ServiceNow: On a Roll, Because Our Customers ROCK!

[MichaelDortch]

'Tis the season to be thankful, grateful and hopeful. And professionally, I am most thankful, grateful and hopeful for our amazing customers.

Any software company can tout its own advantages, actual or perceived. But nothing makes those pronouncements as credible as when they're supported by actual customers with money and personal and corporate reputations on the line. So if you want incontrovertible evidence of the momentum ServiceNow has in the marketplace, you need only look at what our customers are achieving. Herewith, a few highlights of some recently announced customer successes.

Red Hat is the world's leading provider of open source software solutions. (Your very own enterprise is probably running Red Hat software somewhere even as you read this.) The company found that managing its IT infrastructure with premise-based tools was hobbling its efficiency and agility. So the company replaced those tools with the ServiceNow IT Service Automation Suite. "Our legacy product showed us how difficult it is to run IT management servers ourselves.," said Red Hat CIO Lee Congdon. "But now, we're able to deliver services more effectively, more efficiently and more flexibly than if we were trying to set up IT service automation on premise."

Forest City Enterprises is a US-based real estate company with $10.7 billion in total assets. The company was saddled with IT management software that had become unstable and difficult to use. That software was also not aligned with the company's goals of leveraging cloud-based services. So Forest City switched to ServiceNow to consolidate, consumerize and automate business processes, within and beyon.... "Moving IT to the cloud and standardizing on a single system of record is part of our strategic plan," said Bob Bayer, IT director for the company. "The cloud enables us to be more agile by freeing up resources so we can focus on more strategic IT projects."

Kevin Broadway is director of billing systems at innovative wireless carrier MetroPCS. Wired.com recently published his guest editorial, "Driving the Business Forward: How Service Automation Saved My IT Department." "Once we were able to get IT under control [with ServiceNow], we wanted to push our limits and drive the business forward as true consultants for various departments," Kevin wrote. In this consultative role, Kevin and his team have built 15 line-of-business applications. So far.

Informa plc provides specialized information and knowledge via a variety of channels and brands from more than 100 offices in 25 countries. And in perhaps the most seasonally themed ServiceNow-related activity so far, Informa's director of IT service management Paul Hardy has launched a "ServiceNow Advent." Like the Advent calendars that count down the days until Christmas, Paul is using Twitter daily throughout December to highlight a custom application he has built or is building on the ServiceNow Service Automation Platform. You can follow (and share) Paul's daily missives via the hashtag #SNOWadvent.

You can and should also read a great interview with Brad Rohrer, deputy CIO at the University of Miami. He and his team are using ServiceNow to consolidate and centralize IT management and move the university closer to a "cloud-first" strategy.

Also, as I write this, I am en route to Las Vegas, for the Gartner Data Center Conference. At that event, I will have the honor and privilege of moderating a presentation by Eric Fisch, Senior Applications Release Manager at Equinix, a global data center and interconnection company. Eric's topic: "ServiceNow: From IT Service Management Consolidation to Enterprise Service Delivery Innovation." If you're attending the conference, come see and hear Eric, and drop by the ServiceNow booth (#210). You can also see and read about some of the achievements Eric and his team have attained with ServiceNow here.

Whether you're at the Gartner conference or not, if you want to see and hear more great stories from and about ServiceNow customers, you should definitely plan to attend Knowledge14 in April. Register now to take advantage of "early bird" registration discounts. And if you are a ServiceNow customers with a great story to share, answer the call for Knowledge14 speakers and submit one or more sessions. If one of yours is chosen, you can receive a complimentary pass to the entire Knowledge14 conference. And visit the customer success page at the ServiceNow Web site regularly, so you can see more evidence of how hard and consistently ServiceNow customers rock, and the benefits of their efforts to their enterprises.