How ServiceNow and Wind River Work Together for IT/OT Convergence

The benefits of bringing together information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) are clear. By connecting the two, organizations gain better visibility and control over their entire operation. They can improve their business intelligence, respond more quickly to opportunities or emergencies, and refine their day-to-day operations. They can discover assets, automate patching, and orchestrate workflows much more easily.

But IT and OT have historically existed in silos — and until now there hasn’t been an easy way to bridge the two worlds.

The ServiceNow–Wind River architecture brings the same rigor, automation, and transparency that ServiceNow drove in IT service management (ITSM) to the industrial controls, manufacturing, and edge compute of OT. 

Improving IT and OT Asset Visibility

To achieve IT/OT convergence, organizations must start by ensuring that OT assets get the same level of visibility that the enterprise has across the IT estate. ServiceNow and Wind River unify asset visibility by automatically discovering, inventorying, and monitoring OT devices alongside IT assets.

OT asset discovery is different from standard IT processes. For example, OT systems often comprise legacy assets and industrial networks. An OT-specific discovery approach cannot interfere with ongoing network operations. With the ServiceNow and Wind River solution, the process is tailored to the asset types and network protocols at each enterprise location. Security and operations teams can see, track, and manage everything — from legacy PLCs to the latest IoT devices — on a single dashboard. That improves uptime, security, and incident response.

Enterprises can deploy private AI applications to specific branches, factories, or edge sites as easily as requesting a new virtual machine. Staff can deploy clouds and applications across distributed data centers in under two hours.

Each instance is tracked, documented, and orchestrated. As business needs evolve, so do the applications. 

Whether in IT or OT, data sovereignty matters. Leaders in critical industries such as telco, finance, energy, manufacturing, and healthcare face mandates to keep sensitive logs, records, and device data on-prem or within sovereign boundaries. The joint ServiceNow and Wind River solution answers those requirements with a frictionless ordering and deployment model. 

Use Data to Inspire Action

With comprehensive visibility across the IT/OT estate, ServiceNow workflows and AI agents can use automation to evaluate the data so that it leads to productive business actions. 

Organizations can integrate their IT and OT data with enterprise data from business systems such as ERP, enterprise asset management, and even data trapped in spreadsheets and documentation. This unified data foundation enables organizations to automate workflows that deliver measurable business outcomes for IT/OT operations, such as predictive maintenance (to minimize downtime and extend asset life), process optimization (to streamline operations), and proactive cyber risk mitigation (to safeguard critical infrastructure). 

Its minimal footprint for edge computing offers low power consumption, open source flexibility to avoid vendor lock-in, and mission-critical reliability. The result is tangible value through cost savings, improved efficiency, and revenue uplift across the enterprise.

How It Works: Deployment

The joint platform uses a self-service catalog that enables users to provision private cloud capacity and deploy private AI applications. It simplifies complex private cloud and edge AI deployments, which helps streamline operations — an important element in IT/OT convergence — and meet compliance and data sovereignty requirements.

The catalog is designed for two personas:

• Systems engineers who deploy physical servers and manage hardware to create private clouds at data centers or the edge.
• Analysts and prompt engineers who are responsible for ensuring adequate private cloud capacity and deploying AI applications on the team’s behalf.

Instantiating a cloud instance takes about 90 minutes. The process is as simple as this:

• A system engineer uses the ServiceNow portal to check server inventory and to add a new physical server to an edge site. The engineer fills in the technical details (such as networking details, site, and configuration) and submits the request. That updates the inventory.
• The platform provisions servers, installs applications, and configures the cloud environments, with notifications at each stage. Users receive an email confirmation when deployment completes.
• To deploy multiple private clouds in distributed data centers, a prompt engineer selects locations and hardware from the catalog.
• Prompt engineers can use the ServiceNow portal to deploy private AI insights and automation applications on the new cloud, including naming each application namespace. Deployment takes two or three minutes to instantiate the instance, and an email confirmation is sent when it’s ready.
• Once deployed, prompt engineers can log in to the AI applications to import models and test AI functionality.
• The dashboard provides real-time status of deployed clouds and AI applications across locations, offering centralized visibility and management.

Once the private cloud is deployed, team members can set them up thusly:

The backend automation is managed by Wind River® Conductor, which integrates seamlessly with ServiceNow’s API. Conductor automates server installation, cloud platform software deployment, and application installation with progress updates visible in the dashboard and via email.

Whether the effort is meant to support existing IT workflows, OT facilities, or connected systems, two deployment models are supported:

• A SaaS model with cloud-hosted applications on ServiceNow’s or regional data centers.
• A private cloud model, in which the entire stack (including ServiceNow applications and Wind River Cloud Platform) runs on-premises. That supports data sovereignty and sensitive use cases such as telco, FinTech, and healthcare.

The joint solution enables resilient, automated, and scalable private cloud solutions for organizations that want more control over their IT and OT operations. The service is provided and delivered by ServiceNow and its partners. It is supported directly by ServiceNow. 

If you would like more information on the Service Now and Wind River cloud solutions, please contact us for a demonstration. 

By guest contributors:

Grant Challenger, Director of Emerging Technology, Wind River

Brandon Freeman, Director, Outbound Product Management, OT Workflows Service Now