ServiceNow Says New Applications For Legal, Marketing And Financial Verticals Will Unlock Channel Opportunities

ServiceNow Tuesday released three new service management applications for customers in the legal, marketing and financial fields to automate workflows and adopt more effective service processes.

The applications, tailored for those three specific industries, are intended to help organizations move beyond using email and spreadsheets for those functionalities, said Dave Stephens, general manager of the Service Management business unit at the Santa Clara, Calif.-based cloud software vendor.

"What we're seeing with our customers, a lot of organizations are just overwhelmed with work. They rely on email and spreadsheets to get work done and these just aren't the right tools any longer," Stephens told CRN.

[Related: ServiceNow Launches New Suite Of Enterprise Products]

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The applications, Marketing Service Management, Legal Service Management and Finance Service Management, are ServiceNow's latest products to leverage the company's cloud platform to venture beyond its traditional focus on IT services. In the last year, the company released solutions for automating human resources and facilities management tasks.

"Partners have been working with us and have been one of the reasons we've introduced these new capabilities. They're really excited about this new release," Stephens told CRN.

"They see these three new applications for legal service management, marketing service management and finance service management as unlocking even more opportunities for the channel," he said.

A few early adopters have been using the apps for the last few months and ServiceNow has been running them internally, leading up to this week's general release.

The company also has introduced a template that partners can use to quickly construct service applications for customers within any vertical to help manage an increasing volume of work requests.

Such applications built from the template, like the three released by ServiceNow, will allow specific departments to adopt service orientations by which they interact with the rest of their companies, from inbound requests to monitoring projects, according to Stephens.

"Email can't be a solution to this because the speed of business is just too fast," Stephens told CRN.

Jason Wojahn, president of the ServiceNow business unit at Atlanta-based solution provider Cloud Sherpas, told CRN the need to automate, structure and measure workflows is not unique to IT, and the new offerings from ServiceNow are in line with the company's push to enhance service delivery models throughout the enterprise.

"All too often, email, spreadsheets and 'shared' sites or drives are the method of collaborating and ensuring completion of key business tasks and functions in many departments," Wojahn told CRN via email. "ServiceNow is uniquely positioned to address these needs."

The vendor's investments outside of its core IT practice in the areas of HR, facilities, finance, risk and legal allow partners to demonstrate to clients the possibilities of a service-oriented approach applied through a cloud-based technology platform and to help them adopt better organizational practices, according to Wojahn.

ServiceNow "enables partners to open the aperture of technical possibilities for clients across their organizations. In addition, it enhances the clients' capabilities to deliver, automate and integrate with other core services processes or technologies," Wojahn said.

PUBLISHED MARCH 4, 2015