“When you … say, ‘Where am I going to place my bets?’ you can only make so many bets with so many big partners. I look at that and say, ‘OK, well, I can consolidate a bunch of point solutions on ServiceNow and extend that into technology into HR, my employees and also my customers. So now I have one fact base when I do artificial intelligence inside of ServiceNow to empower those workflows,” says Paul Fipps, ServiceNow’s president of global customer and field operations.
When Paul Smith in April decided to step down from his role as ServiceNow’s president of global customer and field operations, he left a big hole in the company’s strategy of bringing the latest in digital workplace and transformation technology and AI to its channel partners.
That hole was quickly filled with the promotion of Paul Fipps, a four-year veteran of the Santa Clara, Calif.-based developer of AI-focused business transformation technology, to take over that role.
Fipps (pictured above) comes into the executive suite of ServiceNow during a time of fast change for the company and the industry as a whole. ServiceNow, which is one of the leaders in bringing ChatGPT and more recently agentic AI to its entire suite of digital workflow technologies, has been more recently pushing hard on expanding its suite to embrace CRM.
[Related: ServiceNow CEO McDermott: ‘We’re Running The Table In CRM’]
CRN recently talked with Fipps about the company’s push into CRM, which he called a natural extension to the ServiceNow Now platform.
“When you have a platform in place as an existing customer, and you really have all those disconnected systems, and you’re bringing data into ServiceNow and using us for technology or for employees, the conversation around CRM really becomes an extension as opposed to, ‘Let’s do a feature/function competitive analysis on some other player,’” he said.
He also discussed AI and what ServiceNow is doing to get its channel partner ecosystem ready for growth in this space.
“[We just] relaunched ServiceNow University, which is actually going out to the market free of charge,” he said. “Partners, customers, everybody will have access.”
There’s a lot going on at ServiceNow. For a look at the big changes coming, read CRN’s full conversation with Fipps.
One of the big pushes this year from ServiceNow is a new emphasis on CRM. How do you take that message to customers and to partners worldwide?
When you have a platform in place as an existing customer, and you really have all those disconnected systems, and you’re bringing data into ServiceNow and using us for technology or for employees, the conversation around CRM really becomes an extension as opposed to, ‘Let’s do a feature/function competitive analysis on some other player.’ That’s typically how we do it. Because once our customers understand you can do front, middle and back office as opposed to just front office that has to then integrate with some other technology, it’s an ‘Oh, yeah’ moment. From an extension standpoint, it also costs less because you’re actually extending your use of the platform. So it’s resonating with customers. We have a $1.4 billion CRM business already. I think it’s very surprising to customers that we have a business that big in CRM.
Now I think industry plays a real role there. We have specialized CSM [customer service management] products already in telco. And we’ve had great success there with the likes of Bell Canada and BT, where they’re using it, basically, for case management from the time that customer calls in to the time the field service management goes out to actually solve the problem. That end-to-end experience is the reason a lot of really large customers in these industries are picking us.
When a company comes up with a big new initiative like CRM, there’s usually a lot of talk about what it’s doing compared to competitors, but ServiceNow seems to be hesitant to actually talk about specific competitors. Why is that?
I just think we’re playing our game and we’re really focused on customer value and outcomes. And when we think about it, we think our differentiation is at the platform level, not other areas. It would be like competing only on ITSM [IT service management] or competing only on HRSD [human resources service delivery]. The power of the ServiceNow platform is leveraging all that data, using it to enhance artificial intelligence, which then drives the intelligent workflows, and then the products all integrated across that. It’s a very differentiated story, but it can be nuanced, and so we’re really making sure we’re articulating that value to our customers.
When you actually look at that, and you say, ‘Where am I going to place my bets?’ you can only make so many bets with so many big partners. I look at that and say, ‘OK, well, I can consolidate a bunch of point solutions on ServiceNow and extend that into technology, into HR, my employees and also my customers. So now I have one fact base when I do artificial intelligence inside of ServiceNow to empower those workflows. I don’t actually have to have point solution AI come in, and I can actually create my own workflows inside of that.’ It’s a really compelling value problem.
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You’re focused on worldwide go-to-market now. Talk about how important indirect channels are to ServiceNow’s go-to-market efforts and what are some things you’re doing to expand your global partner network?
I think you probably know our global partner network has been increasing in size over the past few years. And I think the last number I heard is we have almost 3,000. Our partner ecosystem is growing and growing. From a channel standpoint, for us, our partners have evolved rapidly from the advisory work that we’re all so used to—sell the software and then implement the services—to really become market creators. Many of them have done so. They’re doing advising, co-selling, reselling. They’re innovating. A lot of our largest GSIs [global systems integrators] are starting to innovate on top of the agentic AI workspace. At [our recent] financial analyst day, I talked about our key growth levers, and the first one I talked about was partners. We launched our agentic AI capabilities in March, and we have 55 partners building some 400 agentic agents already. So that is a huge growth lever for us. And the other, at ServiceNow, we continue to really focus on C-suite-level engagement. For our largest partners, they have access to a lot of those new buying personas that we’re targeting for our products and services. They’re really helping us get access to the C-suite.
What kind of training is ServiceNow offering partners to meet the demand for agentic AI?
I actually led a program about a year and a half ago called AI Lighthouse. When we launched our first GenAI capabilities, that was September 2023. It was the first release. Accenture, ServiceNow and Nvidia came together to go find, call it, 13 to 15 really large Lighthouse customers in the space. And we learned a lot through that process. A lot of what customers needed, a lot of what partners needed. And you fast forward, [we just] relaunched ServiceNow University, which is actually going out to the market free of charge. Partners, customers, everybody will have access. You can earn different levels along that journey. We’re really thinking about how do we actually make all of our learning and development accessible for everybody.
Your predecessor Paul Smith in the past told CRN about the investments ServiceNow makes in partners, including equity investments. Is that continuing? Have there been any recent investments that we may not have heard of yet?
We do have an arm that basically makes investments in the partner system, where we either go out with some small equity investments to help those partners grow, or where we actually do something jointly together. We’ve done a lot of IP investments over the past couple of quarters on the partner side. … We recently acquired some of the software from a partner called Bravium.
Have there been any big changes in terms of the industries that ServiceNow targets or any new industries that have become more strategic over the last year?
Two years ago, in one of my previous roles, I actually refactored the industry go-to-market team. We brought in a woman named Holly Briedis to run that. And like we always have, we focused on six industry verticals that we go to market in. I think the nuance there for us was we then started diving deep into the sub-verticals. We picked sub-verticals to focus on such as banking and auto manufacturing and some areas of telco, some areas of our business that were growing but where we needed to really get the entire field on board in terms of the processes within that industry, [to look at] how does ServiceNow’s entire platform serve those industry verticals? I would say we’ve gone into a sub-vertical place, which really resonates with our customers. In financial services, for example, it’s wealth management, banking and insurance, which can be three different kinds of motions. We’ve been very focused on the sub-verticals that will help us grow the fastest and where we see the greatest opportunity to speak our customers’ language.
You mentioned sub-verticals such as banking, which would have been part of finance in the past and automotive ,which would have been part of manufacturing. Any others?
Another industry vertical is in health care, and life sciences in particular. We’re really getting to the sub-vertical and helping customers understand the entire value map across that industry and how ServiceNow serves that value map.
