ServiceNow Brazil Release Webinar

Ron Burt

Welcome, everyone.

Thank you for joining us. We'll give everybody just a minute or two here to make sure we've got folks joining us, and then we'll jump right in.

All right, I think we'll go ahead and get started, and then as folks jump in, they can catch up on the recording if they get here a little bit later. So welcome, everybody. We're going to be talking about Brazil — ServiceNow Brazil. What's new, what matters, and what's next. This session is not going to be a walk-through of release notes. We really looked at it and decided to take the top ten changes that we feel are going to matter most.

For each one of those, we're going to walk through them, cover the business problem it solves, and then let you decide whether to look at it further after your upgrade. We're going to jump right in — but real quick, just a few things about us.

Many of us are from the group formerly known as Cask. We have a new name and a new look, but our focus has always been the same — getting the most from your ServiceNow investment. We are a pure-play ServiceNow partner, from ITSM all the way through App Engine, as you can see labeled there.

We have certified people in all of our product areas, and we work with you in three different phases — envisioning, implementing and development, or managing and optimizing. So wherever you're at in your ServiceNow journey, we have the expertise to help guide you along the way. All of our practice leads were practitioners.

We lived in your world at one point and had to deal with upgrades and all the issues that come along with it. We can feel your pain and pass along the lessons we've learned. That's just a little bit about Ondaro.

My name is Ron Burt, and I'm joined by Ian. Ian, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself?

Ian Cahall

Glad to. Thanks, Ron. Hi, everyone. My name is Ian Cahall. I'm the Associate Director and Principal Architect for Ondaro's IT practice. I've been working in and around ServiceNow for over a decade, and I'm looking forward to sharing some insights with everybody today.

Ron Burt

And I am Ron Burt, Associate Director of the practice. We really focus on the ITSM space. 27 years in higher-ed IT, nine years in ServiceNow, and I've dealt with multiple upgrades along the way — good, bad, and ugly — and all the challenges that come along with a highly customized system.

Nice to meet everybody, and looking forward to this engagement today. A couple of housekeeping items — if you have any questions, please put those in the chat. We're going to try to hold off until the end to answer them, because as we get through the content, some of those questions may get answered along the way.

We'd love to hear them, so make sure to throw them into chat. We also love interactivity — emojis, cameras, anything like that. Feel free. And we'll be having some poll questions we'd love for you to interact with as well.

If you see a poll question, feel free to put your answer in the chat and we'll look at those along the way. From an agenda perspective, we've done the introductions. We're going to do a brief Brazil overview,

then go through those top ten changes — and a top ten-plus item. Then we want to talk about how you prepare and prioritize so you make a solid plan of attack and are ready to go when you move forward with the upgrade, with fewer surprises along the way.

And then at the end, we'll open it up for Q&A and any closing remarks. All right. So with that, we've got our first poll question.

Where are you planning to upgrade to Brazil? A — yes, we're ready, finished the upgrade, and we are exploring the new features. B — yes, we are in the beginning steps of the upgrade, just about to start. C — we're contemplating starting, but aren't quite sure where to start. D — it wasn't even on your radar and you weren't sure it was worth upgrading right now.

A, B, C, or D — please feel free to put your answer in the chat. We're seeing some D's here. Not on the radar.

Lots of D's.

There's a B — just beginning. Awesome. Thanks, Chris.

Ian Cahall

Pretty wide spread there.

Ron Burt

Three and three. And Marci — right in the middle with thinking about it but not sure where to start. This is going to be great for those who are contemplating. Hopefully this will give you the ammunition to decide whether to pull the trigger or hold off.

Awesome. Thank you for the responses. With that, I'm going to pass it over to Ian and we're going to talk Brazil.

Ian Cahall

Thanks, Ron. As we get started, I want to frame up what you can really expect out of this update. As many of you who are living and breathing ServiceNow know — keeping your eye on the direction of the product — there are a number of pretty big announcements happening on what I'd call a semi-annual basis.

We're getting, a couple of times a year, some pretty major product releases and branding overhauls. As a result, we're seeing new things become available mid-cycle, but really hitting fruition in Brazil. A couple of these things have been formally announced within the last month.

A couple have been floating out there since earlier this year but not formally launched with a product update yet. I'm not going to spend too much time on it, but it does set the theme for what a great deal of the focus of this upgrade is really about.

