Rob Koplowitz (00:09)
Hi everybody and welcome to this week's episode of Lowdown on Lowcode. We are up to episode 26. So we're trucking right along here and apparently folks have been getting value out of the show. So we'd love it if you could subscribe, hit the like button, hit the share button. Let's get the word out to other like -minded folks. So I'm Rob Koplowitz. I kind of started my world of Lowcode.
Oh God, like 35 years ago, building Lotus Notes applications, have pretty much hung around the enterprise software world for that time, Lotus, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and then a long stint with Forrester, much of which I was focusing on what we call digital process automation and working very closely with a good friend and colleague, John Reimer. How are you, John?
John Rymer (01:02)
Very well. Great to be here, Rob. So I also worked as an analyst at Forrester. As Rob mentioned, we did a lot of work together, a lot of research together on low code and digital process automation and how those worlds were coming together and have come together. My background is primarily as an analyst for about 25 years, focused on software development. And I'm very happy and excited to introduce our guest today.
Jithin Bhaskar, who is VP and General Manager of the low -code platform business at ServiceNow, a product called App Engine. Jithin, welcome. Very happy to have you on.
Jithin Bhasker (01:46)
Thank you, John. Thank you, Rob. Great to be
John Rymer (01:50)
So Jithin, you are fairly new in your role at ServiceNow. also we find that a lot of folks in the development world think of ServiceNow not as a platform vendor, but as an app vendor, even though the company has long standing and deep investments in platform technology. So tell us a little bit
your origin story. How did you come into this crazy world of low code? And maybe tell us a little bit about the App Engine business within ServiceNow as well, just so people can get the context.
Jithin Bhasker (02:35)
Absolutely. Well, let me start a bit about the ServiceNow from a history point of view. As many of you heard about Fred Lerdy, our beloved founder, he originally envisioned this platform to be a platform which could be used by a business user to be able to automate their day -to -day work. And he talks about an amazing story about someone who met in the hallway.
had a lot of challenges about the day -to -day and the manual process, then how he ended up actually envisioning and building this platform. So low code as a concept is nothing new for ServiceNow. It's in the core and the heart of how our founders have built it, how our product leaders after kind of envisioned it and built it over a period of time. So that's ServiceNow. And we continue to be very customer -led innovation from a platform point of view, as
heard about us, noticed about us, right? Like our market leading product started off with ITSM. It is very customer led innovation. When Fred Letty took this platform, IT teams and the leaders are the one who actually built IT workflow on top of it. That became our core value prop in the beginning. Then customers continue to lead us into one innovation after. Then we came up with customer service management, employee workflow.
We have legal, have finance, all of it. All of it is actually built by this foundational local platform and what we call it now as an App Engine business, more or less. And when customers license App Engine, they more or less get this immensely powerful, highly scalable platform, which we ourselves have built all this as market leading enterprise workflows, like employee technology and customer workflows.
That's a history of ServiceNow. Hopefully that kind of helps. Now about myself. I started my career as a systems engineer way long back. And over a period I moved into a variety of roles, engineering to operations to corporate strategy, &A to, then I found myself in product leadership role. And I joined ServiceNow five years back. Prior to that, I worked with companies like Adobe, Google, Dell.
couple of startups, been in the enterprise B2B space for quite long. And as I've been in the journey through ServiceNow in different roles, year and a half back, I've stumbled upon this opportunity to take up the leadership for App Engine business. I fell in love with it. The reason is because the impact this product can make for a company wide
is immense. The product I built before I took on this role was a DevOps product, hardcore technical product, which focused on developer as a persona. But when I took on this role and when I started understanding more about this App Engine as a platform, I realized that it is meant for everyone in the company. It's meant for whether you are a seasoned developer or you are a citizen developer or everyone in between. Doesn't matter.
what your skill set is. That became our mission, where we wanted everyone to be able to build and automate processes and workflows on our ServiceNow platform. That's what inspires us every day as a product and a business leadership to be able to drive value for our customers and users. That's my background. That's my history along with the
Rob Koplowitz (06:41)
Great story, Jeff. And thank you for sharing it. Hey, just a note to the audience. If you have questions, comments that you like to address, please put them into the, put them into the comments section on, YouTube or Spotify, whatever you're, whatever you're looking at, we'll do our best.
to get back to you on those. And we always love suggestions. So I love that story, Jethan. I want to ask a quick question and then I want to ask a follow I want to make a quick comment and have you respond and then I want to ask a follow -up question. So in my mind, I kind of always had this thought of ServiceNow is an ITSM company. And then Bill McDermott came in and all of a sudden what I was hearing from Bill was,
platform, platform, platform. mean, still very important. app portfolio is still very important. And then I started seeing commercials in really high profile places that talked about your vision of everybody builds a workflow and how they need to. How much has Bill changed the dynamic over there? And how much is he promoting the platform play as part of ServiceNow?
