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

Good morning, afternoon or evening, depending on where you are in the world, I want to welcome you to today's presentation, Unleash the Power of your Developers with Low Code Platforms. Before we dive into the content and speaker introductions, I want to point out this session may contain forward-looking statements and release schedules or features may change. Let me start by introducing our subject matter experts, you'll hear from today. I am Marcus Belvin, Senior Product Marketing Manager for App Engine product here at ServiceNow. And today, I'm joined by two of my ServiceNow colleagues. Chuck Tomasi, Senior Dev Advocate; and Brooks Hawkins Principal Inbound Product Manager. Today's conversation will cover DevOps challenges that many of your organizations face today, how developers can get more done with low-code platforms like App Engine, including a demo of how ServiceNow delivers on these benefits. And we'll wrap up by fielding questions that you send us via the Q&A chat capability during today's session. Now that you know where we're going, let's kick this journey off with a poll. What's your biggest challenge today as a development organization, a, addressing the developer skill gap; b, meeting new app demand; c, app maintenance and upgrades; d, managing app development life cycles; or e, other. And remember to hit submit at the bottom of your poll once you've made your selection. While we await your responses, let me share this reminder as well. You can submit questions throughout the webinar in the Q&A panel at the bottom left of your screen. You can also access the resource materials in the resource list panel. Additionally, please submit the survey at the very end of the webinar. Thanks for participating in our poll. We appreciate your feedback. Wow, so for those thought they were unique in the challenges they are facing. You see now that you are not alone. Because of this, companies are asking themselves, do I build apps fast or control apps role. Well, with ServiceNow, you simply respond yes. Now let me bring in to help with this conversation. DevOps challenges are pervasive throughout many IT organizations, and it doesn't stop with just 1 or 2. So Chuck, what do you hear from your customer interactions are the biggest challenges facing development organizations today?

Marcus, first of all, thank you for having me here today. It is a great honor and thank you, viewers for tuning into this webinar. To get to your question, it's a great question, by the way. One of the biggest ones I hear from our customers is managing that backlog. There's always more work to do than we have resources for. There's this class -- I face that at home every day. I've got more tasks on my honey-dew list than I have hours in the day. So managing the backlog, there's also the resourcing for those. Obviously, you wouldn't have a backlog if you had enough resources to do everything every day. So those 2 kind of go hand in hand. And yet you're still expected to continue to innovate for those business solutions to remain competitive. Those are the big ones. [indiscernible] resourcing and remaining competitive.

Okay. So those are really good. So what are some of the ways you hear IT organizations are trying to solve some of these challenges?

I've heard two main themes. One is how do we get the existing developer cohort more effective. How do we get them working to their maximum capacity. And not only just working, but working on the things that drive real business value. You want them on the high-value things. We don't -- we pay them too much to just put a check mark out there, a check box on a form. That's kind of low-value stuff. You won't solving those high-value business answers. And the other on is how can we work closer with and maybe even utilize that workforce in the business, those line of business leaders are the subject matter experts. How do we tap into that and allow them. They know they need to check box. I don't know what it's for. I'm a developer, I'll just -- I'll continue to ask why, why, why. But they already know that implicitly. So let's leverage that line of business.

Makes a lot of sense. So with App Engine, inherent time and growth saving capabilities of the platform in much the same way object-oriented classes inherent facets of their parent class. The benefits include acceleration of time to value, the ability to build our portfolio is fast and maximizing the skill sets of your most experienced developers. So let's dive into some of these features. So Chuck, do you recall the struggles when you first came into the professional world as a developer?

Oh, my Mark is you're straining my brain. That was some 35 years ago, so I'll try to do my best to remember. First, back then everything was code. There was no such thing as low code. I mean even putting the floppy into the disk drive seem like it requires code at that point. It was tough to learn what you needed to learn. We had printed manuals back then. That was the reference material. And I think between the entire team, we had one manual that went around. So who's got the manual? Where is it? Does it have the page you need? It was very difficult to learn at that point. Secondly, there really was no community. Our community never extended beyond the 4 walls of our building. And if you take all the people in there, the people that have the skill needed to do or to help me or the kind of overlap what I was doing was about 4, and that's not much of a community to talk about. And then third, everything, everything was built from scratch. There weren't any prebuilt library, so to speak, for a lot of these things. So the project that I was working on in my initial career, I had to write a database routine, save records and retrieve records and what did that look like. The reporting engine, the scheduled tasks, workflow, integrations, UI. There was no machine learning or AI, unfortunately, back then. But everything had to be coded by hand, and that was just the technical data of it all was astounding.

