The multi-platform nature of cloud computing has made interoperability a top priority for both digital-native organizations minimizing operational redundancies and traditional enterprises desperate to streamline legacy processes.

To keep up with the on-demand experience guiding market trends, Dave Wright (pictured, left), chief innovation officer at ServiceNow Inc., and MaSonya Scott (pictured, right), senior business development manager at Amazon Web Services Inc., are working to improve integrations within a common catalog of configuration tools.

Wright and Scott spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Marketplace and Service Catalog Experience Hub event in Las Vegas. They discussed the benefits of syncing service portfolios and what the latest iteration of unified features offers customers of ServiceNow and AWS. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

We know about the ServiceNow Service Catalog [and] the AWS Service Catalog. You guys have brought these two things together. Why? How did it happen?

Scott: So AWS, 95 percent of our features are based on customer feedback. Customers tell us, “Your innovation in AWS Service Catalog where you provide the governance, the guardrails, the launch constraints is great, but we already have a service catalog with ideas and tools such as ServiceNow. How can we ingest the details and information into ServiceNow [to] do it in one place?”

We listened to that feedback, got requirements, started a proof of concept, and we’re now on our third iteration.

Wright: Customers were saying they wanted a unified experience to have governance and control. They’d say, “You two are both strategic platforms for us. We don’t want to go to the last mile after to aid the integration.” It was very customer driven.

Where’s the identity, in terms the rights and access that an individual person has inside of your catalog?

Scott: For the AWS Service Catalog, we state the source of truth for all resources, products and portfolios. Then we sync to ServiceNow Service Catalog through their scheduled job process and expose products that the ServiceNow administrator wants end users to see.

We have a scoped application in ServiceNow where you correlate the identities in AWS to a role in ServiceNow. ServiceNow end users don’t have direct access to the AWS console, they just order a compliant, secure product. In the AWS console, the connection only gives the end user role that’s assumed access to the AWS Service Catalog. What that enables is segregation of duty. We put the permissions on the launch constraints, and then you can give the evidence in an audit to what you’ve provisioned.

Where is this partnership in the life cycle?

Scott: Customers are starting to move to production, doing [proof of concepts], and as they give us feedback, we’re creating more releases. Customers are not only just provisioning storage or EC2s, but anything from a cloud formation template workspace, an Amazon workplace. We can also send those requests through ServiceNow.

Wright: If you’ve got that point of initiation where you know something’s happening, we can update the [configuration management database] in real time [and] start looking at software asset management so we can see what’s deployed. We’ve also found use cases where we can look at how we actually map the service to then use Amazon’s cloud migration products to speed up migrations.

Down the road, will ServiceNow be integrated in through the marketplace of the service catalog?

Wright: There’s no reason why it couldn’t be at some point. The only challenge we have at the moment is people using the service catalog to provision all kinds of things, as well as AWS components. We’ve always focused on [changing] the employee experience, [trying] to give them, ironically, an Amazon-like experience. It’s easy to order stuff in the real world from Amazon; why couldn’t I have exactly that same experience when I wanted to order any piece of IT equipment, whether it be physical, virtual [or] peripherals?

Scott: We’re looking to get feedback on not just provisioning, but going through other management tool services to see what customers are looking for. That’s key, building not just a bigger AWS Service Catalog, but a connector between the two platforms so that we can continue to create that synergy.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Marketplace and Service Catalog Experience Hub event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Marketplace and Service Catalog Experience Hub event. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE