ServiceNow's cloud-based platform, the Now Platform, delivers digital workflows that create great experiences and unlock productivity for the enterprise. The ServiceNow product portfolio offers IT, Employee, Customer, and Creator workflows to help drive every aspect of a business's digital transformation. The Now Platform allows organizations to create intuitive experiences with a low-code platform and quickly build digital apps that scale across the enterprise.

ServiceNow recognizes that distributed ledgers are progressively relevant as businesses embrace digital transformation to become increasingly interconnected. The Now Platform enables enterprises to be connected. The partnership with Hedera will extend the reach of digital workflows to enterprise business networks and ecosystems. The ServiceNow Platform can provide each organization Layer-2 connectivity of the digital workflows of the enterprise to the distributed ledger, enabling the work to flow within and across organizations.

At ServiceNow, we believe there are four main opportunities for adopting distributed ledger technology in digital workflows: process and data integrity, tokenization and digital assets, digital identity and privacy, and multi-party business processes. ServiceNow will incorporate Hedera in each area and allow other parties to create new applications on the Now Platform using the Creator Workflow capabilities.

By exposing Hedera to our customers through the Now Platform, ServiceNow believes in their ability and opportunities to:

• Simplify distributed ledger technology adoption: New technologies are challenging to adopt, despite clear value propositions. We can enable seamless and straightforward distributed ledger adoption via the Now Platform, eliminating the barriers for enterprises to incorporate the benefits of distributed ledgers throughout their workflows.
• Increase Process Trust: distributed ledgers allow for the Now Platform to generate an immutable, auditable, and traceable record of every interaction and transaction in a process.
• Enhance Multi-party Workflows: All businesses are multi-party networks; distributed ledgers enhance the quality and safety of connections between all participants.
• Provide Proof and Tokenization as a Service: Real-time consensus, notarization, credentialization, or valuation of digital assets or events.
• Process Automation: A more accurate and complete process record enables more precise and complete process optimization.
• Decentralized Identity & Privacy Management: A global framework to eliminate complex third party management and assurance of identity and privacy

Trusted SLAs

Managed Service Providers (MSP), either external or internal, is a rapidly growing sector where trust is the cornerstone of customer relationships. MSPs exist not only in the IT industry but across many business and administration functions. Each relationship is defined in contracts with set SLAs, KPIs, penalties, and rewards.

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are a classic friction point in the relationship, where the MSP has a conflict of interest between transparency and the need to meet contractual obligations. Moreover, in the long-term, MSPs need to avoid relationship degradation with their customers and, at the same time, differentiate their offerings against the competition.

One example use of this design is in the IT industry, the Now Platform with Hedera can continuously notarize the MSP interaction with its customers. By recording this information to the ledger, each participating party can better ensure a solid and trust-driven relationship and, for the MSP, an opportunity to differentiate their services. At the same time, the notarization pattern helps customers hold their MSP accountable and open opportunities for auditors to evolve their services by connecting to a certified information stream.

E-Procurement Service Management

In a traditional procurement system, the buyer establishes a one-to-one connection with every supplier. For that reason, these processes are still very manual, resistant to standardization, and heavily reliant on inefficient tools like email and phone calls. In the e-procurement set up at the opposite, suppliers in the supply chain of one or more customers constitute a network where the buyer can submit his requests for goods and services. The suppliers can bid for a specific request, and the customer can choose the most attractive bid offered by vendors.

As this network is comprised of competing entities, it must operate in a trustless way for each to work together through a multi-party business process. Hence the benefit of using the Hedera to guarantee certified, signed, and timestamped interactions without the need for a trusted third party.

For these use cases, ServiceNow will apply Hedera Consensus Service as a means to exchange signed, verifiable, and ordered state changes. ServiceNow anticipates deploying multiple layer-2 networks to support each business network and value stream to form a cryptographically verifiable multi-party business process.

With the speed and efficiency of Hedera, ServiceNow is confident in this architecture's ability to scale to any size, involving a few organizations to hundreds or even thousands.