[HN Gopher] ServiceNow acquires Lightstep
___________________________________________________________________
ServiceNow acquires Lightstep
Author : mlke
Score : 70 points
Date : 2021-05-10 16:45 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.zdnet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.zdnet.com)
| Oddskar wrote:
| "the leading digital workflow company that makes work, work
| better for people"
|
| Yikes. That's their slogan? They're not accomplishing this very
| well.
| rchaud wrote:
| Tech valuations would collapse if every company boiled down
| their product offering to a couple of words.
|
| ADP - payroll software
|
| Slack - chat client
|
| ServiceNow - helpdesk software
| tehalex wrote:
| acquisition might have been their strategy all long, but I can't
| see ServiceNow doing anything but strangling what was a cool tool
| - though maybe in the best case some observability will carry
| over to huge enterprises
| dang wrote:
| We changed the url from
| https://www.servicenow.com/company/media/press-room/servicen...,
| which is a corporate press release, to a third-party article
| which gives more background. If anyone knows a better article we
| can change it again.
|
| Corporate press releases [1] are a bit of an exception to some of
| HN's rules (such as "please submit original source") because they
| are suboptimal for curiosity [2]. Mostly they are bland
| boilerplate, and often are written to conceal as much as they
| reveal. So tend to change them to the best third-party article
| that anyone can point us to.
|
| [1]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
|
| [2]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
| ec109685 wrote:
| It boggles me that ServiceNow is as popular as it is. The
| software is dreadful to use. We try as hard as possible to avoid
| anyone ever having to use it through slack bots, data exports,
| etc.
|
| And this paragraph says nothing (what company isn't already
| digital?):
|
| _Companies are betting on going digital in order to thrive in
| the 21st century, but the transition is often challenging to
| navigate, " said Pablo Stern, SVP & GM, IT Workflow Products,
| ServiceNow. "With Lightstep, ServiceNow will transform how
| software solutions are delivered to customers. This will
| ultimately make it easier for customers to innovate quickly. Now
| they'll be able to build and operate their software faster than
| ever before and take the new era of work head on with
| confidence._
| gomox wrote:
| ServiceNow is a classic Enterprise software play that I like to
| call "old, but new".
|
| You take the same old software, with the same old processes,
| the same old salespeople and sales approach, and you make a new
| one that is a little shinier and (crucially) freshly made.
| Because you used your same old connections and investors to
| fund the development, you have a much better product than
| whatever cruft HP Service Manager, CA Service Desk or BMC
| Remedy have been pushing, simply because you haven't been
| fiddling with a product originally written in C++ in 1998 for
| 20 years.
|
| Furthermore, your solution is comprehensive enough that it
| covers most of the existing functionality of the old products
| in the space, and it ticks all of the same compliance
| checkboxes too. So there's very little career risk associated
| to buying it. You even took the customer to the same old
| restaurant you used to take him when he was buying HP software
| from you!
|
| Another popular example of this strategy is Zoom. What is Zoom?
| GoToMeeting/Webex, but new.
|
| On the lower end of the market, there is more entertainment,
| because not everyone that had legacy products want to pay
| through the nose for the pleasure of dealing with an army of
| Service Now suits. This is where companies like Freshworks,
| Atlassian and ours (InvGate) come in.
|
| Source: founder of InvGate, mid-market player in the same space
| mandeepj wrote:
| > "old, but new"
|
| If we end-up in a similar discussion after 10\20 years, your
| comment would still be valid because Chatting, Operations
| software are part of very basic needs of any org. So, at that
| time, your comment also would be - "old, but new" :-)
|
| It's a cycle and it goes on :-)
| sofixa wrote:
| You're spot on, besides this part:
|
| > Another popular example of this strategy is Zoom. What is
| Zoom? GoToMeeting/Webex, but new
|
| Zoom is drastically better than WebEx and GoTo*. It actually
| works cross-platform and has much less hassle.
