Cloudera has announced a collaboration with NVIDIA, which will enable the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) to integrate the RAPIDS Accelerator for Apache Spark 3.0, deployed on NVIDIA’s computing platforms.

The RAPIDS Accelerator for Apache Spark 3.0 will enable enterprises to create data pipelines around artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), without the need to change code, whilst delivering analytics and insights.

According to Cloudera, datasets are growing larger and used for more purposes, such as responding to fraud, developing products, and transforming the supply chain. However, that data creates bottlenecks for data scientists who cannot work quickly enough to train and operate models across their organisations.

Organisations can use an open source, GPU-accelerated platform, such as Apache Spark 3, to train models using AI and ML. As Cloudera Data Platform now supports this functionality, there are more opportunities for high-performance compute, data science, and AI support from research right through to production.

Cloudera chief product officer Arun Murthy says, “At a time when speed is everything, businesses are relying on the power of data more than they ever have. Our collaboration with NVIDIA will give customers the rocket fuel they need to better understand their data and realise the true transformational potential of AI.”

Murthy adds that the deeper integration with NVIDIA is the natural next step for the company.

NVIDIA data science product group senior director Scott McClellan adds, “Apache Spark is a cornerstone of the machine learning and data analytics pipelines enterprises rely on to remain competitive.”

“The processing power of NVIDIA-accelerated computing and Spark analytics running on Cloudera Data Platform provides the flexibility to meet deadlines when time is of the essence, and save on costs when the bottom line is most important.”

RAPIDS Accelerator for Apache Spark will be available in CDP Private Cloud this year. Cloudera and NVIDIA will also roll out other offerings over time, including Accelerated Deep Learning and Machine Learning in CDP Public Cloud in May.

Earlier this month Cloudera announced that CDP will be available through Google Cloud Platform. CDP on Google Cloud helps to create data lakes within any organisation’s Google Cloud. This enables organisations to run analytics and machine learning, migrate pipelines to Google Cloud, and create new pipelines.

“Cloudera Data Platform on Google Cloud is an ideal first step for our joint customers to support hybrid cloud,” says Murthy.

Ricoh has launched a new cloud-based, secure and efficient print management solution for New Zealand businesses.

The new solution, Universal Print, is a cloud-based print solution that allows organisations to manage their print infrastructure from a central location. This is easily achieved by connecting the printing device to Microsoft 365 environment, eliminating the need to resource and manage an on-premise print server.

“This fits perfectly with our strategy as a digital services provider,” says Ricoh New Zealand managing director, Mike Pollok.

“We’ve helped our customers move many of their day-to-day business processes to the cloud already and being able to take print with them offers a host of advantages,” he says.

“As a premium Microsoft Gold Partner and experienced print management provider, Ricoh is uniquely positioned to offer the latest, cutting-edge solution to our customers,” Pollok adds.

Universal Print uses Internet Print Protocol (IPP) that does not require device-specific installation or maintenance so its no longer necessary to install print drivers to every user device that needs to print.

As Universal Print runs completely on Microsoft Azure, when deployed with compatible printers, it completely eliminates the need for any on-premise infrastructure. For non-compatible printers, Universal Print connector software facilitates this process.

According to Ricoh, Universal Print comes with unique features to suit the needs of a modern, hybrid workplace. It allows location-based printing making it easy for users to find a printer nearest to them, keeps data and documents secure on the cloud, eliminates the need to install and maintain printer drivers across devices and offers robust management and reporting capabilities through the centralised Azure portal.

“Simply put, with Universal Print, businesses can easily scale up or down with changing requirements and control their print management system in an efficient, cost-effective manner,” the company says.

Ricoh New Zealand Limited empowers digital workplaces through document management, IT services, commercial printing and office communications. The company helps businesses transform the way they work and harness collective knowledge.

“As a truly global technology provider, Ricoh imagines what the future could bring, and embraces change driven by imaginative thinking.”

Last year, Ricoh was named a leader in IDC MarketScape’s Worldwide High-Speed Inkjet Press 2019-2020 Vendor Assessment.

The recognition cites Ricoh’s broad strengths, including technological innovation, attentiveness to customer feedback and a large install base. The report in particular noted Ricoh’s business development programmes, with high visibility and strong reputation as powerful complements to a robust technology portfolio.

The Challenge Facing Service Providers

Launching innovative enterprise communication services has historically been difficult for service providers. The process is time-consuming, resource-intensive, and slow to produce a return. As a result, many network operators have underutilised their existing assets—including VoLTE infrastructure and mobile subscriptions—when it comes to serving business customers.

That situation is beginning to change. A convergence of major technology shifts is opening up a genuinely new market for cloud-native communication services aimed at business users.

Technology Shifts Creating the Opportunity

Several concurrent developments are reshaping what service providers can offer enterprises:

• 5G: Higher throughput and lower latency enable richer real-time communication services.
• Cloud infrastructure: Microservices architectures allow providers to compose and release new offerings rapidly without rebuilding core systems.
• AI and Augmented Reality: Intelligent automation and AR-enabled workflows become viable for mobile-first businesses.
• IoT: Connected devices expand the communication perimeter well beyond phones and laptops.
• eSIM: Remote SIM provisioning removes friction from onboarding and device management, enabling self-service and automated ‘Try & Buy’ or ‘Multi Device’ scenarios.

Taken together, these shifts create a foundation for next-generation digital transformation and more flexible, mobile-first ways of working—particularly for smaller organisations that cannot afford traditional enterprise IT stacks.

A Framework for Delivering Cloud Communication Services

To capitalise on this opportunity, service providers should consider the following approach:

• Build or enhance turnkey services rather than pursuing fully custom deployments for every client.
• Deliver as a service to achieve scale, reduce time-to-market, and maintain quality-of-service controls without burdening the customer with on-premise infrastructure.
• Expose cloud-based microservices that can be composed into different use cases depending on the customer segment.
• Leverage existing network assets—VoLTE and eSIM infrastructure—rather than building from scratch.
• Prioritise self-service and automation, both for customer onboarding and ongoing service management.

The combination of cloud communication services with automated eSIM provisioning is particularly compelling. It allows business users to activate, manage, and expand their subscriptions with minimal friction—a genuine competitive differentiator for proactive providers.

Three Sales Strategy Steps to Revenue

Technology alone does not create revenue. Service providers also need a focused go-to-market strategy. The following three steps provide a practical framework.

1. Target the Right Client Segment

Business customers can be segmented in several ways:

• By size: Multinational companies (MNCs), large enterprises, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and microbusinesses.
• By industry: Retail, manufacturing, finance, IT, government, and others.
• By IT/communication maturity: How strategically important is technology to the organisation’s operations?

For cloud communication services specifically, the microbusiness segment is worth prioritising first. Microbusinesses are heavily mobile-first, have no in-house IT operations team, and are unlikely to demand fully custom integrations. By contrast, larger SMEs and enterprise organisations with strong internal IT departments often prefer bespoke solutions—which are expensive, slow to deliver, and frequently outdated by the time they launch.

2. Prioritise Convenience Over Feature Depth

For business users who are not IT specialists, convenience is the primary value driver. Effective cloud communication offerings should solve time-consuming and costly communication problems without requiring technical expertise to set up or maintain. When the communication layer just works, employees can focus on their actual business activities rather than managing tools.

3. Minimise the Investment Required from the Customer

Cloud communication services should not require significant upfront capital expenditure from the customer—neither in equipment and systems integration nor in specialist staff. The ‘as a service’ model is critical here: it transforms what would otherwise be a large IT project into an operational expense with a short time to value.

The Microbusiness Market Opportunity

The microbusiness segment is largely untapped when it comes to business-grade communication services. According to the original Ericsson perspective (citing a provider survey and an Ovum B2B demographics report from August 2018 covering North America, Europe, and Australia), approximately 80% of microbusinesses were found to be using consumer-grade subscriptions rather than business packages.

This creates a clear upsell opportunity. If service providers design targeted business packages with self-service onboarding and automation, they can migrate existing consumer subscribers to higher-value plans without significant sales overhead. Initial revenue modelling referenced in the original source suggested incremental revenue potential of roughly €8–€15 per user per month in Western Europe—on top of what microbusinesses already pay for consumer subscriptions.

The scale of the segment amplifies this: the Ovum data referenced approximately 28 million microbusiness enterprises and 52 million employees across the geographies studied. At scale, the addressable incremental revenue opportunity is significant—but capturing it requires automation and smart marketing rather than a large direct salesforce.

Expanding Beyond Microbusiness

A successful microbusiness launch builds the operational foundation—billing systems, self-service portals, eSIM provisioning pipelines—needed to move upmarket. The next logical step is targeting SMEs and larger enterprises, but with an important filter: focus on organisations that are not looking for custom-built solutions. These are businesses that prioritise speed of adoption and operational simplicity over deep integration with proprietary internal systems.

Service providers that establish this progression—from microbusiness to mainstream SME—will be well positioned as cloud communication becomes a standard expectation rather than a differentiator.

Key Takeaways for DevOps and Platform Teams

For engineering and platform teams supporting service providers or building cloud communication products, the practical implications are:

• Design for self-service from day one—automated provisioning, including eSIM, is not optional in a high-volume, low-touch segment.
• Adopt a microservices architecture so that communication capabilities (calling, messaging, conferencing) can be bundled and unbundled per customer segment without full re-engineering.
• Build robust CI/CD pipelines that allow new service bundles to reach market quickly—time-to-market is a primary competitive lever.
• Prioritise observability and quality-of-service controls at the API layer so that service-level guarantees can be contractually offered to business customers.
• Automate billing and subscription management to support the ‘as a service’ model at the scale microbusiness volumes require.

