SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 08, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The Business Intelligence Group today announced that it has awarded Fictiv a 2020 Stratus Award in its annual business award program, which highlights the companies, products and people offering unique solutions using cloud technologies. Fictiv was recognized as a Cloud Disruptor for delivering rapid digital transformation to the decades old status quo within the manufacturing industry.

Fictiv is revolutionizing the $13 trillion manufacturing industry with a cloud-based, AI-powered system that replaces antiquated and outdated methods of communication and manufacturing. Fictiv’s Digital Manufacturing Ecosystem enables hardware companies of all sizes to build hardware faster by cutting prototype, testing, and new product introduction cycles in half, delivering better quality and providing greater transparency, quality and shipping processes than conventional manufacturing or contract manufacturing methods.

“The global pandemic has highlighted long-standing weaknesses in manufacturing, demonstrating that supply chains and manufacturing ecosystems must be robust, transparent, agile, and – above all – digitally enabled,” said Dave Evans, Fictiv CEO and co-founder. “We are delighted to be awarded the title of Cloud Disruptor for our work in actively bringing out this new reality on behalf of designers, engineers, and supply chain professionals.”

Fictiv mitigates risk for product teams though cloud-based technology that allows for shifting and sharing data loads within the manufacturing network. Its Digital Manufacturing Ecosystem has 250+ manufacturers in four countries with 50,000+ hours of available capacity per month. Manufacturing services provided include 3D Printing, CNC Machining, Urethane Casting, and Injection Molding. Based on a Decision Link Economic Impact Model, Fictiv customers can accelerate development cycles by as much as 2x and can reduce supply chain overhead by as much as 80% — even during the pandemic.

“Fictiv is at the forefront of the cloud helping to drive practical innovations in the cloud,” said Maria Jimenez, Chief Nominations Officer of Business Intelligence Group. “The cloud is now part of the fabric of our personal and professional lives and we are thrilled that our volunteer judges were able to help promote all of these innovative services, organizations and executives.”

Fictiv
Fictiv offers manufacturing agility and speed through a portfolio of optimized manufacturing processes for hardware companies of all sizes. Its Digital Manufacturing Ecosystem combines an easy-to-use cloud platform; design, quoting, billing and logistics systems; and an intelligent orchestration engine that manages a network of highly vetted and monitored manufacturing partners that together deliver high-quality mechanical parts at unprecedented speeds. The ecosystem is supported by “boots-on-the-ground” experts to manage programs, inspect quality, and provide ​DfM ​guidance along the way. Over the last six years, Fictiv has manufactured more than 10M parts for early-stage companies and large enterprises alike, helping them innovate with agility and increase supply chain predictability. www.fictiv.com

Business Intelligence Group

The Business Intelligence Group was founded with the mission of recognizing true talent and superior performance in the business world. Unlike other industry and business award programs, business executives—those with experience and knowledge—judge the programs. The organization’s proprietary and unique scoring system selectively measures performance across multiple business domains and then rewards those companies whose achievements stand above those of their peers.

What Is ServiceNow?

ServiceNow Inc (NYSE: NOW) is an enterprise cloud platform vendor that provides workflow automation and integration tools for large organisations. Rather than stitching together a patchwork of point solutions, ServiceNow offers a unified ecosystem that lets workers move across departments — IT, HR, customer service, security operations — while sharing data and processes on a single platform.

The company focuses on four primary verticals: Healthcare, Education, Government, and Financial Services. Each of these sectors faces strict compliance requirements, complex approval chains, and large numbers of internal service requests — exactly the kind of structured workflow problems that ServiceNow is designed to solve.

The Problem ServiceNow Solves

For smaller organisations, building a modern tech stack is relatively straightforward: pick a cloud provider, add a CRM that doubles as a support tool, bolt on an HR system, and wire them together with integration middleware. Imperfect, but manageable.

For large enterprises, that piecemeal approach quickly becomes unworkable. Hundreds of business units, thousands of employees, strict audit trails, and regulatory obligations mean that ad-hoc integrations introduce risk and operational drag. ServiceNow addresses this by providing a common data model and a workflow engine that sits across all of those domains, so a change in one system propagates correctly through others.

