Digital workflow management software vendor ServiceNow’s senior channel director ANZ Matt Bolton sat down with CRN Australia and revealed what the company has in store for local partners in 2023.
Having been with ServiceNow in Australia for over three years, Bolton said that “ServiceNow, in this region is, is an incredible success story.”
“Total revenue for ServiceNow globally in 2022 saw 22% year over year growth, or 25.5% adjusted for constant currency.”
“We've got a really strong ecosystem in Australia and New Zealand; we have large, medium and small partners."
"And partners impact more than more than 90 percent of our business on an annual basis, so we've got to look after them and we've got to invest in them," Bolton said.
He highlighted that due to the smaller size of the Australian market, compared to globally, ServiceNow’s channel strategy in ANZ focuses on “quality, deep relationships with partners” from four categories; sales, service, technology, and service providers.
After rolling out its new global partner program in January, Bolton said that ServiceNow is aiming to bring on board around 20 new partners across these partner categories in 2023. ServiceNow is currently partnered with 94 partners in ANZ.
“When we work with smaller organisations, it's more about finding that capability that makes that partner unique."
"When we're bringing onboard new partners, it's usually with the view that they have an industry specialisation, or they have a technical or a platform area of specialisation that we can tap into. And then we form a partnership based around that capability," he added.
“The times of us, bringing on board a whole bunch of new partners to focus on IT service management as a broad concept is probably over.”
Bolton also shared that ServiceNow has seen significant growth in certain areas of its platform.
“Things like our industry capability for financial services for telecommunications, for health care, as well as making our relationships with our customers, and our employees more intimate through our customer experience and employee experience.”
Bolton pointed out that ServiceNow has far fewer partners than many other technology platforms in place.
“But that's my intention, because we want to make sure that those partners co-invest with us and that we go on a journey together to make our customers happy.”
He highlights that the software subscription basis of ServiceNow is a significant opportunity for partners. Bolton said that that ServiceNow has been involved in several acquisitions since 2020
Some of ServiceNow partners include Accenture, Deloitte, Ernest and Young and Capgemini.
Bolton also shared that ServiceNow ANZ made a commitment at the start of 2022 to add 1,000 new skilled people into the ANZ ecosystem in 2022 and exceeded that target.
He said that ServiceNow has a NextGen Professionals Program where they “make training materials and curriculum available via things like NSW TAFE,” to provide skills for cohorts of trainees to eventually be employed by ServiceNow, as well as customers or partners.
Bolton also shared several customer win stories.
He said that ServiceNow partner, Enable, recently built a solution, dubbed Toolbox, using ServiceNow’s platform which was deployed to several customers across ANZ.
This solution aimed “to tackle occupational health and safety capabilities to make sure that employees that were working had the right kind of trainee training and certifications to perform their work.”
Bolton also highlighted how last Canberra-based ServiceNow partner, BT Automation, deployed a ServiceNow capability in Microsoft Azure in 2022.
This was to ensure that the Australian Government’s Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources’ sensitive data is protected at a higher level of security authorisation.
He also shared how Deloitte Australia helped to deploy a ServiceNow platform for the Rural Fire Service in New South Wales, creating a volunteer portal for volunteers to sign up to help fight bushfires.
“Being a born in the cloud company who has a large mature customer base in Australia and New Zealand, we rely heavily on our ecosystem.”
Bolton concluded that ServiceNow is looking for partners with a “niche capability around industry, or a specific focus on something like security, governance, risk and compliance, employee engagement, customer engagement.”
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