Fast Tracking the App Economy with ServiceNow Apps

Most forward thinking organizations today have adopted ServiceNow as their go-to platform of choice to manage different organizational activities such as HR, incident management, security operations, and managing everyday workflows with ease. ServiceNow offers its users a single cloud-based platform to assign, prioritize, collaborate, collect real-time insights into workflows and activities that offer organizations the advantage of speed in a dynamic and competitive marketplace while providing them in-depth visibility into the different processes and infrastructure via a single system of record.

Why ServiceNow Apps?

As enterprises are getting increasingly ‘appified’, the need for building reliable and efficient enterprise grade applications faster has never been greater. Based on their specific business needs and goals, they need apps for their ServiceNow installation to perform some very peculiar, repeated tasks. ServiceNow offers Now platform to help organizations build those apps.

ServiceNow also has a ServiceNow Store which hosts a variety of third-party apps which can help organizations achieve faster time-to-value. The ServiceNow store hosts a variety of applications that spans across different categories from asset management, capacity management, planning and governance, monitoring, project and release management, service cataloguing, orchestration and many others and across industries such as communications, education, manufacturing, advertising and media, retail, software technology, legal, finance, energy etc. Some of these apps are free whereas; some of them are available for a fee. The paid apps can be purchased using a credit card or by requesting a Purchase Order.

With access to these ready-to-use applications organizations earn the capability to respond to their business demands with a greater dexterity which consequently helps them become more flexible and agile.

Our ServiceNow Apps

Given the advantage the ServiceNow Store brings to the enterprise, we decided to leverage our app development expertise and built two enterprise-grade applications which have found their home in this store.

Having realized the need for an intuitive estimating tool, we developed the Quotematic App that helps its users to create, sign, track and generate quotes at lightning speed. The app has a built-in approval workflow and has the capability to integrate with product catalog, taxes, discounts and also generate PDF quotations that can be printed or emailed directly to the customer without once leaving the ServiceNow dashboard. The app has well defined and transparent flows, has automated workflows (after all, we are all looking to achieve higher degrees of automation within the enterprise), is easily maintainable because of the platform of choice and gives the user the advantage of faster time to market.

The other app that we developed on the ServiceNow platform required a deep understanding of Nimble Storage Provisioning and its outbound REST based interfaces for integration with ServiceNow platform. The Moonshot App aims to optimize the performance of an organization’s storage network and takes away the hurdles that an organization usually faces, such as errors, delays, ineffective utilization and provisioning of storage assets etc. when done manually. All such errors lead to application starvation. The highly secure Moonshot App provides a single user interface with the modules to enhance the clients existing solution or workflow and automates storage provisioning, provides more control to the storage administrator over the existing resources and helps them manage authenticated users, amongst other things.

Our ServiceNow Expertise

All the apps on ServiceNow App Store have to go through a rigorous vetting round to ensure that all the apps deployed are stable and architecturally sound – our ServiceNow expertise has helped us clear these requirements quite easily.

Based on our experience of developing these apps and helping several other organizations develop their custom apps, here is what we think has allowed us in delivering the WOW experience to our customers –

• Our experience in custom application development and having a strong test automation framework in ServiceNow plays a crucial role in the app development process.

• Our understanding of incident management, problem management, third party integrations, SLA management, service catalog, scripting, and reporting offer us a comprehensive understanding of ServiceNow which helps in building innovative apps.

• Our expertise in TIL, ITSM WebServices, Java, and JavaScript help in faster app development and implementations.

• Our experience in external interface integration came to great use when developing the Quotematic app as the app demanded integration with the user’s enterprise system and platform. For Quotematic, we also leveraged our extensive knowledge of Service Level Management.

• As ServiceNow Partners, we have a team of certified ServiceNow system administrators and implementation specialists who are always updated with the latest technological advancements.

Both the ServiceNow apps that we developed were created with two things in mind – one, that they have to simple, intuitive and user-friendly interface so that the non-technical business user can leverage and benefit from it and two, that we give organizations a path to respond to market needs swiftly by helping them automate business processes, increase productivity and ultimately enterprise profitability.