ServiceNow Accelerates Data-Driven Innovation by Architecting Its Enterprise Data Platform on Snowflake

ServiceNow is focused on making work better for everyone through its cloud-based platform. More than *7,700 global enterprise customers rely on ServiceNow’s intelligent cloud platform and solutions to optimize processes, break down silos, and drive business value.

ServiceNow, listed as #1 on Forbes’ innovative companies (2022), is one of the fastest growing SaaS companies on the planet. Achieving this growth requires solid decision-making for every business function in the organization. That’s why nearly half of ServiceNow’s employees—over 11,000 monthly active users—depend on analytics powered by its enterprise data platform (EDP).

Migrating ServiceNow’s Enterprise Data Platform to Snowflake helped the company democratize data, accelerate innovation, and enable unlimited scale for data storage and computation. 

ServiceNow’s central data and analytics team is on a mission to enable data-driven decision making for every role in the company. This requires a solid infrastructure and systems that can scale with the growth. To accomplish this, ServiceNow decided to move their data-ecosystem on the Snowflake Data Cloud. 

Prior to moving on Snowflake, the team had to spend a considerable time managing and maintaining its SAP HANA ecosystem. Performing one system upgrade for the on-prem HANA ecosystem required extensive engineering and testing, including several days of planning, testing, execution and system-downtime. Scaling storage and compute involved lengthy data infrastructure projects that diverted technical talent from innovative work. Building models and overseeing security was challenging for the team.

Seeking to achieve a one-stop solution for democratizing data driven decision-making, and fueling innovation at scale, ServiceNow began evaluating opportunities for major transformation for its Enterprise Data Platform. “We evaluated various products, databases, and platforms keeping in mind the scale of future growth, innovation and operational ease to align with our evolving business needs” says Ankit Agrawal, Director, Data & Analytics at ServiceNow.

Snowflake’s Data Cloud met ServiceNow’s foundational business needs for EDP:

• Execution at scale: Snowflake’s near-infinite scaling of storage and compute made it easier to support more complex workloads for a variety of data-products and extensive user base.

• Centralized data security: Snowflake’s Column-level Security, Row Access Policies, Object Tagging, and Dynamic Data Masking aligned with ServiceNow’s data security and governance objectives

• Operational ease: Snowflake’s fully managed infrastructure and near-zero maintenance freed up engineers to focus on higher impact projects.

ServiceNow migrated core data and analytics infrastructure consisting of thousands of models, tables, jobs, along with multi-terabyte data ecosystem in one year without missing a beat for the business. All data products continued to run as-is to serve analytics and ML capabilities for more than an 11K internal user base. According to Siva Prasad, Sr Director, Data Platform, “We did not pause or ask users to hold any business process. We did this in parallel.” 

Careful planning and execution were essential to the team’s migration plan, which included:

Clear success parameters: Speed of implementation wasn’t the only indicator of success. ServiceNow also set goals for improved performance, scalability, uptime, governance, and cost—all of which were achieved with Snowflake.

“Forklift” strategy: ServiceNow’s aggressive migration timeline necessitated a “forklift” strategy—commonly referred to as a “lift and shift”—instead of a complete redesign.

Snowflake Ecosystem: Snowflake’s ability to work with a wide array of industry-leading tools and technologies, such as HVR and Matillion, expedited implementation and reduced ad hoc engineering.

Snowflake Service Partner & Resident Solution Architects (RSAs): Working with dedicated partners helped to stay focused on running day to day business. Engaging Snowflake RSAs helped in understanding Snowflake features and capabilities better for fast implementation.

Proactive communication: ServiceNow’s “EDP Friday” series brought people together to discuss & share migration learnings. Publishing updates to a microsite kept all the teams informed.

Powering several data-products, insights, knowledge graphs, zero-click intelligence solutions, predictive models, and self-service products with the data cloud democratizes data and enhances data-driven decision-making at ServiceNow. Using APIs to push data from Snowflake to more than 25 business applications—including ServiceNow’s own platform—fosters increased levels of efficiency across the organization.

Leveraging Snowflake to support new insights, applications, and self-service capabilities will help ServiceNow empower more people with data and democratize data-driven decision making for every persona in the organization.

Learn more about Snowflake’s Data Cloud and why you should migrate today.

*Global Enterprise Customers as of End of Fiscal 2022