Debunking the myth of build vs. buy in ServiceNow
Part of what I do is I do a lot of myth busting when I go out there and a lot of times it's well, I have to make a decision whether or not I want to buy versus build. That's usually a very big decision CIOs and business leaders, they’re all either, “I’ll buy it or I’ll build it.” And I always like to quote one of our customers, Intercontinental Exchange, ICE or the New York Stock Exchange. They always said very distinctly, with ServiceNow, it's not buy versus build, it's buy to build. But when you buy into ServiceNow, as a technology, you get the best in class prebuilt workflow products for IT Service Management for Customer Service Management, for Human Resources Case Management. We give you the best tools, prebuilt workflows in all of those areas. But then we also give you access to our core platform with our App Engine that we've used to build those tools. But now you can use our same App Engine tools to build your own applications. So you get the best of both worlds. I think for a long time there were some really bad best practices on the ServiceNow platform, so people wanted to stay away from building apps because it would hose your instance. You saw it six-seven years ago. Now when you build applications or you extend any of our core applications, you don't have to buy an SDK to do it. You can actually use the App Engine and we do it in something called a scope. And so for all the ServiceNow techies out there watching this, they all know with scoped apps are right? But maybe for the business person, “What the heck is a scoped app?” Well, you want to know what a scoped app is? I'll tell you what a scoped app is. You just literally pick up your iPhone and you look at all these things right up here. Okay, those are all scopes, right? Every app on your phone, it doesn't bring down the whole, it doesn’t crash your phone when you upgrade to the next version of the Mac OS or the Android OS, your phone doesn't get hosed because each app on your phone is isolated in its own scope where it's protected and it can't bring down the entire phone or the entire instance. Now with ServiceNow and App Engine, it's the same concept. When you do a custom app or you do a customization where you add on to an existing app, I call it personalization not customization. It's in its scope, so it's protected so it doesn't bring it down. And so now people are starting to learn this, that wow, with ServiceNow I actually get both. I get the ability to buy prepackaged workflows, but yet, I get the ability to build my own custom workflows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=402LhtGyjY0