buy versus build is a challenge every developer faces at some point when it comes to Automation and integration it's good to know your way around the available options before making a decision that could potentially create technical debt this episode's guest brings some light to the pre-built options for servicenow automation engine welcome to breakpoint the servicenow developer podcast here's your host Chuck tomasi hello servicenow admins Builders developers and curious individuals and I say that with the utmost love and respect as always welcome to breakpoint or welcome back to breakpoint the servicenow developer podcast where we bring you the latest tools tips and tradecraft to accelerate your career in this episode I have the great pleasure of talking to senior director inbound product manager Michael minor how are you today Michael doing great Chuck and thanks for having me great to have you here thanks for joining welcome to breakpoint and before I begin I always like to do the intro bio part of the show so we can get to know you a little bit better please share absolutely so I am a senior director for automation engine in product management uh automation engine comprises of integration Hub RPA as well as our newest offering which is document intelligence I've been with servicenow for the past four months and having a blast four months you're a veteran at this point absolutely I am totally a veteran all right and when you're not at work what do you enjoy doing well one of the things I enjoy Chuck I I enjoy running I was out this morning uh doing a run and actually competed in a 5K race this past Sunday how'd you do lots of fun you know I didn't win but then again I didn't expect to win I competed against myself and for that I felt really good that's the important thing people need to recognize is it is a single person it's best when you enjoy it yourself you're competing against yourself that's that's the best way to run I only run when someone's chasing me now where are you located Michael I am located in New Jersey in a town called Highland Park which many people might not have heard of but it's right near Edison which is a more popular neighborhood okay and I assume there are elements of fall starting to creep in as we record this in late September releasing in early October well it is starting Chuck and we've had a really really hot summer out here but the weather is starting to cool off a bit so we're seeing a glimpse of Falls to to begin Now The Listener can't see this but uh you and I are talking on zoom and uh we're roughly in the same age bracket so I assume that prior to this four months you had previous employment and uh what did you do before you got to surface now yeah well I was with Oracle before this I actually spent uh 25 years at Oracle uh and the latest project I was working on there was Oracle integration which is oracle's iPad solution very similar to automation engine and integration Hub okay so I've had a number of years of experience with the application inner integration domain so you know how to do it right this time I'm hoping to figure it out I try not to bash on the competition but I just that was your practice 25 years of practice now we can do it right yeah well yeah we certainly made some mistakes over there so uh hopefully we'll fix them here everyone does all right fun question for you when you were a child what did you want to grow up to be oh no question I wanted to play baseball for the New York Yankees that's what I wanted to be and how did that work out did you did you like go to little league and work your way up or what is that story oh no no no not at all the closest I came was one time I got box seats right behind the Yankees dugout I was so close so close did that crush your dreams or what happened to that dream well I decided I needed to Pivot and try something else and uh software Came Calling and so here we are at servicenow living the dream living the dream the sign behind you says dream even bigger that's right there you go we'll continue to do I think we took that right out of Bill McDermott's Playbook you bet all right before we jump in you already mentioned automation engine and some other things so let's get some definitions down what is automation engine sure so automation engine is the piece of service now that allows our customers to connect servicenow with other applications and systems in their ecosystem okay I thought that was integration Hub well so integration Hub is a big that allows you to do that connectivity using programmatic apis okay and what if there aren't programmatic apis perfect question that's why we have our robotic process automation or RPA which came into servicenow last year so it's fairly recent that allows you to integrate with third-party systems using user interfaces or uis okay so we got the Bots now you mentioned something else real quick a new member to the family document intelligence that's right so document intelligence has just came out very recently and it provides the ability to process uh unstructured or semi-structured documents so if you have let's say invoices purchase orders or other types of documents we can automatically process them to recognize fields and information in that document so that our customers don't have to manually take those documents and enter them in manually I like this I've seen something like this in other platforms where you scan a receipt or something and it goes ah here's the vendor here's the total here's your tip I'm like oh that's kind of cool how it it parses that apart that's a use case of document intelligence that is a perfect use case of document intelligence and then combining that with RPA and integration Hub you can really put together very cool end-to-end business use cases yeah the way I understand it is document intelligence will will parse that data out of there and then you can use it in a flow absolutely to say you know take that total and if the total is greater than a thousand then run to an approval and like okay now we've got some cool stuff to hook up that's exactly right you could take that invoice or whatever you can load that into service now and then process it pick out the fields that you want and even send those fields to a third-party system if you need to