ServiceNow Inc. today advanced its plans of establishing a bigger foothold in vertical markets by introducing new products for telecommunications providers and financial firms. 

The announcement, made at the company’s digital Knowledge 2020 event, was accompanied by the release of new details about its healthcare sector ambitions.

Publicly traded ServiceNow sells a platform used by enterprises to manage parts of their business that involve providing services. That includes customer-facing services such as technical support, as well as internal services supporting an enterprise’s own operations. It has proved to be a lucrative business for ServiceNow: The company grew revenues 33% in the first quarter. 

After former SAP SE Chief Executive Bill McDermott (pictured) took the reins in January, ServiceNow unveiled an ”industry solutions strategy” to help continue this sales growth. The objective is developing specialized products atop its platform with features tailored for key verticals. The new telecommunications and finance products announced today fill in key pieces of this vision.

For telecommunications companies, ServiceNow is adding two new offerings. ServiceNow Telecommunications Service Management promises to help providers deliver better customer support, while ServiceNow Telecommunications Network Performance Management is a network troubleshooting solution. 

ServiceNow is promising “event correlation capabilities” for diagnosing technical issues and features to automate issue remediation. The company will also support TMForum Open APIs. TMForum is a telecommunications industry group and its Open APIs, which are said to be rapidly gaining in adoption, aim to make it easier for carriers to integrate tools such as ServiceNow into their operations. 

Chris Bauschka, ServiceNow’s area vice president of telecommunications, provided some examples of how the company aims to assist carriers. “Imagine that the moment an outage occurs you immediately receive a text message with information on when it will be restored and any workarounds you can put in place,” Bauschka wrote in a blog post. “If you do contact customer care, you get quick answers and an estimated time for a fix.”

ServiceNow today also shared details about its plans for the financial and healthcare sectors. For financial firms, ServiceNow is launching a product called ServiceNow Financial Services Operations to help them better handle customer support requests. The product will focus on enabling support agents to find records and communicate with other departments more easily.

ServiceNow’s telecommunications and financial products will become available this year. In 2021, the company plans to follow up by introducing healthcare and life science products to help organizations in those areas automate service delivery workflows. ServiceNow said that it will pursue the product development effort with guidance from consulting giant KPMG LLP as part of a go-to-market partnership the companies announced this morning.

Vertical markets are also becoming a bigger focus for other platform players in the enterprise market. Salesforce.com Inc., for instance, last year introduced the Manufacturing Cloud and Consumer Goods Cloud solutions. More recently, Google LLC’s cloud business in March appointed SAP veteran Lori Mitchell-Keller to the new position of vice president for industry solutions. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has said that the provider is prioritizing five major verticals as part of its efforts to expand its industry-specific value proposition. 

Photo: SAP