Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I discuss how ServiceNow is positioning itself as the AI platform for business transformation.
Highlights
00:15 — ServiceNow continues to distinguish itself as a very different sort of player in the Cloud Wars Top 10. It’s not an infrastructure company. As part of that, it’s making a big move in the world of agents. I wanted to share a little bit today about a fascinating conversation I had recently with Amit Zavery, its president, chief product officer, and chief operating officer.
01:39 — What’s happening with agents? What do customers want from them? How is this going to work? How are agents different? How are platforms different? The overall idea, Zavery said, is that ServiceNow has built a foundational platform. Any technology can be added to it, from infrastructure to large language models to agents.
02:14 — He said all agents are pretty good at going out and making requests, like, “Hey, I want to do this.” The challenge is you’ve got to be able then to come back and say, “Okay, I not only went out and found the information, I understood the business outcome that the customer is pursuing here.” It’s got to go end-to-end. You’ve got to touch a lot of different processes.
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03:22 — A big part of what he talked about was the orchestrator idea. We’re seeing others step up into this area, which is that businesses are going to have lots of different agents created by lots of different companies who can help pull all those together. Just like you’ve got a multi-cloud world now; you can have a multi-agent world.
04:20 — One thing that ServiceNow has done uniquely is, it’s got workflow technology. Now it’s formed partnerships with the three original hyperscalers: Microsoft, AWS, and Google Cloud. It also recently formed a partnership with Oracle focused on getting workflows tied together with Oracle databases.
