Co-hosting with ChannelE2E’s Content Czar Joe Panettieri, CompTIA President and CEO Todd Thibodeaux chatted with Tony Beller, ServiceNow’s VP of worldwide alliances and channels for this podcast interview. Beller describes the SaaS company’s partner strategy for IT service management (ITSM) and beyond.
ServiceNow’s platform is more than just IT service management these days. Tell us a little bit about how your platform has evolved to meet additional needs.
ITSM is our biggest product line that took us public and it’s a big portion of our revenues. But, we’ve also expanded outside of ITSM into areas like HR management, customer service management, security operations and other areas. We see those areas growing very fast and they are helping us propel our growth. Partners are investing very heavily into HR and security operations. A lot of customers have gaps in these areas where they didn’t put a lot of emphasis in the past, so we’re seeing a lot of growth.
On the security front, do you see your partners becoming customers per se? Are MSPs beginning to consume ServiceNow to build out security operation centers for themselves to manage customer security?
If you look at the top 25 managed service providers globally, at least 90 percent of them are our partners that use ServiceNow and they are all expanding into security operations. Most of our MSPs are also customers. A lot of them are using ServiceNow wall-to-wall. Some of them are just using ITSM. But, of the top 25 MSPs, they’re all using ITSM and at least 50 percent are using security operations. It’s a very exciting segment for us and we are actually investing a lot in that area.
Tell us more about the types of partners you are trying to attract to the table.
Our services partners are the partners we want to own delivery to our customers. It’s very centered on customer success. Our resellers don’t only resell our products, but they must also implement. The third category is MSPs, which we talked a lot about already. And, then, we have about 300 applications posted on our store by our technology partners. We’re looking to these ISVs and OEMs to innovate and extend our platform reach. The majority of our partners fall into more than one of those four buckets.
There’s an IT talent shortage, particularly in the security market. On the one hand, are you helping companies to overcome the talent shortage through automation? But on the other hand, are you working to certify and train these partners to fill the talent gap? What are you seeing in terms of your own growth, you partner needs, your customer needs and the talent gap?
One of our areas of big investment this year is rolling out a certification process that goes along with industry standards across all product lines. We are pushing our partner ecosystem to certify to build specialization across all product lines. Additionally, we’re developing programs around academic training to get more talent into the market. We are building capacity models and we feel pretty confident that the program we’re rolling out will have the capacity needed to deliver the work.
Listen to the full podcast here.
