ServiceNow Launches Key Channel Strategies, Intelligent Automation

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SERVICENOW KNOWLEDGE17 — Enterprise software vendor ServiceNow has initiated three key strategies for its partner community, and unveiled its new Intelligent Automation Engine.

The announcements were made Tuesday during the company’s Knowledge17 conference in Orlando, Florida. About 15,000 customers, partners and others from around the world are attending the event.

During his keynote, John Donahoe (pictured above), ServiceNow’s new president and CEO, and former eBay boss, told attendees that his top priority has been listening and learning, and that one of the main things he’s heard from customers is that they want his company to continue to invest more in its partner community and provide better partner training.

“We heard this feedback and it motivates us,” he said. “We’re going to focus on getting better.”

Tony Beller, ServiceNow’s vice president of worldwide alliances and channels, announced three new partner strategies: new enablement, training and certifications across all product lines; a new Catalyst program for partners that have built offerings around its platform and/or product lines specifically geared toward financial services, health care, SLED (state and local government and education) and federal government; and increased emphasis on growing its ISV partner community.

“When I joined ServiceNow seven months ago, we already had an ISV channel that’s two years old, about 200 partners in the ecosystem and about 300-400 apps in the store,” he said. “They asked me if we could grow this much bigger, and I said yes, so we hired an executive who built the same ecosystem at another company to be almost $1 billion. So we think that their channel is going to grow very fast and we have a lot of ISVs coming at us very aggressively because of our platform, because we have a better platform than a lot of other companies.”

Beller said when Donahoe joined the company, he asked about channel strategy, “and then he said this is good because this is what I’m hearing from customers so I’m glad you’re thinking about that.”{ad}

“We’re doing what we’re doing because we heard from customers and we’re acting on it,” Beller said.

With the ServiceNow Intelligent Automation Engine, customers can prevent outages before they occur, automatically categorize and route incidents, predict future performance and benchmark performance against IT peers. It also will bring …

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… machine learning to ServiceNow’s cloud services for customer service, security and HR. It is part of the vendor’s Now Platform.

“We have a lot of partners that have built practices around that already,” Beller said. “So our partner ecosystem already is super excited about this. We were already working with a lot of them prior to the announcement on what can we do with them a lot more. We think they’re going to build a lot of solutions, and they’re going to go back to our customer base and see what else we can do with the current implementations and add more intelligent automation.”{ad}

Dave Wright, ServiceNow’s chief strategy officer, said intelligent automation “heralds a new era in workplace productivity.”

“With this game-changing innovation, we have embedded intelligence across our platform, trained with each customer’s own data,” he said. “ServiceNow is enabling customers to achieve a quantum leap in the speed and economics of their business.”