Today, ServiceNow is one of the fastest-growing cloud enterprises. Its aim of “making the world of work, work better for people” resonates with meaning across modern enterprises. While they started their journey with ITSM (Information Technology Service Management), competing with industry stalwarts such as IBM and HP, today ServiceNow has diversified to provide solutions that include IT, Security, HR Service Delivery, Customer Service, and a range of business applications.
The prolific rise of ServiceNow could be attributed to the ability to understand how the technology and consequently the IT landscape was going to evolve. They had the vision to spot that this growing responsibility on the enterprise IT infrastructure represented an opportunity to build solutions that allowed business processes to align, automate, and accelerate.
As the business environment, along with the market, evolved and became more software-driven, ServiceNow became central to enterprise automation. ServiceNow allows the modern-day enterprise to operate faster and improves their scalability capabilities by adopting a service-oriented lens on all activities, tasks as well as processes.
With the coming of digital transformation, enterprises are looking to super-charge their processes and convert them into powerful digital, mobile-first workflows that connect systems, apps, and data while giving end-to-end visibility.
Given the criticality of storage, networking, and the cloud to enterprise IT, ServiceNow’s focus on the space is not surprising. Discovery by ServiceNow, for example, has become an important repository for information on Direct Attached Storage (DAS), Storage Area Networks (SAN), and Network Attached Storage (NAS) assets and utility. It also helps organizations find and map all dependencies for all these storage areas and also find applications and devices on the network to update the CMDB with this information.
ServiceNow has also become crucial to cloud, networking, and storage product companies. They are looking to build integration synergies with ServiceNow to improve the value of their portfolio of offerings for their end-users. However, for this, they need to often integrate existing processes or create new integrations with the ServiceNow engine to deliver robust insights and improve their services. The Cisco Assurance Engine, for example, integrates with ServiceNow to provide comprehensive insights and orchestration across IT services along with the underlying network. It thus makes it easier to predict network outages and performance issues and vulnerabilities before they have a service impact.
With ServiceNow, organizations are also able to power their cloud investments and assuage challenges that come with cloud management. With ServiceNow integrations, organizations can optimize their cloud management capabilities and accelerate their cloud services. The on-demand service environment helps in improving cloud utilization, automating recommendations, and driving down costs along with a host of other benefits. It also enables cloud storage providers to govern enterprise-class cloud services for business activities with policies and rules that remain consistent with the rest of the enterprise.
IT today is all about enabling the end users to use technology fluidly. It is also clear that it only takes a single weak link to bring the IT infrastructure to its knees. To make their portfolio of offerings to the enterprise even richer, ServiceNow introduced plug-ins. Plug-ins are essentially pre-built capability sets that can be utilized to accelerate implementations to allow the enterprise to enjoy more out of the box (OOTB) features provided with the instance.
To improve the capabilities of the enterprise, ServiceNow also provides plug-ins that integrate ServiceNow with third-party applications/tools to accelerate efficiencies and improve revenue outcomes. However, what if an out-of-the-box solution is not what you are seeking? What happens when you need a customized ServiceNow plug-in? Or a specific app?
Thankfully, the ServiceNow platform allows enterprises to develop custom plug-ins as well to meet their unique business needs. This is also where Calsoft’s deep understanding of the ServiceNow ecosystem equips us to help enterprises fulfill their plug-in solutions requirements. This understanding comes from having managed numerous ServiceNow integrations with products/services.
Closer to home, ServiceNow plug-ins for storage and networking can provide various functionalities such as volume management, snapshot management, VM provisioning, VM actions, and more. These plug-ins can also be employed to provide extended functionality by adding approval management workflows, incident management, and notifications along with enabling the provisioning of vRA resources from the ServiceNow platform.
The key objective of these plug-ins is to enable seamless synchronization of information across on-premises and cloud-based apps and data sources. Along with this, the plug-ins also ensure better product interoperability and enable smooth operations. The resultant effect is higher customer experience levels.
Calsoft has created plug-ins for Data Center Asset Discovery & Inventory Management, operating as a one-stop-shop to address all data center needs and seamlessly monitor the health of the data center inventory. Given our ServiceNow experience, we also help ISVs and systems integrators in getting the ServiceNow certification for the plug-ins we have developed. Third-party products have to pass a rigorous set of interoperability, security, and performance test criteria and prove that they are compatible with ServiceNow products. We also have exhaustive experience in developing plug-ins for improved ITSM capabilities.
What has helped us excel as ServiceNow technology partners, especially in the storage and networking space, has been our storage DNA. Our deep knowledge in the areas of storage and networking and our consultative approach to address ServiceNow needs of the enterprise has helped us immensely in designing robust ServiceNow plug-ins and enabling ServiceNow integrations aligned to the customer’s needs.