Yes. That actually brings back the memories when I first started out as a developer as well. And for my first project, I had to convert some windows batch scripts as well as some AIX scripting into Java. And for me, the fact that Java's APIs are posted out there on the Internet is documentation was a timesaver. So now when I think of what we offer today from out-of-the-box workflows, it just goes above and beyond what I imagined and had to deal with when I first came on as a developer as well many years ago. So I definitely can relate. So let me go on to another question here. So what are some of the features low-code platforms like app engine provide to help expedite early career developer onboarding?

Well, it really removes that barrier of learning all that code. That's the big thing. Just getting started with tables and forms is so much more efficient these days. You don't need to have any database, SQL knowledge or learn the schema. You don't need to know HTML, CSS and Javascript to do a basic form layout to start getting input and interacting with those records. You can build these solutions as you discuss and prototype. So it's almost like there's not even a prototype actually. You're building production as you go. And that's to say nothing of the power of building a workflow or reporting or analytics, notifications, all these other low-code capabilities that bring power to your applications.

Got you. So that makes a lot of sense. And it's great to hear of all these capabilities that are now afforded the developer out there today. So we talked a little bit about early career developers. Let's move forward a little bit to talk about what there is for the other developers in your IT organizations. So with these capabilities we just covered, helping to shorten the onboarding cycle, it creates opportunities to build apps fast and quickly build out app portfolios. So for you to, what ability does the NOW platform provide to customize or extend those out-of-the-box workflows we just discussed earlier?

Sure, Marcus. The title of this webinar starts out with unleash the power of developers. That really sums it up nicely. The -- our platform does just that. With features like App Engine Studio for quick access to those low-code capabilities, and we still have Dev Studio for that deeper, more sophisticated logic and features. You can take workflows out of the box like customer workflows or financial management and extend that throughout your organization. And this is my favorite part. Because it's all on 1 platform, those teams can work seamlessly across the entire organization.

Got you. Makes a lot of sense. And I love the way this is kind of building on the capabilities that we discussed earlier when it's not just about providing those out-of-the-box workflows, it's enabling the development organizations and those developers be able to extend them much like we were able to do in the early days by customizing your own APIs, et cetera. So with all this app growth, IT admins must get a bit nervous. How can you govern the growing pipeline of apps that are going on not only within your IT organization but sometimes within the business side of your company as well, including the app development life cycle flows through app development into the test phase and then through the deployment phases and eventually into production. This is where App Engine Management Center kind of takes a play -- or takes a role. Is that right, Chuck?

That's right. You hit it on the head. App Engine Management Center, or AMC, is on of our capabilities we came out in the last few years because it directly addresses that nervousness that you said like, well, I'm not turning 200 people loose on my production instance. We need someway to govern this better. The intake process, how do we manage that? The approval, the pipeline to deploy and test this, the usage analytics, if we've built this, we want to make sure it's still being used or maybe it's not, and we deprecate it. That really gives us -- I look at this and go, where was this one I was a kid. I love App Engine Management Center for that.

Me too, and I got out of development before it came along. So it might get me to desktop, my old development skills a bit just to give it a try. Now that we've kind of talked a little bit and hopefully lowered the the risk for the admin, I want to throw in another topic, which is hot on the press these days, and that's generative AI. It's becoming more and more common in app creation. And how is ServiceNow investing in gen AI to streamline the development life cycle?

