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What does it take to rank among the top 50 companies on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest growing private companies in America? Among other things, these days it takes great information technology. Brian Morgan, director of IT at Interbank FX (IBFX) in Salt Lake City concurs.

IBFX is a leading provider of online foreign exchange trading services, serving clients from more than 140 countries. The company handles about $4 billion in transactions a day for its customers. Inc. magazine recently named IBFX as the 46th fastest growing private company in America, and the 5th fastest growing financial services company. Utah Business magazine gives IBFX the title of number one growth company in the state of Utah.

To reach and sustain that level of growth, the IT systems need to be able to grow and adapt rapidly to the company’s needs. This is one of the reasons Morgan and his IT team selected a  software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering from Service-now.com as the company’s IT service management (ITSM) platform. “Service-now.com helps us provide better uptime for our systems than we could do if we hosted an application ourselves,” says Morgan.

Service-now.com is a fully hosted on-demand IT service management application based on ITIL v3. The company was founded in 2005 by Fred Luddy, who previously was CTO at Peregrine Systems and Remedy. When Luddy left Peregrine, he wanted to create a company that offers a far simpler way to do service management. The result is an application that is entirely Web-based using Web 2.0 techniques. Service-now.com competes against the heavy hitters of the ITSM world, including IBM, HP, BMC Software and CA. The difference is, you don’t have to install any software in order to use Service-now.com.

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What does it take to rank among the top 50 companies on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest growing private companies in America? Among other things, these days it takes great information technology. Brian Morgan, director of IT at Interbank FX (IBFX) in Salt Lake City concurs.

IBFX is a leading provider of online foreign exchange trading services, serving clients from more than 140 countries. The company handles about $4 billion in transactions a day for its customers. Inc. magazine recently named IBFX as the 46th fastest growing private company in America, and the 5th fastest growing financial services company. Utah Business magazine gives IBFX the title of number one growth company in the state of Utah.

To reach and sustain that level of growth, the IT systems need to be able to grow and adapt rapidly to the company’s needs. This is one of the reasons Morgan and his IT team selected a  software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering from Service-now.com as the company’s IT service management (ITSM) platform. “Service-now.com helps us provide better uptime for our systems than we could do if we hosted an application ourselves,” says Morgan.

Service-now.com is a fully hosted on-demand IT service management application based on ITIL v3. The company was founded in 2005 by Fred Luddy, who previously was CTO at Peregrine Systems and Remedy. When Luddy left Peregrine, he wanted to create a company that offers a far simpler way to do service management. The result is an application that is entirely Web-based using Web 2.0 techniques. Service-now.com competes against the heavy hitters of the ITSM world, including IBM, HP, BMC Software and CA. The difference is, you don’t have to install any software in order to use Service-now.com.

When Brian Morgan took the IT director job at IBFX, the company had a rudimentary open source trouble ticketing system. He introduced his team and the CIO to Service-now.com, which Morgan had used at a previous company. “As soon as we started using Service-now.com [at IBFX], we became 10 times more efficient in our computing services,” says Morgan. His group uses Service-Now for incident management, change management, the service catalog and a range of other activities. They have a CMBD that will be fully loaded with all the configuration information for the entire IT and facilities teams. “We are on plan to use it to track everything,” says Morgan.

Don’t let the fact that Service-now.com is offered over the Web fool you. It’s as full-featured and robust as much more complex products like OpenView and Unicenter. The appeal of the product is in its simplicity, though. “In my previous job, the company tried to use CA’s ITSM product,” says Morgan. “When we needed to make a simple change, like adding a field to our database, we’d have to hire CA consultants for four hours to make the change. With Service-now.com, we tell an engineer what we want and it’s done in five minutes. The cost to configure the software is almost nil.”

Service-now.com upgrades its software three times a year. Everything is automatic for the customers, so there is no new software to install or pay extra for. The software has applications to support ITIL v3 adoption, including incident tracking, license compliance, asset portfolio, configuration management, chargebacks, and more.

Linda Musthaler is a principal analyst with Essential Solutions Corporation.