Is ServiceNow competing with Salesforce? We talk to Amit Zavery

Thank you.

Sure. Sure. To be very straightforward, we've been in the CRM space for many years now, right? I mean, we have been delivering. If you look at CRM market, there are multiple segments to it. There's customer service, there's salesforce automation, there's marketing automation. So we've been focused on areas where ServiceNow has a lot of natural capabilities around service management, resolution of issues, managing the whole workflow around it, and any complex workflows, how do you automate and improve that. So in CRM space, you look at the segments like customer service, it's a natural growth area for us because we've been solving customer issues, resolving their concerns, fixing things anyway for a lot of employees for many, many years, ServiceNow, and we can easily extend that capability now to customer service. So that's where our natural growth has been and we've been doing very well. Customers appreciating a modern stack, modern technology offering which can deal with complexity and can rewire a lot of things on the fly to solve customer issues. So it's been a good, good growth area. Now if you take that further, we're seeing a lot of areas around in CRM around say order management. Again, it's a complex use case. It requires a lot of workflow. It requires an outcome. It's not about just finding information but finishing a task. Just like customer service, you resolve an issue, or in order management, same thing. You finish a task and get an order shipped, the fulfillment. So that's why we are in that space because a natural extension again for ServiceNow to be able to provide all the capabilities and solve a problem every customer faces in that space today because there's a lot of things. If you look at order management, it's very fragmented pieces working across multiple different products and customers are really dealing with a lot of complexity. So we can solve that. Similarly, if you look at our acquisition, we announced about Logic.ai CPQ. What is CPQ? Configure, price, quote. It's a process very complex. You have to configure a lot of different things, but the outcome is a quote. So you are taking a lot of information, you're resolving things, you're getting approval from many people, and then getting a quote out to a customer.

Yeah. So, if you look at same thing, right? If you look at customer service, you look at order management, you look at what's happening with CPQ, there are a lot of systems out there. It's hotspots of different capabilities. People have integrated it, customized it a lot. It's not one platform. It's not one data model. It's not one way to run and operate and it's not very flexible. Right? So what we believe is that if we can provide the same kind of capabilities what ServiceNow has been doing for many, many years, wiring the enterprise and providing that capability as workflow for that space. I mean, customers really are finding a lot of value because of that where they can take a lot of the various different systems they have and connect them together. Yeah. And that's where you see the disruption. Disruption is basically people having to not wire everything very, very rigidly. The dynamic workflows we provide with AI agents, I am able to now work across many of these different siloed systems and connect those things in a much better architecture way with agentic AI as well as integration into pre-built different systems and not having as a customer having to go and keep on maintaining those things and keep on doing these things in siloed and wiring them themselves and then changing things which is not very, very easy. We are able to do much better. I may be seeing customer success now very fast and customers are appreciating the removal of those painful points they had with siloed systems today and that's the difference.

Well, again, we are not here trying to look at vendors, right? We're trying to, our view is outside in, what customer problems have been solved. And I don't think any of the existing systems customers invest in are completely going away. So we work and interoperate, right? We have a lot of customers who have CRM from vendors like Salesforce, HubSpot and others. This, okay, but can you wire just like we wired, connected today, for example, employee productivity, we wire products like Workday, UKG. Uh, we think we have systems which are coming from various bespoke environments, we were connecting them anyway and they're becoming the way people are using the systems and then we become the system of action and that's exactly what's happening in the CRM space today. Customers are relooking at how do I get value out of my millions and millions of dollars of investment today and there may be areas where they might replatform, in some areas they will connect and that's what our plan is.

Oh, we are having that today already, is in customer service. Customers are choosing us over other vendors when they find our value and our products at a better fit for the business. And we have customers, we see some of the announcements this week. Many, many customers have deployed customer service, CSM product, which is CRM. So people get very excited about that. We're calling it CRM, but that's what it is. CRM in CSM is in CRM. And somehow people like, oh my god, you're calling it CRM, but that's what it is. What, I don't know what else you call it, right? So, and they're like, okay, there's a company which is big there, so you should not be talking about CRM, which is kind of strange to me as well. Like, why not? If that's the problem I'm solving and customers are finding value and they're deploying it, why not, right? So that's the product we have delivered today and it's been very successful and we continue to interoperate and replace wherever it makes sense for customers. We are not the decision maker, customers are. So the outcome is all going to be based on can we deliver right value? Can we provide some better outcome for customers? Is it the solution which meets their needs? And does it really help them go to the future of agentic and other things they want to deploy? And so far the response we're getting from customers is very, very positive and that's why we keep on investing in it to keep on solving those problems and that's really how we should build products.

I don't think anybody has birthright in a space. It's kind of strange to say that they own a segment. I'm not saying they own. I'm saying everybody has a right to play if you can deliver the outcome. And the proof again is always going to be based on where customers are willing to find value of the solutions I'm delivering. And I don't think so anybody can claim they own the whole segment end to end and nobody else should play in it. So I think it's really going to be can we deliver capabilities for the future and reduce the pain point customers have today. If you ask many customers today, are they happy with the CRM? 90% of the customers will say no and that's a fact. So I cannot change the fact. And why is that? Because you probably did research. I'll tell you many things, right? One, the fragmentation, the platforms today between customer service, marketing, salesforce automation, order management, CPQ is very fragmented. It's a bunch of different technologies, different stacks and really, as I said in my keynote, connected by chewing gum. It is really fragile and the amount of money invested in customizing, maintaining and not being able to deploy future capabilities is really bad. It's really horrible for a lot of customers. So they are looking for alternatives to kind of take a lot of the hotspots of stuff they have built or taken from many vendors and bring some solution sanity and get some better ways to run and operate the business. So CRM, just like many other areas, I don't think so CRM is only one I would pick. A lot of areas in enterprise software when a lot of customers are frustrated and they are unhappy with a lot of the things they have over time inherited and they're trying to now maintain that fragmentation, the siloness, and try to get business value out of it. That's the change we're trying to bring in. ServiceNow has always been about how do I get value at a business process level with various systems in place. So Salesforce, Workday, UKG, SAP are no different. We work with them. Yeah. Yeah. They're all trying to make their data models better and let their... That's what we need them on the same data model. That's good. I think all vendors owe that to our customers. So I would encourage them to do more of it. But if you ask a customer today, is it there today? No. There is a problem still they're facing the amount of investment they make. If you look at the amount of millions of dollars been spent on a lot of the different pieces of CRM, it's very, very high. Yeah. And if you ask a customer, did I get my ROI on it? Most of them saying no. And you ask them why is because of fragmentation, multiple stacks, multiple technologies, not customizable, it's not future proof, a lot of the pain points. And our goal is as a trusted provider to our customers, why not solve the problem?

But they're very siloed by one area. If you look at them, they don't go end to end across all the different processes. Companies don't run by silos. The processes connect very like CPQ or when you connect that to order management and now you connect that to your employee productivity. They all need to be connected. All of them are providing pieces of which is great, but that's our job is to connect the systems together. Yeah.

We've been building it much better way for many, many years. If you look at a lot of the platforms today, they are still been built in a siloed manner. If you look at, you should talk to customers and find out from them. Do they think there's one platform across all of these things today? No other than ServiceNow.

No, I think our platform, good thing about what we've been doing and I do really get very excited about having a one architecture with one data model and one user experience and all that kind of stuff. We have built that from ground up the same way for many, many years. What I mean is that today if I have to connect 15 different things, each of them comes with different technologies. So SAP or Salesforce, they're doing a great job of solving the problems they are very good at. I'm not saying no. But when you connect those two things together, who will do that job for you? None of them are doing that. We are doing that for them.