Celebrating 10 years of ServiceNow
Fred Luddy, the Steve Jobs of ITSM
In 1984, Apple introduced the Mac and changed the face of personal computing. As we are celebrating 30 years of a revolution, I realize there is another anniversary that will take place this year: 10 years ago, in June 2004, Fred Luddy created a new company that would change the face of the IT Service Management industry: ServiceNow (known as Glide Software at that time).
I see Fred Luddy as our Steve Jobs: his breakthrough vision changed the IT Service Management forever. There is without a doubt a before and after ServiceNow.
What Fred did with ServiceNow was to apply what ITIL has been promoting for years: remove the Technology and elevate the Service. ServiceNow recognised that service (and not technology) was critical to captivate the market. The reason for ServiceNow’s success isn’t just because ServiceNow built a good product; they put together a complete end to end service experience, with good software, an automated delivery model and full integration capability.
ServiceNow changed the game―not just the rules.
It amuses me to see some players in the industry still arguing about the technology behind ServiceNow. It seems to be our curse: because we serve IT departments, our “geekattitude” pushes us to argue about technology instead of moving to the service chain. I don’t think Salesforce customers (mainly Sales and Marketing departments) know much about multi or single tenancy infrastructure. Actually, they don’t care. And that’s the point when talking about service: do you check what type of plane you will be boarding when you book a flight?
My first contact with ServiceNow was actually as a customer in 2007: the first 3 minutes of demo were sufficient to amaze me. I wanted to be part of this fantastic adventure; in 2008, we created a consulting company exclusively dedicated to ServiceNow and I started running the first demos. What I loved most about these demos was to observe the excitement in the room with prospects suddenly getting back to life and seeing something different from what they knew. At that time, in Europe, we were seen a bit like the eccentric consultants proposing an IT “cloud” solution (what the heck?); it’s funny to see how things have changed today and how cloud has become mainstream.
I remember one particular demo to a big prospect. I was very nervous: Fred was also in the room. It was like driving a Ferrari with Michael Schumacher sitting next to you. I always enjoy meeting with Fred, and encourage you to attend events where he is a speaker, his speeches are very inspiring. As I moved to a new challenge (I am now in Fred’s shoes with product management), I can even more appreciate his work and how difficult it is to build a phenomenal product. “Phenomenal”: Fred loves this word. I think we can introduce a new word: “Fredomenal”.
Amazing past 10 years, but also fredomenal 10 years to come: the best kept secret of ServiceNow platform is certainly its extension outside the IT world to what could be called “Services as a Platform”. I can’t also wait to see some sort of SNapp store to unleash the power of the platform.
Fred: for changing the face of the ITSM industry, for the thousands of jobs you created— not only at ServiceNow (close to 2000 jobs!) but also with the partner ecosystem (probably close to 1000 consultants working everyday on ServiceNow), for changing our lives, I would like to simply tell you (as you love french):
Chapeau bas Monsieur, bon anniversaire et merci
