The ServiceNow Story
Founding and Early Development
A Founder's Vision
Every big company starts with an idea. For ServiceNow, that idea came from a moment of crisis. Fred Luddy was the chief technology officer at Peregrine Systems, a major software company. But in 2002, Peregrine collapsed in a massive accounting scandal, wiping out Luddy's personal fortune.
Losing everything gave him a clean slate. He saw a problem in the world of business software. It was clunky, difficult to use, and required armies of consultants to manage. Luddy envisioned something different: a simple, cloud-based platform that would let regular employees automate and manage services across a company. No complex software installations, just a web browser.
From his home in San Diego, working on a single laptop, Luddy started building his vision. The core concept was a flexible workflow engine. Instead of creating a rigid application to solve one problem, he built a platform that could be adapted to solve many. The goal was to make routing work—whether it was an IT ticket, a human resources request, or a customer service issue—as easy as ordering a book online.
Building Glidesoft
In 2003, Luddy officially founded Glidesoft, Inc. The name reflected his goal of making business processes glide smoothly. For the first year, it was a one-man operation. Luddy wrote the initial 300,000 lines of code himself, creating the foundation of the platform.
His brother, Rob, joined in 2004 to help with sales, and they landed their first customer, the WagerWorks casino in San Francisco. This initial period was about proving the concept. The first products were focused on Information Technology Service Management (ITSM), helping IT departments manage help desk tickets, track technical issues, and handle system changes.
The platform was designed so that non-programmers could build and modify workflows themselves, a revolutionary idea at the time.
As the company gained traction, it needed to grow. In 2005, Luddy secured $2.5 million in angel funding. This was a critical step that allowed him to hire a small team of developers. Among the first key hires were David Loo, Bow Ruggeri, and Don Casson, who became the core engineering team that helped scale Luddy's initial creation.
With this new team and funding, the company was able to refine its product and expand its customer base. The name Glidesoft was changed to ServiceNow in 2006 to better reflect its purpose of delivering services to the enterprise. The foundation was set for what would become a major force in cloud computing.
Now, let's test your knowledge on the founding of ServiceNow.
What was the original name of ServiceNow when Fred Luddy founded it in 2003?
The initial products developed by Fred Luddy and his team were primarily focused on which area?
From a single founder's vision to a small, funded team, these early years established the core principles that would guide ServiceNow's future growth.