Cisco Buys NewScale for Cloud Service Catalogs

In January 2010 we asked the question: Can NewScale make IT service catalogs sexy? Today NewScale is indeed experiencing a moment of sexiness in the IT news spotlight, as the company has agreed to be acquired by networking colossus Cisco Systems. Financial terms were not disclosed.

NewScale's software  allows enables IT organizations to provide to their customers with self-service ordering for  desktop and data center services across cloud, virtual and physical compute environments.

"Cloud computing represents a major shift in the evolution of the Internet, and as more customers migrate from traditional IT infrastructures, the need for rapid self-provisioning and efficient management becomes increasingly critical," said Parvesh Sethi, senior vice president of Cisco Services.  "With the acquisition of newScale, Cisco will be able to accelerate the deployment of cloud services through a service catalog and self-service portal that allows customers to easily manage their IT infrastructures."

Last summer NewScale founder and CTO Rodrigo Flores discussed the value of service catalogs in a cloudy world in an Industry Perspectives article for Data Center Knowledge. Flores urged enterprise companies to embrace the use of public clouds.

"To do this, IT must define a set of public cloud services, along with authorizations, workload policies, and a governance framework," Flores wrote. "This is often done through a service catalog.

"The advantage is that IT operations can gain visibility over what’s already going on, establish proper security policies, and ensure that some oversight over sensitive data is at least in place," he added. "Over time, IT operations can learn about the strengths and deficiencies their customers see in public clouds and come back with new offers that better serve the business."

For more on the deal, see articles at GigaOm , The Register, ZDNet and eWeek.