Service-now.com's Latest Release: New Features AND New Transparency!

Service-now.com, provider of SaaS-based IT service and infrastructure management solutions, will officially announce on Feb. 5 the Winter 2009 release of its software platform. It's the company's 15 software release in more than three years, and most users never even noticed, since they were at home for the weekend. Once they got back to their computers, though, they saw some pretty nifty new and enhanced features, such as:

• The ability to open, update, and close service requests, incidents, problems, and changes from Apple iPhone, Google Android, and RIM Blackberry mobile devices, to replace those sticky notes that tend to follow IT infrastructure and service managers around;
• Powerful, role-based global search of people, policies, processes, tools, and other resources;
• Home page and dashboard layout and content management features that enable companies to leverage familiar “look and feel” features and to decide based on their unique requirements who sees what information in what forms;
• Graphical workflow features that ease and speed application creation and modification without extensive “plumbing” requirements; and
• Project management features that integrate with the software's change, release, and service level management features.

I'll have more to say about these features and why they're both important and valuable in upcoming outings. For now, suffice to say that I'm impressed with the alignment of these features with the features a lot of users I've spoken with want from their IT service and infrastructure solutions.

Equally compelling, the privately held company is also planning to disclose at least some high-level financial results, including recurring annual revenues approaching $20 million, 235 enterprise customers and 2.1 million users in 30 countries, and 18 consecutive months of positive cash flow. If the company continues moving forward through the current economic unpleasantness, as many of us expect the larger SaaS market to do, it could position itself well for sustained growth. It could also become perceived as an increasingly safe bet for those companies considering or pursuing SaaS and interested in the financial health of current or candidate vendors. Which should be all of the companies considering or pursuing SaaS. As I may have mentioned once or twice previously.

Service-now.com understands that success with SaaS is about much more than SaaS technologies. It's easier to be open when the news is good, but I've got to believe earlier, consistent openness helped to lead to Service-now.com's good news. Along with effective, useful technologies, of course.

More soon. Stay tuned.