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50 Innovators of the Year 2022

Tier44 Technologies, Inc. —taking ServiceNow® innovation to data centers

Tier44 Technologies, Inc. —taking ServiceNow® innovation to data centers

In the current data center landscape, infrastructure management and system monitoring go hand in hand. Effective Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) and system monitoring strategies ensure that resources are utilized to the fullest and can also help mitigate human error and other causes of downtime. In addition, these monitoring systems can help facility managers deal with the rising complexity of current customer environments.

To support new data center management requirements, data center professionals need to equip team leaders with the best possible tools.

One of the most innovative Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software is Tier44 Technologies, Inc. Tier44 Technologies is a Premier ServiceNow Technology Partner and leading developer of DCIM software for large enterprises, government agencies, and managed service providers. Tier44’s solutions provide visibility, intelligence, analytics, and automation to help CIOs, IT directors, and facilities managers optimize capacity and manage service levels and power consumption within and across data centers.

Using Tier44’s award-winning products, data centers, operators, and owners can achieve ultimate application reliability using holistic data center management rather than isolated facility and IT hardware modules.

In conversation with Clemens Pfeiffer, the President, CEO, and CTO of Tier44 Technologies Inc.

Q. How does Tier44 organize effectively and creatively for innovation?

Tier44 is a software technology company that brings innovative solutions to ServiceNow customers. The team is built around leveraging patents, experience, designs, and intellectual property from Power Assure. This VC-funded company raised over $40M for award-winning data center energy efficiency improvements, where I was a founder and CTO.

As a premier technology partner dedicated to ServiceNow, this means building capabilities on the ServiceNow platform and enhancing existing ServiceNow functionality with new and innovative capabilities. In our case, such innovation targets any workflow related to managing and operating data centers and their content like servers, racks, networks, and storage equipment.

The result makes ServiceNow a solution that can hold its own against any other Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solution—specifically when it comes to workflow-centric organizations—one of the core strengths of ServiceNow. With ServiceNow features like the Configuration Management Database (CMDB), discovery, event, incident, and business management, complemented by Tier44’s award-winning rack elevation views, graphical floor plans, capacity aggregation, monitoring, and data collection, the combined solution allows you to optimize data center capacity, reduce time employees require to complete tasks and have a single source for all your data center related information, eliminating the need for spreadsheets and standalone DCIM tools.

Q. What are your recent innovative strategies to stay in the competition?

Looking at recent innovations through our EM/8 application, Tier44 created visualizations like maps, floor plans, and rack elevation views, along with data model changes to store images in ServiceNow and add interface definitions and capacity details to the model information.

Upcoming innovations, like Digital Employees® for task automation and custom UI components for an updated user experience, will provide additional cost savings and usability benefits. Specifically, the invention of Digital Employees® is a great way to automate repetitive tasks that can only be done automatically in some cases but require a person in others. With Digital Employees®, the model changes—the task ALWAYS goes to the Digital Employees® first. It has an independent flow for each task/model combination that either completes the task or re-assigns it to a facility/site technician for further action if anything fails. When the technician has fixed the issue, they can either complete the task or assign it back to the Digital Employees® to complete it. Work notes by the actual user and Digital Employees are kept in the same task, making it seamless and transparent within ServiceNow for everyone to see.

Q. What would be the ideal conditions for cultivating innovation?

Tier44 is a small business with employees across the United States. As such, innovation is a habit, something everyone thinks about all the time—you hear something from a customer, you think about two parts. The first is around the ServiceNow platform and roadmap. The second is around our technology.

Is there something already? How could we build it? What would be a unique value we can add that makes it a unique value proposition? As long as everyone breaks “customer requirements” into these two parts, we should be able to identify new and innovative solutions with high value for customers.

Q. What is your business model?

On the one hand, Tier44 provides software as a service by implementing all our innovations on the ServiceNow platform, getting them “built on now” certification, and selling them via the ServiceNow store for easy installation, updates, and maintenance. These innovations are pre-packaged into a downloadable application, delivered directly by ServiceNow for a monthly service fee. Quotes, invoices, and payments are all handled by ServiceNow, which makes it easy for ServiceNow customers to add these applications to their ServiceNow instances.

On the other hand, we are setting up a center of excellence around some of the latest innovations as they have broader applicability across the ServiceNow ecosystem than just the data center. This is related to the automation using Digital Employees® and UI development using custom components where we can help customers with professional services and solution development.

Q. Which positive habits would encourage creativity?

Collaboration and communication are crucial in this line of work. While COVID limited face-to-face customer interaction, specifically with the annual ServiceNow user conference being online only, Tier44 relies heavily on video conferences with existing and potential customers to gather new ideas and requirements requiring innovative approaches.

The hope is that face-to-face meetings will happen more often again as they are still the best way to brainstorm needs and potential solutions.

Q. How will the business landscape change in the next five years?

It will undoubtedly be interesting to see how adopting ServiceNow changes company/organization patterns and workflows. The idea is to reduce dependencies on individual employees by capturing their knowledge of the processes and data sources in a single system for any operational functions such as ServiceNow. It also increases efficiencies, speeds up the completion of tasks, and saves a lot of money and time.

Creating ease of use and innovative products for efficient data center management

Clemens Pfeiffer is the President and CEO/CTO of Tier44. In 2007, he co-founded Power Assure as CTO, utilizing the automation technology for energy management of data centers, demonstrating power consumption reduction by over 50% for large-scale load-balanced application environments.

In 2014, Clemens started Tier44 Technologies and acquired all intellectual property, patents, software, and most assets from Power Assure, taking the technology to the ServiceNow ecosystem by building a data center management solution on the ServiceNow platform.

“The leading DCIM solution for ServiceNow® users.”


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