ServiceNow CEO: Work To Change More In Next Five Years Than In The Past 20

‘We are on the precipice of technology fundamentally changing our lives at work. We know, for the past 10 years, technology has transformed our lives at home, and now the very same thing is going to happen at work,’ ServiceNow CEO John Donahoe said at Knowledge 19.

ServiceNow CEO John Donahoe believes digitalization is about to change the world of work as significantly as it has transformed our experience as consumers and our lives at home.

“I believe that we are at a moment,” Donahoe told the crowd at ServiceNow’s Knowledge 19 event. “A very exciting moment. I believe it’s an inflection point. Possibly even a tipping point. We are on the precipice of technology fundamentally changing our lives at work. We know for the past 10 years, technology has transformed our lives at home, and now the very same thing is going to happen at work. ... At ServiceNow we are very motivated to help enable that future at work.”

ServiceNow, which has been at the forefront of using automation to simplify the jobs of IT professionals in the workplace, expanded its platform to simplify other cumbersome workplace functions including HR and facilities management, and then opened that platform for anyone to create apps customized to their needs at work. The company has enjoyed runaway growth as it sets its sights on leaping from about $4 billion to $10 billion in annual revenue.

Donahoe’s remarks came as the company made several announcements at the Knowledge 19 expo this week in Las Vegas. Among them, ServiceNow has revamped its partner program, inked a deal for expanded offerings with Google Cloud, unveiled its product road map to include app creation for its mobile offering, and added a new Finance Operations Management product built with Deloitte to bring ServiceNow capabilities to that field.

“The future of work will change more in the next three to five years than in the last 20,” Donahoe said.

“We believe that technology can take the 20, 30, 40 percent of our lives at work, where we’re doing repetitive and administrative and redundant tasks, and automate those things so that we can focus all of our time at work doing our creative best.”

ServiceNow and Google Cloud have formed a strategic partnership that pairs the Now Platform with Google Cloud’s technologies. The goal, according to a statement, is to make the Now Platform multi-cloud with the ability to support customers wherever their workloads reside—on-premises and across the major cloud vendors.

“Just like we discovered the services and resources on other cloud providers, such as AWS and Azure, we will now go ahead and discover on the Google Cloud platform as well,” Chanda Dani, ServiceNow’s senior director of product marketing, told CRN about the deal. “We will help customers manage services, if they are having services on Google and Google Cloud. And we will help them optimize cost on Google Cloud as well.”

Also at Knowledge 19 came the news that Deloitte will serve as the lead launch partner for ServiceNow’s Finance Operations Management product. Eventually, the product will include a number of applications that support digital workflows across a finance organization. The first application, Finance Close Automation, helps finance and accounting teams digitize their workflows to reduce finance close risk, improve team satisfaction and accelerate the finance close process.

“We’re a large finance organization, so it was a natural fit,” Shelly Mortimer, managing director at Deloitte Consulting, told CRN. “We were sitting at [Knowledge 18] last year having a conversation around, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could take the power of the platform to a finance organization, and if we could be sitting on stage with a client who is using this new product, and we could talk about that they actually did a financial close?’ Today we had that panel.”

ServiceNow and Deloitte worked with early adopter PayPal, which has now completed several monthly closes with the product.

“Some of the things that we’re hearing is that they’re able to go home before dark now, “ Mortimer said. “They said it’s the best close they’ve seen in years. It’s a natural extension of what ServiceNow does with the workflow engine, so it orchestrates the close, basically. They built this great portal that shows how many days until the close and all the tasks that need to happen. Everybody is loving it.”

Donahoe said Knowledge 19 is unique in that it offers 600 sessions about its products and offerings, of which 90 percent are taught by customers.

“Imagine that,” Donahoe said. “Customers sharing your experience and teaching other customers. That is what a community is all about.”