Is ServiceNow Making a Play for the IT Service Provider Market?

ServiceNow (NOW) has recently come onto MSPmentor.net’s radar as a company to watch. Sure, this is a $683 million publicly-held company that describes itself as “the enterprise cloud company,” so plenty of people are familiar with it.

But for MSPmentor this company is interesting because we’ve seen a smattering of MSPmentor 501 IT service providers name ServiceNow as one of their professional services automation (PSA)/business management platforms.

And then at the launch of ServiceNow’s new app store this week, we saw a handful of names that would be familiar to most MSPs including LabTech Software, Bomgar, LogMeIn, and Cloud Sherpas.

LabTech Software CEO Matt Nachtrab told me that he’s not sure of the size of the overlap in customers between his company and ServiceNow but he believes it is in the mid-market space. He cited both companies’ commitment to fanatical customer service and strong communities as a reason for the partnership.

LabTech Software announced its integration with ServiceNow in a separate statement this week. More information on LabTech’s announcement is here.

Is ServiceNow Expanding its Target Market?

So does this mean that ServiceNow is going after the managed service provider and IT service provider market? The company’s focus has been on large enterprise customers, and according to its 10K report released in February, it has 2,725 of those as of Dec. 31, 2014.

But ServiceNow has recognized the value of other markets and go-to-market strategies. In that same 10K the company says: “We intend to further develop our existing partner ecosystem by establishing agreements with strategic resellers, system integrators, global service providers and independent software vendors to provide broader customer coverage, access to senior executives and solution delivery capabilities, as well as extending the breadth of application coverage through complementary partner offerings.”

Cloud Platforms Expand to Also Become Marketing Platforms

And the ServiceNow Store is part of the extensible platform strategy employed by plenty of other companies today, too. (I’m looking at you ConnectWise and Salesforce.com)

Certainly it’s interesting that vendors who serve MSPs and IT service providers are a part of the ServiceNow store. But the integrations also could point out a move by these companies to expand their own customer bases to include those 2,725 customers of ServiceNow.  ServiceNow and each of its ecosystem companies gain access to each others customers via the platform strategy  — a win-win for all involved and a mark of how go-to-market strategies are evolving in the age of cloud platforms that can also double as marketing platforms.

ServiceNow’s Annual User Conference: Knowledge15

ServiceNow made its Store announcement in conjunction with its annual user  conference in Las Vegas this week where the keynote address’s title is “Enabling Everything as a Service.”  At launch the ServiceNow Store has more than 80 certified applications and integrations from companies that provide a range of services and tools including cloud orchestration, marketing, service and help desk, HR, communications and asset management, among others.

ServiceNow said in a prepared statement that the store “features value-added business applications created by technology partners, solution providers, systems integrators and service providers. Long-time ServiceNow partners Cloud Sherpas, Fruition Partners and others have developed some of the initial applications.”

We’ll be watching the news out of Las Vegas this week and will keep you updated on further developments.