| gomox wrote:
| I agree that it's better, but that's the point. It's better
| in the same way that Service Now is better than HP Service
| Manager: It's essentially the same product, but started
| from scratch 10-20 years later.
|
| There is value to that, and going all the way to IPO by
| succeeding against second system syndrome for 10 years
| straight is no small feat.
|
| This is as opposed to other companies that actually change
| the way things are done (i.e. GMail is not "Outlook, but
| new").
| n0us wrote:
| If it boggles you then I take it you've never used HP Service
| Manager
| jordache wrote:
| I used it like 7 years ago..
|
| If I remember correctly, that POS had both close and exist on
| the same screen performing different functions.
| jlund-molfese wrote:
| Yes! Close would attempt to change the status of a ticket
| from Open to Closed, but often fail along the way with a
| cryptic error about the RADstack being 99% full.
|
| Exit would close the window, and also break your workflow
| if you had HPSM open in two browser tabs
| wdb wrote:
| Is that the one that was .net activex app in the browser?
| haswell wrote:
| For a very long time, HP Service Manager didn't really have
| a functioning web client at all. Customizing and
| distributing the thick client to end users was just part of
| the fun that came with managing that platform.
|
| As competitors like ServiceNow came onto the scene, they
| tried to create a better web client, but at least when I
| was still close to that product, they never quite got
| there. My two final HPSM projects were:
|
| 1) Building a mobile / blackberry compatible web client
| from scratch (HTTP/SOAP) so management types could
| see/approve change requests on the go
|
| 2) Migrating to ServiceNow :P
|
| It would not surprise me at all if they had some kind of
| ActiveX thing going on with their web client...
| leokennis wrote:
| Oh wow. I still remember having to create change records in
| HP Service Center. You had to have split screen, with all
| text (change description, list of impacted CI's etc.) besides
| it in notepad. Then it was quick hand-eye coordination and
| quick CTRL-C - CTRL-V. Too slow? You'd hit the timeout on the
| last screen and could start over!
| bob1029 wrote:
| I remember using ServiceNow in the finance industry many years
| ago. It was a fairly comprehensive dumpster fire back then.
| This above paragraph does not bode well for future
| improvements.
| CamelCaseName wrote:
| So funny to see people complain about ServiceNow.
|
| ServiceNow covers a wide array of our business needs without
| having to buy into a number of different SaaS platforms.
|
| From what I've seen, it's much more feature complete and
| advanced than the competition. (Specifically, procurement)
|
| Is it a PITA to use? Yes. But it forces best practices and the
| main people who interact with it will be power users anyways.
| splistud wrote:
| For all their flaws, platforms like this, Remedy, etc are a
| breath of fresh air for enterprises if the rollout is decent
| TheRealWatson wrote:
| I don't know about the main people being power users. When I
| worked at a company that used it, virtually all of
| Engineering, Support, and Product were constantly using
| ServiceNow's horrendous UI to deal with customers and
| internal IT workflows.
|
| Like others said, we tried hard to not have to interact
| directly with SN, adding scripts and integrations into other
| systems.
| sharken wrote:
| Apparently it is as simple as ServiceNow is approved for GDPR
| related use, while JIRA or TFS is not.
|
| I have not looked into the specifics, but have a hard time
| believing that ServiceNow should be special in that regard.
|
| Also, the way items are related is so far behind JIRA and TFS,
| that there is no competition.
|
| If ServiceNow is the future, i prefer living in the past.
| nick__m wrote:
| Where I work ServiceNow and JIRA are complementary. We manage
| operation and support with sevicenow and manage development
| with JIRA.
|
| Maybe they will eventually drop JIRA for the ServiceNow agile
| development module but they (the deployment team that I'm not
| part of) have many modules to deploy before evaluating that.
| schnevets wrote:
| It boggles me that ServiceNow succeeds even though their most
| ubiquitous product, IT Service Management, is also their worst.