Oh my gosh, that's like the hot topic of the year. I think 2023 is gen AI is going to be Time Magazine's Man of the Year or something, it's that pervasive. If you haven't listened to a new story in the last 24 hours, that doesn't mention it somewhere, I want to know what news you're watching. But how we're implementing it on our platform, we've got things like text to flow where you can describe what your flow is going to do, and we will build out the framework for you. So you don't even have to -- this is like a text building a to say nothing of text to script, which we're also implementing in the near future that allows you to write the description of what you want that script to do. And there's the code already for you. Jumping back to the flow a little bit. If it's not perfect, you can still do -- we have recommended next actions. So if you just sent a notification, maybe there's another action that you want to do next, like, let's send the select message on top of that e-mail. So we've got general ideas of where you want to go with most flows. Generative AI is going to save a lot of people a lot of time and enable those who didn't previously have those skills, the ability to start building them now.

I personally can't wait to see a lot of this coming to fruition. I've seen some of the demos and it is definitely a time saver. So as we move forward and we talked about the early career developers, we talk about developers and governing the space. We want to make sure we cover is there a role in local platforms for your highly skilled developers? And with low code, it isn't replacing the role and the importance of these developers, it's actually helping to maximize those skill sets along their career journeys. So Chuck, you mentioned earlier you've been a developer for 35-plus years. And in those years, many of your peers have moved on in our [indiscernible] engineers, directors of IT organizations with decades of experience. What does low code with App Engine offer them?

A whole lot. If you didn't already pick up on it from earlier, I love it because it's quick and it's structured. So there's a framework around that. First, you start by importing your data or building new tables in a very guided way and then you move on to the experience, the workflow, the process flow, and security is in there as well. So it's not ever forget security. It's a very important part of who has access to what. And when you couple that with App Engine Management Center to manage the intake, the pipelines, the deployment, the usage, all I got to say is, wow, that's, again, where is this when I was a kid. It all adds up to high velocity, which everybody wants, on high-value work. That's the holy grail. And for what it's worth, every project I start these days begins in App Engine Studio.

That makes a lot of sense. And I'm enjoying hearing and learning as you discuss some of these capabilities about all the facets that are built in and available to developers. So do you feel these capabilities present an opportunity for more strategic decisions? And possible innovations from those coding experts?

Absolutely. Without the low-code capabilities like those in App Engine, your developers are going to be doing things like adding a field of the database table with a SQL statement or modifying the forum with HTML, CSS or Javascript like we spoke of 35 years ago, it was crazy. Don't even get me started on how you interact with the workflow. But that used to take them or in many cases, me, hours, days, weeks even to get that right. It was very meticulous, do this, try that, test it, didn't work, go back and forth. Tools like those found in App Engine, like table builder, for example, consolidates that all into one logical place. So it's more intuitive and you can stay focused. I simply added a table on the screen and my field is not only in the table, NoSQL, it's on the form, no HTML needed. And I can jump right to let's go to the third tab and start working on the workflow of how I want to interact with that new data element. It's freeing those developers up from the mundane tasks like putting a check box on a form. That's not the reason I get out of bed. I get out of bed to do deeper logic like integration, so I can get more value of connecting system A to system B to system C and making a whole system more valuable than the sum of its parts. That's where you get value out of the real problem solving and strategy.

Yes. connecting those systems is really what I recall saying the biggest bang for the book, and that's when you really start to see the innovations come to life. So we just covered a lot of key features. So let's take a pause and ask our second and final poll question of the day. Do you have any experience with low-code platforms, either yes or no. And as a reminder, you can submit questions through the Q&A panel at the bottom left of your screen. And don't forget to click the submit button for this poll once you've chosen your answer. Thanks for participating in our 2 polls today. So this presentation seems to be right on time for both developers who have had experience with low-code platforms and those who have not. Hopefully, now you can see what low-code solutions like App Engine can bring to your organization. So let me bring Brooks Hawkins into the conversation to demonstrate how App Engine delivers these development capabilities. Brooks, the floor is yours.

