ServiceNow is well-known for its IT transformation products and customer/employee workflows. But the company has another technology, App Engine, a low-code application platform that lets people build applications faster than they can on any other platform.
In this TechStrong TV interview, I speak with Josh Kahn, general manager of the platform business unit at ServiceNow, about App Engine and the evolving low-code landscape, which is a very hot topic in today’s business environment. The video is below followed by a transcript of our conversation. Enjoy!
Transcript
Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone. Thanks for joining us on another episode of TechStrong TV here on Digital Anarchist. Really happy to be joined for this episode by Josh Kahn. Josh is the general manager of the platform business unit over at ServiceNow. Hey, Josh, welcome.
John Kahn: Alan, thank you for having me. Really excited to be here today.
Shimel: We’re excited to have you here, man. Let me just make sure I didn’t mess up anything with the title or the unit and everything, right?
Kahn: Got it exactly right. That’s right.
Shimel: Cool, man. Appreciate it. So Josh, look, our audience doesn’t really need an introduction to ServiceNow the company. You know, it’s probably one of the most successful companies over the last two/three years in the tech universe, if you will, right? Phenomenal growth, phenomenal story. But you’re the GM for the platform business unit, and I don’t know if our audience is as familiar with that. I think a lot of people think of ServiceNow with ITSM and those kinds of things. What exactly is the platform unit there?
Kahn: Yeah, so the platform business unit actually has two parts to it. One is taking requirements from all of our different lines of business and defining shared capabilities in the platform itself that they use to build their products. The other part is defining the things that our customers and partners need to build their own applications on our platform just like we do. And the platform at ServiceNow really is a single platform. It’s one platform, one architecture, one data model. So we make sure that the same capabilities our own businesses have to build on are available to our customers and partners. It’s the job me and my team have to make sure that that’s world class for all of the developers out there in our customers and our partners and in the ecosystem
Shimel: Sure. Excellent, man. Josh, if you can, share with our audience a little bit, what’s your background
Kahn: Yeah, so I’ve been in platforms for a long time. I actually graduated college and my first job was at Accenture where they said, “Hey, you’ve got to do some development work before you can get on to being a business analyst.” And I thought, oh man, I can’t wait to be a business analyst. I’ll power through this development stuff, and I just loved it, and I spent the first years of my career programming and programming in C on Windows 3.1 and doing three-tier client server systems. That was a lot of fun. At some point, the internet came along and I realized, wow, that was a much better architecture so found my way to Netscape.
Shimel: A little bit
Kahn: Say again.
Shimel: I said a little bit better.
Kahn: Yeah. So I found my way to Netscape which was the only internet company at the time and ended up there working on the Netscape 1 platform in a product management role and just http: my career continued to focus on development environments, platforms, and helping people bring solutions to market. Fortunately, I’ve been at ServiceNow for about four years and am continuing to really focus on how do we build a platform that lets our customers unleash the innovation in their organizations and create the kinds of applications that we create ourselves today? We want to bring that to our customers. That’s a really fun job to have.
Shimel: Excellent. You know, it’s funny. About two weeks ago I interviewed Tom Jermoluk. He was at Netscape obviously with Jim Clark, and he went off with Jim on a bunch of other adventures. They’re still adventuring, right? Tom is now at Beyond Identity or something like that. But yeah, we were talking about – I mean those Netscape days, you’re of an age, I was an OS/2 guy rather than Windows 3.1, truth be told. But you know, you’re at an age where Netscape, people forget I mean that was the opening of the internet commercially, right, without Netscape and what went on there. It was crazy times. Unbelievable times.
Kahn: I mean the thing that I was building an application where we designed a billing system for an airline to bill back and forth and exchange services and fees and they just sort of wash out dollars at the end of the month and somebody wrote somebody else a check. You know, one airline painted the other airlines planes and then the other airline de-iced. It was a really complicated data model to build, and we had to roll it out to all these different hubs but we tackled the data model problem. We tackled the logic problem. The thing that we couldn’t get around was the messaging infrastructure. That’s the thing that the internet made so easy. I mean among many things, I think it’s one of the reasons that it’s unlocked so much potential is it’s so easy to get a message from point to point for an application.
Shimel: Absolutely.
