31: Syncing with ServiceNow: Fast time to value: Introducing the Now Platform Washington, D.C., release

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Andy Whiteside: Everyone welcome to Episode 31 of syncing with service. Now I’m your host, Andy Whiteside. I’ve got a I’ve got a panel of 3 county, me. And at some point, if Fred Reynolds ever figured out how to work. Zoom, we’ll have a panel of 4. We’re kinda making fun of you

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Andy Whiteside: let me do the commercial real quick if you’re a service now, customer, or you want to be, and and maybe you want to be, and you can’t afford it.

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Andy Whiteside: You’re at the right spot, Zintegra can help. I just had lunch with a former employer who who said they want service now, but they moved to something else because they couldn’t afford service. Now, like, wait a minute. We could have helped you with our managed instance. That includes a very cost effective right sized monthly subscription for service. Now, products depending what product you’re looking for.

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Andy Whiteside: there’s also the opportunity to take advantage of this platform that’s magical and and capable. If you’re adopting service now for a ticketing system, don’t do it. If you’re adopting service now, because you want to start with the ticketing system and grow and do something that runs your business starting with it, but branching out to other things. Then you’ve come to the right place with service now, and zintra

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Andy Whiteside: with that I’ve got Eddie Mcdonald on with us at Eddie’s a a long time service now business development. And at 1 point even a coder Eddie, how’s it going.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: It’s going really. Well, thank you.

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Andy Whiteside: Last time you coded something or develop something on the service. Now platform was when.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: It was on Geneva was the last line of code I wrote. I started in Berlin, actually, during the aspen Berlin changeover, and I banged out some code for a few releases. And then I’m like, I’m rather just talk to people. So I hung up my keyboard.

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Andy Whiteside: But you talk to people about it. Now you’ve been on lots of the lineages of the different platforms, and you actually did it at 1 point. So you know, that makes very legitimate to be talking to people about how they’re gonna use the use the technology and be successful with them.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: 100%, yes.

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Andy Whiteside: So we got Fred in the chat window, or, excuse me, he’s in the chat. Whenever here he’s he’s in our audience right now. We’re gonna leave him in there for just a minute to make suffer or not. Come in on time. Mike Savi is with us. Mike is our master architect. Mike is, really doing amazing things, working with our current and future clients. Mike, most exciting thing you’ve talked to someone about in the last week.

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Andy Whiteside: as it relates to service. Now.

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Mike Sabia: I mean just the Washington DC. Release itself, which we’re here to talk about today.

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Mike Sabia: Service now, continues to make great progress in its platform. Now, service now has kind of started pushing some of its products into store releases. So that if let’s say, strategic portfolio management has an update. It is possible to get some of those updates outside of these twice yearly releases. But the foundational changes that affect everything go in in these releases.

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Andy Whiteside: Would you call a service now? A platform you can be very agile on and based on what you just said. It’s kind of agile itself.

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Mike Sabia: I I do. I absolutely agree with that now. You know, 10 years ago, 11 years ago, when I started

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Mike Sabia: the power of service now was the ability to customize, and you can still do that. But service now has grown, and now has a lot of the capabilities that customers needed to customize for

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Mike Sabia: and so as much as possible, we try to stay out of box in order to reduce or eliminate that technical debt, but absolutely a powerful for anything you need.

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Andy Whiteside: That’s a story here all the time, and I want to tell folks out there that if you’re working with a partner like Zintra we can have that conversation open on the front end. We don’t want you to develop down a path where you’re gonna have to pull back. We want to go to service now with you and find out. Hey? Was this something coming in the next release or 2? So that we you don’t develop in such a way. That’s gonna cost you more money later. And you get something that’s standardized on the platform. Let me do this with Fred. We let Fred out of the penalty box

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Andy Whiteside: had him sitting there in the audience. 2. Thanks for what was the what was the one thing you developed

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Andy Whiteside: ahead of time with service, now that you had to go back and undo so that you could adopt something that was built into the platform.

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Fred Reynolds: Oh, man! It was back in the early days, I’d probably say, around event management, alarm management.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: Cs Csm, did we have to rebuild that cause? We built it.

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Fred Reynolds: Pretty sure it was everything in from a managed services perspective the the main separated instance with managing, you know, managing customers through it. So there was a lot of things early out 10 years ago that we started with that we had to develop, to go back and undo.