And that is — as with everything else in the ecosystem and in the industry — we are talking a lot about AI. The first thing we'll touch on is the new product Flow, which is an AI-driven service desk product intentionally oriented toward smaller or mid-sized customers that can make use of a completely out-of-the-box product.

Flow is intended to be something that, unlike ITSM, doesn't really require a huge amount of implementation work or customization. The idea is that it just works. Obviously, for organizations considering adopting this, your mileage may vary. But if it's something of interest, you're probably a moderate-sized organization that has a need for automation and maybe some additional support at the service desk level.

ServiceNow Arc is a brand new product that ServiceNow has launched in collaboration with NVIDIA. Arc is a personal assistant for corporate employees, intended to be an answer to some of the other products out there on the market — like a higher-end Claude model or a higher-end ChatGPT model.

This is an AI assistant that can do a number of different things across your personal workspace — things like helping you respond to emails, collaborate with other members of your team, and interface directly with ServiceNow. A great amount of capability there.

This is a joint venture by ServiceNow and NVIDIA that was announced just a couple of weeks ago and is accessible to folks on the latest version of ServiceNow — Brazil.

And then finally, Otto. Otto is the relaunched and rebranded Now Assist product. For all of ServiceNow's on-platform AI capabilities, Otto is the new toolset that supports that. If you were previously using Now Assist, you may already be seeing the Otto branding even without moving to Brazil.

But there are a great many Otto-only capabilities hitting in the Brazil update, and of course all of the analysis capabilities are now being mapped to that Otto naming — with some enhanced interfaces for conversational activities as well. This sets the stage for what you can expect with this upgrade.

As we move to the next slide, we'll talk about the key themes. When we think about the key categories ServiceNow is really intended to support, we've shifted into a new space. Historically, ServiceNow is known as a technology-based platform.

Over time, they've integrated strategy and people categories to help bring these elements together. And now, as ServiceNow has moved into this new post-AI space, AI has become that fourth pillar. With this upgrade, we are certainly looking at investments in all four categories.

Strategy is really about how we better allocate our investments to business drivers, and we'll see a few different examples of that as we go through our top ten. With technology, we're really interested in how we can do more with less and achieve better outcomes through our tools. And of course, AI will play a role in that.

For our people, it's really about making their work easier and giving them more ways to interface with not just ServiceNow, but with their support systems — whether that's HR or IT operations support. We want to give them as many tools as possible so they can get the help they need in the ways they're ready to engage with it.

And of course, AI continues to evolve. We're looking at ways to move from just summarizing things and providing search-like responses into actually driving action execution. The big headline change for ServiceNow really is about autonomous action. We'll be talking more about that in just a moment.

The goal for all of this is to drive better business outcomes. Here's a quick summary of the top ten changes we're going to cover. First, some of the AI capability that's coming out — I think there are three really huge changes from an AI perspective that ServiceNow is launching with Brazil.

They really matter for users of the platform regardless of where you are on your journey. Then we're going to talk about strategy and execution, everyday work and how those things are getting easier, and finally AI governance and how that's changing.

And then finally, we're going to talk about AI governance and how that's changing.

As we get into the AI segment, we're going to start talking about the Autonomous Engineer and Build Agent. Build Agent has been around for a little bit — some of you may have already gotten your hands on it in the Australia release — but Build Agent has been significantly enhanced via this Autonomous Engineer worker.

For those of you who have attended any of our previous sessions or have been keeping up with what ServiceNow has been doing in the AI space, you'll know they recently launched the autonomous workforce capability and branding. This is truly meant to be analogous to real-world roles and responsibilities.

The Autonomous Engineer is no different. The goal, especially working in conjunction with Build Agent, is to help you support planning, building, and testing components of the ServiceNow platform. This is largely focused on in-platform modules, flows, business rules, and capabilities — and helping you automate some of the creation of those.

The idea is that you're going to get fully fledged build plans with fully fledged test criteria. This will be very similar to working with an actual ServiceNow developer, where you'll have stories and all the components you need to actually be successful. And since this is a fully automated capability, this toolset does work on things in parallel.

As opposed to a strict order of operations — build this, then this, then this — this capability allows us to accelerate a great deal by working on some of those things simultaneously. And from a compliance perspective, we'll maintain our threshold of success, because the Autonomous Engineer in conjunction with Build Agent can run and oversee ATF tests.

