Oracle integrates cloud service with ServiceNow ITSM platform

Oracle today revealed it has integrated its cloud services with ServiceNow’s IT service management (ITSM) platform.

IT organizations that have standardized on ServiceNow will be able to view Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) services alongside other public cloud services presented via the ServiceNow Service portal and the ServiceNow ITOM Visibility application, Oracle’s Clive D’Souza said.

That significantly increases the chance IT teams will opt to employ OCI to deploy application workloads, D’Souza added. “It’s just like having space on a store shelf,” he said.

ServiceNow integration

All Oracle Cloud discoverable cloud resources will now also be extracted and stored in the ServiceNow Configuration Management Database (CMDB) repository, which can then be used to monitor the availability of those resources. That integration will also feed data into the ServiceNow AIOps platform IT teams are employing to monitor workloads.

The integration with ServiceNow comes as more IT organizations are routinely employing multiple cloud services. Many IT teams have now determined that different cloud services optimally run different classes of workloads. IT teams are not necessarily forcing cloud service providers to bid to run workloads as much as they are simply trying to determine which service will provide the best performance for a specific class of workloads, D’Souza noted.

In the longer term, D’Souza said Oracle will continue to evaluate its options for integrating its services with other ITSM platforms that are widely employed in the enterprise.

The effort to make its cloud services more accessible follows Oracle’s move last month to encourage IT teams to employ its OCI platform. Today, Oracle is helping some organizations move a relatively small number of on-premises Oracle workloads to its public cloud at no additional cost. The Oracle Cloud Lift Services initiative provides access to Oracle engineers that are specifically trained to migrate both applications and databases to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) service.

Hybrid cloud

IT organizations have been employing cloud services for the better part of a decade, and yet the bulk of enterprise applications continue to run in on-premises IT environments. In theory, many more IT organizations will be centralizing the management of public cloud and on-premises IT environments as they embrace hybrid cloud computing. But for the time being, each cloud computing environment tends to be managed in isolation from the others. As a result, IT teams find themselves hiring multiple specialists to manage each environment, increasing labor costs with each addition.

Hybrid cloud computing promises to reduce those costs while making it simpler for IT teams to deploy application workloads more dynamically on various platforms. Eventually, IT teams will also employ that capability to force cloud service providers to compete more aggressively to run those workloads.

It may be a while before hybrid cloud computing becomes the new IT normal. But thanks in part to advances in automation and AI, it will soon become simpler for IT organizations to tame what has become a highly complex distributed computing environment.

In the meantime, IT organizations will continue to be torn between keeping as many of their cloud options as open as possible and signing lower-cost long-term contracts.

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