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Andy Whiteside: That you paid to do it, and you had to pay to undo it. But it was the right move to undo it.

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Fred Reynolds: Yeah. And and a lot of that was just really the way that the way that they come to with did things. But at the same time it was things that just weren’t out of the box and workflows that would build into service now, which I believe today they really are.

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Mike Sabia: Fred and I have had some discussions with some other peers as well about the fact that seems like some of our inspired ideas on how to improve platform have magically gotten into the service. Now, platform. Whether that’s inspired service now or something a little more copied is is another discussion. But we’ve always made good progress in in in doing what we need.

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Fred Reynolds: Absolutely well, I will. I will give credit to service now, like they want to go. That occurs cus customer journey with them. So when I was a customer I spent a lot of time with them around feedback as to what was not in the platform. So obviously, I’ve said it many, many times on these podcasts. Right? They’ve done a good job of investment in their own product. And I think it’s from listening to customers and partners as well.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: Hey, Andy, before we move on, you touched on something that’s kind of important there for a second, because you talked to Mike about, you know customization back in the past and how it’s built. Now.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: you know, the folks here is integral. We’re gonna be consultants. First, we’re not order takers. We’re not gonna execute blindly a vision. We wanna talk about it. Make sure that the platform is built on a solid foundation scalable for the future. So we don’t have to go back and rebuild later on, or even worse, Z. Boot from a really nightmarish implementation. So that’s a big differentiator with us, and a lot of other partners is that we wanna understand your business and give you good advice.

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Andy Whiteside: So, Eddie, don’t, do we not get a lot of pushback from our investors by, you know, thinking long term with our customers.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: You know. Sometimes we do, but it’s that’s the price we pay for doing good business. We’re not.

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Andy Whiteside: Joke! We don’t have any.

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Mike Sabia: Was a joke.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: I thought I would thought you were referencing another company that has conversations with us.

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Andy Whiteside: Oh, look! We can be client for life long term oriented because we don’t have to worry about Wall Street, or some type of quarterly objective that some private equity firm has got us handcuffed to

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Andy Whiteside: speaking of spending money to make money, Fred Reynolds, we got our knowledge conference related madness coming up service now, knowledge, and we wanted you to tell our listeners what that’s all about. As we go into it before we jump into talking about the Washington, DC. Release.

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Fred Reynolds: Well, I’m super excited about this year’s knowledge. One that’s in May seventh, through the ninth. And there’s this so many different events, classes, knowledge that can be gained as a customer and as a partner there as well. So I just went to my first one last year, which is funny. Out of the 10 years I’ve been on the platform.

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Fred Reynolds: and the classes are are really incredible. A lot of co-lead with customers. Customer use cases. You can learn a lot in all the different areas. You know, we’re gonna have a nice booth and a nice presence this year as well Andy, as you know, we have a big

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Fred Reynolds: party that we’re having on the ninth of the eighth. I believe it is. But we’re giving away our trip, and we also have a customer appreciation day. We do on the ninth, before the end ceremony.

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Andy Whiteside: Yeah, we’re going from year one, not doing anything but attending to year 2, making a

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Andy Whiteside: making, a big splash.

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Fred Reynolds: And we’re gonna have a large presence there, too. I don’t wanna make that unknown. We could probably have 10, plus you know of of zoom integr

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Fred Reynolds: resources, there to talk to our customers and spend time with our customers, and walking around and meeting people and learning.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: You do. That’s interesting, Fred, because, you know, from a customer perspective, I I love. This is gonna be my 6 knowledge. I love nerding out with our customers and talking about the challenges they’re having and proposing solutions. And from a customer’s perspective they get all this vision from free resources. You know, they’re just hanging out and talking to them. So it’s a good time to come by and say, Hi.

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Fred Reynolds: And it really is that environment where customers can meet customers. And you know, there’s so much information out there they can. They can share their use cases of what they’re going through and talk to people just actually implemented it. So it’s very helpful.

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Andy Whiteside: So I I tell this throughout time. If I’m repeating myself, I’ll make it quick. I I’d love setting up these conferences, having customers go buying passes. I think we’re doing 10 or 20 free passes this year. And I love introducing 2 customers who don’t know each other to each other. And then, later in the week, they’re walking down the hall. They walk right past me and don’t even notice I’m there. That’s like Nirvana.

