GOAT of the Year: ServiceNow

ServiceNow, recipient of this year’s Pure Storage Breakthrough Greatest of All Time Award, is one of the world’s fastest-growing tech companies and the first major cloud provider to move to an all-flash data center.

Michele Jackson

May 21, 2021

4 minutes

Case Study Pure//Accelerate

Achieving “Greatest of All Time” status is no easy feat. But when you see it, you know it. One look at ServiceNow and you’ll see what we mean.

ServiceNow is one of the fastest-growing and most admired tech companies globally, thanks in part to its relentless focus on people. Its cloud-based digital workflow solutions are all about making the world of work work better for people.

As the senior director of cloud capacity engineering at ServiceNow, Keith Martin guided the IT team to modernize the storage environment and help customers thrive. And in the process, ServiceNow became the first major cloud provider to move to an all-flash data center. This standout performance is why we selected ServiceNow as the inaugural recipient of the Pure Storage® G.O.A.T Customer Award.

Putting People First Fuels Industry-Leading Growth—and a Lot of Data

ServiceNow has become a trusted leader in the highly competitive tech world by doing everything it can to support its customers. As a result, the company has grown 40% year over year with a 97% renewal rate—a powerful testament to the value of putting people first.

To maintain that strong growth and competitive edge, ServiceNow must stay at the top of its game. The company hosts 6,900 customer instances on its enterprise cloud infrastructure, each customized to fit unique business requirements and constantly evolving as customers add functionality to their digital workflows. The infrastructure buzzes with activity—64 billion database queries, 291 million HTTP requests, 46 million API calls, and 571 terabytes of backup data, all in a single hour.

Supporting customers’ development cycles meant Martin and his team ran 2.4 million backups and 5,000 database restores every month. No small task. They spent a lot of time bending over backward to ensure the legacy storage system’s lagging performance didn’t impact service levels for customers.

The Turning Point: Status Quo or a Whole New Approach to Storage?

When it came to storage, ServiceNow was at a crossroads. Martin’s team could continue to add capacity and staff to handle increasing data volumes—doing more work for less gain—or they could transform their approach.

They opted for transformation, creating a Modern Data Experience™ to support thousands of customers in the cloud as they build digital workflows that unlock productivity and improve employee experiences. ServiceNow is Pure Storage’s first customer to transition to an all-flash data center, helping Martin and the team deliver a better experience and a faster time to market for the people they work with every day—their customers.

“All the work we do as an organization has a single unifying purpose—to make work work better for people,” says Martin. “On the cloud infrastructure team, it’s our job to make it as easy as possible for our customers to modernize their business processes, and Pure helps us achieve that.”

It’s a valuable partnership on both sides. As the first company to use FlashBlade® as a rapid restore solution, ServiceNow helped Pure Storage refine the functionality, not only meeting its own needs but also creating a better Pure offering in the end.

Greatness Is All about People (with Technology to Help)

With Martin’s leadership on all-flash storage for the cloud infrastructure, ServiceNow is positioned for continued growth and a competitive edge, with unmatched speed and reliability for customers.

Maintaining high service levels for customers has become much easier because the storage just works—no more workarounds to overcome performance limitations. And the team can manage a storage environment that’s 10 times larger without adding staff. That gives them room to take a more strategic role in the business, helping ServiceNow capitalize on emerging technologies such as advanced analytics and AI.

Looking back on this journey, we’re still amazed at the work Martin and his team have done. Not only did ServiceNow become the first cloud provider to have an all-flash data center, but it has maintained an unwavering focus on the customer experience—and on people. And that’s what makes a company great. Congratulations to ServiceNow on earning the Pure Storage GOAT Award!

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