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The joint project will deliver provide automatic problem detection powered by IBM’s Watson AIOps product.

IBM and ServiceNow announced on Thursday a strategic partnership to help companies reduce operational risk and lower costs. They plan to achieve these goals by applying AI to automate IT operations.

The joint solution will combine IBM’s AI-powered hybrid cloud software and professional services to ServiceNow’s intelligent workflow capabilities and IT service and operations management products.

Delivering reduced costs to customers are key to the partnership

In a blog post on Thursday, Robin Hernandez, VP, Hybrid Cloud Management & Watson AIOps, detailed the new partnership. “We are applying leading AI capabilities from IBM Watson into the workflows and data captured in ServiceNow’s Now Platform,” she wrote.

By applying Watson AI to incidents in ServiceNow, customers will leverage automation to decrease time spent on maintenance. They will also be able to reduce the overall number of incidents that occur, she explained.

The cost benefits were echoed by Arvind Krishna, Chief Executive Officer, IBM. “By partnering with ServiceNow and their market-leading Now Platform, clients will be able to use AI to quickly mitigate unforeseen IT incident costs,” he said.

Pablo Stern, ServiceNow’s senior vice president of IT workflow products, summarized the operational benefits of the partnership.

“Engineers at IBM and ServiceNow teamed up to create a joint IT solution, the first of its kind,’ he wrote. “The joint solution will enable customers to enhance employee productivity, have full visibility into their operational footprint, and respond to incidents and issues faster.”

Delivering concrete benefits for business

The joint IBM-ServiceNow IT solution combines IBM Watson AIOps with ServiceNow’s intelligent workflow capabilities. The company’s ITSM and ITOM Visibility products will help customers prevent and fix IT issues at scale.

Businesses that use ServiceNow ITSM can push historical incident data into the deep machine learning algorithms of Watson AIOps. They can then create a baseline of their normal IT environment. They will be able to simultaneously identify anomalies outside of that normal.

Initial results from Watson AIOps early adopter clients show that it would take a human up to 60% longer to manually identify those anomalies.

The joint solution thus enables customers to enhance employee productivity. They can also obtain greater visibility into their operational footprint and respond to incidents and issues faster.

Also read: ServiceNow launches Paris, faster response to transformation and IoT