ServiceNow has announced the official opening and powering up of two new cloud services data centres in Frankfurt and Dusseldorf, Germany. The facilities will serve new and existing ServiceNow customers who need to retain control and management of their data residency.

The Frankfurt and Dusseldorf operations have been built as a mirrored pair to enable ServiceNow to seize the massive customer expansion opportunity in the German market.

The in-country presence means that ServiceNow can serve customers across a far wider and more sensitive assortment of data residency and regulatory compliance use cases.

ServiceNow already has over 200 German customers, served by data centre pairs in London and Amsterdam, as well as Geneva and Zurich. The strategic investment in its cloud infrastructure will ultimately serve to further broaden ServiceNow’s already expanding German customer base, allowing the company to talk to a wider breadth of companies.

Massive expansion opportunity

Initially, the expansion of cloud services may suit Germany-headquartered companies. Additionally, there is a similarly large customer expansion opportunity for ServiceNow to serve non-Germany-located Managed Service Provider (MSP) firms who operate a substantial amount of business with German customers in the domestic market, on the ground. These businesses need to be located on German soil to carry out many of their core operational requirements. This is an investment decision based upon the complexity and volume of cloud services requirements already being evidenced by German customers.

Part of our central go-to-market proposition is that we want to give our customers choice over their data residency and control. When we look at the European market as a whole, we already have a strong presence in London, Amsterdam, Geneva and Zurich, but GDP growth in Germany is stable and positive. The new data centres will help us to strategically expand our presence in Western Europe in what we have identified as a key growth market.

The announcement of these Germany data centres has already allowed ServiceNow to close a number of deals based directly upon the provision of these new cloud facilities. But in truth, every customer conversation ServiceNow is having is focused on the new data centres.

ServiceNow has identified eight key growth markets globally and the two biggest geographical zones are Germany and Japan.

In our view, these two countries will see the greatest amount of digital transformation leading to cloud services growth over the next three to four years. Because of this, ServiceNow has channelled its major investment for growth globally into Germany, with Japan also benefitting from new data centre operations.

Datacentre mechanics

At the new Frankfurt and Dusseldorf sites, ServiceNow has provided all the hardware, network engineering, load balancing and software services backbone to deliver the full ServiceNow Now Platform and all of our partner services at full capacity.

Equinix will provide colocation facilities, which will encompass all site premises requirements such as cooling, power, fixtures and fittings and other aspects of physical site security including CCTV and visitor logs etc.All new and existing ServiceNow data centres also meet the highest standards for reliable power, fire suppression, and physical security.

In line with the investment made in physical hardware, ServiceNow’s German talent pool is also set to expand. The workforce across all German office locations will double over the next 18 months.

We know that data privacy will continue to be an increasingly complex issue in Germany and across the rest of Europe, so we are investing in the people, skills and talent (as well as the physical hardware and virtualised software services) we need to be able to serve customers today and in the future.

With demand for intelligent cloud services growing across every industry vertical for ServiceNow, our customer base has increasingly demanded additional compute, storage and analytics capacity to be provided on mainland European soil. The new data centre pair comes at a time when ServiceNow’s business model for Germany can now fully justify this in-country investment.

To underpin and provide the ServiceNow Nonstop Cloud, ServiceNow operates a total of six global support centres and, with the addition of Dusseldorf and Frankfurt, ten data centre pairs across five continents. Each data centre pair operates in an active‑active mode providing highly performant and available instances for our customers.

German customers, German engineering

German customers will be able to get 24×7, follow-the-sun global data centre operations and support (some of which will be in German where needed), while they can also benefit from additional customer support with German-speaking, full-time employees.

This development creates more opportunities in the German enterprise market for ServiceNow. With German cloud adoption perhaps lagging behind other parts of Europe in some areas, this should open up a lot of doors that were previously closed.

The longer-term plan

The feeling in Germany itself in line with the new data centre openings is certainly one of positivity. There is an almost emotional surge that comes across from our customers who now know that they can locate their ServiceNow public cloud data storage requirements inside Germany.

The bottom line here is the massive expansion opportunity that ServiceNow has identified in Germany, which has resulted in this significant investment in the two new data centres.

We conservatively estimate that this could open up as much as 20 per cent more total addressable market for ServiceNow business in Germany, with healthcare and financial services identified as key growth areas.

With an advanced, high-availability architecture at the heart of our operational backbone, ServiceNow is ready to serve both global and local markets with world standard non-stop cloud services. As they say in Germany ‘Let’s Switch It On, Then!’ — Lasst uns den Schalter umlegen!