It boggles me that ServiceNow is as popular as it is. The software is dreadful to use. We try as hard as possible to avoid anyone ever having to use it through slack bots, data exports, etc.
And this paragraph says nothing (what company isn't already digital?):
Companies are betting on going digital in order to thrive in the 21st century, but the transition is often challenging to navigate," said Pablo Stern, SVP & GM, IT Workflow Products, ServiceNow. "With Lightstep, ServiceNow will transform how software solutions are delivered to customers. This will ultimately make it easier for customers to innovate quickly. Now they'll be able to build and operate their software faster than ever before and take the new era of work head on with confidence.
ServiceNow is a classic Enterprise software play that I like to call "old, but new".
You take the same old software, with the same old processes, the same old salespeople and sales approach, and you make a new one that is a little shinier and (crucially) freshly made. Because you used your same old connections and investors to fund the development, you have a much better product than whatever cruft HP Service Manager, CA Service Desk or BMC Remedy have been pushing, simply because you haven't been fiddling with a product originally written in C++ in 1998 for 20 years.
Furthermore, your solution is comprehensive enough that it covers most of the existing functionality of the old products in the space, and it ticks all of the same compliance checkboxes too. So there's very little career risk associated to buying it. You even took the customer to the same old restaurant you used to take him when he was buying HP software from you!
Another popular example of this strategy is Zoom. What is Zoom? GoToMeeting/Webex, but new.
On the lower end of the market, there is more entertainment, because not everyone that had legacy products want to pay through the nose for the pleasure of dealing with an army of Service Now suits. This is where companies like Freshworks, Atlassian and ours (InvGate) come in.
Source: founder of InvGate, mid-market player in the same space
I'm not at all a fan of ServiceNow, but it's primary use is for huge organizations, up to and including entire government departments with hundreds of distinct contractors and client agencies. There is no practical way to use Slack bots to manage ticketing and work tracking when you have tens of thousands of users and Slack is not approved for any kind of controlled data (PII, PHI, CUI, Classified, Proprietary) and doesn't offer a self-hosted version.
It’s easy to forget this if you work in tech, but there are many, many enterprises still stuck with spreadsheets and legacy software even worse than ServiceNow.
Think about regional banks, governments, utilities, oil & gas, manufacturers, field engineering services, healthcare systems, ... These aren’t exactly customers who can just use Slack instead.
Agreed. This is a particularly petty grievance but it boggles the mind that the landing page for ordinary users is some backend ticket management view and the thing users want is the cushy ticket requesting page with the view of their active tickets and so on which is unfortunately buried behind some unmemorable path and which is not linked to from the obscenely noisy landing page (or any of its network of pages that most users don't care about at all). If you're smart, you create a bookmark and move on with life, but I keep treating it like it's the last time I'll need that stupid link and of course that's entirely my fault. But still, designing software that requires individual users to manage bookmarks is insane.
So yeah, that was my petty grievance--no doubt I or the administrators could make this more pleasant. But I've never heard a single soul have anything favorable to say about SNOW. I don't know if SNOW's success is attributable to an unusually impoverished competitive landscape or if there are hidden factors (it appeals to IT's innate enmity toward the rest of the organization?), but it is surprising that SNOW survives at all.
I've had some realizations recently around this. The quality of the software is in my opinion not a huge factor for the success of the company. Look at car companies like Ford, Toyota, VW. Compared to a Ferrari, Porsche, Bentley they are crap, but yet they are still relatively successful companies in their space. Software is sold to managers. How they make their purchasing decisions is the biggest factor, which comes down to how good the salesperson they interact with is, and their decision making framework. Even if you could make a better platform than service now, you still probably couldn't convince the decision maker to use your software instead. Things like how much they trust the company will be around long term, the support offered, the list of "features", personal relationships are usually more important. A company is more than just the overall relative quality of the product.
It boggles me that ServiceNow succeeds even though their most ubiquitous product, IT Service Management, is also their worst. There are less half-baked products besides the ticketing system.
For example, the IT Operations Management suite includes tools to collect specifications about devices without installing an agent, aggregate alerts to better assess outage impacts, and automatically generate topology maps by analyzing network traffic. It's a wholly different product that justifies some weird design decisions in the Incident/Change system, but it can help explain where Lightstep falls in the ecosystem.
Source: ServiceNow ITOM consultant who has seen customers fare better when they look beyond Incident/Problem/Change/Catalog
"Going digital" is a continuous process, and while I hear what you're saying, SaaS vendors like ServiceNow have been pushing "digitizing processes" hard in the pandemic era, because most companies still have a long backlog of manual/paper processes left to "digitize".
To understand the popularity of ServiceNow, one need only look at the legacy products it displaced: BMC Remedy, HP Service Manager, CA Service Desk, etc. ServiceNow may not be sexy by modern standards, but gives large enterprises a level of flexibility and agility that was never possible with the legacy vendors.
