Fred Luddy, Chief Product Officer for ServiceNow, discussed the company’s strategy, their interaction with customers and their approach to technology innovation with theCUBE co-hosts Jeff Frick and Dave Vellante, live from the ServiceNow Knowledge14 conference.

“I’ve always been someone who listens to customers, find out what they need, and then build the technology” that solves specific problems, Luddy said. ServiceNow does not create solutions that look for a problem to solve.

One need ServiceNow has addressed is end user interface challenges. Luddy stated “the big constraint was that people were using older versions of Internet Explorer (IE). That held it back.”

As Microsoft terminated XP and IE6 is gone,  the newer browsers allow them to take advantage of all the new capabilities and improve the UI.

On disruptive innovation

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Asked of the strategy to spur the embracing of disruptive innovation, Luddy made reference to some popular trends, saying, “where everything is being led right now is in sites like Facebook and Google where people bring their expectations of how technology should work.”
 

 
It’s the ease of use for end users Luddy referenced, making the parallel to enterprises “people are forced into a form metaphor. What we wanted to do is find a better way of working,” he explained. A solution his team put forth was having multiple columns of information flowing, with end users being able to react to data.

“We would like to be thought of as more of an Apple and Google, compared to Oracle,” Luddy said, further explaining that in Oracle’s case, the analogy is more of a financial model than an innovative technical model. Google, Facebook and the like make microscopical acquisitions, blend them into their offerings, and make them available to their customers. “We want to be innovative,” Luddy said, rather than making huge acquisitions.

Asked what the secret sauce of innovation was, Luddy stated, “my belief is that most organizations become very myopic on their own product.” He used the example Blackberry, which once had 85 percent market saturation and focused on how to make the product better. “They were looking at the current strengths, not what the market expectations were going to be.”

What drives the changes in today’s enterprise use of technology, according to Luddy, is the notion of shadow IT and people’s expectations. People see Dropbox, Evernote, and other such services and just start using them. They have a job to do, “their attitude is, ‘I will proceed till I’m apprehended,'” Luddy explained.

Asked if he was paranoid about another product replacing ServiceNow’s offerings,  Luddy said he is always paranoid. “I’m always frustrated. When we complete something, I am pretty content with it for about 30 seconds. I’ve never been happy with anything I’ve produced for more than a few minutes. I see flaws, I see opportunities.”

Building tools for today’s market

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Explaining what makes the company’s App Creator great, Luddy said “we look at the market very differently. We think about the problem to be solved and build the proper technology to solve it. We want people to do programming without realizing they are doing it.”

App Creator is a simple way to make a set of database tables that interact with each other to create applications. “We have a very appropriate set of technologies that solves tens of thousands of customer challenges,” Luddy explained.

Asked if their single system of record, along with the apps built on its framework, and the locking and queuing had become a challenge, Luddy explained that “if you look at how people get work done, there is always some field that is open. In a large part we’ve solved scalability and locking issues by putting in streams of data.”

“I think we have a lot of headroom left,” Luddy concluded, referring to ServiceNow’s largest customers and their growing need for managing massive databases.