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ServiceNow – One of the Fastest Growing Cloud-Computing Company

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Cloud computing has changed the face of the IT industry. It has increased the scope for software companies and the people seeking innovation. ServiceNow is one such company that saw the scope in cloud computing and decided to move forward to work in software-as-a-service. In fact, ServiceNow is known as one of the pioneers of software-as-a-service. The company came into being in 2003, and ever since, it has been growing towards its goal of clients’ satisfaction. Fred Luddy founded ServiceNow, and the company headquarter is located in Santa Clara, California.

ServiceNow, today, deals in platform-as-a-service operations like Cloud computing, technical management support, IT service management, and Enterprise Service Management and is currently serving over 6000 customers worldwide. The company has also started to incorporate artificial intelligence technology into its cloud computing service to yield more practical solutions. ServiceNow employs over 12000 people, and as of 2019, made revenues worth US$3,460,437,000.

Broke to Billionaire Story of ServiceNow

Fred Luddy, the founder of ServiceNow, has a real ‘rags to riches story and has also given us an example of “the age is just a number”. Luddy founded the company, after he went through a $35 million personal fortune loss, because of a fraud in his previous company, Peregrine Systems, around fourteen years ago. He was was the CTO at the company and lost his money due to accounting fraud.

But later, Luddy geared up and started to work on the next project, i.e. a cloud-based product (software-as-a-service) to ease out operations for the average office worker. Luddy founded the software company Glidesoft, Inc. in 2003, just before Luddy turned 50, discarding the psychological thing for people that 50 years is too late for starting a business. In 2004, the company name was changed to ServiceNow, and till 2005, the founder was working on software that the company was going to sell.

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In 2005, ServiceNow hired its first five employees (Luddy’s brother Rob being one of them) and raised US$2.5 million in venture capital. Rob joined the company as the first sales representative, who took the product into the market, making first of the sales for the company.

In just two years after raising the money and going into the market, ServiceNow made revenues worth US$13 million. In 2007, the company moved to San Jose, Silicon Valley, and the company started to make profits. ServiceNow had a D series fundraising lead by Sequoia Capital in 2009, where it raised 41.4 million.

By 2011, ServiceNow had opened offices in places like San Diego, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, London and Frankfurt. The same year, it partnered with Accenture such that the former was offering consulting services to the latter through its hundred dedicated employees.

In 2012, ServiceNow had its first IPO, and the same year its headquarter was moved to Santa Clara, California. ServiceNow made revenues worth 1.39 billion in 2016 and reached the market cap of 12.34 billion. The company also ranked number 1 on the  Forbes Most Innovative Companies list in 2018, and in 2021, it was among the world’s most admired companies for the 2021 list of Fortune Magazine.

Acquisitions

In the year 2013, ServiceNow started to make acquisitions to encourage company growth. Mirror42 (2013), Neebula Systems (2014), Intréis (2015), Brightpoint Security (2016), DxContinuum (2017), VendorHawk (2018), Parlo (2018), Appsee Ltd. (2019), Loom Systems and Passage AI (2020), Attivio (2020), Element AI (2020), Intellibot (2021), and Lightstep (2021) are some of the names of its acquired companies.

The Founder: Fred Luddy

Fred Luddy, the founder of ServiceNow is known as one of the software-as-a-service pioneers. He is an American national and grew up in New Castle, Indiana. Luddy completed his high school at a local public school and has always been interested in computer programming. He joined Indiana University but left his studies in between to work more on his programming skills.

Before starting ServiceNow, he was working at Peregrine Systems as the CTO. But in 2003, due to accounting fraud, he lost money worth $35 million in the same company. After starting ServiceNow, he served the company as the CEO till 2011 and then started working an advisory role for ServiceNow till 2016.

