ServiceNow's IT service management (ITSM) platform is increasingly popular in large companies. But it's sometimes too complex for small and midsized organizations to implement. CareWorx is looking to change that. Indeed, the MSP has developed and released Grand Central, a fully-functioning service desk built on ServiceNow. It also features a SolarWinds integration to help ease remote monitoring and management.
The plan is to make coveted but expensive tools like ServiceNow’s leading ITSM platform more accessible. “We took ServiceNow, that’s really geared towards the enterprise space and we built it out into a SaaS-based offering so it fits within the midmarket,” CareWorx VP of Sales Marco La Vecchia tells ChannelE2E.
CareWorx was a Top 100 Vertical Market MSP for 2017. The company was ranked No. 28 in 2017 vs. No. 98 in 2016. The big jump involved growing momentum across the board plus a focus on senior care facilities. Grand Central's launch could further assist that momentum.
Chatter about Grand Central surfaced at last week's Empower MSP conference, hosted by SolarWinds MSP in Orlando, Florida. As one attendee told ChannelE2E: Out of the box, ServiceNow is basically a collection of lego pieces that you have to snap together -- and that's a complex process. The CareWorx approach, in stark contrast, essentially gives you a more complete ITSM house -- eliminating the need to build the system brick by brick, noted Mike Cullen, VP of sales and customer retention at SolarWinds MSP.
ServiceNow Customization for Midmarket SaaS Consumption: Why?
La Vecchia puts it this way: “We feel that there’s definitely a huge opportunity for CareWorx to take an enterprise-level solution like ServiceNow and provide it to organizations that are anywhere between 400 employees to 2,500 employees. That’s really our sweet spot.”
As La Vecchia points out, enterprises are paying hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars to access ServiceNow technology. But according to La Vecchia, about 80 percent of ServiceNow implementations look basically the same. With that realization, CareWorx was able to take the service and turn it into more of a turnkey SaaS-deployable model. They can also deliver the solution in a matter of days, where a full roll-out of ServiceNow can take six to nine months.
This allows clients to spread out the cost over a period of months, rather than facing an insurmountable price tag from the beginning. When you buy a three year agreement with ServiceNow you have to pay for every year up front plus an implementation fee. With CareWorx’s Grand Central, users pay a one-time fee of $15,000 to turn the service on and a monthly subscription amount for the service thereafter.
ServiceNow-SolarWinds Integration
CareWorx has integrated Grand Central with SolarWinds' remote monitoring and management software (N-central, ChannelE2E believes). As the MSP has moved further into the midmarket, they’ve recognized a need for remote management solutions.
“We’ve noticed that as we talk to our customers there’s a huge gap in that marketplace,” says La Vecchia.
La Vecchia goes on to explain that, for now, the level of integration is relegated to incident management integrated with ServiceNow. Within the next 45 days, though, La Vecchia says the company will have full integration of ServiceNow with SolarWinds.
The CareWorx team has extensive experience building and customizing MSP-oriented software platforms. CEO Mark Scott previously was CEO and co-founder of N-able Technologies, which he exited in 2006. (SolarWinds acquired that business in 2013.) La Vecchia also served as director of sales, North America for N-able.
“We felt that SolarWinds is very well known in the enterprise and midmarket, so we felt that the connection with SolarWinds into that midmarket really made a lot of sense for us in terms of who we were going to partner with,” he says.
Additional insights from Joe Panettieri.
