the San Diego company as they scrambled to lower their IT costs.
“We’re a company that’s been very fortunate,” Luddy says. “But I think a lot of it was Arnold Palmer luck. He used to say, ‘The more I practice, the luckier I get.’ “
So what does Service-now do?
For the past four or five decades, Luddy says the person responsible for overseeing a company’s information technology systems has had problems answering such questions as what do I own? How well is it operating? And is it doing what I intended it to?
Service-now’s software enables the chief information officers at big companies and other organizations to keep track of their assets, such as computers, software licenses, and other IT resources. At the same time, it generates the kind of information that business executives can use to understand, for example, how the cost of operating a sales force in the field compares with the cost of selling products through an online catalog.
Service-now’s Web-based services also enable IT groups to manage their operational chores, which Luddy categorizes as “incident, problem, change.” An incident means something stopped working and needs to be fixed immediately. It might be that an employee’s laptop won’t boot up. A problem means investigating how or why the laptop stopped working. And a change means what’s done to fix it, which might be as simple as a software upgrade.
“Our core business is managing those three core disciplines,” says Luddy, which is no small matter. A big organization can have 50 to 100,000 incidents per month and five to 10,000 changes per month.
The SaaS business model enables Service-now to