okay now that we know the players this is a developer podcast so let's let's talk a little bit about what parts of that are low code and no code and what parts require some deeper development really a low code no code platform so when you're using it you're going to be using what we call Flow designer and that basically gives you a palette where you can drag and drop your items and form a flow that you want between servicenow and Salesforce or Microsoft teams or OCTA any number of other applications that you might have in your ecosystem so it's a very low code no code because it's really meant to you know drag and drop visually however there are certain use cases where coding would come into play where you might need a professional developer to code that particular use case I would say that's less common most of the use cases that our customers need really can be driven by low code and no code and the nice thing about that is you don't need a professional developer you might have a business unit a business user who really understands the business they understand the use cases that need to be developed and that same business unit user can use our platform to actually develop those and flows I I'm noticing that the coding is becoming less and less on the platform in general particularly around Integrations uh Earl Duque and I were just recently working on a graphql API and we could not get the rest step to do the graphql API successfully for whatever reason we're not sure but instead we used a script step that effectively did the same thing and then returned the Json to us so even when you package it into an action and the action into a bundle of spokes the consumer using it on Flow designer is unaware of what's Happening underneath whether the complexity is there or whether you what step you used was it a rest step or a script step so it's inconsequential to the consumer of the spokes in integration Hub anyway yeah very true I mean the consumer is going to be using a set of actions that are made available through our spokes we'll get to that in a little bit so they just know know that they need to invoke a particular action how that action is implemented is really underneath the covers and the consumer doesn't even have to worry about that okay we triggered that word so it's a great segue into our next question let's work our way up in terms of those pre-built capabilities uh when we spoke earlier you had I think it was four bullet points we may even have a bonus who knows depending on where this conversation goes what's what's bullet point number one for pre-built automation engine Solutions both bullet point number one are our spokes so a Spoke is a logical grouping of related actions that know how to talk and communicate with a particular third-party system give me an example so for instance we have a spoke for Salesforce we have a spoke for Oracle applications we have a spoke for Slack so if you want to design a flow where you're posting slack messages or incidents or problems to a slack Channel you would use our slack spoke and you can design a flow that says for instance whenever a an incident in servicenow is added or changed let me invoke that flow and let me write a message to a particular slack Channel I could do all of that developing that flow using the slack spoke that we offer now we have a store full of many of these spokes I think you'd mentioned a number around 175 pre-built spokes we do and constantly growing yeah so I think it might even be a little bit higher than 175 so there's a good chance as our customers are Building Solutions that we haven't spoke for that yeah check the store before you go build your own oh yeah definitely check the store you don't want to go Reinventing the wheel but we don't have a spoke for every possible application out there and certainly there's lots of Legacy apps that we certainly don't have spokes for but guess what if we don't have a spoke for it the platform allows you to build your own spoke yes and that that was the use case that I was getting into a little while ago with that graphql API that's right it goes out to meetup.com I don't think we have a lot of customers out there that are integrating with meetup.com but Earl and Lauren and I need to as advocates to find out hey who signed up for our meetups are they pre-registered do they sign in get the stats get the upcoming meetups all that can be done but we got to build it ourselves now it's not a Monumental thing and it's something we can reuse over and over this podcast gets released through a third party service they have rest apis I can pull that information what are the playlists what are the shows what are the episodes in that show on and on and with stats at lots of Rich API structures so uh I kind of get a charge out of that I like building new tools and and integrating I mean my entire career has been based off of making things talk to other things and this is just another Avenue to fulfill that yeah absolutely and we have a large customer-based building custom spokes it's it's huge many of our customers are choosing to build their own spokes to various systems like some of the probably the ones that you mentioned like Meetup and other applications like that where we they're not part of the 175 plus folks they offer but the platform does allow for that extensibility bullet point number two and here's one that I often forget about flow templates those are a pre-built automation thing yeah so this is kind of the next level up the stack what we were just describing Chuck is using a spoke and developing a an integration flow using that spoke now one level up is you don't even develop the integration you leverage one of our pre-built flow templates the nice thing about that is that we know some of the common use cases that our customers need so we've packaged them into these flow templates so customers can at the very least get a jump start so one example that I'll give is we have our newest category which is flow templates for service desk so these provide pre-built flows for syncing incidents and problems and change requests between servicenow and service Management systems such as BMC remedy and jira now it's impossible for us to note every possible combination that our customer might want to do