Original perspective: Ericsson (ericsson.com), February 2020.

What Is the ServiceNow Store?

The ServiceNow Store is the official marketplace for certified third-party applications and integrations that extend the ServiceNow platform. It allows organizations to add pre-built capabilities on top of core ServiceNow modules — covering IT Service Management (ITSM), IT Operations Management (ITOM), Security Operations, HR Service Delivery, and more — without building custom integrations from scratch.

For DevOps and IT operations teams, the Store represents a practical shortcut: rather than writing and maintaining bespoke connectors, teams can install certified apps that have already passed ServiceNow’s technical validation process.

Why the ServiceNow App Ecosystem Has Grown

Several converging factors have driven adoption of ServiceNow Store apps over recent years:

• Enterprise adoption of ServiceNow itself: As more large enterprises standardized on ServiceNow as their IT workflow platform, demand grew for integrations with tools already in use — monitoring platforms, identity providers, communication tools, and remote support software.
• Hybrid and multi-cloud operations: Teams running workloads across cloud providers need monitoring and incident management tools that surface alerts inside a single pane of glass. ServiceNow integrations with tools like Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and PagerDuty address this directly.
• Compliance and identity requirements: Regulated industries increasingly require that access management and audit trails run through a single platform, driving integrations with identity tools such as Okta and SailPoint IdentityIQ.
• Remote work and collaboration: Tools like Microsoft Teams, Talkdesk, and LogMeIn Rescue gained significant enterprise footprint, and ServiceNow integrations allow agents to work incidents without leaving their primary communication interface.

Notable Vendors in the ServiceNow Store Ecosystem

The following vendors were highlighted in the original market overview as key players with certified apps in the ServiceNow Store. The descriptions below reflect their general integration use cases, not specific benchmark or sales data.

Incident Alerting and On-Call Management

• PagerDuty: Bidirectional integration that syncs PagerDuty incidents with ServiceNow incidents. On-call escalation policies and alert routing can be managed from either platform.
• xMatters: Provides event-driven workflows that can trigger ServiceNow incident creation, notify the right on-call responders, and update records as incidents are resolved.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

• Dynatrace: Pushes AI-detected anomalies and root cause analysis data into ServiceNow ITOM, enabling automatic incident and change record creation.
• Cisco AppDynamics: Feeds application performance alerts into ServiceNow, correlating business transaction health with IT service records.

Identity and Access Management

• Okta: Integrates user provisioning and access request workflows with ServiceNow, allowing HR and IT teams to manage joiner/mover/leaver processes through a single workflow engine.
• SailPoint IdentityIQ: Surfaces access certification campaigns and policy violations as ServiceNow tasks, tying identity governance into the broader ITSM workflow.

Remote Support and Collaboration

• TeamViewer: Enables support agents to launch remote sessions directly from ServiceNow incident records, with session data logged back to the ticket.
• LogMeIn Rescue: Similar remote support capability, allowing technicians to initiate and log remote sessions without leaving ServiceNow.
• Glance: Provides screen-sharing and co-browsing capabilities triggered from within ServiceNow agent workspace.

Communication and Notification

• Microsoft Teams Notifications: Routes ServiceNow incident alerts, approval requests, and task updates directly to Teams channels or individual users, reducing context switching for agents.
• Talkdesk: Integrates cloud contact center functionality with ServiceNow, so inbound call data, caller history, and case records are surfaced automatically for agents handling voice interactions.

Software Asset and IT Asset Management

• Snow Software: Synchronizes software inventory and license compliance data with ServiceNow ITAM, providing a unified view of software assets and spend.
• Nuvolo: Extends ServiceNow into facilities and medical equipment management, connecting physical asset data with service workflows.
• Evergreen: Focused on IT portfolio and application rationalization data surfaced within the ServiceNow platform.

Enterprise Identity and Security

• IBM: IBM offers multiple integrations across ServiceNow modules, including connections to IBM QRadar for security operations and IBM Watson for virtual agent capabilities.

Deployment Models: Cloud-Based vs. Web-Based Apps

ServiceNow Store apps generally fall into two deployment patterns:

• Cloud-based integrations: The third-party vendor hosts the integration middleware. ServiceNow communicates with the vendor’s cloud service via REST APIs or MID Server. This model reduces on-premises infrastructure requirements but introduces a dependency on the vendor’s availability and data processing terms.
• Web-based / platform-native apps: The app runs entirely within the ServiceNow instance as scoped application code. These integrations typically offer tighter platform cohesion and simpler upgrade paths aligned to ServiceNow release cycles.

When evaluating an app, check whether it uses a MID Server (relevant for on-premises or private cloud data sources), direct outbound REST calls, or a vendor-hosted iPaaS layer. Each has different firewall, latency, and data residency implications.

Buyer Segments: Enterprise vs. SME Considerations

The market overview segments buyers into large enterprises and SMEs. In practice, the evaluation criteria differ significantly:

What to Evaluate Before Installing a ServiceNow Store App

Not all Store apps are maintained equally. Before deploying any third-party app into a production instance, consider the following:

1. Certification level: ServiceNow distinguishes between “Built on Now” (developed by a partner on the platform) and apps that simply pass basic technical review. Understand which tier applies.
2. ServiceNow release compatibility: Confirm the app supports your current instance version (e.g., Tokyo, Utah, Vancouver) and that the vendor has a track record of updating for new releases.
3. MID Server requirements: If your data sources are behind a firewall, verify whether the integration requires a MID Server and what network access it needs.
4. Scoped vs. global application: Scoped apps are sandboxed and safer to install, but may have access limitations. Global-scope apps have broader platform access and carry higher risk if poorly written.
5. Support and roadmap: Check the vendor’s Store listing for last-updated date, user ratings, and whether they publish a public roadmap.
6. Data handling: For integrations passing sensitive data (PII, security alerts), review the vendor’s data processing agreements and confirm data residency aligns with your compliance requirements.

Regional Adoption Patterns

The original market overview noted regional segmentation across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America, with specific countries including the U.S., Canada, Germany, France, the U.K., Italy, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, Mexico, and Brazil. North America has historically been the largest ServiceNow market given the concentration of Fortune 500 enterprises and technology-driven ITSM adoption. Europe represents significant growth driven by GDPR compliance requirements, which have accelerated investments in identity governance and security operations integrations. Asia-Pacific growth has been driven by manufacturing and financial services sectors expanding ServiceNow deployments.

Strategic Trends Shaping the Ecosystem

Beyond individual vendor integrations, several broader trends are shaping how organizations use the ServiceNow Store:

• AIOps integrations: Monitoring vendors are increasingly exposing AI-driven root cause analysis through their ServiceNow integrations, reducing mean time to identify (MTTI) by correlating alerts before a human reviews them.
• Low-code workflow composition: ServiceNow’s Flow Designer and IntegrationHub allow teams to build custom spokes connecting Store apps in multi-step workflows without writing Jelly or JavaScript.
• M&A activity: Consolidation among monitoring, ITSM, and security vendors means integration points shift. Teams should track vendor acquisition news that may affect supported integrations.
• Zero-trust alignment: Identity-centric Store apps (Okta, SailPoint) are increasingly positioned as part of zero-trust architecture rollouts, not just IT provisioning tools.

Summary

The ServiceNow Store provides a structured, certified way to extend the ServiceNow platform with integrations from leading vendors across monitoring, identity, remote support, and communication categories. For DevOps and IT operations teams, the most practical value comes from bidirectional integrations that reduce context switching — surfacing alerts, approvals, and asset data directly within ServiceNow workflows rather than requiring agents to operate across disconnected tools. Evaluating apps on certification level, release compatibility, data handling, and vendor support cadence will reduce integration risk and total cost of ownership.

What Resources Can Be Protected?

The first question to ask about any backup solution is which AWS services it supports. AWS Backup covers several core services, including:

• Amazon DynamoDB — managed NoSQL database
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) — block storage for EC2 instances
• Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) — managed network file storage
• Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) — managed relational databases
• AWS Storage Gateway — a hybrid service that exposes iSCSI volumes to on-premises systems

Third-party tools may extend coverage to additional AWS services or offer more granular control over what gets backed up. Before selecting a solution, audit every AWS service your organization relies on and confirm that it is included in the product’s supported scope.

Application Consistency

AWS Backup relies on snapshots. For Windows workloads running on EC2, snapshots can leverage the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to produce application-consistent backups — meaning the backup captures a clean state that applications can reliably recover from. Organizations running non-Windows workloads should verify whether AWS Backup can deliver application-consistent backups for their specific stack, or whether a third-party agent-based solution would be a better fit.

Where Are Backups Stored?

AWS Backup stores data in backup vaults, which are encrypted using AWS Key Management Service (KMS) keys. A single AWS account can create up to 100 backup vaults, and each vault can hold up to one million recovery points. Vaults are straightforward to create and are well-integrated with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for access control.

The key limitation is that backup vaults reside entirely within the AWS cloud. This creates two potential risks:

1. Account compromise: If an attacker gains access to an AWS account, backups stored within the same account could be at risk alongside primary data. AWS Organizations and cross-account backup copies can mitigate this, but they require deliberate configuration.
2. Regional or cloud-level disruption: While a full AWS outage is rare, regional incidents do occur. Backups stored in the same region as the source data may be affected by the same event.