All of our testing requirements can be established through this toolset. And we can also wrap it all up into an update set for promotion, which can be further automated. There are a lot of capabilities here to really accelerate your growth, build-out, and adoption of the ServiceNow platform.

As we adopt more AI capabilities — whether through existing SKUs or new ones — you're going to find a real need to get more out of the AI you're paying for on the platform. This is really crucial for rationalizing the adoption of newer ServiceNow SKUs as well as your overall AI adoption strategy.

The Agent Advisor and AI Admin Center give you a lot of control and insight into where, how, and why you can actually make use of the AI available to you today. This is a single console for setting up and deploying on-platform AI capabilities. It helps with readiness assessments — determining whether you've got the right underlying data and connections built to actually satisfy these capability requirements.

And then it points you in the right direction for where you're going to get the most value — translated into hours saved and dollars saved. This is an immense resource for organizations still exploring available ServiceNow capabilities, helping you plot your course and understand what you'll get back out of it.

Great for building business cases, and great for actually executing on them as well.

And then finally — and this is really cool — this is one of the updates that came out. An early version was available in Australia, but this is the fully fledged version of AI Desktop Actions. This gives us the ability to translate things from ServiceNow directly out onto our devices.

With this new update, we're also getting macOS support for Desktop Actions. Desktop Actions give us the ability to execute things like macros on our devices, and can also automate basic tasks. Think of this as somewhat analogous to a cloud coworker, but with a lot of capabilities that match what previous ServiceNow third-party platforms would accomplish for us.

Think about integrations that previously had to be built, and other technologies that had to be purchased — to actually get that motion from making a decision in ServiceNow to that thing actually happening on your device. And this gives us more confidence in those things, because as opposed to historically very binary inputs and outputs, thanks to AI we can now be much more natural-language driven and outcomes-focused.

Rather than being super explicit — 'I need this piece of software installed, here's where you can find it, here's the executable, here are the circumstances under which it can be installed' —

the AI Desktop Actions capability lets us be much more abstract. Say 'I need this software installed,' and the AI can go find where it should be located, figure out how to install it based on other parameters, and complete the work without extra input. As opposed to several steps and layers of instructions, we can be much more high-level about what we want and give AI the capability to execute.

This is a super cool connectivity — historically we've been working on the ServiceNow platform and have had to rely on other tools to reach out into the real world. AI Desktop Actions brings that into a more closed environment and gives us the ability to do that on both Windows and macOS devices.

As we pivot a little bit away from AI, our first strategy-level item does connect back to it. As we jump into this next slide, this is where we start to bridge from the previous AI topic into other ServiceNow modules — and here's really where these things connect.

As part of the Brazil update, ServiceNow has launched a series of MCP programs for the various ServiceNow modules. Previously, if you were using the ServiceNow MCP available on the store, you could achieve a number of things — pulling out incident data or CI data — but the path to get that data and make it work with your external AI toolsets was a bit more challenging.

If we're looking at trying to pull out incident data or CI data, you can do those things — but it wasn't as easy. The path to getting to that data and making it work with your external AI toolsets was a little more challenging.

With the release of these additional products and features, we're now able to much more directly interact with your data from third-party toolsets. This could be your corporate ChatGPT or your corporate Claude. These tools can now reach into ServiceNow and get much more robust data and insights.

These are plugins available for many of the major toolsets — SPM, ITOM, ITSM, Enterprise Architecture. In the screenshot you can see the one for SPM, where we can get a lot of information about ongoing projects, who's assigned to them, how those projects are progressing against their schedules. We can do that for all of these different areas of the platform now, and because they're built specifically for those modules, the context we're getting is a lot better.

These work with the already-approved AI clients that worked with the overall ServiceNow MCP product previously. And the really important thing here is that we want to make sure we're treating AI like a version of an employee — our ACLs, auditing, logging, all of that is still applied when we're accessing data with MCP.

That is preserved here. We don't have to worry about the AI being able to see things it shouldn't or take actions it shouldn't. All of our in-place security and controls remain in place and unaffected by the use of MCP.

In addition to that, as we take a step further into hybrid project management — there have been several key updates to help make the actual execution of work against projects much simpler, while also providing project managers and portfolio managers more direct insight into what's happening in real time. The project workspace has been revamped in several key ways.

