A winning technology strategy in today’s economy requires one of two things: disruption or innovation. ServiceNow has positioned itself to take advantage of both, while also maintaining its core vision. According to Dave Wright, chief strategy officer at ServiceNow, “From a features perspective, what we’re looking to do is get anyone to build anything that’s managing anything to do with work. That’s the main drive for it. If you’re giving someone a task they need to do, this should be the place they go to do it.”

Building a vibrant developer community

That simple vision has carried the company far. But as competition in the application market heats up, ServiceNow has had to innovate by building a vibrant developer community, Wright said in an interview with theCUBE at ServiceNow’s Knowledge15 event in Las Vegas. “What we’ve realized as a company is that we can never build everything …. and that’s why you see people going out there into areas that we didn’t expect. That’s where you’ve got people doing medical asset management …. [and] pharmaceutical type apps. So really from a verticalization perspective, I’m hoping that we see a lot of independent developers or partners coming up for this.”

But the enterprise software market is a hard one to disrupt, even though much of the software is outdated. “The disconnect … is the fact that the software you use outside of the enterprise is better than the software that you use inside of the enterprise. Now, that’s created a kind of generation gap where people arrive and look at enterprise software and go, ‘Why are you doing it this way? Why haven’t we got the same experience we have with other applications?’”

Younger employees want the Uber or Airbnb experience when they use company software — they don’t want to have to call their parents and ask them to explain how a database works.

Streamlining and creating processes

But at its core, ServiceNow’s biggest disruption to the enterprise software market is still about streamlining and creating processes. It’s the (still) radical idea that companies can take unstructured work formats and let everyone engage and manage their work in the same way, eliminating waste and frustration and empowering employees instead of making them learn dozens of pieces of software to perform simple tasks.

“You don’t have to train people how to use all the front ends then. From a productivity perspective, you get someone in to teach them one UI; you’re done across the board,” Wright said.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 15.