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Fred Reynolds: It is so helpful.

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Andy Whiteside: Alright, so the blow we brought forward today Mike did. And we’re gonna go through. And it’s from John Sigler, from March twentieth, 2024. So it just came out, and the title of it is fast time to value introducing the now platform. Washington, DC. Release Mike. Why did you bring this one.

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Mike Sabia: The it’s timely and pertinent, you know. The Washington DC. Release was just announcement. Rather just went ga generally available just preliminary early release before that. So it’s now available for customers to install with that first patch

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Mike Sabia: and and, as I mentioned before.

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Mike Sabia: the releases are service dials.

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Mike Sabia: ability to make

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Mike Sabia: changes that impact all the products. If there’s maybe a specific product, sometimes you’ll see them at store releases outside of the main releases. But this is its opportunity to to make some of those foundational changes, and we’ll talk to a couple of those, as well as you know, release some new capabilities.

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Andy Whiteside: Yeah, Fred, as a former platform owner for a large corporation.

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Andy Whiteside: What the what do these releases mean to you? Both

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Andy Whiteside: the good and the bad.

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Fred Reynolds: Oh, man!

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Fred Reynolds: So as a as a platform owner in the past it was always current for me to stay as current as possible, so never want to get past in minus one. So I wanted to always be on the latest and greatest to make sure that we were keeping up with, you know, any customizations we were doing and making sure we stay current with the platform. The bad is.

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Fred Reynolds: usually when you get a system like this in a large enterprise environment. It’s really hard to keep up with the workload that the organizations are passing into for unit with a lot of stories, a lot of work, and you never can really take advantage of what is coming out that latest release you. Usually.

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Fred Reynolds: you know, several releases behind on the capabilities you’re trying to introduce. So those have got that figured out kudos for them. But most large companies I talked to later still, trying to work on, you know, not base level stuff. But you know, just things like, you know their their relationships under Cmdb and trying to get more out of, you know, automation in that way. When you can get as far advanced as being on the latest

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Fred Reynolds: platform and using this capabilities, I think you’re you’re in a really great space. I just think it’s hard to get there.

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Andy Whiteside: And Eddie for you. What excites you for customers as far as the opportunity to go to get to the next release.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: You know, it’s an interesting question, because not that it sounds, it could be taken as a negative, but a new release is a litmus test to rule for what you’ve done the previous year. Did you build something that was breaking good or best practice? The skip report is, gonna tell you that after you put a new version in. So, as Mike was saying that

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: configuration is possible, but customization is better. Let’s.

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Mike Sabia: Well, I think you swapped those, but I’m sorry.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: Yeah. Sorry. Yes, yeah. Config. We’re gonna configure the platform, not customize it just for you that way. When we get our new releases like DC, we can implement them. We can see, you know, it gives you a report. You know what’s working well, what’s not. And so that’s one of the exciting pieces that we get to understand that our platform remains healthy as we go forward.

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Mike Sabia: There are some

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Mike Sabia: uses and

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Mike Sabia: place for customization. That’s what we discussed in our workshop, saying, Hey, yes, this is what you had the past.

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Mike Sabia: Are we trying to have the old system on service now, or we trying to use best practices as much as possible? And sometimes we do have to do a little bit of customization. That’s but that’s based on an assessment and a a risk acceptance.

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Fred Reynolds: A Andy. I think that was a great question, by the way, and I think we gonna come back to that a couple of times through this conversation, this blog. Because as I read the blog, I thought that like, Wow, yeah, this is really takes you from a things you were trying to create in or outside of the platform to solve used cases where it was very troubling to. Now it’s more native in the platform. So it’s a really great question. It’s just one of those to get to the latest release. You gotta be ready as a company to use what they’re introducing.

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Andy Whiteside: Yeah.

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Andy Whiteside: hey? I’m gonna call a quick audible, Mike, just give me the 3 to 5 things that people need to be most aware of before they make the move to the next release.

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Mike Sabia: Any release. You have to be aware of the fact that, as Eddie mentioned, when you upgrade, there’s going to be skips, you need to pay attention to those script records and assess them based on the priority skills. This something that I need to address? Or is it something like some form that I can kind of, you know. Wave my hand at

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Mike Sabia: as far as what Fred was saying before. Yes, it’s awesome that there’s all these new capabilities. But for a customer who’s first starting, there’s a lot of foundational work you need to do for you add in a new cap is just release, but also to what he mentioned before.

