Marc Monday: Building the AI Partner Ecosystem of the Future

Marc Monday
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[00:00:00] Marc Monday: There's lots of whiz bank things that can happen with AI, but this is really pragmatic stuff. At the ground floor, if you talk to a user, they can tell you right away. Oh my gosh. This is the administrivia that just takes the air outta my day. I spend two hours going from this screen to this screen to solve a problem. There's your use case. Yeah. And I think that's where the partner comes in and they can unlock that for the customer in a meaningful way.

[00:00:24] Chip Rodgers: So again, as partners you're a an ISV partner working with ServiceNow building some technology that would fit within a certain workflow, a business process. What's the engagement in terms of co-sell, right? You're connecting the field teams together. How, tell me a little bit about that. I use a really

[00:00:41] Marc Monday: technical term. It depends. It really does depend what is the customer's expectation?

[00:00:47]

[00:00:51] Chip Rodgers: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Inside Partnering Chip Rodgers here. And we are here in actually at the. [00:01:00] Beautiful offices of Santa Clara, ServiceNow and Santa Clara. Yeah. Yeah. Welcome.

[00:01:02] Marc Monday: Thank you for coming. Yeah,

[00:01:04] Chip Rodgers: thank you. Yeah. Not the usual sunny day that we have in California.

[00:01:08] Marc Monday: I'm a Seattle guy, so I brought some Seattle weather just for the vibes. Thanks.

[00:01:11] Chip Rodgers: Thanks for that, Marc. So I'm so excited to be joined by Marc Monday. And Marc we're here at ServiceNow as as we said, and Marc is Group Vice President of America's Partners in Channels. Great. Yeah. And welcome.

[00:01:24] Thank you so much. I really appreciate

[00:01:25] Marc Monday: it. Great to see you again, buddy.

[00:01:26] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. Likewise. We we see each other at regularly in conferences and all kinds. We were a catalyst recently and you and I worked together at at SAP a number of years ago. Yeah. And I was on one

[00:01:35] Marc Monday: of your first podcasts. Back in the day.

[00:01:36] Yeah, that's right.

[00:01:37] Chip Rodgers: Back in the day. That was, that's four or five years ago I think. Something like that. Yeah, that's true.

[00:01:41] Marc Monday: Yeah. I think I bought a special podcast microphone that I only used the one time.

[00:01:46] Chip Rodgers: Gosh, Marc, you've, been in technology and partnering. For many years. True. With as I mentioned, SAP, you've also been with Citrix and Cisco and Microsoft.[00:02:00]

[00:02:00] Keep, tell me more. Tell me more.

[00:02:01] Marc Monday: Yeah. I've been so fortunate to work for incredible tech companies and I work for the most incredible tech company now. ServiceNow.

[00:02:08] Chip Rodgers: It is amazing. ServiceNow has just been exploding and doing some just fantastic things, and really, you guys are embedded into AI and workflow and really making things better for customers.

[00:02:20] But let's start there. Marc, talk a little bit about the, your role and what your team is up to these

[00:02:26] Marc Monday: days. For sure. We are building the AI partner ecosystem for the 21st century. Bill famously says The pace of change has never been this fast and it'll never be this slow again.

[00:02:37] And that's what we're going through. The partner opportunity is now. It's incredible. And at ServiceNow we give partners the platform and the tools and the resources to really go make it happen. And for customers, we give them the ability of having choice and meeting them where they are with the infrastructure and tools that they have today.

[00:02:55] And so that for us is the real value promise.

[00:02:59] Chip Rodgers: It is [00:03:00] amazing that the pace of change is incredible. And I think Bill nailed it. You're talking about Bill McDermott, of course. Correct. CEO and who we both have worked for previously at SAP. Great leader. Bill's. Bill's amazing. Yeah, so you, so that's really interesting.

[00:03:13] I think the customers are really trying to figure out like how ai, because of the pace of change, because things are changing so fast. How do we do so they really need companies like ServiceNow and partners to be able to, partners are the key. Make sense of it. Key.

[00:03:28] Marc Monday: Partners are the keys.

[00:03:29] Partners bring a deep level of specialization in customer understanding, and partners know how to move fast and meet the market where it is. And so for us, the key there is bringing the partner and making them central to the growth journey that we have, and then helping unlock that full potential of AI for the customers.

[00:03:45] Chip Rodgers: And so tell me a little bit about the gimme the sort of the lay of the land of the partner ecosystem at ServiceNow. I know you have many different kinds of partners but just take us through that for sure.

