Servicenow makes muscles work

Servicenow’s roadshow “The Future of Work Journey 2019” just stopped in Zurich. Two managers participated in the first phase of Oerlikon’s activities. For Alain Badoux, who has been in charge of sales in Switzerland since 2016 and is now in charge of Austria and Central European countries, the first-class actors are more than just confirming the appeal of the Swiss market. When an executive of an American billionaire company visited its customers on the spot, it also reflected the company’s DNA: “The proximity to the customer is vital to us,” Badoux said.

When he welcomed him, he had already pointed out the importance of the company’s rapid growth. He recalled with satisfaction that the first event held in Switzerland three years ago was held in a very close group of only 20 people.

In the conversation at the closing ceremony of the event, he first clarified some of the core elements that contributed to the popularity of Servicenow. On the one hand, there is the platform concept pursued from the beginning and the use of the cloud from the local data center. Now 98% of customers rely on the cloud. He also made it clear that the IT Service Management (ITSM) that the company founder Fred Luddy began to engage in in 2004 is just one of the three basic application solutions for today’s workflow experts. On the basis of the Now platform, it now covers the entire work process of the company, including not only IT, but also employee and customer processes. The platform is under continuous development.

ITSM is just one of the three pillars

Gartner now ranks the company as a global market leader, ahead of BMC in its ITSM business. But due to rapid expansion, Badoux Servicenow now regards it as a generic product comparable to large platform providers. Names and numbers are impossible, but it is clear that he is using numbers to speak to companies such as Salesforce and Co..

Then, Badoux returned to talk about the distance from the user. For example, a product portfolio that addresses the workflow of today’s IT, employees and customers will benefit from long-term customers such as Cern and SwissRe in Switzerland. They will develop applications that have nothing to do with actual IT on the platform. However, he emphasized that you yourself have benefited from these applications and are still using this form of communication with customers.

At the same time, from the industry range introduced by Oerlikon’s approximately 400 customers and partners, we can see how wide the application range is. Representatives of Novartis, Swisscom and CKW, Credit Suisse and other regular customers, such as SwissRe and Cern. The IT manager from Alpla, a plastics expert, started from Dornbirn, Austria. License consultant Softwareone, the University of St. Gallen, IT service provider and Sursee’s Servicenow partner Bithawk also attended the meeting.

Regarding this summary list, it is interesting that UBS is one of the few companies that uses the local Now platform in both ITSM and HR. In this country, the entire PaaS range is provided by Euquinix leased data centers in Geneva and Zurich. As a partner in Switzerland, only Swisscom can provide services from its data center. Badoux said this collaboration allowed the team to take advantage of customer groups that could not otherwise be addressed.