Knowledge 2022: ServiceNow Focused on Partner Experience to Drive Growth
ServiceNow will roll out a reimagined partner program early next year.
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Channel Futures: Is there a message for partners at Knowledge 2022?
ServiceNow’s Erica Volini: The message that we’re sending to our partners is that ServiceNow fundamentally wants to transform the partner experience. And the word we’re using with our partners is intimacy. We don’t look at it as “we have the product, you implement the product, and we have success.” We’re looking at it as, “we both need to be in the boat together,” using the full power of what each of us brings. And intimacy means we have to understand their business strategies and they need to understand ours. And when we pull them together, we can have exponential growth.
CF: What can partners expect from this ongoing transformation?
EV: The message to ServiceNow partners is that we are completely reimagining our partner program top to bottom. We are revolutionizing our partner processes, everything from deal registration to how we handle deployments, to our partner portal and how we communicate information. We’re being much more transparent around the data and metrics we’re sharing with our partners because we want them to truly be in the boat with us. We’re working hand in hand with our partners to help them create more capacity because we know one of our biggest constraints is having enough people to actually focus on ServiceNow.
We’ll be announcing some pretty significant changes to our partners in September with a rollout in January of next year. And a lot of it’s coming from their feedback. We’re engaging with them in the design process around all of this because we want them to be in the boat with us from the beginning. That’s the message for partners and that’s what hopefully they’re starting to feel.
CF: What kind of feedback have you received from partners? What are their latest needs?
EV: I would say the No. 1 need is help us with more capacity, help us get more talent who are excited about ServiceNow and educated on ServiceNow. The second is co-invest with us, help us with marketing dollars, with partner development funds so that we can actually promote what we’re doing with ServiceNow, which is a big part of the change in our partner program, co-investing. Third is enablement. We are innovating in so many different areas, bringing new products to market, everything from completely updating the user design to putting in hyper automation with robotic process automation (RPA), to getting into new areas like procurement and enterprise resource planning (ERP).
And so our partners need continued, focused enablement to make sure they’re up to speed with everything that we’re doing. And the fourth is to help us better connect to the field. A big part of our focus here is making sure that our field understands the value that partners can provide. And so my belief is we should never have a deal where we don’t have a partner working alongside us because partners have the ability to help us either open the opportunity, close the opportunity or expand the opportunity with their thought leadership.
CF: ServiceNow introduced its new Procurement Service Management (PSM) solution. What will that mean for ServiceNow partners?
EV: It’s part of a bigger play around us modernizing ERPs. So we at ServiceNow see a huge opportunity for clients who have invested in ERPs and are stuck with a lot of customization in those ERPs to use ServiceNow. Gekkobrain, which we acquired, can sort out where all of that customization sits. Celonis, one of our partners, can help figure out where we can make process improvements, and then work with ServiceNow to implement and make improvements. Our partners were incredibly excited about our partnership with Celonis. Many of them had partnerships with Celonis, so they saw it as a natural fit. Procurement is just the first step in that journey.
CF: What do you hope ServiceNow partners can take with them and make use of from knowledge 2022?
EV: At the core, that we are committed to being a true platform company and that ServiceNow can be used across the entire enterprise. Any buyer can be using ServiceNow to deal with their biggest business challenges. And the reason why that’s so important for partners is because they’re the ones having the conversations with those buyers about their biggest business issues. And we want those partners to understand that every time they have that conversation, they should be thinking, “Let’s talk about ServiceNow.” And I think that is what our partners are taking away. That’s why they’re so excited, because they know digital transformation is the biggest opportunity out there. And now they’re seeing that Servicenow has the platform and the capability to address it in so many different ways.
That is the perfect marriage of the opportunity for our partners and the power of our platform coming together to drive value for our customers.
Mark Larsen is president of Cask, a ServiceNow consulting services firm. It handles larger transformational programs, projects and efforts with ServiceNow. Its customer base is primarily large enterprise-size organizations, including public sector, federal and state universities.
“ServiceNow is making a real concerted effort to continue to be able to what I call ‘automate anything,'” he said. “If you look at what historically has happened with ServiceNow, it’s been very focused on how you help your customers and how you help your employees. And so this is really the beginning of the third leg of the stool, which is for your suppliers, and you really think of them as being your business partners. So how do we automate that set of processes? And so for us, this is rounding out how we work with all the constituent groups we’ve seen as a partner.
