Major Incident Communication – Sending SMS via custom provider (not Twilio) using Notify

[lidorz]

Hi everyone,

I’m working with Major Incident Communications in Service Operations Workspace, using the Notify (new) framework.

Out of the box, SMS works with Twilio, but in my case the customer requires using their own SMS provider (Twilio is not allowed).

The SMS provider has supplied:

• API endpoint (URL)

• Username

• Password (Basic Auth)

My goal:

• Send SMS from Major Incident → Communication

• Use the Notify framework (not a custom UI / workaround)

• Integrate with the customer’s SMS provider 

What is the recommended way in Notify (new) to integrate a custom SMS provider?

Has anyone successfully replaced Twilio with a custom SMS provider in Major Incident Communications?

Any guidance, documentation, or real examples would be greatly appreciated.

[Dr Atul G- LNG]

Hi @lidorz 

https://www.servicenow.com/community/itsm-forum/sms-integration-with-third-party-service-provider-fo...

[RameezB]

Hi,

Yes, we tested a similar setup recently where Twilio could not be used because the client required routing through their preferred telecom SMS provider for compliance and regional delivery reasons.

The cleanest approach we found was keeping the Notify workflow for incident orchestration, but moving SMS delivery into a separate outbound REST integration layer instead of tightly coupling directly with the provider logic inside the workflow itself.

A few things that helped in our case:

• Create a reusable outbound REST message/action for SMS delivery
• Handle authentication separately (Basic Auth or token refresh if provider supports it)
• Log provider response + delivery status externally for troubleshooting
• Add retry/failover handling for incident-critical alerts
• Keep message formatting abstracted so providers can be swapped later

One issue we ran into early was that some SMS providers behave differently under high-priority transactional traffic compared to standard bulk messaging. Delivery reports, queue latency, and carrier routing quality became important once incident traffic increased.

We ended up testing telecom-focused messaging APIs instead of only generic SMS gateways because some providers handle enterprise notification traffic better across African and multi-country networks. Africala’s SMS API infrastructure was interesting for this because they support transactional SMS, OTP routing, delivery reporting, and custom API integrations rather than only marketing SMS flows.

If your provider already exposed:

• endpoint URL
• auth credentials
• delivery callbacks/webhooks

then Notify + outbound REST integration should work without needing major UI workarounds.

The biggest recommendation I’d give is to separate:

• incident workflow logic
• provider integration logic
• delivery monitoring/reporting

That makes troubleshooting and provider replacement much easier later.