Thanks, Marcus. Super excited to be here to demo what we have going on with App Engine Management Center. My name is Brooks Hawkins, and I am a principal product manager here at ServiceNow, focused on app governance. My primary products is App Engine Management Center as well as pipelines and deployments. I'm really excited to demo that today. I've been with ServiceNow for almost 2.5 years. And prior to that, I was an IT admin. And so I'm bringing some of that real-world experience and knowledge about how governance works and putting it into some of our products. So before we get started with the demo, I want to go ahead and put up the safe harbor notice one more time. We're going to be looking at a couple of sneak peeks of features that we're targeting to have come out in August. So since we'll be looking at have some forward-looking statements, I want to make sure that we put that safe harbor notice up. All right. Let's get started with the demo. So I am here in my production instance in App Engine Management Center, and I am Able Tutor, who is our App Engine admin. So you can see on the top everything is really request focused. We want to put all the things that require action at the forefront of App Engine Management Center. So the first thing here is our intake request. So this is a standard catalog item that we ship out of the box, and it's completely customizable. So you can add it to your employee portal, you can modify any of the questions here. And so once the user wants to build on App Engine Studio build a new app, they would submit their app idea to you. And as the admin in AMC, you would review what that user wants to build. And once you were good with whatever request the users put in, you would actually in the admin section get to decide what instance you want that person to develop on as well as what permission you want them to have in App Engine Studio. So whether you want them to be able to create new apps or only edit specific applications that, that user has been added to as a collaborator. Once you select that, you can go ahead and approve the request and it would add the user to the correct group on the correct instance, send that user in e-mail and then the user can go ahead and get started with building and you don't have to log into dev at all. So once that user has the right access, they would be able to go to App Engine Studio. So jumping over to our Dev instance. And over here, I'm logged in as Adela who's one of our developers. And she's already gone through the intake process. She has been provisioned with her access, and you can see she's already been building several different apps. So Adela is building an app and she runs into an issue where she needs some help from somebody that has a specific skill set or more skills than she has around development or maybe she just wants to build the app with somebody else on her team. She can actually put in a collaboration request, so she can search for any coworkers here, and put in a request to add that person as a collaborator. Then she can actually select which descriptor or what permission she wants that person to have within her app. So we ship editor and owner out of the box, but you can create your own descriptors. So for example, I created one that is a UX designer, and the permissions for UX designer are around like workspaces and the tools that you would use to do various UX-type features, workspaces, catalog items, things like that. So in this case, maybe Adella wants to add Beth as a data engineer. Surely is a penny request for Elisa as a UX designer, and so she can go ahead and send that off. And that request is actually going to show up in production on in App Engine Management Center for able to take a look at. So if one of the collaborators that Adella has added to her app, that person has already gone through the intake process and already been vetted. She's already part of an AES user group. She has that AES role, then that would be auto approved. And so then that way, you're not creating bottlenecks or having to manage too many collaboration requests. In this case, Adella wanted to add Beth as a data engineer. Beth has not gone through the vetting process. So it would be a manual approval. But since I'm okay with Beth, I can go ahead and approve it. and now Beth would have access to just Adella's ice cream event scheduling app. She wouldn't have access to anything else. And then once Adella and Beth and maybe Elisa build out their app and they're good with that version, they can go ahead and click on submit and submit a request for this to go to production. So they would be prompted to create the version, release notes, and then they go ahead and continue. And what this is going to do is create a deployment request on our production instance in App Engine Management Center, and it is going to publish the app to our app repo. So you can see the third type of request here is deployment. And let me go ahead and refresh that to make sure we have the latest request. So we should be getting a new request here in our dev instance from the 1 that Adella just submitted, but of course, flows are running, so it could take a couple of minutes for this -- the request to actually show up here. But I have another request that's already teed up for us to take a look at. So I have Frank's Food Truck event request app. And in addition to the app being published to the app repo and this request being generated, we also generate an app manifest, which gives an overview of what types of files are in this particular app. I can also look at the deployment details, requestor details, app details. And once I am good with this, I can approve it to go to the testing incidents. And you can see, we also have a visual representation of the pipeline here. And once this app is installed on test, then it's going to go ahead, and we're going to go ahead and also run some ATF and instant scan suites. And once that is finished running, those results are going to be written to this request in both the activity stream and on this deployment environment results table, so that the admin again, can review and make sure that the app is adequately tested. So let me jump back over to the overview page, you see here. This is one of my pipelines. I -- you can actually have as many pipelines as you want with as many instances as you want. So you can see here I have this example second pipeline. It's inactive right now, but I can toggle between the two. I can also click on view all pipelines and see all of my pipelines here. So as I mentioned, sometimes the flows that actually run the pipelines can take several minutes depending on the size of the app for them to finish running because they need to install on that instance, especially with our testing incidence. It has to actually run those ATF and instant scan suites. We ship ATF and instance scan suites out of the box. Those can be modified. And then coming in our August release, you will actually also be able to run any ATF or instant scan suite that you have already invested in creating. So as part of the setup process for pipelines, you'll be able to add those additional suites to a table and all of those would run. You can see the results here have been written to the activity stream with a link to where the results actually are if you need to deep dive into them. So that's ATF. And then instant scan is down here. Those are also -- the summary is also written