ServiceNow, Celonis join forces to power process automation

Workflow management platform provider ServiceNow works with process mining expert Celonis to help companies prioritize and optimize process automation.

Celonis representative Faiz Mandviwalla said that this partnership will make it easier for CIOs to combine the functions of the two platforms when the joint is available, which is expected in the first half of 2022.

ServiceNow introduced tools to its Now platform released in Quebec in March 2021 to help its customers optimize processes. These enhancements only apply to processes built into ServiceNow. However, the cooperation with Celonis will expand Now’s optimization scope, enabling it to access process information on all platforms that Celonis can mine.

Forrester’s principal infrastructure and operations analyst Charles Betz speculated that ServiceNow may have added these features to Quebec, at least in part to put pressure on Celonis to cooperate with it.

“Celonis has been doing this for a long time, so it is neither easy nor cheap for ServiceNow to replace them,” he said.

Cooperate in a fragmented market

The two companies will jointly develop and market their services and use each other’s products internally, rather than competing for market for process optimization.

Stephen Elliot, IDC’s group vice president of infrastructure and operations, said: “This is in addition to the services provided by each company. It helps CIOs organize around technical and business workflows and the potential triggers that drive automation in these processes. …They are putting together building blocks for the foundation. No single supplier can do all of this.”

Elliot said that once ServiceNow and Celonis integrate their respective platforms, companies will be able to build on that foundation. “ServiceNow AppEngine Studio and AppEngine Templates products can be used as front-ends to help IT (and potential business teams) use Celonis’ data and process intelligence to create applications with built-in automation (through templates).”

ServiceNow and Celonis also plan to invest in each other, but both parties are unwilling to disclose the amount of investment. Could this be a prelude to the acquisition? Forrester’s Bates said this is possible, although unlikely at this stage.

Celonis raised $1 billion in new investment in June 2021, and valued the 10-year-old company at $11 billion. The market value of ServiceNow is approximately 10 times its value.

As long as Celonis can still freely explore the process on any platform, Betz will only see the benefits of the CIO in the partnership. Closer communication between companies can help CIOs gain insight into business processes as they do industrial processes.

Optimize knowledge management

“This really brings ERP-level management into knowledge work. This is the end here,” Bates said.

IT leaders can use powerful analysis tools to tell them where everything is in the supply chain, “but when it comes to knowledge work, they know nothing, because knowledge work is basically embedded in isolated systems,” he Say. “It has been very fragmented for a long time.”

But now, software vendors are approaching these isolated systems from different directions, trying to connect them with their own platforms.

“You have an enterprise service management space; you have some reactive actions that are happening, and companies like Salesforce are trying to participate. I’m still waiting for SAP or Oracle to move here in a meaningful way. I think they will happen sooner or later, Because the time and attention of knowledge workers are the foundation of many companies today,” Bates said.

Many companies will encounter the paradox that things that only require three days of hard work usually take six months to complete. “Process mining is a promising tool that can help organizations overcome these problems and better understand the problems of knowledge work,” Bates said.

Kulasekhar Subramaniam, Head of IT at Medtronic ServiceNow, is an IT leader eager to learn more.

In early 2021, he considered using Celonis to mine Medtronic’s IT Service Management (ITSM) process, but was delayed due to the challenge of having to extract all ServiceNow data into a data warehouse that Celonis can access. “It seems to be a complete copy,” he said.

Organizations such as Medtronic want to know how they can mine the data generated by IT operations to identify gaps and bottlenecks and streamline processes.

“I think the collaboration with Celonis will greatly help extract value from the ITSM process,” Subramaniam said. “We are now revisiting Celonis and looking for more information about these two companies.”