Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Amit Jain, Chief Product Officer, ServiceMax (Part 2)

Amit Jain: It made a lot of sense from two angles. One was, it was more cost-efficient and faster because we didn’t have to spin up a bunch of teams to build infrastructure. We focus our teams more on the differentiating capabilities of a field service solution. Also, it helps us that we are on the same technology platform as Salesforce. That’s where the ecosystem is valid.

Salesforce was unique because there are other platforms out there that we could have used to accelerate development. But what Salesforce has done, that no other company has done as well, is that there are so many other businesses and developers who build on it. So, we have a lot of support in other tools and products that we can integrate into that we wouldn’t be able to if we had chosen another platform.

Sramana Mitra: I actually think your product strategy is a very effective product strategy. Salesforce comes into the help desk market. There are other players in the help desk market. Zendesk and Freshworks came a little bit later, but they have been around. 2010 is when Freshworks came in. When it was Freshdesk, it was incubated at One Million by One Million.

Salesforce has had competition. Now here comes the interesting angle. Adding ServiceMax to Salesforce brings in a differentiated capability in the verticals where field service is a big deal. As you mentioned, life science, medical devices, and industrials where having that capability of field service gives Salesforce a much more differentiable angle with which to go to market.

Amit Jain: It goes back to your product focusing on areas that you want to focus on. We were able to alleviate areas where ServiceMax would have to figure out solutions to address those needs.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click on distribution. How much lead generation does Salesforce do on your behalf?

Amit Jain: It’s a lot. The reason I say that is because there are two ways that a buying cycle would happen. There are pointed field service buying cycles where someone’s like, “This is a strategic part for my digital transformation.” They look at our track record and see that we have this customer base and proven product.

Where Salesforce is very helpful is, particularly in the last decade, the CIOs often come into these companies and say, “We’re going to take everything to the cloud.” Then the CRM goes to Salesforce, HCM to Workday, and billing to Zuora. The IT side wants to standardize on as few platforms as possible. If I make the decision of committing to Salesforce, it’s indirect lead generation for us.

Sramana Mitra: How much of your business is co-selling with Salesforce today?

Amit Jain: We sell our products directly. We have our own go-to market. There’s a lot of collaboration and coordination. A lot of customers are common customers with Salesforce. Often Salesforce will say, “We found this opportunity for your guys to come in.” They want to help out the customers with the best solution that’s available and also keep it within the platform. We have a lot of that cross-collaboration, but the actual selling is our own sales cycle.

Sramana Mitra: What is the competitive landscape? Do you compete with Zendesk and Freshworks?

Amit Jain: We do not compete with Zendesk and Freshworks. To your point earlier, it’s viewed as Salesforce competing with them on the help desk side. Then there are competitors on the field service side who integrate with these help desk centers. A lot of the major platforms have field service solutions now that didn’t exist five or six years ago.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Amit Jain, Chief Product Officer, ServiceMax
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