to this table here. So you see we are actually in a different app Adella's ice cream card inventory tracker while Frank's app is moving to the testing instance. And then once I review all the test results and I think everything is good to go, this is another new feature coming in August is previously you would just approve this, it would be installed on production and the app will be closed. But we know most customers have a production deployment window. And so now you actually get the option to schedule and app to be deployed later. So I can choose now more I can schedule for later. Let's go ahead and schedule it for later, let's say, at this request or this app should go in at 5:00 p.m. That's when our deployment window starts and I can go ahead and schedule that to run later. So you can actually see here that this version of Adella's ice cream cart inventory tractor has been approved and is scheduled to be deployed to our production instance. Today, this is -- so 3 p.m. Pacific Time, but 5:00 p.m. Central Time and that the app will be deployed within 15 minutes of that scheduled date and time. So that's an increment that we're checking for that scheduled date and time on the flow and customers can actually customize how often that has looked -- that time has looked for. And you can see here on scheduled deployments tab that the status is previously new. Now it's ready for deployment. The scheduled date is here, and that's the target environment for the app to be deployed to. And if you ever need to change the scheduled deployment date, you can actually just open this record and change the date and time here. So that is how our pipelines work. And the other couple cards that you'll see here at the top of the App Engine Management Center, that count of auto-approved collaboration request, but then also a deployment request flow were to ever fail, then you would see those close failed deployment request here as well. That way, these types of requests don't get lost. And if you ever need to review them, they're right here. So last thing on the overview page are few adoption metrics be able to track how many developers you have, and this is both developers that have access to AES or have some sort of delegated development permission and it's going to be tracked over 90 days. Then how many custom apps do you have in production versus development. And again, this is not just for AES. This is any sort of custom app that you have on your development and production instances. And then actually breaking down those developers by department. So you can see if you were to extend development into your business units, you would actually be able to see which business units are taking advantage of developing in app engine. And I can either click on one of these charts or we can use the top So we'll jump to our custom apps page here, and I have even more information around my total custom apps, custom apps with active deployments, custom apps that are in production versus custom apps in development. And then we actually break down the custom apps by department for both production and development here. These can be popped out for more detail. And then I have the full list of all of my apps here. And any of my apps that have already been published to production at least once, is going to show the version that is currently published to production here. If the app has never been to production before the published version would be blank. So I know that Adella's ice cream have been schedule has never actually been to production. That also, if I compare it with last updated on, helps me identify some of those apps that maybe have been abandoned in the development instance, and it helps you with cleanup. But I can go ahead and open one of these apps. Let me see if this is the right one. Yes, it is. All right. So first you're going to see on an app record is around app usage. So I'm going to test in sense right now, no one's used it -- used the app yet. But what you would typically see here is for the current month distinct users, number of new records as well as number of times records have been updated. And then for each experience in an app, there will be a link here to a user experience, analytics dashboard. As since it's a new app and no one's used it yet, I don't have a dashboard yet for this. These links are auto-generated. Someone has to use the app first for the dashboard to be generated, but I'm going to show you what one of these dashboards looks like. So this is actually the dashboard for App Engine Management Center. And the dashboard for those experiences will look the exact same. You can deep dive into active users, sessions, page views, session durations. You can slice and dice by week, month, active users versus new users, all sorts of different types of events here. Retention, are people coming back to your app. You can create specific funnels if you want to understand how a user is actually using your app. You can create a custom funnel to see, are they doing the -- are they completing the actions that you intend them to complete as part of this app. And then over on left there's a wealth of information, all sorts of things about sessions, first sessions versus returning users versus loyal users, quick abandons, you can break it down by -- you can look into users that never return. They came one time and they never came back. Users that are using multiple devices. You can also look at, I think, the UI analysis is really cool and has a lot of insights. You can see the quit rate, what pages have the highest click rate? Which pages have the highest popularity? Where is the user engagement? How much time is the user spending on each page? You can also look at user flows, how is each user actually using the app and navigation paths, like what percentage of users are going through which navigation paths. It seems like most sessions end after users go to specific pages. So maybe you want to optimize the app based on how users are actually using it, and you can actually compare between new and returning users, more analytics about where the user users are, what types of devices they're using, mentioned funnels already, you can also create cohorts for specific users. So as I mentioned, if an app has something that is supported in user experience analytics. In this case, a workspace, we'd automatically generate this link. And once someone use the workspace, this link would start to work. You can also see here the deployment history of this app or any collaborators. So see that Able has permission to edit this app, and Adella is the owner. I can also open it in App Engine Studio on my development instance. And similarly, we have a developer's page that's going to show total developers, active developers over the last 30 days, change in number of developers and then break that down by department. I can open a developer record and I'll be able to see all the apps that Adella has permission to collaborate on. So she has access to currently 4 different apps as well as the descriptor she owns 3, but she's the editor of 1. If it's actively being deployed, I'll actually see the deployment request number here. And then I can see any of her other requests, intake, collaboration, deployment, so get a whole view of what that developer has been working on. And that is App Engine Management Center. I'm going to go ahead and throw it back over to Marcus and Chuck to close this out.

