Dive Brief:
- The massive IT outage caused by a faulty CrowdStrike software update shipped last week could boost sales for ServiceNow, CEO Bill McDermott said during the enterprise software provider’s Q2 2024 earnings call Wednesday.
- “I think this could actually lead to more sales opportunities once non-ServiceNow customers see what’s possible with a platform like this,” McDermott said, referring to the company’s configuration management database.
- ServiceNow had “instant” visibility into which systems, business services and infrastructure were impacted in customers’ environments, McDermott said during the call. Automated workflows sped up remediation efforts and ServiceNow kept employees up-to-date via its portal. None of ServiceNow’s systems were impacted by the outage, he said.
Dive Insight:
A defective software upgrade in CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform was only live for 78 minutes last Friday. Despite the short window, Fortune 500 businesses are expected to face $5.4 billion in costs, according to Parametrix.
Vendors, like ServiceNow, are using the outage as a chance to call attention to products and services that provide visibility and control, which could have assisted recovery efforts.
ServiceNow quarterly revenues were up 22% year-over-year, surpassing $2.6 billion for the period ending June 30. The software company exceeded projections and raised its 2024 subscription revenue and operating margin guidance.
While the vast majority of businesses have since recovered from the outage, the cascading impact of a single faulty update has raised questions about software monoliths and IT resiliency.
The outage coincided with earnings season, giving CEOs the opportunity to applaud IT teams’ round-the-clock efforts and offer insight into their operational recovery.
The most illustrative examples of how businesses recovered came from the airline industry. United Airlines fully recovered after three days of manually fixing and rebooting more than 26,000 computers and devices one by one. Delta’s recovery, on the other hand, was prolonged by crew-tracking systems failures.