[00:03:56] Marc Monday: Yeah, effectively we have five partner routes to market. So think of [00:04:00] the, we have a broader go to market.

[00:04:01] In terms of how we segment our customer base, our verticals, and then within that we have these sort of five quivers of partner models. And you can choose one or all of those as a partner. You can be a consulting and implementation partner. Which is really important 'cause we have a very customizable platform.

[00:04:16] You can be a reseller, you can be a service provider. And of course we work in part deep partnership with the hyperscalers, which increasingly is an important motion for customers. And then we have a combination of tech partnerships and build partners, more ISV type strategy. So those are the five core routes to market, and as I said, you can be any combination of the above.

[00:04:35] You could be one, you could be five, you could be three. And for us, we wanna make sure that we meet the partner in the way that they like to deliver value to customers.

[00:04:43] Chip Rodgers: And I think, you made a good point, which is that these days partners, a lot of partners are all of the above.

[00:04:50] Service providers are creating IP that sometimes they want to, productize right. And bring to market. And you got ISVs that are providing [00:05:00] services as well. It's it. It's interesting and valuable that you have that flexibility to be able to

[00:05:04] Marc Monday: Yeah. I think that it's key to talk about the outcomes more than the taxonomy.

[00:05:08] I think if we fall into that legacy taxonomy, sometimes it hamstrings, what the value of the partner is providing. Sometimes a partner is publishing an application, and that might not be their historical core business, but it's what they do today. And sometimes a partner might be managing a specific service.

[00:05:24] And so for us, we want to just recognize that this landscape is constantly changing, be agile enough to meet the market, and then again, meet the partner in the way that they like to engage customers, and then importantly, meet the customer with a partner that they trust with the type of value that they're expecting.

[00:05:39] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about the kind of I'm thinking about the lifecycle of partner, partnering that you start with the, co-build co-market, co-sell and then go to market together. Going back to the co build and technology partners, tell me a little bit about that

[00:05:54] landscape. And what are the opportunities there with ServiceNow?

[00:05:57] Marc Monday: The opportunities are, this agentic [00:06:00] moment is truly a unique opportunity for partners, and what differentiates us is we can meet the customer where they are with the infrastructure, that layer that they have with the data layer that they have, with the application layer that they have, we have the ability through our agentic workflows to work north to south and east to west within their infrastructure without having to go buy something new.

[00:06:23] We can make the infrastructure that they have to today more effective through those agentic workflows.

[00:06:29] Chip Rodgers: And. ServiceNow is, the whole premise of ServiceNow is, streamlining workflows and making sure that business processes are working well together. So you're that's your

[00:06:39] ServiceNow's bread and butter.

[00:06:41] Marc Monday: Yeah. If you think of at the end of the day, it's about workflow orchestration and what that control tower is gonna look like in terms of managing those different agents. And there may be agents coming from different applications, layer layers. But what you wanna do is you wanna make sure that something's governing that experience, that this agent may be asking for the same data [00:07:00] from the same database.

[00:07:01] Which one should go first, which one has priority? What are we trying to solve? And so that orchestration layer becomes the most important part of the whole equation.

[00:07:11] Chip Rodgers: So that's really interesting. Marc, tell me more about this, the orchestration layer that that you're talking about.

[00:07:17] Marc Monday: Yeah let's think about a customer in the estate that they have. They're gonna have a data layer and data is the key. So if you think about it, data workflows, AI, that's the, where the pieces come together.

[00:07:27] Yeah. So let's just start at the bottom of the. So they have a data layer. It might be their ERP, could be their core infrastructure in terms of their data set. We wanna make sure that we get that structured in a compelling way where you can actually access it. We do that through something called Zero Copy, and we create a file structure where that's accessible.

[00:07:44] That's step one. That becomes what we'll call a knowledge graph. Then on top of that knowledge graph, you'll have your your applications themselves. And what we're really trying to do is get those applications to talk to each other. The quintessential swivel chair, I'm in this app, I'm in this app, I'm in this app.

[00:07:57] You want those to talk to one another. [00:08:00] So that's the next step, is figure out what we want to have happen within that. And then the next layer of that becomes how do we orchestrate that in a meaningful way? Which agent goes first, which agent goes second? Who is actually coordinating that back and forth?