| There are less half-baked products besides the ticketing
| system.
|
| For example, the IT Operations Management suite includes tools
| to collect specifications about devices without installing an
| agent, aggregate alerts to better assess outage impacts, and
| automatically generate topology maps by analyzing network
| traffic. It's a wholly different product that justifies some
| weird design decisions in the Incident/Change system, but it
| can help explain where Lightstep falls in the ecosystem.
|
| Source: ServiceNow ITOM consultant who has seen customers fare
| better when they look beyond Incident/Problem/Change/Catalog
| hrpnk wrote:
| Given ITSM their weak spot - what's a good alternative for IT
| Service Management?
| gomox wrote:
| Usual suspects are Freshservice, Jira Service Desk and our
| (very) own InvGate Service Desk (demo instance link below
| because how can I not pitch my own product??).
|
| https://webdemo.cloud.invgate.net/
| rchaud wrote:
| >The software is dreadful to use.
|
| The people buying it aren't the same people that have to use
| it.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Agreed. This is a particularly petty grievance but it boggles
| the mind that the landing page for ordinary users is some
| backend ticket management view and the thing users _want_ is
| the cushy ticket requesting page with the view of their active
| tickets and so on which is unfortunately buried behind some
| unmemorable path and which is not linked to from the obscenely
| noisy landing page (or any of its network of pages that most
| users don 't care about at all). If you're smart, you create a
| bookmark and move on with life, but I keep treating it like
| it's the last time I'll need that stupid link and of course
| that's entirely my fault. But still, designing software that
| requires individual users to manage bookmarks is insane.
|
| So yeah, that was my petty grievance--no doubt I or the
| administrators could make this more pleasant. But I've never
| heard a single soul have anything favorable to say about SNOW.
| I don't know if SNOW's success is attributable to an unusually
| impoverished competitive landscape or if there are hidden
| factors (it appeals to IT's innate enmity toward the rest of
| the organization?), but it is surprising that SNOW survives at
| all.
| haswell wrote:
| Having worked at a company with a ServiceNow implementation,
| I think I'd summarize my experience as: ServiceNow can be
| transformative when implemented by a competent team, or
| utterly useless when not managed well or left as-is upon
| deployment.
|
| Orgs get in trouble by trying to solve internal process
| inefficiencies and related people problems by throwing
| ServiceNow at it. The "digital" version of a shitty process
| is still a shitty process.
|
| > But I've never heard a single soul have anything favorable
| to say about SNOW
|
| I've been to the conferences, and there are plenty of folks
| who love the technology stack, and can do powerful things
| with it. But I suspect that most people experience the
| product as an end-user, and that experience is 100% dependent
| on the team that owns/implements the platform. There's a big
| difference between "We have a center of excellence for
| automating manual processes, and ServiceNow is part of that
| solution" and "We brought ServiceNow in to solve world
| hunger" .... ("is this thing on??...")
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Reminds me of SharePoint. Some people swear by it, but my
| impression is that it's something that incompetent managers
| buy and then have to shell out later for "SharePoint
| consultants" to come in and actually make it useful for
| your organization (and whether or not it is useful depends
| on the quality of said consultants) and the best you can
| hope for is a solution that is 80% as nice (from a user
| perspective, not an IT perspective) and 2000+% the cost of
| GSuite.
| rasputnik6502 wrote:
| Yes, if someone can enlighten me - what is so great about this
| software, by looking at their product's growth and popularity i
| was expecting something extraordinary. Then i had to use it and
| it was pretty boring, unintuitive, unsophisticated CRUD
| framework for tracking stuff and it wasn't clear at all where
| is the value it provides over thousands of other applications
| of such kind.
| leokennis wrote:
| The big plus of ServiceNow is that it's slightly less
| terrible than the competition.
