Tier44 Makes Data Center Work Flow

Clemens Pfeiffer, President and CEO, Tier44 Technologies

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Delivering Data Center Management Solutions for Organizations Using ServiceNow.

ServiceNow makes the world of work, work better for people —no matter the circumstances. Employees can be productive wherever they are. Built on the ServiceNow platform, Tier44 provides the IT, employee, and customer workflows needed to manage Data Centers, power, space, networking and IT infrastructure. We call this “making data center work flow”:enabling digital workflows to increase resilience, optimize the use of data center assets and enhance employee productivity as it relates to managing the data centers and their content.

More than 6,200 organizations worldwide use ServiceNow to drive their digital transformation. Standalone tools are being dropped in favor of standardizing on ServiceNow for all workflows – no more external systems, no multiple CMDBs, no siloed applications, and no broken workflows. Organizations are re-platforming as many workflows as possible onto the ServiceNow platform and expanding the use of ServiceNow across the Organization.

It is now time to include the data center portion of your business in the ServiceNow roadmap, regardless of it being a co-location, owned, or hosted environment. Workflows governing capacity planning, installation, monitoring, maintenance, and decommissioning can be moved into a ServiceNow environment enhanced with the Tier44 EM/8 DCIM application. With typical ROIs of less than 6 months and multiple X savings per year, the financial benefits are huge – but more importantly, the employee experience is much improved –multiple tools gone, no more copy and paste from one app to the other – all work accomplished within ServiceNow. This provides an unprecedented user experience, reduces over head dramatically, and lets people focus on tasks and results instead of searching within others apps or spreadsheets.

At the virtual Data Center World in August, PayPal presented their reasoning for using ServiceNow and Tier44 for data center management. They also used an example of an asset management & audit workflow providing savings of 20,000 man-hours per year.

This is something everyone should achieve and we are hard at work building cost-effective functionality and modules that are easy to roll out.

How is Tier44 different from other DCIM solutions?

The main difference is that Tier44 builds applications directly within ServiceNow, validated by the “Built on NOW” certification. Tier44 sells modules via the ServiceNow store, integrating directly with various award winning ITxM modules from ServiceNow such as IT AssetMgmt, IT ServiceMgmt, IT OperationsMgmt, IT BusinessMgmt, and IT RiskMgmt; all areas where ServiceNow is a market leader.

Though this organizations achieve an integrated workflow, single user interface, and easily extendable environment. It also means that each Tier44 element such as a rack view or a floor plan can be used for graphical navigation to quickly see where assets are along with space, power and network capacities. All views and modules can be used as components in any other ServiceNow-based workflow; e.g. to select a RU position or a rack on a floor plan in a capacity planning or procurement workflow. Most importantly, it does not require any API integration or sync with another CMDB, which usually results in delays, reduced data quality, and broken workflows & user experiences.

What future capabilities do customers ask for?

Organizations ask us about a lot of functionality, some are typical DCIM capabilities, some are features from other systems, some are already implemented in ServiceNow. We constantly question our roadmap to make sure we don’t duplicate ServiceNow capabilities and instead focus on missing elements to support data center workflows that provide great ROI and beautiful user experiences. As a premier ServiceNow technology partner we prepare our applications for future releases and the direction ServiceNow is headed (for example with workspaces and mobile apps), so customers can be sure to get more functionality as we extend our capabilities but they don’t have to choose between ServiceNow and Tier44. For example, with ServiceNow providing Discovery there is no need for us to provide an alternative; rather, we focus on our own monitoring capabilities to enhance ServiceNow.

“Automated Asset Management” demonstrates another case Tier44 adds significant value to ServiceNow. As PayPal has shown, 20,000 man hours per year can be saved using new UI Pages, some automation, a workflow, Raritan Asset Management Strips and some monitoring capabilities to automatically read asset tags and RU-positions across data centers. Minutes later customers know where each asset is. For those without Raritan Asset Management Strips we provide a manual bar-code scan solution – which isn’t as quick as the fully automated solution, but still much faster than today.

Listening to customers provides us with great use cases, great ROI opportunities, and priorities of functionality that creates the value-add customers are looking for. We just released EM/8 version 5 which further modularizes our functionality to make it easier to use individual parts within customer workflows and future UI capabilities. You can expect two additional solutions, certified and ready on the ServiceNow store shortly:

- Monitoring for power, temperature, and IT utilization; bringing data directly into ServiceNow and making it usable for performance analysis, trending, CMDB health, and incident creation

- Automated Asset Management; an application designed off the savings that PayPal achieved

We see an increasing trend towards AI and automation. We are planning to using our patented Digital Employees® for task automation to further reduce overall workflow time to completion and we are looking into ServiceNow AI-Ops for predictive analysis and capacity adjustment recommendations.

Working with ServiceNow and building applications that are “Built on Now” has been an exciting road and all the positive feedback from customers acknowledge the value and approach. While some companies try to integrate other DCIM solutions with ServiceNow by synchronizing the CMDB, we don’t see this as a viable path long-term. If history has taught us one thing, it is that native applications on successful platforms are the ones that survive and will be appreciated the most; and that’s exactly what we are providing today.



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