Arne Josefsberg, CTO of ServiceNow, explored the architecture, strategy and benefits of ServiceNow’s SaaS offering and application development platform, in a live interview with theCube co-hosts Jeff Frick and Dave Vellante at the ServiceNow Knowledge conference this week.

Commenting on this year’s Knowledge conference,  Josefsberg mentioned it had been an “all around incredible experience for us,” as existing and potential customers gave very positive feedback on the ServiceNow platform and SaaS offering. Explaining his role within the company, Josefsberg said he had joined about 20 months ago, when ServiceNow was on an incredible trajectory in terms of growth.

“We’ve had some of the largest enterprises in the world on our platform,” which created a need to scale out and mature theinfrastructure. “Now my focus is on where to go next, [..] where to take the company next. “

“In the cloud space we really see the infrastructure providers they are growing a lot, but their business if very different from what we do,” Josefsberg explained. Such providers sell compute, bandwidth, and storage, the costs of which are easy for CIOs to understand. ServiceNow has both an SaaS aspect and a platform aspect, as they sell an application development platform.

One of the main benefits of the ServiceNow platform is that it enables IT to sit at the C-level table. “For IT there’s a shift from managing the infrastructure to managing the business,” and ServiceNow focuses on enabling this shift. Sales, marketing, etc. “don’t care who runs the server, they care about getting business value.” ServiceNow empowers IT to drive business value and strategy. 

Exploring the architecture of ServiceNow, Josefsberg said its beauty was its simplicity. “When it comes to large scale operations, the simpler it is, the cheaper it is to scale it out.” ServiceNow offers an application development platform that allows non-programmers to build apps. Mentioning founder Fred Luddy’s debut with the company, he said that ServiceNow started with an IT service management application suite, but “the underlying mission was to build a rapid application development platform.” It was a very powerful message, and in many ways ahead of its time, he added.

The application runs onto a set of Java virtual machines, a simple, scale-out architecture that is popular today, but was developed back in 20o4. In the back-end there is a database, everything is stored there, not just data and attachments  but also workload, business applications, everything related to the business processes a company uses.

“Our whole platform is based on open source,” Josefsberg said, highlighting MySQL and Java. “The beauty of open source that I found incredibly empowering is that you can stand on the shoulders of others.” Compared to the closed environment, it’s incredibly powerful.

“To prepare for the future, we’re introducing a NoSQL approach,” Josefsberg stated. “We don’t use it in production right now, but we want to be prepared for the future.”

“If you think about the landscape of what we do, we started in IT service management, but we have adjacent areas that have incredible potential,” he explained. One of these areas are IT operations management – automation, discovery, etc. Another one that also has incredible potential is IT business management – the type of systems that IT leaders, CIOs, VPs of operations, use. It include compliance, regulatory type of applications and ServiceNow plans to expand its offering in this segment.

“The application development platform itself opens a lot of potential for us. We want to make application development approachable for the citizen developer.” IT development projects, explained  Josefsberg, usually takes 12-18 months. By that time businesses have already moved on and the app is useless. Time to market is a critical issue. “we want to enable them to build apps very very quickly.”