Historically, IT organizations had no choice but to use hard-coded process flows and spreadsheets for  service relationship management. That not only necessitated significant time investments in manual data entry but also made it considerably more difficult to administer large-scale environments where information would inevitably get scattered across hundreds if not thousands of individual files, leading to a great deal of inefficiency and compromising governance.

By the time ServiceNow came along with its cloud-based automation platform, this problem has already spiraled out of control for many enterprises despite the best efforts of traditional ITSM software providers such as IBM and CA. The firm’s timing couldn’t have been more perfect. In a few short years, it emerged as one of the growing vendors in the industry, all thanks to unique approach that extends the system of record beyond IT across the entire enterprise leveraging the elasticity of the public cloud.

“Pretty much any request, response and fulfillment-type workflow can be handled by our platform,” Fred Luddy, the founder and chief product officer of ServiceNow told SiliconANGLE in a 2013 interview on theCUBE. The strength of ServiceNow is that it’s a horizontal solution at its core but can be extended to meet industry and department-specific requirements through a built-in application creator that allows users to build pre-packaged services for managing business processes without doing any coding.

“What our customers have done over the years is create different applications that help them streamline that workflow. Typically that workflow is handled by people creating a spreadsheet, emailing it to someone else, having it emailed back, perhaps they built a Lotus Notes app in the past.  Our platform usage has been expanded by our customers sometimes beyond our wildest dreams,” Luddy said.

Although it’s not unreasonable to assume that customer-developed applications far exceed the number of apps created by ServiceNow partners, the firm has done surprisingly little to take advantage of its users’ resourcefulness so far despite seemingly recognizing the potential from very early on. But that is changing today with the introduction of Share, an online exchange that lets members of the ServiceNow community to share ideas and avoid having to reinvent the wheel when they stumble upon a problem that someone else has already solved.

The free marketplace features applications, extensions, integrations, dashboards and other improvements to the core platform provided by customers and partners that have been ‘authenticated’ by the company, which ensures that the solutions in the catalog are safe for deployment. As for the service itself,  it features a simplified search capability that makes it easier for developers to filter for software that meets their specific criteria and packs limited social functionality as well, namely the ability to rate contributions based on their usefulness.

Although limited, the launch lineup for Share is nonetheless impressive. It includes several applications for requesting different types of assets, from projects to equipment, as well as a wide range of specialized automation utilities designed with specific industries in mind. There’s also a developer tool called HereNow that provides a real-time location tracking capability which can be embedded into mobile applications for improved content targeting.

photo credit: Tsahi Levent-Levi via photopin cc