Automation Center – Amit Saxena and Tom Freeman, ServiceNow

This is texturing TV. Hey everyone, welcome welcome to another tech strong. TV segment, you know we've been we've been doing a lot of coverage over the last couple days around the new major new release on the servicenow platform called Tokyo if you haven't watched already, you know, my colleague Mitchell Ashley CTO of principal researcher here at Tech strong did a great interview.

With service now that gives kind of a broad overview of all of the goodies. Chopped into Tokyo. I I did another interview with my friend vasant GM of the risk and GRC Es I'm gonna ask him.

I I mean to help me because I forgot the initials of it's risk and then is it ESG? It's environmental social and governance management. So yeah.

Yes. so, you know, please after you're done watching this or before you want to watch this go check those out but continuing our coverage. I want to introduce you to Two Gentlemen here.

First it's time Freeman. Tom has been on Tech strung TV before he's like he's kind of the designated demo guy and Tom's going to be doing a demo later on here as part of what we have in store for you. But the the kind of star of our interview today is And I hope I don't miss this up Amit Amit.

Save for me anyway. Saxena, okay. I mean welcome.

Well, thank you for being here. Alan good to be yeah, so Tom, I'm gonna give you a chance to introduce yourself one, you know, we get to the demo portion of the of the interview but amid, why not if you don't mind, why don't you give people a little bit of your background? It's all absolutely and so I've been here with the service now for good about seven months and a leading the portfolio of automation engine which includes robotic process automation RPA integration and document intelligence, which is a part of the ITP.

Yep, and of course in in releases past we've talked about RPA and we talked about value stream and a lot of the great stuff in here. But in Tokyo, we have like a new a new Star is Born. Why don't you talk to us about it indeed indeed Tokyo is very exciting for service now customers right?

And I think Alan we listen to our customers carefully. In fact, not only all the pain points, but we try to figure out what is stopping them from scaling the automation programs and and recently, in fact the idcco survey which was conducted this year 95% of CEOs are pursuing that digital for strategies becoming a reality and and according to the law research. The reason they are doing it.

It's simply because the companies who are investing in digital first are seeing twice the revenue growth and that's where the Tokyo release comes in, right? Are giving our customers exactly what they've been asking for navigating those complex business challenges across all the industries accelerating those business models in a way which is easy to implement, of course good for the people so that employees are happier than the day and it's good for the company Top Line and bottom line cost savings so good for the profits. Absolutely, you know certainly I mean, I I apologize.

chance though to introduce kind of your what's your role at service now and And so forth. I know what we did a little bit. But we didn't formally use your title and in case people I know it's on the bottom.

Third that people say but I kind of feel we left that out. Why don't you give people Title. Oh no, no problem at all.

And so I'm general manager and VP of products here at service now at a part of the period of workflow team and me and my team is leading the set of Innovations around what we are calling it hyper automation set of Technology. Right? So it's combination of automation engine combined with app engine combined document intelligence and RPA.

So that's now I love it good. Okay. Now, I'm sorry.

I feel like the world is back in order. We have automation Center in Tokyo, actually. It's funny.

There was a the Tokyo release went out. I guess that was well people are seeing this after we recorded it obviously, but the Tokyo release if I'm not mistaken went out on on Wednesday. And then the automation Center release went out of day after correct.

Yeah, I think we are there are just so many countless Innovations available with our Tokyo release just to name the view Enterprise Asset Management environmental social and governance management manager of admin Center service now walk which is protecting the business from the premium platform privacy and security issue resolution and automation Center. So we had just spanning out these various releases across two days. That way customers get a chance to be able to pay attention to this.

Okay. So automation Center automation such big piece here of Tokyo and probably you know, one of the parts that are near and dear to you. I'm at one talk to us.

What is that about? Yeah, so as we've been talking to sea level exacts as we have been talking to the people who've been managing multiple automation Center of excellences. One of the things which is constantly emerging Allen is how do I manage this large automation landscape across my company, how do I manage this automation sprawl and Alan you've been covering this space for so long as you know, so many automation Technologies out there, right?

So with that in mind, what we did is we are launching an automation Center as a part of our service now Tokyo release and this is enabling the right and unified visibility so that every organization can maximize the Valley of the automation departments. And and the reason for that is Many of organizations were invested time into automation this struggling with this islands of automation multiple disconnected point of automation tools, which are spread across cross departments and this leading to this fragmented oversight and it's kind of a disjoint view of automation opportunities because every automation tool has its own dashboard. So as a result the CEO team is never able to fully realize The automation goals, they're not able to see the big picture across all the vendors across all the automation Technologies.