In DevOps terms, ServiceNow occupies a similar conceptual space to a service mesh or an internal developer portal: it abstracts the complexity of underlying systems so that teams can focus on outcomes rather than plumbing.

ServiceNow in the Enterprise IT Landscape

ServiceNow competes with larger platform vendors — including IBM — that also offer middleware and enterprise integration tooling. Its competitive advantage, at least as of the original 2019 article, was described as agility: being large enough to support enterprise-scale deployments, but small enough relative to incumbents to avoid the legacy architectural assumptions that slow down bigger vendors.

Key platform capabilities that matter to DevOps and IT teams include:

• IT Service Management (ITSM): Incident, problem, and change management built around ITIL processes.
• IT Operations Management (ITOM): Discovery, service mapping, and AIOps capabilities that help teams understand infrastructure dependencies.
• DevOps integration: Native integrations with CI/CD pipelines, allowing change requests to be created, approved, and tracked automatically as part of a deployment workflow.
• Security Operations (SecOps): Vulnerability response and threat intelligence workflows integrated into the same platform.
• HR Service Delivery: Onboarding, offboarding, and employee service requests managed through the same workflow engine used for IT.

ServiceNow and DevOps Workflows

One area where ServiceNow has become increasingly relevant to DevOps practitioners is automated change management. Many regulated industries require a formal change approval process before production deployments. Historically, this was a manual bottleneck that conflicted with the continuous delivery model.

ServiceNow’s DevOps module allows pipeline tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, and Azure DevOps to automatically create change requests, gather approvals, and update configuration management databases (CMDBs) as part of the deployment process. This means teams can maintain audit compliance without abandoning automation.

For organisations in financial services or healthcare — two of ServiceNow’s core verticals — this kind of integrated change control is not optional. It is a regulatory requirement, and ServiceNow positions itself as a way to meet that requirement without sacrificing deployment velocity.

The Business Context (as of Mid-2019)

The following figures come from the original June 2019 source article and reflect conditions at that time. They are included for historical context only.

• ServiceNow was founded approximately 15 years before the article was written (around 2004).
• The company carried an approximate market capitalisation of $47 billion at the time of writing.
• Year-to-date stock performance as of early June 2019 was approaching 50% gains.
• Q1 2019 earnings were described as strong enough to lift the broader cloud sector.
• The original analyst commentary described ServiceNow as the “best house on the block” in its category.

The original piece was written by Louis Navellier, a growth-focused investment newsletter editor, and reflected his assessment at the time. His commentary noted that ServiceNow’s predominantly US-based client base — particularly in financial services — insulated it somewhat from trade-war uncertainty that affected other technology stocks in 2019.

Why This Matters for DevOps Professionals

Whether you are evaluating ServiceNow as a platform for your organisation, being asked by leadership to integrate with an existing ServiceNow deployment, or simply trying to understand why your enterprise’s change advisory board runs through a NOW workflow, a few things are worth knowing:

• ServiceNow is a platform, not a point tool. Implementations tend to be organisation-wide and involve significant configuration. Expect a longer evaluation and procurement cycle than you would see with a SaaS tool.
• The CMDB is central. The quality of ServiceNow’s ITOM and DevOps capabilities depends heavily on the accuracy of the CMDB. If your organisation’s asset and dependency data is incomplete, that will limit what you can automate.
• APIs and integrations are first-class citizens. ServiceNow exposes a REST API and maintains a marketplace (the ServiceNow Store) with pre-built integrations for common DevOps tools. Check the Store before building custom integrations from scratch.
• Governance is a feature, not a bug. For teams coming from a startup or greenfield DevOps background, ServiceNow’s approval workflows can feel heavy. In regulated enterprise environments, those workflows exist for defensible compliance reasons.

Summary

ServiceNow occupies a well-defined niche in the enterprise IT market: large-scale workflow automation and integration across IT, HR, security, and customer service functions. For DevOps teams operating in regulated industries, it is frequently the system of record for change management and incident response. Understanding how it works — and how to integrate your pipelines with it — is a practical skill for engineers working in enterprise environments.

Original source: investorplace.com (June 2019). Attribution: Louis Navellier, Growth Investor newsletter. This editorial rewrite is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.