

With Fujitsu Enterprise Service Catalogue Manager, there’s complete control over the pricing and options displayed to the customer.

Further customisation is available in the form of reports tailored to the individual customer based on their usage, terms and conditions.

“Helping service providers give customers this personalised experience is one way Fujitsu is helping to shape the business of tomorrow,” Frikenschmidt says.

How Fujitsu Enterprise Service Catalogue Manager works

Fujitsu Enterprise Service Catalogue Manager provides a single pane of glass for business users to source any kind of private, public and hybrid cloud services.

Having full transparency of the whole cloud consumption in one system allows IT to optimise its cloud service portfolio and to identify superfluous resources.

Automating the delivery and delegating cloud service operations to the business user relieves the IT operations, and helps to focus on cloud services optimisation.

Fujitsu Enterprise Service Catalogue Manager lets service providers do the following:

* Create a single, flexible self-service portal experience for business users.

* Offer users an interactive service catalogue.

* Create and manage service catalogues with optional features such as categories, tags and ratings.

* Implement pre-packaged adapters for public and private IaaS that are included in the product.

* Build, govern and support a hybrid cloud service-based ecosystem.

* Define service offerings including flexible price models.

* Provide customisation features to brand service catalogues individually.

* Collect events and data based on usage of services as a basis for billing and reporting.

* Create invoices and reports for service users.

Benefits of Fujitsu Enterprise Service Catalogue Manager include flexible business solutions that embrace hybrid cloud services; shorter time to development and deployment; less operational work; and cost transparency.

Because Fujitsu Enterprise Service Catalogue Manager is based on Open Service Catalogue service providers can also benefit from technical support with enterprise-grade SLAs; regular releases, tested and approved by Fujitsu QA; and discounts on training and certification.

Fujitsu also offers both standardised and individual professional services for Enterprise Service Catalogue Manager.