COUNTRY FOCUS: GERMANY
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.
Philip van der Wilt, SVP,
GM EMEA, ServiceNow
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.
Data centre 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.
52
INTELLIGENTCIO
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, nine
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% 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!
We spoke to van der Wilt to find out more
detail about data explanation in Germany.
On Germany being a popular data
centre destination
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
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