ServiceNow was founded in 2004 by Fred Luddy in San Diego, California. Luddy had spent decades in enterprise IT and saw how much time organizations wasted on manual processes — ticketing, approvals, asset tracking. He built ServiceNow to replace those fragmented systems with a single cloud-based platform.
The company’s IT Service Management (ITSM) product became the entry point for most customers. It handled incident management, change requests, and problem resolution in a unified interface. But ServiceNow didn’t stop there. It expanded into IT Operations Management (ITOM), HR Service Delivery, Customer Service Management, and Security Operations.
ServiceNow’s Now Platform lets enterprises build custom applications using low-code tools. Flow Designer, IntegrationHub, and the App Engine enable companies to automate workflows across departments without writing much code. The platform processes billions of transactions daily for more than 7,700 enterprise customers.
Annual revenue crossed $8.9 billion in 2024, with subscription revenue making up over 95% of the total. ServiceNow consistently posts net revenue retention rates above 125%, meaning existing customers keep spending more each year.
The company went public in 2012 and has been led by several CEOs since Luddy stepped aside. Bill McDermott, who previously ran SAP, took the helm in 2019 and pushed aggressively into AI-powered automation. ServiceNow’s AI features now include predictive intelligence, virtual agents, and generative AI capabilities built on large language models.
Headquartered in Santa Clara, ServiceNow employs more than 22,000 people worldwide.