Many third-party backup vendors store data outside the AWS cloud entirely — for example, in a separate cloud provider’s object storage. This provides genuine separation between primary data and backups, which can strengthen your overall resilience posture. It may also reduce storage costs depending on what Amazon charges for backup vault storage versus alternative destinations.

Data Recovery: Speed, Flexibility, and Support

A backup strategy is only as good as its recovery process. AWS Backup has two notable advantages here:

• No data egress over the internet: Because backup data is stored within the AWS cloud, restore operations do not require transferring large datasets across the internet. This typically results in faster recovery times.
• Single-vendor support: When something goes wrong during a restore, having Amazon as both the cloud provider and the backup vendor means you deal with one support chain rather than coordinating between multiple vendors.

Third-party solutions can offer greater recovery flexibility. Some tools allow EC2 instances to be restored to alternative cloud platforms, such as Microsoft Azure — a valuable option for organizations that want multi-cloud resilience or are in the middle of a cloud migration. Third-party products may also provide more granular restore options, such as item-level recovery for databases or file-level restore from volume snapshots.

Integration With Your Existing Backup Infrastructure

A factor that is easy to overlook is operational overhead. If your organization already manages a backup platform for on-premises workloads, ask whether it also supports AWS environments. Introducing a completely separate backup tool for cloud data means additional consoles to monitor, separate reporting, and separate policies to maintain.

Some third-party vendors provide unified platforms that cover both on-premises and cloud workloads under a single interface. This can reduce complexity and make it easier to enforce consistent RPO and RTO targets across your entire environment. AWS Backup, by contrast, is AWS-specific and does not extend to on-premises infrastructure directly.

Key Decision Factors at a Glance

Conclusion

AWS Backup is a solid, well-integrated choice for organizations that primarily run AWS workloads and value simplicity, fast in-cloud restores, and native service integration. It is most effective when paired with cross-account or cross-region backup copies to address the single-account risk.

Third-party solutions become more attractive when you need broader service coverage, application-consistent backups for non-Windows workloads, off-cloud storage for stronger isolation, cross-cloud recovery options, or a unified platform that spans on-premises and cloud environments.

There is no single correct answer — the right AWS backup strategy depends on your workload types, recovery objectives, risk tolerance, and existing tooling. Evaluate each option against those specific requirements before committing.

New Relic Unveils a New Generation of Observability at FutureStack 2019

At its annual FutureStack conference in New York City, New Relic announced a series of significant platform innovations centred on making New Relic One the industry’s first observability platform described as simultaneously open, connected, and programmable. CEO and founder Lew Cirne led the announcements, which included new products for log management, distributed tracing, metrics ingestion, and AI-powered incident response.

The additions respond directly to how modern engineering teams operate: running distributed, containerised workloads across multiple clouds, often managing data from a heterogeneous mix of agents, open-source tools, and third-party services. New Relic One aims to consolidate that data into a single platform with built-in intelligence and extensibility.

“New Relic One is now the world’s first observability platform that is open, enabling customers to bring in agent-based and open telemetry data so they have no blind spots; connected, allowing customers to see relationships between their systems so they can act more quickly and effectively; and programmable, empowering customers to build entirely new applications on top of New Relic to fuel their business. It’s not a platform unless you can build apps on it.”

— Lew Cirne, CEO and Founder, New Relic

Programmability: Building Custom Applications on New Relic One

One of the headline announcements was the general availability of programmability across the New Relic One platform. This capability allows New Relic customers, partners, and developers to build purpose-built applications directly on top of New Relic One — combining observability data with their own business data in a single interface.

Key Programmability Features

• Familiar tech stack: Applications are built using React.js and GraphQL — widely used technologies in modern web development — lowering the barrier to entry for engineering teams already familiar with the JavaScript ecosystem.
• Fast time-to-app: New Relic claims developers can go from idea to working application in minutes, not days.
• No additional cost: Programmability is available to all existing New Relic customers at no extra charge.
• Open-source app catalogue: New Relic released an initial set of applications, co-developed with early-access customers and partners, on GitHub under the Apache licence.

“The new programmability features have equipped us to get significantly more value from New Relic, at no additional cost. Our DevOps & SRE teams are now able to create tailored apps, for their specific business needs, that easily fit into our workstream. At an enterprise-scale, programmability has enabled an agility in data for both application and platform teams.”

— Joshua Biggley, Sr. Engineer, Enterprise Monitoring, Cardinal Health

Initial Open-Source New Relic One Applications

New Relic released the following apps as free, open-source downloads from GitHub at launch:

• Cloud Optimize — Compares provisioned cloud resource sizes against actual utilisation, helping teams identify over-provisioned infrastructure and reduce cloud spend.
• GitHub Integration — Surfaces service ownership and recent commit history directly within New Relic One, so on-call engineers can immediately understand what a service does and who last changed it.
• Site Analyzer — Models how improvements to performance KPIs such as page load time and traffic volume can translate into better conversion and customer experience metrics.
• Status Page — Aggregates Statuspage.io status feeds into a single dashboard, giving teams a unified view of upstream dependencies during an incident.
• Customer Journeys — Tracks cohort progress through conversion funnels, providing product and engineering teams with visibility into how user behaviour correlates with technical performance.

Open: New Relic Logs, Traces, and Metrics

New Relic’s “open” pillar focuses on eliminating blind spots by making it straightforward to ingest the full range of telemetry data — logs, metrics, events, and traces — regardless of source.

New Relic Logs

New Relic Logs is a log management capability integrated directly into New Relic One. Rather than context-switching between a dedicated log aggregation tool and an APM or infrastructure dashboard, teams can search, filter, and correlate log data alongside application traces and infrastructure metrics in a single interface.

• Ad hoc log searches return results without pre-defined indexing configurations.
• Designed to scale without the operational overhead of self-hosted log management solutions (e.g. managing Elasticsearch clusters).
• Available to New Relic customers at time of announcement.

New Relic Traces and New Relic Metrics

New Relic Traces and New Relic Metrics extend the platform’s data ingestion capabilities to cover distributed tracing and time-series metrics from any source — not just New Relic’s own agents.

• Agent-based and agentless: Teams can send data from existing New Relic agents or route telemetry from open-source and third-party instrumentation directly into the platform.
• OpenTelemetry support: New Relic confirmed active contributions to and support for the OpenTelemetry project, as well as involvement in AdoptOpenJDK and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
• Both products were made generally available at FutureStack 2019.

Together, Logs, Traces, and Metrics cover the four pillars of observability telemetry (the fourth being Events), giving teams a complete data foundation within a single platform.

Connected: New Relic AI for AIOps and Smarter Incident Response

New Relic AI is the company’s answer to alert fatigue — a chronic problem for DevOps, SRE, and on-call engineering teams operating large-scale systems. The product applies machine learning to correlate, aggregate, and de-duplicate incident signals, presenting teams with a prioritised, contextualised view of issues rather than a flood of raw alerts.

New Relic AI Capabilities

• Noise reduction: New Relic reported that initial customers observed more than 80% reduction in alerting noise. (See review notes.)
• Automatic anomaly detection: The system identifies unusual behaviour in production metrics without requiring teams to define manual thresholds for every signal.
• PagerDuty integration: New Relic AI connects directly with PagerDuty, enriching incidents with contextual observability data without requiring changes to existing on-call rotations or escalation policies.
• Slack integration: Critical incident context and anomaly alerts are surfaced in Slack channels, keeping teams informed in the tools they already use during an incident.
• Reduced MTTR: By automatically correlating related alerts and surfacing probable root causes, New Relic AI aims to cut mean time to resolution.

Why This Matters for DevOps and SRE Teams

The FutureStack 2019 announcements reflect a broader shift in how observability platforms are expected to work. Stitching together separate tools for logs, metrics, traces, and alerting introduces toil, context loss, and integration maintenance burden. The New Relic One direction — a unified data plane with open ingest, cross-signal correlation, and a programmable surface for custom applications — addresses operational pain points that are well-recognised across the industry.

For teams already invested in open-source telemetry standards like OpenTelemetry, New Relic’s stated commitment to those projects (including contributions to CNCF) signals that vendor lock-in at the instrumentation layer is less of a concern than it was with earlier generations of APM tooling.

The programmability layer is particularly notable for platform engineering teams: the ability to embed observability data into custom internal tooling — without maintaining a separate backend — has meaningful implications for developer experience and operational efficiency at scale.

Market Overview

According to Persistence Market Research, the global IT infrastructure monitoring market was valued at approximately US$19.24 billion in 2015 and was forecast to reach US$34.1 billion by 2024, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.6% over the 2016–2024 forecast period.

IT infrastructure monitoring tools have become essential for organisations that need to guarantee the availability of their services and minimise the financial impact of unplanned downtime. These tools apply equally to physical hardware, virtualised environments, and cloud-based systems.

Key Vendors in the Market

The report identified several major players competing in this space, including:

• Centreon – open-source-based monitoring platform widely used in European enterprises
• CA Technologies – enterprise IT management and monitoring solutions (now part of Broadcom)
• Splunk Inc. – machine data analytics and infrastructure observability platform
• Nagios Enterprises, LLC – one of the most widely deployed open-source monitoring frameworks
• AppDynamics, Inc. – application performance monitoring with infrastructure correlation capabilities (acquired by Cisco)

These vendors compete across software licensing, managed services, and cloud-delivered monitoring offerings.

