Red-hot information technology service management provider ServiceNow Inc. beat every metric that matters today as it announced stronger-than-expected fourth-quarter results.

Highlighting the quarter at the Santa Clara, California-based company were a 41 percent jump in subscription revenues and 35 percent growth in total revenues. Full-year sales of $1.39 billion grew 38 percent over the previous year, an impressive statistic for a company of that size.

Investors liked what they saw. In after-hours trading, ServiceNow stock leapt nearly 6 percent.

And there are no signs of a slowdown for the company, whose annual sales have nearly doubled in the past two years. The company also has set an ambitious goal of reaching $4 billion in revenues by 2020.

ServiceNow forecast current-quarter revenues of between $406 million to $411 million, ahead of analyst projections of $403 million. The company said full-year revenues should come in between $1.82 and $1.85 billion, moderately above consensus estimates of $1.8 billion.

Central to that growth strategy is positioning IT service management, or ITSM, as a platform upon which other capabilities can be built, much as SAP SE did in enterprise resource planning two decades ago. With new products in the areas of application development, security, customer service and human resources, ServiceNow is hoping it can prove out the analogy.

On the company’s quarterly earnings call, a confident Chief Executive Frank Slootman (pictured) said that in ITSM, there is almost no competition any more. “Customers are dropping all pretense that there is anybody else in the mix,” Slootman said. “They’re conceding that ‘you guys are the ones,’ and it goes from there.”

Although the sales process isn’t so simple in other parts of the business, Slootman said the core platform is driving plenty of additional sales. He cited one account that bought $11 million worth of the new services last year after starting with a $1 million ITSM investment.

Diversification push

ServiceNow company mounted a renewed push in 2016 into IT operations management, known as ITOM, led by its ServiceWatch Suite. “The pairing of ITOM and ITSM is very strategic,” Slootman said. “It’s a key reason for customers to swallow the entire platform strategy instead of small subsets.” He said the goal of deriving 15 percent of annual revenues from ITOM by 2020 is realistic, particularly since ITOM was 21 percent of revenues in the fourth quarter.

ServiceNow plans to grow its workforce to 6,000 global employees next year, up from 3,600 in 2015. The number of global 2000 customers it adds every quarter has actually accelerated over the past two years. The company estimates its North American Global 2000 penetration at 58 percent, but only 13 percent in Asia-Pacific.

“ServiceNow has taken its foothold in the boring IT help desk/service management space and transformed it into a rich platform for service automation for both IT and certain business lines,” said David Vellante, chief analyst at Wikibon, a sister company of SiliconANGLE. “In my view it’s going to end up competing against leaders like Salesforce.com.”

Slootman would probably agree. Prodded by analysts to identify reasons why sales might eventually level off, he predicted, “We will be able to come up forever with new opportunities to sell.” The only obstacles to growth, he added, are that “we have to give our sales and marketing team some time to equip themselves.”

Slootman spoke to SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile studio theCUBE last May at the company’s Knowledge conference:

Image via theCUBE

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