ServiceNow

Software Enterprise company ServiceNow is named Leader in the 2020 Magic Quadrant by Gartner

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Cloud computing is very crucial since data has become the key asset for every individual or a gigantic nation. The business tycoons are also dependent on big cloud companies these days for IT services. Because, no matter in which field or what size of a business is, IT service is required by all of them. ServiceNow is a famous company based in Santa Clara, California that provides IT services around the world. It provides a cloud computing platform that enables better efficiency of a company by managing its digital workflow. Four founders, namely, Fred Luddy, David Loo, Don Goodliffe, and Bow Ruggeri officially founded the company in 2003. Since then the company has acquired many businesses, expanded geographically, and hired over 11,000 employees.

About the founders

Fred Luddy

Fred Luddy worked as a software developer at Amdahl Corporation for four years. In 1990, he joined Peregrine Systems as the CTO of the company and worked there for thirteen years followed by founding ServiceNow. Currently, Fred is the Chairman of the Board of Directors at Service Now.

David Loo

David Loo is famous for being the CEO of Perspectium in 2013. But, before that, he was the founding developer of ServiceNow and resigned from the company in 2012.

Don Goodliffe

Don Goodliffe is one of the founding members of ServiceNow who was hired by Fred during 2005. He is currently the VP of the J&D Goodliffe Association.

Bow Ruggeri

Bow Ruggeri started his career as a junior software developer at controlroom.com followed by a developer at CTSNet. He was the Principal Architect at ServiceNow for seven years before he founded another start-up, Dreamtsoft.

History of ServiceNow

With a lucrative career experience, Fred founded ServiceNow in 2003, and eventually, the other three joined in. So, we can say that Fred is originally the father of the company who started it from scratch and wanted to enforce similar services as Peregrine Systems. After a couple of years, he decided to perform the first round of hiring and ended up with five more people in the team. Till then he was the only employee of ServiceNow. When the company was founded it was known as Glidesoft Inc.

In 2005, the company raised $2.5 million from its first funding round from JMI Equity. Next year, the company changed its name to ServiceNow followed by opening its first office in 2007. The company’s profit was remarkable and in 2006 its annual revenue summed up to $13 million. Eventually, the number of offices started increasing, and by 2011 they had offices in San Diego, Atlanta, Chicago, New York, London, and Frankfurt with more than 250 employees.

Eventually, the company came into partnership with a few companies one of them being Accenture. The company decided to file an IPO and in 2012 became a publicly-traded company. This year, ServiceNow shifted its headquarters from San Diego to Santa Clara.

Expansion and Business model

In the industry, ServiceNow is one of the earliest companies that started providing IT management services. So, the success of the company skyrocketed over no time and even the founders were swept off their feet. Bow Ruggeri, in one of his interviews, said that he never expected the company’s growth to increase so rapidly. Maybe this is the reason he stepped out and embarked on a whole new venture with Jerrod Bennett to experience it all over again and do it better.

ServiceNow started acquiring many companies starting with Mirror42 in 2013 followed by Entries in 2015 and Brightpoint Security in 2016. With AI and ML growing and dominating the modern world, ServiceNow acquired a machine learning startup, DxContinuum in 2017. Later in 2017, the company acquired Telepathy, a human-centered design firm that doubled the size of ServiceNow’s internal design agency. The latest acquisition of the company was in June 2020 when it acquired Sweagle.

ServiceNow’s business model is based on Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider that allows a customer to use the platform for running and managing applications without worrying about the infrastructure. Fred said that to excel with this kind of business model it should provide real values to customers. So, sticking to the old code is not a good idea and one must keep redesigning to match with the pace of the clients.

ServiceNow and Zoom

With the pandemic taking a big toll on the world, Zoom’s popularity was increased by many folds. This month, Zoom introduced new hardware as a service offering in partnership with ServiceNow. The deal is a symbiotic relationship as both parties will be benefited. While this new service of Zoom will run on one of the platforms of ServiceNow, ServiceNow will use Zoom for all its internal communication purpose. With recent end-to-end encryption recently launched by Zoom for paid customers, ServiceNow will be hugely benefited.