Last month, we wrote a piece entitled “Why Everyone Wants To Partner With ServiceNow” and recently, the company announced yet another blockbuster partnership. It’s a blockbuster because the agreement provides ServiceNow access to Microsoft’s existing customer base. And just a couple months back the company announced its partnership with Google. Are these partnerships a possible testing ground for a future marriage or are they a strategic means to acquire new customers? In either case, CEO John Donahoe is better positioning the company for dynamic growth in the near and long term.
With Microsoft, ServiceNow will make its full SaaS platform available on Microsoft’s Azure in addition to its private cloud. And in return, Microsoft will implement certain ServiceNow solutions such as its IT and employee experience workflow tools and make them available to the network of Microsoft customers.
Microsoft’s enterprise customers will benefit in a number of ways, namely, they will have unparalleled financial and operational visibility coupled with reliable service and application-level information that is needed to manage cloud usage and costs. ServiceNow provides a framework for the agile management of public and private clouds through a single systems of record.
“There is an enormous opportunity for customers — including in the public sector — to apply the power of the cloud to become more efficient and responsive,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. “Our partnership combines ServiceNow’s expertise in digital workflows with Azure, our trusted cloud, so that customers can accelerate their digital transformation, while meeting their security and compliance needs.”
Meanwhile ServiceNow customers will be able to best leverage Microsoft Azure functionality thus gaining more control of their cloud infrastructure.
“Expanding our strategic global relationship with Microsoft enables ServiceNow to more fully leverage and integrate our platform and products with Microsoft’s leading enterprise technology and capabilities,” said John Donahoe, president and CEO of ServiceNow. “Together, ServiceNow and Microsoft will help our enterprise and government customers accelerate their digital transformation, creating great experiences and unlocking productivity.”
Despite its seemingly ubiquitous presence, Microsoft Azure has not been around for that long. It was launched in 2010 but has evolved and expanded quickly across the enterprise market. Today, it is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed and Microsoft partner hosted datacenters. It also provides technical services, both PaaS and IaaS, and supports a number of programming languages as well as other tools and frameworks.
ServiceNow achieved popularity in the software industry for the way it revolutionized IT service management decades ago. Today’s its IT Operations Management Solutions (ITOM) gives enterprises complete visibility and control of their entire IT environment, including virtualized and cloud infrastructure. It automates and streamlines key processes such as incident management, configuration and change management.
Both solutions have excelled over the years driven by the increasing demands for more visibility and control by developers and IT manager alike. Now with this partnership intact, customers get the best of both worlds while perhaps Microsoft tests out the ROI on having ServiceNow capabilities in-house.
