Bill McDermott’s year: ServiceNow is becoming “the decisive software provider”

In the business world, when many people saw the long-term SAP boss Bill McDermott (Bill McDermott) move to ServiceNow at the end of 2019, it caused an uproar. After his first year of service, he should clearly know what he is doing and why.

The just announced fourth quarter and full-year 2020 results speak for themselves. Last fiscal year sales increased by 30% to 4.5 billion U.S. dollars and profit was 119 million U.S. dollars. Compared with McDermott’s previous employers, profit margins are small, but the company is currently investing heavily to further develop its product line and global expansion.

Investors seem to have no doubt that the latter will happen, and that the near future will be characterized by strong growth. The market value of ServiceNow currently exceeds $100 billion, which is more than twenty times its sales. In October 2019, just before McDermott took over at the helm, the stock price was about $250. In mid-December last year, it reached a record high of US$565.

One might argue that in the 2020 crisis, almost all IT and Internet giants have been rewarded with sales and stock price growth-and this is for good reason. During the lockdown and other measures, cloud computing, e-commerce, and digital business processes kept the economy running. On a global scale, the industry finally realized that digital transformation is irreplaceable, triggering a digital race.

However, although the benefits of cloud computing and other key technologies have been widely discussed in the past few years and most IT managers should know it, at the beginning of the crisis, the capabilities of ServiceNow’s Now Platform were not so obvious. This is where the special talent of people like Bill McDermott is able to recognize timing and articulate the right strategy to play a role.

McDermott sees Corona as an opportunity to prove to the professional world the capabilities of the Now platform. McDermott recently said on the Cloud Wars podcast of American magazine: “Then we released an emergency response application, which later evolved into a set of applications for safe return to work.” “This makes the advantages of Now Platform shine because of you It can be developed within a few days and promoted globally.” The Now platform is currently used in multiple countries/regions to control the distribution of corona vaccination.

It is also the fast implementation speed of such projects that makes the company clearly realize that the Now platform is not just IT service management, that is, the discipline developed by ServiceNow as a company.

Instead, Bill McDermott is working hard to make ServiceNow “the defining software provider of the 21st century.” “Our engineers spend time creating the future, not integrating the past,” McDermott said. The Now platform enables customers to focus on what they want to achieve instead of worrying about the status quo. In this case, McDermott described the Now platform as a “market-entry machine” that can execute projects in days and weeks instead of years and months.

McDermott recognized this capability when he was at the helm of SAP-and how it differed from SAP and its peers. The role of ERP and similar systems is to record and manage data, whether it is inventory management, finance or human resources. They are “systems of record” and therefore are the basis for building solutions such as the Now platform.