Thank You
Thanks ServiceNow! Your panic buying has made the situation worse for everyone else.
The tech world's pandemic supply chain meltdown drove ServiceNow to place orders for a year worth of datacenter kit in January 2022, believing that doing so was necessary to get the hardware it needed to cope with growing customer workloads. "Pre-COVID, I could generally get stuff in 45 days," CTO Pat Casey told The Register …
Just like every person who bought a few more loo rolls when the pandemic started, or driver who tops up their tank in anticipation of expected fuel supply problems.
The result is the same.
Each separate case seems perfectly reasonable when considered in isolation, but really it's just selfishly prioritising anticipated needs over other people's actual immediate needs.
Since when are companies supposed to take care of other companies? Are you one of those accountant run companies (the vast majority of them) where to save a few bucks the supply chain was rendered so fragile as to threaten the company's survival?
Or do you just question capitalism when it's finally not advantageous to you any more?
Good on these guys for planning ahead. Like Toyota did.
I have no compassion for technology companies run hy accountants rather than engineers where oh surprise that causes issues. Like Intel did.
Yes but placing the order does not guarantee that anything will be delivered, even if it is for a year in advance.
The reality is that the entire supply chain should be balancing the limited supply of parts so that what they can manufacture gives everyone a chance to buy something, not one company buy everything.
At the end of the day AWS, Microsoft, Facebook etc are probably taking containers of stuff before it even leaves China leaving crumbs for everyone else.
The loo roll panic buying was different: Sheple bought extra loo rolls "just in case" - despite the supply chain saying "There are no supply problems" (And there weren't - as was demonstrated by all the loo roll on special offer a few months later crowding the corridors after the initial panic buying)
This is the supply chain saying "There are problems, orders are taking longer to fullfil" and the purchaser adjusting their buying schedule based on the new lead times.
That’s not quite true, manufacturers in many areas increased production for the expected long term demand. only it didn’t work out ,so there was massive excess capacity in the system and much dead money sat on many warehouse shelves. it was probably cheaper to sell at cost than store it.
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It's not a "just-in-case" situation. ServiceNow (like most "good" businesses) bases their future growth on historical trends and buys accordingly - the only difference is that rather than keep the cash in the bank, they ordered 4 quarters' worth of kit in one go instead of quarter by quarter.
It would be a very poor CIO who made that decision without having the data to back it up, an even poorer CTO to make a mistake on what was needed and over-order, and the worst to anticipate growth and have to reject it because "we don't have enough servers"
With ServiceNow's current growth pattern, this is a perfectly sane decision. And, as mentioned by another commenter, it's not up to ServiceNow to solve every other company's procurement problems.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has doubled down on his company's stance on working from home and flexible working, that great pandemic debate.
Following widespread WFH enforced by global COVID-19-related lockdowns, opinion is divided between those welcoming the new normal of work-where-you-like and those who see numbers coming through the office door as a proxy for productivity.
Those in the latter camp include Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon – who has taken several opportunities to insist that his staff get back to the office full time – and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who insisted the temptation of coffee and cheese presented a serious threat to the nation's post-Brexit economic success.
More than two years after England launched a COVID data store, keeping details of National Health Service (NHS) patients, the country's National Data Guardian (NDG) remains unsatisfied with who is accessing the data.
The COVID-19 data store was launched in March 2020, and would pull together medical and operational data about the spread of the virus across the country.
IT helpdesk-turned-workflow software company ServiceNow is to acquire Hitch Works, which produces software to help organizations better use their employees' existing skills.
Hitch Works focuses on "AI‑powered skills insights", which will be added to ServiceNow's Now Platform to help customers with talent gaps by tying employee learning and development to workforce planning.
ServiceNow said the purchase is designed to help companies under immense pressure to attract, train, and retain an effective workforce.
Poll As return-to-office attempts continue to fail for big tech businesses, another proposed change to the work world is gaining steam: The four-day week.
In the UK, a 70-company trial program the BBC described as "the world's biggest" began this week, with participants paying their employees a regular week's pay for 80 percent of the labor. That pilot may be the largest, but it's hardly the only one.
Some companies have opted to trial the four-day week on their own, like Dell, which recently switched to a shortened week in the Netherlands after previously trialing it in Argentina.
ServiceNow's efforts to expand into more industries will soon include a Procurement Service Management product.
This is not a dedicated application – ServiceNow has occasionally flirted with templates for its platform that come very close to being apps. Instead it stays close to the company's core of providing workflows that put the right jobs in the right hands, and make sure they get done. In this case, it will do so by tickling ERP and dedicated procurement applications, using tech ServiceNow acquired along with a company called Gekkobrain in 2021.
The company believes it can play to its strengths with procurements via a single, centralized buying team.
Interview In a month that has seen nearly a fifth wiped from his company's share price, Bill McDermott is remarkably cheerful.
"I see growth everywhere," ServiceNow's CEO tells The Register.
For context, it is not just ServiceNow that is getting a rocky ride. Some estimates suggest Big Tech stock has lost $1 trillion in value in the last week, with all the big players down.
UK telecoms and IT services company BT is forecasting £25 million ($30.8 million) in savings over five years by ditching some legacy applications and switching to ServiceNow workflow and automation technologies.
BT Digital, the company's IT unit, said it plans to replace 56 legacy applications and 76 different ways of implementing service processes with a single ServiceNow platform as part of a large group-wide transformation programme.
The deal is said to apply to external IT and network services for BT clients as well as internal support at BT.
Fresh off the heels of Marvell Technology's Tanzanite acquisition, executives speaking at a JP Morgan event this week offered a glimpse at its compute express link (CXL) roadmap.
"This is the next growth factor, not only for Marvell storage, but Marvell as a whole," Dan Christman, EVP of Marvell's storage products group, said.
Introduced in early 2019, CXL is an open interface that piggybacks on PCIe to provide a common, cache-coherent means of connecting CPUs, memory, accelerators, and other peripherals. The technology is seen by many, including Marvell, as the holy grail of composable infrastructure, as it enables memory to be disaggregated from the processor.
Helpdesk software provider ServiceNow has posted revenue of $1.72 billion for the calendar first quarter of 2022, up 27 percent from a year earlier.
The workflow-focused company, led by CEO Bill McDermott, reported that subscription revenue hit $1.63 billion, an increase of 26 percent on the same period in 2021. Professional services grew 36 percent to $91m.
First-quarter total gross profit was $1.35 billion on a 79 percent margin. That's down from $1.42 billion a year earlier, a 5 percent drop. Meanwhile, overall net income was $75 million, down from $352 million in Q1 2021.
Workflow specialist ServiceNow has announced a heavy emphasis on robotic process automation (RPA) in the next release of its platform, to get aging applications working with each other in a more user-friendly fashion.
One analyst said users already invested in workflow would welcome the release, but RPA specialists may have a technical edge.
ServiceNow has promised the "San Diego" release of its Now Platform will include more modern visual design as well as the RPA capabilities. The latter sits within the Automation Engine, which combines Integration Hub with a new RPA Hub that provides centralized command and a control center to monitor, manage, and deploy digital robots that automate repetitive manual tasks.
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