“Digital transformation is the opportunity of this generation,” says ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott. “If you look at the Zoom partnership as one example, all companies want simple, easy, seamless experiences for their people and their customers. This is how you transform companies. This is how you grow and this is how you navigate a digital experience to win. We’re at the forefront of the digital transformation rage in the cloud.”

Bill McDermott, CEO of ServiceNow, discusses their partnership with Zoom and how that is part of them being at the heart of the current digital transformation rage in the cloud taking place with every major company worldwide:

We’re At The Forefront Of The Digital Transformation Rage

Digital transformation is the opportunity of this generation. If you look at the Zoom partnership as one example, all companies want simple, easy, seamless experiences for their people and their customers. This is how you transform companies. This is how you grow and this is how you navigate a digital experience to win. We’re at the forefront of the digital transformation rage in the cloud. We’re super excited.

If you look at Zoom, they had 300 million users utilizing their system in the heart of this COVID crisis. I expect that will continue to grow. The question was how do you handle 300 to 400 million users, most of them concurrently on a global scale? They turn to ServiceNow to solve that problem. Our customer service management solution is like no other in the marketplace. We can not only use self-help tools for customers, but we can also use virtual agents. Best of all, most of the service that will be required when Zoom does have to remediate an issue will be done predictively on the Now platform. 

ServiceNow At The Epicenter Of Helping Zoom Innovate

Furthermore, they also want to have a hardware as a service business model that they’ll bring to offices all over the world. The idea here is simple, touch it once–instant collaboration, instant linkage to the ServiceNow workflow, and then the users get a great experience. That hardware as a service business model will be very large for them because they want to displace existing legacy vendors with their modern solution. ServiceNow is in the epicenter of helping Zoom utilizing our great innovation and ultimately taking both of these solutions to market to help many many customers around the world.

If you look at the tech sector for cloud, companies that are at the forefront of creating great digital experiences, these companies are going to continue to scale, continue to hit new highs and continue to grow. Nine out of ten CEOs have a digital-first strategy before COVID. Now I suspect that 10 out of 10 would have a digital-first strategy. It’s the only way to navigate these choppy waters. 

We Get Things Done In Days and Weeks, Not Years

The companies that will do less well, and I’m just basing this on research and current results, are the ones that have heavy time-consuming elongated project cycles or potentially commodity hardware where customers are just not going to invest in that. Whatever they invest in they want a return and they want that return to come quite quickly. In the case of ServiceNow, our business cases show 5, 6, 7 times return on investment and we get things done in days and weeks, not years. That’s what makes the big difference. Speed, value creation, and truly illuminating great employee and customer experiences are what this market is all about.

One of the things that we covered in our last earnings call is that 20 percent of our business is in one-way shape or form tied to industries that would be highly impacted by COVID. What was amazing is we didn’t have one down-sell or one cancellation in that total customer group. What you’re seeing is when you have a platform company that truly can innovate, make work actually work better for people, take cost out, and improve business productivity, that’s the last place even challenged industries are going to cut. 

We’ve been very fortunate because the partnerships that we have built with this hungry and humble culture and our near 100 percent retention rate are paying off even in the most challenging industries like the airlines, hospitality, and retail.