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Mike Sabia: When you are

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Mike Sabia: perhaps evaluating the need to do something that service does now does not provide. You need to make sure that it’s not coming down the road. And if it is something you really really need, are you gonna delay? Are you gonna put in a a

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Mike Sabia: preliminary version. Do you now need to upgrade to that product when you know Fred and I worked together? But previously, you know, we had done a lot of great work with Csm or Csm type stuff. And then service now came out with Csm. And we had to do some refactoring. So always have to be careful about where you are and where you’re going.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: Yeah, that’s interesting, Mike, because, you know, having folks like you and the rest of our architects here that have those intimate relationships with service now and have those points of contact. I can’t tell you how many times in my career dozens, dozens, and dozens of times where a customer wanted something implemented that was coming out in their next release, and because we knew that

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: we could save them money by not redoubling down on our work, but also save them from having to reverse back to out of the box later on.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: So yeah, that’s great.

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Fred Reynolds: That’s true.

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Andy Whiteside: Alright. So, Mike, the first section here talks about. Oh, look at this

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Andy Whiteside: we made to the first when we’re talking about AI new generative AI capabilities.

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Andy Whiteside: This is really what becomes real in the Washington, DC. Release.

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Mike Sabia: Well, I mean, Gen. AI has already started to be released. And you know, 2 main areas that they’ve already worked on is some development tools to, you know, enable the developer to

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Mike Sabia: work faster.

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Mike Sabia: And they’ve also done a lot of General AI around customer service management. So case summary. So if a new person is looking at it, they can have a quick summary of that of that ticket. I’m not gonna go into all the details of there. But the things that are focused on in this blog are the fact that they are doing AI around Itom.

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Mike Sabia: So if you get an event or alert out of another system. Yes, you can ingest that in a service now and act upon it. But the new Gen. AI. Capabilities that are released in Washington, DC. Have to do with the ability for service. Now, to read rather cryptic logs

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Mike Sabia: and get information out of that in order to say, Hey.

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Mike Sabia: this is something you’re gonna have to worry about in in a day. You know that that alerts gonna come, be coming soon. You need to kind of be aware of that right now. Rather. Then, when it happens.

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Fred Reynolds: And you don’t understand how valuable that is for a company that’s based in their uptime. Their credibility on, you know, something that’s reading in alarms and and and logs in that way. This is this is very neat, very proactive, and preventative versus being reactive. So it’s a game changer.

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Fred Reynolds: Would they be doing this.

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Andy Whiteside: Eddie, do you think people understand what that means to them?

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: I, you know, I would hope, because the folks that work in operations they are obviously a little more technical. But this step that Mike just outlined is service. Now, telling you what the problem is versus telling you. There’s a problem and figure it out. It’s very much. Here you go go get to work on the fix versus, let’s go figure out the problem is and then fix it. So yeah, the the time saved alone is well worth the investment.

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Andy Whiteside: And and I’ve got this little Andism thing about all the all roads lead to Rome. All roads lead to service. Now and then all roads lead from Rome, all roads lead from service. Now, I mean, this is that all roads lead from service. Now, moment where it’s proactively telling people this is happening. Here’s what you need to do to go fix it. Now use, I guess, your human elements to figure out if that’s correct or not, or just let me go fix it. That’s what the promise of this is.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: Yes.

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Fred Reynolds: It’s also the same story of, do you want a lot of people to fix something? Or you want to do that automation and put smarts behind it to make sure. You know you can. You could take on more work with less people with the same amount of people, and these are the steps to help you do that.

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Andy Whiteside: Funny. I just had lunch with a former colleague of mine, who retired about a year ago, and when he retired they had to hire 4 people. Well, he was basically manually able to script and automate all this stuff without the power of AI. That next generation is gonna have the benefit of leveraging AI to maybe stay small, ish and maybe even get down to one person again. That kind of that equates to the math to where this helps save money.

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Fred Reynolds: Yep.

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Andy Whiteside: Alright next section is still talking AI re responsible in purpose. Built AI, Mike, what’s this covering?

