Tier44 Technologies
Making Data Center Work Flow

Today’s modern enterprises are beginning to hit a wall with their datacenters due to isolated silos of data and processes managing them. Particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic it has become critical to take full advantage of new technologies for streamlining infrastructure performance, scale, and economics. It has become evident a complete rethinking of datacenter design and management is required to support the digital transformation of the organization and integrate data centers into the core business workflows.

Building on top of its industry leading IT Service Management foundation, ServiceNow is automating workflows throughout the organization by adding new modules such as IT operations management, discovery, asset management etc. and allowing partners to provide add-on applications for their domain expertise. As a result, ServiceNow has shown examples where service outages were cut by 80 percent; average incidents resolution time was reduced to under 5 minutes, and P1/P2 incidents were decreased by 65 percent.

As a Premier ServiceNow Technology Partner, Tier44 Technologies provides workflow optimization and ensures reliability using their holistic data center management approach to make work, work better for people involved in planning, managing, and operating data centers and the huge amount of IT equipment they contain.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Clemens Pfeiffer, president and CEO of Tier44 Technologies, discusses the company’s expertise and how they help their clients face ongoing market challenges to make data center work flow.

Can you give us a brief overview of the organization?

Tier44 is the leading data center management solution provider for ServiceNow. Since our inception in 2014, we have focused exclusively on building applications on the ServiceNow platform used by over 6,000 organizations. By leveraging ServiceNow, the CMDB, incident, problem, change management, and optional IT Operations Management modules like event management and discovery, Tier44 provides a complete data center management solution., The technology encompasses incident and workflow management, asset monitoring and audits, dynamic power management, capacity planning, and runbook automation. We provide the most comprehensive “Built on Now” data center management solution available in the current market. Another notable capacity of the solution is the EM/8 runbook automation; which supports the infrastructure necessary to remotely turn on or off one or more pieces of equipment to adjust server and IT capacity to variable demand and outside events.

Built directly on the ServiceNow platform and certified by ServiceNow, our data center management environment uses their configuration management database (CMDB) details to visualize floor plans, server racks, and more while providing real-time access to IT and facilities metrics with full historical analysis. This allows organizations to add the data center to its core ServiceNow environment and extend IT planning processes to include data center related activities for end-to-end coverage.

What are the major pain points that you are witnessing in this space, and how do your solutions cater to these pain points?

Tier44’s primary focus is to ensure a smooth and optimized data center workflow.

Data centers are often entangled in multiple applications; so when an incident arises, facility managers find it time-consuming to spot the issue and make a decision. The opposite is true when using Tier44 - data center, facility and IT managers can navigate through ServiceNow, look at the incident, make necessary decisions, and manage all the activities required for problem resolution within a single environment.

Along with enabling quick decision-making and turnaround time, we also provide a streamlined workflow with our automation capabilities to get new equipment into production. For example, when receiving a rack, a data center typically has to manually check all servers and their asset tags to ensure they are present and in the correct location. However, 4-6 hour long manual processes such as this can be shortened to a mere 15 minutes utilizing our approach to automation. This unlocks a new level of efficiency as formerly annual data center audits can be completed daily; allowing the organization to focus on its core capabilities rather than allocating precious time on mundane tasks. Moreover, with the work-from-home culture gaining precedence, our solution allows data centers to work with a reduced number of manual tasks while monitoring processes remotely.

What is the implementation process you have in place to address the challenges that your clients face? What sets you apart from other players in the market?

The business world is now racing toward creating a connected workforce. ServiceNow is emerging as one of the foremost cloud-computing platforms delivering excellent, robust digital workflows. Being a premier ServiceNow partner is one of the biggest incentives for us and of huge value to our customers. To help companies successfully get on the ServiceNow roadmap, we take a two-step implementation process. The first step comprises downloading our EM/8 solution from the ServiceNow store. We then perform a gap analysis and determine our customer’s overall requirements. This process also ensures that the customer enters the essential data into ServiceNow and defines the workflow. In the second step, we setup the ServiceNow applications to perform end-to-end processes and workflows.

Additionally, we can provide consulting services and work with their systems integrator for ServiceNow implementation. In some instances, customers want complete automation from the outset. We help them automate each workflow in smaller chunks, get it working, roll it into production, and then proceed to the next one.

The aspect that distinguishes us from our competition is our enormous data center experience coupled with the ability to translate it into the precise solutions that ServiceNow customers need. We can get our customers live within a matter of hours rather than take a traditional three-year route. Our clients implement ServiceNow to ensure a smooth data center workflow optimization, and our task is to help our clients build success on top of it.

Could you share a story with us where you helped the client in attaining what they wanted?

While we have helped many clients over the last few years, one of our major collaboration has been with PayPal. They reached out to us looking to enhance their ServiceNow capabilities We assisted them with asset management, including managing million-dollar assets, keeping track of their location, and how they relate to the ServiceNow environment and ultimately to their payments app. Due to our comprehensive implementation, their site engineers saved a substantial amount of time on asset management. We are talking 90 percent time savings on asset management, and that’s an especially significant number if you consider hundreds of thousands of devices. That was really huge.

At this juncture, what is the business philosophy that is driving Tier44 forward, and how does the road ahead look like for your company?

We all know ‘data is the new oil of the digital economy,’ and it is becoming more valuable than ever. Keeping that in mind, we are continually improving our solutions. We are about to release a new version of our application in the ServiceNow store, which is a significant improvement on the current iteration. It will give customers more flexibility in using Tier44 products and following ServiceNow’s lead, we are making our solutions more configurable by the customer themselves. Coupled with that, we are adding more individual modules to the data center management environment around asset monitoring and management, capacity planning, predictive analysis, and other functionality that customers can add on to our main product. These modules will be easy to use and quick to install, in addition to highly configurable by the customers as needed. With these plans in our roadmap, we are poised to become one of the most sought after ServiceNow technology partners; however, we plan to stay true to our focus on supporting data centers.