IBM and ServiceNow collaborate on IT’s AIOps

The joint solution will save time and IT resources for maintenance activities, allowing IT staff to focus on projects that bring more value to the business.

IBM and ServiceNow announced that they have expanded their strategic partnership to combine Watson AIOps with ServiceNow’s IT service management and IT operational management visibility. Its goal is to help companies reduce operational risks and reduce costs by applying AI to automate IT operations.

Specifically, the solution is designed to help companies gain deeper, AI-driven insights from their data, create benchmarks for typical IT environments, and take concise recommended measures for abnormal behaviors to help prevent and repair IT problems on a large scale . This will save time and IT resources for maintenance activities, thus focusing on driving the transformation projects needed to support their business’ digital needs.

See also: AIOps gains traction as a technology accelerator

In the announcement, IBM fully considered the use of AI for IT and AIOps. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said: “To the extent that every company has quickly become an AI company, AI is one of the biggest forces driving change in the IT industry.”

Natural application of Watson

Watson AIOps uses machine learning, natural language understanding, interpretable AI and other technologies to automate IT operations. When it launched in May, IBM said:

“Watson AIOps uses IBM’s leading natural language processing (NLP) technology to understand the contents of the ticket to automatically identify and extract solutions. After identifying new problems, Watson AIOps will identify similar incidents that have occurred in the past and provide suggestions for the next Best practices to solve current problems to restore service. With the insights of Watson AIOps, predictive and proactive capabilities can be used to drive more automation, thereby shifting operations teams to higher-value tasks.”

Watson AIOps correlates different data in the entire tool chain to gain hidden insights and help you determine the root cause of incidents more quickly. Eliminate the need for multiple dashboards and enter insights and recommendations directly into your existing workflow, so you can quickly resolve IT incidents.

By monitoring data in real time, as complex issues develop, Watson AIOps can provide deep insights and visibility, enabling teams to diagnose and resolve mission-critical issues faster. Watson AIOps uses a pre-trained AI model that has been adjusted with data from existing IT monitoring tools to provide your team with valuable new insights into their environment.

Focus on solutions

This week’s announcement builds on the previously announced partnership between IBM and ServiceNow, which will help companies simplify IT operations in multi-cloud environments. The new joint solution will be available from IBM later this year.

The joint IT solution combines the intelligent workflow capabilities of IBM Watson AIOps and ServiceNow, as well as ITSM and ITOM Visibility products. Companies that use ServiceNow ITSM can push historical event data to Watson AIOps’ deep machine learning algorithms to create a benchmark for their normal IT environment, while having the ability to help them identify abnormalities outside of normal. Based on the preliminary results of a particular Watson AIOps early adopter customer, such a process may require up to 60% of manual labor to complete manual identification. The joint solution will position customers to improve employee productivity, have a clearer understanding of their operational footprint, and respond to incidents and problems faster.

The new joint solution will be available later this year. It will combine IBM’s AI-enabled hybrid cloud software and professional services with ServiceNow’s intelligent workflow capabilities and market-leading IT services and operations management products.