One of the most fundamental problems facing IT is the great variety of individual IT tools available, each having its own set of data, management, and user interfaces. SiliconANGLE founder and CEO John Furrier recently sat down with Dave Wright, VP of Worldwide Solutions Consulting at ServiceNow, to discuss the complexity and lack of standardization that has resulted. Wright also shared how ServiceNow has added three new apps to its “single system of record” to help IT manage ERP better.

Enterprise IT cloud company ServiceNow, one of the fastest-growing players in the IT Service Management (ITSM) space, has extended its flagship platform with three new applications for simplifying the enterprise technology lifecycle.

The new Vendor Performance Management, Resource Management, and Password Reset applications were added to IT Service Automation Suite, the company’s cloud-based solution that automates IT workflows. The enhanced solution enables CIOs to make the most out of their tight budgets and to prioritize projects.

Unifying for a single system of record

The updated platform consolidates back-office processes into what the company calls a “single system of record” spanning the entire IT organization. “What this enables you to do is to manage the whole of IT in a consistent manner,” explained Dave Wright, VP of Worldwide Solutions Consulting at ServiceNow. “So you’re not just looking at your operations or your development phase; you’re looking at the entire lifecycle of any IT asset that you have in the company.”

Wright explained the history behind why today’s IT needs a single system of record. Over the years, “people had all these multi-tier platform apps that…needed to be implemented [and] configured in separate ways,” Wright said. “You have massive, complex data chains between them doing data transformation.”

The fundamental concept behind ServiceNow’s architecture, Wright said, is this “single system of record” where everything sits on one system and one data model with a common code base. “And all the functionality you get—the ability to have orchestrated workflows [and] the ability to do a lot of escalations—you could build that into any module within the system,” he added, explaining the single system of record’s main benefit.

The 3 new apps

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Vendor Performance Management, the first app, gives companies much-needed leverage over their tech suppliers by evaluating and comparing them with competitors. “What [this app] allows you to do is correlate all the different incidents, problems and outages that you’ve had with a vendor, and monitor the SLAs that you get with the vendor,” Wright explained. “So you can then compare and contrast all your vendors.”

The first app is complemented by the Resource Management app, a real-time tool for improving resource planning at scale and driving further cost savings. “What this allows you to do is manage the most expensive resource in the company, which is the people,” Wright said. “You can now look across your workforce and see who’s being utilized at what points. You can plan ahead and sort out capacity for peak periods and get a feel for what people are doing on a day-to-day basis.”

Finally, the Password Reset app lets end-users reset their own passwords on a self-service basis rather than having to ask IT. ServiceNow claims that the application reduces support requests by as much as 20 percent, which they said can amount to massive productivity gains. Besides, with today’s employees being more familiar with technology, many employees “aren’t expecting a system where you phone up and someone resets your password,” Wright said. “They want to do it themselves.”

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ServiceNow faces competition from HP’s Propel

ServiceNow is going strong, but it faces increased competition from vendors such as HP. HP last week introduced Propel, a freemium ITSM solution featuring a service catalog, a news feed and a knowledge base. The premium edition comes with enhanced security and integration with on-premise systems.

Suzanne Kattau contributed to this article.