ServiceNow Unveils the Now Platform Tokyo Release

ServiceNow has announced the Now Platform Tokyo release, designed to help organisations navigate complex business challenges amid an uncertain macro environment. The ServiceNow Tokyo release is purpose-built to deliver better employee and customer experiences, supercharge automation and trust in operations, and accelerate value in ways that are good for people, good for the planet, and good for profits.

According to the 2022 IDC CEO Survey, 95% of CEOs see the need to adopt a digital-first strategy and the majority of organisations are down the path of executing their plans.  The rationale for this focus is clear: Digital companies deliver twice the revenue growth of non-digital companies, according to Valoir Research. The new digital-first, fully integrated workflow automation solutions in the Tokyo release increase the power of the Now Platform to create seamless experiences, continuously generate new value by accelerating innovation at scale, and allow people to do their best work.

“Our ServiceNow Tokyo platform release gives customers exactly what they need in this moment—new solutions that deliver immediate value, are easy to implement and use, and help them do more with less,” said CJ Desai, chief operating officer at ServiceNow. “Now is not the time to experiment. A platform for digital business is the only way to create great experiences, drive new business value, and accelerate transformation so organisations can focus on growth in our digital-first world.”

Accelerating value with purpose-built solutions

With today’s complex compliance and risk management landscape, customers have asked ServiceNow for solutions that make them more agile and resilient across their enterprise. ServiceNow is responding with new, purpose-built features in the Tokyo release that unlock more value from tech investments for CFOs, COOs, and sustainability teams—simplifying complex supply chains, automating asset management, and delivering auditable, investor-grade sustainability data.

• Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) automates the full lifecycle of physical business assets from planning to retirement for industries such as healthcare, financial services, retail, manufacturing, and public sector. The solution helps reduce costs, mitigate risks, and improve strategic planning with visibility into the entire enterprise asset estate. Additionally, it optimises inventory levels for the business and operates stockrooms efficiently to better leverage existing assets and maximise asset life.
• Supplier Lifecycle Management (SLM) empowers organisations to transform traditionally high-effort supplier engagements that live in email and spreadsheets into modern, digital experiences, enabling teams to reduce operating costs and refocus talent on building a more resilient, diverse, and high-quality supply base. With SLM, suppliers leverage self-service experiences to get help, deflecting common inquiries into the respective teams.
• Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Management has been enhanced to allow companies to establish and document ESG goals and KPIs, track performance, collect and validate audit-ready data, and create disclosures that align with major ESG reporting frameworks, in a single end-to-end solution. Key capabilities include carbon accounting to calculate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and an innovative user experience that helps companies efficiently meet increasing requests for ESG data. ServiceNow is collaborating with Emissionsbox, Fujitsu, KPMG, LTI, Mindtree, NTT DATA Corporation and RSM US LLP, to extend ESG Management’s reach and capabilities into the market.

Boosting engagement and productivity with great experiences

Now more than ever, employee retention is critical. Engaged, productive, and empowered employees contribute heavily to customer and business success. The Tokyo release helps organisations prioritise their most valuable resource—people—with new tools that advance talent development and retention, and therefore benefit the overall business:

• Manager Hub addresses managers’ greatest pain points—like burnout and intensifying pressure to keep employees happy and engaged across dispersed teams. Available through Employee Centre desktop and mobile, Manager Hub provides a single destination for managers to establish and review employee journeys and respond to requests while delivering personalised resources and training to help managers grow as leaders.
• Admin Centre—part of ServiceNow Impact—allows system administrators to easily discover, install, and configure ServiceNow solutions through a self-service experience. The new Adoption Blueprint features a guided process that gives admins application recommendations based on instance maturity, increased visibility into application entitlements, and simpler application installation and configuration—all from within their in-instance application.
• Issue Auto Resolution for Human Resources expands the capabilities of Issue Auto Resolution for ITSM to HR teams. The solution applies natural language understanding (NLU) to analyse requests and deliver self-service content that meets employees where they are through channels like Microsoft Teams, SMS, and email. It also identifies urgent HR cases and routes them directly to an employee care representative when a higher level of support is needed.

Supercharging Intelligence and trust for operations and security

According to Gartner®, software infrastructure spending in segments containing PaaS, cloud management, and security is forecast to grow at a double-digit rate, reaching a combined spend of over $120 billion by 2026.[3] At the same time, protecting data and mission-critical applications has become more complex amid an increasingly sophisticated threat landscape. ServiceNow is raising the bar for data security and intelligence with new capabilities that strengthen security deployments across an entire organisation.

• ServiceNow Vault protects business critical ServiceNow applications using a set of premium platform privacy and security controls. Using flexible key management and data classification to drive data anonymisation, Vault enables organisations to protect sensitive confidential data and increase regulatory compliance through native platform encryption. Vault also enables organisations to strengthen their platform security posture by simplifying the management and protection of machine credentials, as well as validating the authenticity and integrity of code being deployed to the MID Server helping to ensure no malicious insertion. Finally, Vault facilitates organisations to export their ServiceNow system and application logs at scale and in near real time as a service.

Organisations such as Blackhawk Network, DNB Bank, First Solar, Fruit of the Loom, Orange Business Services, and University of California Irvine are already realising the benefits of the ServiceNow platform.

Commenting on relevance of this latest release for regional enterprises, Mark Ackerman, area VP for Middle East & Africa at ServiceNow, said, “With the Now Platform Tokyo release, ServiceNow is giving our customers in the MEA region purpose-built solutions that will create value in critical business areas. Whether it be modules like Manager Hub and Admin Centre that will enable businesses to stay one step ahead of the competition in the war for talent, or modules like Supplier Lifecycle Management and Enterprise Asset Management that will simplify complex supply chains, automate asset management, and deliver auditable, investor-grade sustainability data, we remain committed to continuously innovating and evolving our Platform to provide regional customers purpose-built solutions that will support, and accelerate, their digitisation initiatives.”

Availability

The Now Platform Tokyo release is generally available today.