ServiceMatters attended the Knowledge17 PartnerNow Summit to catch up on the latest partner-related news and success. We checked in with Daniel K Österbergh, Area Vice President Channel & Alliances, EMEA at ServiceNow to get the EMEA perspective on the PartnerNow Summit.

Thanks for the opportunity to explain how we are working right now.  Today ServiceNow has just over 300 partners across the EMEA region with 400 staff from a good number of these businesses registered for the Global PartnerNow Summit here at Knowledge17 in Orlando, Florida.

With an opening statement delivered by our new CEO John Donahoe, this was a great opportunity for us to talk about where we stand today as a division; that can be easily summarized in four cornerstone points:

• Partner growth at lightspeed – We are fully behind our partners with an energy that we describe as ‘growth at lightspeed’. What really matters is that we want all our partners to understand that this comes from our heart, as does our business strategy.
• Transformational focus – We exist to drive business value today – and this is instead of driving ‘only’ IT value. We make this differentiation because, historically, we may have been purely focused on the IT department. As we now also concentrate on HR, SecOps and customer service disciplines, we have broadened our communications to encompass a wider business value conversation.
• Innovation – As a company we are focused building a robust third party partner network for Independent Software Vendors (our ISV store). Our Catalyst programme allows partners to sign up for our platform and then create specific industry-vertical custom-aligned applications based on their individual needs.
• Partner enablement – ServiceNow’s services organization is here to enable our partner ecosystem system, not to compete with partners at any level.

So with these driving cornerstones in mind, today we look at a vibrant partner ecosystem that we are committed to investing in globally and in EMEA too. Our partners are broken out by our own tiered model which offers Bronze, Silver or Gold levels. Partners can choose to be pure sales partners, pure services partners, or both.

Looking at wider developments, consolidation in the partner space – especially across EMEA – has created a potential short-term challenge as the companies themselves integrate to a degree. But growth and development are a part of business and I see it as a natural evolution of our industry. Long term I only see opportunities to drive more transformation projects as these companies become ever-more skilled and develop wider technology stacks.

Our EMEA Channel and Alliances team has been expanding since the start of this year with some great new talent. This team will now help us execute our KPIs for 2017 and work diligently to evolve channel coverage and reach our wider goals as an organization. I am really delighted to call out the following names and welcome them to the EMEA team:

In terms of the way our partners develop in the future, I am convinced they will now be able to innovate more and drive a greater number of fully transformational projects based on our five Business Units (BUs).

What I love most about working with our partners is watching and learning what they do for our customers with ServiceNow technology. They are changing how people work, making people’s lives more efficient and they are helping firms function in the same way as the intuitive consumer technologies that we have all come to enjoy and rely upon. This drives business change, higher productivity and human interaction with business processes in our digital connected world.