so maybe that flow template is going to give our customer 80 percent of what they need maybe they have some custom fields that they introduced into servicenow or into BMC remedy which of course we wouldn't know anything about so it's extensible that our customer can go in it's fully editable they can actually modify those flows that were generated from the flow templates and tailor it to their needs so it's kind of the 80 20 it allows them to get 80 right off the bat and fill it in with the 20 of what they need the nice thing about it is that they have a tried and true flow that other customers are using and it gives them further confidence in terms of testing that that flow is going to hold up and um and perform the way it should so if you're playing along at home let me build you the the stack that we have so far we've got flows that can be built off of flow templates those flow templates have a series of actions in them that are using spokes or that are part of a collection of actions from a Spoke so you'd mentioned say slack for example or jira we'll take jira because that's a that's where I wanted to go we some of those actions have what we call Dynamic inputs and they can do introspection on that remote system so let's say one of the actions is go get me a list of projects obviously you can't hard code that into an action it goes out to jira and says give me the list of projects then when you see it on Flow designer when you're designing this you pick the project because it already went out and fetched that list that's a dynamic input same kind of thing if it were you know mapping fields to a table say I need to go get these fields and you went oh but what about all those custom fields we put on jira not a problem Dynamic inputs can take care of that it does that introspection of a list of data or a list of fields get the data structure and then present it back to you in flow designer so that you can then use that I I just built one yesterday as a matter of fact they're really powerful next is dynamic outputs yeah I've used Dynamic inputs recently with Microsoft teams saying that you might have multiple channels and it'll say hey there's a list of channels that you have pick one right so it's it's really handy otherwise you're left with uh possible misspellings or how do I how do I find out what that right channel is is it still active you know because it's Dynamic data it's going to change well you want your integration to keep up with that oh after flow templates what have you got for me well well the thing I have for you Chuck are solutions okay uh you're gonna have to clarify on that one I didn't think it was going to be self-explanatory so I'll go ahead and clarify uh so these are really end-to-end solutions that are fully integrated with servicenow they're really meant to be more of the 100 versus the 80 okay one example is what we call client software distribution or CSD so this is a really cool one and we have lots of customers using CSD this allows uh let's say your employees at your company to be able to install software on their laptops let's take Microsoft teams maybe an employee needs to install Microsoft teams on their laptop okay well using servicenow they can log into their servicenow portal and they can go to the catalog and they can look up teams and they can put it in their cart and then order it it's just like if they were using Amazon or some other uh yeah or the Google you know the app store or the Apple Store yeah exactly wow okay yeah just like that and that once they place the order well what happens it's probably going to go through some approval process as defined by the company maybe the employees manager needs to approve it it's going to go in check to make sure that the company has sufficient licenses to Microsoft teams because obviously we don't want to be out of compliance we're doing all that on the background oh yeah that's all part of this solution is the license compliance checking and okay wow license compliance checking it feeds into a software asset management or Sam which is one of our servicenow applications and when all is said and done and the thing is approved boom Microsoft teams is it is installed on the employee's laptop so really cool where was this 20 years ago when I was doing basic desktop Administration yeah life would have been so much easier it wouldn't have been no more walking around with the floppy disk oh I remember those days was it the three and a half or the five and a quarter we'll leave that one for the imagination of the listener foreign and so and extending that our latest addition to our Solutions is what we call Cloud deployment automation uh we just added this to our repository and it's very similar to what I described for CSD in that you're ordering you're placing it or putting your cart in placing order but here the software is not deployed onto your device like your laptop but you're deploying a software stack into the cloud like AWS for instance oh okay so we're really excited about that and we think that's going to be a real hit with our customers so you could stand up a virtual machine with everything installed on it just straight up somebody says hey I need a new Dev web server or something lyrical okay neat yeah you define what that stack is going to and then it would be available in your catalog and you would place the order just like you would anything else now didn't we have the ability for people to build that before or and now this is a configurable solution is that the difference between yesterday and today well currently uh available from all these AWS certainly provides that ability but here you're able to do it from servicenow if you're using servicenow as your system of Engagement if you're tracking usage and compliance from servicenow it enables our customers to do it right from service now rather than having to go to a separate school to do that and what is beyond Solutions because that sounds like a pretty complete package well it is pretty complete but I have one to share with you but wait there's more there's more it's now an infomercial thanks that's right more Chuck we have in Solutions so if you take our automation engine many times that automation engine and the three products that I mentioned that comprise it