My name is Jesse, I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the ServiceNow Q1 2019 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw the question, press the pound key. Thank you. Michael Scarpelli, Chief Financial Officer, you may begin your conference.
Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us. On the call with me today is John Donahoe, our Chief Executive Officer. During today's call, we will review our first quarter financial results and discuss our financial guidance for the second quarter and full year 2019. We'd like to point out that the company reports non-GAAP results in addition to, and not as a substitute for or superior to, financial measures calculated in accordance with GAAP. All financial figures we will discuss today are non-GAAP, except for revenues and revenue growth. To see the reconciliation between these non-GAAP and GAAP results, please refer to our press release filed earlier today, and for prior quarters, previously filed press releases, all of which are posted at investors.servicenow.com.
We may make forward-looking statements on this conference call, such as those using the words may, will, expects, believes, or similar phrases to convey that information is not historical fact. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. Please refer to the press release and risk factors in documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recent annual report on Form 10-K, for information on risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those set forth in such forward-looking statements. I would now like to turn the call over to John.
Thanks, Mike. Good afternoon, everyone, thank you for joining us on today's call. We delivered another strong quarter, continuing the momentum from our outstanding 2018 performance. We are focused on driving customer success, we're expanding our footprint across almost 75% of the Fortune 500, enabling digital transformation as a strategic partner to the world's largest enterprises. We're delivering digital workflows that create great experiences and unlock productivity. This is the future of work. Let's look at key Q1 results. In the first quarter, we closed 25 deals with ACV greater than $1 million. We now have 717 customers doing more than $1 million in business with us, which represents a 33% increase year-over-year. Our renewal rate for the quarter continued to be strong at 98%. This quarter, we saw particular strength in the Americas region, led by strong performance with U.S. federal agencies.
Three of our top 10 largest net new ACV deals were with federal agencies. We now have six federal customers doing more than $10 million in ACV with us. These results show how the public sector is embracing cloud-based solutions. It demonstrates our role as one of the core strategic partners to these government agencies, helping them digitally transform how they operate, serving their employees and citizens, and delivering services. Our Q1 results also underscore our strong product portfolio. This quarter, our Customer Service Management product saw significant growth, with 28 customers now spending more than $1 million. Our customer workflow products enhance customer operations management. That means that our customers are able to deliver better experiences and outcomes for their customers. In fact, Customer Service Management led to one of our largest deals during the quarter.
This customer evaluated a number of competitors, including the legacy incumbent technology provider. They chose ServiceNow because of our operations management capabilities. This is our sweet spot, managing inbound contacts to identify the root causes of customer issues, fixing those issues so that you can prevent future problems, and automating self-help solutions. In other areas, our IT and HR products led a large expansion deal with Humana, a Fortune 100 company. Humana is now expanding their use of the ServiceNow Platform across IT and HR to enable enterprise-wide focus on improving productivity and enhancing their employee experience. Across our customer base, we saw a positive response to the launch of our Madrid platform release in Q1. Early indications show that customers are adopting Madrid faster than previous releases.
Madrid offers customers over 600 innovations, such as new mobile-first experiences and digital workflows that unlock productivity for IT, for employees, and for customers. This customer response shows our progress in making upgrades simple and easy, ensuring customers can quickly take advantage of our latest platform and product innovations. I'm personally very excited about the mobile capabilities we're rolling out. We're delivering easy, intuitive, out-of-the-box mobile capabilities that enable consumer-like experiences across the enterprise. These are the kind of experiences that employees expect and demand today. We've also made significant strides in our product organization over the past year, led by Chief Product Officer, CJ Desai. We have a great global product team. They're driving continuous quality enhancements and customer-focused innovation across our platform and product portfolio.
This team is also focused on building a strong pipeline of product innovation as we look to meet a broader range of customer needs and leverage the power of our Now Platform across the entire enterprise. During the first quarter, I had an opportunity to visit Israel and spend time with our product teams there. As you recall, we acquired SkyGiraffe in late 2017 to enhance our mobile capabilities. That Israeli-based team is fully integrated now. I met with this team and many other tech entrepreneurs throughout Israel. Israel has an incredible community of outstanding world-class technology talent. We're building a strong product and tech hub there with more than 125 employees to date. I left Israel so impressed with the quality and caliber of our team and with the innovation happening there.
I also traveled during the quarter to Amsterdam, Tokyo, and Sydney, spending time with our teams and customers. My customer interactions worldwide continue to validate the business imperative of digital transformation. Customers continually tell me that the strength of our product portfolio and the capabilities of our Now Platform position us as one of their core strategic partners enabling digital transformation. Our focus on the Now Platform and three core workflows, IT, employee, and customer, are being well-received by our customers, and it's empowering our product teams to focus on delivering even more integrated digital workflow solutions that drive great experiences and unlock productivity across the enterprise. A few weeks ago, we held our first CIO advisory board meeting, spending two days with roughly a dozen of the top CIOs in the world.
