ServiceNow acquires Lightstep
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
And this paragraph says nothing (what company isn't already digital?):
Companies are betting on going digital in order to thrive in the 21st century, but the transition is often challenging to navigate," said Pablo Stern, SVP & GM, IT Workflow Products, ServiceNow. "With Lightstep, ServiceNow will transform how software solutions are delivered to customers. This will ultimately make it easier for customers to innovate quickly. Now they'll be able to build and operate their software faster than ever before and take the new era of work head on with confidence.
If I remember correctly, that POS had both close and exist on the same screen performing different functions.
Exit would close the window, and also break your workflow if you had HPSM open in two browser tabs
As competitors like ServiceNow came onto the scene, they tried to create a better web client, but at least when I was still close to that product, they never quite got there. My two final HPSM projects were:
1) Building a mobile / blackberry compatible web client from scratch (HTTP/SOAP) so management types could see/approve change requests on the go
2) Migrating to ServiceNow :P
It would not surprise me at all if they had some kind of ActiveX thing going on with their web client...
So yeah, that was my petty grievance--no doubt I or the administrators could make this more pleasant. But I've never heard a single soul have anything favorable to say about SNOW. I don't know if SNOW's success is attributable to an unusually impoverished competitive landscape or if there are hidden factors (it appeals to IT's innate enmity toward the rest of the organization?), but it is surprising that SNOW survives at all.
Orgs get in trouble by trying to solve internal process inefficiencies and related people problems by throwing ServiceNow at it. The "digital" version of a shitty process is still a shitty process.
> But I've never heard a single soul have anything favorable to say about SNOW
I've been to the conferences, and there are plenty of folks who love the technology stack, and can do powerful things with it. But I suspect that most people experience the product as an end-user, and that experience is 100% dependent on the team that owns/implements the platform. There's a big difference between "We have a center of excellence for automating manual processes, and ServiceNow is part of that solution" and "We brought ServiceNow in to solve world hunger" .... ("is this thing on??...")
To understand the popularity of ServiceNow, one need only look at the legacy products it displaced: BMC Remedy, HP Service Manager, CA Service Desk, etc. ServiceNow may not be sexy by modern standards, but gives large enterprises a level of flexibility and agility that was never possible with the legacy vendors.
This analogy doesn't work here IMO. Indeed, in many respects like reliability, a Ford, Toyota or VW is actually much better than a Ferrari. They're just very different brands: one set are mass market brands and the other ones are exclusive luxury brands, and they have different features that appeal to each.
But Ford, Toyota, VW cars are certainly not "crap", and e.g. Toyota is renowned for the quality of its vehicles.
Think about regional banks, governments, utilities, oil & gas, manufacturers, field engineering services, healthcare systems, ... These aren’t exactly customers who can just use Slack instead.
Licensing cost seems to be way worse, creating a situation where users can only see their own tickets and not those of co-workers.
If your org is not that large or if it can't allocate a semi dedicated team, other products will probably have better defaults.
You take the same old software, with the same old processes, the same old salespeople and sales approach, and you make a new one that is a little shinier and (crucially) freshly made. Because you used your same old connections and investors to fund the development, you have a much better product than whatever cruft HP Service Manager, CA Service Desk or BMC Remedy have been pushing, simply because you haven't been fiddling with a product originally written in C++ in 1998 for 20 years.
Furthermore, your solution is comprehensive enough that it covers most of the existing functionality of the old products in the space, and it ticks all of the same compliance checkboxes too. So there's very little career risk associated to buying it. You even took the customer to the same old restaurant you used to take him when he was buying HP software from you!
Another popular example of this strategy is Zoom. What is Zoom? GoToMeeting/Webex, but new.
On the lower end of the market, there is more entertainment, because not everyone that had legacy products want to pay through the nose for the pleasure of dealing with an army of Service Now suits. This is where companies like Freshworks, Atlassian and ours (InvGate) come in.
Source: founder of InvGate, mid-market player in the same space
If we end-up in a similar discussion after 10\20 years, your comment would still be valid because Chatting, Operations software are part of very basic needs of any org. So, at that time, your comment also would be - "old, but new" :-)
It's a cycle and it goes on :-)
> Another popular example of this strategy is Zoom. What is Zoom? GoToMeeting/Webex, but new
Zoom is drastically better than WebEx and GoTo*. It actually works cross-platform and has much less hassle.
There is value to that, and going all the way to IPO by succeeding against second system syndrome for 10 years straight is no small feat.
This is as opposed to other companies that actually change the way things are done (i.e. GMail is not "Outlook, but new").