Growth Drivers

Several factors were identified as accelerating adoption of IT infrastructure monitoring solutions:

• Downtime cost reduction: Undetected system failures can cause significant financial losses. Monitoring tools help detect issues early, reducing both mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to resolve (MTTR).
• Security and compliance requirements: Growing regulatory pressure and the increasing frequency of cyber incidents have made continuous infrastructure monitoring a baseline security control for many organisations.
• Cloud and hybrid infrastructure growth: As workloads shift to cloud and hybrid environments, monitoring tools capable of spanning on-premises and cloud resources have become increasingly important.
• Digital transformation initiatives: Enterprises expanding their digital service offerings require robust monitoring to maintain service-level agreements (SLAs) and customer experience standards.

Market Restraints

Despite positive growth trends, the market faced notable headwinds:

• Security concerns with cloud-based monitoring: Cloud and hosted monitoring solutions require organisations to extend trust to third-party providers. Cloud-based solutions inherently have a broader attack surface compared to air-gapped on-premises tools. This concern was cited as a factor that could limit market growth, particularly in regulated industries.
• Complexity and integration costs: Deploying comprehensive monitoring across heterogeneous environments can be technically complex and expensive, particularly for smaller organisations.

Market Segmentation

By Type: Software vs. Services

In 2015, the market was divided between software and services segments:

• Software segment: valued at US$6.1 billion in 2015, estimated at US$6.5 billion by end of 2016.
• Services segment: the larger of the two at US$13.1 billion in 2015, projected to reach US$13.9 billion by end of 2016. Services include implementation, managed monitoring, and support contracts.

By End User: Large Enterprises vs. SMEs

Large enterprises dominated end-user adoption, accounting for 73% of overall revenue in 2015. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) contributed the remaining 27%. The higher share of large enterprises reflects the complexity and scale of infrastructure that typically justifies dedicated monitoring investment.

By Deployment Model: On-Premises vs. Cloud

On-premises deployment was the dominant model in 2015, representing 69.8% of total market revenue. However, cloud and hosted monitoring solutions were forecast to grow at the highest CAGR over the forecast period, reflecting broader enterprise trends toward cloud-first infrastructure strategies.

By Industry Vertical

The Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) vertical was the largest adopter in 2015, holding over 40% of overall market revenue. This is consistent with the sector’s strict uptime requirements, regulatory mandates, and high sensitivity to data breaches.

The healthcare segment was forecast to record the highest CAGR during the forecast period, driven by accelerating digitisation of health records, connected medical devices, and increasing regulatory requirements around system availability and data protection.

Regional Analysis

North America held the largest share of the global IT infrastructure monitoring market in 2015 and was expected to maintain this position throughout the forecast period. This is attributable to the high concentration of technology vendors, early adoption of cloud infrastructure, and mature enterprise IT spending in the region.

Asia Pacific was identified as a high-growth region, also forecast to expand at a CAGR of 6.6% between 2016 and 2024. Rapid digital transformation across economies such as China, India, and Southeast Asia was cited as a key driver of this growth.

Why IT Infrastructure Monitoring Matters for DevOps Teams

From a DevOps perspective, infrastructure monitoring is a foundational capability that underpins several engineering practices:

• Continuous delivery pipelines depend on infrastructure health checks to gate deployments safely.
• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices use infrastructure monitoring data to calculate error budgets and inform SLO/SLA compliance.
• Incident management is directly improved by monitoring tooling that reduces MTTD and MTTR.
• Capacity planning relies on historical metrics collected by monitoring systems to forecast resource requirements accurately.

As infrastructure grows more distributed and cloud-native, the monitoring tools organisations choose—whether open-source solutions like Nagios or commercial platforms like Splunk and AppDynamics—play a critical role in maintaining operational visibility across the full stack.

What Is IT Help Desk Software?

IT help desk software gives support teams a single system of record for incoming requests and incidents. Core capabilities typically include:

• Ticket lifecycle management – logging, routing, escalating, and closing support requests.
• Workflow automation – auto-assigning tickets, triggering notifications, and enforcing SLA rules without manual intervention.
• Self-service portals – allowing end users to submit requests and search a knowledge base independently.
• Reporting and analytics – tracking resolution times, agent workload, and customer satisfaction metrics.
• Integrations – connecting with monitoring tools, CMDB systems, chat platforms, and CI/CD pipelines common in DevOps environments.

Notable Platforms in the Market

The market includes a wide range of vendors catering to different organization sizes and use cases. Frequently cited players include:

• Jira Service Management (formerly Jira Service Desk) – tightly integrated with Atlassian’s developer toolchain, popular with DevOps and software engineering teams.
• Zendesk – a widely adopted customer-facing and internal support platform with strong omnichannel capabilities.
• Freshdesk / Freshservice – Freshworks’ consumer-support and ITSM-focused products respectively, both cloud-native.
• ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus – an on-premise-friendly option with deep ITIL alignment.
• LiveAgent – known for multi-channel ticketing including live chat and social media.
• TeamSupport – oriented toward B2B customer support teams.
• LiveChat – primarily a live-chat solution that also routes conversations into a ticketing layer.
• MSP Anywhere, Samanage, Front, AzureDesk, Vision Helpdesk, Nectar Desk, Techinline FixMe.IT, XSellco, Dixa, NABD, DiamanteDesk, ZupportDesk – additional vendors serving specialized niches such as managed service providers, e-commerce support, and open-source deployments.

Organizations should evaluate vendors against their own SLA requirements, budget, existing toolchain, and whether they need cloud-hosted or on-premise deployment.

Deployment Models

Cloud-Based

SaaS delivery removes the burden of infrastructure management, offers faster onboarding, and typically includes automatic updates. It suits organizations that prioritize scalability and minimal upfront capital expenditure. Most modern vendors default to cloud-first delivery.

On-Premise

Self-hosted deployments give organizations full control over data residency and customization. They are common in regulated industries—such as healthcare, finance, and government—where data sovereignty or strict compliance mandates make a third-party SaaS model difficult to justify.

Key Vertical Markets

IT help desk software is used across many industries, but several verticals drive disproportionate adoption:

• IT support and managed services – the primary use case; MSPs and internal IT departments use these tools to manage incidents, problems, and change requests at scale.
• Healthcare – hospitals and health systems use help desk platforms to support clinical and administrative staff, with particular attention to HIPAA-compliant data handling.
• Education – universities and school districts deploy help desk tools to support faculty, staff, and students across distributed campuses and remote learning environments.
• Retail and e-commerce – customer support teams handling order issues, returns, and product questions rely on omnichannel ticketing.
• Financial services – internal IT desks and customer-facing support benefit from audit trails and SLA enforcement built into modern platforms.

Market Drivers

Several structural trends continue to push organizations toward investing in dedicated help desk platforms:

• Remote and hybrid work – distributed workforces generate a higher volume of IT support requests and make informal, walk-up support impossible.
• Digital transformation initiatives – as organizations adopt more software, the number of applications requiring support grows, increasing ticket volume and complexity.
• DevOps adoption – engineering teams increasingly integrate service management tooling directly into CI/CD pipelines, creating demand for tools like Jira Service Management that bridge development and operations.
• Regulatory compliance – audit requirements in healthcare, finance, and government mandate documented, traceable support processes that informal communication channels cannot provide.
• AI and automation capabilities – vendors are embedding machine-learning-driven ticket classification, suggested responses, and chatbot deflection to reduce agent load.

Market Restraints and Challenges

• Implementation complexity – migrating from legacy systems or spreadsheets to a structured platform requires process redesign and change management effort.
• Total cost of ownership – per-agent SaaS pricing can escalate significantly as organizations grow; on-premise alternatives carry infrastructure and maintenance costs.
• Integration debt – connecting a help desk platform to existing monitoring, ITSM, identity, and communication tools takes engineering time.
• User adoption – support staff accustomed to email or chat-based workflows may resist structured ticketing processes without adequate training.

Evaluation Framework for DevOps Teams

When selecting an IT help desk platform, DevOps and platform engineering teams should consider the following criteria:

1. API and webhook support – can the tool trigger or respond to events in your CI/CD pipeline, monitoring stack, or incident management platform?
2. ITIL alignment – does it support incident, problem, change, and asset management if your organization follows ITIL practices?
3. SLA management – can you define, track, and report on service level objectives per ticket category or customer tier?
4. Self-service and knowledge base – a well-maintained knowledge base reduces repetitive tickets; evaluate authoring and search quality.
5. Reporting depth – ensure you can export data or connect a BI tool for capacity planning and trend analysis.
6. Security and compliance posture – review SOC 2 reports, data residency options, and access control models before committing.

Summary

The IT help desk software market is mature but still evolving rapidly, driven by automation, AI-assisted triage, and deeper integration with DevOps toolchains. Whether you are evaluating an enterprise ITSM platform like Jira Service Management or ManageEngine, a cloud-native SaaS option like Zendesk or Freshservice, or a smaller specialized tool, the fundamentals remain the same: choose a platform that fits your team’s workflow, integrates cleanly with your existing stack, and scales with your organization’s growth without creating unsustainable licensing costs.

Original market overview sourced from Contrive Datum Insights via newstechmarkets.com (2019). Vendor landscape and market conditions have evolved since publication; verify current vendor offerings and market data independently.

Why Incident Management Software Matters for DevOps Teams

As organizations accelerate software delivery through DevOps practices, the ability to detect, triage, and resolve production incidents quickly becomes a competitive differentiator. Incident management software sits at the intersection of on-call scheduling, alerting, runbook automation, and post-incident learning. Without a structured toolchain, engineering teams waste critical minutes during outages routing pages manually, duplicating work, and losing context that could prevent repeat failures.

