IT as a Service Broker: My 4 Talking Points

[errol_rodericks]

Extract: From recent conversations with customers and prospects, I picked up 4 themes everybody is focusing on when it comes to Enterprise Service Management and Automation. Join me online or offline to understand the impact of Enterprise SaaS and PaaS for your business and IT department.

===

The best way to pick up new customer insights is to go out and just talk to the people. That's why I turned May and June into an online/offline road trip of sorts.

Last month, we hosted almost 4,000 attendees at our customer conference Knowledge13 in Las Vegas. Watch this recording of ServiceNow's founder and CPO Fred Luddy describing the Future of Now - it's an experience. Last week, I spoke at Gartner's Infrastructure & Operations Summit in Berlin, and joined a panel discussion on the future of I&O. Then today and tomorrow, I am in London at Forrester's I&O Forum, and in two weeks, you can join me live for a webcast with my buddies David and Andy on keeping your CMDB in shape. Then in between things, I traveled to our key prospects and customers across EMEA, to sit down with their teams, understand their challenges and explain about the benefits ServiceNow can bring to their operations and bottom lines. Our customers tell us they are plenty.

There is a clear red line in the hundreds of conversations I got involved in over the last months — it spans across these 4 points:

1. Service Broker
IT departments are moving away everywhere from being technology-focused, and are transforming into managed service providers and brokers. This means that they are adopting a more holistic approach to collecting demand from the business, delivering composite SLA's spanning multiple services, managing vendors in the cloud and taking a holistic approach to "continual service improvement". We call this the NOW State of IT, a move which cannot be completed succesfully without a single system of record for IT, where all stakeholders, knowledge, workflows, and reports come together for the whole organisation to benefit from. In this series of demo's, you can see how the ServiceNow platform supports an entire organisation and all of its departments.

2. Categories of Services
Enterprises move away from large, monolithic applications, like ERP systems. They break them up into constituent services, which are then being categorised into private, public, hybrid and community cloud categories and sourced accordingly. The same is happening for IT tools. ServiceNow is seen by many as the cloud vendor of choice for self-service and shared services. Our complete suite of IT Service Management applications and "ERP for IT" value proposition fit into this public cloud category. In addition, we are seeing an increase in HR, Facilities, Logistics and Financial services being implemented on our SaaS platform. With our recently introduced App Creator, quickly automating robust, workflow-based business processes is easier and safer than ever.

3. Operations: Service Relationship Management
Talking about "Infrastructure & Operations", there is definitely less time spent on Infrastructure, with all eyes focused on Operations, with service portfolios being at the top of IT's agenda. In terms of infrastructure, the most important discussions are to do with provisioning of cloud-based and highly virtualised environments and related vendor management. For more details on recent updates to ServiceNow's Cloud orchestration and provisioning capabilities, read Michael Dortch's blog.

4. Foundational: Automated CMDB
Advanced IT departments have stopped trying to tackle challenging and endless problems like the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and have instead started to focus on services from the cloud, with the CMDB being automatically implemented with the right scope, content and management as a result. If you want to understand this trend in more detail, you may want to join this webcast.

It is great to see how relevant ServiceNow's recent product innovations and introductions really are, speaking to so many practitioners from across EMEA. I surely hope I get to discuss some of these themes with you personally soon. Be it in London, online, or wherever you are — let me know if you want to chat about your Service Management challenges, and I'll be happy to come and join you for a coffee and an honest conversation.