Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I explore ServiceNow’s ambitious growth targets, with CEO Bill McDermott aiming to triple revenue and drive advancements in AI and customer workflows.
Highlights
00:50 — In Q3, ServiceNow’s subscription revenue was just over $2.7 billion. So, times four and that gets you to about the $11 billion rate. That was up 22.5%. McDermott said, “We can go to $30 billion.” Its remaining performance obligation was up 33%, to almost $20 billion. On the call, he went into a lot of detail. I pulled out what I think are the top four drivers for the company.
01:48 — The first is what it wants to do with its AI agent technology called Now Assist. It wants to have agents everywhere — not only the ones created by ServiceNow but also that ServiceNow customers create. McDermott talked about wanting to be the agent control tower, end-to-end, for enterprises. Now Assist, McDermott says, is the fastest-growing product in ServiceNow’s history.
02:36 — A couple of months ago it introduced RaptorDB , which McDermott says is for AI-first companies. He cited Amadeus, and said hundreds of others are interested in it. He gave some very steep claims about the performance—the way it is much faster in both analytics and transaction processing. He didn’t say compared to what. But it does sound like an interesting product: all about handling larger and larger volumes of data more quickly.
03:20— Along with that, something new that McDermott talked about was the Workflow Data Fabric. So, this is the machine that feeds the data analysis beast here, with everything going into AI. It says it will be able to take data from inside ServiceNow, but also from third parties, handling it very securely, whether structured or unstructured, and pull it in.
Ask Cloud Wars AI Agent about this analysis
03:54 — When he started five years ago, ServiceNow was mostly focused around IT. Now, it moved into security, Employee Workflows, Customer Workflows, what he calls Creator Workflows, some things around finance, really getting into almost the ERP space, HCM, and so on. It’s building out a portfolio of these workflows.
04:21 — Of all these, McDermott says Customer Workflows are performing very well. He’s been very bullish on them for a long time, but on the call, he said, “This will be, I believe, ServiceNow’s biggest business—customer workflows.” He’s hinted at moving more aggressively into the CRM space.
04:58 — Overall, we see a lot of ambition from ServiceNow, with a focus on advanced technology. They’re working on everything from agents to databases to this Data Fabric, and there’s a strong belief that Customer Workflows are where the company will gain the most traction.