The global market for IT and DevOps incident management software has grown steadily since the mid-2010s, driven by cloud adoption, the proliferation of microservices architectures, and rising customer expectations for service availability. Demand spans both large enterprises managing complex, distributed systems and small-to-medium businesses (SMEs) seeking affordable, SaaS-delivered solutions.

Key Players in the Incident Management Software Market

The following platforms were identified as leading vendors in the incident management space as of the 2019 timeframe. Each has continued to evolve its feature set, so engineering teams should evaluate current capabilities directly with each vendor.

• PagerDuty – One of the most widely adopted on-call and incident response platforms. Provides alert routing, escalation policies, on-call scheduling, and an event intelligence layer that reduces alert noise through machine learning.
• Freshservice – An ITSM platform with built-in incident management aligned to ITIL practices, popular with IT operations teams that want a service desk and incident workflow in a single SaaS product.
• Samanage (now SolarWinds Service Desk) – A cloud-based ITSM solution offering incident, problem, and change management alongside asset management.
• JIRA Service Management (formerly JIRA Service Desk) – Atlassian’s ITSM offering, tightly integrated with JIRA Software, making it a natural choice for teams already using the Atlassian ecosystem for issue tracking and project management.
• Opsgenie (acquired by Atlassian) – An alerting and on-call management platform that integrates with monitoring tools such as Datadog, Prometheus, and Grafana, and routes alerts to the right responder.
• VictorOps (now Splunk On-Call) – Focuses on incident collaboration, enabling teams to chat, annotate timelines, and run runbooks within a single incident context.
• NinjaRMM (now NinjaOne) – A remote monitoring and management platform used primarily by managed service providers (MSPs) for endpoint monitoring and automated remediation.
• ServiceNow – Enterprise-grade ITSM with deep incident, problem, and change management workflows. Common in large enterprises with mature ITIL processes.
• Symantec (Broadcom) – Offers security-oriented incident management as part of its broader IT security portfolio.
• Web Help Desk (SolarWinds) – An on-premise or SaaS help desk with incident ticketing capabilities suited to smaller IT teams.
• DERDACK Enterprise Alert – Specializes in critical alerting and mobile incident notification, with a focus on industrial and enterprise environments.
• SunView ChangeGear – An ITSM suite offering ITIL-aligned incident and change management workflows.

Deployment Models: Cloud vs. On-Premise

Incident management tools are generally available in two deployment models, each with trade-offs that DevOps and IT teams should consider carefully.

Cloud-Based (SaaS)

Cloud-delivered platforms such as PagerDuty, Opsgenie, and Freshservice offer faster time-to-value, automatic updates, and elastic scalability. They are well-suited to teams embracing cloud-native infrastructure. The subscription model shifts costs from capital expenditure to operating expenditure, which many finance teams prefer. The primary concerns are data residency and compliance for regulated industries.

On-Premise

On-premise deployments give organizations full control over data and network boundaries. They are common in government, financial services, and healthcare environments subject to strict data sovereignty requirements. The trade-off is higher operational overhead: teams must manage upgrades, availability, and scaling themselves.

Market Segments by Organization Size

Large Enterprises

Large organizations typically require deep integration with existing ITSM frameworks (ITIL, COBIT), complex escalation trees, role-based access controls, audit trails, and SLA reporting. Platforms like ServiceNow, JIRA Service Management, and enterprise PagerDuty plans are commonly evaluated at this tier. Total cost of ownership, vendor support SLAs, and API extensibility tend to dominate buying decisions.

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)

SMEs prioritize ease of setup, transparent pricing, and a low administrative burden. SaaS-first tools with free tiers or low per-user pricing—such as Freshservice, Opsgenie, or the free tier of PagerDuty—allow smaller teams to implement structured incident response without dedicated ITSM administrators.

Regional Market Activity

Adoption of incident management software is global, with notable activity across the following regions:

• United States – Home to most major vendors and the largest installed base, driven by high cloud adoption and mature DevOps practices.
• Europe – Strong demand, shaped in part by GDPR compliance requirements that influence deployment model choices.
• China – Growing adoption as domestic technology companies scale their engineering organizations.
• Japan – Enterprise IT investment in modernizing legacy ITSM toolchains.
• Southeast Asia and India – Rapidly expanding engineering talent pools and SaaS-first startup ecosystems driving SME adoption.
• Central and South America – Emerging market with growing cloud infrastructure investment.

What to Evaluate When Choosing an Incident Management Platform

Market reports provide useful context, but DevOps engineers need practical criteria. Consider the following when evaluating tools:

1. Alerting integrations – Does the platform integrate natively with your monitoring stack (Prometheus, Datadog, CloudWatch, Grafana, Nagios)? Webhook support is a minimum baseline; native integrations reduce setup friction.
2. On-call scheduling flexibility – Can you model your actual rotation patterns, including overrides, follow-the-sun schedules, and multi-tier escalations?
3. Noise reduction – Alert fatigue is a serious reliability problem. Evaluate deduplication, suppression, and grouping capabilities before committing to a platform.
4. Runbook and automation support – Can responders trigger automated remediation (Lambda functions, Ansible playbooks, scripts) directly from an incident? Platforms that support this reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR).
5. Post-incident review tooling – Does the platform generate incident timelines, support blameless retrospective workflows, and export data for trend analysis?
6. Pricing model – Per-user pricing can become expensive as teams grow. Understand how pricing scales with on-call responders, API call volumes, and integrations.
7. Compliance and data residency – For regulated industries, confirm where incident data is stored and whether the vendor offers data processing agreements.

Market Outlook

The incident management software market has consolidated through acquisition since 2019—Atlassian acquired Opsgenie and merged JIRA Service Desk into JIRA Service Management; VictorOps was acquired by Splunk; Samanage rebranded under SolarWinds. This consolidation reflects the strategic importance of reliability tooling to larger platform vendors. Organizations evaluating tools should factor in vendor roadmap stability and the risk of feature changes following acquisitions.

Emerging capabilities to watch include AIOps-driven anomaly detection before incidents occur, tighter integration between incident management and observability platforms, and reliability scoring frameworks (such as SLO-based alerting) that tie on-call policies directly to user-facing reliability targets.

Summary

The IT and DevOps incident management software market offers a broad range of solutions suited to teams at every stage of DevOps maturity. Cloud-native teams prioritizing speed and integration depth tend to favor PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or Splunk On-Call. ITIL-oriented IT departments often align with ServiceNow or JIRA Service Management. SMEs looking for rapid deployment and predictable costs have strong SaaS options in Freshservice and entry-tier PagerDuty plans. Regardless of platform, the goal is the same: reduce the time between a production failure and its resolution, and use every incident as a learning opportunity to improve system reliability.

What Is IT/DevOps Incident Management Software?

Incident management software automates the workflow around detecting service disruptions, notifying on-call engineers, coordinating cross-team responses, and capturing post-incident data for retrospectives. In a DevOps context, these tools integrate tightly with monitoring stacks, CI/CD pipelines, chat platforms, and ticketing systems so that the path from alert to resolution is as short and auditable as possible.

The category spans a wide range of capabilities: on-call scheduling, escalation policies, runbook automation, SLA tracking, and root-cause analysis reporting. Some platforms are purpose-built for incident response, while others embed incident management within broader IT service management (ITSM) suites.

Notable Vendors in the Space

The market includes both specialist incident-response tools and full-featured ITSM platforms. Commonly cited vendors include:

• PagerDuty – A widely adopted on-call and incident orchestration platform with extensive integrations and AIOps features.
• Opsgenie (Atlassian) – On-call management and alerting, deeply integrated with Jira and the Atlassian ecosystem.
• VictorOps (now Splunk On-Call) – Focuses on collaborative incident timelines and Splunk observability integration.
• ServiceNow – An enterprise ITSM platform with a mature incident management module favored by large organizations.
• Jira Service Management (formerly Jira Service Desk) – Combines ITSM workflows with Atlassian’s project tracking, popular in software engineering teams.
• Freshservice – A cloud-native ITSM platform targeting mid-market and enterprise IT departments.
• Samanage (now SolarWinds Service Desk) – ITSM with asset management capabilities.
• NinjaRMM (NinjaOne) – Remote monitoring and management platform with built-in alerting and ticketing aimed at managed service providers.
• DERDACK Enterprise Alert – Alert management and mobile notification platform used in critical infrastructure environments.
• Web Help Desk (SolarWinds) – On-premises help desk and ticketing tool with incident tracking.
• SunView ChangeGear – ITIL-aligned ITSM suite with incident, problem, and change management modules.
• Symantec (Broadcom) – Offers IT management tooling as part of a broader enterprise software portfolio.

This is not an exhaustive list, and the vendor landscape evolves frequently through acquisitions and product pivots. Always verify current ownership and product roadmaps directly with vendors.

Deployment Models

Incident management platforms are available in two primary deployment models, each with distinct trade-offs:

Cloud-Based (SaaS)

SaaS solutions require no infrastructure to manage and typically offer faster time-to-value, automatic upgrades, and built-in high availability. They are the dominant choice for cloud-native and DevOps-oriented teams. The main concerns are data residency, compliance requirements, and dependency on vendor uptime.

On-Premises

On-premises deployments give organizations full control over data storage, network isolation, and customization. They are common in regulated industries (finance, healthcare, government) where strict data sovereignty rules apply. The trade-off is higher operational overhead and slower upgrade cycles.

