A Customer’s Guide to ServiceNow Release Families

Navigating a new ServiceNow release family can be a daunting experience for customers getting hit with an influx of announcements, release notes, product documentation, and sales reps trying to schedule pitch calls.

As new releases approach, it becomes increasingly important to familiarize yourself with the release and identify your organization’s needs before speaking with your ServiceNow sales team. This will ensure informed decision-making and lessen the influence of the vendor’s own sales agenda.

Here, I will outline the basics of a ServiceNow release family, an overview of historical trends around ServiceNow’s releases and how customers can strategically approach new releases to maximize Now Platform value.

What is a ServiceNow Release Family?

ServiceNow drops two release families each year, coinciding with the vendor’s March Q1 and September Q3 ends. Each release reflects the start of a new Now Platform version, enhanced with environment patches, new modules, and product announcements aligning with the latest business initiatives. For background, the table below provides an overview of ServiceNow’s release schedule from 2011 – 2025.

ServiceNow Release Schedule

Release Name	Date
Aspen	2011
Berlin	Q3 – 2012
Calgary	Q2 – 2013
Dublin	Q4 – 2013
Eureka	Q2 – 2014
Fuji	Q1 – 2015
Geneva	Q4 – 2015
Helsinki	Q2 – 2016
Kingston	Q4 – 2016
Jakarta	Q2 – 2017
Istanbul	Q4 – 2017
London	Q2 – 2018
Madrid	Q1 – 2019
New York	Q3 – 2019
Orlando	Q1 – 2020
Paris	Q3 – 2020
Quebec	Q1 – 2021
Rome	Q3 – 2021
San Diego	Q2 – 2022
Tokyo	Q4 – 2022
Utah	Q2 – 2023
Vancouver	Q4 – 2023
Washington DC	Q1 – 2024
Xanadu	Q4 – 2024
Yokohama	Q1 – 2025
Zurich	Q4 – 2025

Upgrading to a recent release not only presents an opportunity for customers to improve their Now Platform experience but is an inevitable part of maintaining an active ServiceNow environment.

As of the 2018 London release, ServiceNow follows a standard N-1 support model, meaning that customers must upgrade their instances once per year to remain on a supported Now Platform version.

It is important that customers remain on top of ServiceNow’s release announcements, so they can incorporate it into their ServiceNow upgrade strategy.

How ServiceNow Release Families Impact Customer Renewals

Unlike other cloud providers, ServiceNow historically refrains from applying traditional list cost increases to products. Instead, we see the vendor opting to modify product capabilities and licensing metrics under their twice-a-year release families and cite the “enhancements” as justification for charging a higher price point. This can be particularly frustrating for customers who do not expect to receive any additional value from these changes and are being quoted for significant product spend uplifts.

We have seen the following release family changes impact ServiceNow customers at renewal:

1. Product Rebrands

ServiceNow is known to remove/downgrade capabilities under less robust license editions as part of a product “rebrand” and push customers towards more robust (and expensive) licensing to maintain their current feature set.

Past examples of this are the increase of standard response times under the rebrand of Customer Success to Impact, as well as the more recent elimination of Integration Hub Enterprise, now replaced by Automation Engine. While Automation Engine offers the added benefit of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) capabilities, ServiceNow will not grant this enhanced functionality at no cost. Now, Integration Hub Enterprise customers must either settle for less robust capabilities under Integration Hub Professional and risk business disruption, or upgrade to Automation Engine to maintain their existing product capabilities, while paying a premium for RPA features that may or may not be used.

Our recommendation: Communicate any identified value gaps to your rep during negotiations.

• Emphasize that your organization requires embedded Integration Hub Enterprise capabilities but there is no business case for RPA adoption under Automation Engine Enterprise. Your messaging should emphasize any existing history/partnership between your business and ServiceNow and place the responsibility on ServiceNow to “get creative” with the solution based on the outlined demand (e.g. reduced pricing, professional services credits, etc.).

2. License Metric Changes

In addition to toying with product features, ServiceNow is known for changing licensing metrics under new release families. We have seen ServiceNow adopt two approaches when adjusting product metrics:

• Making things more complex

The most notable example of ServiceNow complicating things for customers is the introduction of subscription unit licensing for products like Software Asset Management (SAM), Hardware Asset Management (HAM), and Enterprise IT Operations Management (ITOM) under the 2020 Orlando release.

