Claiming to be the world’s fastest-growing cybersecurity company with the most-complete security offering, ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott is not-so-subtly transforming his company into a security powerhouse even as it continues to trumpet the “AI control tower for business reinvention” line.
Can’t they do both, you ask?
Of course they can — but as business customers face unprecedented pressure to do that reinvention-thing in quarters rather than years, they want to align with AI and cloud vendors whose vision and mission are crystal clear.
And I believe that while right here and right now the “AI control tower” position is still leading the way at ServiceNow, McDermott is eyeing the booming growth numbers coming from the cybersecurity part of his business as the big breakthrough opportunity in today’s AI-obsessed and data-driven world.
Let’s look at the breadcrumbs from the past several weeks:
- July 22: Q2 earnings call is all about security. On ServiceNow’s Q2 earnings call, McDermott’s opening comments are absolutely dominated by his commentary about customers’ desperate need for modern AI-native cyber solutions. Along the way, McDermott also used that call to highlight ServiceNow’s position as the fastest-growing major enterprise-security vendor, and its new status as the eighth-largest such firm in the world. (Check out my full analysis on that with extensive comments from McDermott’s remarks in “Bill McDermott Q2 Money Quote: ‘ServiceNow Offers Certainty in Uncertain Stack'” and also in “Can ServiceNow Help CEOs Sleep at Night?“)
- August 3: New CMO comes from Armis, a recent cybersecurity acquisition. After former CMO Colin Fleming left to take on the same role at OpenAI in late May, McDermott reached into a high-growth cyber company ServiceNow was acquiring, Armis, and named its CMO, Simon Mouyal, to take on that vital responsibility for ServiceNow. And in the press release announcing Mouyal’s appointment, the very first professional attribute McDermott noted about his new CMO was Mouyal’s expertise in cybersecurity. “Simon is a proven category leader who knows how to turn breakthrough innovation into market leadership…. He combines deep expertise in cybersecurity with world-class storytelling to build iconic brands, showcase value, and supercharge demand. Simon joins us at a defining moment as enterprises around the world turn to ServiceNow as the AI control tower for business reinvention.”
- August 4: ServiceNow declares it has “industry’s most-complete security offering” as it launches “Autonomous Security.” Bundling six solutions into what it believes represents a comprehensive end-to-end and autonomous cyber shield, ServiceNow promises it can deliver “prevention-first, AI-native cyber defense” across (a) unified exposure management, (b) continuous vulnerability detection, (c) cyber-physical security, (d) identity and access security, (e) agentic incident response, and (f) cyber risk and compliance. Armed with that portfolio, ServiceNow says, enterprise can “prevent, contain, and remediate risk at machine speed, before threats become breaches.”
Final Thought
To lean on a common buzzphrase, “Two things can be true at once.” And so I expect that even as McDermott and ServiceNow continue to tout the “AI control tower for business reinvention” tagline, beneath the surface they’re going to be investing heavily in and focusing heavily upon the massive potential of their cybersecurity business as the fuel for ServiceNow’s next wave of steep growth.
As McDermott said on the Q2 earnings call five weeks ago, “Risk at scale is why CEOs are losing sleep right now. They read all these threat headlines, they see all these platforms and token invoices, and they don’t know what to do.
“This is the gap — and ServiceNow is the bridge.”
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