Dusseldorf The US ServiceNow Group and the emerging Munich technology company Celonis will work together as strategic partners in the future. The two companies hope to develop joint products, sell each other’s services and collaborate on marketing. Specifically, its purpose is to first enable enterprise customers to analyze their business processes and then improve them through digitalization and automation.
ServiceNow’s CEO Bill McDermott explained the interaction between the two companies as follows: “Celonis is taking X-rays: what’s wrong with the patient?” The company’s software analyzes business progress, where bottlenecks appear, and what changes are better the result of. “ServiceNow can immediately obtain the results of this analysis and automate the workflow,” McDermott said. The American manager started working at ServiceNow at the end of 2019. Prior to that, he was the head of Waldorf-based Dax Group SAP for nearly ten years.
The sales partnership with ServiceNow will further enhance the applications of the most valuable German startups. What the two have in common is that they integrate the services of many companies. Celonis is considered one of the pioneers and market leaders in process mining.
The term is based on mining: just like mining mineral resources in a mine, Celonis transfers data in all business processes from various systems to the surface. In this way, the process can be visualized, analyzed, and in some cases automatically optimized. Take Cityline, a subsidiary of Lufthansa, as an example: Celonis has built an application for airlines through which the handling of aircraft can be organized as quickly as possible according to the number of passengers and luggage and the necessary maintenance.
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The role of ServiceNow is even higher: with its cloud platform, customers can design and automate business processes across various IT systems. The company is known for its solutions for IT departments, but it hopes to transfer this principle to many other areas of the business world.
For example, HR solutions should make it easier for new employees to get started. With just a few clicks, you can set up your email inbox, order notebooks and send your data to the human resources department. To this end, the software uses interfaces to access the systems of providers such as SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft, or Oracle where the data is located.
Billionenmarkt super automation
The bosses of both companies particularly emphasized the benefits of cooperation for customers. Celonis co-CEO and co-founder Alexander Rinke said: “We believe that the winners of digital innovation will be companies that are data-driven in all aspects of their business.”
Bill McDermott said that in the past three years, digital transformation has invested 3 trillion US dollars, but only one-fifth of the projects are profitable. “The first reason is that things are not well integrated.” The first joint application of ServiceNow and Celonis was announced in the first half of 2022.
According to boss estimates, 20% of Celonis customers already use ServiceNow. In the long run, Bill McDermott expects that the partnership between the two companies will bring “thousands of new customers.” Celonis and ServiceNow are part of the hyper-automation growth market, which is expected to reach US$8 trillion in the next three years.
Following the announcement of the partnership, ServiceNow also announced that the company intends to make a strategic investment in Celonis. Neither company wants to comment on the conditions. To be sure, Celonis’ goal is to achieve an independent IPO in the medium term. In the latest round of financing, the startup was valued at 11.1 billion U.S. dollars (calculated at the then exchange rate: 9.1 billion euros). With a valuation of more than ten million U.S. dollars, Celonis is the first and so far only German Decacorn.
As far as ServiceNow is concerned, it has repeatedly exceeded analyst expectations recently. In the second quarter, the company once again achieved significant double-digit growth, and profitability is expected to increase substantially. The market value currently stands at 125 billion U.S. dollars (108 billion euros).
Interestingly, Bill McDermott and Celonis have a history: during his tenure as SAP boss, the manager worked with the founder. Rinke said that even then, he was a great supporter. The founder said: “Compared with our 1.5 million US dollar transaction, he really has greater concerns.” But when he sent an email to the then SAP boss on December 31 to thank him for his cooperation, he was on Friday. I thanked him for his “good news” within minutes, and continued to encourage him: “The sky is the limit.”
Celonis takes over real-time data provider
Since then, the relationship with SAP has changed. The Waldorf Group acquired Celonis’ competitor Signavio in May. Since then, the two companies have actually been competitors. ServiceNow and Celonis emphasized that their partnership is not exclusive: customers are still free to work with competitors of the two companies.
At the same time, Celonis has strengthened itself through acquisitions. Earlier this week, the acquisition of Licenses.IO, a real-time data provider, was confirmed. “They allow us to integrate data from hundreds of sources into Celonis in real time,” Rinke said. Using Lufthansa Cityline as an example, he explained how Celonis customers use it to further optimize their business processes: Before each flight, the pilots had to decide how much gasoline to add based on their experience. Various factors play a role-such as weather, route, aircraft, number of luggage, and number of passengers.
As a result, today there is too much fuel, and the corresponding heavy aircraft consumes more gasoline than necessary: “With Lenses, we can process all the pilot’s information in real time and make recommendations on how much fuel he needs to carry.” From the check-in and baggage system The data. Lenses.IO has 60 employees in London and Athens. Both parties have agreed not to disclose the purchase price.
more: Valuation over 10 billion: Munich startup Celonis is the first Decacorn in Germany
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