We had a rich discussion reaffirming that we are on the right path with our strategies, our product vision, and our focus on customer success. We've also been pleased with some of the positive feedback we've received throughout the quarter in response to our first-ever company brand campaign, which launched in January and continues through early June. As I've said before, this campaign is designed to increase awareness of ServiceNow more broadly with C-suite executives. The campaign is also resonating very well with our employees and enhancing our recruiting efforts from a talent brand perspective. We'll continue to invest in company brand awareness to position ServiceNow as both a partner and employer of choice. In closing, I'm pleased with our strong start to 2019 and our continued progress against our priorities.
We are committed to making the world of work better for people, and we're focused on building deep trust-based customer relationships to enable their digital transformation and create the future of work. I know many of you are planning to join us in Las Vegas on the week of May 6th for our Financial Analyst Day and for Knowledge19, our seminal customer event. We expect this year's conference to be our largest effort with 20,000 people registered to attend. Spending time with our customers is always my favorite activity, and Knowledge is one of the real highlights of the year. I'll look forward to seeing many of you there. With that, I'll turn the call back over to Mike.
Thank you, John. In Q1, we delivered another good quarter. Strong top-line growth combined with margin expansion. After a strong 2018, it was very important that we started 2019 off on the right foot. Let's dive into the highlights from the quarter. Subscription revenues for the first quarter were $740 million, representing 40% year-over-year adjusted growth, including $20 million in foreign exchange headwind. Subscription billings were $810 million, representing 33% year-over-year adjusted growth, including $22 million and $18 million of foreign exchange and duration headwind, respectively. Our revenue and billings performance was driven by strong bookings in the Americas. In addition, accelerated revenue recognition from self-hosted deals related to our federal business drove revenue of performance. We continue to see traction across the product portfolio with 17 of our top 20 deals purchasing three or more products as customers realize the power of the platform in an enterprise-wide solution.
We booked four Customer Service Management deals with more than $1 million of ACV, including a $3 million deal to a federal agency, our largest CSM deal ever. We also booked a $1 million HR Service Delivery deal with the federal agency to modernize their HR processes and employee experiences with our user portal and mobile capabilities being a differentiator. Our U.S. federal business highlighted the quarter representing 15% of total net new ACV, up from 6% in the prior year. We booked our largest Q1 deal ever with a federal agency who is now doing more than $18 million in ACV. We expect the U.S. federal sector will continue to purchase throughout the year as they digitally transform how they operate. We saw strong profitability in Q1 with operating margin at 19%, driven by our revenue performance and expenses that will be realized in Q2.
Our free cash flow margin was 40% and benefits from a seasonally high amount of collections from our strong Q4 billings. Let's turn to guidance for the second quarter and full year 2019. For Q2, we expect subscription revenues between $778 and $783 million, representing 35%-36% year-over-year adjusted growth, including approximately $15 million of foreign exchange headwinds. We expect subscription billings between $798 and $803 million, representing 32%-33% year-over-year adjusted growth, including approximately $17 million of foreign exchange headwind. We expect a 17% operating margin, which is impacted by Q1 expenses moving to Q2 and expenses related to our annual users conference, Knowledge19. We expect 193 million diluted weighted average shares outstanding.
Coming off our strong Q1, we are raising our full year 2019 subscription revenue guidance to between $3.235 and $3.250 billion, representing 35%-36% year-over-year adjusted growth, including approximately $45 million of foreign exchange headwind. We are also raising our full year 2019 subscription billings guidance to between $3.725 and $3.740 billion, representing 32% year-over-year adjusted growth, including approximately $50 million and $22 million of foreign exchange and duration headwinds respectively. While we are increasing our top-line revenue guidance, we are also increasing our investments and maintaining full year 2019 margin guidance as follows. Subscription gross margin of 86%, operating margin of 21%, which includes record hiring in Q1, and free cash flow margin of 28%, which includes the opening of a new pair of data centers in Japan expected for later this year.
For the year, we expect diluted weighted average shares outstanding of 193 million. Before closing, please note our financial analyst day will be held on Monday, May 6th in Las Vegas in conjunction with Knowledge19. For those who cannot join in person, we will hold a webcast of the event accessible on our IR website. With that, operator, you can now open up the line for questions.
Thank you. At this time, I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, please press star one. Your first question comes from Raimo Lenschow with Barclays. Your line is open.
Hey, thanks for taking my question. Two quick questions. First, can you talk a little bit about the platform strength this quarter? Obviously, you mentioned federal, but the 17% you got from platform still kind of seems to be like a step up from what we've seen before.
