The recent emergence of Platform as a Service (PaaS) has forever changed how enterprises develop and launch innovative applications. Rather than adopting old school style standards, organizations can use the cloud and DevOps to make the application deployment process more efficient.

ServiceNow, the global leader in providing cloud-based services used by enterprises to streamline and automate their IT operations, represents a new generation of enterprise software companies whose use of cloud delivery is giving them a huge leg up on the old on-premise software vendors.

Like every year, ServiceNow Knowledge event takes place on April 29, 30 and May 1, 2014 at Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA. The Knowledge14 conference is expecting nearly 6,000 attendees and the agenda has a lot of interesting breakout sessions and labs ready for all the Knowledge14 visitors. TheCUBE team will be at the event to learn and share the newest technologies for transforming IT service relationships across the enterprise.

Cloud computing and DevOps accelerate automation

As with many companies in the technology space, ServiceNow’s journey has not all been as mapped out. Cloud delivery was the cornerstone of ServiceNow’s strategy enabling it to deliver its innovations quicker and more efficiently than its competition.

ServiceNow looked at drivers for and opportunities from automation and they are fine tuning cloud computing and DevOps to accelerate the evolution of automation-enabled service management, with ITSM itself evolving to adapt to automation.

One of the lifecycle of DevOps process is change control and it has always been a spike in the side of IT. ServiceNow is hoping to shake up this paradigm with their change control Configuration Automation offering. The company’s Change Management and Configuration Management tools integrates with Puppet to provide a popular open-source automation framework. By eliminating the need to use different tools to manage infrastructure, the platform simplifies compliance, helps IT organizations improve quality of service.

The company’s other offering ServiceNow HR Service Automation enables HR executives to understand the department’s workload and make better decisions for organizations to automate HR case management. HR Service Automation eliminates various HR tasks and requests are auto-assigned, scheduled, tracked and reported for a vastly higher level of productivity and efficiency.

Last year, ServiceNow picked up Dutch analytics startup Mirror42 to build advanced monitoring capabilities into the ServiceNow platform. The solution features a wide range of data visualization capabilities, including predictive modeling and the ability to produce scoreboards that show IT and business performance.

ServiceNow enhances software development

As the need for software increases across the business world, most developers feel the need of individual IT tools having its own set of data, management, and user interfaces. Catering to this phenomenon, ServiceNow last year unveiled its App Creator solution, which uses a point-and-click strategy that allows non-technical individuals to develop advanced applications.

App Creator provides a breakthrough in simplifying the process of building custom applications. The automation tool offers a great deal of depth for developers and enables users to put together form-based apps and other simple features as easily as Excel spreadsheets. With a simple point-click-publish approach, non-technical IT personnel through technically-savvy developers can rapidly build custom applications that use forms-based workflow to automate IT or line of business processes.

Where ServiceNow stands out in the cloud provider market is that they focus on total integration of a customer’s overall IT processes. The ServiceNow Cloud Provisioning is a new orchestration application that enables IT to automate the entire cloud management lifecycle. From self-service cloud selection to automated, standardized cloud creation and resource optimization, ServiceNow Cloud Provisioning does it all for enterprises.

With Knowledge14 event approaching this week, ServiceNow customers should expect new tools and services to improve service delivery within IT and throughout the enterprise by managing and automating service relationships and interactions. This collaboration will be important as cloud and other consumerization trends continue to impact the software development landscape.