ServiceNow, Inc. (NOW) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome, and thank you for joining us for today's event. Before we get started, we have a few housekeeping tips that will help make your experience more enjoyable. First, today's session is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] We will remind you about completing the survey at the end of the webinar. Finally, thanks [ for joining ] today's webinar. Now let's get started.

Hello and welcome for developers, builders, admins, everyone on a wide variety of platform topics, I am so excited that I can barely get the standard lines out today. We are celebrating the release of Utah, and you can't spell Utah without U. Quick reminder, there is a new widget on the bottom of your screen. In the bottom right, I was told with some people and a speech bubble to add reactions, there they go, they're flying by applauses and hearts and the usual stuff. We appreciate that. Let us know what you think as we're going through this. Welcome, everybody, from around the world, whether you're watching live or you're watching this recording later. I am so excited to be here. Let's get on with it with some quick introductions. Before we do that, we need that safe harbor. We are talking about an early availability release. So please be aware that some of the things we talk about may not be, so far, so good, but may not make it to the general availability release in March, so we will be coming out with that very, very soon. Also a quick reminder that Utah is available on your personal developer instances, starting today. I know last time we did this, it took a few hours from the webinar to get that available. So after the webinar, go check out, developer.servicenow.com. See if you can do an upgrade to Utah. You're going to love what you find. And we're here to give you some of that orientation. Okay. Quick introduction about me. My name is Chuck Tomasi. For those that are new, you may not know me. So here's the quick -- the 30-second pitch. I am a senior developer advocate at ServiceNow. I've been here since 2010. I've done hundreds of videos and thousands of podcasts in my history, loving every minute of it, sharing the information with you. Before I was an employee, I was a customer, so I've been where you are. I've done your job to some extent, plus or minus a few different things. And my history goes way, way back. I can now officially say I'm in my fifth decade of my tech journey. So over to Lauren.

Also, thank you so much, Chuck. Good afternoon, evening, and good night, everybody. Sorry. Hi, there, everybody. My name is Lauren McManamon. I am the second newest senior developer advocate on the ServiceNow team. I was a former ServiceNow developer and joined ServiceNow in 2017 as a creator workflow solution consultant. You might have seen me. I'm kind of a familiar face joining the developer advocacy team in 2022, perhaps at the Dallas Now at Work keynotes or perhaps you were one of my customers. So shout out to you all avid enthusiasts of photography, YouTube and training for my Sake Sommelier test here in October. With that, I'll kick things over to you, Pranav.

Hi, everyone. My name is Pranav. I'm the newest developer advocate, like, 2 months old into ServiceNow. I have close to around 8 years of ServiceNow experience. I started as a software engineer, moved into consulting, did it for a couple of years. And just prior to joining ServiceNow, I was working with customer end support and was supporting them with their implementation. I was also part of the ServiceNow MVP Class for the last 2 years, which I'm really proud of. Apart from my work, I love to box, play video games and travel to some exotic destination whenever I get a chance. Now I pass it to Earl.

Thanks, Pranav. Hi, everyone. My name is Earl Duque. I am a developer advocate with ServiceNow. I joined about 1.5 years ago. But before that, I was a developer for 3 different customers, mostly in higher education. Just like Pranav, I was a previous developer MVP. And I also participated in a lot of our ServiceNow Hackathons with a lot of finalists and category winners making really silly things. Right now, I am the program lead for the developer mentorship program, Hacktoberfest and a lot of other things, too. I am a proud contributor for womennow.dev. Go ahead and check that out if you are -- if you're an ally or if you're seeking to contribute to growing the community of women inside ServiceNow. And on the side, I like games just like Pranav, building weird stuff on ServiceNow and making silly videos. And if you are on TikTok or Instagram, you can see my handle on there and check it out. But now that we have introductions out of the way, we're going to go ahead and jump in. If you check out your screen right now, you see we have a big agenda for you today, and we'll jump in soon, but we have a little bit of housekeeping announcements that we want to get through right now. There are a lot of things going on. You'll see icons throughout the slides during our presentation today. If you see a dollar sign at the top right, that means it's a paid option. So if there's no dollar sign on the top, that means it's part of the platform, it's part of -- a feature that everyone will be getting, so that's great. And if you see a little house icon, that little house icon is an indicator that it's part of the ServiceNow store. And so you'll need to go to the store to see the capabilities to get it and to see if there's pricing on there. A little bit more of announcements or a little bit of fun stuff that's going on with this TechNow is it's actually the tenth birthday of TechNow. TechNow was launched 10 years ago on February 1, 2013, and the original host were Chuck Tomasi and Andrew Kincaid. And funnily enough, the first TechNow, the live audience for TechNow was only 10 people, and it was on Google Hangouts. And the first topic, now it seems ancient to us, but was Jelly and it was a very relevant topic for all of the developers and admins out there in the ServiceNow instance. And if you check out Chuck's picture right now, it's actually great. This is before the bow tie. He's not wearing any bow tie. And I think Chuck actually has some little bow ties he can show off right now. Chuck?