are embedded with our servicenow offerings so customers barely see it it's just there is part of that end product that we offer from servicenow so to give you an example we have HR Service delivery okay which is one of our offerings within our employee workflows and it offers integration with uh Microsoft active directory and it's using integration hub for that solution but customers don't have to go and get integration hubs separately they don't have to pay for integration Hub it's just part of that solution servicenow customers that are using Azure active directory for their identity management and they're using HR Service delivery they can use this capability for for instance for efficient onboarding of employees so say when I joined servicenow four months ago I needed to have the right set of roles and access to certain systems you can automate that from HR Service delivery calling into Azure ID to provide the roles and entitlements that I need for my job we got to get that really soon here yeah we do have a lot of things automated here we just don't have everything automated like most other organizations it's a very Dynamic processes change people change you gotta you gotta be able to keep up so yes we can do that yeah yeah I think we experience the same uh things that our customers experience in terms of automating as much as possible but there are certain areas that we still haven't gotten to that we need to still get to and that's what our customers are facing they want to automate as much as possible but inevitably there's always is going to be those things that they still haven't been able to quite get to but hopefully it's in the road map and hopefully automation engine will help them get there we're customer zero we we feel your pain that's right that's right we absolutely do now I know that many of our listeners are working for partners and thank you very much to all of our wonderful Partners what is something that our partner listeners should know about so partners that are part of our so-called TPP program uh they actually have the ability to contribute to our store so you can go anybody can go to store.servicenow.com there is a link there for Integrations and you will actually see on the left side there is a filter that will talk about the categories that I mentioned spokes flow templates and solutions and you'll also see that there's another filter for partners and servicenow so if you click on Partners you will see all the content that Partners have provided and as if you're a partner out there and you haven't contributed you have that ability to contribute spokes or float templates or Solutions as a way to help you gain traction with the customers that you're serving using servicenow and it doesn't necessarily have to mean that's your primary source of income that's your primary product a lot of our partners put out information as almost lead generation or value add to say hey this is a capability we can do here's an example in the store and it it turns out very well for them oh yeah I think you're absolutely right and it really could span the gamut I've been talking with one partner that is on one side of the gamut their entire business entire business is selling the apps solutions that they provide in our store they have 39 apps that's it that's their whole business built on servicenow and then we have other partners that are looking to Leverage servicenow to service their customers and yes it that this is a good inroads to say hey we have the expertise we provided this spoke or template or solution and we can help you build out your Integrations with servicenow leveraging the content that that we have available so yeah absolutely it's it's really could be one or the other and many of our partners actually fall in between those well thank you thank you now it's time for my favorite question for all the product managers what's on the roadmap for automation engine okay well automation engine number one I mentioned the three components that comprise automation engine integration Hub RPA and document intelligence you're going to see more and more of those products converging there's some there are some convergence there there are some convergence today they do come together with flow designer but there is additional work that's going on to make them more closely aligned in terms of how do you develop a box in RPA versus how do you develop content for integration Hub those are going to converge and we're also going to be developing more templates and solutions that combine those three components because we know and we've heard from customers hey we need integration Hub we need RPA we need dock Intel we need all three of those to give us a the integration solutions that we need and so we're going to be coming up with more of those targeted templates and solutions that that combine those those three components of automation engine but I would say the most important thing is our customers we listen to our customers as product managers we're always in contact with customers and when we hear that there are use cases that span multiple customers that clicks off the light bulb for us to say hey we need to provide that out of the box yeah we have too many customers trying to do X let's provide them with X so that our customers don't have to reinvent the wheel and that's what I would say is true for all of our customers developing these Solutions if you're a developer don't reinvent the wheel first thing you want to do when you're trying to build one of these Integrations take a look at what we have in the store chances are that we have some artifacts that are going to help you build that solution whether it be one or more spokes or templates or Solutions it's more important to be able to develop that solution as quickly as possible and with the highest quality than to invent it yourself that gets into the follow-up question and I can hear at least a half a dozen people in my head who have asked this in the past do we have some kind of published roadmap of things we're working on so that they don't go and say I need that meetup.com spoke and then they go and build it and two months later we go hey guess what we just released at the store I go oh man yeah well we do first of all uh have some content that