Primary Buyer Segments

Demand for incident management software comes from two broad organizational categories:

• Large Enterprises – Require deep ITIL alignment, role-based access control, multi-team coordination, executive reporting dashboards, and integration with existing CMDB and ITSM ecosystems. Total cost of ownership and vendor support SLAs are major evaluation criteria.
• Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) – Prioritize ease of setup, transparent pricing, and out-of-the-box integrations with popular tools (Slack, GitHub, Datadog, PagerDuty, etc.). Low administrative overhead is essential when dedicated IT operations staff are limited.

Regional Adoption Trends

Adoption patterns vary by geography, influenced by cloud maturity, regulatory environment, and the concentration of technology-intensive industries:

• North America – The largest market by adoption and revenue, driven by a dense technology sector, mature DevOps practices, and high cloud penetration rates.
• Europe – Strong demand particularly in Germany, the UK, and the Nordics. GDPR compliance requirements shape deployment model choices, with on-premises and private-cloud options remaining relevant.
• Asia-Pacific – Rapid growth driven by digital transformation initiatives in China, India, Japan, and Southeast Asia. Cloud-first adoption among technology startups and large-scale e-commerce operators is accelerating uptake.
• South America – Emerging adoption led by Brazil and Argentina, often through SaaS platforms that minimize local infrastructure investment.
• Middle East and Africa – Growing interest tied to government digital transformation programs and expanding fintech sectors in UAE, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa.

Key Capabilities to Evaluate

When assessing incident management platforms, engineering and operations teams should examine the following functional areas:

• Alerting and noise reduction – Can the platform deduplicate and correlate alerts to prevent on-call fatigue?
• On-call scheduling – Does it support multi-layer escalation, rotation overrides, and follow-the-sun scheduling across time zones?
• Integrations – How well does it connect with your monitoring stack (Prometheus, Datadog, New Relic, Grafana), ticketing (Jira), and communication tools (Slack, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty)?
• Runbook automation – Can responders trigger automated remediation actions directly from an incident?
• Post-incident analysis – Does the platform generate incident timelines and facilitate structured postmortems?
• SLA and reporting – Can it track mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to resolve (MTTR) over time?
• Compliance and audit trails – Does it provide immutable logs of all incident actions for regulatory review?

Market Drivers and Challenges

Drivers

• Increasing complexity of distributed, microservices-based architectures raising the volume and variety of incidents.
• Growing business cost of downtime, raising executive visibility of incident response maturity.
• Adoption of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices formalizing incident management as a discipline with measurable objectives (SLOs/SLAs/error budgets).
• Expansion of cloud-native development creating demand for integrations with Kubernetes, serverless, and multi-cloud environments.

Challenges

• Alert fatigue: high-volume, low-signal alerting environments reduce responder effectiveness and create tool burnout.
• Integration complexity: organizations running heterogeneous monitoring and ticketing stacks face significant configuration overhead.
• Data privacy concerns limiting cloud adoption in certain industries and regions.
• Vendor consolidation (e.g., acquisitions) can disrupt roadmaps and force costly migrations.

Questions to Ask Before Buying

Before committing to a platform, teams should be able to answer the following:

1. What does our current incident response workflow look like, and where are the biggest friction points?
2. Which monitoring, observability, and ticketing tools do we need to integrate with on day one?
3. Do our compliance requirements mandate on-premises deployment or specific data residency?
4. How many on-call engineers will use the system, and how is pricing structured per user or per feature tier?
5. Does the vendor provide a free trial or proof-of-concept environment against our real alert volume?
6. What is the vendor’s own uptime track record, and what happens to our on-call notifications if their service degrades?
7. How does the platform support postmortem culture and continuous improvement over time?

Summary

The IT/DevOps incident management software market covers a broad spectrum of tools, from lightweight SaaS on-call platforms to full-featured enterprise ITSM suites. The right choice depends on organizational size, existing toolchain, compliance requirements, and the maturity of your incident response practice. Evaluating vendors against concrete criteria—integrations, noise reduction, SLA reporting, and postmortem support—will yield a more defensible decision than relying on analyst forecasts alone. Given the pace of acquisition activity in this space, verify current product ownership and roadmap commitments before signing multi-year contracts.

What Is the IT Service Desk Market?

The IT service desk sits at the heart of enterprise IT operations, acting as the single point of contact between end users and IT support teams. It covers incident management, service request fulfillment, problem management, and increasingly, self-service automation. As organizations across healthcare, education, financial services, and general IT operations scale their digital infrastructure, demand for robust service desk platforms has grown steadily.

A 2019 market study covering the period from 2014 to 2026 examined the global IT service desk landscape, profiling key vendors, deployment models, and geographic opportunities. The sections below summarize the key findings and structure of that analysis.

Key Players in the IT Service Desk Market

The research identified the following vendors as significant participants in the global IT service desk market during the study period:

• Samanage – A SaaS-based IT service management (ITSM) platform focused on simplicity and ITIL alignment, now part of SolarWinds Service Desk.
• Freshservice – A cloud-native ITSM product from Freshworks, known for its clean UI and rapid deployment model.
• ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus – An on-premise and cloud ITSM suite from Zoho’s ManageEngine division, popular in mid-market organizations.
• Jira Service Management (formerly Jira Service Desk) – Atlassian’s ITSM offering, tightly integrated with its developer toolchain.
• Zendesk – Primarily a customer support platform that has extended into IT service management use cases.
• Track-It! – A help desk and IT asset management tool historically popular with small to mid-sized IT teams.
• BMC Remedy 9 – BMC Software’s enterprise-grade ITSM suite, targeting large organizations with complex ITIL process requirements.
• Cherwell IT Service Management – A highly configurable, codeless ITSM platform aimed at enterprise customers.
• Agiloft – A flexible, contract and service management platform with strong workflow automation capabilities.
• Re:Desk – A lightweight help desk solution targeting smaller teams.
• ServiceNow – The dominant enterprise ITSM and IT operations management platform, widely regarded as the market leader in large-enterprise deployments.
• GoToAssist – A remote support and IT help desk tool from LogMeIn (now part of GoTo).
• Spiceworks – A free, ad-supported IT help desk and network monitoring tool popular with small IT departments.
• EasyVista – A European-origin ITSM platform offering ITIL-certified processes with a low-code customization layer.
• Wolken – An enterprise service management platform covering IT, HR, and facilities use cases.

Market Segmentation by Deployment Type

The research segmented the IT service desk market into two primary deployment models:

Cloud-Based

Cloud-based (SaaS) service desk platforms deliver the application over the internet, eliminating the need for on-site infrastructure. Key benefits include faster deployment, automatic updates, and consumption-based pricing. Vendors such as Freshservice, Zendesk, and ServiceNow have heavily invested in cloud-first architectures. The cloud segment was widely expected to show stronger growth through the forecast period as organizations accelerated their shift away from on-premise software.

On-Premise

On-premise deployments give organizations full control over data residency, customization, and integration with internal systems. This model remains common in regulated industries such as healthcare and government, and among large enterprises with existing infrastructure investments. ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus and BMC Remedy have traditionally served this segment well.

Market Segmentation by Application / Vertical

The study identified the following primary application segments:

• Healthcare – Hospitals and health systems use service desks to manage clinical application support, device management, and HIPAA-compliant incident tracking.
• IT Support – The broadest segment, covering internal IT departments across all industries managing end-user computing, infrastructure incidents, and service requests.
• Education – Universities and school districts require service desks to handle student and faculty technology support, often at high ticket volume with limited staff.
• Others – Includes financial services, manufacturing, retail, and government, each with their own compliance and workflow requirements.

Geographic Coverage

The report covered market conditions and growth trajectories across the following regions:

• United States
• Europe
• China
• Japan
• Southeast Asia
• India
• Central & South America

The United States and Europe represented the largest established markets, driven by mature IT departments and strong ITIL adoption. Asia-Pacific regions, particularly India and Southeast Asia, were identified as high-growth opportunities due to expanding IT services sectors and increasing enterprise digital transformation spend.

Key Market Drivers

Several structural trends were driving growth in the IT service desk market at the time of the study, many of which have continued or accelerated:

• ITIL and ITSM framework adoption – Organizations increasingly standardizing on ITIL v3 and ITIL 4 processes to improve service quality and reduce resolution times.
• Shift to self-service – Growing investment in knowledge bases, chatbots, and self-service portals to deflect tier-1 tickets and reduce support costs.
• Integration with DevOps toolchains – Demand for tighter links between ITSM platforms and CI/CD pipelines, monitoring tools, and incident response workflows.
• AI and automation – Early adoption of machine-learning-assisted ticket routing, predictive incident detection, and virtual agents.
• Remote workforce support – Growing need to support distributed employees, which favored cloud-based platforms with remote access capabilities.

Study Methodology and Time Frame

The research used the following time frame structure:

Data was analyzed by region, vendor, deployment type, and application vertical. Where base-year data was unavailable for a given vendor or segment, the most recent prior year was used as a substitute.

Report Structure Overview

The full research report was organized into the following sections:

1. Report Overview – Study scope, key segments, players covered, market analysis by type and application, study objectives.
2. Global Growth Trends – Market sizing, regional growth trends, industry drivers, opportunities.
3. Market Share by Key Players – Revenue by manufacturer (2014–2019), market concentration ratios (CR5 and HHI), M&A activity and expansion plans.
4. Breakdown Data by Type and Application – Comparative sizing of cloud vs. on-premise and vertical segments.
5. International Player Profiles – Detailed profiles for each of the 15 vendors listed above, including company background, product description, and revenue data for the 2014–2019 period.

