Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Amit Jain, Chief Product Officer, ServiceMax (Part 1)

ServiceMax is one of the great success cases of the Bootstrapping by Piggybacking strategy that we espouse in 1Mby1M. It is also an excellent Vertical Cloud case study. Please study this case study to understand the nuances of how the company leveraged the Force.com platform in compelling ways.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to ServiceMax as well as yourself.

Amit Jain: We are the leading provider of asset-centric field service management. You think about industries such as medical devices, life sciences, and OEMs that produce these very complex pieces of equipment that need to be maintained and kept running. We provide the software for the technicians to go into the field and keep the equipment up and running. People in the back office make sure that they’re being maintained on schedule.

It’s critical for these machines to be functional. They’re not nice to have’s. When we think about our customer base, we think about life sciences and industrial equipment manufacturers like Schneider Electric. I’m the Chief Product Officer at ServiceMax. I oversee our project and engineering organizations in delivering the products and, specifically the applications that power these OEMs and manufacturers.

Sramana Mitra: I know ServiceMax has been one of the great case studies of an ISV being built on the Salesforce ecosystem. I want to start there. In One Million by One Million, we have a track called Bootstrapping by Piggybacking where we encourage startup ISVs to build on top of somebody else’s stack to take advantage of the ecosystem and capabilities that are further down in the value chain and then add domain-specific knowledge and so forth on top of it, but just doing it more cost-effectively.

I’d like to hear about your experience building this company with the founding team to this level. You have scaled quite a lot. You’re probably one of the larger case studies of this business model.

Amit Jain: Absolutely. One thing to talk about is what it means for an entrepreneur to be an ISV and build on a platform like Salesforce. You said a couple of keywords. One is cost-effective and speed. The second is the ecosystem. I’ll talk about both of them.

When you’re an early-stage company trying to grow, the story in our early days was we were evangelizing this space of field service which was, traditionally, more of a cost center approach and a nice-to-have on the IT purchase list. It was seen that field service was an add-on to help desk or call center applications. For us, as we were thinking about our natural distribution of product, the most efficient way of distributing our product is by saying that field service is where we purchase for integrating on its own.

If there’s a problem with a machine, the operator is going to call or reach out to customer service. The triaging is a case that’s in the call center. Then someone makes a decision and says, “Now it’s going to be a work order.” Given that dynamic, it made sense for us to have our story of ServiceMax of how we integrate well with call center products. Nobody buys these solutions in a vacuum. The question became Salesforce. They were a massive leader in CRM and a burgeoning leader in the call center at the time ServiceMax started.

When Salesforce was trying to position their call center product, a lot of the customers were saying, “What about field service?” Salesforce was looking for partners to offer a solution. It made sense for ServiceMax to strategically have an integration strategy with a distribution channel like Salesforce. Then we say, “We know we’re going to have a relationship with Salesforce. When we build our products, should we consider using the platform or should we build our own?”

This is where it comes back to the product perspective. What’s their differentiation? Where are you adding value? Do our customers value that we are on a different stack than Salesforce or is it actually advantageous for us to be on a similar stack as Salesforce?

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Amit Jain, Chief Product Officer, ServiceMax
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