SM: Are there even any companies out there that have technologies worth acquiring that are in what you term the ERP for the IT market? FL: Some, but not too many. Companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Computer Associates made done dozens and dozens of acquisitions. They would approach the ERP for the IT field with
SM: Your company has been disruptive to the marketplace, which has forced your competitors to change their entire business model to address your success. FL: Exactly. It’s similar to when Southwest came on the scene and dropped a whole new way of doing business for airlines into the market. We have a very different model.
SM: I talk with a lot of CIOs. They tell me that 25% of their architecture is cloud computing. How does the role of the service desk evolve in that scenario? FL: As these customers start to move more and different apps into the cloud, they still have to manage those applications and the vendors.
SM: Who was your first enterprise customer? FL: We had a couple of big customers very early. Edmunds.com was a big customer of ours, as was Qualcomm. TIAA-CREF was another. Those companies became a beachhead for us to get follow-on customers such as Hyatt.
SM: Did you bootstrap ServiceNow? FL: In the beginning it was completely bootstrapped. I had a couple guys volunteering who worked on nights and weekends, and that helped me out. However, it was really just me and a dozen customers at that point.
SM: What were you doing at Peregrine? FL: I was the chief technology officer from 1990 until the end of 2003. We built software for the help desk and service desk market. The company grew from $4.5 million a year to $500 million a year. We acquired a lot of companies before Peregrine Corporation had
Fred Luddy founded ServiceNow.com in early 2004 and has served as chief executive and technology officer since the company’s inception. He was CTO at Peregrine Systems from 1990 to 2003. Prior to Peregrine, he founded Enterprise Software Associates (ESA), and worked at Boole and Babbage, and the Amdahl Corporation. Fred tried to attend Indiana University