Thank you, Brooks. I seem to learn something new every time I see App Engine demonstrated. So as we get ready to answer some of your questions, I wanted to share a few possible next steps for you to consider. You can sign up for an innovation works to receive guided hands-on experience with app engine. You can start building an app today with their own personal developer instance on the NOW platform or you can get certified as a ServiceNow developer. As you were not alone in deciding to make this investment, customers have chimed in. And ServiceNow is yet again rated a leader in Z2's low-code and no-codevelopment platform in 2023. Responses from users like you helped make these ratings happen. So if you use App Engine, we're working to gather additional peer reviews. Peer reviews are super important. Think of this like Yelp for software. Just go to the QR code on this slide or the link in the Resources section of the webinar and spend 5 to 10 minutes approximately to write a review. As further encouragement, contributors receive a $25 Amazon gift card. We would greatly appreciate it, and thank you in advance.

So let's take a beat and see what questions have come in during our discussion. Wow. So the questions have been coming in fast and furiously. There were a couple of common questions that were asked that I wanted to address. One is, yes, the session is recorded, it will be made available as a webinar replay. We have a whole page on-demand webinars. So it will be made available for you all. There was also a question about the poll results that came in. So I wanted to share at least the information from that first poll results with the audience. So reminder that first question was what's your biggest challenge is the development organization? About 40% said addressing the developer skill gap. The next leading response was meeting new app demand at around 22%. And then third was managing app development life cycle. Followed by app maintenance and upgrades. And about 6% to 7% said other when it came to that first poll. So let's dive into some of the additional questions that came in. Let's see, let's start with this one. We're making changes to an application, will the same flow through test to be the same. Brooks I think that might be for you.

Yes. Yes. The answer is yes. You would have a single pipeline -- you can have multiple pipelines. The caveat is each pipeline has had a unique source instance, so development. But every time you make a change when you're ready to move those changes to production, you would submit a new deployment request and it would go through the same pipeline and the same process.

Okay. Another question that came in, are there any future tools coming to help convert legacy workflows to new flow designer? Chuck, I think you can take that one.

