ServiceNow - the help desk that became the workflow of the enterprise

The company began as a personal recovery. Fred Luddy had been chief technology officer of Peregrine Systems for thirteen years when it collapsed in an accounting fraud and filed for bankruptcy in September 2002, taking with it, by one account, some 35 million dollars of his own stock. In June 2004, two weeks before turning fifty, he incorporated Glidesoft in California with himself as the only employee. The product was a help desk: a ticketing system, a configuration database and a workflow engine, delivered from the web, one instance per customer, at a time when the idea of running IT operations on somebody else's servers was regarded as reckless.

He gave it away at first, to find out what was broken, and he had learned at Peregrine exactly how wide the gap was between what enterprise software promised and what it did for the people who used it. The first paying customer was a small software vendor; a seed round of 2.5 million dollars arrived in 2005; the name changed in 2006 to say what the company was. It was profitable early and it nearly sold itself far too soon. Frank Slootman took over as chief executive in 2011, the company listed in June 2012 at a valuation of about two billion dollars, and it is now an S&P 100 constituent with revenue above thirteen billion.

What it turned into is more interesting than the numbers. A help desk records what is broken and who is fixing it. Once that record is authoritative and everything else - the asset inventory, the change approvals, the security incidents, the vendor tickets - is wired into it, the ticketing system becomes the place where the organisation's operations are actually decided. ServiceNow's growth was the discovery that the workflow around the ticket was worth more than the ticket, and that whoever holds the workflow holds the enterprise's process. For the networking and security practitioner, it is where the incident is opened, where the change window is approved, and where the audit trail lives.

The origin belongs beside the Nortel entry's accounting scandal and the Fujitsu entry's record. A company was built by someone who had watched, from inside, what happens when the record an organisation runs on cannot be trusted, and who set out to make the operational record the thing you could.