ServiceNow revamps Global Partner Program with new designations

LAS VEGAS – ServiceNow has turned its partner program upside-down as it continues on its path to become a $10 billion company.

David Parsons, senior vice-president of ServiceNow’s global partner ecosystem and alliances, unveiled the changes last week to more than 2,300 attendees at the company’s Partner Summit just before the company’s annual user conference, Knowledge.

“We’re moving away from the Gold, Silver, Bronze into more of an Elite, Premier and Specialist designation,” he said. “This does not make it good/better/best. Our challenge before was everybody wanted to be gold in our ecosystem because everybody thought silver and bronze meant number two or number three.”

The new segmentation program, which goes live on July 1, looks at two sets of criteria: partners’ breadth and depth of ServiceNow-enabled solutions in their practices and managed services, and their go-to-market maturity. Previously, partners who had invested in areas like change management, business process reengineering, and industry expertise were being measured in the same way as partners who just trained and certified people.

Four key areas factor into the evaluation of breadth and depth: Capacity (the number of people certified on ServiceNow technology), competency (specializations, measured by certifications), customer success (validated by published criteria including implementations meeting minimum customer satisfaction scores), and capability (a qualitative assessment of the partner’s digital transformation skills, industry domain expertise, and global scale).

Five designations are available:

Registered Partner: For partners new to ServiceNow, who have met minimum qualification requirements for the program and who have yet to achieve measurable activity or certifications.

Specialist Partner: Provides highly specialized skills in a specific area in one or more ServiceNow products.

Premier Partner: Focuses on fewer than five ServiceNow products in multiple regions.

Elite Partner: Specializes in five or more ServiceNow products across the IT, Employee Experience and Customer Service workflows and has established operations in multiple geographies.

Global Elite Partner: An Elite partner with deep industry domain expertise; digital transformation skills, including business process re‑engineering and organizational change management; global scale; commitment to achieve a $1 billion (USD) ServiceNow practice within three to five years; and “CEO‑level” commitment to a ServiceNow practice. This designation is reviewed annually.

Parsons said that partners are also receiving insight into ServiceNow’s roadmaps, something they’d requested during his 90-day listening tour of partners worldwide after he joined the company six months ago, and he briefed them on the conference announcements as well.

“We had a full morning session, where we walked all the partners through early insights and what our customers are hearing today through Thursday. And this is part of the partnership, we wanted them to have a sneak peek, a day in advance of our customers hearing this, so that they could be better informed and helping their customers process and digest what they’re hearing here,” he said. “And that was all part of our new partner lean in and investment. There’s a lot of appreciation for that, because they’re going to look a lot smarter, as they should, in front of our customers, because they’re partners. And they haven’t felt that in the past.”

In addition, ServiceNow has built a new deal registration system that requires a seven-day service level agreement (SLA), with a registration hub operating 5 x 24 that manages the process. A new service provider program provides commercial frameworks, pricing models, and rules of engagement for partners building services on top of the Now Platform, and a concierge service lets all partners get help navigating ServiceNow.

To address complaints that the cost of training was too high, the company has built a free automated test framework so partners can get training on demand. And partners who subcontract for other partners will now receive certification credits.

Deloitte is the poster child for all this, Parsons said. “They’re building IP on top of our platforms. And they’re doing the industry work, the industry workflows, and they’re really focused on your business process reengineering or change management and business value delivery. They’re all about the outcomes.”

“As we look at the marketplace and the needs of our customers in the marketplace, we realized that we need to do more together to drive digital transformation and change in the marketplace,” said Dejan Slokar, global ServiceNow alliance leader at Deloitte Canada. “If you look at the current set of capabilities that ServiceNow offers, we look at that as really horizontal capability offering a really broad set of capabilities across the enterprise. But what’s really an opportunity and a need in the marketplace is taking that set of capabilities into industry-specific conversations, industry-specific solutions.”

DeloitteASSIST is one such solution. It uses mobile and voice technologies in the Now Platform to allow medical staff to capture the real-time needs of hospital patients while cutting down on alert fatigue. The system not only enables communication, it triages patient requests and directs those that don’t require a nurse’s attention to the appropriate person, for example, a nursing assistant or orderly if all the patient requests is a pillow or a blanket. It is, said Slokar, an example of the type of solution Deloitte plans to deliver globally in areas such as financial services, oil and gas, public sector, and health sciences.

 

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Lynn Greiner
Lynn Greiner
Lynn Greiner has been interpreting tech for businesses for over 20 years and has worked in the industry as well as writing about it, giving her a unique perspective into the issues companies face. She has both IT credentials and a business degree

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