What does ServiceNow provide to users? May I ask the president of the Japanese subsidiary-ZDNet Japan

ServiceNow, an enterprise cloud service provider, has grown steadily. The company has always been a leader in SaaS IT service management, but it is a PaaS provider and advocates a “platform platform.” What does the company provide to users? We asked Mr. Masasa Murakami, President of ServiceNow Japan.

Provide a “platform platform” for use with business systems

“We want to be the Amazon in the office.”

Mr. Murase seems to be very familiar with the character of reporters, and he came to the beginning of this article when he heard such interesting remarks. When I write like this, I usually continue to explain the meaning, but here I will explain later. First, based on Mr. Murase’s story, I will introduce what kind of company ServiceNow is.

The company provides cloud services that support better working methods by building various workflows covering the entire company (from IT to personnel and customer services).

Founded in 2004. The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, with approximately 12,000 employees worldwide, more than 6,200 customers, and sales of US$3.46 billion in fiscal year 2019 (FY12/FY19). It is estimated that by 2020 (FY12/20) it will be around US$4.2 billion. In September 2013, the Japanese subsidiary Service Now Japan was established.

By the way, ServiceNow, which is both a company name and a service name, wants to directly deliver IT as a “service” to “Now”.

Figure 1 summarizes these services. The “Now Platform” in the middle is PaaS, which has functions such as workflow, database, artificial intelligence (AI), analysis, and user experience (UX).

Figure 1. Service overview (Source: ServiceNow Japan)

The biggest point is that this Now platform can cooperate with each business system described in the next row to provide cross-domain workflows. As shown in the figure, many companies use software and services called “platforms” from various vendors in the systems of each business, but Now Platform has the image of “packaging” these software and services. Yes.

ServiceNow also provides SaaS, which can develop workflows for employees and customers, including IT work on this PaaS, and also provides an environment where anyone can use low-code/no-code to develop new services. For these reasons, Now Platform is positioned as a “platform platform.”