|
| There simply is no good product in this space, at least not
| for enterprise clients with 1000's of users and even more
| regulatory and internal requirements.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| To me the best thing is that it is decently quick compared to
| other systems that I have used. Querying a table directly in
| SQL? Instant. Querying that same table in Remedy? 30 seconds.
| I'm sure the people behind Remedy have a great reason for it,
| but I do not care.
|
| Servicenow occasionally does a spinnywheel but 99% of the
| time I have loaded the table I need in less than 5 seconds.
|
| Plus:
|
| - I can open it in multiple tabs. Not the shitty in-app tabs
| with unclear labels that take forever to switch, actual
| browser tabs. Other solutions give you a session collision if
| you open two tabs. In SNOW you can middle click anything.
|
| - The search is decent.
|
| - I dont have to click a goddamn 'form fill' button on every
| single field. If your form designer isn't braindead you can
| tab you way through the form without needing a mouse.
|
| - I can make my own templates for common tasks and use them
| right away without invoking a manager. I can put my favorite
| templates on a toolbar instead of having to click into a sub-
| page.
|
| None of these things are big asks but they are things that,
| as a user, the competition is chronically bad at.
| sofixa wrote:
| Maybe it depends on the deployment, but my SNOW experience
| was the polar opposite.
|
| It was dogshit slow, search was useless and painful to use.
| Most things required a mouse. Tickets got lost. The UI
| looks like 2006 and the UX is out of a Microsoft text book.
|
| The fact it can be used across tabs isn't really an
| achievement, but if your bar is so low...
| haswell wrote:
| "Going digital" is a continuous process, and while I hear what
| you're saying, SaaS vendors like ServiceNow have been pushing
| "digitizing processes" hard in the pandemic era, because most
| companies still have a long backlog of manual/paper processes
| left to "digitize".
|
| To understand the popularity of ServiceNow, one need only look
| at the legacy products it displaced: BMC Remedy, HP Service
| Manager, CA Service Desk, etc. ServiceNow may not be sexy by
| modern standards, but gives large enterprises a level of
| flexibility and agility that was never possible with the legacy
| vendors.
| dang wrote:
| (That quote is from the original submitted article,
| https://www.servicenow.com/company/media/press-
| room/servicen..., which we've since changed - more at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27109670)
| wppick wrote:
| I've had some realizations recently around this. The quality of
| the software is in my opinion not a huge factor for the success
| of the company. Look at car companies like Ford, Toyota, VW.
| Compared to a Ferrari, Porsche, Bentley they are crap, but yet
| they are still relatively successful companies in their space.
| Software is sold to managers. How they make their purchasing
| decisions is the biggest factor, which comes down to how good
| the salesperson they interact with is, and their decision
| making framework. Even if you could make a better platform than
| service now, you still probably couldn't convince the decision
| maker to use your software instead. Things like how much they
| trust the company will be around long term, the support
| offered, the list of "features", personal relationships are
| usually more important. A company is more than just the overall
| relative quality of the product.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Look at car companies like Ford, Toyota, VW. Compared to a
| Ferrari, Porsche, Bentley they are crap, but yet they are
| still relatively successful companies in their space.
|
| This analogy doesn't work here IMO. Indeed, in many respects
| like reliability, a Ford, Toyota or VW is actually much
| better than a Ferrari. They're just very different brands:
| one set are mass market brands and the other ones are
| exclusive luxury brands, and they have different features
| that appeal to each.
|
| But Ford, Toyota, VW cars are certainly not "crap", and e.g.
| Toyota is renowned for the quality of its vehicles.
| leesalminen wrote:
| Ford and Toyota don't belong in the same sentence when it
| comes to the quality of its vehicles.
| wppick wrote:
| Yes, it's not a perfect comparison... But if you were to
| ask someone who regularly drives (or is driven in) A
| Bentley whether a Toyota RAV4 is crap they will probably
| say yes. Why? Because what's important to them is the
| luxury, and the bells and whistles of their Bentley.
| Compare this to software where they largely have the same
| "features", but one platform is easier to use than the
| other. Is the software that is easier to use "luxury
| software"?