There are new widgets, new visualizations, and new segments that give more overarching insight into projects. Collaborative work management has helped re-establish where and how users are able to complete their work. And we're able to pull all of this together in real time. Historically, jobs were running to refresh some of these data widgets, or you could manually refresh them — all of those things have been set to real-time synchronization.

As opposed to having to wait for a job to run or a manual sync to occur, we're now getting that data in real time, which obviously speeds up the efficiency we can gain working in collaboration across our different multifunctional units.

This is a huge one for those working in the security or vulnerability space. Earlier this year, Unified Security Exposure Management was announced, and it is officially here. It's a new, more comprehensive vulnerability management toolset that gives us a consolidation of all of our various vulnerability management activities.

This gives us the ability to integrate with all of our external vulnerability data sources and consolidate these into direct work streams, while also bringing in risk management capabilities. Where historically these things sat in different spaces, we're now working in a much more integrated fashion — our vulnerabilities are both informed and managed via our risk management and vice versa.

While these things have historically been somewhat parallel work streams, we're now finding ways to tie them together. And of course, in addition to this, there's more intelligence around AI security mitigation. We're not so much looking at using AI for certain capabilities here — though it does offer that in various ways.

We're much more interested in actually combating AI-driven vulnerabilities by bringing in additional intelligence and capabilities explicitly meant to help seek out and address AI exposures in your environment. There's a great deal of capability here. This also integrates directly with AI Control Tower, so if there are AI systems that need to be managed for vulnerabilities, we can track those against those records directly — a huge help from a connected data model perspective.

Now we pivot to everyday work. First up, employee experience. Pretty much consistently over the last two and a half to three years, every ServiceNow upgrade has had some pretty major changes for the employee front end.

This one's no different. Earlier in the year, Employee Works got launched as part of the Moveworks acquisition for ServiceNow. And at Knowledge earlier this year, Employee Slate was announced. Employee Slate is officially available now for those of you subscribed to this product.

The real goal here is to create a consolidated front end for your users — meet your users where they are. This is a combination of the historic Employee Center capability, which obviously still exists and is a great way to get self-service across the various ServiceNow capabilities,

now supplemented by the ability to address some of these things via conversational access. It's a much more robust experience than the legacy Virtual Agent, powered by ServiceNow Otto — and it can also work in conjunction with some of the other tools we talked about earlier, like ServiceNow Arc, which gives folks the ability to work with that dedicated personal assistant within the system.

All of these things are bringing together a single point of entry to ServiceNow and all the various services offered through it. And in addition, we're driving some of these things into better, more intelligent decision-making for both your service delivery leaders and the actual fulfillers.

Getting more context in real time, removing friction between submitting a request and looking for updates — we're trying to be more proactive and drive some of those things both via the portal at the Employee Center level, but also via the other ways people are engaging with ServiceNow now — whether directly via something like Arc, via updates in Teams, or a number of other potential integration points.

Next up is a topic close to my heart — Asset Management. There are a number of key asset management enhancements that have come out as part of Brazil. One of our biggest pain points for folks working in the asset space is bringing data into the platform when it's not from an automated, integrated connection.

With the Brazil update, we have made a number of major changes to data imports by allowing AI to assist with this. Historically, when you complete a data import into one of the various asset management modules, a very common outcome is that you're going to receive errors and data mismatches.

This AI capability actually helps us more proactively address simple errors that could occur during an import process and proactively remediate some of those things — which ultimately results in less time spent cleaning up data and addressing errors, and more time actually working on the assets themselves post-import.

A huge benefit there. There's also a direct integration with HAM and various contract interfaces, including the new Contract Management Pro capabilities — a big benefit for folks working in contracts, especially for leases on hardware assets. And then finally, software reclamation has undergone a big facelift.

Previously, if you were working in Software Asset Management, you'll know that software reclamations were established via removal candidates. They've revamped how that reclamation works by actually calling it reclamation — which is much more in line with what the industry calls it. Much more efficient for folks working in the space.

And in addition, there are a number of AI-assisted capabilities with reclamations — like tuning your reclamation rules and acting on them based on certain parameters. As opposed to having to wait for someone to look at a reclamation or rely on basic binary automation, we can actually allow AI to action certain reclamations if they fall within certain parameters — taking work off the plates of your software asset managers and allowing them to focus on more valuable activities like contract negotiations and new product onboarding.

And then finally — and I think this is another super cool one that's going to be very helpful for a lot of folks — intelligent approvals. Historically, for those of you who have worked in Flow Designer or the old Workflow Studio, building approvals can be pretty straightforward if you just need one group to do a simple yes-or-no approval.

But if you needed complex multi-approval chains, multiple groups providing input, or more information on the what and why behind an approval — this new capability gives us the ability to convert written approval policies into actual approval capabilities and actions within a workflow. This takes us from historically having to figure out how our real-world policies map to ServiceNow capabilities, to allowing ServiceNow to directly translate that for us — building those approvals in real time and testing those approval processes so we know it's working the way we want before we publish the flow.

If you have spent any time building these yourselves, you know this is a huge improvement over the legacy process. It's going to bring you much closer to delivering those services to your end users than was historically possible. A huge benefit for a lot of folks.

And then finally, AI Control Tower has been completely overhauled. For brevity's sake, it's very likely that this will continue to be the case over the next several upgrades — I anticipate this product will continue to get major overhauls every release. Several new capabilities have been added to Control Tower.

Number one, they've added lifecycle playbooks for AI governance. As you know if you've worked with playbooks elsewhere on the platform, playbooks give us a set of key automations around what we want to do, who's involved, how they're involved, and how this plays out into our policies and processes. A welcome addition for anybody doing governance work here on the platform.

But a huge change that really makes a lot of sense — and likely should have been done previously — is actually connecting our AI systems to business applications within the CMDB. Previously these records existed, but our AI assets are now actually becoming connected to our overall service mapping and our overall CMDB model. There are a ton of potential downstream impacts from that.

The ability to do better, more mature risk governance, better ownership tracking, and better downstream impact analysis. This has really made AI Control Tower go from an offering that sat somewhat outside the rest of the platform, to something that's truly connected to it — which is obviously one of our big value points within the ServiceNow space.

In addition to that, we've got the ability to assign certain views to roles within the Control Tower. We can create stewards, asset owners, and system owners and give them different ways of looking at the data around our AI — how effective it's being, the value we're getting back, adoption, and so on.

These give us a lot more capability to do effective governance throughout our process and more effectively adopt AI in conjunction with everything else we talked about earlier.

That was our top ten. But there are a few things we want to highlight outside the top ten — a couple of additional items worth checking out. We're not going to spend a ton of time on them, but we do have a pretty big enhancement for SPM demand.

We have automatic summaries and duplicate detection for incoming demands. Duplicate detection is the really big key here — very frequently, anyone who's worked in the demand intake space has gotten duplicate demands from different users who weren't talking to one another, even when using the demand portal.

This is a great way to help consolidate those directly. Dev sandboxes have been improved — this is one of the answers to some of the complaints around PDI. We've now created more instanced dev sandboxes available within your dev instance to help developers be more successful. Enterprise Architecture has introduced a more robust technical debt feature, giving us the ability to track technical debt over time against targets automatically.

And then finally, MCP has given us the ability to stand up a bit faster and improve our security metrics when working with AI connectivity.

Next up, we want to spend a couple of minutes on ITOM. There are a few big changes for ITOM that are really worthwhile. Previously we talked about some of the new MCP capabilities, but one of the things we can now do is create alerts and act on them driven from MCP.

If we're using other AI capabilities external to ServiceNow that are able to generate identifications or create events, we can drive those in through MCP and act on them from an ITOM Event Management perspective. We also have the ability to work on reliability — a huge enhancement to previous business continuity management activities.

And ITOM really seems to underpin that whole space. In addition, we can now search through our service maps in plain language thanks to the AI capabilities that have been launched. This takes us from working in list views and various external queries to actually working directly in our service maps, searching against them — and you don't have to be an absolute technical expert who knows all the server names or service names to find what you're looking for.

You can find what you're looking for.

In addition, ITOM plays a big role in AIOps, and there's a lot more additional monitoring laid out across various AI-related workflows. We have a consolidated APS 360 overview that gives us the ability to monitor our workflows in one place. We can also get more robust reasoning around why alerts were auto-closed by the system, and better-group our alerts with some AI insights.

Historically, we had to create very specific grouping rules — now we're able to do that more effectively with plain-language monitoring.