We’ve seen a lot of demand for this type of automation for a long time. We’re very excited. ServiceNow, as part of their GRC product, their risk product, has been doing vendor risk management for a long time. And so when you really think about that 360-degree view of the supplier and how you interact with them in a way that is automated and traceable, and has transparency, this is kind of the golden ticket.”
David Kanter is senior managing director for the ServiceNow business group at Accenture. The Accenture and ServiceNow dedicated business group launched in October 2020.
“It was an investment, an agreement between both of our CEOs as we focus on creating a market of using the ServiceNow platform to transform work and help our clients become digital businesses even faster,” he said. “The scope is global in reach. We cover all major markets, so North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific. And our focus is global with a very intense focus on industry.”
The ServiceNow business group at Accenture is experiencing “hyper” growth, Kanter said.
“We set a series of plans to go achieve $1 billion together by 2024 and I can tell you we’ve already recast that plan to much higher,” he said.
As the pandemic continues easing, the business group sees three overall client needs in the market, Kanter said. Those are the need to harness the cloud, continue to reimagine service and customer operations, and rethink work experiences.
“We see the demand for those services continuing to grow,” he said. “There’s a need for new capabilities, processes and tools, and we see ServiceNow as core to helping clients do that.”
David Kanter is senior managing director for the ServiceNow business group at Accenture. The Accenture and ServiceNow dedicated business group launched in October 2020.
“It was an investment, an agreement between both of our CEOs as we focus on creating a market of using the ServiceNow platform to transform work and help our clients become digital businesses even faster,” he said. “The scope is global in reach. We cover all major markets, so North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific. And our focus is global with a very intense focus on industry.”
The ServiceNow business group at Accenture is experiencing “hyper” growth, Kanter said.
“We set a series of plans to go achieve $1 billion together by 2024 and I can tell you we’ve already recast that plan to much higher,” he said.
As the pandemic continues easing, the business group sees three overall client needs in the market, Kanter said. Those are the need to harness the cloud, continue to reimagine service and customer operations, and rethink work experiences.
“We see the demand for those services continuing to grow,” he said. “There’s a need for new capabilities, processes and tools, and we see ServiceNow as core to helping clients do that.”
At this week’s Knowledge 2022 conference, ServiceNow said it wants to transform the partner experience as partners are the key to it reaching its ambitious revenue goals.
ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott said the company now expects to hit $11 billion in revenue by fiscal year 2024. That’s higher than the $10 billion he previously anticipated.
ServiceNow also expects to reach $16 billion in revenue by fiscal year 2026. That’s up from the prior estimate of $15 billion.
At Knowledge, ServiceNow introduced its new Procurement Service Management (PSM) solution to help transform procurement across the enterprise. It aims to speed up delivery times for easier sourcing tasks through digitization and self-service.
Among the thousands of ServiceNow partners are global systems integrators like Accenture and Deloitte, regional players, technology partners such as Microsoft and Trend Micro, and service providers.
Erica Volini is ServiceNow’s senior vice president of partner go-to-market (GTM) operations. She said ServiceNow has seen an uptick in managed services.
ServiceNow’s Erica Volini
“We’re seeing more and more partners who are using the ServiceNow platform to be able to deliver their managed services,” she said.
Evolving GTM Strategy
Volini said she joined ServiceNow after 23 years as a senior partner at Deloitte. She did so because ServiceNow wanted to evolve its GTM strategy with partners.
“If you think about how we work with partners, it’s in a very traditional what we call a co-sell, co-deliver model where we have an opportunity – of course we want a partner working with us on the opportunity – and we want to work with them on then implementing once we win the deal,” she said. “As we try to expand to be a true enterprise platform company, and we want to deal with significant business issues and business imperatives like environmental, social and governance (ESG) or global business services (GBS) or risk across buyers, we need partners to actually co-create the market with us. And when I say co-create, that means we need to marry the partners’ thought leadership, the partners’ IP, the partner sales motions around transformation alongside the power of our platform to help educate the market on what ServiceNow can do.”
ServiceNow is much bigger than an IT operations platform, Volini said.
“We’re selling employee experience, customer experience, automating, low-code/no code and we can’t educate the market on our own,” she said. “We need our partner ecosystem to do that. They’re in the best position to do it.”
Scroll through our slideshow above for a Q&A with Volini and more from Knowledge 2022.
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