What comes to mind when you hear the words “service management?” If it’s an 800 number you dial to get to a help desk, Frank Slootman, president and CEO of ServiceNow, Inc., has news for you: “Desk is a four letter word.” According to Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, Slootman once uttered that sentence to a shocked audience. “He got some boos, because people hang on to their help desk.”

What would anyone in IT have against the help desk? Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), cohost of theCUBE, tried to elucidate Slootman’s logic. “He takes it to the next level within service management, which is to do the analysis and then do the root cause analysis, so you don’t have those things repeating over and over,” he explained.

Meet ServiceNow’s ‘peeps’

“The real story around ServiceNow is around the customers, the core customers, what Slootman calls, ‘our peeps,'” said Vellante. ServiceNow prides itself on its tight relations with customers and its mixing and meshing style of acquiring.

Vellante explained ServiceNow’s unique style of acquiring; when it makes an acquisition, he said, it actually re-platforms the company into ServiceNow. And they do this within a surprisingly short time frame.

Third great estate

A recurring theme at the event has been the idea of the three great software estates: First was ERP; second was CRM; and now ServiceNow claims it is introducing a third estate. Vellante said this third estate is an overarching model that includes back office IT, sales, service and everything in between.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge16.

Photo by SiliconANGLE