ServiceNow and Celonis Join Forces to Attack Legacy IT Complexity

Pushing new-wave technologies to the front lines of enterprise IT’s toughest battles, ServiceNow and Celonis are promising to untangle convoluted legacy systems via a range of options from which business customers can choose.

On my weekly Cloud Wars Top 10 rankings, high-flying ServiceNow is #7, and in recent weeks has seen its market cap match and even exceed that of #9 IBM.

Celonis is a high-flyer itself whose breakthrough process-mining technology—recently branded as “execution management”—has been adopted by thousands of customers across the globe.

In today’s announcement, the leaders of ServiceNow and Celonis focused on their combined ability to help businesses identify processes that should be automated and then optimize that integration for seamless inclusion within the digital-business operations that are essential for competing in the digital economy.

In reading the material put out by ServiceNow and Celonis, my sense is that the companies are wisely choosing to give customers a set of options for how to deploy the new solutions. Customers can:

• choose to focus on fixing current process bottlenecks while otherwise maintaining the status quos of their environments;
• upgrade to the new solutions as part of a broader overhaul, which will ultimately drive greater benefits but will also be at least moderately disruptive during the process; or
• elect to deploy some combination of the two by attacking the bottlenecks and adding components of the broader solutions offered by ServiceNow and Celonis.

The press release from the companies offered a forward-looking and mildly speculative testimonial from a unit of industrial giant Siemens. Saying that Siemens GBS has “seen positive results to our processes” with its early use of Celonis, head of Digital Solutions Matthias Egelhaaf added that “we are very excited about the business-process opportunities” that ServiceNow and Celonis will be able to unlock together. 

ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott offered a broad perspective, saying in the press release that the real goal is to help business leaders “evolve business models and accelerate business transformation.” By joining forces with Celonis on this initiative, McDermott said, the tech firms expect to help customers “liberate business from decades-long process bottlenecks, integration challenges, and workforce frustration.”

My take on what McDermott’s describing is the partnership will help accelerate the speed at which businesses are able to operate, analyze data, optimize operations, and make better-informed decisions.

From the Celonis side, the initiative is aimed at helping customers “put data to work in every facet of business execution,” said cofounder and co-CEO Alex Rinke. He added that the partnership “underscores just how significantly data is revolutionizing enterprise software.”

This is a great move for ServiceNow, Celonis, and their customers because it gives those customers more choices for figuring out how to drive maximum value from their legacy environments while also being able to move at their own pace into the digital future.

I think we’ll see plenty more partnerships involving Cloud Wars Top 10 vendors like ServiceNow with high-potential “children of the cloud” in high-growth new areas such as RPA and other types of automation, low-code no-code, machine learning, digital twins, and mixed reality.

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