Previously, customers could easily track and predict license utilization under straight-forward metrics, such as computers and nodes. The transition to a subscription unit model heavily complicated this process, as it requires customers to apply fixed licensing ratios set by ServiceNow to different types of IT resources to determine demand.

ServiceNow is aware that customers struggle with subscription units and uses this as an opportunity to step in and offer to do the heavy lifting by providing their own estimate counts. Naturally, the vendor provides little transparency into the calculations behind these volumes, which is a major red flag for deal planning. With ServiceNow’s reputation for inflating proposal quantities, this “black box” approach to subscription unit volumes poses a major risk for over-purchasing and committing customers to a higher spend than necessary.

• Oversimplifying

We often see ServiceNow customers struggle to determine how to efficiently allocate licenses based on individual user demand. ServiceNow’s response to this has been to push all-employee, unrestricted user licensing in deals as a means of “simplifying” environment management.

Previously, unrestricted user licensing was often reserved for core, user-based products like IT Service Management (ITSM). However, we have seen ServiceNow transition over the last few years to expand this license type to other products, including those not typically licensed per user, such as ITOM, SAM/HAM, and Integration Hub.

The catch here is that while unrestricted user licensing carries a lower unit net cost due to the sizable purchase volume, total cost of ownership (TCO) often falls at a premium over named user and/or standard metric licensing. This, paired with the fact that some employees may never even touch these products, is a recipe for overspending and underutilizing.

How Can Customers Strategically Approach New ServiceNow Release Families?

Taking the time to get ahead of demand planning and closely monitor utilization can secure your business hard dollar savings early on in ServiceNow negotiations. Follow these steps to ensure your organization is in the best position to achieve favorable outcomes.

1. Thoroughly assess your go-forward ServiceNow roadmap

With all the hype ServiceNow generates around release families, it is easy to get sucked in by the new features and products hitting the market. Customers need to have a firm understanding of their current and projected needs to prevent unnecessary spending pressured by ServiceNow’s sales team.

We recommend focusing on the following items when developing your roadmap:

• Needs vs. Wants
  • Differentiating between business-critical products and “nice to haves” ahead of time eliminates the uncertainty around “what is the baseline?”.
  • Customers should present ServiceNow with their list of product requirements at the start of negotiations and build from there.
  • “Nice to haves” can be introduced later in the deal to incentivize ServiceNow to grant additional concessions, like reduced renewal price uplifts and meeting high-level budgetary figures.
• Vendor Motivation
  • Am I interested in products that align with ServiceNow’s recent business initiatives?
  • It is important to understand that not all products weigh the same when it comes to negotiations.
  • ServiceNow goes through periods where the vendor heavily pushes certain types of products (e.g., GenAI, industry-specific solutions, etc.).
  • Identifying whether any items in your roadmap fall under this category can indicate opportune times to speak with a sales rep.
• Timing
  • Do any of your initiatives coincide with important dates to ServiceNow?
  • ServiceNow’s sales team is motivated to secure new offerings in as many customer contracts as possible in the months following a new release family, and even more so leading up to quarter/fiscal year deadlines.
  • Planning major adoptions around these dates can set your organization up in a favorable leverage position before negotiations even start.

2. Let ServiceNow pursue these conversations

ServiceNow is eager to get in the room with customers to discuss sales opportunities following new releases. Letting your rep pursue the conversation rather than initiating it yourself sets the following expectations:

• Exploring the new releases is not an immediate priority as a customer and will occur on your own timeline
• The business needs a compelling value case to consider adoption

Once started, you should be prepared to drive the conversation and direct ServiceNow’s focus back to the product roadmap. This places the onus on ServiceNow to identify opportunities for new releases to help customers achieve their Now Platform goals, rather than simply selling whatever the vendor has deemed the “hot ticket” item of the release.

To learn how UpperEdge can help your enterprise navigate ServiceNow’s latest release and negotiate optimal contract terms, contact us today for tailored advisory services.