Amit Zavery, who spent almost 25 years at Oracle before joining Google, is taking the COO role at ServiceNow as the company attempts to draw a line under investigations surrounding an earlier executive hire. Credit: Just a day after announcing his departure from Google to his LinkedIn followers, Amit Zavery said that he is joining ServiceNow as COO. ServiceNow said that Zavery will serve as “president, chief product officer (CPO), and chief operating officer (COO) to lead product and engineering, effective October 28, 2024.” “In his role as president, CPO, and COO, Zavery’s responsibilities include ServiceNow’s platform, products, engineering, cloud infrastructure, and user experience. He also leads enterprise-wide operations,” said. The post Zavery is filling was left vacant after an earlier executive hiring saga, which now involves investigations from US government entities including the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General, and the Army Suspension and Debarment Office. That matter involved ServiceNow hiring the 娇色导航of the US Army to serve as its head of its global public sector. On July 24, ServiceNow said that an internal investigation had determined that the company’s president and COO, CJ Desai, “had violated company policy regarding a possible conflict relating to such individual’s hiring” and that it had reached an agreement with Desai that he would immediately resign from all positions with the company. The former Army CIO, Raj Iyer, also quit ServiceNow. He told CIO.com at the time, “I resigned because I didn’t want to be associated with this fiasco in any way. It’s not my fault.” In an earnings call with analysts on Wednesday afternoon, ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott championed Zavery’s hiring. “During his tenure, he helped build Google Cloud into the fourth-largest enterprise software company by increasing annualized revenue from $7 billion to over $41 billion. Before joining Google Cloud, Amit had a distinguished career at Oracle, where he presided over their growth and Platform as a Service and data analytics,” McDermott said. “With sterling educational and career credentials, Amit is a world-class engineer and engineering leader. From a commercialization perspective, he’s also an expert in packaging and pricing.” In his , Zavery said leaving Google was “the toughest goodbye,” but added, “I’m excited about the new adventures and opportunities ahead.”One of his first adventures at ServiceNow will be figuring out how best to package and price the company’s new tools for creating AI agents, introduced in September in the Xanadu release of the company’s Now Platform for managing workflows. “While the suddenness and manner of CJ Desai’s departure seemed unfortunate, it provides an opportunity for ServiceNow,” said Charles Betz, VP and principal analyst at Forrester Research. “In the IT space, ServiceNow’s primary competitor is Atlassian, which has a strong grip on the developer community. Amit Zavery’s experience with the famously developer-centric culture at Google, building Cloud products primarily consumed by developers, has the potential to strengthen ServiceNow offerings such as Agile development and collaborative work management, improving competitive positioning versus Atlassian. His hyperscaler experience will also be relevant to the escalating competition between ServiceNow and Salesforce. “ This post has been updated to include Forrester’s comment. SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe