ServiceNow and Microsoft Partnership: Great for ServiceNow and Microsoft Customers, Great for Vendor Lock-In
ServiceNow and Microsoft are furthering their partnership by hosting the Now platform in the Azure-trusted cloud. These features and integrations are powerful, but comes at the price of vendor lock-in.
ServiceNow announced this partnership and the following items on July 9, 2019:
- ServiceNow will soon be available on Azure Cloud in the US Government and Australia regions.
- ServiceNow and Microsoft are working towards improving integrations between the Now platform and the Azure Marketplace.
- Microsoft is implementing ServiceNow’s IT and HR modules.
Source: Microsoft Azure at SoftwareReviews, Report in Press
Source: ServiceNow Service Management at SoftwareReviews, Report Published February 2019
Our Take
This partnership will help ServiceNow to expand its expertise of working in the government space. When this partnership includes other global regions, ServiceNow will be even more attractive to foreign governments because of this expertise.
Smaller government organizations should still strongly consider other service management vendors. ServiceNow is quite costly, and there are many mid-market ITSM solutions that also have experience working with government clients. Just because DISA uses ServiceNow doesn’t mean your regional police force or your municipality must use it.
By focusing on its partnership with Microsoft, customers can expect improved integrations between the Now platform and Microsoft Azure’s analytics capabilities. This means you can more easily analyze your CRM data, employee engagement data, and IT data, allowing for even more powerful chatbots, ChatOps capabilities, and proactive enterprise services.
The more customers rely on these features, though, the greater vendor lock-in they will experience to both ServiceNow and Azure. It will be much more disruptive when customers need to migrate from ServiceNow and Azure to a more inexpensive ESM offering on premises due to budgetary and political changes.
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