Bruno Buffenoir, who has served as the former regional vice president of HP Software and ServiceNow since July 2017, unveiled the 2017 NowForum Paris. ServiceNow now has 185 customers in France and is doing everything possible to gain market share in France. Therefore, the new head of ServiceNow France emphasized that the number of skills provided by publisher partners has increased by 72% in one year. The American publisher is rapidly developing its distribution network, especially expanding its customer portfolio with mid-sized companies. If, as Bruno Buffenoir admits, ITSM (IT Service Management) is still the core business of ServiceNow, then 30% of visitors said they want to discuss issues other than IT service management with publishers.
This evolution of the company’s use of the ServiceNow platform illustrates that two of the four companies that testified on NowForum Paris demonstrated projects outside the ITSM domain in the strict sense. Air Liquide and Dalkia came to testify on ITSM and IT operations management projects respectively, while Ernst & Young described its human resources projects. In the case of Unibail-Rodamco, it mentioned the facility management expansion of the original ITSM project.
Our customers need “out of the box” solutions
Karel van der Poel, Vice President of ITBM and SAM Products at ServiceNow and Vice President of DG Analysis, then gave a speech to outline the publisher’s product strategy. While all publishers are emphasizing the personalized features of their products, the first part of the strategy seems somewhat contradictory. The product manager pointed out that the needs of ServiceNow customers have prompted publishers to be more standardized: “Our customers see us as experts in ITSM and IT operations management. They say they pay attention to us on these issues. They ask us to be more standardized and provide more Off-the-shelf solutions so that we can deploy faster.”
This demand for off-the-shelf solutions also emerged in the testimony of Scott Owen Mason, IT chief operating officer of Novartis’ IT operations. His company, as part of its digital transformation, migrated its applications as a service, following the rule of 3 “0”-size is 0, customization is 0, and distance is 0. The “first “0” aims to reduce the current footprint of existing IT in order to create new space for the applications we want to create. We have reduced our application portfolio by 40% in just a few years. Thousands of people, but this is how we get rid of the burden of the past. The second 0 is “0 customization”. We are a very large company with many different needs. We can innovate, but through standardization. Therefore, we Try not to personalize solutions, but use ready-made solutions as much as possible. ServiceNow enables us to enhance this approach. Finally, “zero distance” means that we must always be on the side of the customer. “
An acquisition designed to accelerate the modernization of the ServiceNow interface
Another priority of ServiceNow is to improve what marketing calls the “user experience.” In recent quarters, ServiceNow has announced that it wants to modernize the user interface of its services, which is a somewhat outdated interface in the eyes of Gen X. This prompted the publisher to acquire Digital Telepathy on October 2, 2017. The San Diego-based UX studio and its 30 designers will be able to participate full-time.
Finally, Karel van der Poel mentioned the third priority that any software publisher cannot avoid in 2017: machine learning. “The third part of our strategy is to innovate and stay ahead of the market. For us, innovation means the upcoming machine learning, Internet of Things, big data. But how to understand it and how to profit from it?”
The publisher acquired DxContinuum at the end of 2016 to integrate this layer of artificial intelligence into its platform in the name of an intelligent automation engine. This AI layer has existed since the Jakarta version of ServiceNow. Therefore, these new functions make the emergence of predictive functions possible, which are related to fault detection and even service improvement. In addition to the environmental media hype related to artificial intelligence, Karel van der Poel also wanted to prove that ServiceNow has adopted a pragmatic approach when implementing Learning on its platform.
Chatbot for Kingston
Farrell Hough, General Manager and Vice President of ITSM and Operations Management of ServiceNow, is even more outspoken about the future of the ServiceNow platform. Jakarta witnessed the arrival of cloud management solutions and software license management modules. The next version, called Kingston (expected in the first half of 2018), will see the arrival of virtual agents. “After the service portal era, we are now at an inflection point. New technologies are now available, whether it is supervised machine learning or virtual agents. It is very clear today that all applications today must be “mobile first.” If we Machine learning can be applied, we can start to make predictions, and usage will change. We will collect more and more user data, and the structure of exchanges will become less and less. When considering virtual agent technology, conversation design becomes a new kind of Form of knowledge engineering.”
In addition to acquiring supervised machine learning technology from DxContinuum, ServiceNow also recently completed the acquisition of Qlue and acquired a stake in BuildOnMe. The transaction provided him with all the necessary elements to create a chatbot. “We are rebuilding their interactive technology platform for launch later this year. Our smart agent will be launched with the Kingston IT service management version. By working with early adopters, we understand that we must be able to rely on large amounts of data. We It was found that this method reduces the time it takes to organize incidents; it makes it possible to improve the responsiveness of the team, thereby increasing the support-related SLA. Another interesting point is that this method also increases user satisfaction with IT This will be the first hands-on proxy application on our platform, and it can be obtained from Kingston.”
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