[00:08:13] That's really the key. And so if you think about that workflow, our core business north to south and east to west. How do you do that across whatever the estate might be, the applications, the hyperscale infrastructure, the data sets, and that's the real value promise that we deliver. The partner opportunity is wonderful because then the partner can go to the customer and say, I'm not gonna require you to do anything other than how do we connect these pieces across your estate?

[00:08:39] Chip Rodgers: Terrific. Yeah. When And using ServiceNow,

[00:08:43] Marc Monday: of course. Yeah, of course. Yeah, of course.

[00:08:45] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. And, but

[00:08:46] Marc Monday: we can work with other agents too. We had an announcement yesterday with with Microsoft. The agents can meet each other again, but someone has to orchestrate those together.

[00:08:54] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. It's the conductor. Yeah, orchestra conductor.

[00:08:57] Marc Monday: Totally. I like the idea of control tower in a way. It's like an [00:09:00] air traffic control. You've got certain planes that need certain space on the runway. They need to come in at a certain sequence time. There needs to be a certain space between them.

[00:09:08] And it's all a matter of a time schedule. So this idea of that control tower orchestrating. Which agent is coming into the equation at which time. And when it's leaving, that's really important.

[00:09:18] Chip Rodgers: So for partners, again, then being a part of that that ecosystem to be able to deliver that value to customers, that's critical.

[00:09:26] It's the

[00:09:26] Marc Monday: most critical, honestly, because again, the partners are gonna have relationships with these customers. They're gonna know what the existing infrastructure is. They are trying to help the customer realize value. 'cause in this pace of change, a customer may not have the budget to go think through a big, let's say, a multi-year ERP transformation.

[00:09:47] Maybe they're just trying to get very specific workflows solved, let's say in a simple thing like an approval chain or an update chain. They don't need to go update everything within the infrastructure, but they need to get that access. And then [00:10:00] importantly, talking between applications.

[00:10:01] So this is where the partner really comes in because they can look side, as I said, side to side, north to south, east to west, across the estate, and then deliver that value based upon this orchestration layer that we're creating.

[00:10:13] Chip Rodgers: Love that. That's cool. So again, as partners so you know you're a an ISV partner working with ServiceNow building some technology that would fit within a certain workflow, a business process how, and you've got something that's really cool, right?

[00:10:28] It's really valuable to the, to, to the customer, to ServiceNow customers, to their customers. What's the engagement in terms of co-sell, right? You're connecting. The field teams together. How, tell me a little bit about that. I use a really

[00:10:41] Marc Monday: technical term. It depends. It really does depend what is the customer's expectation?

[00:10:46] We'll have, we have the ability to publish services in our store. That's a great place to start. We have the ability for partners to do traditional deal registration around the partner and the opportunity that they're managing. And then of course we have this [00:11:00] opportunity to do co-selling in a number of ways.

[00:11:02] Co-selling with the hyperscaler, co-selling with the partner, and then connecting the dots to the field. In my role, that's one of the things that we do, is we bring together the right partner and the right opportunity at the right time. And it's the most exciting thing of what we do because the customers right now.

[00:11:16] They're really looking for guidance. They know that they wanna take cost outta the equation. They know that they want to embrace this AI movement, but they may not know how to do that. And that's where the partner comes in with that deep level of , specialization and the ability to take the existing infrastructure, the existing applications, the existing data set, and then make them more powerful.

[00:11:37] Chip Rodgers: Where are you seeing some of those successes are, is it within certain horizontal business cases, verticals geographic, like all the above? What? Tell me about some I think there's

[00:11:49] Marc Monday: four key areas where there's opportunity. There's more than that, but let's just start at the highest level.

[00:11:53] There's a traditional IT business, so there's lots of room for autonomous IT and improvement of [00:12:00] IT systems. IT systems delivery. Hardware management, asset management, our core traditional business. Huge opportunity there. Security is increasingly important. Yeah. Particularly as you're thinking about this scenario across a number of different applications and services, that's a unique opportunity.

[00:12:15] Importantly, we also have a focus on the CRM space, and that takes our existing CSM practice and extends that across the estate, and that's another unique opportunity for our partners to meet the customer where they are with the infrastructure that they have, and then supercharge it, leveraging the power of our agents.

[00:12:32] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. So it security, CRM big opportunities for partners.

[00:12:39] Marc Monday: Yeah, for sure. And again, I think that the thing I like about this is our partners are so powerful in their ability to assess where the customer needs. We had a meeting with a partner yesterday and they were talking about what's the entry point?