Yeah. Well, included in that group, platform was strong, but you also have Performance Analytics in there, Raimo, as well, and Performance Analytics had a very strong quarter. Platform was strong as well, and we're seeing that in many of our customers.
Okay. Then, can you talk a little about, you talked about the record hiring in Q2, Mike, but you still talked about Q1 expenses kind of that slipped in Q2. Can you talk a little bit about what was going on there and the magnitude? Thank you.
It was record hiring in Q1, and the impact of that is flowing through to Q2. It was very back-end loaded, a lot of that hiring that skews as well. There were some other expenses that we were expecting to incur in Q1 that got pushed to Q2 because of timing, and we weren't ready to spend the money efficiently, so we pushed it into Q2.
Perfect. Well done. Congratulations.
Thank you.
Your next question goes to Brad Zelnick with Credit Suisse. Your line is open.
Excellent. Thanks so much, and congrats on a great start to the year. My first question is for John. John, the momentum you're seeing in U.S. federal is really impressive, and Mike's comment suggests you're seeing a lot more demand in this market throughout the year. Can you help us understand the size of the opportunity in context of 15% of your ACV mix today? Where can it go, and how do you think about this translating to other governments around the world looking to transform the citizen engagement and the way government employees work?
Well, Brad Zelnick, I think the way you put the question is exactly the right way to think about it. If I just step back, let me describe this as the public sector, and included in public sector would be federal, state, regional, and local governments. In the first quarter, I think in my global travel, I met with all flavors of that. Simply put, those institutions are under more pressure than ever to deliver better experiences for their employees and their citizens and to drive real productivity in a time of economic challenge. The key thing is that they are now realizing that cloud is a great way to do this. By and large, they've largely overcome their security concerns around cloud.
Whether it's at the U.S. federal government, other federal government, state, regional, local, we see a pretty aggressive appetite to both understand and embrace cloud. As you know, let me just now zoom in on the U.S. federal a little bit. We, over the last several years, have built a dedicated U.S. federal team
Who've been focused on both orienting and packaging and ensuring that our platform and our products conform to the requirements of the U.S. federal agencies. In 2018, that was roughly 10% of our ACV, and as Mike mentioned, in Q1 of this year, it was roughly 15%. Over time, it's hard to gauge any given piece, but I think Mike and I would both say that overall public sector, when you add not just the U.S. federal government, but other federal government, state and local, could be up to 20% of our business over time.
I would agree. There's no reason why it can't be 20% plus from what we're seeing right now.
One of the interesting things, Brad, that is, to me, one of the most exciting pieces of this is that, interestingly, these government public sector organizations are often some of the most innovative users of our platform. What's interesting is these federal agencies and many of the state regional in Australia, and the U.K., and other markets, think platform first, and they see the power of our platform to adopt their ability to deliver better experiences. Let me give an example. The Veterans Affairs U.S. agency has adopting a ServiceNow first philosophy, both for their employees and for their customers who are veterans. For instance, they've got a global service desk for over 550,000 Veterans Affairs employees, powered by ServiceNow. They're using ServiceNow to allow their customers, that is, the veterans, to help schedule some of their procedures in their respective hospitals.
Because our assets are in the Veterans Affairs CMDB, if a veteran has to schedule an MRI, ServiceNow's platform can help that veteran figure out which hospitals have which openings with which equipment, and actually schedule their appointment. I find it very energizing to spend time with, whether it's the defense-oriented federal agencies or other federal agencies, because they are some of the most creative and innovative users of our platform.
Thanks very much for that, John. Mike, just a competitive question for you, but more in the context of pricing, especially in HR and customer service clouds, where you're seeing large players stepping up investments. Can you talk a bit about pricing trends and average discount specifically in those clouds? Thank you.
Yeah. We haven't seen anything noticeable from a, if you're talking specifically about HR, as we like to say, our employee experience, and we really take a different approach to those other vendors. Those other vendors are more specific around HR, we're more around enterprise service delivery for our employees. We're still seeing adoption by our customers jointly with whether it's a Workday or a SuccessFactors, or even extending the life of a PeopleSoft implementation. No change there.
Excellent. Thanks again.
Your next question comes from Kirk Materne with Evercore ISI. Your line is open.
Thanks very much, and thanks for taking the question. I guess, John, just to start off with, given the success you all have had in the federal government, and I realize it's somewhat unique, how are you thinking just about the broader sort of verticalization of your sales organization as you go deeper into big enterprises, sort of being able to speak the language of industry, and be able to sort of help them solve their biggest problems? I guess, how are you thinking about that evolving as you look out maybe over the next 12-24 months?
