Service Now

Overview

Ten years ago, I was skeptical whether "the cloud" would actually emerge as a viable solution. For starters, you ask someone what is "the cloud" and you'll get different answers based on some broad perspective for how they view the use of the term. Ultimately to me, "the cloud" translates into whatever it takes to deliver a managed service by an outside service provider. The key here is on service. Today, that means minimally a server, storage along with the related administrative service for upkeeping the backend (Infrastructure as a Service - IaaS). Taken a step further, there has to be a software service on the frontend, otherwise, there is no use for the service. That software service can also be a part of a cloud offering which also provide administration, development and support (Software as a Service - SaaS) that the client may or may not maintain its configuration.

ServiceNow is an interesting offering in that it is a combination of IaaS and SaaS, whose infrastructure is dynamically redundant over 4 instances with software running on top of their managed infrastructure supporting mainly service management functionality aimed at both IT as well as other business service functions. ServiceNow is a current market leader in “the cloud” space providing an Iaas/SaaS solution to business.

When ServiceNow began as solely a developmental framework where they innovatively created a foundational UI and utility set which provides a consistent method for reading a comprehensive set of configuration rules in terms of database data definition and data rules but includes predominantly javascript code for managing the data and functional service on both the client and server. It was originally brought to market as a simplified web development tool for developers to develop over in order for the developer to focus on functionality rather than being distracted by recreating a utility UI. Not having much success selling it as a dev tool, they needed a use case in order to better market the system’s capabilities. First implementation of ServiceNow was over ITIL support. It was this demonstration implementation that brought success to ServiceNow.

This section highlights work and thoughts related to application architecture and development over the ServiceNow framework. This development framework uses the Glide system that has set the standard for other cloud service providers to play catch up in terms of robust utility, flexibility which translates into minimal time to implement new applications that fit the enterprise. I have found that I can even use this developmental platform as a communication tool in a requirements gathering meeting to just go ahead and stub out basic data and functional requirements as those requirements are being defined. Sweet!