Bye-Bye, Old Office...

One of my colleagues took the snap at right, showing the office where I've worked for the past couple of years.  That office was in the building we called the “wooden spaceship” because of its resemblance to the disc-shaped part of Star Trek's USS Enterprise.  We're all going to miss that old building: lots of character, and right on the beach.  Also termites, roaches, rats, and cranky heating and air conditioning, but that's all just part of the character...

Now we're in a sleek new building, albeit far more conventional.  We've leased the entire building, and the amount of space inside is breathtakingly huge compared to our old building.  It's located at 12225 El Camino Real, San Diego.  The photo below is a Google Maps view; my team's office is on the second floor where the orange arrow is pointing, facing south.  One side of our office is open (i.e., there are only three walls) and facing tall windows looking across Carmel Valley – a pleasant, sunny view with lots of greenery, but not quite like the ocean views of our old building.

I went in to the new building on Saturday to unpack and troubleshoot any problems – but also just to see what the new place was like once everything was installed.  Many of my colleagues were there as well.

There were lots of reactions to various things.  Probably the most interesting reactions were related to the kitchens – there's one on each floor, and they are stunningly well-equipped compared to our old place.  The second-floor kitchen (which my team will use) has two enormous industrial-strength refrigerators, three microwave ovens, enough storage for an army regiment, sinks, an ice machine, coffee machines, and a soda fountain.  It looks like a facility you'd find in a restaurant, except there's no range or oven. 

What Can I Say?

One of my co-workers, displaying his particular skills.

My little team and a couple of the people we work most closely with (including this character, who writes our customer-facing technical documentation) all went out together for lunch yesterday.  Good company, good Thai food - enjoyable for all of us.

We also went and visited the vastness of the new building we're moving into this Friday.  It's gigantic compared with our current building!  But it's also unfinished.  A small army of workers is busy installing things, running wires, putting up lights, painting, etc.   Someone who's never managed such an affair (like me!) looks at this chaos and says “How on earth can they possibly be finished by Friday?”  But those in charge are confident they'll be ready...

Service-now in the News Again...

This time it's a nice little piece about one of our customers: Orrick, an international law firm. Orrick's IT operations are located in Wheeling, West Virginia; I visited them a couple months ago to help them get our Discovery product (a piece of our overall product that I've been focused on) up and running. Here's the lead from the article:

Changing your Service Desk solution can be a large project with many challenges. The ideal is to improve customer service, while reducing costs and making the transition as painless as possible. Many companies also want to adopt ITIL processes into their Service Desk. For Orrick, the SaaS solution Service-Now.com was the choice.

The Discovery product gets a nice little mention, and there's a video showing the Orrick facilities and several of the people that I worked with there. Orrick's service team is a finalist for a prestigous industry award, and they give our product credit as one of the things (certainly not the only thing!) that got them there...

Service-now in the News Again...

This time an article in CIO Magazine. An excerpt, quoting our CEO (Fred Luddy):

Luddy used a combination of young and experienced staffers claiming that a young mindset is required. More experienced developers can tend to be set in their ways which may have been good ideas in the past, but are not good ideas today. For example, Luddy asks "why would anyone write APIs" anymore? APIs made sense back in the client server days but is not the most efficient approach in an SOA. Luddy challenged his more experienced developers to go with what is relevant to the problems you are trying to solve today and "shed your baggage at the door." Luddy's best advice is "choose the simplest, most flexible technologies." His team did just that and selected a variety of open source and web 2.0 technologies to make the user presentation layer as user friendly and customizable as possible.

It's exciting to see us getting more press attention, and interesting to see the things they pick to focus on. One thing I'm sure of: when the press talks with Fred, they aren't hearing the usual plate full of buzz words that high-tech CEOs seem to love so much, without really understanding them...

Service-now in the News Again...

Network World has a little article about us. Here's the lead:

What does it take to rank among the top 50 companies on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest growing private companies in America? Among other things, these days it takes great information technology. Brian Morgan, director of IT at Interbank FX (IBFX) in Salt Lake City concurs.

IBFX is a leading provider of online foreign exchange trading services, serving clients from more than 140 countries. The company handles about $4 billion in transactions a day for its customers. Inc. magazine recently named IBFX as the 46th fastest growing private company in America, and the 5th fastest growing financial services company. Utah Business magazine gives IBFX the title of number one growth company in the state of Utah.

To reach and sustain that level of growth, the IT systems need to be able to grow and adapt rapidly to the company’s needs. This is one of the reasons Morgan and his IT team selected a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering from Service-now.com as the company’s IT service management (ITSM) platform. “Service-now.com helps us provide better uptime for our systems than we could do if we hosted an application ourselves,” says Morgan.

Startup of the Week...

InformationWeek magazine is profiling the company I work for as the “Startup of the Week”. Here's the lead:

"I founded this company to atone for my sins," says Fred Luddy, CEO of Service-now.com. His transgression? Developing expensive and cumbersome IT management software while at Peregrine. Service-now provides help desk, change and configuration management, discovery, and more via easy-to-deploy SaaS. Can you forgive him?

Go read the whole thing, and decide for yourself if you forgive Fred.