ServiceNow adds new RPA capabilities with San Diego release

Santa Clara, California headquartered ServiceNow, a provider of cloud-based solutions that define, structure, manage, and automate workflows for enterprise operations, today launched the latest version of its Now Platform, bringing an all-new RPA Hub and an improved visual experience.

Officially dubbed Now Platform San Diego, the release brings new robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities to empower enterprises with the “true potential of hyperautomation” and help them create smarter, faster and better ways of working to drive productivity. It is generally available starting today.

Need for hyperautomation

Today, organizations across sectors are moving to digital business models to thrive in the new normal and adapt to changing market conditions. However, more often than not, disconnected critical systems and dependence on specialty Centers of Excellence (CoEs) disrupt this shift, resulting in expensive, repetitive, and manual work of connecting the silos for employees.

Hyperautomation, which involves orchestrated use of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and low-code application development, solves this challenge by rapidly identifying, vetting and automating as many businesses and IT processes as possible. When put in appropriate use, it can connect modern, legacy or unstructured data sources and easily eliminate the silos, accelerating digital transformation.

Now Platform San Diego strengthens hyperautomation

While ServiceNow has been focusing on hyperautomation with Now Platform’s low-code and AI capabilities, the latest release is all about strengthening the product. As the company explains, Now Platform San Diego brings Automation Engine, a comprehensive suite of automation integration solutions that combines the power of Integration Hub with robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities of the all-new RPA Hub. This comes exactly a year after the company’s acquisition of Intellibot, a robotic process automation (RPA) company based in Hyderabad, India. 

When combined with the platform’s existing technologies, the offering allows enterprises to automate manual and repetitive tasks and connect any system to ServiceNow, delivering three times faster time to value. The RPA Hub, in particular, provides an essential management interface, allowing enterprises to build, administer and monitor digital robots for automation. This way, it helps streamline processes and boosts employee productivity while reducing human effort and errors. 

Currently, the RPA Hub features 1300+ pre-built components (including actions, connectors, OCR and computer vision) to accelerate time to value for automation initiatives, and an RPA Desktop Design Studio, allowing users to design, test and publish both attended and unattended bots as they scale automation quickly. The studio also comes with a built-in connection Flow Designer, allowing users to pass information to and from their ServiceNow instance with ease.

Improved interface

ServiceNow is also giving a visual upgrade to the Now Platform, which it calls the Next Experience. According to the company, the visual revamp will bring the most important work at the fingertips of platform users, allowing them to quickly dive in. It brings every application under one consistent experience and features a redesigned component library, new iconography, typography and illustrations. There’s also more focus on personalization with options for defining accessibility and layout preferences among other things. 

With the Next Experiences, users will also get 25 purpose-built workspaces (such as Cloud Operations Workspace, HR Agent Workspace) providing access to the new design, surface insights with dashboard, and ML-based task and action recommendations. These workspaces will ultimately enable companies to field requests/issues more efficiently, ServiceNow says.

Along with this, the new platform is also providing targeted vertical-specific solutions to help banks, insurance companies and telecommunications and technology providers accelerate their digital transformation efforts.