[00:12:51] And it's almost like a, if you've heard that metaphor of you're in an elevator, what floor am I getting off on? I really like that metaphor a lot because the partner will know, oh, I'm on the 33rd [00:13:00] floor. This is what I need to deliver. Oh, I'm on the second floor. Oh, I'm down in the bowels of the basement.

[00:13:04] Where at the infrastructure layer, here's the thing that I need to deliver. That's really where the power of partnership comes together. Yeah.

[00:13:11] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. I think because nobody now, no one company can build everything. So you've gotta have very u unique, business processes or use cases for that

[00:13:21] partners are gonna. Really

[00:13:22] Marc Monday: they understand it inside and out. You nailed it. The headline is, the AI revolution won't be one alone. It is a team sport. And for us right now with the customers expecting so much and so much pressure coming at them, this is our opportunity to do it in a collective way.

[00:13:36] Yeah,

[00:13:37] Chip Rodgers: That's fantastic. What's next?

[00:13:40] Marc Monday: Oh my gosh, there's so much to do. It's just a matter of how do we take this moment? And really seize it. And I think the key is taking those use cases, real live use cases and turning them into reality. We have this notion of like process mining and workflow orchestration becomes a [00:14:00] key element of that.

[00:14:00] But the trick is you've gotta go from that C-suite where they bought in. I love AI. Sounds great. I wanna save cost. I wanna save money, I wanna save time. Terrific. I don't wanna invest in a bunch of additional heavy infrastructure.

[00:14:12] Chip Rodgers: Go do it. And now they're make it

[00:14:14] Marc Monday: happen. So again, using the elevator metaphor.

[00:14:16] Yeah. We're going from the 65th floor down to the first floor. And we need to look at the user. What are your swivel chair? What's happening right now? Why is that approval chain take 17 steps? What are the pieces of that? So that idea of process mapping becomes so critical. To establishing what the agent is gonna do.

[00:14:35] And I think that's the key is there's lots of whiz bank things that can happen with AI, but this is really pragmatic stuff. At the ground floor, if you talk to a user, they can tell you right away. Oh my gosh. This is the administrivia that just takes the air outta my day. I spend two hours going from this screen to this screen to solve a problem. There's your use case. Yeah. And I think that's where the partner comes in and they can unlock that for the [00:15:00] customer in a meaningful way.

[00:15:01] Chip Rodgers: So that brings us around to the SI partners. Yep. There's a, and consulting partners.

[00:15:07] There's a, just a, again, a lot of opportunity there because these are change management. These are like, really, you need to understand the business pretty deeply to be able to even make recommendations.

[00:15:17] Marc Monday: For sure. Again, like if we use the example of it's, it has to touch the ERP in a meaningful way, and that's our background.

[00:15:22] That's a pretty sophisticated conversation because we know that ERP is the backbone of the company. It's the central nervous system. And so when we're tinkering with the central nervous system, we really need to have an expert there. And that's where the consulting and implementation partners are so critical because they understand all of the elements across the key data sets within the estate.

[00:15:44] Chip Rodgers: Fantastic. Marc, thank you so much for taking some time. This has been pleasure. This has been awesome.

[00:15:50] Marc Monday: Yeah. So great to see you. I think that I wanna leave you with customers need flexibility right now. Customers need partners that can meet them where they are, [00:16:00] and customers need help in terms of what is the interoperability across their applications, across their

[00:16:07] their data and their core systems of record. And it all starts with trust. And my favorite thing about working with partners is customers truly trust them to transform their business. Yeah. And for me, that's what makes this so exciting.

[00:16:23] Chip Rodgers: That is awesome. That's terrific. Marc, thanks.

[00:16:26] Thank you for taking the time and and sharing so many insights about where ServiceNow is today and what's in for the future.

[00:16:34] Marc Monday: And let's do it again.

[00:16:36] Chip Rodgers: Alright. Every what? We'll put it on the, we'll put it on the calendar every six months.

[00:16:41] Marc Monday: Let's do it for sure. Maybe we can get you to come to knowledge in Las Vegas in the spring.

[00:16:46] That might be a great opportunity.

[00:16:47] Chip Rodgers: I'd love to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Terrific. All right. Thank you, Marc. Thank you. And thank you all for joining another episode of Inside Partnering, and we will see you next time. Make sure to like, share and subscribe on substack. [00:17:00] Thanks everybody.

[00:17:00] Marc Monday: Thanks everybody.

[00:17:02]

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