Yes. Thanks, Marcus. Great question. We get this a lot, especially since we came out with Flow Designer in Kingston. People were looking for an upgrade path. The hard truth is they are 2 different architectures. It's a bit like saying, can I take an electric vehicle and turn it into a -- or take my legacy vehicle and turn it into an electric vehicle. There are 2 different architectures. So the current answer is no, we don't have anything. We are continuing to look at this. A lot of the legacy workflows in my experience have tended to be end to end. They were monolithic. They worked a case or a ticket or whatever from end to end. Whereas flows have a different mindset as it were. They're very prescriptive. They do a specific piece of the overall workflow for that process so that you can run them multiple times if necessary. So it gets really tricky is how do you take a monolithic thing and break it into its constituent functional parts. That's not to say that all of them are incapable of it, but it makes that migration all the more challenging. So it is something we've heard from customers, and we continue to look at it. But as of today, nothing.

Okay. This next question is a little long, but I think it's for you, Brooks. Before going to what does a code of view entail? And there's another part to this question, is there a checklist or a white paper on what to check for in a ServiceNow code review as opposed to an old-school Java code review, for instance?

Yes. So I can take this question, and Chuck, you can feel free to add on to this. From the pipeline an automated perspective, instant scan is really around what you should be checking for performance, manageability, all of those key things that you want to check on every single app. So we have an out-of-the-box suite that is shipped with our pipelines. But of course, instant scan is a great thing to look into so that you can add to those best practices on what to check for in particular apps that are being deployed to production.

You stole my answer about instant scan. But I'll, yes, and that.

All right. Go for it, Chuck.

There are always people contributing new checks. Checks are the things that you're looking for I believe Sasha Group on the ServiceNow team has a library of things specifically around code. And you can take those and enable or disable them or reconfigure them to your organization standards because we realize not everybody says, Boucaut, not use x, that would be a finding for some, not for others. But keep your eye out for those libraries, ATF is another good one to test the functionality of a given flow or something to make sure that you're getting the results expected that can be configured in your pipeline as well. So between the technical checks of a code review and the functional checks of automated test framework, you've got a lot of power at your fingertips. Some may still require a good old-fashioned human eye to go, this is not the way we like our flows to go. Let's see if we can reorganize that to the standards that we have.

Okay. I think these next two questions are related specifically to what you showed in the demo, Brooks. First one is, is there a way to turn the auto approval off?

So the only auto approval that we have is around the collaboration request. Everything else requires a manual approval. The only way to turn it off would to be -- to go into the flow and copy the flow to remove that auto approval step. But the only way a user would be auto approved is if they already have some sort of AES user role.

Got you. And this next one is how does that incorporate CHG. I'm not sure this relates to auto approval, but the question starts, how does that incorporate with CHG assuming that you need a approval before scheduling?

Yes. So Today, we don't have a native integration with change. So you would have to -- once your app is ready go to production, manually go create that change request, get your approvals and then when you're ready, come back and approve the deployment to go to production. That being said, since we have our safe harbor, we are looking at adding that integration out of the box in the pipeline to register as a CI, create change request as part of that deployment process, and we are targeting Vancouver store to for that release.

Okay. Next question. How do I find the out-of-the-box workflows is [indiscernible] step-based fulfillment flow, but how do they find others like that one?

The legacy workflows are going to be under the workflow editor. You could type workflow editor, and it will bring you there, find those. The flow designer flows are going to be listed at their flow designer, and they're often categorized by application. For example, the applications that I write will have flows that have the application column with the name of that app. So you can sort and filter as you like. The challenging part will become for some of those older things, they'll be in a global scope. They won't be tied to a specific application. So it might be difficult to say, this is the flow used for a catalog item versus this is the flow used for a change request or a problem management. So oftentimes, there's a description that makes it a little easier. Emergency change is a flow that goes with change management. So either in the workflow editor for the old, old stuff or flow designer for the newer things.

Okay. The next question is a pipeline-related question. Does the pipeline date associated to the approved time?

