ServiceNow San Diego Release Launches, Includes First Modules for MSPs

ServiceNow San Diego, the semiannual update to the company’s Now Platform, started rolling out on Wednesday with a revamped user interface (UI). The release also includes new automation capabilities and offers the platform’s first modules for MSPs to onboard and manage clients.

The entire platform has a significantly enhanced and more consistent interface that the company calls “New Experience.” ServiceNow describes the new UI as more modern with simplified navigation, making it easier to move between tasks.

It also includes 25 preconfigured workspaces for various user roles. Among the different workspaces, there’s customer support, dispatch, field service, HR, cloud operations and service operations and more.

ServiceNow’s Jeff Gore

“There’s a whole range of productivity tools we put in place for these agents that’s going to not only make their work lives easier, but also, improve the experience that they’re going to be providing,” said ServiceNow VP of marketing Jeff Gore.

The Now Platform needed an overhaul of the user interface, which ServiceNow has addressed, said Austen Harrison, a technical consultant and developer at Kirkland, Washington-based Covestic.

Covestic, which provides both professional and managed services to ServiceNow customers, was an early tester of the San Diego release.

“Most ServiceNow partners and customers have been anticipating this change,” Harrison said.

In recent years, ServiceNow has expanded its user base beyond just IT administrators. With HR and customer service agents using the platform, it needed a more user-friendly interface, Harrison emphasized.

“They’ve had this strong need to ensure that the ServiceNow look, and feel is catering to those folks,” he said.

First Tools Specifically for Technology Providers

Among the new industry-specific tools added to ServiceNow’s San Diego release include those for banking, insurance companies, telecommunications providers and those that deliver technology services.

The Technology Provider Service Management solution is suited for MSPs, providing customer service and operations management. ServiceNow said it lets MSPs provide AI-based self-service and support to customers. ServiceNow also added Order Management for Technology Providers, which it said it designed to provide more rapid provisioning of services.

New Automation Engine Enables RPA

The ServiceNow San Diego release also has an upgraded automation engine. The new engine brings robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities that ServiceNow gained with last year’s acquisition of Intellibot. The new Automation Engine combines ServiceNow’s Integration Hub with the Intellibot RPA functions, providing hyperautomation capabilities.

Using ServiceNow’s low-code application development tool App Engine, the hyperautomation features let employees automate manual and repetitive functions tied legacy and modern systems.

“They have a separate process automation designer, so that they can enable folks to author some of these cross-enterprise workflows, and sort of enable the very unified process across the platform,” Covestic’s Harrison said.

ServiceNow’s new Automation Engine also includes RPA Hub, a new management console for deploying and managing digital robots. The company designed these digital robots to automate repetitive tasks now performed by employees.

RPA Hub supports with over 1,300 preconfigured components and includes RPA Desktop Design Studio to build, test and publish bots. A component called RPA Hub Spoke gives users of ServiceNow’s Flow Designer no code access to Remote Hub.

“The RPA capabilities look really strong,” Harrison said. “Their investment in automation and machine learning with predictive intelligence gets better and better with every release.”