Service-now.com is the winner of the Pink Elephant 2010 Innovation of the Year Award, after being a finalist for the same award the previous two years.

The Innovation of the Year Award winner was announced last week at Pink Elephant's 15th Annual IT Service Management Conference and Exhibition in Las Vegas. A panel of ITSM experts selected the new Service-now.com Software Development Lifecycle Management application as the most innovative product of the year.

The Pink Elephant Innovation of the Year award, first presented in 2008, recognizes a product or service developed by the vendor community that has made the greatest contribution to IT service management in the previous calendar year. The award considers the following criteria:

* Development of open standards for process and tool integration;

* Automation of complex processes across management tools;

* Advancements in data consolidation, federation or analysis;

* Support of organizational change initiatives through innovative use of management and monitoring tools.

In the Fall 2010 release, Service-now.com release management gained the significant addition of full software development lifecycle management to help application developers and IT service organizations more effectively deliver on customer requirements while promoting stable, low-maintenance application releases. By connecting the software development lifecycle back to the problem management process, Service-now.com creates a closed-loop development cycle, where for the first time, individual enhancements and bug fixes can be associated back to their originating request or cause. Service-now.com supports several development methodologies including pre-built templates for waterfall and Scrum approaches.