A couple more quick highlights. ITOM has enabled health log analytics, giving us the ability to create alerts only when issues persist. Rather than flagging things in real time where they might be less valuable, we can now look at where we've got issues that are longstanding.

We've also got the ability to manage more certificates — more ACME certs — and we've now launched the ability to store and manage CyberArk keys. If you work with CyberArk, you know that's a huge value. Historically, that was something we had to do off-platform, so being able to consolidate that work stream in ServiceNow is a big benefit.

Discovery — and this is a huge one. MID servers now support PowerShell 7 and give us the ability to access credentialed scans. Historically those capabilities were a bit beyond our reach. PowerShell 7 opens up a lot of additional command capabilities, much more visibility, and much more customization. Credentialed scans give us the ability to work more effectively through our environment and support some of those items.

And then finally, synthetics. Historically we've been able to do synthetic checks and tests. We're now able to accomplish more with consolidated synthetic checks that cover multiple services rather than one check per service — again giving us the ability to be much more efficient and get to our endpoints much faster.

Everything we've just covered — we've spent the last 35 to 40 minutes giving you a rapid-fire list of some of the things we see as most valuable coming in or already available in Brazil, since Brazil launched earlier this month. If any of this was of value and you're trying to figure out how to take advantage of it —

what do you need to do to get into Brazil? We'll start with a quick poll. The question is: do you know how to prepare for the upgrade? Have you already upgraded to Brazil? Are you prepared but haven't upgraded yet? Do you have a sense of what you should do but need to review the process further? Or are you not prepared or not looking to complete an upgrade right now?

Have you already upgraded to Brazil? You are prepared but haven't upgraded yet. You have a sense of what you should do but might need to further review the process. Or you're not prepared, or simply not looking to complete an upgrade right now.

Steve says he's not prepared. Prasanth — same. Cody says he's between C and D, which is fair.

We've got a B — prepared but not upgraded yet.

Between B and C. Pretty widespread. So the next couple of slides we're going to jump into exactly that. First up, where do we start? There's an order of operations here. Ultimately, we want to understand what we're trying to solve for.

While it's always good to be on a scheduled upgrade cadence, for those on a more ad hoc approach — trying to determine whether an upgrade is worth it — it's important to understand what your North Star is. What are the things you want to get out of it?

This matters because while upgrading gives you access to all of these things, adoption is a completely different story. The prescriptive steps we recommend: number one, figure out what that North Star is. Go through some of the capabilities we've just shared, as well as what's available in the ServiceNow release notes.

Pick two or three that are really high value or high priority for your organization, and try to figure out how you would measure adoption and success with that capability. Then plan your adoption. First, confirm licensing — I did see a licensing question in the chat, and we'll address that in a moment.

Assign your owners if you don't already have them — who's responsible for the module or functionality, and who's going to lead the charge? Then agree on governance. How do you measure that success? Who's going to participate in setting things up, using these, testing these?

How can you get the most out of those elements? It's about making sure your organization is aligned on what's appropriate and what's value for your organization.

And then to prepare — we're going to go through a straightforward process. This is true for all upgrades, but especially so for Brazil, with so many net-new capabilities — new modules, additional bolt-on features. The goal is to start with a review of the upgrade.

Go out and look at the release notes. The great thing is that ServiceNow provides release notes based on what version you're coming from. You don't have to be on Australia to jump to Brazil — you can certainly be on Xanadu, or even earlier, depending on your upgrade schedule.

Obviously the bigger the jump, the more significant the change. If you're coming from further back, like Xanadu, this effort could be a bit more intense. But we have the ability to look at those release notes, compare your current version to where you're heading. And what's really important — in addition to all the net-new capabilities we talked about today — with every upgrade, there are a handful of deprecations.

Things that are no longer being utilized, or that have migrated to different parts of the platform. It's really important to understand that. Then from there you're going to validate — look at your current integrations, your important workflows, the customizations you've implemented, and understand the impacts to those things.

If there's a feature replacing a customization, you can sunset that customization — a huge opportunity for your organization. You want to confirm your dependencies and your licensing. What plugins do you need to take advantage of these features? Do you have the right licensing so you don't find out later that you can't actually use them? Then walk through testing.

ServiceNow does have an upgrade process that helps you test, but it's really important that you do regression testing on some of your customized apps where appropriate, and also walk through your key features — whether that's self-service catalog items or key workflows. You want to make sure you've got people in place to verify things are still working after your upgrade.

