Cisco Cisco Process Orchestrator 3.0 Betriebsanweisung

Service-Oriented Orchestration provides the agility to model and act on IT services. These features make 
creating orchestration active and dynamic, and allow for:

Defining new, higher-level services in the system, and deploy new services quickly. 

In real-time, after these new types of services have been defined, creating real-time instances of 
those new services. 

Using events to watch for patterns in these services, enabling policy-driven automation.

Service-Oriented Orchestration combines several industry trends to synthesize a fresh approach to 
orchestration:

Service modeling capabilities of a service catalog are now available in the orchestrator layer. 
Process Orchestrator provides fluid mechanisms to exchange service information with the Cisco 
Prime Service Catalog, advancing the integration of these systems. 

The feature delivers many of the capabilities of object-oriented design and programming into the 
RBA / ITPA world. The shift from traditional orchestration to Service-Oriented Orchestration is 
similar to the shift from procedural to object-oriented programming. Today, virtually all 
programming is done with object-oriented languages, and object-oriented design has transformed 
the industry to higher levels of productivity and quality. Service-Oriented Orchestration holds the 
same promise. 

The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) prescribes a service-centric approach for IT. Configuration 
Management Databases (CMDBs) model IT services and their relationship to other IT assets. 
Service-Oriented Automation allows automation to be driven through a model of current and 
potential IT services, aware of their relationships and interdependencies. In this aspect, the 
principles of service modeling in Process Orchestrator are essentially the same as modeling services 
within ITIL and CMDBs. While Process Orchestrator can integrate with an available CMDB, there 
is no requirement to have a CMDB to enable orchestration. 

The feature aligns to industry standards like the DMTF Common Information Model (CIM) and the 
Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA).

Model-based automation is becoming popular via script-based tools, especially in the configuration 
management space. Process Orchestrator combines the capability to model services with the 
openness to integrate with these tools to leverage their strengths. Moreover, the feature allows 
model-driven orchestration atop legacy tools to bring the full power of model-driven approaches to 
integrate with other IT tools.

Service-Oriented Orchestration allows automation to focus on higher level IT services, possibly specific 
to the customer’s business and unknown by Cisco when the product is built. User interaction shifts to 
services on which to act and what you can do to them. The approach to defining automation shifts from 
having to first decompose automation into a sequence of processes, to decomposing high-level services 
into their components, and then defining actions that are possible on each of the component services. 

This inversion in approach is simple, yet powerful. Cisco Services, partners, and customers can model 
services and extend others’ services without coding. Extensions and automation can be packaged, 
shipped to customers or moved from development to test to production, versioned, and upgraded. 

The approach delivers several key benefits:

Greater ease of use in combining Process Orchestrator with Prime Service Catalog.