People don’t know what they want until it’s shown to them, as the late Steve Jobs once said. This philosophy is the reason behind cloud-based IT automation vendor ServiceNow’s current expansion from providing IT help desk services to providing IT service management automation. Whether they know it yet or not, companies need to replace IT help desk services with IT service management automation—and ServiceNow thinks they’re just the provider to help them do so.

ServiceNow is all about the cloud, IT-as-a-Service and SaaS. Their expertise is in IT service management and they brought it to the cloud. They came to market with a specific solution—help desk—and they went after that with laser focus. But they are not just a help-desk vendor. In fact, it is their cloud-based proprietary platform that is helping them to expand into other areas according to Glenn O’Donnell, VP and Research Director, Infrastructure and Operations, at Forrester Research. “What’s really under the covers is a platform upon which they can build a whole bunch of other stuff,” O’Donnell told SiliconANGLE. “That’s really the secret sauce of ServiceNow.”

This expansion into other IT areas is dependent upon IT service management automation, something from which the cloud-based vendor says IT departments would greatly benefit. “We’re showing people what they can aspire to,” ServiceNow CEO Frank Slootman told theCUBE co-host John Furrier at ServiceNow Knowledge 14. Slootman was talking about inspiring IT departments to replace the monotony of repetitive IT tasks with automated services. “We’re trying to stimulate, inspire, motivate, give people a sense of mission as opposed to [having them feel like they’re just] keeping the lights on, managing crises, running around with [their] hair on fire.”

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The proving ground for cloud adoption

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Most often, ServiceNow competes with legacy system providers such as HP, CA, BMC Software and IBM. As they move outside of IT, ServiceNow’s competition often includes the spreadsheets that are being used to manage processes now. “Or point products that lack the single system of record and robust development capabilities of the ServiceNow platform,” added Shane Jackson, Director of Marketing at ServiceNow, in an interview with SiliconANGLE.

ServiceNow’s portfolio of cloud-based software automates and manages IT services across the enterprise. Their products are built on a single cloud platform and they are already automating service relationships outside IT. “We offer applications like HR Service Automation as part of our portfolio,” explained Jackson. “And our customers are building thousands of applications on their own to solve business problems in all kinds of different functions and lines of business outside IT.

For example, Red Hat has been a ServiceNow customer for a couple of years now. According to Mike Carraway, Senior IT Director at Red Hat, this is in part because of ServiceNow’s cloud-based automation expertise which helps Red Hat in its quest to be the proving ground for cloud adoption in the enterprise.

“We try to prove out our own tools,” Carraway told theCUBE cohosts Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick at ServiceNow Knowledge 14. “But one of the things that led us to ServiceNow is we also try to be a proving ground just around the cloud in general, as Red Hat looks to go to the cloud as an organization, we as an IT shop are making a big push into the cloud.”

More than ever, Jackson said that ServiceNow customers are using their platform to create and manage services beyond the IT department. “In fact, our 1Q14 results [recently] announced…showed that 34 percent of our annual contract value signed in the quarter were upsells—or ones that were beyond the standard IT functions—into HR, marketing, facilities, finance and more.”

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Service is everything

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The market opportunity for ServiceNow since Slootman joined the company three years ago has evolved dramatically. “The expansion from what used to be called Help Desk Management to IT Service Management has basically exploded the market at least five-fold,” Slootman said. “Service is everywhere and service is everything.”

ServiceNow will continue to try to help customers expand its platform to assist with more enterprise services. ServiceNow said its vision is to extend this into every department and to every service. “In most companies, this is a greenfield opportunity,” Jackson explained, “since marketing, HR, finance and other departments often rely on piece-meal processes such as emails, faxes and spreadsheets to make requests and resolve issues.” Jackson said typical task include ordering new equipment, on-boarding a new employee or adding a new vendor.

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Automation: A social imperative

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Companies often view service management automation as it relates to human resources, frequently fearing that automation tools such as ServiceNow’s will replace a lot of their people. But should that scare prospective customers away? In other words, why is now the right time for automation, for IT service management automation in particular?

According to Slootman, companies should not fear the change that automation brings but instead embrace the changes. After all, he is confident that, in the economy at large, we’re going to soon see a massive substitution from people to systems. This is because, he said, the technology and the economic imperative are both here. “It’s very much a societal and social question,” Slootman explained. “But here’s the thing: What’s the alternative? Are we going to try and stop it and not do it? It’s going to happen. Markets are going to run their course. What needs to happen is that we adjust.”

ServiceNow is positioning itself to be the company that helps companies adjust to this societal and social trend. ServiceNow started to shift gears about a year ago, Slootman said, “from the operational infrastructure concentration” that they had to “really starting to drive, strategically, the business towards enterprise service management and…expanding the [total addressable market (TAM)] way beyond where we’d been before.”

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Watch theCUBE interview at Knowledge 14 with ServiceNow CEO Frank Slootman here:

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