I literally quit my job because of how much I hated working in ServiceNow. It's the worst platform I've ever had the misfortune to be forced to used. I was trying to get people to let me build replacement tools - there was so much stuff that we were paying out the ass for that we absolutely did not need with ServiceNow. It's really expensive and extremely poorly designed and you need specialized people just to maintain it. At a certain point, it makes a lot more sense to roll your own, maintain your own, and not let some company bleed you dry.
> At a certain point, it makes a lot more sense to roll your own, maintain your own, and not let some company bleed you dry.
Everyone has this thought, at some point, about any serious software. Then they try rolling their own and realize they were relying on a LOT more than they thought they were, and every change someone asks for WOULD have been checking a checkbox in what they already had.
Also, now you traded your "specialized" people for only one or two people on earth who are familiar with a bespoke application.
It's closely related to the, "just make it work like Excel" problem in software development... seems like a simple 80/20 thing until someone is literally trying to remake excel from scratch inside every bullshit little application.
But there's 2 problems with that.
First, ServiceNow itself is an Oracle imitation. A Salesforce imitation. A SAP imitation (a very bad SAP imitation), an IBM Remedy (dear GOD do I HATE IBM remedy) with as it's one "advantage" that it supports automation a bit better, you could even say these are MS Access/Dynamics imitations.
And at least you could say that (deep) under the covers Oracle and SAP have excellent software. ServiceNow does not.
Second, ServiceNow SUCKS. I mean it's not quite as bad as IBM Remedy, but it really, really tries.
I like to say that most of this software is like mounting a big, heavy metal spike on the wall and then hitting your head constantly, repeatedly, as hard as you possibly can, against the point. With one important difference: unlike with IBM Remedy, when hitting your head hard on a big metal spike, the pain stops after a while.
I have heard a few analysts mentioning that software stocks are under the threat of AI. Apparently now anyone can build enterprise software in their pajamas using AI. To the extent that this ridiculous reasoning is driving the stocks down, I think it presents a good buying opportunity. But one has to wait until the bleeding slows down a bit.
it might be more that business process can become a plain text word document, that modifying the program requires only describing the change in plain language, that the user interface to show information becomes unnecessary when you can just ask any question, that data can be loose and unstructured, even stored as images, and interpreted on the fly.
the general purpose chatbot plus a "how to" does replace needing to build esoteric specialized workflows.
Now can you explain how do you replace Service Now (service management tool cursed with the ticketing system) with a flat text file.
If it's a compelling proposal, I might share it in my company. I'll make sure to credit you in the document.
Of course in line with your radical complexity savings, I expect the comprehensive proposal to be at most one paragraph long :)
This is a huge deal in the US Enterprise space.
ServiceNow is not exactly the Operating System that companies run by (arguably ITIL or other frameworks), but its operation is (arguably) critical to making those kind of business systems work.
> The only major SaaS stock that is on the up is Oracle, with a 4% increase in stock price over the last year.
Someone wrote that with a straight face. It almost feels like the whole article's purpose was to sneak that line in there.