Jithin Bhasker (07:51)
A great point, Rob. Bill has been a catalyst for us to be able to rapidly amplify as a platform for business transformation. Indeed, he's brought in a completely different flavor along with all the CEOs we have had in the past. But I believe, you know, from a vision point of view at the moment for us as a company,
Here is how we say it, especially with the advent of all the generative AI and everything. We are the AI platform for business transformation. That's our strategy, that's our vision, that's our mission at the moment. Often our customers and CIOs and CEOs and the leaders, they all are thinking about how can we get on board with this idea of AI?
and everything happening around them in the market, there is a certain amount of formal, even we all have the formal too, what are we missing out when we wake up? The answer is you need to find these platforms which can actually carry you through the journey to be able to rapidly merge into those latest advancements and capabilities which could add on to your portfolio, whether it could be your operations, your product.
or the way you serve your customer or internal employees, irrespective whomever that is. And that's why we believe we are the AI platform for business transformation with the immense amount of investment we are doing into both sides, the platform and the generative AI. It's natively embedded within our platform. And it's a long answer, but I just wanted to set the context and add the right things.
Rob Koplowitz (09:40)
It's a great answer and I appreciate it. I want to follow up with a little bit more detail on this and just say, look, this is a crowded space, right? So, you know, when John, back in our Forrester days, John and I had a handy spreadsheet where we tracked all the low code and process automation vendors. And I think there was, we were trying about 116 at the time, which wasn't completely comprehensive, but it was a big list. And they weren't all the same, right? Some are more focused on process. Some are more focused on citizen development. Some are more focused on governance.
different sort of things that made them stand out. I'm a ServiceNow account executive and I've just walked into a net new account. They're making a commitment to low code. What am I hearing that says this environment, this opportunity is really what we're designed to do? What are the characteristics of the perfect ServiceNow prospect customer?
Jithin Bhasker (10:34)
Absolutely. So few things there. One is it's a customer which already has dabbled into multiple low -code platforms as point low -code platforms, many players in the market. Now the challenge they are trying to solve is how do I now have the right governance controls and the consolidation of all of this together? Along with it, they might have already invested.
more than 85 % of the Fortune 1000s and 2000s are already on ServiceNow platform, either on ITSM or CSM or employee workflow, you name it, right? They've already invested in a platform like ours. Now, low code is an extension of the notion and the platform strategy, they have already embraced it. So when you're walking into an account and when you hear the CIO often talk about how can I scale
my team to be able to support the ever increasing backlog. And the answer is the low code and the empowering a broader set of skillset across the organization, even beyond IT. That's where we really come in. It's a consolidation of low code as a notion and a platform. Second thing, the CIO is a strategic thinker already thinking about how can he leverage the whole company to drive business transformation.
even in the simplistic term, digitizing these manual processes, which focus at the edge of the operations. It could be a sales operations lead. It could be a sales manager. could be someone who is managing hospital emergency shift schedule. We have customers who have built some of those mission critical applications, which manages the ER scenario. So those are the scenarios we really thrive, whether it's a consolidation of platform, but now they want to look
the right governance and control, but at the same time empowering a broad set of employees within the company to drive agility, scale, fast or rapid innovation, especially from a business operations and applications point of
Rob Koplowitz (12:45)
That's great, Justin. Thank you so much. Listeners, folks out there, just a quick word, Lowdown on Lowcode is brought to you by Analysis .Tech. And if you would like to interact more with Analysis .Tech with myself, Rob Koplowitz, many years in research around digital process automation, John Reimer, Lowcode, he coined the term Lowcode, Ryan Dugid, multiple Chief Product Officer positions with software companies, Dave Marcus,
great experience with product channel partnership. Francis Carden, the godfather of RPA, who was the founder of OpenSpan, later purchased by Pega. Andy Bartels, the former chief economist at Forrester Research, he's now chief economist at Analysis .Tech. Please find us on Analysis .Tech. We'd love to interact with you more and see how we might be able to.
I help you. commercial over John.
