23 May 2011 1 Posted by Paul Burns
I had the good fortune of attending the 5th annual Service-now.com Global User Conference last week in San Diego, California. Called Knowledge11, the conference stretched from May 15th – 19th and focused squarely on IT service management or ITSM. This blog represents a handful of takeaways that touch upon the history of Service-now.com as well as some of the company’s more recent developments.
Serivce-now.com History – As with many entrepreneurial companies, understanding the founder helps better understand the company. Fred Luddy—the eventual founder of Service-now.com—was employed at Peregrine Systems from 1990 to 2003 where he held the position of Chief Technology Officer. During that time Peregrine also owned the Remedy Corporation which was subsequently sold to BMC and remains a flagship service management offering. HP eventually acquired Peregrine and used Peregrine Service Center to upgrade its own service management offerings. To say the least, Luddy has had a tremendous impact on the IT service management industry. His integral and industry-shaping involvement in ITSM has also greatly influenced his most recent venture.
After leaving Peregrine in 2003, Luddy did some early platform-as-a-service (PaaS) experimentation that later formed the technology foundation for Service-now.com. He founded Service-now.com in early 2004 and until recently served as CEO. Luddy is a real hands-on technologist that actually still does coding work on the Service-now.com platform. Of course he was no slouch as CEO either, growing the company to $100 million in annual revenue before turning over the CEO reigns a few weeks ago to Frank Slootman (Slootman previously lead Data Domain to an IPO and eventual sale to EMC). Luddy now serves as Chief Product Officer and is working to add even more emphasis on innovation as well as customer driven value.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) – Service-now.com was an early innovator in SaaS. While certainly not as early as Salesforce.com, the company brought SaaS to an entirely new industry segment: ITSM. For most, ITSM wasn’t an obvious domain to apply SaaS. Many SaaS offerings were taking the basic approach of building applications around tables full of data. That pattern for SaaS applications is still apparent today where anything that can be done manually with a spreadsheet now seems to have a corresponding SaaS application. But Service-now.com went beyond that by delivering a SaaS application which reached back to customer premises to manage IT infrastructure, processes and people.
Service-now.com was intent on breaking the rules long established and followed by traditional software vendors. If customers wanted something different, Luddy meant to deliver it: reduction of up-front acquisition costs; elimination of separate maintenance, support and upgrade costs; seamless upgrades from version to version (while not breaking customer specific customizations); and so on. However, for Service-now.com it wasn’t about following a pre-defined SaaS blueprint. The company uses separate instances, allows customers to upgrade when *they* are ready, and in some cases even allows customer-premise instances.
IT 3.0 – As noted by Service-now.com, “Social networks, mobility, virtualization, service-oriented software, cloud computing, new sourcing models, and scores of other trends are redefining IT’s place within the enterprise as well as demolishing the barriers still remaining between IT and business departments.” These changes have inspired the company to drive toward what it calls IT 3.0. Some of the megatrends within the IT industry are readily apparent in a few of the attributes of IT 3.0:
- Communication: collaborative, many to many
- Technology: delivered as a service
- IT and Business: inseparable
Fundamentally, the focus of Service-now.com’s IT 3.0 is on people rather than technology or processes. So, not surprisingly, people-oriented capabilities are increasingly evident in the company’s solution. Self-service, knowledge management and even content management are streamlining a number of IT processes. Social capabilities are increasing through features like Chat and Live Feed, allowing IT support staff to work more efficiently and get critical information to IT customers even faster. These and other collaboration capabilities are allowing users to swap ideas, seek peer advice, and offer suggestions for task changes and improvements anytime, anywhere.
Wrapping Up
Service-now.com didn’t get to $100M in revenue so quickly by producing a “me too” offering. It will be interesting to see where else the company takes IT 3.0—and SaaS, and PaaS, and ITSM, and anything else over the next year. I, for one, am already looking forward to Knowledge12.
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Reader comments
excellent summary
Posted by Anonymous
Paul, excellent summary of the event. You may add here Thom’s speach about “phisical” networking! 😉
My personal experience in the event was as well to learn that PaaS allows for much more than just ITSM with a time-to-market really shortened.
Albert
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