It is Throwback Thursday, so I thought I'd bring along some old friends. I do have version 1 and version 2 of the old red tie with the power icon and the 3 that were graciously gifted to me with our 2018 branding on them as well. So I thought that would be fun. I also want to give a shout out to all the people who helped along the way. We have a new set of hosts here with Earl and Pranav and Lauren. Thank you so much, but I would be remiss if I didn't give a shout-out to Dave Slusher and Kreg Steppe. They've been very helpful, along with Stacey Bailey, Max Pham, who are my other people on here and, of course, Jeremy Duncan. So thank you to everybody who has helped be a co-host, and of course, the numerous, numerous guests we've had for the content along the way. Back to you, Earl.

Thanks, Chuck. Well, continuing on the Chuck train, Chuck does host a Break Point podcast. It is the ServiceNow developer podcast. And so a really quick plug Break Point talks about the stuff to make you a better ServiceNow developer. So things like product features, career stories, nontechnical skills, soft skills, all that stuff is weekly or every other weekly topic that Chuck hosts one of our wonderful guests on. So it is a podcast so you could feel free to find it anywhere on wherever you get your normal podcasts, Apple, Google Play, Spotify or even on our YouTube channel. So go ahead and check those out. You can see it on the screen, devlink.sn/break-point. Another thing that's going on is for App Engine, which is our choice for low-code application development for custom workflows. We're still gathering peer reviews for G2. And what G2 is, think of it as, like, Yelp for software. It's a way for our peers to review the software that they use. It's pretty simple. Go to that QR code on the screen or we'll also provide the link in the webinar's show notes and spend 5, 10 minutes to review it. We really like the -- when you contribute these reviews, whether it be critical or -- and you're honest or beaming. We want to hear it all. And if you do submit one of those reviews, we'll send you even a $25 Amazon gift card as a promo right now. We appreciate it. Thank you so much for doing those things. And so this is a live webinar, and we have a question-and-answer feature. But we get a lot of repeat questions. And so this moment is for us to talk to you about frequently asked questions. So this is an overview of App Engine, Automation Engine and a multitude of other platform features that we are going to be using as developers and admins. It's not a demo, though. So we won't be doing any demos in this presentation because there's so much for us to cover. Think of this as, like, a table of contents for things to come. We will be doing deeper dives into the topics in upcoming videos, blogs and podcasts. And you can actually see what we plan to do deep dives on if you go to devlink.sn/Utah, and you'll see all the things that we have planned out for the next couple of months, actually. So make sure to check those out. Before anyone asks, we will not be discussing licensing and pricing here. It's like the #1 thing we always get asked. If you have questions about product pricing, please make sure you contact your accounting. And then between our big topics like App Engine and Automation Engine, we will be taking breaks for Q&A between sections, so we could try to answer some of your questions live on this webinar. But that was a lot. That's -- enough of the housekeeping items. Let's jump straight into the content, and I'm going to kick it off and give it to Lauren.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Earl. I'm so excited that I get to kick things off this morning and talk about App Engine. So speaking of App Engine, a couple of newcomers might be thinking, what is App Engine? Well, since the Quebec release of ServiceNow, App Engine has allowed users the ability to create, delegate and maintain custom low-code applications and all the facets that make them up. So there are a lot to cover for App Engine's overall changes. But let's go ahead and start with the enhancements. Table builder has a trifecta of enhancements that have come with the Utah release. Now let's start off with how you import. When you import a data source to create a new table, you can actually now select for it to be extended off of an internal table too. So essentially, after importing, it'll then also prompt you to match the fields, very, very similar to how the transformation maps have worked in the past. So essentially now instead of having to create an extended table first and then import and kind of reconfigure everything, you can do that all with a click of a button. The second enhancement to Table Builder and kind of speaking of extended tables as well is given that there are tons and tons and tons of options for the default extended tables list, we've finally picked out the vastly most common ones, moved them to the top of the list and also provided some much more descriptive descriptions, as you say, of every single table. So now there's no more confusion between extending off of sys_user versus imp_user. And then finally, when building your table, there is now a read-only