Well, Kirk, it's an area that we're leading into, as you mentioned, Federal was sort of the first area where we really focused on it. That is both a go-to-market motion, where you have dedicated people who speak the language, but also tailoring the product to making sure we're meeting the Federal security and other requirements. A second area, as I think you know, is we have a dedicated, we call it Med Sled team, but a dedicated team around some of the healthcare market. Again, both to meet the go-to-market expectations of those customers that we understand their deep needs, and to ensure that our product complies with the regulatory compliance requirements in the healthcare sector, broadly defined. Obviously there's several sub-sectors within healthcare. The third area where we have a, I would call a quasi-formal vertical, is financial services.
This is just by virtue that a large portion of the financial services world is either in New York or London. If you were to look at our New York and London teams, you see a lot of dedicated resources toward the financial services sector. Obviously within that, you've got banking, you've got insurance, you have other sub-sectors. There it's both a go-to-market motion, also some focus on the encryption and other security requirements required for compliance and regulatory capabilities. Those three, I would say, we're furthest along. We're increasing to invest in those and making sure that they are becoming more globally oriented in our ability to share experience and our ability to ensure that we're tying our roadmaps to them. We have a set of next verticals, too.
Telecom is an area where, again, the needs are very common globally, whether you're Telstra in Australia or AT&T or Verizon in the U.S. or SoftBank in Japan. That's an area where I would say is next on our stage of building out a bit of a global vertical focus.
Great. Thanks very much, gentlemen. I'll.
I'll just finish up, Kirk. There are a couple others, where it's more packaging and communicating that we understand the industry, we speak their language, we can share best practice. Those would be further down the road.
Super. Thanks very much. I'll pass it on to others. Congrats on the quarter.
Your next question comes from Sarah Hindlian with Macquarie. Your line is open.
Great. Thank you so much. Thank you for taking my questions, and congrats. I'll add my congratulations on a really nice start to the year. My first is for you, John. John, as you're looking at digital workflows, how are you thinking about the next near adjacencies for you guys? Maybe you could give us an update on how you're thinking about your M&A strategy as well at this time. Then Mike, I have a follow-up for you. It would be great if you could give us a little bit of incremental color on what you're seeing in terms of new logo additions, I think in particular in international markets. Thanks, guys.
Yeah, Sarah, on the first part of your question, in terms of organic product innovation, I think we've talked before that we, at the beginning of last year, formed something we call NowX, which is a dedicated team focused on defining and building products that will launch one to three years out. What's interesting is we have an abundance of ideas. It's ideas that come from our customers, ideas that come from developers, ideas that come from our people.
Frankly, many of these ideas come from examples where customers have built a automated workflow on our platform, and they come to us and said, "Hey, we built this for our own use, but we would love it if you build it out of the box." What the NowX team, which is now up to well over 100 people do, is they take all these ideas on top of the funnel, they prioritize, work their way down to basically build out working prototypes of, let's say, three to five, maybe eight of them. Then actually get some early, I'll call it alpha customers, to see if they really resonate, and then get a beta customer to see if they come out or if they have the kind of value we think they do.
Our goal is each Knowledge to announce one to two, I don't know if you'd call them new products. I would call them adjacent extensions of our product portfolio. You'll hear about one of those this coming Knowledge. I think you'll see a series of incremental new capabilities and new products that come out of us each year. Building that organic innovation muscle is really important. M&A to date has largely been focused on what we call acqui-hires. That's broadly defined as acquiring technologies and teams that help build out and accelerate the build of our platform. We'll continue to do those. If and when we see opportunities to acquire adjacent capabilities, acquire new growth engines, obviously we've got the resources to do it, we'll act on it.
One of the luxuries we have is the luxury of choice and time because we have such a strong organic innovation agenda.
Sarah, on your question with regards to new logo acquisitions, what I'll remind you is roughly 80%+ of our net new ACV comes from existing customers. The new logos don't contribute a big piece of net new ACV in any one quarter, but that is the future for those upsells. With regards to new logos, we did add about 200 new logos in the quarter, and that compares with all of 2018, we added about 1,000, I think. If you look at that, it was about 50% North America and 50% rest of the world. I will say North America was really driven by our federal, as we said earlier, was the one that really outperformed in our net new ACV.
I would say EMEA and APJ were a little light, but that's because they came off such a fabulous 2018, and we knew Q1 going into that when we gave guidance, it was going to be a tighter quarter.
That's great color. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
Your next question comes from Matthew Hedberg with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.
Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Congrats from me as well. I guess for either of you, ITSM was included, I believe, in 15 of the top 20 deals this quarter. I think you talked last year about how ITSM re-accelerated. I guess I'm wondering, did you see that same trend this quarter? Can you put a finer point on maybe what's driving such strong results in your core?
I would say is ITSM, there was no re-acceleration in ITSM in Q1, ITSM and IT products in general, were extremely strong for us and continue to be the big driver of our net new ACV. We expect that to continue throughout the year, especially when we're landing new logos. There's still a lot of room for expansion within our existing customers within ITSM.
