ServiceNow: Competing with Jira & Datadog

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Given the broad product portfolio that ServiceNow does have, are there any products that you’ve evaluated that you don’t currently use? If so, I’m curious why you might not have adopted any of those products.

Another reason is that, historically, we had dev ops separate. This is part of the things I’ve changed where we’ve had developer and ops in separate organizations; when you think about true integrated dev ops, that does integrate code life cycle into the process so it doesn’t just start with the incident, it starts with when the code was tested, in which environment, who wrote it etc. ServiceNow has less desirable solutions than true dev ops software platforms such as Datadog, so that’s ITSM.

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Given the software intensive nature of the work that you’re doing and that you’re offering a SaaS solution, when I think about the largest direct competitor to ServiceNow on the ITSM side, for me Jira Service Management comes to mind for the reasons you’ve mentioned, because it’s directly tied to Jira and companies such as your own where the developers are working largely out of Jira, them moving into Jira Service Management is a natural evolution. I think in one of the screening questions you mentioned that you’re not currently using Jira Service Management so I’m just curious, could you explain why not use Jira Service Management? How do you think about the competition between those two companies in that specific product category?

I’m not sure about any feature set that Jira’s missing because honestly, maybe the UI in ServiceNow is better in that area, but again that is something that evolves and can be fixed. I think it’s a big threat and the reason is more historical; it’s like a separate ops team that is not too familiar with Jira and adopts ServiceNow; they like to use ServiceNow and they use ServiceNow learning and flow management etc. To my knowledge, everything we use in ServiceNow does exist in Jira and it is our plan to look into that more closely.

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For ServiceNow, I think, their response to your comments in terms of Jira’s offering being similar -what they would probably say is that, maybe, if you’re looking for a stand-alone ITSM solution, Jira can do a lot of the similar things, but if you’re looking more for an IT platform for your enterprise and you want to expand into different products – whether that’s IT asset management, GRC, security ops, you mentioned already ITOM, CSM – if you’re looking for a broader unified platform then I think that’s where they tend to stand apart. What are your thoughts on that view? Does it carry weight? Does it have merit or are there shortcomings that outweigh that?

It’s a good question, it does have merit. You mentioned Jira, for example; if you don’t use necessarily the ‘best of breed’ or different solutions, it has merit. However, where it really falls apart is when you think about the dev sec ops transition because the way they are presenting it – and I can understand why – it’s kind of the IT holistic end-to-end view that is driving the adoption of who will be the all-in-one or most-in-one solution. In companies that are truly software-driven, software as a service, have true dev ops and so on, I would argue that the integration that matters is neither IT or ops folks are communicating through one tool, but it’s the visibility of the software delivery that drives everything. What matters more? Understanding the software, the code change that caused a problem with one of our big customers and how it’s getting handled, who is working on it, who is going to deliver it, which is the dev ops integration with Jira? Or that we know that everything that needs to come together in order for us to work with a customer is in one single pane of glass, like the contractual obligations; even that is probably also more in Salesforce? I think that if IT was truly king, then maybe this argument is valid, but in today’s world, it’s software that’s king in the enterprises that I’m familiar with. That’s probably the weakest area of ServiceNow.

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