Choosing an IT Service Desk Platform: Practical Guidance

For DevOps and IT operations teams evaluating service desk platforms, the vendor landscape above maps to several distinct buyer profiles:

• Small IT teams on a budget – Spiceworks (free) or Track-It! offer entry-level functionality without per-agent licensing costs.
• Growing mid-market teams – Freshservice and ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus offer strong ITIL coverage with manageable implementation complexity.
• Developer-centric organizations – Jira Service Management integrates naturally with Jira Software, Confluence, and the broader Atlassian ecosystem, making it a strong choice for software delivery teams.
• Large enterprises with complex ITSM requirements – ServiceNow and BMC Remedy provide deep process coverage, extensive integration frameworks, and the enterprise support structures needed for large-scale deployments.
• Organizations in regulated industries – On-premise options from ManageEngine or BMC, or compliant SaaS offerings with robust data residency controls, are typically preferred in healthcare and financial services.

When selecting a platform, key evaluation criteria should include: total cost of ownership (licensing plus implementation), native ITIL process support, integration capabilities with your existing monitoring and alerting stack, self-service portal quality, and the vendor’s roadmap for AI-assisted automation.

What Is Continuous Integration Software?

Continuous Integration (CI) software automates the process of merging developer code changes into a shared repository frequently — typically multiple times per day. Each merge triggers an automated build and test sequence, catching integration errors early and reducing the time and cost of software defect remediation. CI is a foundational practice in modern DevOps pipelines and is tightly coupled with Continuous Delivery (CD) workflows.

Adoption of CI tooling has accelerated as organisations of all sizes shift toward agile development, microservices architectures, and cloud-native deployments. This has created a competitive and fragmented vendor landscape spanning open-source projects, commercial SaaS platforms, and cloud-provider-native services.

Major Players in the CI Software Market

The following tools and vendors were identified as key participants in the global CI software market as of 2019:

• Jenkins — The dominant open-source CI server with a large plugin ecosystem, widely self-hosted.
• CircleCI — A cloud-native CI/CD platform popular with startups and mid-market engineering teams.
• Travis CI — An early SaaS CI platform with strong adoption in open-source communities.
• TeamCity (JetBrains) — A commercially supported CI server with deep IDE integration.
• Bamboo (Atlassian) — Tightly integrated with Jira and Bitbucket for enterprise teams.
• GoCD (ThoughtWorks) — An open-source tool focused on pipeline visualisation and modelling.
• AppVeyor — A Windows-first CI service popular in the .NET ecosystem.
• Codeship — A hosted CI service targeting developer simplicity and fast onboarding.
• Drone.io — A container-native CI platform built around Docker.
• Semaphore — A fast, hosted CI/CD service with a focus on build speed.
• Bitrise — A mobile-first CI/CD platform targeting iOS and Android development.
• Buildbot — A Python-based, highly configurable open-source CI framework.
• CruiseControl — One of the earliest CI servers, largely superseded by newer tools.
• Hudson — The project from which Jenkins was forked; still maintained by the Eclipse Foundation.
• Puppet Pipelines (formerly Distelli) — A deployment-focused pipeline tool in the Puppet ecosystem.
• AWS (CodeBuild, CodePipeline) — Cloud-provider-native CI/CD services integrated with the AWS ecosystem.
• Microsoft (Azure DevOps / Azure Pipelines) — Enterprise CI/CD tightly integrated with Azure and GitHub.
• Chef — Infrastructure automation tooling often used alongside CI pipelines for configuration management.

Market Segmentation

By Deployment Type

• Cloud-Based — Managed SaaS CI platforms where the vendor operates the infrastructure. Examples include CircleCI, Travis CI, Semaphore, and AWS CodeBuild. Preferred for lower operational overhead and elastic scaling.
• Web-Based (Self-Hosted) — Tools deployed on-premises or on private cloud infrastructure. Jenkins, GoCD, and Buildbot fall into this category. Preferred by organisations with strict data residency, compliance, or customisation requirements.

By End-User Organisation Size

• Large Enterprises — Typically require on-premises or hybrid deployment options, role-based access control, audit logging, SSO integration, and SLA-backed support. Vendors such as Microsoft (Azure DevOps), JetBrains (TeamCity), and Atlassian (Bamboo) target this segment.
• SMEs (Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises) — Often favour managed SaaS platforms that reduce infrastructure management burden, with transparent per-seat or per-build-minute pricing. CircleCI, Semaphore, and Codeship are common choices.

Regional Market Coverage

The market research covered CI software adoption, production value, and consumption across the following regions, with historical data from 2014–2019 and forecasts through 2026:

• North America — The United States represents the largest single market, home to many leading CI vendors and a high density of agile-native software organisations.
• Europe — Including Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Russia, and Poland. Strong enterprise DevOps adoption, particularly in financial services and manufacturing sectors.
• China — Rapid growth driven by domestic technology giants and government digital transformation initiatives.
• Japan — Mature software market with growing DevOps adoption among large IT service providers.
• India — A significant and fast-growing market, driven by a large software services industry and startup ecosystem.
• Southeast Asia — Including Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam.
• Central and South America — Including Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia.
• Middle East and Africa — Including Saudi Arabia, UAE, Turkey, Egypt, South Africa, and Nigeria.
• Other Regions

Market Dynamics

Growth Drivers

• Accelerating adoption of agile and DevOps methodologies across industries beyond software-native companies.
• Shift to cloud infrastructure reducing the barrier to deploying or consuming CI tooling.
• Growth of microservices and containerised application architectures, which require automated integration pipelines to manage complexity.
• Increasing developer headcount globally, expanding the addressable market for per-seat and usage-based CI pricing models.
• Regulatory and competitive pressure on software delivery speed in sectors such as financial services, healthcare, and retail.

Limitations and Challenges

• High fragmentation in the vendor landscape makes vendor selection complex for buyers.
• Self-hosted open-source tools (notably Jenkins) carry hidden operational costs in maintenance, plugin management, and security patching.
• Organisations in regulated industries face data residency and compliance constraints that limit SaaS CI adoption.
• Cultural resistance to DevOps transformation remains a barrier in large, traditional enterprises.

Opportunities

• Emerging markets in Southeast Asia, India, and Africa represent significant greenfield opportunities as developer communities grow.
• AI-assisted CI features — such as intelligent test selection, flaky test detection, and build failure prediction — are an emerging differentiator.
• Mobile CI (Bitrise, Fastlane integrations) remains an under-penetrated segment relative to server-side CI maturity.
• Government and public sector digital transformation programmes globally are creating new enterprise CI demand.

Report Structure Overview

The source market research report was structured across the following analytical sections:

1. CI Software introduction, market scope, and size estimation (including market concentration ratio and maturity analysis)
2. Global value and growth rate: 2014–2026
3. Market segmentation by type and application
4. Regional production value and growth rates: 2014–2019 (historical) and 2019–2026 (forecast)
5. Competitive landscape: market share and company profiles of key participants
6. Product specification, technology, and production analysis (revenue, cost, gross margin)
7. Regional market value and consumption forecasts: 2019–2026
8. New project feasibility analysis, including SWOT analysis for new market entrants and investment suggestions

Takeaways for DevOps Practitioners

While market research reports like this are primarily targeted at investors and business strategists, they contain useful signals for DevOps engineers and engineering leaders:

• Vendor consolidation is ongoing. Several tools listed (Hudson, CruiseControl, Codeship) have seen declining adoption or acquisition since this report was produced. Evaluating long-term vendor viability matters when selecting CI tooling.
• Cloud-native CI is winning on convenience. The shift from self-hosted to SaaS CI reflects broader infrastructure trends. Unless there are strong compliance reasons to self-host, managed CI reduces operational burden significantly.
• Tool proliferation creates integration complexity. As the CI vendor landscape grows, so does the need for standardised pipeline-as-code approaches (Jenkinsfile, .circleci/config.yml, .github/workflows) that reduce vendor lock-in.
• Regional market growth matters for platform choice. Teams operating across multiple geographies should evaluate whether their CI vendor offers data residency options and low-latency build runners in their key regions.

Source: portbulletin.com — Global Continuous Integration Software Market Report, 2019.

What Is DevOps Incident Management Software?

DevOps Incident Management Software bridges the gap between development velocity and operational reliability. When a production system degrades or fails, these tools automate alert routing, on-call scheduling, escalation policies, and post-incident review workflows. By integrating with monitoring stacks, CI/CD pipelines, and ticketing systems, they help engineering teams detect, respond to, and learn from incidents faster than manual processes allow.

The category sits at the intersection of IT Service Management (ITSM) and modern DevOps practice, which is why the vendor landscape includes both traditional ITSM platforms and cloud-native alerting tools built specifically for on-call engineers.

Key Vendors in the Market

The research report identified the following platforms as notable players in the DevOps Incident Management Software space:

• PagerDuty – Cloud-native on-call management and event intelligence platform widely used by SRE and DevOps teams.
• OpsGenie – Alert management and on-call scheduling tool (acquired by Atlassian), designed to integrate tightly with Jira and other Atlassian products.
• VictorOps – Incident lifecycle management platform with timeline-based collaboration (later rebranded as Splunk On-Call after acquisition by Splunk).
• JIRA Service Desk – Atlassian’s ITSM product providing incident ticketing and workflow automation, now known as Jira Service Management.
• ServiceNow – Enterprise ITSM platform with broad incident, problem, and change management capabilities.
• Freshservice – Cloud-based ITSM solution from Freshworks targeting mid-market organizations.
• Samanage – IT asset and service management platform (now part of SolarWinds Service Desk).
• NinjaRMM – Remote monitoring and management tool aimed at managed service providers.
• Web Help Desk – SolarWinds’ help desk and ticketing product with asset management features.
• DERDACK – Enterprise alerting platform focused on critical infrastructure and manufacturing environments.
• SunView Software – Provider of ChangeGear, an ITSM suite with ITIL-aligned incident management.
• Symantec – Included for its security-incident management capabilities within broader IT operations tooling.

