ServiceNow launches Now Platform Tokyo release

ServiceNow, the digital workflow company making the world work better for everyone, 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, the company said.

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 executing on 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, COO 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.”

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 a user experience that helps companies efficiently meet increasing requests for ESG data. ServiceNow is collaborating with DXC Technology, Emissionsbox, Fujitsu, KPMG, LTI, Mindtree, NTT DATA and RSM US to extend ESG Management’s reach and capabilities into the market.

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 Center 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 Center—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.

According to Gartner, software infrastructure spending in segments containing platform-as-a-service (PaaS), cloud management, and security is forecast to grow at a double-digit rate, reaching a combined spend of over US$120 B by 2026***. 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 with 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 Management, Instrumentation, and Discovery (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.

“At NTT DATA Corporation, advancing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals is a key priority,” said Tomoyuki Azuma, head of ServiceNow business at NTT DATA.

“Having partnered with ServiceNow to enable AI-powered, end-to-end workflow management, we have seen how ServiceNow capabilities can accelerate key business initiatives across industry verticals. Building on the success of that partnership, we are excited to leverage ServiceNow’s new ESG Management solution as we continue our path to create a more sustainable future and find ambitious solutions that can scale and evolve over time.”

“Australian Red Cross is committed to bringing people and communities together in times of need,” said Brett Wilson, CIO, Australian Red Cross. 

“ServiceNow has been a great partner on our digital transformation journey by helping us streamline our systems and processes so that we can save time and focus on supporting our communities. We are thrilled for ServiceNow’s new Admin Center solution to enable us to easily find and implement new applications and drive greater efficiency so that we can continue to make a difference in our world.”

*IDC’s Worldwide CEO Survey, 2022: The CEO Agenda in a Digital-First World, Part 2 – DX Approach, Investments and Digital-First Strategies, Doc # US48899122, March 2022

**Valoir Research, The State of Digital Transformation, September 14, 2021

***Gartner, Forecast Analysis: Enterprise Infrastructure Software, Worldwide, 12 August 2022