John Rymer (13:49)
Just, and just a quick follow up on that last point you were on. It sounds like your ideal customer has already accepted that low code has value, but they kind of want to graduate and be much more planful and mindful of governance and so forth. So they may be, you use the term consolidating, but it sounds like they're also stepping up and really applying it, really applying the technology very deeply. Is that fair?
Jithin Bhasker (14:19)
It is fair and John and Rob, I was reading your maturity curve over the last few days. Where I would fit in our offering and the platform and the value prop is the number three, four and five, where the customers have already matured to a set. It doesn't mean that we have customers who are starting at the very first time on a low code. We have built
John Rymer (14:34)
Got
Jithin Bhasker (14:46)
tools and technologies and the experiences on the platform in a way that anyone with no technical background and skill set can actually build application in few minutes on our platform or automations in, and our customer says it right. This is something I heard during one of our customer advisory board last year during our knowledge, where one of the customers stood up on the stage and said,
Often when you start to explore ServiceNow platform and the App Engine, imagination is actually a limit in terms of what it can build. Whether it's a simple application that just forms and feel, or it's a complex application where you want to integrate with a number of other CRM, ERP, financial system, it's all possible because we have so many pre -built templates, thousand plus out of the box integrations ready to go.
So we can cover a spectrum, but what I see a lot of the strategic CIOs, our customers are, they are at the maturity level of three, four and five in your maturity quadrant, right? Where they see the best value and they're the best customer for us to be able to drive
John Rymer (16:01)
By the way, we did a episode of Lowdown and Lowcode on our maturity model. If you want to learn more, just either have a look at that on our YouTube channel or your favorite podcast source or contact us. Happy to discuss it. Jithin, I think there's a lot more work that we can do to make that even more useful than it is. I want to just pivot real quickly because we mentioned AI and obviously AI is huge.
and really the source of a huge amount of innovation in low code. Let's start with, you could give us as much as you can, because I know there's a lot going on that you're not ready to talk about, but what are you guys doing with AI and the platform?
Jithin Bhasker (16:53)
Absolutely. Well, for us, we are looking at AI as a natively integrated part of the platform. It's not a bolt -on. It's not a side project for us. It is one of our key priority at the moment. That's one of the reasons we are continuing to gain that market share and the leadership as the enterprise AI platform at the moment.
We have launched a number of real products and initiatives and capabilities. As an example, last year itself, we came out with something called code generation, where it is a simple English prompt. You have the ability to generate snippets of code, blocks of script, whatever you can think of. And we are seeing outputs like almost 40 % additional productivity gains our developers are starting to gain.
that is very focused on you are a pro -code seasoned developer. How do you leverage ServiceNow platform in the flow of the work as you're building, writing the lines of codes or building blocks of script. And you have this ubiquitous way in which our code generation really helps you go much, much faster. And I foresee a world where an expert developer will become 5X to 10X more productive.
in terms of leveraging some of those capabilities. That's one. Then moving into the low code scenario is where we have already launched products like Flowgen, where you can simply prompt. It'll actually build the whole process flow for you. Imagine the complexity we all have had when you were looking through the lens of this whole BPMN, the notations, and trying to build
as this process to be and get to the Delta, we all had that challenge where we knew what the to be needed to be, but we didn't have the right technology to truly materialize that vision or the idea. That's what this flow generation is really enabling our technical to non -technical users at the moment on the platform. They can envision what the to be need to be.
They just need to prompt it, and our platform will immediately build that for you in like a three to four minutes right in front of your eyes. So you've cut down so much time in terms of mapping the assets to B and all of it. Then last May in Knowledge 24, we announced the launch of App Generation. When you think about an application, it's complex, right? An application essentially means
You need to have a data table which can help you store and save all the data and run the CRUD operations. Then you need to have an automation which can actually run the workflows, which is what the best part of our platform is because we are all about workflows across the enterprises are. Then you need to have an UI and it could be a browser, it could be a portal, it could be a mobile. You need to bring all of this together along with the right access controls and security. That's what makes an application.
in a definition point of view. Imagine you can bring all these assets and the objects together with that simple English prompt in few minutes. So more or less, you have the ability to build an application in few minutes, almost to 80 % of what you were looking for. The last 20 % is where low code really become the hero, where it is the last mile.
of your experiences where low -core platform performs as a harness for building all this idea and the concept. And now the last 20 % or 30 % is where you're really fine -tuning the experiences and polishing how that application need to look like. So from a generative AI point of view, just summarizing
It's the core of our platform. It's natively built into a platform with our own purpose -built domain -specific language models so that it really serves the purpose and the accuracy of the output what our customers, our users are looking for. Then we are harnessing the power of low -code to be able to truly get to the finishing line or the last mile so that you have the complete application or a flow built
right there in front of your eyes in a minutes.