Last end of Marcus' question, proof time in a change ticket, which I can answer. So as I mentioned before, change in pipelines are not today natively integrated. So the dates around pipelines are going to be around when was the deployment request opened? When was it closed? And there will be the approval records with those dates, but it won't be tied to the change process at all with the current version of pipelines.

And next question, what pipeline technology does App Engine leverage for the ICD?

So our pipelines and App Engine are completely built on ServiceNow. They use a ServiceNow App repo. Our CI/CD spoke and Flow Designer are the 3 primary technologies that are used to move apps from environment to environment.

And there's a general question here about what programming languages does App Engine support?

Well, the whole goal of App Engine is to be low code. But when you do have to get that code part in there, there is capability to do that, and it is Java script for the most part. You could put a -- if you're in flow designer and you need to create a custom action or a transform script on one of your steps or something, you can do that all in Java script.

Okay. And does App Engine integrate with other ServiceNow technologies like ITSM, CRM, et cetera?

Yes. Next question. I'm just kidding. The good answer is, yes, and this is all one platform. So there really isn't an integration as I traditionally think about it, where we're moving things between systems. It's really do I have access to the tables on the same database, on the same schema for that particular use case. And what are the policies and permissions that need to be put in place if I don't. So it's more of a governance question than an integration question. It's one of my favorite things to do is leverage data from other tables. The classic case is, I've got all my users in the SIS user table and everybody feeds off of that for assignments, for requesters, for all of these things, whenever I need to reference a person in the system, it comes out of that one table. It doesn't matter if it's ITSM or CSM or something that I built myself. It's all linked to CIS users. So crossing between these departmental applications simply becomes a matter of granting permissions where necessary.

Okay. And we've been pushing through the questions. Thank you all for submitting them. There are still a number of questions that have come in. So if you did ask a question and we did not get a chance to get to it during this live Q&A, please note, we will respond to you with that. So I don't want to want anyone to feel like their question didn't make it into the queue. We will respond to those after this session if we don't get to it through the live Q&A. One other question that has come in, what trainings would we recommend for those who have not built an app on ServiceNow before?

So on NOW learning, we have a couple of different citizen developer paths, which even if you're not assistant developer, but you're new to ServiceNow are helpful to understand how to build on ServiceNow and there's some certifications around that. If you go to community under product hubs and app development, there is a citizen development center. And on the power and enable section, there's lots of information about training and preparing citizen developers and other developers that have not built on ServiceNow for to build on ServiceNow.

Okay. I see we're near the end of our time. So let's let that one be the last question we answered live. And as I mentioned, we will address any follow-up questions after this session. What Brooks just mentioned about our trainings in the Resources tab, I do want [indiscernible] are the resources area for this webinar. We have a number of resource links available. And the NOW learning resource link is one of those that are there. along with some other webinar replay links, et cetera. So definitely check out the resources area for this webinar for some quick links to some of those areas. All right. So first, I want to say thank you. Thank you. Thank you to everyone that took time out of the day to hear about what we wanted to cover, focusing on how we can unleash the power for the developers in your organizations with a local platform. There are many other resources out there. For instance, we just held Knowledge '23. A lot of those sessions were recorded and they are available as on-demand sites now, all you have to do is simply sign up for that digital experience, and you can view those sessions to hear some of our latest and greatest innovations around the NOW platform. and the capabilities such as this creative workflow and app engine space. Additionally, we mentioned a couple of times, we do make our webinars available on demand for replay. This webinar will also be posted on this site within about a week, 2 at the most. So definitely take this link out, check this page out bookmark it. So maybe once a month or at least once a quarter, you can revisit the space, you see some of the newer webinars we've made available from ServiceNow, and we're up to date on our latest and greatest innovations and technologies. And finally, with our last release, which we called Utah, we created [indiscernible] so if you aren't able to watch it live, you can watch the replay. So we do want to make sure you're aware of all those resources. And again, this, I think, is also available in the resources tab. So that is it for our webinar today. We want to again thank you all for your time. Please forward play link on to your colleagues. This message out developers out there to focus on kind of the innovative and strategic decisions and leave kind of the better to task and the mundane task to look once it is happening. So again, thank you.