ServiceNow Inc. today announced a collaboration with IBM Corp. to provide automatic problem detection features powered by IBM’s Watson AIOps product.

Publicly traded ServiceNow’s Now Platform provides a centralized hub from which information technology teams can manage their companies’ infrastructure and applications. Watson AIOps is an IBM software product that uses machine learning to detect IT issues such as network disruptions.

The companies are readying an integration for later this year that will bring the two offerings together. IT professionals will gain the ability to view problems detected by Watson AIOps in the ServiceNow interface through which they perform their day-to-day work. Moreover, Watson AIOps will provide suggestions for how to fix the issues it detects.

The integration takes advantage of the fact that, because ServiceNow’s platform tends to play a central role in its customers’ IT operations, it can provide up-to-date data about the state of their infrastructure. Watson AIOps analyzes data from ServiceNow to create a baseline model that describes how a company’s technology environment usually behaves. It finds anomalies by looking for events that diverge from this baseline.

ServiceNow and IBM are positioning the solution as a way to reduce the time needed to fix technical issues. Citing data from early customer deployments, the companies said Watson AIOps makes it possible to speed up troubleshooting by more than 60% in some cases. That can mean, for example, 60% less downtime when a mission-critical business application goes offline. 

“By partnering with ServiceNow and their market leading Now Platform, clients will be able to use AI to quickly mitigate unforeseen IT incident costs,” said IBM Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna.

The companies will launch a joint go-to-market push to drive adoption of the solution among customers. “IBM is expanding its global ServiceNow practice to include additional capabilities that provide advisory, implementation, and managed services on the Now Platform,” Pablo Stern, ServiceNow’s senior vice president of IT workflow products, detailed in a blog post. “ServiceNow is co-investing to train and certify IBM employees and dedicated staff for customer success.”

The collaboration will enable IBM to make Watson AIOps more compelling for the many organizations that use ServiceNow — which, in turn, is gaining the ability to offer customers more automation features to streamline their IT workflows.

The fact that Watson AIOps will use IT infrastructure data enterprises keep in ServiceNow to find anomalies underscores the growing importance of ServiceNow’s data management capabilities to its big-picture product strategy. The company has been strengthening this part of its feature set recently. In June, it acquired Sweagle NV, a Belgian startup with a database for storing configuration information about the state of a company’s applications and infrastructure.

Image: ServiceNow