ServiceNow Paris Release Targets Unique Needs of COVID-19 Economy

ServiceNow is evolving beyond its IT service management heritage and taking the channel along for the ride. Much of the company’s momentum comes as it seeks to help customers adapt to what it calls the COVID-19 economy.

As such, this week, ServiceNow continued its transformation toward offering organization-wide workflow management, not just ITSM. The code released this week, “Paris,” in the Now Platform, features industry-specific applications. For example, banks now may issue credit cards and telecom service providers can manage service management and network performance.

Those are just two of the many possibilities partners can facilitate for their clients. In fact, consultancy Deloitte already is handling the retail banking part for ServiceNow, and fellow channel partner Accenture is working with telcos.

The following new products within Paris enable other capabilities, too:

Microsoft, Twilio and SailPoint Play Big Roles

Yet, there’s more. ServiceNow now integrates with Microsoft, Twilio and SailPoint, as well as the new ServiceNow Service Graph Connector Program.

Regarding Microsoft, look for four integrations within Azure and Teams:

“By connecting ServiceNow’s digital workflows with Azure and Microsoft 365, we’re empowering customers to leverage the cloud to make work better,” said Ari Schorr, senior program manager for strategic alliances at Microsoft.

Meanwhile, ServiceNow has brought cloud communications provider Twilio’s conversational messaging to its customer management solution. Organizations now can engage with customers through Twilio, directly through ServiceNow.

Molly Fischer is senior director, strategic ISVs, at Twilio.

“The customer experience is crucial for business success in the next normal,” said Fischer. The Twilio integration lets businesses “communicate on the channels they prefer, all in an easy, streamlined and efficient way.”

Finally, ServiceNow also has expanded its partnership with …

… SailPoint, an identity and access management vendor. The Paris release contains the SailPoint for Service Catalog alongside ServiceNow’s HR Service Delivery. That means users have all their service and application requests and approvals in one view.

“By integrating with ServiceNow’s employee workflows, we are making it simple and easy for businesses to deliver amazing employee experiences,” said Harry Gould, senior vice president of worldwide partners at SailPoint. “The combination of SailPoint for Service Catalog and ServiceNow HR Service Delivery brings all of the information employees need into a single, secure location, helping them to be productive, cost-efficient, and most importantly, enjoy their work.”

Helping Customers Achieve ‘Agility and Resilience’ in the COVID-19 Economy

ServiceNow’s David Parsons

All these new additions to ServiceNow Workflows will prove essential “for business agility and resilience amid the COVID-19 economy,” David Parsons, senior vice president, global alliances and partner ecosystem at ServiceNow, told Channel Futures. “The new integrations with Microsoft, Twilio and SailPoint are part of how we do that. Resiliency and agility are top of mind for nearly every organization that relies on technology to adapt to the new way of working. With these new integrations, ServiceNow, along with our technology partners, will be able to provide customers an even more seamless experience between the tools that they’re already using.”

When it comes to specific ways partners can implement the Paris-based changes for customers, Parsons offered some thoughts.

“Every system integration has some sort of risk program,” he said. “Our new business continuity management product enables ServiceNow channel partners to sell something to their customers to meet the changing needs of the COVID-19 economy — and build this into their risk practice, creating new services revenue on top of license sales.”

The Service Graph Connector Program, a new designation within the Technology Partner Program, will help with those efforts. Parsons said the program ensures that “many of the third-party tools that businesses rely on today are directly integrated with ServiceNow, making it easy for customers to integrate, upload and organize data on a single platform.”

The Workflow Revolution

ServiceNow says it developed Now Platform Paris largely in response to the so-called workflow revolution brought about by COVID-19. As businesses rethink how to operate and serve customers, they need better tools.

“The C-suite realizes that 20th-century architectures are too slow and siloed in today’s fluid working environment, where they need speed and agility,” said Chirantan Desai, chief product officer at ServiceNow. “The Now Platform Paris release provides smart experiences powered by AI, resilient operations, and the ability to optimize spend. Together, they will provide businesses with the agility they need to help them thrive in the COVID-19 economy.”

Stephen Elliot, program vice president, DevOps and management software, at research firm IDC, agreed.

“Customers are increasingly considering the business value from integrating separate, but increasingly dependent workflows across teams, and the business and IT organizations,” he said. “There is unquestionable customer traction, in part accelerated by COVID-19 and its pressure to drive more collaboration between IT and business stakeholders to digitize processes, rethink customer engagement models and make strategic business decisions faster than at any point in the last 10 years.”