rendering of how your table is related to others within and outside of your scope. Why is this important? Well, it really shows the impact of the data set that you're working on and shows how everything is connected on the ServiceNow platform even going beyond the scope of the application that you are creating. Another enhancement is one that possibly you might have missed. This was part of the November Tokyo store release, which if you'd like to read more about, we actually have a full blog post detailing all the specifics where you can learn more. Concerning the building of custom app templates, prior to this, if there was something wrong with the build, it would just simply not go through and kind of shrug its shoulders at you. At this release, however, now you will clearly know what the impediment is. Not only will you know what the impediment is, but it kind of categorized them, basically showing you a full log of all the problematic items but differentiating between whether or not something is being skipped over as part of your template or if it's actually preventing it from being built in the first place. Now that we've got the enhancements out of the way, finally on to stuff that is absolutely 100% brand new. It brings me so much joy to announce that there is a new low-code way for users to create workspaces, something that was previously pretty much relegated to the Pro Code domain through UIB. Workspace Builder kicks things off in a very similar way to guide an app creator, walks you through essentially what is available to build with your workspaces and really details also why each part is important. Users can now also easily pan back-and-forth between the builder and the preview and build these, configure workspaces very rapidly. It's also worth noting that you will not be able to edit old workspaces in the Workspace Builder. Just want to make sure we can hammer that home. This will pertain to things that use the experienced workspace template from Tokyo Store 1 version and beyond. So keep that in mind when building. It also gives you incentive to upgrade your instances to stay at minus 1. Next, the major addition has come to App Engine management center, admins' one-stop shop for all the analytics for their custom apps. Not only is this previously available -- not only is what was previously available now broken down in a month-by-month view, but now there's much more quantitative analytics on user experiences. Staying with the theme of experiences here, for each experience, users can not only see who is using it, how much time people spend, how many times they return and everything that is actually done. So if they're using that to build or update or delete, you will actually know that, that's occurring. This is fantastic for teams that are trying to prioritize lists of where they should spend their time developing or what needs more TLC. Now you can see what your users are spending the most time on to leave that lasting impact on anything that you decide to upgrade. And then also, we have the Belle of the ball. May I be the one to introduce you to ECM, something that's so important, it is an acronym within an acronym itself. So ECM or ERP Customization Mining is basically the answer to one of the biggest problems that I faced when I was one on the solution consulting team. When we are on these teams, we are meeting with customers that really, really power users of the big ERP powerhouses like SAP. They were maybe learning, trying and -- trying to figure out how to utilize all that legacy data with the workflow and UI capabilities that ServiceNow had. But when they were considering what to start with, they kind of ran into 2 problems. One, the amount of data in these ERP platforms was so vast, they didn't really know it to prioritize; and two, to actually create a custom application that utilize both to their best extent, they would be the leverage experts in both platforms, a very pricey resource at most customer bases. ECM removes both of these impediments. It is ridiculously powerful. Not only does it scan currently only SAP instances, but spoiler alert, probably more to come soon, but also identifies where the customizations have been made and even ranks them based off their complexity. So using this to kind of choose where to start, you can build custom apps that help you integrate ServiceNow and ERPs. And spoiler alert, too, if there's an app template that you've already created that's appropriate for that custom app, it will make recommendations. Now like I said before, given the supremacy it currently has in the ERP space, and also may be a little bit because we've got Bill in our corner now, it's no surprise that we're starting this off with SAP-only for our first release, but there is definitely more to come in the future. And I'll give this a moment to kick things off for a quick amount of Q&A.

Thank you, Lauren. One of the questions that we received was, can you use Table Builder without App Engine Studio like we can with Decision Builder?

That is a fantastic question. I believe currently Table Builder is only accessible through App Engine Studio, but I will need to double check on that to be sure.

