It's been a busy week for service management and connectivity, with the focus split between making support easier to access and protecting the platforms enterprises already rely on.
ServiceNow is betting employees will increasingly seek IT help in Slack and Teams. Atlassian customers, meanwhile, have a more immediate task: patching a critical vulnerability across self-managed products including Jira Service Management. On the network side, Vi Business is expanding its managed SD-WAN proposition with Cisco Meraki.
ServiceNow Takes Its AI Service Desk to Slack and Teams
ServiceNow launched Flow on 1 October, a conversational, AI-native service desk designed to operate through collaboration tools including Slack and Microsoft Teams.
The product allows employees to ask questions, raise requests and automate repeatable workflows using natural-language prompts. ServiceNow said Flow can handle routine tasks such as password resets, access requests, policy questions and infrastructure provisioning, either resolving them automatically or escalating them when needed.
The most notable part of the launch is its positioning as a standalone service. New customers do not need an existing ServiceNow relationship or wider platform deployment to buy and activate Flow. Existing customers on AI-native ServiceNow SKUs can deploy it through consumption-based usage without a separate procurement process.
ServiceNow says Flow can be up and running in a day, with no implementation project or infrastructure required. That is a direct appeal to smaller IT and DevOps teams that may have viewed full enterprise service-management deployments as costly or difficult to introduce.
“Technology leaders today want simplicity. They want their teams empowered to solve problems quickly without adding complexity," said Stephen Elliot, Group Vice President for Software Development and IT Operations at IDC.
"The real value comes when those solutions can be easily automated and repeated at scale. By combining conversational experiences with accessible automation, organizations can shorten time-to-value, reduce manual effort, and deliver more consistent service outcomes.”
Flow is in controlled availability, with general availability in North America and EMEA expected in the fourth quarter of 2026.
Atlassian Issues Urgent Jira Service Management Patch
Atlassian disclosed a critical vulnerability on 5 October affecting eight self-managed Data Center products, including Jira Service Management, Jira Software, Confluence and Bitbucket.
The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-21589, has a severity score of 9.3 and allows an unauthenticated attacker to access specific files within an affected application’s web-root directory. Exploitation requires prior knowledge of a target file’s exact path and name, meaning the vulnerability cannot be used to enumerate or list directory contents.
That limitation narrows the attack, but does not remove the risk. Sensitive files stored in accessible locations could still be exposed.