Just building on that, Matt, what Mike was saying, that here's what I think can be a little misleading. I think frankly, we as an organization really embrace this aggressively. Last year and maybe late 2017, but throughout last year. We may have an ITSM presence in a large global bank, but it may be in the private wealth business and not yet enterprise-wide, or it may be in Europe, but not in the other regions. When we look at, we have a strong ITSM presence and as I said earlier, 75 of the Fortune 500 are our customers. In many of those cases, we landed in a division or a geography or a certain part of the organization, and we're in a world where increasingly customers want to drive platform adoption across the enterprise.
Some reasonable portion of the ITSM growth or the "re-acceleration" is simply existing customers saying, "You know what? We got great results in division A, let's drive this enterprise-wide." "We got great results in geography A, let's extend that to be a more global rollout." That's why I don't think you can consider it a "mature product." I think it's a significant opportunity for many.
That's great. Maybe just one more quick one about GSI momentum. I know we've talked about in the past in terms of how significant GSIs can become for you guys. I'm wondering if there's any update there, and perhaps was that some of the strength in platform sales this quarter?
What's interesting, I was with Mike Lawrie from DXC yesterday. We had our quarterly top to top. I was with Janet, the Chairman of Deloitte, last month. We had a half-day top to top. I'll see Andrew Wilson from Accenture next week at Financial Analyst Day, and I think he'll even be a guest of honor there. In each of these conversations, and obviously the same with KPMG, IBM, basically what they're saying is they see the same digital transformation opportunity and need. They see ServiceNow as one of the fastest-growing portions of their practice. I think we've gotten significantly better over the past 12 to 18 months of basically calling on, selling to, and serving customers in a coordinated way with these GSIs.
That's actually healthy for customers, because in many cases, to get full value out of the ServiceNow platform, you need to re-engineer your processes. It's one thing to lift and shift historical processes and put it on the ServiceNow platform, and you get some benefits of that. The real power is when you take the time to also re-engineer how you operate. That's how you get digital transformation to operate. Our platform is increasingly at the epicenter of that, not just in IT, but across many of the various products and services. Some of these GSIs, DXC, who I was talking with Mike yesterday, they have Platform DXC, right? They are building their own platform, of which ServiceNow is a core component, along with some of the cloud providers and others.
We sell both with these GSIs directly to the customers where there's a direct ServiceNow instance. In other situations, the customer is buying the platform, if you will, from the SI, of which ServiceNow is a piece of it. Frankly, we're indifferent. Whatever allows the customer to get the best results. They're a critical part, not just of our future, but I think, frankly, a critical determinant about whether digital transformation actually transforms customers' businesses and drives significant improvement in results. It's got to require us working closely with the GSIs. I think they see that, we see that, so there's stronger focus and energy than ever on making sure that happens. I'm also delighted, I forget if I mentioned this last quarter, we've hired David Parsons to run our partner ecosystem.
He's just a fabulous leader in this area, and so I'm really pleased with the progress that our teams are making in this area.
Well done. Thanks again, guys.
Your next question comes from Walter Pritchard with Citi. Your line is open.
Hi, thanks. Question for John and question for Mike. John, on the CSM side, you mentioned legacy incumbent replacement. Could you talk through the competitive landscape there, what you're seeing given the success this quarter? How much is the big Salesforce in the market versus legacy and then some of the smaller emerging players that you're competing against in that space?
Yeah. Most of the CSM deals that we're doing is we're not replacing modern technology, we're replacing legacy technology. That could be a legacy Oracle implementation from a Siebel implementation. It may be there is a lot of Remedy that was used out there as well for CSM or a home-grown solution. That's typically what we're seeing. There usually is modern technology competing at the table for the same business we're going after. It's really about our approach to CSM, why customers choose us. When they do choose us, it's because they like the fact that we are all about understanding root cause analysis within our system. It's a lot more collaborative with people in the organization to resolve the problem, so you never see that incident again. That's just a very different approach to Customer Service Management from a CRM-centric approach.
Yeah. Walter, let me just build on that. CSM is clearly a huge segment, huge market, $20 billion market. I think way too many people think that somehow it's all the same, and it's not. They're distinct segments in that market. Different providers align better with different segments. As Mike said, we're not focused on going after the full $20 billion. There are certain segments of the customer service market that require a strong CRM-based system. We're not the best provider of that. Salesforce is the best provider of that.
