ServiceNow Exec Talks Up Microsoft Teams Extensions for Paris ITSM Release

The release of Microsoft Teams extensions will let the company’s voice, chat and virtual chatbot interface appear in third-party solutions. Launched at last week’s Microsoft Ignite virtual conference, initially 20 partners plan to surface Teams in their offerings. Among those Microsoft identified include HiVue, ServiceNow, Range, Buncee and PagerDuty.

Matt Schvimmer, a senior VP at ServiceNow, believes the Microsoft Teams extensions are important. As longtime partners, the extensions will appear in ServiceNow’s service management (ITSM) offering. Microsoft Teams features will roll out incrementally in the upcoming ServiceNow update called Paris, set to go live this fall. Schvimmer, who is general manager of ServiceNow’s ITSM business, said Teams integration was a high priority. In an interview with Channel Futures, Schivimmer explains what integrating Teams into ServiceNow ITSM will bring to partners and customers.

Channel Futures: What capability has ServiceNow integrated into Teams?

ServiceNow’s Matt Schvimmer

Matt Schvimmer: There’s the employee interface in Teams that will provide notifications, new approvals and the ability to check on incidents and all those other things on the front end.

CF: When will it be available?

MS: It’s in beta now and the employee interface becomes [generally available] in November. The agent side will go live in January. Every month, we’ve released additional updates. All of our ITSM customers who use Teams can use it. And that gives them an out-of-the-box virtual agent experience for most common use cases.

CF: So those are the chatbots?

MS: Absolutely. It’s the chatbot. It’s the first thing we worked on together with Microsoft with regard to this integration. The next part is the employee experience.

CF: Is this chatbot based on Microsoft’s Bot Framework?

MS: It’s our chatbot, through Teams. It looks like another agent, or another IT service person in Teams. It says “Now,” but a customer can take it and change it to their own brand.

CF: But the chatbot is surfaced through Microsoft Teams?

MS: On the back end, you can set it up in ServiceNow. There are multiple channels that we’re trying to surface from. Teams is one. You may have some customers that come in through a website. Employees may go through an intranet that offers access to an IT support portal. The bot can appear on the portal or it surfaces through Teams.

CF: And now Microsoft Teams is effectively just another channel to expose it?

MS: Teams has been high on our customer request list. Part of our goal has been to meet employees wherever they are — and they’re in Teams. They’re in Teams in droves. We do a product advisory council meeting every year at our user conference in May. At our latest meeting, there were 80 customers. I polled them, and all but one has either deployed or is in the process of deploying Teams. It’s a hugely strategic channel.

CF: Are there other channels that are that high in demand?

MS: No. When you start talking about employee engagement or productivity, it’s really Teams. We do get some Slack as well; we do a lot with Slack actually. And there are some people that roll their own with off-the-shelf components, though that’s far less common.

CF: What about Zoom and Cisco WebEx?

MS: We have a ton of integration with Zoom already. We’ve also been working with Cisco on …