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Cisco Prime Service Catalog provides employees with a self-service portal, a service catalog, and a lifecycle management software for enterprise IT use cases (licenses sold per user) and cloud computing use cases (licenses sold per server). These services are designed in Cisco Prime Service Catalog by service designers and made available in the Service Catalog portal for end user to order.
The services may be a simple service like ordering a laptop where the IT support provides the laptop to the employee or a complex service such as provisioning an application stack that requires automation and orchestration of various tasks.
To be able to perform services that require automation or orchestration Prime Service Catalog integrates with external systems. The external systems could be external directories, domain managers, BMC Remedy SRM, Cisco UCS Director, and so on.
Any application that is making a call to request services or manages service items is at the northbound of the integration design and the application that receives the request, performs the required action, and sends a response is at the southbound of the integration design architecture. For example a company’s custom portal that makes an API call to Service Catalog for service request is at the northbound of Prime Service Catalog whereas the other applications that receives an API call from Prime Service Catalog to perform the required operation is at the southbound of Prime Service Catalog.
Figure 1-1 Integration Scenario Example
During a service request/ delivery workflow Prime Service Catalog integrates either with Cisco Process Orchestrator which in turn interacts with other applications to be able to complete a service request. It could also directly interact with the external application based on the integration design. ie., either the Prime Service Catalog interacts with an external application by making a southbound call directly to the application or through Cisco Process Orchestrator.
There are also a few implementations where the Service Catalog is integrated with the company's portal. This means that the services are defined by the company in its portal and is designed and delivered using Prime Service Catalog. Therefore the end user submits service request using the company's portal and the portal interacts with Prime Service Catalog for the service delivery.
Consider the following scenario for Prime Service Catalog Integration:
Scenario: A user needs to add himself to a organization group.
1. Service Designer designs a service where the service form has the following details:
User ID, Group name(drop-down list), User Name, and the Request Name “Join Group”.
2. User logs in to Service Catalog and requests the service” Join group”
3. User fill the details in the service form and clicks submit
4. Prime Service Catalog gets the user details and service form attributes from the service form and sends it to service link.
5. Service link makes an API call to active directory add the user to the group.
6. Active directory completes the request and returns HTTP response 200 and the flow is complete.
Note Service Link module of Prime Service Catalog enables the integrations of Prime Service Catalog with external systems.