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Mike Sabia: It. It’s just talking about the fact that

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Mike Sabia: you know, AI is growing. There’s a roadmap for it. You have additional ui gen generative. AI. Us. Use cases. And one of those examples is this star Coder 2. So service now wants service. Now the product to be readily accessible. They want PE customers to be able to adopt it

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Mike Sabia: quickly, and that means reducing the implementation cost so, or the the effort to make customizations or configurations after your initial implementation and start Coder 2 is a Lm. Regarding coding capabilities, and it’s a partnership between service now and Video and a couple of others where they have an Lm. About coding standards, and that will speed up coding.

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Mike Sabia: Get

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Mike Sabia: improvements out there quicker.

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Andy Whiteside: Fred. Thoughts on this.

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Fred Reynolds: No, I mean, I think that’s that is awesome. It’s like Mike said. I mean, if it’s there’s always a

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Fred Reynolds: a a sometime, a significant cost to standing things up, getting moved, things moving forward, and then time associated with that. So anything that can be automated or done in the way. That’s that. That builds it faster. To get it out there faster is is a strong plus. I like to start seeing some of that in place. I honestly haven’t seen it yet, so that would be interesting to see. Mike and I in the archives have had conversations around some of this AI. When it comes to code development or implementation. So haven’t got experience with it yet, Andy. But looking forward to seeing what it can do.

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Mike Sabia: There were some good

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Mike Sabia: courses on how to use Gen. AI in various

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Mike Sabia: use cases, whether it be improving development or customer service management. There are some great courses on now learning for that which talk about the the value of it, and then also you know what the effort is to make that happen. Now, source out does use its own. Lm, it’s not going out to open AI or anything like that. So it’s it’s not as if your your proprietary information has to go out there. But if you need to create a

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Mike Sabia: a summary of a ticket, it’s all within service now as Llm. And you can, you know, make those advantages?

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Mike Sabia: Yeah.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: You know, there’s the takeaway. Here is also the financial impact. So you know, service now led with the low code no code several years back, and that took off. And this is just the next iteration of that where AI is helping you, you know, write this code incorporating, there’s 600 different languages. So you you’re getting to your finished product with fewer human errors. So, and that’s just all about saving money.

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Mike Sabia: Right. Now. L, you know, using Geno, AI is not

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Mike Sabia: free. It takes computing power and service now does have costs associated with using generative AI which, you know, there’s predictive AI in the platform that that doesn’t cost additional cost. But for generative AI there are some costs associated with that. And there are.

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Mike Sabia: There’s documentation about how to make those business cases. Here’s the cost. But here’s the savings, you see, hey? If yes, maybe it’ll cost us money. But if I can have one less developer or one less implementer, or speed up my my systems to be able to respond to events before the Lord happens that saves money.

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Mike Sabia: spend money, save money.

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Fred Reynolds: Yep.

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Andy Whiteside: Next section talks about intelligent automation. Mike.

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Mike Sabia: So I’m gonna talk a little bit about the first one workflow studio that’s mentioned here. So service now has already had flow designer and and process, automation designer and decision builder and service now. But they’re kind of bringing it together. So flow. Designer is is your low code. No code flows that replace business rules.

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Mike Sabia: where protest automation designer comes in. Play is one. If you have logic says, Hey, based on this condition, do this based on this condition. Do that. That’s great. But if you have a third condition, you don’t have to recode it. So it’s ability to have decision tables. And in this release they’re they’re bringing it together. The flow design or the process automate automation, desire pad and decision builder all into one tool

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Mike Sabia: speed up the development

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Mike Sabia: and the the understanding of what’s happening.

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Andy Whiteside: Good as a, as a business owner under your current role and your previous role. What excites you about this.

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Fred Reynolds: Well, I mean, anytime you can create a tool set for your development teams to work faster with and more efficiently. I mean, you always get excited, cause you gotta see that that makes them a whole lot more efficient of what they do. I think this is a little bit beyond what I’ve ever done in the platform. As far as I’ve never written any code. I’ve never done that. So Eddie may have a little bit more experience there, but from owning tools and building tools, I mean, this is another step, and making sure that those that are

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Fred Reynolds: configuring on the platform have a lot more tools at their disposal.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: And just to be clear, my coding skills today are very similar to a monkey in front of a typewriter. So don’t don’t.

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Andy Whiteside: Perfect that may be perfect for the next generation.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: Right, right.

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Fred Reynolds: Well look as it is with flow. Designer Mike. That’s the way it’s intended. The flow designers to drop, drag and drop and to build things. So you don’t have to have that code of experience. It’s more profit.

