ServiceNow, Inc. is an American software company based in
Santa Clara, California
Santa Clara ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for "Clare of Assisi, Saint Clare") is a city in Santa Clara County, California. The city's population was 127,647 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, making it the List of cities and towns i ...
, that supplies a
cloud computing
Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...
platform for the creation and management of automated business workflows. It is used predominantly for the automation of
information technology
Information technology (IT) is a set of related fields within information and communications technology (ICT), that encompass computer systems, software, programming languages, data processing, data and information processing, and storage. Inf ...
process, for example, the reporting and resolution of issues impacting an organization's systems. The company was founded in 2003 by
Fred Luddy and is listed on the
New York Stock Exchange
The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE, nicknamed "The Big Board") is an American stock exchange in the Financial District, Manhattan, Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It is the List of stock exchanges, largest stock excha ...
(ticker symbol: NOW) and is a constituent of the
S&P 100 and
S&P 500
The Standard and Poor's 500, or simply the S&P 500, is a stock market index tracking the stock performance of 500 leading companies listed on stock exchanges in the United States. It is one of the most commonly followed equity indices and in ...
indices. In 2018, ''
Forbes
''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine founded by B. C. Forbes in 1917. It has been owned by the Hong Kong–based investment group Integrated Whale Media Investments since 2014. Its chairman and editor-in-chief is Steve Forbes. The co ...
'' magazine named it number one on its list of the world's most innovative companies.
History
ServiceNow was founded as Glidesoft, Inc. in 2003 by Fred Luddy, and later incorporated in California in 2004.
Luddy had previously served as
chief technology officer for
Peregrine Systems, an enterprise software company based in San Diego, until 2002.
In founding the company, Luddy intended to provide the same services previously available from the then defunct Peregrine Systems.
Luddy was the only employee until mid-2005
when in
venture financing from JMI Equity allowed Glidesoft to hire five additional people.
In 2006, the company changed its name to Service-Now.com. In 2007, ServiceNow reported an annual revenue of and opened its first
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley ...
office, in
San Jose.
2007 was also the first year that the company "went cash flow positive".
, the company had 275 employees in its San Diego, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, London and Frankfurt offices, as well as a partnership with
Accenture who had more than 100 ServiceNow consultants.
At this time, the company was sometimes known as "Service-now".
By April 2011, the company had named
Frank Slootman as
chief executive officer
A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization.
CEOs find roles in variou ...
.
In June 2012, ServiceNow became a
publicly traded company following a
IPO. Shortly thereafter, the company relocated its headquarters from
San Diego
San Diego ( , ) is a city on the Pacific coast of Southern California, adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a population of over 1.4 million, it is the List of United States cities by population, eighth-most populous city in t ...
to
Santa Clara, California
Santa Clara ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for "Clare of Assisi, Saint Clare") is a city in Santa Clara County, California. The city's population was 127,647 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, making it the List of cities and towns i ...
.
It was taken public by
Morgan Stanley
Morgan Stanley is an American multinational investment bank and financial services company headquartered at 1585 Broadway in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. With offices in 42 countries and more than 80,000 employees, the firm's clients in ...
one month after it took
Facebook
Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
public.
In October 2019, the company announced that CEO
John Donahoe would be succeeded by
Bill McDermott, formerly CEO of
SAP SE at the end of the calendar year. In January 2020, Bill appointed Gina Mastantuono as President and Chief Financial Officer.
In May 2023, Nvidia announced a partnership with ServiceNow to bring AI services to major corporations. This partnership aims to utilize company-specific data in the new AI service, distinguishing it from the AI advancements made by OpenAI and ChatGPT.
As of December 2023, the number of employees in ServiceNow was estimated to be around 23,000.
In 2024, the platform was reported to have leaked potentially highly confidential data from the "knowledge base" module of over a thousand corporate users due to a misconfiguration of its access control settings.