John Rymer (21:36)
Right. Rob, I just want to highlight that what Jithin's described also, ServiceNow is not saying coders go away. There's a place for you in our ecosystem, which not everybody, not all the vendors have that attitude. Anyway, Rob, thank you, Jithin. Rob, back over to
Rob Koplowitz (21:57)
Well, coders or maybe the last mile being in low code, that's where we pivot to that kind of builder mindset. So this new empowered business, these empowered business people who can now participate more fully. So now we've hit the last mile, we hit the finish line, but we really haven't hit the finish line, right? Because things change. Business opportunities change. You find points of friction. You find ways to optimize. You have new business opportunities, new business challenges.
and I kind of started to think about that as the world of, of maybe process intelligence, process mining, task mining, all of which are areas that that service now has, has invested in pretty heavily. so tell us about A, those investments and, know, B, does that bring us into a, there is never a last mile we're on a loop and it's continuously improving forever. I mean, is that, is that what the future holds for us?
Jithin Bhasker (22:56)
Wonderful question, Rob. So it kind of go back to the platform and the consolidation aspect I was talking about. So today, I've seen a lot of customers leveraging different solutions for different parts of that continuous loop you spoke about, right? How about we bring all that to you together in a one single platform with a single data model at the backend with
with the three levels of experience. It could be a procoder who actually wanna build using code. It could be a locoder who actually wanna build using locode, click, drag and drop kind of a solution. Then it's an absolute no code, which I spoke about where you prompt, get all of those. So we are converging not only the experiences layer across the three different personas, but at the same time, bringing all of this continuous loop together. As an example,
we all have built automations and applications in our life at some point of time. Starting to build an application or automation is just the beginning, right? And once you build the automation, then as a strategic, I would say efficiency focused team, which we all are, know, careers and our life and day to day, right? You're always looking at what can I do to continuously optimize whether it could be a particular...
request or a response flow. It could be a specific function which may have a longer response time. But you're continuously monitoring these response time and SLAs across. So you need to have a platform which can help you kind of either mine the process or mine the task based, timestamp based activity so that you have a specific clarity into what processes are the long pole.
versus the faster one so that you can continuously optimize it. So our platform not only help you build with the low code, but with the task mining and the process mining at the background, you're getting this continuous native inbuilt analytics, real time on a consistent basis. Now on top of it, we not only help you build all this low code experiences and all of it, but we also have the offering of RPAs and thousand plus out of the box integration.
which you can bring together. Because in some cases, you may say the best solution is build an automated workflow. Some cases, you may say, just want to fetch the data. I need to put an RPA bot in place. Imagine all of this orchestrated in the single platform where you not only make it easy to build, but continuously analyze, monitor, optimize the process, leveraging the SLI's process mining and task mining capabilities.
but at the same time, go back and continuously refine that loop, just like you said, Rob, which, you know, when I speak about this to our customers in different executive briefings or customer calls, that is what makes us proud to say we can bring it all together in a single platform. And just to add on another layer, one of the reasons we feel really proud about it is, and like I said, I worked in other large enterprise companies in the past,
we have a very different acquisition strategy when we acquire these IPs and capabilities from the market. As soon as we acquire, we just don't throw out in the market and then start to build a business around it or to go to market. But we take time to really re -platform every one of those acquisitions, whether it's the process mining company we acquired or the task mining company we acquired, we took time to really re -platform
make it natively integrated within the platform so that you as a customer don't have to worry about your data transformations, integrations, security, privacy. You're not jumping through hooks and hooks to be able to bring it all together. So everything we offer is very natively replatformed or embedded built into the, I don't think any other enterprise company really offers
when we say a single platform for all that closed loop cycle, which we just
John Rymer (27:20)
Well, that's certainly a good test to apply when you're looking at platforms for, you know, for customers to apply. Yeah. Interesting.
Rob Koplowitz (27:20)
Sean?
