Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Amit Jain, Chief Product Officer, ServiceMax (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Have Zendesk and Freshworks put in field services or are they integrating with other field service solutions?

Amit Jain: I don’t know of a solution from Zendesk and Freshworks specifically. The customer profile for them tends to be more mid-market versus our enterprise focus. We don’t have specific integrations into those systems.

Sramana Mitra: Your primary source of a help desk solution is all Salesforce-based?

Amit Jain: We do have customers that are off of Salesforce. We do have customers who use ticketing systems like ServiceNow. The lion’s share has come through with a Salesforce integration.

Sramana Mitra: When Force.com was launched, there were a few real success stories of ISVs being built on that platform. The three that come to mind are Veeva, Vlocity, and ServiceMax. There are others, but I think these are standout case studies of people who built very big businesses on top of the Salesforce ecosystem. Talk to me about the vertical cloud strength. For you, these verticals like manufacturing and medical devices are important. Are there any other verticals?

Amit Jain: Oil & gas.

Sramana Mitra: If you look at those, the field services function is key for those verticals. What we are seeing more and more in cloud startups is a focus on vertical workflows. Salesforce, itself, is heavily double-clicking down on vertical workflows. Talk to me a bit about how you have done your product and go-to-market strategy that is specific to those verticals. What are the differences in those four verticals that you talked about? What kind of nuances do you see in how you’ve done your product strategy and go-to-market strategy?

Amit Jain: It’s in vogue right now to do a vertical strategy. In the last several years, the move to the cloud has been a compelling event, followed by the move to mobile experience. Now the market’s demanding a more purpose-built and ready-to-go solution. Give me the best practices that will help me reduce that time to value.

Our approach on this is when we think about verticalization, it’s always how we take our horizontal IPs and see which vertical it would apply to. Then we build application modules that are more vertical-specific. What does that mean? An application module would be something that has a UI that might be more specific to an industry as well as best practice workflows. I’ll give you an example.

The compliance step that a technician has to go through in order to maintain equipment step-by-step is very specific to medical device manufacturing. Five years ago, we had more of a horizontal solution that we can configure how that goes. Now, we’ve done a lot of configurations for so many manufacturers.

On the other hand in Oil & gas, they use projects. The work of a technician doesn’t last for one day. It lasts multiple days or even a week. Then we have a specific application offering that allows you to schedule these complex projects that are more geared toward Oil & gas. You don’t over-index too much by building disparate apps because you lose the scalability. What is the underpinning technology that is down across but, at the workflow and UI layer? How can we make that more tailored for the customers? It helps us be more focused on our pipeline and our win rates.

Without a vertical strategy, you end up doing broader lead gen. It takes longer to qualify the products. We can be more specific over addressable markets as well. Those are some of the considerations that come to mind from a product and go-to-market perspective when we think about verticalization.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Amit Jain, Chief Product Officer, ServiceMax
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