ServiceNow unveils telecom order management tool

ServiceNow unveiled the latest release of its cloud-based Now Platform, which includes a new order management tool for telecom providers that will help the vendor evolve beyond its roots as a service management and network performance management enabler.

The Now Platform Quebec release, available now, includes Order Management in Telecommunications, a tool based on TM Forum Open APIs that is aimed at streamlining ordering processes by automating workflow from order orchestration to fulfillment. The new system for order management was designed with help from managed services provider TPX Communications, which also is deploying it, and other ServiceNow service provider partners. Deutsche Telekom recently completed a proof-of-concept trial of the order management solution.

Chris Bauschka, vice president and general manager of telecommunications at ServiceNow, told FierceTelecom that the company is looking to help resolve long-standing challenges service providers have faced because their order management processes have not been integrated with their service assurance capabilities, leaving them without visibility into the status of orders or the health and performance status of newly-delivered services.

“There has been a disconnection between service provisioning and service assurance,” he said. “These systems usually provide different views of the world, and they don’t work well together. We are bringing those worlds together. It’s the power to see an order in flight through the whole process to when services get turned up in real time.”

Bauschka said ServiceNow built a full software stack to provide the full range of order management capabilities with automated, catalog-driven workflows to connect order decomposition, order changes and related aspects of the process to order fulfillment. The TMF APIs allowed order management to be better integrated with service assurance tools, giving providers a more streamlined, less operationally expensive approach to order management, he said.

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Order Management in Telecommunications extends ServiceNow from its traditional footing in service assurance onto new ground in the service ordering and provisioning arena, not a surprising move from a company that has grown rapidly via acquisition over the years to expand capabilities throughout a variety of industries. 

However, Bauschka said the company still sees itself as complementary to other operation support system enablers. “Companies usually don’t cross these domains, but we are not looking to be all things to all people. We are complementary to the OSS side, and not touching the network. We are becoming more relevant as a single service stack provider.”