Quality Clouds
Streamline Your ServiceNow

In an effort to democratize app development in enterprises, ServiceNow with its low-code/ no-code app development capabilities, empowers professionals having limited app development skills and experience, with seamless micro-apps development and integrations between systems. However, when it comes to software development, “citizen developers” of these low code/ no code platforms end up with over-customizations and technical debts that result in the performance and scalability of the platforms being compromised, and with them their ability to deliver value to the business. “When it comes to SaaS implementations, a lot of changes to the out of the box functionalities are going to compromise your future upgrades. ServiceNow encourages partners and customers to commit to the out-of-the-box (OOTB) functionality in ServiceNow instances,” begins Albert Franquesa, the CEO at Quality Clouds. To reduce the maintenance and upgrades effort on the instances and to avoid the accumulation of technical debt, he suggests that automated inspection of all the pre-production and production instances of the SaaS platforms using proper management and control tools can reduce the TCO more than 20 percent.

Quality Clouds provides an automated software solution that ensures enterprises deploy good quality customizations and optimally operate their SaaS solutions. In an interview with CIO Applications, Franquesa shares his insights on his company’s value proposition, and the leading edge cloud-based software services Quality Clouds brings to the table.

Provide us with an overview of Quality Clouds.

Quality Cloud is a software startup; we leverage a solution that helps enterprise companies to manage and control their size and investment, including their ServiceNow investment. In our experience, we’ve been able to manage the multiple environments stack in a holistic way, which has resulted in dramatically reducing not just the customization waste in the SaaS platforms but also the TCO more than 20 percent. Our uniqueness in the market stems from our holistic approach to managing the ServiceNow ecosystem—from development to production.

What are the market pain-points that Quality Clouds addresses?

Quality Clouds is often approached by two broad categories of companies: one, with enterprises using ServiceNow for a longer duration and second, enterprises focusing on Agile and DevOps and considering ServiceNow for workflow automation instead of an IT tool for ITSM purposes.

The pain point in the first case is to deal with technical debt. With SaaS management platform, Quality Clouds provides transparency and an understanding framework for cloud applications to enterprises. We help enterprises to anticipate future technical debts by reviewing their entire cloud applications before it goes live into production. This allows our clients to review the issues and address it before they amplify. Yet another challenge is the reversing the OOTB functionality in ServiceNow instances. Quality Clouds helps the clients to keep the ServiceNow platform aligned with the out-of-the-box functionality as much as possible by detecting changes in OOTB functionality in every instance.

With the other case, the challenge lies with transitioning enterprises who believe in the agile relationship between development and IT operations. We ensure these enterprises have control and quality gate in place, and they stick to their business practices allowing them to retain OOTB functionalities.

Elaborate on some of the key services that you offer.

Quality Clouds assists developers and architects in improving workflow automation while offering an automated in-depth review of the technical configuration of ServiceNow instances. The assessment detects development issues at source and tracks any new configuration assets added into users’ instances. In addition, we govern the instances by offering full visibility and complete health check with our platform.

Quality Clouds assists administrators in the daily administration tasks of ServiceNow instances. Our company offers an automated process, admin bot to run periodically against productive instance and warn about alerts that require urgent attention. The process includes tasks such as reviewing the daily failed import jobs, detecting slow homepage loads for users, and sending the alerts in the mail. This helps the enterprises to evaluate platform utilization over time and create a productive environment.

What are some of the chief differentiators that set apart your company from your competitors?

We offer a multistate tool that enables CIOs and CTOs of different enterprises who have a stack of different solutions like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Microsoft Office 365 with SharePoint to view their stack investments’ performance. Quality Clouds is a perfect fit for such users, as it provides a ‘single pane of glass’ for all their SaaS developments. At the end of the process, the KPIs evaluates the technical debt and the number of alerts, eliminating the need for a specialist to run the operation.

Additionally, Quality Clouds offers SaaS user adoption insights in its platform that fortifies enterprises’ operational management. The analytics service lets the enterprises measure their ROIs, which is often hard for enterprises to understand on their own. The service enables a user to break down the platform in departments and efficiently measure their ROIs.

Can you point out a case study to highlight the benefits brought to one of your clients?

We grow along with our customers who bring us new clients through business referrals. To uphold our customer base, we provide an application that cuts downtime required for customer feedback while improving the user experience. Our platform and solutions improvements are based on customers’ queries and needs.

Quality Clouds provides seamless integration of its low code cloud platform with clients’ existing instances. The cloud platform analyzes these instances followed by an assessment report, which is sent back to the clients. This process helps the client to keep a check on their ServiceNow developments. In an instance, Quality Clouds assisted an insurance company in improving its development and reducing its technical debt. After implementing our outputs and metrics for a couple of months, the client found a reduction in its technical debt and issues by 15 percent. We are now assisting them to move to the next stage, which includes the involvement of different outputs from Quality Clouds into their software development life cycle. With this, we are expecting a dramatic reduction of 60-70 percent in technical debt and issues through our platform in the future.

Where do you envision in the future?
Quality Clouds is planning to introduce an Artificial Intelligence module that would help customers with hints to reduce their technical debts and issues. We are moving toward a more proactive approach to solving issues in the SaaS platforms by providing specific recommendations on which ones to solve and how.

In terms of international expansion, we are planning to expand our footprints in North America by the end of 2019.