Deployment Models

Products in this category are generally available in two deployment models:

• Cloud-Based (SaaS) – Hosted and managed by the vendor. Preferred by teams that want fast onboarding, automatic updates, and elastic scalability without infrastructure overhead. Most cloud-native DevOps tools—PagerDuty, OpsGenie, VictorOps—operate exclusively or primarily in this model.
• On-Premises – Deployed within the organization’s own data center or private cloud. Preferred in regulated industries (finance, healthcare, government) where data residency and compliance requirements restrict the use of external SaaS platforms.

Industry and Enterprise Segmentation

Demand for incident management software spans organizations of all sizes, though requirements differ significantly:

• Large Enterprises – Typically require deep ITSM integration, role-based access control, audit logging, SLA tracking, and the ability to handle thousands of concurrent alerts across geographically distributed teams. Platforms like ServiceNow and JIRA Service Management are common choices.
• Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) – Generally prioritize ease of setup, transparent pricing, and integrations with common monitoring tools (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana). Cloud-native tools with free or low-cost starter tiers are popular entry points.

Core Capabilities to Evaluate

When assessing DevOps Incident Management Software, engineering teams typically evaluate the following capabilities:

1. Alert routing and noise reduction – Intelligent grouping and deduplication of alerts to prevent on-call fatigue.
2. On-call scheduling – Rotation management, override handling, and escalation policies.
3. Multi-channel notification – Phone, SMS, push, email, Slack, and Microsoft Teams integrations.
4. Runbook and playbook automation – Linking alerts to documented response procedures or triggering automated remediation scripts.
5. Post-incident review (PIR) tooling – Timeline reconstruction, contributing-factor analysis, and action-item tracking to support blameless retrospectives.
6. Metrics and reporting – Mean Time to Detect (MTTD), Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR), and SLA compliance dashboards.
7. Integration ecosystem – Native connectors to monitoring, logging, APM, CI/CD, and chat platforms.

Regional Market Footprint

The source report segmented market analysis across the following regions, reflecting where enterprise IT spend and DevOps adoption are most concentrated:

• North America – United States and Canada. Historically the largest market for DevOps tooling, driven by technology sector density and SRE adoption.
• Europe – Germany, UK, France, and Italy highlighted. Strong demand in financial services and manufacturing verticals with specific regulatory requirements influencing on-premises deployments.
• Asia-Pacific – China, Japan, India, and South Korea. Rapid growth driven by expanding cloud infrastructure investment and large software engineering workforces.
• South America and Middle East/Africa – Emerging adoption, often through multinational enterprise agreements.

Market Drivers and Challenges

Several factors have sustained demand for DevOps Incident Management Software:

• Rising system complexity – Microservices, Kubernetes, and distributed cloud architectures increase the blast radius and frequency of incidents.
• SRE adoption – The spread of Site Reliability Engineering practices formalizes incident response as a discipline requiring dedicated tooling.
• Regulatory pressure – Financial services and healthcare regulators increasingly require documented incident response procedures and audit trails.
• Remote and distributed teams – On-call tooling that works across time zones has become a baseline requirement for engineering organizations.

Key challenges include tool sprawl (teams maintaining overlapping alerting and ticketing tools), high alert volumes leading to on-call fatigue, and the difficulty of integrating incident data across heterogeneous monitoring stacks.

Choosing the Right Platform

No single platform is optimal for every team. Selection should be driven by the organization’s size, compliance constraints, existing toolchain, and the maturity of its incident response practice. Teams new to structured on-call processes often benefit from starting with a focused alerting tool like PagerDuty or OpsGenie before expanding into broader ITSM platforms. Enterprises already standardized on Atlassian or ServiceNow ecosystems may find the most value in extending those platforms rather than introducing a parallel toolchain.

Regardless of vendor, the underlying goal is the same: reduce the time between a production problem occurring and it being resolved, while generating the data needed to prevent recurrence.

What Is ServiceNow?

ServiceNow Inc (NYSE: NOW) is an enterprise cloud platform vendor that provides workflow automation and integration tools for large organisations. Rather than stitching together a patchwork of point solutions, ServiceNow offers a unified ecosystem that lets workers move across departments — IT, HR, customer service, security operations — while sharing data and processes on a single platform.

The company focuses on four primary verticals: Healthcare, Education, Government, and Financial Services. Each of these sectors faces strict compliance requirements, complex approval chains, and large numbers of internal service requests — exactly the kind of structured workflow problems that ServiceNow is designed to solve.

The Problem ServiceNow Solves

For smaller organisations, building a modern tech stack is relatively straightforward: pick a cloud provider, add a CRM that doubles as a support tool, bolt on an HR system, and wire them together with integration middleware. Imperfect, but manageable.

For large enterprises, that piecemeal approach quickly becomes unworkable. Hundreds of business units, thousands of employees, strict audit trails, and regulatory obligations mean that ad-hoc integrations introduce risk and operational drag. ServiceNow addresses this by providing a common data model and a workflow engine that sits across all of those domains, so a change in one system propagates correctly through others.

In DevOps terms, ServiceNow occupies a similar conceptual space to a service mesh or an internal developer portal: it abstracts the complexity of underlying systems so that teams can focus on outcomes rather than plumbing.

ServiceNow in the Enterprise IT Landscape

ServiceNow competes with larger platform vendors — including IBM — that also offer middleware and enterprise integration tooling. Its competitive advantage, at least as of the original 2019 article, was described as agility: being large enough to support enterprise-scale deployments, but small enough relative to incumbents to avoid the legacy architectural assumptions that slow down bigger vendors.

Key platform capabilities that matter to DevOps and IT teams include:

• IT Service Management (ITSM): Incident, problem, and change management built around ITIL processes.
• IT Operations Management (ITOM): Discovery, service mapping, and AIOps capabilities that help teams understand infrastructure dependencies.
• DevOps integration: Native integrations with CI/CD pipelines, allowing change requests to be created, approved, and tracked automatically as part of a deployment workflow.
• Security Operations (SecOps): Vulnerability response and threat intelligence workflows integrated into the same platform.
• HR Service Delivery: Onboarding, offboarding, and employee service requests managed through the same workflow engine used for IT.

ServiceNow and DevOps Workflows

One area where ServiceNow has become increasingly relevant to DevOps practitioners is automated change management. Many regulated industries require a formal change approval process before production deployments. Historically, this was a manual bottleneck that conflicted with the continuous delivery model.

ServiceNow’s DevOps module allows pipeline tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, and Azure DevOps to automatically create change requests, gather approvals, and update configuration management databases (CMDBs) as part of the deployment process. This means teams can maintain audit compliance without abandoning automation.

For organisations in financial services or healthcare — two of ServiceNow’s core verticals — this kind of integrated change control is not optional. It is a regulatory requirement, and ServiceNow positions itself as a way to meet that requirement without sacrificing deployment velocity.

The Business Context (as of Mid-2019)

The following figures come from the original June 2019 source article and reflect conditions at that time. They are included for historical context only.

• ServiceNow was founded approximately 15 years before the article was written (around 2004).
• The company carried an approximate market capitalisation of $47 billion at the time of writing.
• Year-to-date stock performance as of early June 2019 was approaching 50% gains.
• Q1 2019 earnings were described as strong enough to lift the broader cloud sector.
• The original analyst commentary described ServiceNow as the “best house on the block” in its category.

The original piece was written by Louis Navellier, a growth-focused investment newsletter editor, and reflected his assessment at the time. His commentary noted that ServiceNow’s predominantly US-based client base — particularly in financial services — insulated it somewhat from trade-war uncertainty that affected other technology stocks in 2019.

Why This Matters for DevOps Professionals

Whether you are evaluating ServiceNow as a platform for your organisation, being asked by leadership to integrate with an existing ServiceNow deployment, or simply trying to understand why your enterprise’s change advisory board runs through a NOW workflow, a few things are worth knowing:

• ServiceNow is a platform, not a point tool. Implementations tend to be organisation-wide and involve significant configuration. Expect a longer evaluation and procurement cycle than you would see with a SaaS tool.
• The CMDB is central. The quality of ServiceNow’s ITOM and DevOps capabilities depends heavily on the accuracy of the CMDB. If your organisation’s asset and dependency data is incomplete, that will limit what you can automate.
• APIs and integrations are first-class citizens. ServiceNow exposes a REST API and maintains a marketplace (the ServiceNow Store) with pre-built integrations for common DevOps tools. Check the Store before building custom integrations from scratch.
• Governance is a feature, not a bug. For teams coming from a startup or greenfield DevOps background, ServiceNow’s approval workflows can feel heavy. In regulated enterprise environments, those workflows exist for defensible compliance reasons.

Summary

ServiceNow occupies a well-defined niche in the enterprise IT market: large-scale workflow automation and integration across IT, HR, security, and customer service functions. For DevOps teams operating in regulated industries, it is frequently the system of record for change management and incident response. Understanding how it works — and how to integrate your pipelines with it — is a practical skill for engineers working in enterprise environments.

Original source: investorplace.com (June 2019). Attribution: Louis Navellier, Growth Investor newsletter. This editorial rewrite is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.