The truth is, businesses almost never use their resources at anything close to their full potential. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of the most powerful is also somewhat unexpected: The company doesn’t know what they are. It’s almost impossible for a company to keep track of hardware, software, data and other resources across the whole organization. Being able to discover and utilize the full extent of the company’s assets can provide a major advantage.

To better understand some tools used to track resources, Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, talked with Mike Nappi, senior director of Product Management at ServiceNow, Inc., during the ServiceNow Knowledge16 conference.

Hunting infrastructure

“Having a good understanding of how your business activities are supported by your infrastructure is absolutely huge,” Nappi said. He explained how ServiceNow offers a portfolio of tools that can find things across a network, record what they find and describe the relationship between those infrastructure items. The company has also built an event management product and a cloud management product.

There are more use cases for infrastructure mapping than we imagined, he said. It allows operators to understand the root causes of problems on their networks much more quickly. Customers used it for data migration planning, and it’s been used for audit and compliance activities, he said.

Managing Cloud infrastructure

Customers are starting to look at Cloud strategy, moving some or all of their services in public Clouds, according to Nappi. Being able to see their infrastructure helps inform that move. A ServiceNow product called Orchestration is a general-purpose automation tool that can be used to automate any sort of process, he said. It can integrate and create a dashboard for metrics across multiple Cloud environments.

This message around service-centric operations management is resonating with customers, Nappi added.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge16.

Photo by SiliconANGLE