Building a community of ecosystem partners

As ServiceNow scales from $4 billion to $10 billion, we recognise the need for a more predictable and consistent way of embracing and growing our community.  

On a strategic level, the ServiceNow partner ecosystem is firmly ‘embedded’ into our business strategy. Rather than managing our partnerships in a silo, they are built into our overall go-to-market strategy. They are intrinsic to how we work as a business. 

Over the past 18 months, we have been making great strides towards making this vision a reality. Here’s how it works in practice: Alliance & Channel Ecosystem (ACE): From crawling to running. 

Last year we launched a new operating model for our partners titled ACE – Alliance & Channel Ecosystem. More than just an operating model, this is a multi-year transformation of our partner ecosystem. We started with the “Crawl phase” in 2019 and move into the second — Walk phase — this year.  

Next year we will be in full Run mode with the help of a simple, transparent and predictable operating model encompassing 10 new or enhanced programmes. 

Several key principles inform this transformation model. 

First, we want to give our partners an easy, consistent and predictable experience when they engage with us, across every region and within every partner segment.

Second, we want to enable and support our partners to co-sell and co-deliver across the ServiceNow Platform to help accelerate our joint customers’ digital transformation journeys and deliver measurable business value plus amazing workflow experiences. 

The third principle is based on building a vibrant and balanced ecosystem made up of global, regional and ocal partners, each addressing segments of the market and/or specific industry use cases.  

Delivering value and innovating in targeted industries 
The nature of our partner engagement is long-term and value-driven, rather than transactional. ServiceNow’s new Value Delivery Framework maps out this customer journey with our partners, and helps to position, measure and deliver value. 

One of ServiceNow’s key objectives is delivering innovation that drives the digital transformation agenda right across a customer’s organisation, not just in IT. Our partners help us do this in targeted vertical industries using compelling use cases.  

For example, when a partner understands the drivers in a vertical industry with respect to a specific agenda, say employee experiences, they can bring their understanding of that industry’s language and priorities to the table. They can take our standard platform and build an industry-specific use case.  

In oil & gas, for instance, this may include taking the standard employee workflows and building a specific employee engagement use case to enhance access to rig workers, or to serve health and safety information more effectively. 

Celebrating our ecosystem in Warsaw 
We held our annual EMEA Partner Symposium in Warsaw in the first week of March, hosting more than 200 global and regional partners. The two-day event was the perfect opportunity to update our partners on the evolving ServiceNow narrative, our ACE model and the progress of our three-year ecosystem transformation. 

Our annual symposium has established itself as a strong platform for nurturing our personal relationships and fostering a sense of community within our ecosystem.  

We gathered some invaluable feedback and also had very positive discussions about our brand new certification and accreditation programme, the launch of our new ‘Workflow campaign in a box’ initiative (a pre-packaged campaign for partners to drive momentum in their businesses) and our IP monetisation strategy for partners. 

The Partner Awards evening celebrated those organisations that have made a significant contribution to accelerating customer success in the past year, alongside ServiceNow. All award winners are detailed on this blog. 

These takeaways from the EMEA Symposium highlight what makes our ACE approach so special. Our partners are playing a key role in helping ServiceNow reach new customer personas via new buying touchpoints. They drive business value realisation, platform adoption and successful customer projects.  

© 2020 ServiceNow, Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.