Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It has a gigantic budget.

Gaurav Rewari: Right. Stepping along the pillars, if you will, of IT service management to IT asset management, to IT project management, these are the building blocks of something called ERP for IT. They were imagining that into existence in the cloud. I felt that not only were they doing that replacement category for IT service management, but their ambition is also playing out on a larger scale with this ERP for IT.

Another thing was that they looked long and hard at what they did in IT service management and they said, “IT service is just one example of a shared service within a company. All departments avail of IT services. Guess what? HR is simiilar. Legal is similar. Why don’t we take our service management application, which is fundamentally about people in the company issuing requests and a bunch of people fulfilling requests, and extend that into areas of facilities, HR, legal, and re-imagine this.”

Every large company needs that. What I saw was a company that was doing that replacement category of IT service management and expanding the ambition into ERP for IT and enterprise service management. This was a lesson from MicroStrategy around customer satisfaction. I knew in my heart that, as that footprint was going to increase, that secondary market for analytics on top of data would also increase. That moment would come. We wanted to be well-positioned for that. That’s why I chose that domain. We did one more thing. A couple of us decided to go quietly as a silent partner into this annual event called Knowledge.

Sramana Mitra: This is ServiceNow?

Gaurav Rewari: Yes. So we went to Las Vegas to this event in 2013. We walked the halls, and 90% of the presentation was not done by ServiceNow people, but by customers. The level of customer satisfaction that we saw was striking. We said, “We’re intellectually convinced that this is a great space for powerful analytics.” After that conference, we were emotionally convinced as well that these are customers who are going to stick with that solution for a long time.

Sramana Mitra: So you built your strategy on top of ServiceNow?

Gaurav Rewari: Yes, we were going to build cloud-based BI applications in that unique way that allows for quick creation of apps and survival of changes. We were going to pick ERP for IT and enterprise service management domains with ServiceNow as our anchor source of data. Since it’s a data warehouse-based approach, we pull in data from other sources as well like HR and financials so we can answer questions that go beyond just what the data and ServiceNow can help us answer.

If you analyze ServiceNow in a data warehouse like ours, you can answer questions like, “I have a thousand agents who are fulfilling incident requests. What are the choke points in the system? What incidents are hardest to crack? Which agents seem to be the ones who are able to solve difficult incidents?” Suddenly, you can say, “What is my true cost of servicing one incident? Is there a correlation between how much training I give to an agent and how quickly they are able to respond to incidents?” Those kind of questions can only be answered when you pull in data from other sources.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify
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