Now Platform Enables Organizations to Scale DevOps to the Enterprise

New enterprise DevOps solution will let ServiceNow customers develop better software faster, shipping to production in minutes vs. days, weeks or months

DevOps is here to stay. And for good reason.

In today’s hyperconnected world, if you’re not fast, your competitors will be.  Every industry is being disrupted by software, and every company is trying to figure out how to navigate and embrace new technologies as they scale. 

DevOps, the practice behind developing digital products, fosters an agile relationship between development and IT operations. ServiceNow realizes that in today’s fast-moving business world, DevOps is essential for any organization seeking to rapidly respond to changing customer and marketplace demands. In fact, 56% of global infrastructure decision makers now report that their organizations are implementing, have implemented, or are actively expanding their DevOps initiatives, according to the January 2019 Forrester report, Five Key Trends To Benchmark DevOps Progress.

ServiceNow already digitizes IT, employee and customer workflows with the Now Platform. Today, we are introducing ServiceNow DevOps, which extends the power of the platform to simplify and speed software development and deployment.

While many businesses are leveraging DevOps in various capacities, they’ve yet to be able to scale it across their entire organizations. The challenge in scaling is that while there are many tools at developers’ fingertips, enterprise processes around audit, compliance, security and change management may still be performed manually. This can result in friction and delays during deployment, as well as limited visibility across numerous teams within an organization, making it difficult to drive best practices and DevOps adoption across the enterprise.

“CIOs are driving cultural change and new tool adoption to accelerate speed and quality capabilities through DevOps practices,” said Stephen Elliot, Program Vice President, Cloud Operations, IDC.  “Over the past several years, our executive advisory indicates when successfully adopted, DevOps improves cross-silo change management capabilities, drives IT and product management alignment, and empowers executives with clear metrics that drive business growth. Successful adoption requires connectivity across the toolchain and increased use of automation.”

Extending the Now Platform to DevOps

ServiceNow DevOps connects developers and IT operations using the Now Platform to automate the manual and time-consuming change approval process, to enable customers to release features rapidly and safely.

ServiceNow DevOps also provides visibility across the product development toolchain. It integrates with leading DevOps tools to provide automated change management and a single dashboard across planning, development, testing, deployment and operations. This allows leaders to easily view common metrics across teams and drive best practices, regardless of the tools being used. This can mean shorter development cycles, increased deployment frequency and more dependable, high-quality releases.

Powered by the Now Platform, ServiceNow DevOps helps IT departments approve code faster by automating the process based on pre-set rules and policies determined by change managers, in turn allowing them to focus attention on higher risk submissions. Developers will see their code in production in minutes rather than days or weeks, and they’ll be able to build code and submit it for approval using their favorite tools.

ServiceNow DevOps currently integrates with Jira Software, GitHub, BitBucket and Jenkins, with more integrations expected to be rolled out periodically.

One of our DevOps pilot customers, Thomas Larsen of DNB Bank ASA, recently said, “ServiceNow DevOps will help our business keep pace with the demand for new software and deliver rapid customer value without compromising quality or increasing risk. We are seeing the benefits of the solution already and expect to make updates and changes in minutes instead of days or even weeks. The agility we expect to achieve will play a key role in enabling our organization to be nimble in reacting to customer demands and market opportunities.”

ServiceNow DevOps is currently available for financial services organizations based in the Northeast region of the United States and the United Kingdom. The offering will be gradually rolled out to additional customers in 2020.

Reducing the financial services change lifecycle from days to minutes

A platform-based approach to DevOps is crucial, especially for highly regulated industries such as financial services, as it enables developers to constantly adapt software to evolving regulations.

From trading firms to big banks and exchanges, financial services organizations are vying to deliver new features and content to customers faster and more securely, and they are leveraging DevOps tools and practices to support those efforts.

Should a financial services company undergo a time intensive audit, for example, ServiceNow DevOps offers access to a slew of data and the ability to quickly track and understand who changed the code and why, how the deployment approval decision was made, what tests were conducted and what results were achieved, helping teams gain visibility and the ability to  audit the end to end development and release process as needed.

One ServiceNow customer, a large global financial services organization, has 25,000 developers who were spending 20% of their time chasing approvals to deploy in controlled environments. By utilizing ServiceNow workflows in partnership with their development tools, time spent on change orders was reduced from 55 hours to 18 minutes, and a change lifecycle decreased from 23 days to 90 minutes.

The Now Platform deliver digital workflows that create great experiences and helps unlock productivity for employees and the enterprise. With ServiceNow DevOps, our customers now have the tools to help keep pace with the demand for new software and deliver rapid customer value

Together with customers like DNB Bank, we are making the world of work, work better for people.

Use of Forward‑Looking Statements

This blog contains “forward‑looking statements” regarding our future plans. Forward‑looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties and are based on potentially inaccurate assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expected or implied by the forward‑looking statements. If any such risks or uncertainties materialize or if any of the assumptions prove incorrect, our results could differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the forward‑looking statements we make. Factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those in any forward‑looking statements include: (i) delays in rolling out the offering to additional customers and (ii) delays in releasing the additional integrations. We undertake no obligation, and do not intend, to update these forward‑looking statements.

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