I took a look at a new 'emerging standard' the other day, SPACL: Service Portfolio and Catalog Language. Of course this (well meaning) effort is led by a 'consortium' of vendors, including such gorillas as IBM, CA, BMC and (of course) the leading Service Catalog vendor.
SPACL's goals include things like "An open-standard definition of Service Offerings and Service Requests that is vendor and tool agnostic", "A definitional model so catalog development is decoupled from operations", and "Rigorous, normative schema that enables automated exchange of definitions".
While I believe the intent of this consortium is sincere, and interoperability is a noble objective, it just brings up a horrid nightmare of ISO-like Technical Committees run by former bell-heads. Getting the Cloud vendors to standardize the way they describe services…..hmmm, what's wrong with that picture?
In a November '09 post in the Wisdom of the Clouds, James Urquhart commented on the customer/provider challenges between commoditization and differentiation. Clearly, SPACL has the potential to help here.
But with the gap between IT and the Business widening every day, the thought of technical staff getting wrapped up in establishing a 'standard' for interoperability between Service Catalogs seems like CMDB madness all over again. From what I've seen, these are primarily Technical Service Catalogs that focus on interoperability of requests. More Inside-Out thinking and no real connection with the Business at all.
Danger! Danger! SPACL ahead!
SPACL has value, but don't get lost in space. If you want to survive in today's business climate, you'd better be in lock-step with the Business and that will demand uniformity of purpose and Outside-In thinking. Having interoperable components in Technical Service Catalogs will help (mostly IT), but you won't live to realize this dream unless the business satisfies external customers.
So go ahead and track this (SPACL) effort, and even root for their success. If you're a large user of cloud services, use your leverage to demand interoperability. But don't get lost in SPACL; the (external) customer is still king.