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Mike Sabia: For sip, for for simple stuff, for sure. It’s when it’s more complex that you need to, you know. Consider exactly what you want to accomplish. You know those flows can be, can become complex, and it might be better to do your process design a little differently, or break it into components.

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Mike Sabia: even though process flow designer is not

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Mike Sabia: and customization going back to that brief topic that still means it means it has to be designed. And you need to have a good partner who can do that rather than say, Hey, you want this. Let me just start coding or start creating flows. You need to plan those for them to be most useful.

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Andy Whiteside: So next next topic is called simplified experiences. How does DC enable that.

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Mike Sabia: Well, so over the last couple of years you’ve seen that use of workspaces has improved the usage of the source out platform when that first came out it was focused at the tier one. Now it’s focused for the actual use and support of the product. And this is another place where they are looking to have a better

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Mike Sabia: experience around different areas of service now, and one example of that is the sales and order management which, provides a a visual

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Mike Sabia: understanding of what has been ordered, what has been what’s available

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Mike Sabia: and how you order those additional information. It’s a it’s a better ui around that. And then, secondly, they’ve also improved the performance analytics reporting across the whole service. Now, platform from, you know, surfacing real time information, and, you know, creating the triggers and and leveraging a Ops to support the Service operations. Workspace.

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Andy Whiteside: Yeah, Fred, can you translate what he just said?

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Fred Reynolds: Well, I’ll I would tell you the way I look at this simplified experience and sales and order management became, because there’s multiple applications on the platform right? This is another application. There. It’s around procurement around sales enablement. So I think what Mike saying is, they had this out for a couple of years now they’ve really enhanced from that to simplify the experience of

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Fred Reynolds: of of operating with it right of the the dashboards, the workflow that comes out. It’s just simple click through to see it and better reporting. So I think this is just more enhancements came to Washington to make it more simplified in that procurement space which is one that is interesting, Andy, because, again, a lot of entry point in the service now is around it. And maybe even I, Tom, if they have that just it related stuff.

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Fred Reynolds: Not as many people, you know. Just as I was aware of Hrsd. The procurement, the sales cycle. But service now does it all, and I think the more and more every release comes out. They’re really hitting every one of those areas and making it dashboard a lot easier simplified to work with it. And this is just another one of those.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: So service now has had the capability to integrate with your suppliers for some time, whether you have to, you know, order laptops, or boxes of whatever that you know, sometimes millions of dollars a month. But it was purely transactional. I think the upgrade here is all of that additional visibility. I mean, they’re talking about. You can get quotes and and

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: order tracking. There’s a lot of bells and whistles that is more than just a point and click and hit. Send and wait for your boxes to arrive.

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Andy Whiteside: This, to me seems like a really obvious example. That service now is going both deep and wide within the platform. And now we’re, you know, encroaching on other areas around. You know, business delivery.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: Well, it’s it’s about information, you know. I mean, we’re all used to. We order something from Amazon. We want to know. We wanted the email to know they got it. We want to know when it’s been sent. We want to track it when it gets here. I mean, that’s just that’s the world we live in now. And and you know big businesses are the same way. They want this information and a click.

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Mike Sabia: Right and.

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Fred Reynolds: Point now to having all this information having the analytics on top of that. And this is not just helping you with your process and making sure in the end it’s better, is supplying analytics to that. And now with AI automational that, too, to make it even more efficient.

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Fred Reynolds: Sorry, Mike, I interrupted. You.

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Mike Sabia: No, I was just gonna say, you know, for those who’ve been on the service now platform for many years. There’s the old traditional ui, with all the list views, and for people are familiar with that that’s super quick. But for people who are not familiar with it, it looks a little archaic, maybe a little confusing. And this is another area where service now is putting its new ui around its capabilities.

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Mike Sabia: Previously it was around workspaces. Now it’s about, you know.

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Mike Sabia: sales and order management.

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Andy Whiteside: I I wanna tweak something, heard Eddie say all this information with a click. I think we’re really talking about here now, is all this information without even having to do the click.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: Yeah, just on your board, right?

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Andy Whiteside: It’s it’s happening.

