It was announced today that Cisco has acquired NewScale in order to expand its line of software used for cloud services.  NewScales products are used by enterprises for provisioning of IT resources across virtualized, physical, and cloud based environments in an efficient manner. 

As Cisco puts it “We are shifting from producing all IT services consumed within our "small-farm" data centers to consuming IT services produced in the cloud by service orchestrators. This change is becoming increasingly evident.”

As a growing number of organizations are beginning to implement private or internal clouds. Others are experimenting with hybrid clouds, to provide self-service access to a shared pool of in-house virtual resources as well as services from external cloud providers.

No matter what type of cloud your company uses, NewScale product, Service Catalog, is an essential ingredient of cloud computing. In order for the organization to reap the full benefits of cloud computing, users must be able to easily request the cloud computing services they need and IT must be able to respond quickly to those requests. NewScales catalog empowers users to serve themselves by choosing from a menu of standard cloud service offerings.

This is just another step forward in the inevitable switch to the cloud for IT services.