I remember using ServiceNow in the finance industry many years ago. It was a fairly comprehensive dumpster fire back then. This above paragraph does not bode well for future improvements.
Yes, if someone can enlighten me - what is so great about this software, by looking at their product's growth and popularity i was expecting something extraordinary. Then i had to use it and it was pretty boring, unintuitive, unsophisticated CRUD framework for tracking stuff and it wasn't clear at all where is the value it provides over thousands of other applications of such kind.
Corporate press releases [1] are a bit of an exception to some of HN's rules (such as "please submit original source") because they are suboptimal for curiosity [2]. Mostly they are bland boilerplate, and often are written to conceal as much as they reveal. So we tend to change them to the best third-party article that anyone can point us to.
My org was just stuck with Service Now recently when someone convinced management it was better than Zendesk, got the contract signed and then resigned when the integration became difficult. Wish I could leave negative feedback on his LinkedIn profile, but the guy even removed mention that he worked with my org and claims to have been self employed the last 3 years.
I don't get it. What is the value add? Apparently, more tracing of workflows and exposing traditionally DevOps style metrics into workflows that everyone in the org can appreciate. I'm not convinced. Maybe lightstep is having issues with growth and sold out?
This seems likely. Went through a tracing RFP at a large company and people knew products like datadog, splunk, appdynamics, even honeycomb, but had never heard of lightstep. Even ex-googlers who knew bhs had never heard of lightstep. And when I was being recruited by lightstep in early 2020, before COVID, the process ended in a hiring freeze. I never got the impression they were thriving.
I would love to be proved wrong on this, but most of the startups that are focused on:
- Observability
- Security / Compliance
Seem like they're plays by the founders to get acquired by bigger firms (either for acqui-hire or just to augment their own "observability and/or security" offering).
I would be very curious to see a company that really make it big and remain independent in this area. It seems to me like DataDog has been the only successful company in this area, with some other honorable mentions (e.g. honeycomb.io, sentry, sensu etc.)
I once served as a PM for a startup in the observability space.
Monitoring is a brutal industry, as engineers love to build monitoring products. There is a long tail of hundreds of monitoring startups catering to every wim that are backed by only a small handful of engineers.
On the other hand, integrating a monitoring product into a company large enough to pay for the product is extraordinarily expensive. The DevOps team might want to have end-end visibility, but they can't add the library support required to make the deal work. Supporting one companies specific libraries is unlikely to pay off for other companies.
When it comes to distributed tracing, the value proposition depends on convincing every dev team in the company that this is the best solution for monitoring.
Larger companies have an easier time "cross-selling" these features, and can sometimes win deals by simply having the capability even if its never used.
I think you're right -- if only because it's probably the most viable path to growth.
If your value prop is 'we're stable and you can trust us', and your buyers are 'large enterprises that don't like to take risks', your biggest impediment if you have a great product is that you aren't part of a company like ServiceNow.
What's the saying? "The battle between every startup and incumbent comes down to whether the startup gets distribution before the incumbent gets innovation."
Even harder when you need enterprise proof-points...
I mean, few startups in any area make it big and remain independent. It's probably just that startups in this area are more visible to you because their products are ones you might use.
This seems to me because after connectivity (“solved” with service mesh) getting proper insights at scale on observability is quite hard. Security is and will always remain har as one mistake can have large consequences.
acquisition might have been their strategy all long, but I can't see ServiceNow doing anything but strangling what was a cool tool - though maybe in the best case some observability will carry over to huge enterprises
[+] [-] ec109685|4 years ago|reply
And this paragraph says nothing (what company isn't already digital?):
Companies are betting on going digital in order to thrive in the 21st century, but the transition is often challenging to navigate," said Pablo Stern, SVP & GM, IT Workflow Products, ServiceNow. "With Lightstep, ServiceNow will transform how software solutions are delivered to customers. This will ultimately make it easier for customers to innovate quickly. Now they'll be able to build and operate their software faster than ever before and take the new era of work head on with confidence.
[+] [-] gomox|4 years ago|reply
You take the same old software, with the same old processes, the same old salespeople and sales approach, and you make a new one that is a little shinier and (crucially) freshly made. Because you used your same old connections and investors to fund the development, you have a much better product than whatever cruft HP Service Manager, CA Service Desk or BMC Remedy have been pushing, simply because you haven't been fiddling with a product originally written in C++ in 1998 for 20 years.
Furthermore, your solution is comprehensive enough that it covers most of the existing functionality of the old products in the space, and it ticks all of the same compliance checkboxes too. So there's very little career risk associated to buying it. You even took the customer to the same old restaurant you used to take him when he was buying HP software from you!
Another popular example of this strategy is Zoom. What is Zoom? GoToMeeting/Webex, but new.
On the lower end of the market, there is more entertainment, because not everyone that had legacy products want to pay through the nose for the pleasure of dealing with an army of Service Now suits. This is where companies like Freshworks, Atlassian and ours (InvGate) come in.