And this is where automation Center comes in. You're not only empowering the whole Center of Excellence team, but the overall it team with the complete visibility of organizations hyper automation or intelligent automation landscape so you can see a central view of vendor agnostic way of looking at all the cost savings across your organization. So so that's the beauty of automation Center.

You know, I meant this is great. Sometimes though pictures worth a thousand words. What do you think?

Absolutely support that let me bring one of a demo gross Tom Freeman and let's look at this automation Center and then I can come and talk about some of the specific Innovations which are included in that so Tom, let's take a look at a product. Let's do it. All right.

So charm yet it all queued up. That's great. Yeah, I'm always ready to rock out and especially when it comes to automation.

Okay? Yeah, no question about it. So what we've got here is automation Center as amid said it's one of the flagship capabilities coming out and servicenows Tokyo release, but before we dive into all the cool bells and whistles we have here on our various dashboards, let's put ourselves in the shoes of an automation initiative as it traverses the full life cycle from the initial ideation portion all the way to deployment and that's really kind of the heart and soul of automation Center is that it unifies these various fragmented what we call Islands of automation for our customers, but it also helps them manage the entire life cycle of automation.

So with automation Center, we have two awesome ways. That folks can get started and they get started with the concept we call automation requests. So the first one here is leveraging our service catalog technology.

So you'll see this is a familiar user interface for many of our customers. It's what we call employee Center Pro and within employee Center what they can do is leverage a very simple form to start thinking about the automation that they want to bring to life. Now.

This is really really helpful for our customers because what it does is allows the people that are closest to their day-to-day activities the folks that are actually, you know, seeing these these visceral opportunities for automation. It gives them the opportunity to start thinking like an automation engineer and just outline some of these key details about what they see as an opportunity. So this is option number one.

You can just submit a forum and basically ask for some help ask the automation Center of Excellence or ask your it team to help support you with automation. The other opportunity we have to get started with automation Center is to use our process mining capability that we call Process optimization. So in this tool, we have the opportunity for analysts to review process and they can take a look at our out-of-the-box workflows.

They can even use this to assess the efficacy of our custom low code applications. But what's awesome is that as they're reviewing a process if they see a big piece of lag in here? They see like a large amount of human latency between two steps what they can do is automatically leverage and integration that we have to open up an automation request that will then flow into automation Center.

So whether it's coming from a flash of inspiration or whether an individual is having a really data oriented structure approach. They can open up what we call these automation requests these all flow into automation Center. Now we can take a look at a particular automation request here to get a better understanding of what this really means and what it basically provides is a starting point for a kind of an automation to start providing value back to the business.

You get all the detail that the individual entered from either one of those two entry mechanisms that I just shared but importantly you have the opportunity to align your automation to business goals and you can outline expected cost savings and expected time savings. Now that's really allows you to Baseline your expectation around Automation and ensure that it's really providing the ROI. You expect back to the business.

It's also unifies all the activity that revolves around automation because you have all the tasks associated with these Automation and all the resources that will be doing the development all in one place. You can really keep your your life nice and sane. Now we have the ability to manage more than just requests in here.

You have all of your robots in here as well. You have the bot processes which are basically the jobs that those robots will be running and you've got the ability to manage a variety of different automation sources now we can this is one of the cool Parts you can manage service now's robotic process Automation and third party automation as well. So it's not just for service now.

Now if we dig into a particular bot process, you'll see one of the other unique differentiators here for our solution, which is the ability to leverage our best-in-class configuration management framework. So we call this cmdb. Basically what this means is that the automation will be a configuration item equivalent to any other aspect of infrastructure in a customer's environment.

So now what they can do is leverage all sorts of our out-of-the-box capability like our change management approach and our Incident Management approach, but they can also use our cool dependency mapping software to see a clear topology of the way in which their automation lines up to infrastructure that they're dependent upon and software that they actually leverage. So this is really cool because in the past automation would be kind of floating out in The Ether and you kind of cross your fingers sometimes hoping that it works if someone upgrades Downstream software, they may not know that your automations dependent upon it and vice versa. And so what we have now is the ability to proactively understand if there's a change request coming our maintenance window for my Windows Server, I can make sure that I know about that outage for my automation if I know that my Erp application is gonna get upgraded I can do some proactive testing for my automation to ensure it works with that new version.

So as you can see, it really provides a holistic way to manage Automation and bring it together from any different aspect of the business and using these dashboards that we saw in the beginning. We now have an opportunity to take a look at the value. It's bringing back so you can see we can understand the value that the automation is bringing to the business in terms of what's already been achieved.

