Interview with John Donahoe, CEO of ServiceNow: Company-wide digital transformation

In the past year, John Donahoe served as President and CEO of ServiceNow. After nearly ten years of leave, he joined the IT Service Management (ITSM) of the SaaS platform, and then took over the position of eBay for nearly ten years. He served as President and CEO from March 2008 to July 2015, and later became chairman of the eBay Board of Directors. . PayPal management. John Donahoe just answered our question. ServiceNow currently has more than 4,000 customers. In 2017, its turnover reached 1.9 billion US dollars, an increase of 39%.

LMI: After you gain experience in the consumer market, how will you bring to B2B cloud providers such as ServiceNow in terms of vision, management, and product roadmap? The 2020 turnover forecast is a goal of 4 billion US dollars?

John Donahoe : I spent a lot of time listening and learning from customers. In the first year, I traveled the world and met more than 500 customers. The discussion was surprisingly consistent. They come to us so that we can become their strategic partners for digital transformation. I bring the same customer-centric thinking that I have used throughout my career to ServiceNow. ServiceNow listens to customers and responds to their needs. We invest in their success, which is a priority for me. I am not only committed to achieving the goal of 4 billion US dollars in 2020, but also committed to achieving the growth of the company after 2020. We set a goal for ServiceNow: We make the working environment better for everyone. This goal guides everything we do. During the journey of global goals, I met with employees from all over the world to share our vision, strategy and cultural values. The response was enthusiastic. People at ServiceNow are very interested in what we can accomplish together to continuously drive customer success and build a great business.

In the past three years, ServiceNow has greatly expanded its range of functions, extending its SaaS services from the IT department to the HRD, CRM and security teams. However, ITSM is still the most important source of income in turnover. How do you plan to further contact other business departments?

Our flagship product is IT, and we still have a lot of room for growth in this area. Our performance on new products is also very good, and development momentum is strong. We have a very good relationship with customers who buy multiple products. CIOs and other business departments are increasingly aware that the functions of the ServiceNow platform can enable them to promote the digital transformation of the entire enterprise. We are very satisfied with the opportunities in each product category and the ability to implement them company-wide. We have many opportunities for growth and can become strategic partners of our customers.

In recent months, ServiceNow has made various acquisitions, including DxContinuum, Qlue, Telepathy and SkyGiraffe, and invested in MapAnything and BuildOnMe. In the next few years, do you plan to prioritize internal development or seek to acquire other technologies to continue to rapidly expand the ServiceNow platform?

Acquisitions will continue to play an important role in the development of our platform and products. We are always looking for technologies that can complement our existing functions and create more value for our customers. Telepathy and SkyGiraffe are good examples of how we can use acquisitions to accelerate design and mobility capabilities.

Do you think Salesforce is one of its main competitors in the developer ecosystem and application market? Do you plan to develop the ecosystem in the same way and expand the tool and program suite for developers, for example in vertical industries?

We look at the market through the eyes of our customers. Cloud platforms such as Salesforce, Workday and ServiceNow are complementary and not competitive. Today, ServiceNow has a strong ecosystem and we are investing in this area to ensure that our partners and developers have the tools and resources needed to innovate on our platform and provide services to customers.

In Europe, ServiceNow and the host Equinix have established two ServiceNow data centers for mirroring services in Zurich and Geneva, Switzerland, and two other mirrored data centers in London and Amsterdam. With the implementation of Brexit, does ServiceNow plan to deploy other mirrored data centers within the EU?

We continuously evaluate our data center strategy on a global scale. We will continue to place data centers in the most relevant locations for our business so that we can provide the best service to our customers.