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Andy Whiteside: You’ve pre-programmed it. Citizen developer, maybe even pre-programmed it. And now we’ve got the power of the

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Andy Whiteside: the digital transformation version 18, or whatever it is, for your organization has now finally come full circle, and in theory come to life

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Andy Whiteside: right.

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Mike Sabia: You know, for example, there’s there’s reorder rules where like, Hey, I always want to have 20 mice in my storeroom, as you, you know, drop below a certain number you reorder, but the ability to set that up to configure what those those rules are. The trigger. All of that’s in the new ui make it a lot more accessible.

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Andy Whiteside: yeah, you know what it’s. It’s been interesting to me, cause since Fred’s come on board. And you guys have started working with some of our vendors like, we’re not working with our our vendors that we work with, that we resell their products, not service now, but our products, they their products we resell. It’s interesting to me. So how many of them are using service now to manage their back end, which includes things like, you know, reorders and and getting the their products in

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Andy Whiteside: their platforms out to the customers who are buying them

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Andy Whiteside: in supporting them. Yeah.

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Andy Whiteside: alright. Last section here talks about extensibility, Mike. What are they trying to get across.

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Mike Sabia: So the common service data model is something that service now is is fully embraced the last few years. The idea that you don’t just have, you know Cis, or assets, or or the like. It’s how everything tied together. You had the foundational data of users and locations departments.

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Mike Sabia: and then you go into. You know your your code. You’re building it. You’re you’re managing your technical services, such as your your server or your your prod test dev servers. But then there’s the business services that sit on it and the business applications you sell. So if somebody reports, hey, I have a problem with my email.

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Mike Sabia: you would be able to see. Well.

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Mike Sabia: that’s not a Ci. What Ci might be causing the problem. You’d be able to have service

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Mike Sabia: mapping in order to see what Ci support that service. And similarly, when you’re scheduling a change and you’re gonna be bringing a server down, you could see what services it can impact and what service now is doing here is is operationalizing it a little bit more, you know, not not just having it an association in this of dependencies, but actually having process around it. And th. This might be a topic that probably deserves its own

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Mike Sabia: blog discussion or or podcast discussion. It’s hard to go into all the details in. In, you know, a limited amount of time.

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Andy Whiteside: Yeah. So, Fred, you immediately said, Yeah, this deserves its own. What is? Why? Why.

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Fred Reynolds: Well, I think so, because at 1 point service I had like that slogan. It’s a unifying platform. If he was so, what do you mean by it’s a unifying platform. And I think the the Csd is really, it’s more of a standard, right, Mike. It’s not really an application as part of the core platform. But it’s a it’s a guideline to follow. To way, you’re storing data. So that’s accessible across all the applications across all the users on the platform. So that way, you find a way to capture as much data as possible. Now, with the use of AI and things that could crunch

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Fred Reynolds: data a lot quicker. I mean, I think there’s more use out of it. But that’s why I think it could deserve its own, because I think breaking out and understand what that is. A lot of customers even have service now

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Fred Reynolds: are not aware of

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Fred Reynolds: how to how to use it, how to implement it, or how to apply it.

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Andy Whiteside: And and what I love about the the platform right is, if you do start applying it to different pieces of your business.

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Andy Whiteside: they will. At least it feels like kind of organically come together through the software in this common. This kind of common database.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: Or it’s actually not even organically. It’s by design. They come together, you know. It’s I mean, that was one of the core pieces that those silos will be broken down, and having that end to end platform that can go from one side of your organization to the other. Now we’re gonna drop gin AI on top of that. The whole organization can benefit.

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Andy Whiteside: So, Eddie, I agree at the same time, when we start with customers on the service now platform, and I can see that they’re as long as they’re not fighting it, it will organically just start to pull stuff in, pull stuff in for full. And if they didn’t have a plan strategy. It’s happening. It’s happening.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: Yeah, it’s on our side is by design on their side. It’s organically.

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Andy Whiteside: Yeah.

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Fred Reynolds: Wishes.

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Andy Whiteside: As long as they’re not fighting it, and occasionally you find some that just.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: So keep, but.

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Andy Whiteside: Of disparate systems. And you’re like, just let it happen.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: Well, what you do is you put a certain module in place, and you make the other parts of the organization jealous that jealousy has sold a lot of deals.

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Andy Whiteside: Well, yes, if it’s done right, and if that first one put in place is successful, how many, Fred, have you seen where that first one wasn’t successful, and they’re going the opposite direction where they’re trying to rip it out. We’re going. What are you doing?