There are other segments that want to take inbound contacts, identify root cause, which is a cross-functional workflow, fix what the problem was, which again requires cross-functional coordination workflow, so that that problem doesn't happen in the future, and segments where you want the customer to be able to address in a self-help or automated fashion, resolving their problem, understanding where it stands. Our platform is well-geared for that segment of the market. If you were to see where we focus our go-to-market teams and CSM, it's not across the entire CSM market. It's against the sub-segment of the market where our product lines up well with needs. That tends to be B2B, technology companies, services businesses, and ones where there's, I would call, sophisticated customer needs to be served. This is not a zero sum market. It's a $20 billion market.
As Mike said, there's a lot of old legacy software there. I think there will be multiple winners in this segment.
Mike, on the upfront business, you had a strong quarter there with the Fed. How should we think about what you're expecting as we move throughout the year? It seems like that was light in Q4, and it was stronger this quarter. Is there any way for us to get an expectation there for the year or think about how it'll vary quarter-to-quarter?
Unfortunately, it depends upon the new business that's happening. Renewal business, we know, for instance, I know in Q2, there's a pretty big renewal that will take place that's on-prem. We did suspect that this business was going to happen in the quarter, we kind of hedged that a little bit because I just don't know if it doesn't come in. It was really driven by the Federal government, a big chunk of our Federal government, roughly 50% of our Federal business is self-hosted because they can't be in a public data center, and they would consider ours to be a public data center, even our FedRAMP data centers, they're not comfortable being in because of the security they require. It's hard to forecast. I will say it is about 6%-7% of our revenue for the full year is associated with self-hosted deals.
Great. Thanks.
Your next question comes from Jennifer Lowe with UBS. Your line is open.
Hi, thanks. This is Rakesh Kumar sitting in for Jen Lowe . I wanted to talk about this Adobe partnership that you guys discussed a couple of weeks ago. What does this specifically mean for ServiceNow, and what more can we expect in the future?
Well, Rakesh, this frankly, came to Shantanu and my attention based on our respective customer visits. It wasn't something, even though he's a very good friend of mine, it wasn't something we thought of in isolation. We both came back from the ongoing customer visits we do and had a growing number of customers asking, "Hey, could you connect some of the ServiceNow platform with some of the Adobe capabilities we have?" Shantanu was hearing the same. We're a big Adobe user ourselves internally. We got our platform team and to a lesser extent, our CSM team, together with the Adobe team about how can we ensure that a shared customer that's using Adobe and ServiceNow, we make one plus one equal three, making it easier to use, getting more value. It's often about linking the data. Adobe provides tremendous marketing analytics and other data.
Our platform has a lot of data, if you're going to get a 360 view of the customer, if you're going to get the kind of actionability, Adobe generates the insights, we often are the system of action. Linking them together is wherever possible, making it easier for customer to get value is sort of was the spirit. Shantanu announced it at their customer conference. Feedback from our customers has been strong, and our teams are excited about it. We think it also can offer some incremental opportunity for each company.
Great. I have one more. You talked about adding two new data centers in Japan. Does that potentially accelerate G2K penetration in that region?
Well, the whole reason why we're building those data centers is because we think it's going to drive business, and there are a lot of G2Ks in Japan specifically, and based upon our feedback to get into some of those larger entities, they've required data centers to be in Japan because of data sovereignty requirements. Yes.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from Keith Weiss with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.
Thank you. This is Sanjit Singh for Keith Weiss. Congrats on a nice start to the year. I had two questions. Maybe we can start off with a question on Madrid. John mentioned about 600 new features with this release. I think a key highlight was sort of the mobile application development, making it easier to build applications on top of the platform. Do you see any of the new features or capabilities sort of force multipliers for some of your core products, or does that sort of fuel growth in just the overall platform business?
Well, as I said, Sanjit, I'm very excited about mobile. In my prior life, I had a chance to have a front-row seat in the consumer mobile revolution and got to see firsthand how born-in-the-cloud applications like an eBay, like a PayPal, like a Amazon, a Lyft, have completely transformed our lives at home by taking what's complex in our personal lives and making it simple, easy, and intuitive. That's now going to happen in the enterprise. With Madrid, was the first time we launched, in essence, the replatformed SkyGiraffe native mobile capabilities in the ServiceNow platform. Madrid started with the fulfiller experience. I see some nice pickup by our customers who are excited about that. New York, which comes this summer, has the employee experience. You'll hear us talking at Knowledge about how the mobile employee onboarding capability that's true enterprise-wide onboarding.
We're using it internally now at ServiceNow, and it's awesome. Secondly, what I would call shared services portal, that in a mobile app. I think you're seeing the most progressive companies realizing that employees don't care if they have an IT problem, an HR problem, a facilities problem, a legal problem, a finance problem. They just want to get their problem addressed. They just want to get their questions answered. If you're going to get people to migrate from, change their behavior from picking up the phone and calling to going one place to get their questions answered and their problems addressed, that must be a shared services portal, internally branded. We see that, we have that as a web product today.
