At this year’s Knowledge16 conference, a collection of 12,000 customers, partners, and developers came together in search of ways to extend and collectively grow their portfolio of services. As they entered Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay convention center, the power of ServiceNow was on display everywhere. The large, red banners; excited conference-goers; dancing ServiceNow “power button” mascots; and energetic staff emanated the force of the ServiceNow movement. This year’s theme was “Service Revolution,” and the conference proved that ServiceNow’s platform is indeed paving the way for new service possibilities.
ServiceNow’s growth is enabled by an ecosystem of partners, consultants, and ServiceNow evangelists. Within this ecosystem is a tightly tuned focus on ServiceNow being a holistic platform versus just an application designed to deliver IT services. ServiceNow is not just valuable for its out-of-box solutions, but for its versatility. The platform invites and encourages third-party innovation and partner development to deliver relevant and beneficial IT services. This was highlighted at the CreatorCon and Hackathon conference events where developers and users alike were encouraged to build their own cutting-edge ideas. ServiceNow creates the platform, and users make it their own.
This evolution of ServiceNow as a platform exposes interesting opportunities for closing functionality gaps. One new service frontier ServiceNow has recently ventured into is Security Operations. Security, Vulnerability Response, and Threat Analysis are initial applications that will be available to users and offer great value, especially to senior leadership. The platform looks robust and is ready to feature rich third-party add-ons.
With much IT and Engineering development moving into the Cloud, the notion of “DevOps” is another critical topic surrounding ServiceNow’s platform. They’ve created a solution that will enable end-to-end interaction between IT, Engineering, and Operation Teams. This will eliminate technical barriers that inherently add friction and will help build and run cycles within an enterprise. This may be a cultural transformation for some users, but once adopted, can be driven by the ServiceNow platform and its ecosystem of partners.
ServiceNow is continuing to develop a service revolution with their innovative platform that allows users to build and cultivate all of their service needs. By creating a platform for users to build on, it allows them to evolve their custom service offerings. Because you can’t spell “revolution” without “evolution.” Be on the lookout for these new ServiceNow features and more in 2016.
