IBM and ServiceNow Collaborate to Automate IT for Enterprises

IBM and ServiceNow have expanded their strategic partnership designed to help companies reduce operational risk and lower costs by applying AI to automate IT operations. Available later this year, a new joint solution will combine IBM’s AI-powered hybrid cloud software and professional services to ServiceNow’s intelligent workflow capabilities and IT service and operations management products.

The solution is engineered to help clients realise deeper, AI-driven insights from their data, create a baseline of a typical IT environment, and take succinct recommended actions on outlying behaviour to help prevent and fix IT issues at scale. Together, IBM and ServiceNow can help companies free up valuable time and IT resources from maintenance activities, to focus on driving the transformation projects necessary to support the digital demands of their businesses.

“AI is one of the biggest forces driving change in the IT industry to the extent that every company is swiftly becoming an AI company,” said Arvind Krishna, Chief Executive Officer, IBM. “By partnering with ServiceNow and their market leading Now Platform, clients will be able to use AI to quickly mitigate unforeseen IT incident costs. Watson AIOps with ServiceNow’s Now Platform is a powerful new way for clients to use automation to transform their IT operations.”

“For every CEO, digital transformation has gone from opportunity to necessity,” said ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott. “As ServiceNow leads the workflow revolution, our partnership with IBM combines the intelligent automation capabilities of the Now Platform with the power of Watson AIOps. We are focused on driving a generational step improvement in productivity, innovation and growth. ServiceNow and IBM are helping customers meet the digital demands of 21st century business.”

Organisations are under pressure to deliver innovation and create great experiences for customers and employees, all while driving efficiencies and keeping costs and IT risks down. Yet in today’s technology-driven organisation, even the smallest outages can cause massive economic impact for both lost revenue and reputation. This partnership will help customers address these challenges and help avoid unnecessary loss of revenue and reputation by automating old, manual IT processes and increasing IT productivity.

IBM and ServiceNow will initially focus on:

• Joint Solution: IBM and ServiceNow will deliver a first of its kind joint IT solution that marries IBM Watson AIOps with ServiceNow’s intelligent workflow capabilities and market-leading ITSM and ITOM Visibility products to help customers prevent and fix IT issues at scale. Now, businesses that use ServiceNow ITSM can push historical incident data into the deep machine learning algorithms of Watson AIOps to create a baseline of their normal IT environment, while simultaneously having the ability to help them identify anomalies outside of that normal, which could take a human up to 60% longer to manually identify, according to initial results from specific Watson AIOps early adopter clients. The joint solution will position customers to enhance employee productivity, obtain greater visibility into their operational footprint and respond to incidents and issues faster. Specific product capabilities will include ServiceNow ITSM, ServiceNow ITOM Visibility and IBM Watson AIOps.
• Services: IBM is expanding its global ServiceNow business to include additional capabilities that provide advisory, implementation, and managed services on the Now Platform. Highly skilled IBM practitioners will apply their expertise to facilitate rapid delivery of valuable insights and innovation to clients. IBM Services professionals also will introduce clients to intelligent workflows to help improve resiliency and reduce IT risk. ServiceNow is co-investing in training and certification of IBM employees and dedicated staff for customer success.

The announcement strengthens the partnership previously announced by IBM and ServiceNow to help enterprises simplify IT operations for multi-cloud environments.

Also, IBM has announced the formation of the AIOps Elite Team – a new no-charge advanced engagement team, dedicated to engineering AIOps in a client environment and building and refining AI models.

The new joint solution will be enabled through a joint go-to-market strategy and will be available later this year from IBM.