- So why are we here? We are going to show you how we are gaining success by using App Engine Management Center, what magic we are doing with it, of course. We are not John and Davey, but we are Dhruv and Ashutosh. So another fantastic duo, let's say. And we are going to take you through App Engine Management Center. Alongside me, I have a person who makes sures that our security center performs very well and the cyber teams are able to achieve what they want, and he's none other Dhruv Gupta. - Hey, and I've got Ashutosh with me, and his team ensures that we can work effectively and support our security teams. Okay. (audience clapping) What are we gonna do today? We gonna talk about what was the motivation behind and what were the key priorities that we started with this program. We'll give you a sneak peek about how we are doing. And then we will evaluate with you is AEMC a perfect solution or not? And obviously, at the end, you will have some key takeaways. - So these are the numbers, which we got from one of the studies, which ServiceNow did with the customers as well. You see, we need to have local low code platform in every organization to speed up the development, right? But to make it happen, what you need is a speed, but at the same time you also need a proper road. I think last year we had F1 here, right? So to achieve, to reach to the final state, you need a proper road, and that is what we are going to show that how important governance is and how important the App Engine Management Center plays a vital role, basically. So these numbers, if you see there is a gap between, on the right side, if you see, we have available developers, but we have so many requirements coming from the business that it becomes impossible for me as a platform owner to keep track of what is going on where because I don't have a single pane of view and I get lost, I don't have proper KPIs to manage, and it was impossible for me to also promote the App Engine Studio within the organization more and more and to go to the business. So why we started with this? First of all, what were our priorities? If you see, we were very short on skilled resources. The ServiceNow market within Netherlands is very, very tough. We have rare number of resources. So that was one of our trigger that why don't we train our own people? Why don't we give them power so that they can develop on their own? Then we wanted to reduce the time towards the production and we wanted people to develop on their own in the less time. Efficiency is one of the important thing. To achieve that, we really struggled. We had to train them, but how to train them was a problem as well. And last but not least, we have N number of low-code/no-code platforms within the organization competing with ServiceNow. So we need to make sure that we consume that pressure and we provide the productive tool towards the organization. But to do all this, governance is important. To do all this, there is something ServiceNow provided, which we will see in the upcoming session. - It's quite common in IT, right? That you need to be productive, you need to be cost-efficient, yet deliver high-value products. So this is the current snapshot we have in our organization. We have 190 citizen developers, and these numbers are huge for us. And looking at these numbers, I can see you start, you did a fair job starting early. Thank you. - There is always a discussion around, there is always a dilemma as well, whether to focus on scaling the innovation or have a centralized control. And I know which one is tempting, scale innovation fast. But the problem here is with scaling innovation fast is that the magic you missed without centralized governance is the problem. So you expect to scale innovation faster in a linear manner, whereas if you focus on the governance upfront, the growth would be exponential. You might not get results upfront, but the growth would be exponential. And on those numbers, those citizen developers are not only citizen developers building custom apps, now they are supporting us with critical modules, like SecOps, VR, HR. They are our resources and they're happy as well. What do you think? - So we had a clear vision when we wanted to go with App Engine Studio. So we wanted to innovate fast, but at the same time, we wanted to have a centralized control. But few releases back, we didn't have anything where we can have a centralized control. We were doing it on a different places within the platform. And as a platform owner and a lead, we were really struggling that, hey, how can we show this to the organization that I have this number of people, this number of applications. Can these people, how many requests they are using to do the deployment towards production? And that was the reason we started adopting App Engine Management Center. So if you look, most of the organizations fail with low-code/no-code platform because of not having a long-term vision and they start with the big bank project. But we didn't do that. We started really small. And when we adopted App Engine Management Center, we did not concentrate on all the features. First, we wanted to have a intake process in place, which will show me how many applications have been requested within the company, are they really used or not. But currently, we had some risks. So we saw that there are, and also Gartner is mentioning that, we had a risk towards the business because business people were saying, "Okay, I developed this app but what is the footprint of people visiting that app, working on that app, requesting that particular functionality." At the same time, we already mentioned that we don't have better return on investment if we do not drag the things. You should have clear and proper defined KPIs within the company to track the progress of your citizen development program. How to do it? And that is where App comes into the picture. If you look what is App it's nothing but a single pane of view where you can track multiple number of things. But another thing is it supports your delegated development, where me as a platform owner, the first thing I go and see, hey, okay, is there any request pending for me for an approval? Yes? Bam, approve it. And then it goes to the tech leads, for example, through and then he will evaluate particular things, and he will give you second