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Fred Reynolds: Absolutely. Yeah, it’s very common.

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Andy Whiteside: Alright, guys, did we cover it?

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Fred Reynolds: Blew it in.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: Like we did.

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Andy Whiteside: Anything Mike, last word from you anything we didn’t cover. You’d want to cover.

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Mike Sabia: Any release of service now

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Mike Sabia: has a lot of different capabilities, and you can go to. You know the the release release notes

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Mike Sabia: to see exactly what is included in that, or go on to

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Mike Sabia: service now’s learning platform. Now, pla now learning to find out more about that release, and of course you can always come to us. Integrate. Say, Hey, I’m interested in this component. What does this mean for me? And we’ll have a practical discussion about what your your needs are, and how we can map service now to meet those comparatives and and objectives.

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Andy Whiteside: And how much would that cost them.

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Mike Sabia: To have discussions with us. That’s part of pre-sales motion. That’s free.

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Andy Whiteside: Part of being a good partner

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Andy Whiteside: Fred. Anything you want to cover. We didn’t cover.

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Fred Reynolds: Well, I would say, as someone who’s bought, implemented, supported a lot of software through the years when it comes to new releases software release for those new releases. This is an important thing to look at. But do you have the right

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Fred Reynolds: software that you have your platform because you see every release of service now has come out with, I think, since started, has a long list of things is doing. It’s so big right now. They have big topics, right? They don’t have all the documentate they have that, I’m sure, Mike, you probably go look at that stuff, but they have so much detail on this as opposed to some products. When you get that new release in this 15 bug fixes right. And it may be one new little feature. I just want to stress the fact that every single release of service now has really big ticket items that help our customers get more use out of it.

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Mike Sabia: Right. And and in fact, the releases are really focused around making material changes. If you just have a bug that comes out in the in the the patch releases.

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Fred Reynolds: Oh, that’s good to know.

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Mike Sabia: The year. So the the releases, the the twice yearly releases are really about new capability.

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Fred Reynolds: And my last statement, sorry, Andy, is that if anybody needs help with doing these upgrades, we’re there to help support them, because it’s always occurred. It’s always important to stay as turn as possible.

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Andy Whiteside: And these upgrades are coming, whether you want them to come or not. So you better get some help

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Andy Whiteside: Eddie the the furthest behind you’ve ever seen a customer be in terms of generations.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: Oh, well, service now puts puts guardrails around that a while back. It used to be in minus 2. I think I’ve seen

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: back in the day. I think I saw maybe 4 back 4, and they the the platform was just dying on the vine. They weren’t really actively expanding it. But yeah, in minus one is the sweet spot, I think. I do. Wanna wrap up with one thought that Mike touched on a minute ago with predictive AI being available on the platform for a while, which is for the lay people in their AI predictive. AI takes data from the past and tries to

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: predict or speculate on what might happen in the future. Generative generative AI is what’s happening now. It can wrap up a meeting, and Gen. AI can take the notes from that meeting and put a concise synopsis or summary right there for you. So it’s very different. Tool. Gen. AI is active, and it’s engaged with you right now, where predictive has its spot. But it was data driven from past experiences.

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Andy Whiteside: Yeah, that’s awesome. I, as you say, that I’m

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Andy Whiteside: every time I go to hit record in this this I’ve got an opportunity to hit with with AI cloud AI, or whatever Zoom’s calling it, and I haven’t done it yet. I think it’s feature. I gotta turn on, anyway. But I I’m curious to see what it would think and say about what we’re doing here. I wonder if it’s gonna help coach us through it and do it differently, or if it’s going to take what we produce and turn around and polish it up and help us, you know, have something better to present.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: Well, that’s the nightmare. What does it think about what we’re doing?

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Fred Reynolds: Yes, sir.

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Andy Whiteside: Yeah, I mean, I made a comment of the day online that the the biggest

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Andy Whiteside: part of genitive AI to me is going to be the coaching that it’s going to be able to provide you.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: Yeah.

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Eddie McDonald – XenTegra: absolutely.

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Fred Reynolds: Yep.

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Andy Whiteside: Well, guys, I appreciate this another session in the books here and we’ll look forward to doing again in a couple of weeks.

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Mike Sabia: Cus much.

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Fred Reynolds: Like it.