• Vodafone Business has entered into a strategic enterprise service management collaboration with platform-as-a-service giant ServiceNow
• ServiceNow will integrate Vodafone Business’s service management code into its cloud platform and combine it with its own telecom software applications
• The move will give Vodafone Business a single, AI-enabled platform through which to manage its B2B customer engagements  
• The collaboration is an important one for Vodafone Business, says Appledore Research analyst

Vodafone Business has brokered what looks like a significant customer service management collaboration with platform-as-a-service (PaaS) giant ServiceNow that will give the enterprise service provider a single view of its customers’ networks and applications at a local, regional and international level and enable faster and more accurate responses to service requests and issues.

The enterprise services arm of Vodafone Group, which boasts 4.7 million business-to-business (B2B) customers and annual revenues of more than €7.7bn (based on the fiscal H1 run rate), hopes the five-year deal with ServiceNow will “transform the service experience for millions of business customers with industry‑leading AI capabilities on the ServiceNow Platform that enable Vodafone to resolve queries, detect and fix service anomalies and deploy tools, faster.” If it works, those capabilities will likely attract even more enterprise customers to Vodafone, which appears to be one of the few major European telcos whose B2B unit is achieving overall sales growth.  

According to Vodafone Business, the collaboration combines its “expertise in managing complex networks with ServiceNow’s purpose‑built service assurance solutions for telecom”, including its Telecom Service Management (TSM), Telecom Service Operations Management (TSOM) and Network Inventory Management tools. And, of course, there’s a heavy emphasis on the role of AI in this: “This is accelerated by the power of agentic AI, with ServiceNow’s telecom industry AI agents executing intelligent, context‑aware actions that work across the service lifecycle,” added Vodafone Business. 

In addition to those existing tools, ServiceNow is integrating Vodafone’s in-house developed enhanced service management (ESM) software code, which will be exclusively licensed to ServiceNow. “This helps ensure a uniform experience across all Vodafone Business customer touchpoints, including online, email and telephone interactions, delivered through Vodafone Operations teams,” noted the service provider.

“Vodafone and ServiceNow have created a highly programmable and self‑adaptive AI solution befitting of the digital age,” stated Marika Auramo, CEO of Vodafone Business. “With AI at its core, we can more easily and effectively support customers with their connectivity needs and digital journeys – from large multi‑national customers to smaller companies, globally or locally,” she added. 

Paul Smith, president of field and customer operations at ServiceNow, added: “This collaboration brings together the power of ServiceNow’s AI platform with Vodafone’s deep telecom expertise to give businesses a more proactive, end‑to‑end view of their services. Together, we’re delivering AI‑driven solutions that help service providers move faster and stay ahead of customer expectations as they evolve.”

The collaboration is an important one for Vodafone Business, according to Francis Haysom, partner and principal analyst at Appledore Research. 

“Stripping away the liberal use of ‘AI’ in the announcement, this is fundamentally about ServiceNow enabling Vodafone Business to move to a single platform for network management of multiple enterprise networks – a solution that is already the dominant service management solution within those enterprise customers,” noted Haysom. “Appledore has for some time viewed the ability of ServiceNow to implement application-to-application integration (Service Bridge) as a game changer in telco engagement with enterprise customers.”

And the analyst specifically noted the importance of ServiceNow taking on and integrating the telco’s in-house code. “ServiceNow acquiring the Vodafone ESM as part of the deal is also interesting – typically CSP-specific workflows and code do not easily make repeatable solutions. However, ServiceNow, with its history of replatforming all acquired code, may have the opportunity to make this truly deployable to all,” added the analyst. 

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV