ServiceNow Introduces New Version of the Now Platform, Giving Businesses Must-Have Digital Tools to Workflow Disruptive Change

Rhea-AI Summary

ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) has launched the Now Platform Quebec release, enhancing digital workflows with expanded AI capabilities and low-code app development tools. The update empowers businesses to innovate swiftly, improving productivity amid a digital transformation surge, with 80% of Fortune 500 companies utilizing the platform. With estimates from IDC predicting over $7.8 trillion in digital transformation investments by 2024, the new features, including Creator Workflows and AI enhancements, cater to evolving workplace demands, ensuring seamless operations and improved employee experiences.

Positive

• Enhanced platform features with AI capabilities for increased productivity.
• Introduction of low-code tools, enabling faster app development for diverse skill levels.
• 80% of Fortune 500 companies use the Now Platform, indicating strong market reliance.
• IDC projects over $7.8 trillion in digital transformation investments by 2024, highlighting industry growth potential.

Negative

• None.

ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW), the leading digital workflow company that makes work, work better for people, today unveiled the Now Platform^® Quebec release. This latest version of the Now Platform features expanded native AI capabilities and new low-code app development tools, empowering customers to innovate quickly, realize fast time-to-value, improve productivity and deliver great experiences. With companies radically changing the way they operate and accelerating digital transformation, the Now Platform is enabling the digital speed, agility and resilience every business needs to create the future of work.

App Engine Studio and App Engine Templates (Graphic: Business Wire)

Nearly 80% of the Fortune 500 and thousands of organizations worldwide are relying on the Now Platform to help protect revenue, maintain business continuity, stay productive and safe, and deliver great experiences for their customers and employees. As organizations plan for supporting distributed workforces long-term, cross-functional workflows that create great experiences for customers and employees are critical. Digital investments are at an all-time high. According to IDC, worldwide digital transformation investments will total more than $7.8 trillion by 2024.¹

Industry leaders, including Nike, Adobe, Deutsche Telekom, Logitech, Medtronic, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and others are using the Now Platform to accelerate their digital transformation programs to deliver innovation, agility and productivity.

"In today’s challenging environment, organizations worldwide are pivoting fast, adopting new, distributed models of working and creating new workflow-enabled ways of operating with more agile, resilient, digital enterprise value chains,” said Chirantan “CJ” Desai, chief product officer at ServiceNow. “Customers are relying on ServiceNow's Now Platform to deliver enterprise digital workflows, create new business models, enhance productivity and enable great customer and employee experiences in any operating environment. This newest version of the Now Platform further enhances the must-have enterprise digital tools customers need today.”

“As businesses shift from emergency response to long-term recovery and distributed work becomes the norm, organizations are accelerating digital transformation efforts and investing in new technologies that promote continuity and agility,” said Philip Carter, Group Vice President, European Chief Analyst and WW C-Suite Tech Research lead at IDC. “The ability to deliver end-to-end digital experiences for employees and customers alike will be a crucial competitive differentiator. There is significant customer traction, accelerated by the pandemic, for unified technology platforms that connect systems, silos and processes to enable these connected, digital-first enterprise models.”

The low-code workflow revolution

ServiceNow today introduced Creator Workflows to join its existing IT, Employee and Customer Workflow portfolios to put the power of automation in the hands of the business, enabling people at every technical skill level to build apps at speed.

Creator Workflows feature ServiceNow’s low-code development tools, App Engine and IntegrationHub, which allow businesses to transform old, manual processes into modern, digital workflows at scale. With the Now Platform Quebec release, ServiceNow has introduced new products within Creator Workflows that let developers of every skill level build workflow apps fast:

• App Engine Studio accelerates app development at scale with a fast, intuitive and guided low-code visual development environment that empowers people with no coding experience to collaborate and build applications.
• App Engine Templates give teams access to pre-built workflow building blocks so that citizen developers can get a head start on building apps without having to start from scratch.

Low-code is becoming a strategic imperative for businesses to adapt to a rapidly changing environment. According to Gartner, “by 2024, low-code application development will be responsible for more than 65% of application development activity.”²

Several organizations, including St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the City of Los Angeles, have turned to ServiceNow’s low-code App Engine to build custom end-to-end workflows that ensure these organizations can focus on delivering critical, lifesaving services to patients and citizens at scale during COVID.

With the Now Platform Quebec release, ServiceNow is helping organizations be more agile and adept at new ways of working. Leveraging one unified platform and data model, customers can continually monitor and optimize business processes to proactively identify and avoid bottlenecks and empower employees to work in an increasingly distributed fashion, as returning to the office becomes an option for some organizations. Three additional new workflow solutions include:

• Process Optimization enables IT and customer service organizations to visually create and improve the underlying processes driving workflows and to proactively identify and avoid process bottlenecks to speed issue resolution.
• Workforce Optimization provides a workspace for IT and customer service managers that helps organizations optimize productivity. The workspace monitors real-time agent productivity, workload and KPIs across multiple channels, resulting in improved customer experiences.
• Engagement Messenger extends self-service to 3rd party portals to enable AI search, Knowledge Management, Case and Virtual Agent interactions, which result in increased case deflection and improved customer satisfaction.

Machine learning and native AI solutions for digital resiliency and business productivity

The Now Platform Quebec release allows organizations to enhance productivity with powerful, new, native AI capabilities. In addition to the need to innovate fast and deploy quickly at scale, customers need to deliver enterprise-wide, consumer grade digital tools that enhance productivity for more distributed workforces. New capabilities to enhance productivity include:

• ITOM Predictive AIOps predicts issues before they become problems and helps organizations automate resolutions.
• Virtual Agent enhancements accelerate time to value with guided setup and topic recommendations and speed incident resolution with end-to-end AI-powered conversational experiences.
• AI Search delivers a consumer-grade search experience for employees and customers, giving people the personalized, relevant, and actionable information they need right from their search window in service portals, on mobile, and Virtual Agent.

These new capabilities represent the AI functionality acquired with Loom Systems and Attivio, which have been incorporated in the Quebec release. The Now Platform Quebec release keeps work flowing with advanced AIOps capabilities and gives customers deeper insights into their digital operations to minimize and fix incidents before they become issues, delivering consumer-grade AI-driven experiences that harness personalized insights to help organizations work smarter and faster.

Great employee experiences for the new world of work

ServiceNow continues to create great employee experiences by helping employees find answers to questions and fulfilling employee requests across the enterprise – from HR and IT to legal and facilities. In addition to providing consumer-grade search experiences with AI search, ServiceNow announced new innovations to help organizations boost employee engagement across the enterprise, including Universal Request. Universal Request enables agents to collaborate and transfer tickets across departments while keeping employees informed of the status of their ticket so that employees can stay focused on their work without being concerned where the request is supposed to go.

Availability

The Now Platform Quebec release is generally available today.

Additional information:

• Watch a demo of the App Engine Studio and Templates solution.
• ServiceNow’s Chief Product Officer, CJ Desai, shares additional insights in his blog on:
  • IT Workflows capabilities build the future of IT at speed.
  • Customer Workflows capabilities connect customer operations and boost loyalty.
  • UI Builder capabilities for App Engine and Customer Service Management solutions enable customers to cater to different audiences.
• Employee Workflows capabilities create connected and engaging employee experiences, which you can learn about here.
• ServiceNow today also introduced new innovations for the telecommunications, financial services, and healthcare industries, which you can learn about here.

What customers and partners are saying about the Now Platform Quebec release:

Adobe

“In today’s experience-driven economy, ServiceNow has played an integral role in shaping digital workflows,” said Ronell Hugh, Head of Product Marketing, Adobe Experience Platform. “The Now Platform has helped us simplify internal workflows and improve the overall employee experience.”

Acorio

"The Now Platform Quebec release reinforces ServiceNow’s mission to redefine what meaningful work looks like in the 21st century by connecting people, processes, and technology for true long-term success,” said Ellen Daley, SVP, Acorio an NTT DATA Services Company. “With the addition of enhanced artificial intelligence, mobile capabilities, UI Builder, and more, the entire Now Platform has become indispensable, especially as we continue to deal with our global health crisis. ServiceNow has enabled our clients who, in turn, have inspired us as they stayed calm and dug deep to protect their customers and employees with the Now Platform. The best innovation happens in these times and I am amazed at what our customers are doing to ensure safe work and serve customers who need them more than ever. With Quebec and beyond, let’s continue to look forward to the future and a healthy business environment, underpinned by a peaceful and socially just community."

Logitech

“Logitech implemented ServiceNow to increase the speed and agility of our ITOM and ITAM teams, supporting IT compliance and more efficient operations for our workforce,” said Anne Carrigy, head of enterprise IT, Logitech. “We are excited to enable employee collaboration, integrate with some of our existing platforms, and more using ServiceNow’s new Now Platform Quebec release. ServiceNow’s digital workflows provide a solid employee experience that help keep us focused on innovation.”

Deutsche Telekom

“With the establishment of the new B2B business unit in 2020, DTAG started the implementation of the B2B Powerhouse initiative, including the endeavor to radically simplify and unify processes and IT for the B2B business,” said Angela Maragopoulou, CIO B2B, Deutsche Telekom. “For this purpose, the 1B2B leadership team decided to join the ServiceNow Design Partner Program for influencing and contributing to the further development of the ServiceNow platform capabilities in line with the needs of a modern B2B telco.”

Discover

“Our development team has found ServiceNow's Quebec release to be a milestone release for expanding our ability to provide value back to our organization,” said John Skender, Lead Software Engineer at Discover. “It’s never been a better time to be a developer on the ServiceNow platform and a huge reason for that is UI Builder. UI Builder for App Engine has allowed our team to create modern and data rich applications at an incredible pace. Our team loves the ability to use modern development tools and our end users love the engaging applications we’re able to build.”

Juniper Networks

"It’s in Juniper‘s DNA to help our customers solve the biggest networking challenge of our time – complexity,” said Sharon Mandell, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Juniper Networks. “And as longtime users of ServiceNow, we’ve extended this mantra into our own IT practices to simplify, modernize and improve our business agility. We look forward to using features made available in the Now Platform Quebec release to streamline operations and boost innovation across the company so that Juniper can focus on providing customers the simple network experience required in this new era.”

Medtronic

“Our primary mission is to alleviate pain, restore health, and extend life,” said Kulasekhar Subramaniam, IT director – ServiceNow Platform, Medtronic. “ServiceNow’s agile, intuitive, and structured low-code tools have been essential in driving innovation and ensuring our focus stays in providing our stakeholders with the best experience in achieving their goals in a timely manner. We embraced a citizen developer model with user-friendly tools and templates to meet the growing demands of our business partners and the results have been astounding, with over a 50 percent increase in app development in the ServiceNow platform. Creator Workflows products, like App Engine, play a key role in developing innovative technologies that put patients first and effect positive change in the communities we live and work in.”

Qlik

“We’re hyper-focused on providing our teams the end-to-end support needed across every aspect of the business, and App Engine enhances our ability to provide purpose-built applications to solve unique business issues,” said Dan Le Masurier, Director IT Service Delivery, Qlik. “With App Engine Studio, we look forward to quickly developing and delivering specialized enterprise-grade applications to deliver even more value to our teams.”

Deloitte

“Organizations across industries have undergone incredible digital transformations in the last year as we continue to adapt to a changing world of work,” said Erica Volini, principal and human capital leader, Deloitte Consulting LLP. “Through our continued collaboration with ServiceNow and their latest Now Platform updates, our clients will be prepared for the modern workforce with the ability to enable productivity from anywhere and drive business agility at scale.”^*

^* Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of our legal structure.

¹ IDC, WW Digital Transformation Spending Guide, 2021

² Gartner, Top 10 Application Predictions Through 2025, 12 May 2020

About ServiceNow:

ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) is making the world of work, work better for people. Our cloud-based platform and solutions deliver digital workflows that create great experiences and unlock productivity for employees and the enterprise. For more information, visit: www.servicenow.com.

© 2021 ServiceNow, Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210311005235/en/

FAQ

What are the key features of the Now Platform Quebec release by ServiceNow?

The Quebec release includes enhanced AI capabilities, low-code app development tools, Creator Workflows, and features for process optimization and workforce engagement.

How does the Now Platform benefit Fortune 500 companies?

The Now Platform allows Fortune 500 companies to innovate quickly, improve productivity, and maintain business continuity during digital transformations.

What is the significance of the $7.8 trillion digital transformation investment forecast by IDC?

The forecast suggests a robust growth environment for companies like ServiceNow, as organizations increasingly invest in digital workflows and technology solutions.

When was the Now Platform Quebec release made available?

The Now Platform Quebec release is generally available as of the announcement date of the press release.

How does the low-code functionality in the Now Platform affect app development?

Low-code functionality allows users of varying technical skills to build applications quickly, thereby accelerating app development and enabling faster responses to business needs.