Tier44 Technologies - A premier ServiceNow technology partner

Data centers have become one of the most important infrastructures for any company. It will play a crucial role in the future data economy. As the world moves increasingly to the web, users and businesses demand business digitalization, which requires extensive data centers. Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software is a new class of software that gives data center operators the ability to run efficiently and improve data center infrastructure planning and design. It typically replaces Excel, Visio, and homegrown databases.

Tier44 Technologies is a Premier ServiceNow Technology Partner and leading developer of Data Center Management software for large enterprises, government agencies, and managed service providers. We interviewed Clemens Pfeiffer, the President and CEO of Tier44 Technologies, to learn more about the company and the services. Here are a few excerpts of the interview:

Q. Can you take us through the company's journey right from its beginning to the point where it unwaveringly stands today?

Tier44 was founded in 2014 to provide data center management solutions on the ServiceNow platform. The founders and team members brought their extensive experience working with data centers in the past to ServiceNow, which was rapidly rising as the IT Service Management platform of choice for F2000 companies. We saw a need from these companies to also manage their data centers, co-location facilities, and IT equipment inside the data center with ServiceNow.

Since then, we have seen rapid adoption of ServiceNow, its new features and capabilities, and a strong emphasis on partners helping ServiceNow customers complete their implementation either by providing professional services or add-on applications for domain-specific functionality. Furthermore, ServiceNow released their own app store allowing partners to sell ServiceNow certified applications as add-on's that can be directly installed into a ServiceNow environment, similar to what people know from iPhone apps and the app store.

Utilizing ServiceNow allowed us to build applications that help organizations with managing their data centers. Starting with a graphical representation of racks, we added more capabilities like capacity aggregation, room/data center views, recently monitoring the facility and IT equipment, and asset auditing and tracking. With ServiceNow being workflow-centric, we were able to provide capabilities using workflows that save customers millions of dollars in annual labor cost and reduce workflow end-to-end execution time and Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) by over 30%.

"Tier44 solutions provide visibility, intelligence, analytics and automation to help CIOs, IT directors, and facilities managers to dynamically optimize capacity, and manage service levels and power consumption within and across data centers."

Q. Do you remember your first successful project? Share the experience.

Its well known that PayPal is one of our customers as they did a variety of presentations on the subject at various conferences. But when you look at the details, it shows that global adoption of ServiceNow combined with Tier44's data center management modules can streamline data center-related workflow by a significant margin. We learned at PayPal that ServiceNow allows for a rapid rollout of new capabilities, better than any other solution. However, we also saw that a successful implementation occurs when high-level executives support the project, force a global rollout, and monitor its success.

Q. Do you believe advanced sub-systems and infrastructures in place will play an important role in providing real-time experience?

Absolutely, we see a lot of improvements in the infrastructure of data centers, be it on the facility or IT side. We also see that in a lot of cases, organizations want all this data in a single place so they can correlate details across multiple parts of the data center. For example, getting real-time power consumption from the servers and cooling units and temperature helps mitigate risk. Therefore, we decided to build data collection capabilities that will store such data in ServiceNow. That allows customers to use real-time data and capacity planning details to optimize the use of assets within ServiceNow.

Q. How do you maintain a production network with an extensive distributed system?

Many F2000 companies are using ServiceNow as it is a cloud-based ITSM/ITOM platform – and they also want to use it to manage their complete infrastructure, including power, networking. With the ServiceNow platform providing scalability, we can focus on the functional aspects of the solution and build it on top of ServiceNow.

Q. Trust is a difficult attribute to measure and a delicate dynamic to maintain. How do you maintain this with your customers?

I believe that trust needs to be earned. Trust takes time to gain and can be lost quickly. References and recommendations will give you a head start, but it doesn't take you very far. As a company, we are honest with the customers, deliver them what we say, tell them what we cannot do, and hold ourselves accountable.

Q. What helps Tier44 Technologies stand tall in the software services industry? What makes you unique?

It is the combination of data center facility and IT operational knowledge paired with software engineering and the translation of this deep understanding into applications built on the ServiceNow platform that a customer can easily buy and deploy. Nobody else is offering that. We obviously see competition from standalone data center infrastructure management solutions and IT management solutions, but all of them require complex integrations and data synchronization with ServiceNow, leading to a significant data quality issue.

Q. How do you empower your employees to grow? Tell us about the company's work culture.

We are a small organization, and I try to empower people to make their own decisions when solving customer problems. I make sure they align with our long-term vision, but otherwise, I try to stay out of the implementation unless I see some violations of standards and strategy. With our focus on ServiceNow, we are also an attractive career opportunity as it's an area of high demand that helps keep talent.

Q. How are you keeping up with the growing customer expectations?

With most customers, we are in a constant dialog of requirements and features. ServiceNow comes out with a new release every six months, which means technology partners have to do the same. As a result, we adjust our own roadmap with every release, considering ServiceNow's upcoming functionality, our own build capabilities, and customer demand to make sure we add what's not in ServiceNow and don't waste time building something that ServiceNow has already or will have ready shortly.

Q. Do you have any new services launching soon?

Yes, we have a major update coming out, and we have a couple of add-on products that we are going to release. We had to slow down a little due to covid and a focus on cash flow. But we are now back at full speed to add more capabilities in rapid succession.

Q. Do you have any expansion plans? What is the next step for the company as it continues to grow?

We currently have two locations and plan to keep it this way in the near future. We started to work more with ServiceNow implementation partners to provide professional services leveraging our applications. We will grow our engineering capabilities but hope that partners can take the majority of implementation services.

Meet the President and CEO

Clemens Pfeiffer is the President and CEO of Tier44 Technologies. He is a globally acknowledged expert that can balance data center IT and facility-related requirements to maximize application uptime at minimal capital and operational expense. Clemens has leveraged over 25 years in software architecture, business process automation, and technology to design and define what is called "Software-Defined Power" for data centers, a mechanism to abstract applications from power dependencies, using automated operating procedures and energy market intelligence to determine the most reliable and cost-efficient location for an application at any point in time.