Those of us involved with IT and networking have tracked the rise of ServiceNow and how it has positioned itself as the center of IT operations, helping to make IT organizations become more efficient at managing complex processes. However, with ServiceNow development resources in high demand, network infrastructure is often slow to be integrated with ServiceNow environments, making life harder for network teams and ServiceNow teams alike. With Itential’s ServiceNow app, we’re aiming to meet customers where they’re at. The goal? Making the workload lighter for network and ServiceNow teams and helping IT Management deliver a more cloud-like experience for their IT consumers.
Right now, the demand on IT organizations is heavier than ever – networks and infrastructure at large are expanding and growing in complexity, and IT is tasked with delivering more services much faster and with greater security. To level up and take this on, IT organizations are adopting automation across their infrastructure – with the new certified Itential ServiceNow app, IT organizations will have the ability to rapidly deploy network automations into the ServiceNow ecosystem, enabling a wider audience of users to utilize them.
So how does the app help these three teams? Let’s take a look:
Network Teams
For network teams who’ve made progress with building a library of useful network automations one of the next steps in their automation strategy should be exposing automations in other platforms for greater consumption by teams in the IT organization. With the Itential ServiceNow app, the network team can continue to build, test, and publish automations in Itential, and the app running in the ServiceNow platform will dynamically discover them, allowing ServiceNow admins to provide their users with the ability to run the automations in a self-service portal.
Benefits to network teams include:
- Decreasing time to publish automations in ServiceNow from months to minutes.
- Reducing manual backlog by enabling more self-service network automation.
- Managing and controlling automation access from the Itential Automation Platform.
ServiceNow Teams
ServiceNow teams are tasked with making IT operations more efficient and ensuring ServiceNow works with the ecosystem of IT systems and tools in their organization. They sit at what’s effectively the hub of IT and keep the entire platform running and evolving. To accomplish this, custom ServiceNow development work is in high demand – building custom code to tie unique processes and systems together with ServiceNow drives a lot of operational efficiency.
With the Itential app, ServiceNow teams no longer carry the burden of building and maintaining custom integration code for every network automation that a ServiceNow user may need. The app uses Itential’s API to dynamically discover any published automations along with their associated forms and can render those forms directly in ServiceNow any time a user decides to run an automation in the platform.
Benefits to ServiceNow teams include:
- Standardized installation of the app from the ServiceNow App Store.
- Eliminating time-consuming processes to document APIs, automations, and forms.
- Removing the ongoing burden of creating and maintaining integration code.
Check out this demo to see how easy it is to install, configure, and use in ServiceNow.
IT Management
The Itential ServiceNow app increases intra-team efficiency between networking and ServiceNow, which ultimately helps deliver maximum business value. For IT management, tasked with improving IT operations while ensuring business goals are kept at the forefront, adopting tools that increase the value of investments that have already been made is a smart move.
Benefits to IT Management include:
- Improving customer experience by accelerating IT request delivery.
- Reducing time-consuming processes between network and ServiceNow teams.
- Delivering self-service automations for network infrastructure across IT.
Why Improved Integration is Important
Integration that’s rapid and easy is key for the future of IT. IT organizations must adapt – end users expect cloud-like delivery of services and infrastructure needs to become more agile. Taking days or weeks to resolve network changes and relying on manual processes just won’t cut it as organizations continue to scale.
The Itential ServiceNow application provides the capability for ServiceNow to essentially act as a user of the Itential Automation Platform, enabling a ServiceNow user to run an Itential automation in the ServiceNow platform without submitting a request to the network team. Itential’s new app will drive significant efficiency gains for IT by cutting out ServiceNow development time, increasing exposure and consumption of valuable network automations, and driving greater value from investments that have already been made. I look forward to seeing how our customers can utilize the app to make yet another step forward on their automation journeys.
You can see a detailed rundown of the app’s features and capabilities here. See the latest release of Itential’s ServiceNow App in action where I’ll walk through how simple it is to configure and use.
Rich Martin
Director of Technical Marketing ‐ Itential
Rich Martin is the Director of Technical Marketing at Itential. Previously, Rich has worked at several networking vendors as a both a Pre-Sales Systems Engineer and Systems Engineering Manager but started his career with a background in software development and Linux. He has a passion for automation in the networking domain, and at Itential he helps networking teams to get started quickly and move forward successfully on their network automation journey.
