Geneva launched on Dec 8th, and one of the highlights is the upgraded and streamlined development environment, in the form of the new Studio cloud IDE. The combination of Studio and ServiceNow Platform services makes leveraged enterprise cloud app development a reality with Geneva.
What do I mean by "leveraged enterprise cloud app development"? I'll break it down. But first, let's recall what "leverage" actually means.
If you use $100K of your own money to buy $100K of land, you haven't used (financial) leverage.
On the other hand, if you use $100K of your own money and borrow $400K to buy $500K worth of land, you're using financial leverage. You now control $500K of land with only $100K of your own money.
If the value of the land goes up 10%, your profit without leverage is $10K. With leverage, your profit is $50K.
So think of Studio + Platform services as that $400K loan (interest free and no payment required unless your app is deployed onto a production instance with fulfiller licenses) in the above example. As the developer, you put in 20% or $100K worth of the overall code of the app — the most valuable part that solves the actual business need for the end user — while Studio + Platform services provides you with the $400K worth of developer tools and Platform services, enabling you to deliver an app that's actually worth $500K to the business. And, if the number of users of your app exceeds the initial expectation, then the business makes more "profit" ($50K vs $10K). That's leveraged application development.
Let's take a closer look at how this is actually delivered in Geneva:
- The ServiceNow Platform comes with a comprehensive set of built-in services that do a lot of the heavy lifting that's required with true enterprise-grade app development, for you. This means that every app you develop on the ServiceNow Platform can leverage whichever of these services you choose to incorporate - which slashes app dev and testing time, and exponentially increases your productivity the more apps that you build with these re-usable services. To see what these over twenty Platform Services are, see the almost-complete list in the Platform section of the Geneva release notes, as well as the pre-Geneva Platform documentation. I say "almost-complete" because there are even more Platform services available than are listed in those two places - things like Performance Analytics (which all apps can enable), Reporting (which all apps get automatically), and Orchestrations & MID Server (which all apps can leverage).
- Studio puts these Platform services at your fingertips in a highly efficient manner you'd expect from an IDE. Features such as JavaScript linting, syntax checker, API prompter, code search, and application explorer massively improve the developer experience on the ServiceNow Platform.
- Studio enables you to easily package and post scoped apps and manage updates to the app repository where they can be published to your test and production instances or the ServiceNow Store if you're a Technology Partner with a certified app or integration. This means that you can make apps available instantly to teams, workgroups, departments, your entire enterprise, or the entire ServiceNow customer install base globally, at the push of a button.
If you're a professional app developer in IT and you're facing increasing demands from across the enterprise for more and more new cloud-native apps and integrations faster, while still needing to adhere to stringent enterprise requirements for security, availability, governance, analytics, regulatory compliance and more
OR
If you're an ITSM or ITOM administrator that develops apps to help you and your team automate your work and address more use cases with the ServiceNow Platform
OR
If you're an ISV looking to publish scoped apps and integrations to ServiceNow customers globally on the ServiceNow Store
THEN
Studio+Platform services is the knockout combo you've been looking for. Dive in with your own always-free-to-develop Geneva developer instance at ServiceNow Developers.
Now that's what I call leverage.
