Day Two at Knowledge12 brought me into closer contact with ServiceNow's founder Fred Luddy and CTO Arne Josefsberg, as I sat down after the keynote for one-on-one meetings that brought the company's key strategies into clearer focus. The Luddy keynote was instructive, too, revealing the company founder to be a true techie, who can deploy ServiceNow solutions and program an airline tracking program in real time. However, the most essential message from ServiceNow concerned the importance of the customer.

All three key trends in the ServiceNow portfolio of offerings are the direct outgrowth of customer requests:

For the past five or six years, we have been monitoring the growth of ServiceNow. An early Cloud player in IT Service Management, ServiceNow has steadily and patiently acquired functionality and customers and respectability under entrepreneur and founder Fred Luddy's management. In the past year or so, however, ServiceNow has made a considerable leap.

This year's Knowledge12 user conference is double the size of last year's with nearly 2000 in attendance. What accounts for this? Two key hires, CTO Arne Josefsberg (ex-Microsoft) and President and CEO Frank Slootman, bring market insight and deep experience to ServiceNow that have nicely complemented Fred Luddy's original vision and execution. Let's look closer.