ServiceNow has evolved over the last ten years from a specialized ITSM provider to a full-featured low code platform with ready-made solutions for a number of common enterprise business functions. If you were to believe the often hyperbolic CEO, ServiceNow will become the only software platform needed by enterprises to address digital transformation. While their product expansion has been impressive, I think their scope will land somewhere in between.
ServiceNow (NOW) is a company that I have followed for years and have owned in the past. While we tend to see large software services vendors slow down revenue growth as they pass $1B in sales, ServiceNow is exhibiting staying power by executing product expansion across multiple, adjacent service categories and then cross-selling them into the largest enterprises. This motion drives enormous spend elasticity, with nearly 100 customers exceeding $10M in ACV.
The company started in 2004 with IT Service Management, basically delivering a better software solution for the enterprise IT Helpdesk. This naturally expanded into other IT services, like asset management, operations management, portfolio management, governance and compliance and more recently security operations. At their core, all of these business processes are organized around “workflows”, which represent a series of steps taken by the user, a specific data model to store the state of their interactions and logic to control the flow and enforce business rules. The original model mirrored a “ticketing” system. Since then, workflows have evolved into full-fledged applications.
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