In New York, there'll be, I think, just a killer mobile app that'll be out of the box, low code, no code requirement for the customer, branded in the customer's name, where they can then allow their employees to go one place to get their issues resolved. Will that lead to an acceleration? You called it an acceleration of ITSM and HR case management and some of the other products. I think it will certainly be an enhancer, and we hope an accelerator. It is. You see more and more companies taking a shared services mindset to driving a great end-to-end employee experience. I think mobile will be the accelerator of that.
That makes a ton of sense. I'm looking forward to hearing more at the Analyst Day in a couple of weeks. My second question was sort of around sales. With so many big opportunities ahead of the company, whether it's ITOM or CSM or HR. From a sales perspective, were there any changes made this year to, you said, moving to a more specialized sales force, or do you really feel that the current sales force can go to a customer sort of selling the entire platform, whatever use case the customer may be interested in?
Well, I think the biggest change is, I don't know if you classically call it sales, but it's the other parts of the full go-to-market motion, which includes post-sales coverage. I mentioned in my remarks that we met with 10-15 of the top CIOs in the world in our CIO Advisory Council. One of the things our best and largest customers are looking for is dedicated ServiceNow resources who are solutions architects, who are on-site helping them ensure that they are architecting their implementation of ServiceNow to get maximum value from the platform and advising them on how to extend the platform.
As we think about our entire go-to-market motion, it's not just the classic pre-sales disciplines of account exec, solutions consultant, product line specialist, but we also now have the solutions architects who are also often part of our professional services organization, who are training and certification, and our partner ecosystem I referred to earlier. It's that whole combination of capabilities that allows us to deliver the kind of end-to-end customer coverage that allows us to expand those customer relationships in the way Mike described earlier in a healthy manner. In our case, we're quite fortunate that all that reports to David Schneider.
Dave is architecting right from the very beginning, a seamless experience where when we both sell to a customer initially and then serve them and expand our relationship and help deliver real value to them over time, we're doing that, bringing the full breadth of our capabilities to bear that full end-to-end, we call it go-to-market experience. That includes customer success, solutions architects, and coordinating with our partners. In that sense, yes, our quote-unquote "sales motion" is evolving, and Dave's doing a great job, and his team. Did I mention David Parsons, Jimmy Fitzgerald, Cat Lang, who are on the post-sale coverage areas, coordinating along with Kevin Haverty and the really strong pre-sales team we have. It's now increasingly, we aren't even talking about pre-sales, post-sales. We're just talking about customer coverage.
Got it. Appreciate the thoughts. Thanks, John.
Your next question comes from Samad Samana with Jefferies. Your line is open.
Hi. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to ask about traction for the add-on products outside of the U.S., or maybe if you could give us a little bit more color around whether you're seeing more traction for CSM and HR Service Delivery in the U.S. or outside of the U.S., and within the newer products, what's having more success with your international customers?
We're really not seeing any difference from a customer adoption of the emerging or platform. It's pretty much the same profile in the U.S. and EMEA and APJ. At the end of the day, these tend to be global, large enterprises that all have the same problems. I'm not seeing any noticeable difference. Yes, one quarter you may have, because there's big deals in CSM or HR, may be stronger in one region over another, but when you look at it over a year, there's really no difference that I've been able to see.
Great. Maybe just one follow-up. The ITSM Pro SKU, I believe that's priced quite a bit higher than the core SKU. I'm curious if that's having an impact on the size of new deals and as existing customers come up for renewal, maybe you could comment on whether they're upgrading to the higher dollar SKU, or if that's driving a positive impact on getting them to adopt additional products rather than eating a price increase. Maybe it would be helpful if you could just walk us through that as well. Thanks.
The ITSM Pro bundle was really a way to monetize the investments we made in artificial intelligence and machine learning, and we have definitely seen an uptick in that pricing. It's been able to keep our pricing higher on customers who are electing to do that with new customers, and we are seeing success on renewals with customers, but it's still very early. Remember, our renewals take over a number of years. Typically, a customer signs a three-year contract, and I think it's going to take a little bit more time to see what the uptick is with our installed base of customers. It's definitely gaining traction with new logos.
Great. Thanks for taking my questions today. Congrats on the quarter.
Your next question comes from Derrick Wood with Cowen. Your line is open.
Great. Thanks. John. Given the brand marketing you've invested in over the last few months, and I know you mentioned it's increased awareness with C-level executives, but I'm curious, has this already helped kind of in the field surface new conversations and engagement at the C-level? I guess if we were to fast-forward a year or two from now, is one of the hopes that it drives more executives to be buyers of ServiceNow? How do you think it could help transform high-level engagements?