Source: founder of InvGate, mid-market player in the same space
[+] [-] nonameiguess|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gk1|4 years ago|reply
Think about regional banks, governments, utilities, oil & gas, manufacturers, field engineering services, healthcare systems, ... These aren’t exactly customers who can just use Slack instead.
[+] [-] throwaway894345|4 years ago|reply
So yeah, that was my petty grievance--no doubt I or the administrators could make this more pleasant. But I've never heard a single soul have anything favorable to say about SNOW. I don't know if SNOW's success is attributable to an unusually impoverished competitive landscape or if there are hidden factors (it appeals to IT's innate enmity toward the rest of the organization?), but it is surprising that SNOW survives at all.
[+] [-] wppick|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schnevets|4 years ago|reply
For example, the IT Operations Management suite includes tools to collect specifications about devices without installing an agent, aggregate alerts to better assess outage impacts, and automatically generate topology maps by analyzing network traffic. It's a wholly different product that justifies some weird design decisions in the Incident/Change system, but it can help explain where Lightstep falls in the ecosystem.
Source: ServiceNow ITOM consultant who has seen customers fare better when they look beyond Incident/Problem/Change/Catalog
[+] [-] buzer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CamelCaseName|4 years ago|reply
ServiceNow covers a wide array of our business needs without having to buy into a number of different SaaS platforms.
From what I've seen, it's much more feature complete and advanced than the competition. (Specifically, procurement)
Is it a PITA to use? Yes. But it forces best practices and the main people who interact with it will be power users anyways.
[+] [-] haswell|4 years ago|reply
To understand the popularity of ServiceNow, one need only look at the legacy products it displaced: BMC Remedy, HP Service Manager, CA Service Desk, etc. ServiceNow may not be sexy by modern standards, but gives large enterprises a level of flexibility and agility that was never possible with the legacy vendors.
[+] [-] Mandatum|4 years ago|reply
From their front page.. Appears you go back in time without Lightstep.
[+] [-] calvinmorrison|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] n0us|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bob1029|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rchaud|4 years ago|reply
The people buying it aren't the same people that have to use it.
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jollybean|4 years ago|reply
Sold to Execs and Managers, not users.
[+] [-] zxienin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tut-urut-utut|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sharken|4 years ago|reply
I have not looked into the specifics, but have a hard time believing that ServiceNow should be special in that regard.
Also, the way items are related is so far behind JIRA and TFS, that there is no competition.
If ServiceNow is the future, i prefer living in the past.
[+] [-] rasputnik6502|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
Corporate press releases [1] are a bit of an exception to some of HN's rules (such as "please submit original source") because they are suboptimal for curiosity [2]. Mostly they are bland boilerplate, and often are written to conceal as much as they reveal. So we tend to change them to the best third-party article that anyone can point us to.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[+] [-] technick|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandyarmstrong|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Oddskar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sethammons|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffbee|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pm90|4 years ago|reply
- Observability
- Security / Compliance
Seem like they're plays by the founders to get acquired by bigger firms (either for acqui-hire or just to augment their own "observability and/or security" offering).
I would be very curious to see a company that really make it big and remain independent in this area. It seems to me like DataDog has been the only successful company in this area, with some other honorable mentions (e.g. honeycomb.io, sentry, sensu etc.)
[+] [-] lumost|4 years ago|reply
Monitoring is a brutal industry, as engineers love to build monitoring products. There is a long tail of hundreds of monitoring startups catering to every wim that are backed by only a small handful of engineers.
On the other hand, integrating a monitoring product into a company large enough to pay for the product is extraordinarily expensive. The DevOps team might want to have end-end visibility, but they can't add the library support required to make the deal work. Supporting one companies specific libraries is unlikely to pay off for other companies.
When it comes to distributed tracing, the value proposition depends on convincing every dev team in the company that this is the best solution for monitoring.
Larger companies have an easier time "cross-selling" these features, and can sometimes win deals by simply having the capability even if its never used.
[+] [-] pboutros|4 years ago|reply
If your value prop is 'we're stable and you can trust us', and your buyers are 'large enterprises that don't like to take risks', your biggest impediment if you have a great product is that you aren't part of a company like ServiceNow.
What's the saying? "The battle between every startup and incumbent comes down to whether the startup gets distribution before the incumbent gets innovation."
Even harder when you need enterprise proof-points...
[+] [-] marcinzm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cj|4 years ago|reply
Proofpoint (PFPT) is a big security / compliance company. Market cap is about half that of Datadog.
Crowdstrike (CRWD) is another big one. Twice the size of datadog.
[+] [-] spockz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffbee|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Oddskar|4 years ago|reply
Yikes. That's their slogan? They're not accomplishing this very well.
[+] [-] rchaud|4 years ago|reply
ADP - payroll software
Slack - chat client
ServiceNow - helpdesk software
[+] [-] tehalex|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] politician|4 years ago|reply