ServiceNow: No longer just for IT service management

In order to expand its foundation beyond the core IT Service Management (ITSM) market, ServiceNow is using artificial intelligence and analytics technology. This week completed a series of AI-related acquisitions, appointed the issuer’s first AI manager, and officially announced the release of the “Orlando” version of its low-level platform. Used to develop code for business applications with AI capabilities for predictive analysis and construction of automated workflows.

All these initiatives highlight what Dave Wright, ServiceNow’s chief innovation officer, explained: The publisher’s goal is to become a “platform” for companies to coordinate distributed tasks. In their six other excellent solutions for ERP, CRM, HCM…

In order to achieve its goal of achieving 30% growth in subscription revenue this year, the publisher is also working on applications in specific areas, such as the financial sector.

ServiceNow’s business promotion

ServiceNow was founded by Fred Luddy in 2003 under the name of GlideSoft. It was initially to provide enterprises with a web-based business application platform to create form-based workflows to adapt to their business methods. Work without having to go through the long and expensive process of customizing ERP.

First, Fred Luddy marketed its Glide platform as an ideal product for enterprise service management (ESM), targeting Tivoli Service Desk (service and asset management tools) and Vantive System (applications) customer CRM) in each of these applications After the publisher terminates support. The founder also provided his platform as an IT service management tool based on the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL).

Although the ITSM product defines what ServiceNow customers have seen in the past decade, the underlying coding platform has never disappeared. In the past few years, ServiceNow has provided its platform (renamed to Now) as a white label to application development partners, while providing it to CIOs to solve various problems in its business. the company.

Artificial intelligence brings new power

Big changes are expected. In November 2019, former SAP CEO Bill McDermott (Bill McDermott) left SAP a few weeks after taking over ServiceNow, and former ServiceNow CEO John Donahoe left Nike. In January 2020, Mr. McDermott has made his presence felt. He has acquired two startup companies specializing in artificial intelligence to enhance ServiceNow’s existing AI functions. It also decided to cooperate with Deloitte and Accenture to develop industry-specific solutions on their platforms, starting with banking and telecommunications applications.

The first of the two AI startup acquisitions announced on January 22 involved the Israeli company AIOps Loom Systems. The company explained that its ability to analyze log and indicator data will allow ServiceNow to automatically resolve issues for users of its ITSM and IT operations management systems. The second model was released on January 29, 2020 and is called Passage AI. This is an AI-based dialogue platform that reinforces Parlo, another chatbot creation solution that the publisher has acquired in May 2018. ServiceNow’s Passage AI plan includes removing language barriers in group work or when making requests to its service portals, workspaces, and other interfaces through chatbots.

MS alumni promote innovation

This week, the company hired its first AI manager, Vijay Narayanan, who served as the head of data science at Microsoft and most recently as the head of content and discovery engineering at Pinterest. Mr. Narayanan will lead the Advanced Technology Group of Service Now.

For Charles Betz, Forrester’s senior analyst (infrastructure and operations), ServiceNow is becoming a complete enterprise software platform close to leading ERP and CRM vendors. “Although players may avoid face-offs, I expect the fringe competition will intensify. In general, the company’s competition for the general management of tasks and jobs will increase.” Bates

The value of artificial intelligence

IDC’s AI software platform, content analysis and discovery system research director Dave Schubmehl said that the company is clearly no longer just an ITSM company. “Users should treat ServiceNow as the artificial intelligence/automation platform for their business, providing guidance, normative and predictive responses for various applications including ITSM.” He added: “Adding natural language understanding will allow AI A conversation about issues that ServiceNow helps to solve and resolve.”

The acquisitions of Loom and Passage AI are too new to enrich the Orlando version of Now platform available from March 11. However, ServiceNow has long been investing in artificial intelligence internally and has invested through previous acquisitions such as Appsee, Attivio, Parlo and Qlue. Mr. Betz of Forrester explained that as Orlando developed, this strategy began to pay off. The analyst explained: “It goes from “shiny objects” to “real value propositions,” such as better predictions, anomaly detection, natural language understanding, and “work optimization.” ServiceNow noted that it will use AI with Orlando To automatically propose recommendations and contextual information, make virtual agents available to provide self-service experiences, and provide predictive analytics and automated workflows.

Improve chatbot

Specific tools include updates to the natural language understanding capabilities of virtual agents, and a system that distributes the workload to the (manual) agents best suited to handle it because they have experience in solving such problems, Or because he is already working with the same client.

There are some new analysis functions that can directly help the CIO. These include Cloud Insights, which IT administrators can use to optimize the cost of computing workloads across multiple clouds, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and private clouds running on VMware. Wright of ServiceNow. “We not only allow people to perform analysis. Because we have a workflow engine in the background, we are also able to take these steps to automate and optimize what is happening. There are also tools to assess operational risks and expose software to zero-day vulnerabilities. in.

Other famous Orlando additional facilities

As a bonus, ServiceNow DevOps, which was previously offered as a paid supplement, is now included in the main version. The company said this will enable developers to release features developed on other platforms faster by automating the change approval process.

Another area ServiceNow strives for is mobility. Wright said: “It has a big impact on how people make the employee experience more user-friendly and easy to use.” The Orlando mobile client includes a new method of directly locating employee information based on personal profile information, including their location, Department or position; Analyze the ability to determine how employees use the application; and the company’s ability to use its own brand to improve the ServiceNow mobile application.

This branding option means that companies can build their own mobile applications without hiring Android or iOS developers. “We have integrated these design elements into the ServiceNow platform, so we can provide users with a simple drag and drop interface to build mobile applications and publish them to the Internet.”