we are making available for our Utah release that will give our customers visibility into what to expect in early next year uh and shortly thereafter will be sharing information about our fall release which will be Vancouver and even our Washington release which will release when is that I guess sometime in early 2024 wow twice and it's 2024. I know I also have to appreciate that the customers are going wait I've just got to San Diego you know so yeah there's a whole spread of you know there's a big spectrum of who's working on what here well it's pretty exciting that we're so close to the end of the alphabet I mean this is really I don't know what happens after that no it's going to be it's gonna be great there's apparently there's a committee out somewhere trying to figure that out I have some ideas that would good luck today yeah uh any words of advice for our listeners our developer listeners that are out there I would say that as you're looking at servicenow in particular developing your Integrations with servicenow be prudent make sure that you understand what servicenow is making available when you look at our spokes make sure you understand whether there are one or more spokes that you can take advantage of when you look at our flow templates make sure that you understand whether there is a flow template that is similar to what you're trying to build and the same for Solutions now in some cases you might have to build your own in that case go ahead and build your own spoke and integrate that but I would advise everybody looking to build these types of Integrations whether it's with integration Hub or RPA or doc Intel or some combination thereof do check and see what is available from servicenow as well as from our partner community I'm going to and that yes and you can see test and work with many of these right from your personal developer instance so if you don't have a PDI yet developer.servicenow.com you log in you can go to the manage screen on the developer portal and say I want to turn on integration Hub if it's not already on and start experimenting even to the point of I I this is something that was ingrained to me when I first started on service now look at the standard examples the pre-loaded data that comes with it and learn from that right down to naming standards the way you name your actions if you are to build your own spoke the way you name your actions can have a huge impact as to how well they're consumed how they appear in the menu are you consistent with the way that other actions are named how does jira get records how do they save how do they update what are the names what are the parameters and that can help you build out your own so look at those pre-built Solutions uh if if you don't have what you're looking for and you say oh yeah I'm gonna have to build my own look at those towards examples yeah yeah absolutely naming is is certainly very important it's something that we take seriously when we're naming uh our actions within our spoke or even our templates or Solutions because uh we don't want our naming to be confusing I think one of the things that we always stumble on are acronyms we have so many acronyms oh my goodness and that's why like when I was describing our client software distribution I mentioned CSD but it didn't start with that because if I say CSD I don't even know Chuck if if you would have known what C is I think I take that in my every morning for my medical package could be I don't know I don't know what you're taking but that's another that's another uh discussion doctor said 20 milligrams of CSD every morning sounds good yeah give me some of that but I think I think acronyms can get overloaded a little bit too much and you want to stay away from that because you might know what an acronym stands for but maybe the person even in the next cubicle they might not be able to relate to that so naming is is really important to make it easier for the next person that's trying to leverage your artifacts for them to understand what it is that that they're leveraging good point well thank you very much for joining us today Michael before we leave can you let the listener know how to get in touch with you should they want to build a Spoke that's already in development by servers now oh yeah sure you can reach me at michael.miner servicenow.com always happy to hear from customers that is our you our customer are our best source of information so do feel free to reach out to me and I'll have links in the notes on the podcast in the blog entry so shouldn't have any problem finding that well thank you wonderful listener for joining us today don't forget to check out the other servicenow podcast you can find them all on the community under the resources menu community.servicenow.com or if you prefer servicenow.com podcast we'll also bring you there you can subscribe to this or any of them to get them automatically delivered to you breakpoint is brought to you by servicenow I am the executive producer Chuck tomasi the video and captions are done by my colleague Earl Duque and to find out more about the servicenow developer program already mentioned link head over to developer.servicenow.com and thank you so much Michael for sharing with us today thank you it's my pleasure please let us know what you think about this podcast you can leave feedback or ask questions in the servicenow community for more great information on servicenow development check out the servicenow developer portal at developer.servicenow.com thanks for listening foreign this episode's guest brings some light to the pre-built option and I say that with the utmost respect I should remind you one more thing Michael before I continue take two on that welcome hello servicenow admins Builders developers and of course all the Curious image I love it these are the things you don't see behind the scenes when you listen to one of your podcasts it's great hopefully we can get through the intro in the next 30 minutes that was just practice okay I wasn't sure if we started it this is why we have outtakes at the end of the show too yeah we want to kind of conclude this within the hour anything to add to that yeah maybe we throw that out yeah it was a little quick I was like whoa boom done oh yeah you think so all right