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I'm not at all a fan of ServiceNow, but it's primary use is for
| huge organizations, up to and including entire government
| departments with hundreds of distinct contractors and client
| agencies. There is no practical way to use Slack bots to manage
| ticketing and work tracking when you have tens of thousands of
| users and Slack is not approved for any kind of controlled data
| (PII, PHI, CUI, Classified, Proprietary) and doesn't offer a
| self-hosted version.
| foolfoolz wrote:
| service now has horrible defaults. access is so restricted
| you can't see anyone's name and no one can see your ticket
| but you. you can submit something and have it not move and
| have no idea who to talk to. then your communication tools
| become part of the service now workflow
| wil421 wrote:
| That's your companies implementation and your lack of roles
| in the platform.
| sharken wrote:
| And the list continues: Emails are displayed in full as
| comments, creating a hopeless high amount of noise.
|
| Licensing cost seems to be way worse, creating a situation
| where users can only see their own tickets and not those of
| co-workers.
| nick__m wrote:
| You need a "pizza sized" implementation team to deploy a
| useful servicenow instance into a moderately large
| organization (+1000 FTE).
|
| If your org is not that large or if it can't allocate a
| semi dedicated team, other products will probably have
| better defaults.
| r00fus wrote:
| Perhaps this is due to compliance. In enterprise space,
| what you describe is a feature.
| gk1 wrote:
| It's easy to forget this if you work in tech, but there are
| many, many enterprises still stuck with spreadsheets and legacy
| software even worse than ServiceNow.
|
| Think about regional banks, governments, utilities, oil & gas,
| manufacturers, field engineering services, healthcare systems,
| ... These aren't exactly customers who can just use Slack
| instead.
| jollybean wrote:
| They are an Enterprise Product, meaning they tick a massive
| number of boxes, have a big salesforce, can be a default
| solution on major purchases.
|
| Sold to Execs and Managers, not users.
| zxienin wrote:
| It amuses me, that you could say everything above verbatim, if
| you replaced Bill McDemott's SNOW with his past (SAP).
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| ServiceNow is single-highhandedly the worst software I have
| ever used.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| Clearly you never used BMC Remedy...
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| Seconded.
| Idiot211 wrote:
| You genuinely just gave me chills. I've not had to use
| Remedy in a long time. I'm fortunate that I have not
| rasputnik6502 wrote:
| I've been re-implementing Remedy functionality for a
| telecom operator around year 2000. They decided to go
| with custom software because Remedy was horrible. I
| wonder what kind of horribility it is now, 20 years
| later. And we still have to use ITSM systems that look
| and feel almost exactly the same like 20 years ago. How
| it's possible, the ideas behind these tools are not
| exactly rocket science, simple ticket tracking with some
| standardized data structure and relationships - nothing
| that you couldn't put together in a month. I wonder why
| companies even buy these tools, probably you could have
| much better system developed for you and your specific
| needs for 10% of what it costs to buy certified ITSM
| system.
| [deleted]
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| My company switched few months ago from ServiceNow to OTRS.
| It's awful. I wish we just kept ,,the good old" ServiceNow.
| gomox wrote:
| OTRS is not really a competitor. It's a crusty open source
| solution whose only advantage over ServiceNow is that it
| doesn't cost upwards of $1000/user.
|
| It's not really in the same ballpark. The decision was
| certainly financially motivated.
| buzer wrote:
| If you think ServiceNow is dreadful, you probably haven't seen
| many of it competitors.
| Mandatum wrote:
| >
| https://images.ctfassets.net/d3bkzhxwv8fv/4Yp9zWrgcGEFUMOvSS...
|
| From their front page.. Appears you go back in time without
| Lightstep.
