On-prem SaaS? ServiceNow will do it if you ask nicely, and really need it

Turns out its application can work with databases other than its own

The sales pitch for software-as-a-service is that you get powerful applications without having to worry about their underlying infrastructure. But SaaSy workflow vendor ServiceNow will, quietly, let you run its wares on-prem.

The Register learned this when we caught up with senior veep for product engineering Robert Krohn last week at the company's World Forum in Melbourne, Australia, and suggested he'd been busy rebuilding software to run on the Postgres database that now backs its SaaS. Krohn remarked that he hadn't been busy doing that, because ServiceNow's apps can comfortably work with other databases – and that's what makes it possible to run on-prem.

The company has since confirmed to The Register that on-prem operation is possible.

We're told it's an option for those whose data is classified at the level of Secret or higher, users who need to operate "in a physical environment that needs to be disconnected," or can be deployed in cases where "a customer requires a solution to be air-gapped."

We were also told the hardware required to run on-prem is "relatively simple and depends on the transactional and availability demands of the customer's proposed environment." ServiceNow offers calculators that help to determine the appropriate infrastructure for customers' needs.

A ServiceNow consultant recently posted a guide to running the company's wares on-prem, suggesting you'll need a pair of servers – one each for the database and application – packed with at least 16 GB of memory. A load balancer is also necessary.

RHEL or CentOS are the preferred OSes, and MySQL is the top database option, but Oracle or SQL Server can do the job. A Java runtime environment and web server (probably Apache Tomcat) are also required.

ServiceNow doesn't trumpet its on-prem offering because it would rather you focus on its AI. Sumeet Mathur, senior veep and managing director of the company's India Technology & Business Centre, told us ServiceNow's developers use its own coding assistant and currently accept 48 percent of code suggested by the bot. That acceptance rate, he said, means ServiceNow can develop more features faster. He thinks it also means more non-developers will code custom apps for the platform, and cited a staffer who wrote one to ease distribution of physical mail at a 5,000-person ServiceNow office in India as an example of what's possible.

That office, he added, isn't fully occupied. ServiceNow workers are allowed to pick "personas" that determine how much time they're expected to spend in its offices. Attendance is not compulsory, but attendance expectations are communicated – especially around times when teams are busy finishing a coding sprint, or planning future releases.

We also chatted with chief innovation officer Dave Wright, who shed a little more light on why ServiceNow needed to build its own database. He said ServiceNow itself used some billion-row tables, and customers operated at similar scales. Building to meet those demands saw the company acquire a databases-at-scale outfit called Swarm64 in 2021 and spend the next few years making its wares ready to power ServiceNow's SaaS.

But not necessarily its rare on-prem offering. ®