As a marketing organization, we look at several aspects to measure our success in market penetration, awareness and visibility. One of the many statistical areas we look at are Website visits and page views. Recently we have had to filter our results to get an accurate picture of our Web stats. The reason? Our competition.

We try to be as transparent as possible. We post all our marketing collateral in public forums like our corporate Website, our Web community and other vehicles like Slideshare, LinkedIn (search Service-now.com), Service-now.com folks on Twitter>Twitter, and Youtube.

Our product documentation is readily accessible by the general public in the form of a Wiki. We allow anyone to view our forum discussions and blog posts. We even provide a wide-open instance of the latest version of our software without requiring registration. We constantly receive feedback from the IT community that they appreciate our transparency.

That said, we are acutely aware that our competition is taking advantage of our philosophy. Yesterday alone, BMC had more than 200 page views and close to 500 for the week of June 1st. To put things in perspective, yesterday the next closest page view count for a single site visitor was about 60.

Why so much traffic from our competition? Maybe the 'big guys' are beginning to notice that their customers are disappearing or that the market is demanding modern SaaS, not SaaS messaging camouflaging client / server ASP or maybe we have a hidden treasure in the site... Whatever the case, we must be doing something right.

Service-now.com is experiencing double-digit percentage, year-over-year revenue growth, has been cash-flow positive for nearly eight straight quarters and has doubled our Website visits quarter-over-quarter. I guess the fact that our competition is crawling our Website is the ultimate compliment.

Hopefully the big guys can learn a little from the Service-now.com community. We'll keep on setting the pace, sticking to our transparent philosophy and driving innovation into the IT management market. All aboard!