Startup Of The Week: IT Management Online

"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? --Andrew Conry-MurraySERVICE-NOW.COM

HEADQUARTERS: Solano Beach, Calif.

PRODUCT: Service-now

PRINCIPALS: Fred Luddy, founder and CEO; Andy Chedrick, CFO; Bob Alexander, VP of customer operations

INVESTORS: JMI Equity

FUNDING: $7.5 million

EARLY CUSTOMERS: Juniper Networks, AIG

WHAT'S DIFFERENT

Conventional IT service management software is notoriously difficult and costly to deploy. Service-now's SaaS approach claims to cut that time and cost by as much as 50%. Founder Luddy also cites the company's organic product development as a key differentiator to vendor suites made up of components bolted together through acquisition.BACKGROUNDLuddy was CTO of Peregrine for 13 years, until 2003. During his tenure, Peregrine bought Remedy, a maker of help desk software. Peregrine sold Remedy to BMC in 2002, around the time Peregrine filed for bankruptcy and was mired in an investigation into its accounting practices. HP bought Peregrine in 2005. Luddy hasn't strayed far from his Peregrine roots. His brother, also a former Peregrine employee, is VP of sales. Investor JMI Equity was founded by former Peregrine chairman John Moore. CONTROL KNOBSService-now is aimed at large companies. The suite includes management for incidents, changes, configurations, and releases; a service desk and catalog; and a configuration management database. The company offers two deployment modes: a service and an on-premises offering. The service mode requires an IPSec VPN connection to one or more of Service-now's data centers. The on-premises option consists of a management device at the customer site. Service-now manages the device.THE COMPETITIONBMC, CA, HP, and IBM dominate with on-premises software. BMC also offers some managed services delivered via SaaS. Klir Technologies offers SaaS-based IT management, but it's pursuing the midsize market.TIMELINE