Service-Now Names Software Industry Veteran Frank Slootman as CEO

When I met in January with Service-now.com founding CEO Fred Luddy, he said the company that provides software-as-a-service for IT management has enough momentum to carry it through an IPO. Today, if I’m reading the tea leaves correctly, the San Diego company took an important preliminary step in that process by naming Bay Area software industry veteran Frank Slootman as CEO.

Slootman, who was born and educated in Holland, was previously the CEO of Data Domain, the data backup company founded in 2001 with backing from Greylock Partners.

Slootman joined Santa Clara, CA-based Data Domain in 2003 and headed the company through a period of extraordinary growth, which included its 2007 IPO on NASDAQ as well as its acquisition by EMC for $2.4 billion in 2009. (Hopkinton, MA-based EMC topped NetApp in a fierce but short bidding war for Data Domain.) Following the EMC buyout, Slootman remained at Data Domain for 18 months as the company integrated its operations with EMC, forming what is now EMC’s backup recovery systems division.

In January, Slootman joined Greylock’s Menlo Park, CA, office as a partner. He plans to continue his long-time affiliation with both Greylock and EMC. He told me this morning he plans to move to San Diego, and for what it’s worth, that Service-now plans to keep its global headquarters here.

Frank Slootman

Before joining Data Domain, Slootman focused on application development and infrastructure products as a senior vice president of products operations at Borland Software. He also spent seven years at Compuware as general manager of UNIFACE in Amsterdam and as general manager of the EcoSystems division in Campbell, CA.

Today, his expertise includes enterprise infrastructure and software, which is the focus of the Web-based platform that Luddy developed at San Diego’s Service-now.com. Luddy, who founded Service-now.com after leaving Peregrine Systems in 2002, will guide the company’s product strategy and evolution as chief product officer.

Service-now generated $86 million in revenue last year, and Luddy says the company just passed the $100 million mark in terms of contracts for this year. “We’re currently growing at about 18 percent a quarter, which puts the company on a path to double every year for

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.