Kahn: It’s really, really changed the –
Shimel: Yeah, no, it was revolutionary. But you know, you bring up a good example and that is kind of what development was like back then versus what development can be like today. That kind of brings me up to App Engine and what I wanted to speak to you a little bit today, right, where, look, man, it’s – thank God you don’t have to do what you were doing in 1996/97/98 to develop an application today, right? We do have the internet. It does make a lot of things easier.
But we also live in a time of low-code no-code revolution where you don’t have to be a C-plus developer anymore to put together an application rather quickly. Rapid application development, right? And so I think a lot of people who are familiar with ServiceNow, Josh, they may not be familiar with App Engine and what it brings. So talk to us a little bit about – if you don’t mind, talk to us a little bit about App Engine.
Kahn: I’d love to, and I think you’re absolutely right. We’re well-known for our IT transformation products, customer workflows, employee workflows, less known for App Engine. So we focused App Engine on providing an application platform that lets people build applications faster than they can on any other platform. A lot of the first questions I get from customers is, “Hey, I have a number of application platforms and I can build – yeah, I want to go faster but what kinds of applications is your platform really best for?”
And one of the things that we’ve really done, in addition to making it possible to build low-code and build fast, is focus on digital workflows. So digital workflows are ways to drive business process across the organization. A lot of organizations were building those pre-COVID because they had digital transformation initiatives, but the COVID pandemic put the speed and the need of digitizing business process to the forefront of every organization, every government. It’s really just been a catalyst for building applications that drive business process, run across a lot of different systems, and create those sort of digital outcomes.
Shimel: Great. You’re preaching to the choir here, and we see it every day. Six years’ worth of digital transformation in about four months. That being said, digital transformation is way big, right? I probably went out of the screen on that. I apologize. It’s very big. But low-code no-code allows us to almost take it in bite-sized chunks. It allows us to get our hands around it without the huge development teams and all the languages and all that and really – especially like now in COVID, right, I need an application that does this now, right? We just sent everyone home remote. I need to be able to do this now. And so things like App Engine enable that sort of thing. Do you have any maybe examples you could share with us?
Kahn: Absolutely. Yeah. I think you’re absolutely right. And we see a world where, look, people who write software and people who code are still going to be incredibly important, right?
Shimel: No doubt.
Kahn: The issue is demand. There’s just too many applications to build so we’ve got to help people who don’t know how to code but do know business process to create those applications. That’s what we really tried to do with our low-code platform. And I’ll give you some examples, and a lot of the kinds of applications that people build in a no-code way tend to be the simpler variety of applications. So a few that we’ve worked with customers on. One they call Opendoor. So this allows all of their employees to submit ideas or concerns to the executive team. It was an idea at this organization that started when it was a very small company.
As the company has grown and grown, it’s no longer feasible for people to walk into the CEO’s office and he was getting 60,000 e-mails a year with ideas for how to do things better or how to mitigate risk. And so they had someone build an application using low-code technology called Opendoor, and any employee can go on a mobile device, submit an idea or a concern and it gets routed to the right executive team in the corporation at the executive level to address so it doesn’t all go to the CEO. If it’s obviously an issue that should be thought of in the finance department, it goes straight to the CFO. If it’s something that should be thought of in the human resources department, it goes straight to the talent officer. But it’s a way that employees are able to get those requests, visibility to the executive team. It was built without developers writing code. It was simply a no-code application process.
Shimel: Excellent.
Kahn: You know, I think there’s also an interesting dynamic, too, where we see an opportunity for people who write code to support those – we call those citizen developers. A lot of people use that term citizen developer. So what we think of as a citizen developer is someone who is technical but doesn’t typically write code. So I’ll give you an example. One individual was the person in her department that they would always go to and say, “Hey, we’re going to evaluate a SAS application for project management. Can you go look at these three apps and tell us which one you think is best?” So she really knew technology. She could log in, find her way around, configure things but wasn’t going to go write code to build an application herself.
What we’ve seen with the citizen developers is they can get pretty far into building an application, but oftentimes they hit a cliff where they need help from somebody who can really write code, whether it’s an integration with a system of record or some kind of complex business logic that’s just a little bit beyond the capabilities of the no-code tooling that they’re using. That’s where we think it’s really important to bring these citizen developers and the developers who write code together on a single platform so that they can support each other and we can get scale from the citizen developers but also have the pro code developers do the tough stuff that really empowers and enables the citizen developers.