Then go through activation. As you complete your upgrade, some of these things are not going to be turned on by default — you'll have to actually activate certain plugins or configure certain features to get the most out of them. While this process is standard, it's always important to understand the full scope of what an upgrade takes and plot it out appropriately.

Ron Burt

Awesome. Thank you. That kind of wraps up the content. We're going to get into Q&A. But we also wanted to let you know that there are some other opportunities as well. If you've jumped on any of our other MasterClasses, there are some great ones on ITOM that Ian has presented — feel free to check those out.

And if you need any help with any of this going forward with the upgrade, we have Expert Assist available — you can get someone from Ondaro to help guide you through that process. Or if you need some guidance on the roadmap and planning it out, we have road mapping services you can take advantage of as well.

We also have Propel — if you don't have the resources and want us to help manage things, it's a managed services engagement where you can really start to unlock results from this large investment in the platform.

So those are some options. You can also join some of our future MasterClasses or check out the ones already available. And there will be a survey sent out after this — we want to hear from you. Give us feedback and topics you'd like to see in the future.

Ultimately, we'd like to hit on areas that really impact you in your day-to-day efforts and how we can come alongside you and partner with you on those topics. Send us your topics — we'd love to have them.

Thank you. We're going to get to some questions. First question, Ian — is this available in FedRAMP soon?

Ian Cahall

Yes. As of the general availability release, Brazil is available in FedRAMP environments. But not all features are going to be available on FedRAMP — pre-existing FedRAMP feature limitations are still in place. Certain capabilities like Build Agent are not currently available in FedRAMP environments, although they are planned to make it there eventually.

As you can imagine, FedRAMP environments are very heavily restricted on what AI can and can't do. Some of these capabilities haven't made it to FedRAMP yet, but you can upgrade to Brazil as of the beginning of this month.

Ron Burt

Awesome. And the next question — is there any reporting within the demand records similar to project status reports?

Ian Cahall

Yes, there is absolutely reporting for demand. There are dashboards and a series of visualizations available within the project workspace, as well as in the portfolio workspace. Depending on what reports you're looking for, it may or may not be exactly the same.

And of course, you do always have the ability to create your own reports and visualizations using a combination of the native reporting capability and Platform Analytics.

Ron Burt

Awesome. And one more question — can you also mention licensing requirements for the latest features within demand in SPM?

Ian Cahall

I don't have those off the top of my head, but it's certainly something we can follow up on, Beatriz. As you know, ServiceNow has recently moved to new SKUs for many of their products. I believe the features we mentioned for demand and SPM are covered under SPM Advanced or SPM Prime.

But we can confirm that with you.

Ron Burt

And then the last one — Cody mentioned: you talked about reliability in ITOM. Can you briefly describe how that works?

Ian Cahall

Absolutely. Reliability is a newly introduced KPI. It works much like uptime measurements if you've looked at those in Enterprise Architecture or in one of the portfolio management toolsets in SPM. It's a very similar concept.

But here we're looking at a combination of uptime metrics and a historic degradation of services. It's not just 'is it up or is it down' — which is a binary thing. It's the impact to related services or features that builds out an overall reliability metric for an application or service. A much more multifaceted KPI that lets us track not just whether people can sign in or access a server, but whether specific features within that application or things stored on that server are accessible as well.

It's a higher-level KPI, but it's fed by more fine-grained indicators — and many of those indicators can be generated automatically with the help of AI. AI can actually determine what constitutes reliability and help you build that picture.

Ron Burt

Awesome. Great questions. Thank you, Ian. If we've got a couple of minutes here — about four minutes left — if anybody has any outstanding questions they didn't get to ask, feel free to unmute or put them in the chat. And again, as I mentioned, there will be a survey that comes out.

We appreciate your interaction here with the polls and with the questions, and we definitely would appreciate any input you have for future topics. The survey is a great place for that.

Ian Cahall

Excellent.

Ron Burt

All right. I think we're good then. Thank you, Ian — great job. And great questions, everyone. We look forward to getting your feedback and seeing you at the next one.

Ian Cahall

Beatriz, we will be in touch to follow up on the licensing question. Thanks so much, everybody.

Ron Burt

Thanks, everyone.

Ian Cahall

Bye-bye.