I'm excited to be participating in Knowledge17, learning about the transformational past and future of the ServiceNow platform. A software tool developed by a single individual, Fred Luddy, only fourteen years ago has grown into a comprehensive enterprise solution which topped a billion dollars in revenue last year, and plans to grow that stream to four billion dollars by 2020.
John Donahoe (Chairman of the Board at PayPal and former CEO at eBay) joined ServiceNow as their new CEO only 45 days ago, and today he demonstrated how a tool which was previously so IT-centric is evolving to facilitate amazing customer experiences across departments throughout any organization. He's helping drive that innovation by spending a great deal of his time listening to ServiceNow's customers and inviting them to collaborate with ServiceNow's team in strategic discussions. John's decision to invert ServiceNow's organizational chart, placing his square at the bottom, soundly illustrated his commitment to provide outstanding servant leadership.
The technological innovations we saw today transcend the traditional boundaries between HR, IT, Finance, Security, Compliance, Legal, Customer Service, and other 'siloed' business services. That seamless integration allows us to accomplish our work with dramatically improved efficiency. This is possible not solely because we have the information we need, but because we can aggregate, breakdown, visualize, and react to that enormous wealth of information in real time, and we are continuously improving the tools and processes we use to do so.
We also heard from Dr. Scott Mason, COO at Novartis and Ashley Haynes-Gaspar, VP at GE Digital about the revolutionary changes ServiceNow is enabling in their organizations. Scott and Ashley each bore witness to the reality of these benefits. For example, Ashley spoke about how she and her team selected ServiceNow to replace 95 legacy systems at GE Digital, allowing their people to share information and cooperate like never before. She predicted a savings of trillions of dollars over time.
Ashley also devoted a significant portion of her presentation to addressing the massive gender inequality we see in the technology industry, sharing the importance of enabling girls to begin developing technical mindsets from a young age. As a father, I am committed to ensuring that my daughter has even more opportunities for success than I've enjoyed, and it's personally inspiring to see the progress Ashley is driving in this area.
Dave Wright, Chief Strategy Officer at ServiceNow took the stage to give a truly mind-blowing presentation about the future of the platform, explaining how the advent of machine learning in the operations management space is going to streamline organizations in every industry in ways we can barely fathom today.
He demonstrated the power of this AI by coupling it with event management to detect precursors to upcoming problems. This allows us to proactively solve incidents before they even occur!
Whether it's medicine, power generation, sales, insurance, government, or anything else you can imagine, our ability to collaborate and innovate will increase exponentially as we learn to maximize the benefits we gain from technology. When that technology is coupled with inspiring leadership and cohesive teams, there's no limit to what we can accomplish together.