Yeah, Derrick. I think it is too early to point out that direct cause and effect, but I can tell you, for instance, as I engage with C-suite execs, either at customers or just more generally, the number of people that said, "Hey, I saw that ServiceNow ad. Boy, that was funny," or, "That was great," which is exactly what the point was. Alan Marks, who is sitting here next to me, is our Chief Brand and Creative Officer and was the real architect behind these commercials. Again, here's the simple way I think about it, and I think Mike and I would think similarly about this.
A year from now, when a CIO or a CIO and CHRO are bringing to a CFO a $10 million contract for ServiceNow, we want that CFO to say, "Oh, yeah, I've heard of ServiceNow." There's just a general awareness as being one of the top strategic platforms that we're trying to build. Whether that will lead to new leads across the C-suite, I don't know. I think frankly that's not the direct goal, because usually, the new leads come from more direct selling activities. This provides kind of the air cover, legitimacy, and brand building that establishes us as a leading, innovative, very human, with maybe a little sense of humor, company. I also think, frankly, the value is as much with on the employee brand side. Talent is the lifeblood of any technology company, and we are growing rapidly and growing globally rapidly.
It matters if students on the top universities have heard of ServiceNow. It matters if someone in a local market can, say, go home to their parents, to the old proverbial mother, and say, "Yeah, I'm joining ServiceNow," and have his or her mother have heard of ServiceNow. You may laugh about that, but that kind of stuff matters as you're kind of scaling in the way we are, and we are absolutely focusing on attracting and retaining top talent. The global brand building is also part of that, is both C-suite executives and talent. So good start. We're going to get the data in on our aided and unaided awareness, which I'm sure has increased, and we'll continue to invest to build that over time.
Got it. Thanks. Just hoping to touch on the SecOps product. It doesn't seem to get as much attention as CSM or HR, but can you talk about how you see the opportunity shaping out over the next 12 to 18 months and maybe what you can do to help drive more penetration in the security budget?
Well, I think interestingly, one of the things that we've done is by bundling our products into the three workflows, and SecOps is in the IT workflow.
I think that's a little bit more symptomatic or emblematic and aligned with how the decision-making often happens. Where we thrive is when a CISO and a CIO are both jointly involved in our product decision. We do vulnerability response, incident response, and so it's part of, I think, a healthy and natural ServiceNow bundle, if you will, ServiceNow suite of solutions. I'll also say, I mentioned earlier, I was with Mike Lawrie and his team from DXC yesterday, and they have some very interesting security offerings that they were saying that they believe ServiceNow can be a really important component to it. I think partnerships with people like DXC, with people like Accenture and Deloitte, and KPMG can also accelerate that part of our business. We aren't offering the full security solution.
We have an important component of it with our security, our incident response, our vulnerability response, and to some extent, our GRC capabilities.
Right. Okay. Thank you.
Your last question comes from Michael Turits with Raymond James. Your line is open.
Hey, Mike and John. I just want to talk about the mid-market and commercial market. Who are you seeing competitively down there, and are you adjusting your go to market in any way?
We tend to see in the lower market, that's where you hear of more the Atlassian with their service desk and Zendesk, and you have Freshworks. It's been the same people that we've seen there for a number of years, but it's a very small piece of our business. As you know, we tend to focus more on enterprise. The commercial segment now is around 20% of our business, and even of that's really the high-end commercial. It's typically the 3,000 to 5,000 employees we focus on. It still very much is a direct selling model. We are trying to do more through the channel, but at the end of the day, when you have customer data, they want to have a direct relationship with you. Channel partners are more involved in that segment, but we still have direct contracting relationships with those customers.
I got to say, there's really been no change in that market for the last five or six years that I've seen. With the one exception, I would say, is we used to hear more of Cherwell. We don't hear of Cherwell nearly as much as we used to in that segment.
Michael, just building what Mike said, my observation would be, one, we have a terrific leader there, John Sapone, and he's got a really, really strong team of a talented commercial sales team. But what you see is there's certain businesses that are in that-- we define commercial as the 1,000 to 5,000 people, that are high growth and are on their way to becoming an enterprise. Almost inevitably, the larger you get, the more you want a platform, and the more you want to scale a platform like ServiceNow. That's really where we're strongest. Someone that's going to stay right at 1,000 employees and be there three to five years from now, they have to make a fundamental decision. Do they want to go with one of the companies Mike mentioned earlier, or do they want to go with ServiceNow?
What we really like about our position is those companies in that market that are growing understand that once you get to a certain size, you have to have the kind of fundamental platform that we offer. John and his team do a nice job of segmenting that market and ensuring we're focusing our energies on where customers have a real legitimate need for what we deliver and offer. As Mike said-
Thanks, guys. Thank you. Oh, sorry.
Okay.
Thanks very much, guys. Really appreciate it.
Okay. Thank you, everyone. As a reminder, a replay of this call will be available as a webcast in the Investors section of our website. Thank you for joining us today.
This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.