Shimel: You know, Josh, that is so dead on to part of what DevOps is about, right, which is all of us working together in that thing. I wanted to let you finish your thought, but a couple of comments on it is number one, when we look at the full spectrum of the kind of applications modern enterprises, modern organizations need to function, yeah, there are some things that are really hard. They need applications that are really hard to build, have very, very complex workflows and very complex needs or requirements. You really do need to be a high-level developer, let’s call it, a really high level experienced developer to pull that off.
But I would venture to say that that’s probably 20 percent or less of the kind of apps – when you look at the full spectrum of apps that people use, it’s probably 20 percent or less. I think the majority of the apps are rather mundane, right? They don’t need the rocket scientist to develop. If you just give someone some good building block tools, they could put together 90 percent of the functionality they need, 95 percent of the functionality that app needs to be functional and effective.
And I think, you know, we said it before, there’s something like 40 million, 42 million developers in the world was the last number I saw, growing 20 percent a year. Would be the fastest growing country on Earth. It’s still not enough. As you said, there’s still not enough developers. So part of what we have to do in DevOps, part of what we do in digital transformation is say, “Hey, if we don’t need one of those 42 million on this but we have someone here doing it, let someone here do it.” We don’t need that pro developer, if we can call it that, to do everything every time. And so the citizen developer as the term is coined, right, becomes more and more important to do more and more of these 80 percent or so apps that don’t require it, right, that don’t require that pro guy or pro gal.
And so the real question for organizations, and I’m sure this is something you deal with, is how do you empower those people? With an App Engine maybe. But sometimes – Josh, again I’d like to hear your voice – it’s not just the tool. It’s making the CIO, the IT department aware that, hey, let’s not just dump everything on that developer’s desk because he is dealing with security and DevOps and testing and deployment. He’s got enough on his plate. Are there things we can take off the plate for the citizen developer and get it done quicker, cheaper, and just as functional?
Kahn: Yep, absolutely. So it’s really interesting you say that because we see a pretty common journey with a lot of our customers that have great success with App Engine and it tends to start with the team building a business-critical application of some sort. So I’ll give you an example. Academy Mortgages is one of our customers, and I talked for a bit with the CIO about their journey, and I’ll describe it in terms of what Academy Mortgage did, but this is a very common journey that plays out in lots of our customers.
So Felix was describing first they had a couple of business-critical applications they built out on the platform. So Academy Mortgage does loan origination. Then a lot of times they will package them up and sell them to investors. So there’s a process when you sell them where there’s a set of stipulations that have to be attested to as a part of that process. So they had a hundred people that manage that stipulation process.
So they built a digital workflow on our platform with App Engine, and they were able to do that process with half the number of people. So they reduced from 100 people to 50 people to process even more loans than they had in the past. You say, well, hey, where did those 50 people go? And I asked Felix that question. He’s like, “Hey, these are people that know the mortgage industry. They’re incredibly knowledgeable. They’re great employees. We redirected them to other work.”
So this is a case where they took a business-critical application, had a huge cost savings and increase in revenue generation for the organization through the combination of saving those people and redirecting. But that was only step one. You know, the next thing is they built a small center of excellence. So they put, not huge, three people in a team that were like the experts on building App Engine applications. That team was able to build over 50 applications for 27 different departments at their organization. So now they’ve gone from a couple of big wins – I mentioned one of them, but they had a couple of big wins – to a small center of excellence team and then they move on to phase three.
Once they’ve had that broad sort of impact with the 50 applications, they start empowering the rest of the organization to build the simple ones, right? So Felix calls it power to the people. He wants to let the citizen developers do the really simple stuff and his CEO team is gonna continue to do the high impact, high complexity, real business value-driving applications. So the vision that you laid out, Alan, is exactly what I’m seeing our customers doing is combining both professional developers for the really complex stuff and citizen developers for the simpler applications
Shimel: I mean it’s the right person for the right job using the right tool, quite frankly. So you know, Josh, I, like the rest of the world, hope and pray that this COVID thing doesn’t stick with us forever and we come out the other side somehow into what the new normal is. In this new normal, what role – I mean do we go back – we can’t go back to the way it was before, but what role does low-code no-code play in this whole thing going in this new normal that emerges
Kahn: Yeah, I mean it’s incredible the amount of processes that are being re-engineered across every industry. Anything that depended on contact, human contact, paper changing hands, two people being in the same place is now being re-engineered to become contactless processes. And so for any organization will have hundreds or thousands of those processes, and to think that you’re going to need a skilled developer to write code to reengineer each one of those processes is – you know, you’re going to put the timeline out too far for your organization to be successful. You’ll put people’s lives at risk. You’ll put your organization at risk.
