ServiceNow Exec discusses Microsoft team expansion for ITSM in Paris

The release of the Microsoft Teams extension will enable the company’s voice, chat and virtual chatbot interfaces to appear in third-party solutions. When it launched at the Microsoft Ignite virtual conference last week, initially 20 partners planned to introduce Teams into their products. The companies identified by Microsoft include HiVue, ServiceNow, Range, Bunce and PagerDuty.

Matt Schvimmer, senior vice president of ServiceNow, believes that Microsoft Teams expansion is important. As a long-term partner, these extensions will appear in ServiceNow’s Service Management (ITSM) products. The Microsoft Teams feature will be rolled out gradually in the upcoming ServiceNow update called Paris, which will be launched this fall. Schvimmer, general manager of ServiceNow ITSM business, said that team integration is a top priority. In an interview with Channel Futures, Schivimmer explained what integrating the team into ServiceNow ITSM will bring partners and customers.

Channel Futures: What features has ServiceNow integrated into the team?

Matt Schvimmer: The team has an employee interface that will provide notifications, new approvals, and the ability to check events and all other things on the front end.

CF: When will it be available?

Multiple sclerosis: Now in the beta version, the employee interface becomes [generally available] November. The agent will be online in January. Every month, we will release other updates. All of our ITSM customers who use the team can use it. In this way, they can get an out-of-the-box virtual agent experience in most common use cases.

CF: Is that a chatbot?

Multiple sclerosis: absolute. It’s a chatbot. In terms of integration, this is the first thing we cooperated with Microsoft. The next part is employee experience.

CF: Is this chatbot based on Microsoft’s Bot Framework?

Multiple sclerosis: Through the team, this is our chatbot. It looks like another agent or another IT service person in the team. It says “now”, but customers can change it to their own brand.

CF: But did the chatbot surface through Microsoft Teams?

Multiple sclerosis: On the backend, you can set it in ServiceNow. We are trying to emerge from multiple channels. The team is one member. You may have some customers who entered through the website. Employees can access the IT support portal through the intranet. The robot can appear on the portal or be displayed by the team.

CF: Now, Microsoft Teams is actually just another channel for exposing it?

Multiple sclerosis: The team has always been high in our list of customer requests. One of our goals is to deal with employees everywhere, and they belong to the team. They are in groups. We hold a product advisory committee meeting at the user conference in May every year. In our latest meeting, there were 80 customers. I investigated them and everyone except one has deployed or is deploying the team. This is a very important strategic channel.

CF: Are there other channels with high demand?

Multiple sclerosis: Do not. When you start talking about employee engagement or productivity, it is actually a team. We will also get some slack. In fact, we have done a lot of work with Slack. Although some cases are rare, some people develop their own using off-the-shelf components.

CF: How about Zoom and Cisco WebEx?

Multiple sclerosis: We have done a lot of integration with Zoom. We have also been working with Cisco…