Foster City, California - (The Hosting News) - June 22, 2007 - The first Editor’s Choice Award for Service Catalog contributions, from the Open Source Service Catalog Community (OSSCC), has been bestowed upon the service offering definition, ”Dedicated Hosting Environment,” for its completeness, relevance, and usefulness.

The OSSCC Editorial Board is comprised of an independent team of ITIL experts, consultants, industry analysts, and practitioners. With more than 2,100 members, the Open Source Service Catalog Community is the most popular forum worldwide for IT practitioners to leverage best practices and proven examples as they get started with their Service Catalog initiatives. The vendor-neutral community includes areas for members to download Service Catalog templates, and encourages members to upload their Service Catalog examples to share among the community. The site also includes free resources, articles, community forums and links to relevant blogs.

Rodrigo Flores, CTO of newScale and Chairman of the Open Source Service Catalog Community Editorial Board remarked, ”The phenomenal response to the new Open Source Service Catalog Community demonstrates the growing hunger for information and best practice Service Catalog content.”

The winning Dedicated Hosting Environment service offering describes the end-to-end delivery and back-end management of a Windows or Linux application hosting environment. Unlike other entries that were focused on IT services provided to an end user or business unit, this particular service offering is an Infrastructure service provided to other IT groups or application development teams in a large enterprise. As a result, this service offering would ultimately be included as a component within a bundled service under the category of Application Services or Application Management.

The editorial board consists of chairman Rodrigo Flores, newScale, Inc.; Loy Allen, Perot Systems; Charles Betz, author and IT practitioner; Eric Borboen, Blue Infinity; Kris Brittain, Gartner; Troy DuMoulin, Pink Elephant; Martin Gandar, Butler Group; Brian Grafsgaard, QBS; Chip Gliedman, Forrester; Char LaBounty, LaBounty and Associates, Inc.; Michael Nieves, Accenture; Don Ottomano, Column Technologies; and Kirk Rothenberger, IT director. Detailed bios of the editorial board members are available at: www.servicecatalogs.com/Config/IntroText/AboutUs.

Martin Gandar of the Butler Group added, ”The description of this service offering is excellent. It outlines the service level options and pricing – and the different tiers of service are clearly defined. For IT practitioners seeking to define their application hosting services, this provides an excellent starting point and a valuable contribution to the community.”

The Dedicated Hosting Environment service includes a companion service request template, for requesting the setup, maintenance and on-going management of a new dedicated hosting environment in a shared data center. This template provides a real-world depiction of how to link the service definition in an actionable Service Catalog to the Request Fulfillment process for provisioning. As highlighted by one member’s comments in the community,”I do not know if this is coincidental. I had developed a very similar Service Request form 2 years ago. This form actually validates what my own development was. Thanks a ton.”

As a founding sponsor of the community, newScale is providing a shared instance of its newScale AlignmentCenter and newScale RequestCenter applications so that community members can envision how their service definitions could be published in a Service Catalog and communicated to business customers and end users. Membership is to the community is free and open to everyone, to encourage cross-industry collaboration and an open dialogue among ITIL experts, practitioners, and novices.

The community is dedicated to the creation, sharing and distribution of Service Catalog and Service Portfolio best practices. The community is created, managed and maintained by independent IT practitioners committed to helping deliver greater IT value and to foster better IT-business alignment. As an Open Source community, contributions are critical to building and fostering a vibrant forum to achieve the community’s goals.

To learn more about the winning service definition, please visit: www.servicecatalogs.com.

For more information about the Open Source Service Catalog Community, please visit: www.servicecatalogs.com.