ServiceNow Buys San Diego Specialist in Customer Experience, Design

Telepathy office (Telepathy photo used with permission)

[Clarified 10/10/17, 11:15 am. See below.] ServiceNow (NYSE: [[ticker:NOW]]), the Santa Clara, CA-based giant that provides cloud-based IT services, is boosting its emphasis on human-centered design with its acquisition of Telepathy, a San Diego specialist in customer experience and design.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“ServiceNow chose us because of the design culture and process we have created over the last 17 years,” Telepathy co-founder and CEO Chuck Longanecker wrote Monday in a blog post announcing the deal. The design studio, founded as a digital agency in 2001, has focused increasingly on data-driven design and improved user experience.

ServiceNow likewise emphasized the UI/UX aspect of the deal in a corporate blog post titled “ServiceNow doubles down on customer experience design with acquisition of Telepathy.”

Asked to explain how the acquisition “doubles down,” Longanecker wrote in an e-mail that “it was based on us doubling the size of the Design Experience Organization,” ServiceNow’s internal design agency. “From Telepathy, every customer-facing producer on our team (designer, developer, strategist) was given an offer,” Longanecker wrote. “I don’t think I can say how many hires they made.”

In ServiceNow’s corporate blog, chief product officer C.J. Desai wrote that design “is as important as the underlying program and computing power. Design focuses technology into cohesive, coherent, and compelling user experiences …”

The company says its latest web-based platform consolidates ServiceNow’s legacy IT and software into a modern system that combines cybersecurity, customer service, human resources, and business apps to “consumerize” employee services.

[Editor’s note: ServiceNow founder Fred Luddy told me in two interviews (in 2007 and 2011) that he started the company as Glidesoft in November, 2003. A filing with the California Secretary of State shows the company was incorporated in California in June 2004.) ServiceNow, incorporated in California in 2004, moved its headquarters to Santa Clara shortly after the company went public in 2012. It now has about 6,000 employees worldwide, including almost 1,000 employees in the San Diego area.

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.