level of approval. You can define your own level of approvals, right? Then the next part is source control. Every organization has a version controlling tool in this place, but ServiceNow came up with their own CI/CD pipelines and also provides you with a powerful source control integration where you can keep or back up your applications. Last but not least, which is very important, which helps us to scale our citizen development program and App Engine Management Center provides that overview also, none other than Instance Scan and ATFs. These two things will show you a green light or a red light on App Engine Management Center that, okay, this application is not according to the quality, this is failing. Please go, please ask the delegated developer of that particular application to fix it. When I say all this, the top layer you see, App Engine Management Center really provides this three benefits. So it gives you, it ensures that the quality of application is intact. Then it also shows you who has access to it because license management is a nightmare. You have to track your licenses properly. In the current release of ServiceNow, you can see and you can track the license per role per application. ServiceNow released the store app recently for this. So please upgrade your app engine management center. And the last but not least, the operational efficiency, we are going to production or we are releasing our citizen development, are releasing towards the production within less than 10 minutes after they submit the request. It's a huge achievement. Because they have to wait on us for two weeks as a central team to release some things to production, but now they have the power to go to production on their own within 10 minutes. Of course, we as a platform team need to make sure that the ATFs are in place, Instance Scan is in place. Then the next thing is I think, Dhruv, please explain the audience what exactly what are our learnings, and if App Engine Management Center is perfect or not. - I can do that. But before that, one thing that is most interested here that I am personally more interested is the security aspect of the application. So when you start citizen development, you always have a fear that if someone who is not that good messed up with certain other apps. So ServiceNow platform has that functionality of application scoping and delegated development. So you as Ashu mentioned that delegated development ensures that you have only access that you require to work on your app, nothing else. Okay, is AEMC a perfect solution? Well, nothing is perfect. So first thing, I'll go with the benefits. First one is the single pane view, which I think is the most important thing for you at least. Yeah. And also yesterday, we saw in the keynote that everyone is moving towards OneView, right? - And just imagine, like whenever there's a demand for application building, you have to track how the request was initiated, what are the deployment status, how many users currently you working on it because ServiceNow is not cheap, and we know that there's a value for it. So you want to track like if I give citizen developer, certain people with the access to build something, am I gonna pay for it, do I need to manage how many users I have active in the system, and all of those things. It's a time saver, obviously. And you can always monitor the usage. Now, coming back to the negative aspects, since we are customers, we are using it. So we can tell you certain things from our experience. First, functionality that we are worried or actually we have shared that feedback, and ServiceNow is working on it in parallel. Whenever you move an app from one instance to another, say dev, test, acceptance, then if you encounter a situation where you feel like in acceptance, I have a version that is not good and I need to create another version and deploy that and I don't want to deploy the first version, which is not possible at the moment. So we have to deploy the first version of the app and second version so that it gets synced. And again, certain Git control and GitLab, sometimes Git tricky as well. Second thing that we are working on it is ServiceNow has included change management process in your deployment lifecycle. So you can deploy apps quicker, but every organization doesn't want to do that quickly. As finance thingy, we need to make sure that we have a compliance satisfied. We have change raised. ServiceNow has provided that functionality as of now, but it's not visible on AEMC. - No it's not. - At least in the latest version that I have seen, not. But all in all, the value that you get with AEMC is phenomenal and it helps you streamline your processes and get things sorted. So I think it's a good thing to have. - Yeah, and we are also in touch with ServiceNow in some features which are coming, like, for example, updates and deployments, and you can track those updates and deployments also in App Engine Management Center. So please look out for the new features, which will be coming. And, of course, if you need some help, we are there to share our learnings. And we are part of Product Advisory Council, where we learn new things about App Engine Management Center, and me and Dhruv can help you to know more about it. - If you wanna stay connected, you can scan these QR codes. These are our LinkedIn profiles. Nothing fancy or anything there. But, yeah, I think we are, we still have good time, man. We made it quite good. - Yeah, we have two minutes. If you have some burning questions, we can address those. - And even if you don't have burning questions, we will be standing there. So feel free to ask. Yeah? - Yes, please? You just said that we can track update sets in App Engine. So not just App Engine work but work outside of App Engine. Is that correct? - Yeah, so it's coming. So safe harbor. I don't know. Don't take the decision based upon what we are saying, but it'll be there. Update sets per applications can be moved because people don't want to get rid of update sets. They still want to work with it because it becomes easy to roll back what Dhruv just explained. So you can move any update sets from one instance to another instance, and you can track it on App Engine Management Center. Okay, we will be here. If you have any questions, please let us know. And thank you for coming.