UPDATED 09:00 EDT / SEPTEMBER 16 2020

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With new Paris release, ServiceNow accelerates business resiliency and enterprise automation

ServiceNow Inc. announced some big changes today as part of the Paris release of its flagship Now Platform, saying they will help organizations to become more agile and resilient and boost productivity amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

The Now Platform is a cloud automation platform designed to help enterprises automate parts of their business that involve service delivery. It also helps companies streamline information technology operations such as assisting employees with setting up their work computers and finding cybersecurity issues. Not least, it provides features for specific departments within an organization, including human resources groups.

ServiceNow said the Paris release is meant to assist companies struggling to cope with the enormous disruption to their businesses caused by the coronavirus pandemic. COVID-19 shutdowns have wreaked havoc on economies across the world, but at the same time, they have also helped to kick off a new wave of digital transformation.

ServiceNow Chief Executive Bill McDermott (pictured) said in a press briefing that one of the biggest impacts of COVID-19 on the economy is that it has exposed weak links in old value chains, and that in turn is driving a new workflow revolution.

“Value chains are splitting apart and they’re being reassembled back together with technology platforms such as ServiceNow,” McDermott said. “The big idea is the autonomous enterprise. The idea of moving work to value is what it’s all about.”

To that end, the ServiceNow Paris release adds six completely new features to the Now Platform that the company says will enable enterprises to become more autonomous. The updates will enable customers to respond more quickly to business change and boost productivity through embedded analytics and artificial intelligence in every app, while digitizing and automating work across the enterprise, it said.

The new products in the Paris release include a Business Continuity Management service that enables companies to automate their business impact analysis and business continuity plan development. Then there’s Hardware Asset Management, a new offering that’s designed to automate IT asset lifecycles by tracking the financial, contractual and inventory details of an organization’s hardware and devices. Meanwhile, Legal Service Delivery gives legal departments greater visibility to make decisions faster and enhance productivity by eliminating manual emails and phone calls.

The Paris release also contains three new, industry-specific products that it says will help telecommunications and financial services providers to transform their business operations. They include a new Financial Services Operations tool that can help banks to connect their teams and systems more efficiently, a Telecommunications Service Management offering and a Telecommunications Network Performance Management service.

In addition, the Paris release sees ServiceNow build on its acquisition of the configuration data management startup Sweagle NV. It said it has integrated its ServiceGraph to its Configuration Management Database schema model, a move that will give customers a more consistent and data-driven approach to managing their entire digital lifecycles.

Service Graph now underpins all of ServiceNow’s solutions, the company said enabling businesses to bring together technology, people and processes into a “service-oriented view” for the first time.

The other key theme of the Paris release is partner integrations. ServiceNow said it has worked closely with Microsoft Corp. on four new integrations focused on Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Teams. In addition, the company has teamed up with communications provider Twilio Inc. to add new conversational messaging capabilities to its Customer Service Management solution. The release also adds an expanded integration with SailPoint for Service Catalog with ServiceNow HR Service Delivery.

CJ Desai, chief product officer at ServiceNow, told SiliconANGLE in an interview that the Paris release is the best it has ever done. It also comes at a time when the company is seeing massive demand for its core IT products, including its IT Operations Management services.

“The employee service management services we created four years ago are on fire,” Desai said. “In the first half, ITOM was growing nicely, though we saw some slowness in demand because they’re such big projects. But now in the second half, demand is picking up. Everyone is saying we have a job to do.”

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: World Economic Forum/Flickr

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