ServiceNow, a publicly-traded enterprise cloud services company, is the latest Silicon Valley tech powerhouse to mine the Seattle area for talent. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based, with $424 million in sales last year and about 2,000 employees worldwide, recently took over 42,000 square feet of space at Kirkland-based office complex Carillon Point, GeekWire has learned.
The company already employs over 100 people in Kirkland, and the new office space on the third and fourth floors of the 4000 building will allow the company to accommodate up to 250 people.
“The investment is in terms of people, but it is also an acknowledgement of the richness of talent and creativity in this area,” said Sri Chandrashekar, Vice President of Automation and Cloud Infrastructure Development. “The Kirkland center is extremely important to us, and it plays an important role in the company’s operations and future advancements.”
ServiceNow’s technology allows IT staffers to access one code base, aligning the interests and activities of various employees.
“As more companies turn to service automation to transform IT and the way work gets done in the enterprise, we need to scale our cloud infrastructure automation, cloud operations, and continue to innovate with our technology,” said Chandrashekar, a former group program manager for Office 365 at Microsoft.
ServiceNow, which is hosting an open house Thursday to promote the new office space, is led by several former executives in EMC’s Backup Recovery Systems Division. The CEO is former Data Domain CEO Frank Slootman, a former advisor to Greylock and EMC exec who joined in May 2011 about a year before it went public on The New York Stock Exchange under the ticker NOW. The company’s market value now stands at $7.5 billion, with a stock price that has surged 46 percent in the past year.
ServiceNow marks the latest Silicon Valley tech company to expand its tech operations in the Seattle area, joining eBay, Splunk, Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce.com and others. In many of those cases, the companies have poached Microsoft talent to service in key leadership roles in the offices.
But Chandrashekar — who calls Seattle a “special place” for its many well-educated tech professionals — thinks the area is attractive for other reasons. “Maybe (the) rain and mist help cultivate great ideas and drive inspiration,” he says.
