How would you summarise what ServiceNow is doing with its multi-tier channel move?
If you look at what ServiceNow are trying to do, they’re a $14bn company today. They want to get to $30bn in five years, and they have to do that through scale. And obviously, that’s what they see distribution would bring to them.
We now sit in between them and their Indirect partners. They still have a limited number of direct partners in the countries where we’ve been awarded – there’s about six in EMEA. The rest are Indirect, and they will be transacting through Exclusive.
On paper, initially everyone was going, ‘oh, that doesn’t make sense’. But [ServiceNow’s] growth accelerator is around the AI story and also – more specifically – cybersecurity and autonomous security.
When you look at it like that, it absolutely makes sense they’d want to partner with Exclusive Networks as the largest global cyber security distributor.
We’re there to provide scale.
We’re also there to focus in on their sub-1000. As with any vendor, they run out of people to put against accounts, so they look to distribution to drive the activity in the pipeline in those areas because obviously they own the enterprise and that’s what they want their guys to be focused on. But from the midmarket downwards, they need a scaling engine within that piece of the market. And that is Exclusive, effectively.
How many ServiceNow partners will you be dealing with in EMEA?
They have between 600 and 700 partners in EMEA – we have over 20,000.
How large a team are you building around ServiceNow?
I’m recruiting over 70 people, and all those people are going to be 100%-focused on ServiceNow. We’ll also be recruiting again. My leadership team is in place. We’re recruiting inside sales, renewals, vendor specialists, vendor managers, and are also looking at we’re calling territory managers who work with a partner to talk to end users.
They’re based all over.
We’ve got a hub we’re putting in Dublin. We’ll be looking at putting inside sales, renewal and customer success specialists there. All of this is aligned with the way ServiceNow goes to market. They talk about their renewal rate being at 98%. That’s something we have to try and emulate.
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