The Enterprise Needs An Ecosystem... and Happy Birthday!?!

[allan_leinwand]

Here is the U.S. we are in the middle of a very interesting election cycle, so please permit me to quote a famous politician who once said, "It takes a village." In the same way that it takes the ecosystem of a village to raise children, the enterprise needs an ecosystem to be run their business successfully. During meetings with CIOs I hear that they want a cloud platform to build and deploy services for many diverse business needs. These services include everything from IT requests to datacenter management to facilities issues to legal document review to human resources employee on-boarding and more.

IT needs to power the needs of nearly every department in the enterprise. And asking IT to build all of these services is a daunting, if not impossible, task for an enterprise of any scale. Cloud computing does enable an agile and responsive enterprise environment, but the services do not appear out of thin air - they do need to be developed and deployed in a reliable and efficient manner.

Here at ServiceNow we develop applications that offer many of the services mentioned above to their enterprise. An enterprise CIO can quickly bring digital transformation to their company and drive their business forward using our platform and applications. Many enterprises use our applications out-of-the-box and those get deployed quickly and this works well.

At the same time, we know that we are not subject matter experts in every enterprise application area, that we cannot develop every application that an enterprise could conceivably need and we do not build applications to fit unique enterprise environments. The needs of the enterprise have a very long and diverse tail of use cases. Fortunately, our cloud platform is exceptionally extensible and integrates easily with other products - but that still means that someone in the enterprise potentially needs to do work to build and launch new services.

And getting that work done brings up a very important milestone....Happy 1st Birthday ServiceNow Store! We launched the ServiceNow Store just over a year ago at our Knowledge15 conference and today we have over 250 partners enabled, 150 certified applications (with 50 more in the pipeline) and millions of dollars of applications sold. It has been an amazing first year watching the ServiceNow ecosystem grow rapidly.

While that is good progress for the ServiceNow Store, how does this help the enterprise CIO? The reason we launched the ServiceNow Store was to help build an ecosystem of developers and partners building services that we certify and that an enterprise can easily add to their instance. We have tens of thousands of active developers on our developer site (a bit more about them here) learning, building, discussing and deploying applications. That is a big and thriving ecosystem working on applications that we are not addressing. And that means that CIOs can leverage these developer and partner ecosystem to deploy services for the needs of their business fast and reliably.

The combination of the Enterprise Cloud combined with our developer and partner ecosystem gives our customers access to a variety of developer skills, applications, integrations and solutions that they can easily use to build and launch services. The ServiceNow certification of these solutions in the Store gives the enterprise CIO peace of mind about its functionality, performance and security. Existing ServiceNow customers can buy items from the Store easily as the process is handled by the existing enterprise purchasing channels. All items in the Store are written in an application scope so they do not interfere with other services already deployed on the platform and can be deployed easily.

It is not only developers adding to the ServiceNow ecosystem but our partners as well. We have had incredibly successful partners for many years and now these partners and others are building applications and services and offering them in the Store. The ServiceNow Store gives our valued partners visibility and marketing to our customer base, a way to scale up their own sales efforts and intellectual property protection for their creations. Enterprise CIOs can add partner applications seamlessly through the ServiceNow Store.

Enterprise does need an ecosystem. The ServiceNow Store and related ecosystem is just over a year old and we are seeing growth in developers and partners everyday. Enterprise CIOs can benefit from this rich ecosystem of skilled developers and partners plying their trade in a large variety of vertical markets and domains.

We look forward to seeing all everyone at Knowledge16 in a few short weeks - if you are going I guarantee that you will be seeing a very rich ecosystem for the enterprise!