That's my understanding as well, Lauren. Awesome. So another person was asking when you showed off the class tables having descriptions, do all the class tables have descriptions? Or is that something that we can configure, too, in the future?

Are you talking about the extended labels? Yes. So I believe all of them were given some general amount of description, the default ones that were available. However, I believe the ones that were prioritized were given more lengthy descriptions.

Awesome. Another quick question, ECM. What application suite is that under?

ECM is currently, I believe in the additional points within an app. What I'll always say, it depends on your licensing structure. It exists within the App Engine like umbrella, I believe, but it's something that will have to be added or included. I'm not sure about -- obviously, we can't discuss pricing, but it's something that would need to be negotiated, I believe.

Awesome. And maybe one more question. Do you know can the Workspace Builder be used at existing workspaces like SOW? Or is it only for building new workspaces?

As long as they are made after Tokyo store 1, I believe that they will work with the Workspace Builder.

Awesome. Do any of you all see any other questions we think we should answer on air before moving on?

No, we can go on. All right.

Thank you, Lauren, for showing us some of the new features of App Engine, let's switch our focus to Automation Engine. For those of you who don't know about Automation Engine, Automation Engine can be thought as a combination of integration hub, RPA Hub, document intelligence and automation center, which binds them all together. Before I jump into the new features, let me talk about Hermes. It's a term that will be mentioned in this presentation a few times. Hermes is as a ServiceNow platform capability that enables customers to use Kafka to connect to their data system to their ServiceNow entrances for streaming data at scale in near real-time. In short, you can think of it as a message bus built on Apache Kafka, which offers fast and scalable data, exchanges between ServiceNow engines and third-party system. You will see Hermes used in 3 main places: Stream Connect, which I'll cover in the upcoming slide and IDR and log export service, which Chuck will cover in the platform section. Now let's move into Integration Hub. Quick update. Till now we have built 186 books for our customers to consume. Moving on to the new features of Integration Hub, first up is Stream Connect for Apache Kafka. You can utilize Stream Connect plug-in on the ServiceNow platform to produce and consume data at scale between ServiceNow and other business processes. From the platform, you can leverage the Kafka message flow bus -- message float process data or if you have already developed the RT configurations, and you want to switch to Stream Connect, you can easily do that by utilizing different consumer, as you can see on this slide, which are part of the Stream Connect. Stream Connect plug-in also supports the main separation for our MSP customers. If you want to know more about it, we are coming up with a Creator Toolbox episode on Stream Connect with one of our product managers. So you make sure you check our Utah calendar at devlink.sn/utah. Let's look into some of the Integration Hub import enhancements. For those of you who don't know about integration of import, it is a web portal that simplifies the process of importing data from external sources and transforming it into ServiceNow table. As part of Utah, we have added support to import CSV file types when using the Integration Hub import experience. Another feature we have added is the automap feature. You can now click on the automap button to map source field to target field automatically. And lastly, we have added a couple of new features to the Action Designer steps. You can have many REST endpoints configured through the platform using the old REST message report. Now you have the ability to convert these into new action steps easily using the REST step itself And talking about the REST step, we have made the testing of REST step easier by allowing you to test the REST step in isolation. And you can provide runtime values to it also, which allows for modular testing of the stop. Just to call out, we have added the isolated testing to the SOAP set also. Personally speaking, I love these 2 features. As when I was making -- working on a customer integration back in the day, if these features were there, it would help me a lot. Now let's move to RPA Hub. Let's look into some -- what's RPA Hub? RPA or robotic process automation is the form of business process automation where bots are deployed as a substitute for human in routine high-volume manual task. The Utah release brings several RPA Hub enhancements for accelerating the RPA deployment. First one and also the most celebrated feature and my personal favorite, you can get -- you can now get an RPA Hub enabled in your personal developer instances. One to callout on personal developer instances, there is a limit of 1 attended and 1 unattended robots. If you want to get a PDF for yourself, you can visit [ ml.servicenow.com ]. Next up is the RPA Recorder, which allows you to record your task and automatically generate a flow based on the recording. This feature will make your bot building process super-fast. Another new feature is the unified app connector. It helps in interacting with and capturing elements from the desktop and browser-based application. And here are some of the -- here a couple of more quick things from the RPA department. You can easily move the RPA configuration across instances using update sets. There is an added MFA support for logging into multifactor enabled application. With the auto read-drive functionality in RPA Hub, it re-tries the failed work queues of -- work queue item based on the application exception type, quite similar to how retry policy works in Flow Designer. Robo calendar or robot calendar enables you to visually determine the available time slots for bots for optimum robot utilization. If you want to know more about it, we'll be coming up with the Creator Toolbox as well as a Live Coding Happy Hour episode with one of our product managers to deep dive into the RPA Hub. So make sure you check the Utah calendar at devlink.sn/utah. Let's move into document intelligence. For those of you who don't know about document intelligence, it's a human-assisted document-parsing application to replace manual work. As Chuck mentioned in the previous chat now that we have thought ServiceNow how to read, and in Utah, we have target some new tricks to read more efficiently. Let's look into some of the new features, starting with better support for extracting information from long tables. Till now, our AI only supports extracting single-page tables. In Utah, we will be expanding the range of table, which our AI can support to provide additional automation possibilities when dealing with long tables. We are also bringing a new interface for table extraction as shown in the slide. Next up is the new admin experience. The current admin experience relies on the lists and forms, but that's not case in Utah as we are bringing an entirely new admin experience based on the Next Experience. Lastly, we are bringing a better support for extracting information from checkbox. Until now, we are only supporting manual extraction of checkboxes. In Utah, we are adding AI models that will learn how to extract checkbox information through user feedback. We are also revamping the UI in order to provide a better user experience for extracting different types of checkbox information. If you want to know more about it, we'll be getting into some of the nuts and bolts of document intelligence during an episode of Live Coding Happy Hour 2. And so make sure you check the Utah calendar at devlink.sn/utah. Let's move into the last section of automation engine, that's Automation Center. Automation Center helps to go on the end-to-end multi-vendor life cycle in one place. In simple, this is your command and control center for all your automations, whether it be part of ServiceNow or outside of ServiceNow. Let's look into some of the new updates. First up is added support to visualize flow data in Automation Center. You just have to select which flows you want to track using the automation tracker. We have also addressed some of the gaps in the UI Path integration and enhanced its capability. Lastly, we have added the ability to show any existing similar automation to enable reusability and avoid duplicate efforts. If you want to know more about it, we'll be coming up with a Creator Toolbox episode on automation center with one of our product managers. So make sure you check the Utah calendar at devlink.sn/utah. I have said Utah calendar multiple times. It can easily turn into a drinking game to do that. I'm just joking about it. That's all I have for automation engine. Now I'll take some questions, and then we'll move to the next section.

