What is ServiceNow?

Sep 10, 2024

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ServiceNow or the Now platform is much like Salesforce Cloud ‘Platform‘ when I look at it from a very high level. It helps you with some pre-built solutions and plugins for your enterprise IT business operations. The difference in their product journey is that ServiceNow started as an incidence/ticket management platform and Salesforce started as a CRM platform. This difference also translates into the system experiences and solutions that they offer.

What kind of products do they offer?

It has prebuilt apps for most IT management functions & use cases like GRC & ESG, but the real magic is in the now platform. It can be used to customise, create, import, extend, design and build your own business use cases around the NOW platform. There is a dedicated page in the admin experience which lists all the available NOW products.

How was your first experience with the NOW platform?

Some key advantages I see on ServiceNow side is:
The modelling structure/DB of this platform FEELS more flexible and robust in terms of: creating fields, more option of field types, the spreadsheet kind of experience while building the tables, has good page speed from my experience so far & even the user interface is easy to adapt as a new user.

Have to get the development & automation experience yet. Maybe a topic for future articles.

One key problem that I experienced is:
In some rare cases I see some things not working as expected – ‘GLITCHY’ behaviour. [Just a first impression]

Much like Salesforce, any new organisation that is purchasing this product/licenses without a good research can get overwhelmed & confused if they are under/over utilising the platform due to many options available with the platform.

Overall its a huge and impressive platform, just like SF.

Did you get some idea about the pricing of product licenses?

NO 👈

What about the security model?

I can see that the whole CLOUD PAAS ENTERPRISE industry agree on this idea of ROLES and PERMISSIONS. ServiceNow offers similar thing called as ROLES, GROUPS which decide how you can deal with the data and feature access on the NOW platform. It also has other common enterprise security features, not fully explored like: Device Management, IP Range Restrictions, Logs, etc.