ServiceNow CEO on “The Whole Point Of Digital Transformation”

Business is really simple, and people are more productive and they're doing things that can lead to growth and opportunity says ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott. That's the whole point of digital transfo...
ServiceNow CEO on “The Whole Point Of Digital Transformation”
Written by Rich Ord

“Business is really simple, and people are more productive, and they’re doing things that can lead to growth and opportunity,” says ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott. “That’s the whole point of digital transformation. Right now, companies are hunkered down with systems that are absolutely wearing them out. It’s time to make the bold move, pivot to ServiceNow, and let’s get in there and fix the job.”

Bill McDermott, CEO, and President of ServiceNow says that only one in four digital transformation projects actually deliver positive ROI due to lack of integration:

Most Digital Transformation Projects Don’t Deliver

We have a situation on our hands where digital transformation, cloud computing, and business model innovation, are all converging at once. ServiceNow is the platform, of all the enterprise platforms, that really makes business work. One of the big lessons that business has right now is trillions have been poured into digital transformation yet only one in four projects actually deliver positive ROI. The reason for that is lack of integration.

Our system integrates with all the existing systems as well as all the collaborative tools in the enterprise. From day one, the customer gets it up and running swiftly because it’s in the cloud. They begin to derive value from it because you automate the way the work is done and ultimately, you’re now in a position to serve your customers the way they want to be served. It’s a speed game and ServiceNow is at the top of its game.

Companies Have To Create New Business Models

We’re an example. If you’re going to grow your company you’re going to take advantage of digital transformation. This is the only way out and it’s the only way forward. In the 20th Century companies put in big heavy on-premise systems. The issue is now they can’t, in a frictionless economy, immediately pivot those business models because they haven’t digitally transformed their business.

About 25 percent of the opportunity of businesses out there today over the next three years will come from white space places they are not in today. They have to create new business models. They have to think about new partnerships and new routes to market. Without the baseline of a platform like ServiceNow they’re not going to get there. 

That’s The Whole Point Of Digital Transformation

I am very optimistic that the economies of the world not only are going to recover but actually going to do very well this year because people are going to be investing in digital transformation. We have seen that does not cost jobs. On the contrary, it frees people up to do things like go after new markets, derive new ideas, and so forth, because the AI revolution is also on.

We have built-in machine learning and AI into our platform. So 80 percent of the soul-crushing work people don’t want to do is done by the Now platform. The 20 percent that involves a human immediately gets initiated through a workflow order from the Now platform. 

Business is really simple, and people are more productive and they’re doing things that can lead to growth and opportunity. That’s the whole point of digital transformation. Right now, companies are hunkered down with systems that are absolutely wearing them out. It’s time to make the bold move, pivot to ServiceNow, and let’s get in there and fix the job.

Fastest-Growing Pure-Play SASS Silicon Valley Company

If you look at our actual earnings results, they were stunning and obviously achieved beyond expectations performance across the board. We also followed that through in the guide. We’ll continue to be the fastest-growing pure-play SASS Silicon Valley company. We will continue to have the best margin profile of all of them. Obviously, we’re going to continue to gain market share in industries around the world, in geographies around the world, particularly in Europe and Asia Pacific, and Japan. 

We will also gain market share on personas. Lots of people are getting the memo now that ServiceNow obviously dominated the IT automation market but the same backbone platform has enabled us to change the employee experience, the customer experience. In these tough times with COVID we can write low-code onto our platform in minutes and roll out new applications to hundreds of thousands of people so companies can move super fast.

We keep the guide consistent with the revenue that we generated in 2020. If there’s an upside to that… fantastic. That’s what good companies should do. They should go beyond expectations when they can but we stand by the guide and we’re looking forward to having a great year. 

ServiceNow Was Born In The Cloud

The whole idea of ServiceNow is so different than SAP which was a company that needed to pivot to the cloud in 2010. We did that and that was very successful. ServiceNow was born in the cloud. It’s a very young company with tremendous growth opportunity on the organic front. Having said that, (we would be in interested in an acquisition) if you have a situation where there is a partner out there that has a substantial TAM, that can be highly complementary and synergistic with ServiceNow on the revenue side. 

It also would have to do great things for the customer, because we have a precious platform and we jealously protect the integration power of that platform. A lot of things would have to be right but I can tell you as responsible business people we always look at it. We don’t need it to make our goals but you always have to look at it. We do want to be the defining enterprise software company the 21st century. That’s our plan.

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