Platform-as-a-service provider ServiceNow is making serious waves in the Australian Cloud market with double digit quarterly growth and a rapidly expanding the customer base.
It now has more than 160 Australian customers including AGL Energy, Deakin University, Service Stream, Pacific Aluminium, Orica, Upstream Print Solutions, Echo Entertainment and Parks Victoria.
It is also one of the fastest growing public companies on the New York Stock Exchange and has a market value hovering around $6 billion.
ServiceNow helps companies create a single system of record for IT and automate manual tasks, standardise processes and consolidate legacy systems.
It also helps customers create custom applications and evolve the IT service model.
ServiceNow chief strategist officer, Chris Pope, told ARN companies were transforming their legacy service platforms in response to disruptive technology.
"When you look at the dinosaurs like IBM and BMC, they just don't have the agility anymore to compete," he said.
"We are seeing really disruptive technology, where customers are moving to the service platform, the transformation is happening all over the world."
ServiceNow has 8-10 Australian channel partners including Fujitsu, Cloud Sherpas and Keystone.
Pope said the company was looking to grow its customer base 10-15 per cent every quarter.
"We have had way north of double digits growth and, certainly in Australia, we will look to add 10-15 new customers this quarter," he said.
"Our technology works, it does what it says on the tin. Nobody does what we do in the market."
However, according to a recent report by Ovum, Cloud services adoption, though expected to grow, remains at micro-niche levels in many Australian organisations with only 3 per cent of IT activities currently Cloud-sourced.
As a result, many organisations are left to manage disparate platforms and services in-house, making IT more costly, more demanding with increased dedicated IT staff needed and inherently more risky.
Pope said companies needed to re-think their approach to their Cloud strategy and IT, including automating, consolidating and streamlining processes, so IT departments could focus their efforts on being a source to manage enterprise service relationships.
As more tools, systems, data and solutions are implemented into organisations, the ability to track, monitor and manage these becomes virtually impossible.
"This obsession with purchasing new tools leaves IT departments with disparate, siloed systems, which means they are spending more time on completing manual processes then actually completing value-added tasks that solve real business problems," he said
"For so long, IT has been kept busy by putting out fires and keeping the lights on that the management of IT services becomes an afterthought.
Earlier this month, ServiceNow released Share, which allows developers to quickly search, evaluate, view, rate and download apps, app extensions, code snippets, orchestrations, integrations and dashboards provided by ServiceNow-authenticated customers and partners without charge.