And so the pace of digitization is just going through the roof. The only way to really keep pace with that digitalization is to empower citizen developers. So what we’ve seen in our customers is a real demand to empower their citizen developers, their business analysts to reengineer business process. They know that process well. If they can be armed with tools that allow them to model it, define it, and deploy it, then the organization can create transformation at scale. That is what everyone is looking for in this post-COVID era.
Shimel: Absolutely.
Kahn: We’re dealing with it today, but even as we move out those processes will continue to be reengineered and change.
Shimel: Agreed. I think, look, the whole thing around business process automation, robotic process automation, RPA, another popular topic and I think the other thing is we’re interviewing a analyst a couple weeks ago and they said something like we’ve done six months or six years of digital transformation in a couple of months.
The interesting thing about that is it’s almost like putting money in the bank. So that money’s there now. So when and if this COVID enters, you don’t start with zero in the bank. You start with what you’ve already deposited, right, and then we build on that. I think that’s an important thing for people to remember in that all of these investments we’re making now and empowering our citizen developers with tools like App Engine. They’re now short term or diminishing assets. These are long-term investments we’re making that will serve us well going out beyond the immediate crises or whatever you want to call it.
And it’ll be interesting because I feel like, you know, so like you, we both came of an age, right, when the internet came onboard and we had this concept of internet time, right, this kind of crunch time. In internet time, it goes three times faster than the real world. I think we have now introduced like COVID time, and I don’t mean to be – look, a lot of people are suffering. A lot of people are dying. But we have compressed timeframes in terms of how fast we’re developing apps, in terms of how fast we are bringing onboard these things. I don’t think that goes away. You can’t put that genie back in the bottle.
Kahn: You can’t. You know, I think there’s a perfect example of that that we saw with the City of Los Angeles. So the mayor’s office wanted – this is early on in the pandemic. They wanted to roll out COVID testing for all of the citizens of Los Angeles, and they called ServiceNow, and we brought in one of our partners on a Saturday morning. The mayor was saying I have a press release on Sunday night. I need to roll out the testing application so that when we tell people there’s testing, we can tell them where to go to sign up. And so this partner, Cask was our partner that did this, they assigned six developers who worked through the night, did a demo for the mayor’s office on Sunday morning, and by Sunday evening they had this application up and running for 4 million citizens of Los Angeles, eventually expanded to the county so you get to 16 million people.
But it’s interesting because it wasn’t a registration form. It was a really powerful logistics app. Behind the scenes, they had to have agents who could route the request to the right site to get tested. They had different sites and each site had two-hour windows where they didn’t want to put too many people in a window because then you have –
Shimel: Unbelievable.
Kahn: – too close together. So you want to talk COVID time, I mean within 48 hours they were able to build an application that handled a complex logistical challenge and make it available for 4 million people. You know what I mean? Even on the internet.
Shimel: Fantastic.
Kahn: – that would be inconceivable.
Shimel: Crazy. I don’t want to get into politics, but why couldn’t we do that nationally, man? You know, if it worked for L.A. for a couple of million? But let’s not go there. Josh, we’re about out of time. I want to thank you for coming on and sharing a little bit with us, talking, learning. You know what we didn’t mention? For people who want to find out more about App Engine, where can they go.
Kahn: Yeah, look, best place to go is ServiceNow.com. You’ll drill into the platform area, learn about App Engine. If you’re interested, you get your own developer instance and you can be up and running building applications in no time.
Shimel: Fantastic, man. Hey, thanks for joining us. Josh Kahn, VP of the Platform Business Unit at ServiceNow, talking to us about App Engine, empowering citizen developers around the world. This is Alan Shimel for TechStrong TV. We’ll be right back with our next guest.
Oracle is also proposing to add a Vector application programming interface (API), along with enabling some C++ features in Java 16.