We can see what's on track then we can see areas of opportunity. As we scroll down we can see kind of the active automations that are running and the cost savings and Time Savings They're bringing back to the business and importantly we can see all these future automations the potential that your team's been servicing through that web Forum or through process optimization. And what's cool is you can see it split out by organization so you can understand the Departments that maybe you could use a little more support in leveraging your automation capabilities.

Now if we go to the final screen here executions, we'll see all the detail admins are going to love you're gonna see job summary incident summary around your active automations. And this will let you keep that proactive perspective on your automation to make sure things are running smoothly and importantly you can get keep an eye on to the dependent business applications. So if any changes are coming down the pipe you can stay ahead of them.

Lastly we have a bit of AI and ml driven capability under the hood. We have automatic insights. So these will surface to let you know if something should you know catch your attention you should maybe be aware of it before causes an issue with your automation.

We also have urgent take action insights that are gonna let you know when there are resource dependency or major concerns that are really actively impeding your automation. So as you can see automation Center really brings together a lot of capabilities here unifies, those automation those islands of automation that pretty much every business out there has to deal with it allows our customers to manage the full life cycle of Automation and it provides transparency into the value in these kpis that are associated with your automation. So that Allen in a minute back to you.

Fantastic good stuff Tom as always. You are the king of demos. Okay.

Thanks Alan. That's a that's a very impressive as usual great interface. Great ux design from service now, but really it's a you know beyond just hey, it's another application.

There's some great functionality here. I always find. You know the best way to demonstrate Beyond doing a demo.

Best way to bring it home is to bring it into real world real life real customer situations. So I'm going to put you on the spot and and ask you to talk about. You know the way some service now customers are using this.

Or we'll be using it. Yeah, we actually had a huge Five Blind for customers in our design so one of the things in my team does is we've done a design partnership program Allah, well that means is we give a preview of something which is going live so even though this is coming out right now we have more than 14 customers lined up they've been looking at it providing feedback and part of our design partner program and they cannot wait to get their hands on on this year origin of the product because as you see you know, there's teams in this customer side salad who've been doing automations for years and decade and this is the first time those teams themselves are getting an automation technology for their own use and that's what is powerful about it is automation Center is for those CEO teams to be able to make their day and week and month better in managing the whole pipeline of our Is coming in able to view centrally what automations worth pursuing and able to pre-detect instead of being reactive proactive about what automations may fail so that they can take those measures to avoid the downtime with the overall execution dashboard. So a lot of interesting thing built in we are hoping our automation Coe teams and and any automation teams in journal is going to find a lot of value with automation Center.

I love it. I love it real-world experiences. Anything you could share yes there.

So there are two large one large manufacturers. We've been working with um, and then another large scale SI company a global SI company. Now, these guys are having a huge Army of automation Series where they are getting thousands of intakes of automation opportunities coming in at the same time.

What is interesting thing as Tom was demonstrating you it's easy to fill out a form Allen and say hey, this is what I need, but wouldn't it be great if Autumn our process mining to automatically detects. What is the area you need to be automating and that's the beauty of this. It detects.

It it all you can create an automation opportunity into it into our mission center. You can use our portfolio of RPA integration low code apps to be able to address that so that overall life cycle is what these Large manufacturer team this large system integrated is very excited about and and the second thing which storm was talking to an alluding to is. Is our tie into what we do the best which is our configuration management database.

So all the automations we've built using our robotic process automations. They also connect back to that configuration item which service now ecosystem understands really well and the advantage of that is Anything any change management which is happening in coming weeks and coming months. It will automatically flag it to the central dashboard that you may see in potential downtime.

So you may want to do something about it. That way you can proactively avoid that automation from not running. So a lot of excitement in our customer data in general about this this functionality.

I love it. Excellent stuff guys. We're overtime.

It was supposed to be 15 minutes and we we kind of blew through that real quick top. Well, wait before we wrap up armit. People who want to maybe check it out, right?

I know how service now works. It's a platform everything on you know on Tokyo platform is available to service now customers. But for people who maybe aren't servicenow customers today, but saw this and maybe want to be where should they be going?

Well, we have it took your page with all this Innovations Bella available on service not calm and specifically one of those Innovation talks about automation Center. com. That will be great place to get started.

Fantastic Tom. I want to thank you as always for doing a great job on demos, right it it's more than people think just being able to do a real demo, right? And so I appreciate it start getting ready for the next one.

I mean, there's always a pleasure to have you on Excellent. Excellent work here with with the Tokyo. We're looking forward to seeing how the market kind of picks up on this and some of the interesting things.

I come out of automation center with it. com and go check out the Tokyo page from there guys. Thank you very much.

We're gonna take a break here on Tech strong TV, and we'll be back in a moment.