Alain Badoux, Vice President of Services for the Alps and Central and Eastern Europe

From Helmuth Fuchs

Mr. Badoux, ServiceNow’s global sales in recent quarters have increased by 35% to 40% year-on-year. What is the situation in Switzerland? What special challenges does such rapid growth bring to you?

Alain Badoux: We are certainly pleased that we also enjoy a high growth rate in Switzerland and have been doing this for many years. The focus is on the success of our customers, and we have received good feedback from our customers.

“Switzerland is an early adopter market for all of our ServiceNow solutions.”
Alain Badoux, Vice President of Alps and CEE Service

Switzerland is an early adopter market for all of our ServiceNow solutions. For a long time, companies no longer regarded us as ITSM tools, but as enterprise providers. In the large-scale partner ecosystem, we also have many powerful partners, and we can work with these partners to provide customers with quality services. We also see a high degree of acceptance of cloud technology in Switzerland.

The surprising growth is that the number of major customers who use ServiceNow’s services with a turnover of more than $1 million per year is rapidly increasing. What is your target audience in Switzerland, a typical SME market?

In Switzerland, we meet the needs of customers in all market segments, that is, we can consider more than two-thirds of the companies in the SMI (Swiss Market Index) as customers. For example, at the same time, we also have customers who work in the field of technical services. These customers have only a few hundred employees. Switzerland is famous for its financial and pharmaceutical industries, and we already have many customers in these areas. However, our target group includes companies from various industries. Switzerland does not have these classic SMEs, but many international companies are our customers. They realized the possibility of the cloud early on, which was also reflected in the process of adopting the ServiceNow solution, and has nothing to do with the industry.

Currently, everyone is talking about digitization and digital transformation. How do you solve this problem with your customers?

By changing the company’s processes, we are changing the world of work. We make this possible through the “ServiceNow Now Platform”. With our digital workflow, the usual tedious and manual routine tasks can be completed quickly, easily and efficiently. This allows employees to focus on tasks that are truly important. Provide a better experience for employees and customers. Ultimately, this will also benefit the business.

Forrester positioned ServiceNow as the technology leader in the latest version of the enterprise service management well-known provider comparison. What does this specifically mean for your customers, and how can they stand out from the competition with the help of your platform?

The results of the Forrester Wave™ clearly show that ServiceNow as a platform, in addition to the “IT service management” area you mentioned, also covers many other areas besides IT.

“We use artificial intelligence to automate repetitive tasks, which have no added value.”

Our platform is designed for company-wide workflow management, control, automation and orchestration. We provide a common platform to map all services in the company-from human resources to finance, IT to procurement and facility management. We use artificial intelligence to automate repetitive tasks that have no added value.

The company’s customer service management can also be seamlessly integrated into Now Platform. Service management methods allow us to solve the causes of customer problems and directly link customer service to other departments of the company.

With ServiceNow, customers can simplify the workflow of the entire company through an integrated platform, thereby creating a better, simpler, and more intuitive user experience for employees and customers. We can clearly see that Switzerland is an early adopter market in terms of our solutions.

The current essential technologies seem to be artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). How to use them in ServiceNow?

The automation of IT processes is very important to provide employees and customers with a great experience, but it is also important for early detection of problems and system failures. If IT processes are unified and integrated on one platform, new technologies such as AI and ML can be used efficiently, and the company can be farsighted. Therefore, automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning are very important to us.

For legal and compliance reasons, the location where data is stored and processed has become increasingly important. Where is the ServiceNow data center for Swiss customers?

For a long time, ServiceNow has been providing its customers with two mirrored data centers outside the EU in Switzerland. Together with our multi-instance cloud architecture, it can bring customers a high level of security and reliability. In addition, Swisscom also offers a local cloud with ServiceNow, which complies with more specific regulations. Since our data center is located in Germany, we are in a very advantageous position and are clearly ahead of many competitors.

“In addition to the EU, ServiceNow has been providing two mirrored data centers for its customers in Switzerland for a long time.”

It is worth noting that the latest acquisition of ServiceNow is a language company (Friendly Data, Parlo). Which applications will benefit from the acquisition first?

We focus on the use of speech recognition, as well as the targeted use of artificial intelligence or machine learning to achieve better workflow and better user experience. Therefore, machine learning and other emerging technologies are an integral part of our platforms and solutions. Voice recognition combined with virtual agents (chatbots) can further improve the end user experience, especially the customer experience in customer service.

“Through our recent acquisition, Appsee, we now provide a better workplace experience in the mobile sector.”

All these technologies enable employees to devote their time and energy to more meaningful and profitable activities rather than routine tasks. Through the last acquisition of Appsee, we now provide a better workplace experience in the mobile field. This is also the focus of our last update to the Madrid release. Because no matter where you are, more and more work is being done on mobile devices. With Appsee, we will continue to improve user analysis to provide a better user experience out of the box.

Although ServiceNow has provided the possibility of digital technology on its platform, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, chatbots or automated trading advisors, at least in Switzerland, the reality is that even if there are large service providers, outside of official working hours There is hardly any support. How far is the distance between technological possibilities and business reality, and where have the possibilities been best utilized?

The biggest challenge in the technological environment is usually to always keep pace with the pace of innovation and technological development. Artificial intelligence, machine learning and chatbots will continue to develop rapidly in the future. We are committed to the effective use of technology, providing quick solutions to customers’ daily and actual needs, and improving the working environment through a new quality of user experience.

We already have customers who have successfully used these technologies. In fact, it is often difficult for companies to get started. One of the reasons is that they want to do too many things at once, instead of focusing on simple, fast implementation use cases.

Digitalization has also changed the job profile and the company’s requirements for employees. Compared with the earlier change process, nowadays, high-quality professions (such as doctors, lawyers or programmers) are also affected. Where do you see new opportunities, especially in Switzerland, what must the economy do to ensure that, most importantly, the impact of digitalization is positive?

Technological progress is changing jobs permanently. As in every stage of profound change, some of the job profiles we know today will disappear as new technologies take over these activities-whether in the automation of daily tasks or in autonomous driving.

However, new jobs are also emerging, and we may not even be able to imagine it today. This development has been and is a feature of every stage of technology-driven change, and each job description has changed at least in part due to the impact of new technologies. There is a challenge: how do we support people to keep up with the pace of technological change? This means that employees must relearn how to use technology, especially in artificial intelligence. Every employee needs to master the core skills of digital skills and abilities. Digital native languages ​​are a basic requirement of the 21st century-applicable in Switzerland and the world.

“Every employee needs a core digital skills and competence library.”

The speed of technological change not only affects the world of work, but also our daily lives. At home, we use voice to interact with artificial intelligence, which is unimaginable recently. Technology makes our lives easier, and we don’t want to be without it-it means we will adapt and learn. We experience similar changes in the workplace at a faster rate. To successfully master this change, extensive public and private commitments are required.

At the end of the interview, you have two wishes. What are they like?

Let me answer our CEO John Donahoe in a different way. His nightmare is that he will wake up in five years and find that cloud services are just another technical hype, not adding value to customers. However, his dream is that he will wake up in five years, and the cloud service platform will prevail. In this way, ServiceNow will become one of the few remaining platforms widely used by customers, thereby generating real added value.

Another wish is that local businesses and the public sector recognize the opportunities that cloud technology has in stores. They can also learn from international companies in the private sector. For them, the cloud is no longer the focus of discussion, but a necessary condition. Cloud means growth and further development-we can help.