At this week’s ServiceNow Knowledge 2014 event, being held in the Moscone Center in San Francisco, a major new collaboration project on the ServiceNow ecosystem, known as Share, was announced. SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE, hosted by Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick, welcomed ServiceNow’s Vice President of Marketing, Shane Jackson, to the broadcast.

Jackson, with the company for only about 12 months, counts this year’s Knowledge event as his first. Acknowledging this fact, Vellante asked Jackson if he had experienced any big surprises since joining ServiceNow.

“I tell my family,” Jackson began, “that I used to work on the infrastructure, the plumbing of the house. But now I work on the automation across the house.”

That analogy, he believed, best helped them to understand the shift he experienced transitioning to ServiceNow.

The big Wednesday announcement for ServiceNow was the rollout of their new Share functionality on their website (https://share.servicenow.com/). The site, with a clean and easy to use interface, is intended to be an online exchange where customers and partners can upload and download applications and development content. Share users can leverage ideas from others in the community and do not have to rebuild similar functionality from scratch, according to the accompanying press release.

Jackson explained how ServiceNow arrived at the conclusion this was a necessary way forward for the company.

“We asked CIO’s what we could do and they asked for a way to share,” he said. “They would tell each other stories about what they were doing on our platform and would find others were building the exact same thing.”

Share was designed so that ServiceNow customers wouldn’t have to rebuild the wheel independently of one another. Addressing proprietary issues within individual organizations, Jackson said, “We have it set up so your system administrator gets a heads up each time there is a share. So, there is a system of checks and balances built in.”

Observing the similarity to other communities, Frick commented, “It’s like a pseudo-open source, leveraging participation by the community.” Jackson responded, “It’s exactly what we’re aiming for. We want the ServiceNow community to interact with one another and help achieve results faster.”

Share was designed with ServiceNow’s partner ecosystem in mind, too. “If you go to the first page,” Jackson stated, “we have a featured partner that is based on recent uploads.” He goes on to explain that once partners reach a threshold of uploads the partner is given a page unto themselves on the Share site.”

“How do you decide what apps are coming out of ServiceNow and what are coming out of the community,” Vellante asked.

“Share is a way to accelerate the ability for others to build apps on ServiceNow,” Jackson responded. “But at the same time if the customer or partner wants to build an application and it competes with one of our own, we are ok with that. We’ll let the market decide which is the best.”

Jackson explained ServiceNow’s vision for their new Share rollout stating that the first goal is simply to build an awareness of this new capability among their customer base. “We already have 1,200 downloads and we just launched.” That is all community based activity. “It’s like the old ‘take a penny, leave a penny tray,” he said.

The ServiceNow Knowledge 2014 event continues through May 1 and SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE will continue to bring you live coverage of the conference.

photo credit: djwtwo via photopin cc