Lontra's Visionary Service Portfolio Solution Enhanced to Help Align IT Services With Business Demand

Pink Elephant IT Service Management Conference

REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Lontra, Inc., an innovative provider of IT Service Portfolio Solutions, today announced the release of Lontra Service Portfolio Management Suite v5.0. The new release of Lontra's flagship product suite significantly enhances the value of its Service Catalog solution by enabling IT organizations to incorporate service-based costing, forecasting, demand planning, service delivery management, and end-to-end service request functionality into their service portfolio and service catalog initiatives.

IT organizations are rapidly adopting a customer-centric service delivery model, usually based on the ITIL framework. While many have begun implementing a requestable service catalog in order to productize and define what IT delivers, they have run into challenges when it comes to understanding service costing and pricing, predicting and controlling IT demand, and tracking and collecting the metrics they need in order to improve customer satisfaction.

Lontra Service Portfolio v5.0 addresses these issues and more by including:

• A service library that contains a hierarchy of IT services defined as templates utilizing a patent-pending technology;
• Automated service demand capture, forecasting, and actual consumption tracking;
• A patent-pending service chargeback methodology for mapping GL line items to services;
• Ability to establish unit cost transparency using the Lontra Demand Manager and Financial Manager;
• Ability to define varying levels of services at different price points, helping to shape IT demand;
• Enhanced service request capability and fulfillment including automated approval workflows;
• Built-in SLA tracking and visibility into real-time performance metrics;
• An all-new Subscription Manager module to track the services that users have
  subscribed to and the change history of these services;
• Pre-built executive dashboard reports and enhanced ad-hoc reporting capabilities;
• An integration framework to support two-way communication between existing
  GL systems, ticketing systems, CMDB, and more.

"With Lontra Service Portfolio Solution v5.0, IT organizations now have the platform that they need to truly manage IT like a business," said Lontra's Founder and CEO, Boris Pevzner, "Lontra's solution provides the much-needed 'front office' capability to IT that communicates the value IT provides to its customers, which is supported by comprehensive IT financial management, demand management, fulfillment, subscription tracking, and other business critical functions."

Lontra will be previewing its new Service Portfolio Solution v5.0 at the Pink Elephant IT Service Management conference in Las Vegas, NV February 18th-21st, 2007.

About Lontra

Lontra is the first IT service portfolio solution provider to incorporate demand planning and cost transparency into the core of the service catalog and request management solution. Built on industry leading technology acquired from Centrata in 2005, Lontra combines award-winning ITIL and service catalog expertise, comprehensive product functionality, and on-demand access to ramp up customers quickly and successfully and deliver faster return on investment. Only Lontra enables IT organizations to rapidly create an actionable customer-centric service catalog, influence behavior by publishing tiered services and pricing, provide cost transparency in chargebacks, consolidate and standardize IT services, and optimize supplier services based on demand and performance. Lontra is delivering results to leading companies across a range of industries. The company is venture funded and located in Redwood City, CA. For more information, visit www.lontra.com, or send an email to info@lontra.com.