In October, Salesforce debuted Agentforce IT in a direct challenge to ServiceNow's ITSM product, and analyst firm Forrester's vice president and principal analyst Charles Betz rated it the "most credible threat" ServiceNow has ever faced.
ServiceNow isn't worried.
"We're not talking about models. We're not talking about things that are commoditized," Heath Ramsey, the company's group vice president of outbound project management for the AI platform, told The Register.
"People are talking about workflow. We feel like we do it better. I know we do it better. We become a platform for work in the enterprise and we also become the AI control tower for work in the enterprise," he added.
Ramsey said generative AI has opened customers' eyes to using automation as a part of their business transformation in a way that the 21-year-old ServiceNow hasn't seen before. By focusing on processes across a customer's entire business rather than one function, Ramsey said ServiceNow is best positioned to show customers how to get value from AI.
"ROI means a lot of things to a lot of different people, and I think a portfolio of cost savings, productivity gains, all those different kinds of things is ultimately what's going to land," he said. "We can come with the quantification of 'Here's the number of agents that you have. Here's the volume of work that's done.' The individual organization can say: 'Well, it used to cost us X amount of dollars to do this, and now the agent is doing that.' We actually have that in AI Control Tower, where you can see the value that comes from the AI infrastructure that we are providing."
ServiceNow has also expanded its products' capabilities through acquisitions.
Just this year it bought Logik ai to beef up its CRM platform, data catalog company Data.World, and identity access tool vendor Veza. Another big buy saw ServiceNow splurge $2.85 billion for Moveworks, to incorporate that company's AI assistants and agentic reasoning into its platform.
This week, Bloomberg reported that ServiceNow is in talks to buy cybersecurity company Armis for $7 billion. ServiceNow would not comment on those reports.
Amid all those deals, one fear is that ServiceNow's walled-garden platform becomes overrun with products that diverge from its roots, Forrester vice president and principal analyst Charles Betz told The Register this week.
"ServiceNow, historically, has avoided buying a portfolio of independent products. They are not like Computer Associates or HP back in the day," he told us. "ServiceNow has been extremely architecturally disciplined. The big question with both Armis and Veza is, are they going to maintain those legacy code bases and start risking going down the road of the old software portfolio vendors, or are they going to actually reimplement on the Now platform?"
Going back to the company's first acquisition of the business analytics firm Mirror 42 in 2013, ServiceNow has traditionally incorporated acquired technology into its own environment, Ramsey said.
"So it wasn't like trying to take an existing technology and bolting it on and doing all different kinds of unnatural things in order to be able to get it to all work together," he said.
"That kind of approach has allowed us to not only acquire companies, but we build that into the code and the ability and the capabilities of the platform to ensure that our customers are able to get access to it very, very seamlessly, and that it all works together."
When it comes to incorporating acquisitions, Ramsey looks at ServiceNow's platform as possessing three layers. At the bottom is a data layer, with a workflow layer in the middle and a user experience layer riding on top,
Ramsey described Moveworks as "kind of an experience layer thing."
"So we're looking at 'How are we going to integrate these technologies to make the best experience layer possible?'" he said. "There's other acquisitions, like Veza, which is identity security, and that's going to be woven into the platform across these different layers, in terms of how we do our security and data and everything else." ®