| sethammons wrote:
| I don't get it. What is the value add? Apparently, more tracing
| of workflows and exposing traditionally DevOps style metrics into
| workflows that everyone in the org can appreciate. I'm not
| convinced. Maybe lightstep is having issues with growth and sold
| out?
| jeffbee wrote:
| This seems likely. Went through a tracing RFP at a large
| company and people knew products like datadog, splunk,
| appdynamics, even honeycomb, but had never heard of lightstep.
| Even ex-googlers who knew bhs had never heard of lightstep. And
| when I was being recruited by lightstep in early 2020, before
| COVID, the process ended in a hiring freeze. I never got the
| impression they were thriving.
| sandyarmstrong wrote:
| Feeling old, thought this was about
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiteStep and was very confused.
| Oddskar wrote:
| This really brings me back! As a kid I found this stuff so
| exciting.
| sandyarmstrong wrote:
| Yes, LiteStep was the first time I felt really in control of
| my computer. Virtual desktops, lighter shell, etc. For me it
| was the gateway drug that got me to eventually move to the
| Linux desktop.
| politician wrote:
| There's a 100 things called Lightstep. Which one is this?
| pm90 wrote:
| I would love to be proved wrong on this, but most of the startups
| that are focused on:
|
| - Observability
|
| - Security / Compliance
|
| Seem like they're plays by the founders to get acquired by bigger
| firms (either for acqui-hire or just to augment their own
| "observability and/or security" offering).
|
| I would be very curious to see a company that really make it big
| and remain independent in this area. It seems to me like DataDog
| has been the only successful company in this area, with some
| other honorable mentions (e.g. honeycomb.io, sentry, sensu etc.)
| cj wrote:
| > I would be very curious to see a company that really make it
| big and remain independent in this area
|
| Proofpoint (PFPT) is a big security / compliance company.
| Market cap is about half that of Datadog.
|
| Crowdstrike (CRWD) is another big one. Twice the size of
| datadog.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Isn't Splunk a much better example than Datadog?
| spockz wrote:
| This seems to me because after connectivity ("solved" with
| service mesh) getting _proper_ insights at scale on
| observability is quite hard. Security is and will always remain
| har as one mistake can have large consequences.
| lumost wrote:
| I once served as a PM for a startup in the observability space.
|
| Monitoring is a brutal industry, as engineers love to build
| monitoring products. There is a long tail of hundreds of
| monitoring startups catering to every wim that are backed by
| only a small handful of engineers.
|
| On the other hand, integrating a monitoring product into a
| company large enough to pay for the product is extraordinarily
| expensive. The DevOps team might want to have end-end
| visibility, but they can't add the library support required to
| make the deal work. Supporting one companies specific libraries
| is unlikely to pay off for other companies.
|
| When it comes to distributed tracing, the value proposition
| depends on convincing every dev team in the company that this
| is the best solution for monitoring.
|
| Larger companies have an easier time "cross-selling" these
| features, and can sometimes win deals by simply having the
| capability even if its never used.
| marcinzm wrote:
| I mean, few startups in any area make it big and remain
| independent. It's probably just that startups in this area are
| more visible to you because their products are ones you might
| use.
| pboutros wrote:
| I think you're right -- if only because it's probably the most
| viable path to growth.
|
| If your value prop is 'we're stable and you can trust us', and
| your buyers are 'large enterprises that don't like to take
| risks', your biggest impediment if you have a great product is
| that you _aren 't_ part of a company like ServiceNow.
|
| What's the saying? "The battle between every startup and
| incumbent comes down to whether the startup gets distribution
| before the incumbent gets innovation."
|
| Even harder when you need enterprise proof-points...
| technick wrote:
| My org was just stuck with Service Now recently when someone
| convinced management it was better than Zendesk, got the contract
| signed and then resigned when the integration became difficult.
| Wish I could leave negative feedback on his LinkedIn profile, but
| the guy even removed mention that he worked with my org and
| claims to have been self employed the last 3 years.
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