IBM, ServiceNow In New AI Partnership

IBM and ServiceNow are partnering to provide enterprise solutions that utilize AI to automate IT operations. The new joint solution combines 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 raises up deep AI‑driven insights from their data and then recommends actions for IT organizations to take that help them prevent and fix IT issues at scale.

“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.”

ServiceNow says that in today’s technology‑driven organization, even the smallest outages can cause massive economic impact for both lost revenue and reputation. They note that 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.

Here is what IBM and ServiceNow are planning:

• 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 allows IT to deliver scalable services on a single cloud platform estimated to increase productivity by 20%.

• ServiceNow ITOM Visibility automatically delivers near real‑time visibility from a native Configuration Management Database, into all resources and the true operational state of all business services.

• IBM Watson AIOps uses AI to automate how enterprises detect, diagnose, and respond to, and remediate IT anomalies in real time. The solution is designed to help CIOs make more informed decisions when predicting and shaping future outcomes, focus resources on higher‑value work and build more responsive and intelligent applications that can stay up and running longer. Using Watson AIOps, the average time to resolve incidents was reduced by 65 percent, according to one recent initial proof of concept project with a client.

• 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.

“Businesses are facing increased pressures to match the digital pace of a cloud‑first market in order to meet the demands of their customers,” said Stephen Elliot, program vice president, DevOps, and Management Software, IDC. “The C‑ suite is transforming workflows to deliver insights and automation for more efficient customer engagement models and cost containment strategies for the business while simplifying IT operations and increasing collaboration between IT and business stakeholders.”