ServiceNow covers a wide array of our business needs without having to buy into a number of different SaaS platforms.
From what I've seen, it's much more feature complete and advanced than the competition. (Specifically, procurement)
Is it a PITA to use? Yes. But it forces best practices and the main people who interact with it will be power users anyways.
Like others said, we tried hard to not have to interact directly with SN, adding scripts and integrations into other systems.
Sold to Execs and Managers, not users.
For example, the IT Operations Management suite includes tools to collect specifications about devices without installing an agent, aggregate alerts to better assess outage impacts, and automatically generate topology maps by analyzing network traffic. It's a wholly different product that justifies some weird design decisions in the Incident/Change system, but it can help explain where Lightstep falls in the ecosystem.
Source: ServiceNow ITOM consultant who has seen customers fare better when they look beyond Incident/Problem/Change/Catalog
The people buying it aren't the same people that have to use it.
There simply is no good product in this space, at least not for enterprise clients with 1000’s of users and even more regulatory and internal requirements.
Servicenow occasionally does a spinnywheel but 99% of the time I have loaded the table I need in less than 5 seconds.
Plus:
- I can open it in multiple tabs. Not the shitty in-app tabs with unclear labels that take forever to switch, actual browser tabs. Other solutions give you a session collision if you open two tabs. In SNOW you can middle click anything.
- The search is decent.
- I dont have to click a goddamn 'form fill' button on every single field. If your form designer isn't braindead you can tab you way through the form without needing a mouse.
- I can make my own templates for common tasks and use them right away without invoking a manager. I can put my favorite templates on a toolbar instead of having to click into a sub-page.
None of these things are big asks but they are things that, as a user, the competition is chronically bad at.
It was dogshit slow, search was useless and painful to use. Most things required a mouse. Tickets got lost. The UI looks like 2006 and the UX is out of a Microsoft text book.
The fact it can be used across tabs isn't really an achievement, but if your bar is so low...
From their front page.. Appears you go back in time without Lightstep.
I have not looked into the specifics, but have a hard time believing that ServiceNow should be special in that regard.
Also, the way items are related is so far behind JIRA and TFS, that there is no competition.
If ServiceNow is the future, i prefer living in the past.
Maybe they will eventually drop JIRA for the ServiceNow agile development module but they (the deployment team that I'm not part of) have many modules to deploy before evaluating that.
If I had to sync tickets I would also wish for a Jira only workplace as I mostly do projects that require development and planning but I am almost sure that the peoples who mostly do customers and employees support would have the opposite opinion.
It's not really in the same ballpark. The decision was certainly financially motivated.
Corporate press releases [1] are a bit of an exception to some of HN's rules (such as "please submit original source") because they are suboptimal for curiosity [2]. Mostly they are bland boilerplate, and often are written to conceal as much as they reveal. So we tend to change them to the best third-party article that anyone can point us to.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
- Observability
- Security / Compliance
Seem like they're plays by the founders to get acquired by bigger firms (either for acqui-hire or just to augment their own "observability and/or security" offering).
I would be very curious to see a company that really make it big and remain independent in this area. It seems to me like DataDog has been the only successful company in this area, with some other honorable mentions (e.g. honeycomb.io, sentry, sensu etc.)
Monitoring is a brutal industry, as engineers love to build monitoring products. There is a long tail of hundreds of monitoring startups catering to every wim that are backed by only a small handful of engineers.
On the other hand, integrating a monitoring product into a company large enough to pay for the product is extraordinarily expensive. The DevOps team might want to have end-end visibility, but they can't add the library support required to make the deal work. Supporting one companies specific libraries is unlikely to pay off for other companies.
When it comes to distributed tracing, the value proposition depends on convincing every dev team in the company that this is the best solution for monitoring.
Larger companies have an easier time "cross-selling" these features, and can sometimes win deals by simply having the capability even if its never used.
If your value prop is 'we're stable and you can trust us', and your buyers are 'large enterprises that don't like to take risks', your biggest impediment if you have a great product is that you aren't part of a company like ServiceNow.
What's the saying? "The battle between every startup and incumbent comes down to whether the startup gets distribution before the incumbent gets innovation."
Even harder when you need enterprise proof-points...
Proofpoint (PFPT) is a big security / compliance company. Market cap is about half that of Datadog.
Crowdstrike (CRWD) is another big one. Twice the size of datadog.
Yikes. That's their slogan? They're not accomplishing this very well.
ADP - payroll software
Slack - chat client
ServiceNow - helpdesk software