Jithin Bhasker (27:30)
Absolutely, John. And it goes back to the question you were asking, right? Like even though we didn't amplify a lot of our platform strategy, we've always invested and thought like a platform product leadership team. Many, I would say high regards to some of our leaders like CJ Desai, who's our chief product officer. He's a big proponent of, you know, the platform and replatforming things so
It is always natively integrated as one tech stack, one data platform. And we have huge investments in terms of our platform versus all other vertical solutions which we offer from an out of the box point of
John Rymer (28:15)
Great. Thank you, Jithin. I want to close with one last question. I think you've done a great job in describing the vision of how applications are created, measured, evolved, and responding to Rob's question. Very interesting. I'm curious
How you think then, IT and business people and professional developers, there's a whole, every company has an ecosystem. How will those structures, how do you think those structures will evolve? Will we even talk about IT departments in 10 years? Or will it be completely democratized? What are you guys seeing?
in terms of those kinds of transformations.
Jithin Bhasker (29:16)
Yeah, I would like to quote John Breton -Sivick from Forrester, where he came out with a survey. And I was reading his article. By the way, I take a lot of advice from him as I think about product strategy, high regards to him. And one of his blogs which he wrote was, 87 % of the enterprise developers already use this low code in some form or fashion. And majority of those enterprise developers belong to IT today.
Now, that number of 87 % will not shrink. It will continue to multiply and double because you've read all these numbers which comes out of other research firms like an IDC. They have recently upgraded the 750 million applications in the next few years to 1 billion applications in the next few years. You continue to need to have a lot of IT developers who can actually build
highly complex applications, which could be the 20 % of everything the enterprises need, but there is that 80 % is what I really want to talk about to answer your question. That 20 % pie will continue to grow. You will continue to need to have highly skilled developers in the IT who could bring the right, not only the platform together, but at the same time, making sure it's integrated with all the different technologies, whether it's CRM, ERP.
or it could be a financial system. So you definitely need those highly skilled experts who could actually, they will do much faster in terms of the integrations and the efficiencies and all of it for sure. But what I would like to really emphasize is that then that 80 % is where I think, and I believe is where the business users would directly work with developers and these developers may not necessarily need to be humans.
Currently, as we speak, we are building capabilities which an AI agent will almost act like a full -fledged developer for you. And I don't have the timelines when we would launch it, but we are going into a model where a business application where you, let's say it could be a sales operations manager wanted to get the latest dashboard
EMEA central market and I want to track on a consistent basis and I want to get a notification when there is a variance in the standard deviations or whatever, you could simply prompt it. This AI developer agent will build that for you right there. But imagine if you want that application now to pull the data from an SAP or a CRM data, that's when you need that 20 % IT developer to be able to help, make sure it's tested, validated, access controls are checked in.
All of this. That's what I believe there is this symbiosis of a business user, an AI agent acts like a developer, and then this highly expert IT or an enterprise developer who will work in that cohesive way. And every CIO or according to the economist survey, the backlog for IT is six to 12 months in most of the large companies.
My hope is that that will continue to get reduced, even though the demand for automation and application will continue to grow. And the last scenario I want to talk about is where, if you think about prioritization, which happens in that IT backlog, often there are these smaller applications which would help some of these operations and functions goes below the cut
because of the ROI or the impact of the scale, but those small things make a huge difference. that's like, know, death by the thousand paper cut scenario in an enterprise company. That's what constrains your agility. That's what constrains your innovation and the pay sometimes, right? That is the area I believe this whole symbiosis I spoke about will continue to accelerate and deliver on a consistent basis, which
I'm really excited about what's ahead for us.
John Rymer (33:38)
Thank you, that's great. By the way, thanks for your shout out for our former colleague and friend, John Bratton -Sevick. He's with Forrester Research for those of you who don't know John. He's terrific. Rob, back over to you.
Rob Koplowitz (33:50)
He's terrific. Yeah. So just one comment on your last piece, Jithin, before we close out. I think that part of the shared passion that John and I have around this is this belief in our hearts and belief in the data that says this thing called digital transformation that we are all trying to get to.
Jithin Bhasker (33:51)
Absolutely.
Rob Koplowitz (34:17)
requires getting below the cut line. You have to automate everything end to end. It all has to be visible. It all has to be able to participate in broader processes, et cetera. So it's extraordinarily important. We agree with you.
wholeheartedly. Thank you, everybody, for listening to another episode of Lowdown on Lowcode. If you've liked what you've heard, subscribe, hit the Like button, share with your friends, and visit us at analysis .tech. Jithin, thank you so much for joining us today. Great, great session. Really informative.
John Rymer (34:52)
Thank you, Jithin.
Jithin Bhasker (34:52)
Pleasure is mine. Thank you, Mara. Thank you, John.
Rob Koplowitz (34:54)
All right. Thank you, everybody. We'll see you next week on Lowdown on Locode.