In October 2024, the company announced its plans to invest $1.5 billion in the UK. Its data centers there are located in the cities of London and
Newport, Wales
Newport ( ) is a city and Principal areas of Wales, county borough in Wales, situated on the River Usk close to its confluence with the Severn Estuary, northeast of Cardiff. The population grew considerably between the 2011 and the 2021 Unit ...
.
Acquisitions
*July 2013: Mirror42, an
Amsterdam
Amsterdam ( , ; ; ) is the capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, largest city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It has a population of 933,680 in June 2024 within the city proper, 1,457,018 in the City Re ...
-based software developer
*July 2014: Neebula Systems, an Israeli cloud computing tools company
*February 2015: Intréis
*June 2016: Brightpoint Security
*January 2017: Machine learning startup DxContinuum
*October 2017: San Diego
human-centered design firm
Telepathy
Telepathy () is the purported vicarious transmission of information from one person's mind to another's without using any known human sensory channels or physical interaction. The term was first coined in 1882 by the classical scholar Frederic ...
; the acquisition doubled the size of ServiceNow's internal design agency, the Design Experience Organization
*October 2017: SkyGiraffe, an enterprise mobility company backed by Microsoft Ventures. SkyGiraffe formed the basis for ServiceNow's Mobile Platform, released in March 2019.
*April 2018: VendorHawk, a
software-as-a-service management company
*May 2018: AI startup Parlo
*October 2018: Data analytics company, FriendlyData
*May 2019: Appsee Ltd., an analytics startup
*November 2019: Fairchild Resiliency Systems
*January 2020: Loom Systems, Passage AI, and Attivio
*June 2020: Sweagle
*November 2020:
Element AI
*March 2021: Intellibot
*May 2021: Lightstep
*August 2021: Swarm64 and Mapwize
*October 2021: Gekkobrain
*June 2022: Hitch
*October 2022: Era Software
*July 2023: AI-powered platform G2K
*December 2023: UltimateSuite
*March 2024: 4Industry
*July 2024: Raytion GmbH
*November 2024: Mission Secure
*January 2025: Cuein AI
*February 2025: Quality 360°
*March 2025:
Moveworks
*April 2025: Logik
*May 2025: Data.World
Platform
ServiceNow is a
platform-as-a-service, that is designed to support
IT service management and
help desk functionality with automated workflows. Their fee model was based on a cost per user (seat) per month, with that cost ranging down from .
The platform is packaged into different suites of applications called "modules", which are tailored to various business processes. Some of these areas include
Governance, risk management, and compliance,
audit
An audit is an "independent examination of financial information of any entity, whether profit oriented or not, irrespective of its size or legal form when such an examination is conducted with a view to express an opinion thereon." Auditing al ...
,
business continuity planning,
disaster recovery,
vendor management, and
environmental, social, and corporate governance. A commonly referred to benefit of the platform is that many of these modules are interconnected, such as the IRM suite (Integrated Risk Management), which will automatically create issues and assign tickets based on various risk and audit findings, findings that can be found through the manual or automated performance of different activities such as evidence requests. There is also a
data and information visualization report creator called Performance Analytics.
The ServiceNow script is written in
JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior.
Web browsers have ...
, with database queries being made using a proprietary object-oriented API called Glide. In July 2023, the company released a
generative AI speech-to-code feature, which the marketing research firm Valoir estimated could reduce relevant work time by 40 percent.
See also
*
IT service management
*
DevOps
DevOps is the integration and automation of the software development and information technology operations. DevOps encompasses necessary tasks of software development and can lead to shortening development time and improving the development life ...
*
BMC Software
*
ERP software
References
External links
*
{{Authority control, state=expanded
Software companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area
Companies based in Santa Clara, California
Cloud computing providers
Cloud applications
IT service management
Companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange
Software companies established in 2003
2003 establishments in California
2012 initial public offerings
American companies established in 2003
Software companies of the United States