Good job, Pranav. So we have a question about what would -- would Hermes be, like, a next-level integration for things like active directory syncing. And/or we also had a question that Chuck answered. But what would be some possible use cases for Hermes as an enterprise solution?

Yes. So some of the possible use cases for Hermes can be if you want to send your data outside of ServiceNow for reporting purpose, you can utilize the Hermes, because it allows you to transfer data fast and -- in a fast way. So that's one. And coming to the thing like the first question that you asked, like for [ AD ] things, yes, you can connect it to Hermes. And from Hermes, you can get the data into ServiceNow at a fast scalable way. It is, like as I mentioned in the previous slide, it's like a message bus, where you can put your messages and all the application can consume data from that message bus for more scalable and faster transaction.

Follow-up question is, is Hermes connects directly to apps? Or is it always be a mid-server?

So Hermes connects, why the mid-server? That's there. And the thing is that like you have message flows that, while the Integration Hub, you have the message flow that's there. So if you want to push data to Hermes, you can utilize the Integration Hub message flow. That's the recommended -- that's the recommendation that we have.

And do you know if it's cloud and available on on-prem also?

So it's available on cloud. For on-prem, like I need to check on that, but till now, I think it's available on cloud, and we can support -- it supports domain separation also if somebody's asking.

Awesome. We saw a lot of reactions to RPA being able to be used in PDIs coming up. And we have one question asking, so does that mean the RPA Studio is that -- do we have the embedded version in the PDIs? Or is it still needed to be installed locally on our machines?

You have to install the -- RPA comprises of 2 things. One is the RPA on ServiceNow and one is the RPA client app. So once you install the plug-in, you will have to install the RPA client to build all your RP automation. So yes, to --in short, yes, you have to install the particular software to build your RP automations.