UPDATED 14:36 EDT / APRIL 23 2015

Winning developer hearts and minds through flexibility| #know15

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With a background as a software engineer, Jonathan Sparks, director of Product Management at ServiceNow, understands what it’s like to be a developer. Fortunately, he says that their platform makes things easy, especially when designing applications for enterprise.

“As a developer, I want to solve problems for people and see them get excited …. I don’t necessarily want to have to build out middle layers,” Sparks said in an interview with theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante at ServiceNow’s Knowledge15 event in Las Vegas.

Taking care of the “middle layers”

 

ServiceNow is designed to take care of those middle layers, Sparks said, from security to databases and user authentications, which allows good engineers to become great ones. Even non-coders can solve problems for their companies using the platform as well: “It’s a toolset that’s actually approachable, so that you get people who maybe have more of an IT background, maybe more of an admin background, all of a sudden they’re building applications and really solving people’s problems,” Sparks stated.

But in the end, Sparks said, “The platform that gets to developers is the platform that wins,” so they’ve been working hard to make life easier for developers, improving access to its products with a new app store and free instances of the CreateNow platform for members of the dev program. Even CreatorCon, an event following Knowledge15 with over 1,200 people in attendance, is designed to promote the developer community and connect them with people who know ServiceNow’s core systems backwards and forwards. The innovation payoff of all of these investments has been phenomenal, Sparks said, with applications appearing in the store catering to many different verticals with a variety of difficult problems to solve, especially in the medical field.

The highest levels of flexibility

 

Innovation at that level, whether it’s hospitals or huge corporations like Johnson & Johnson, require the highest levels of flexibility. Consumer products may be able to get away with a single-user interface, but applications for enterprise have to be able to fit within a company’s existing framework if they’re going to sell. ServiceNow has these customization features built in so that a single application can be customized by multiple end users once they purchase it.

“Which is a great, great thing for people who want to sell into enterprise,” Sparks said, “because, in the end, everybody has their own process.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 15.


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