Having recently caught up with ServiceMax CEO, Neil Barua, Field Service News Editor-in-Chief, Kris Oldland realised just how unusual the story of ServiceMax is amongst tech companies. It is a story of twists and turns and now that Barua is driving forward his own chapter in that story, Oldland felt it was an appropriate time to recount the epic tale of the start-up that changed the industry before becoming worth almost a Billion Dollars and ask Barua where the next chapter is going to be set in these most disrupted of times...

Most tech companies have a decent origin story.

Indeed, many could (and often have been) the subject of an entire book of their own. However, not many companies have the oh so many twists and turns that ServiceMax has had. The life story for most companies within the small $25Bn corner of the enterprise tech world that we in the field service sector call home is mostly Mills and Boon. A brief account of love that ends in the protagonist being whisked away to a quieter life far away from the frantic frontier world of innovation.

The tale of ServiceMax, at least to my mind, is more akin to the great epics, with a far less linear but ultimately more fulfilling story to be told, and like most great epics, it is a story that spans more than one volume.

Maybe it is simply because I have been personally close to the story from near the very start that I see it in this way - although I personally don’t think it is just that. I’ve been there at the birth of several companies within our sector. I’ve watched them flourish and then watched them fade back into the general noise of the industry as the cycle of innovation and acquisition, acquisition and innovation rumble ever onwards.

Such companies, the Coresystems’, the TOA’s and the FieldOne’s, all had their stories. They all had their heroes, and they all had their moments in the sun. Yet, there was a sense of inevitability when it came to the final chapter. Slowly, inevitably, they became assimilated into the corporate colours of the respective industry giants that acquired them along the way. There is no shame in that. Indeed, it is the way these things are generally done; ultimately, the innovators almost always end up becoming a footnote in someone else’s story.

 

"From these humble origins, which can be traced back to a two-week project Athani and Hari initially built for a client under the moniker of Maxplore, ServiceMax quickly rose from start-up to genuine market leader in record time..."

 

And this is what makes the ServiceMax story so intriguing.

Despite being the biggest prize of them all, despite hitting the headlines across the global technology press when GE acquired them for close to a Billion dollars, simultaneously shining a spotlight onto our sector like never before, the GE chapter remains a footnote in the ServiceMax saga and not the other way around.

As I say, I’ve been privileged to have a front-row seat for almost a decade in the ServiceMax journey. For me, as an outside observer watching the company move through its various evolutions, there are three very distinct personas of a company that has dominated our industry headlines for that same period.

Firstly, there was the brash, brightly coloured ServiceMax, all bold colours, orange lettering against a big blue cloud if I recall. Built on the Salesforce platform but identifying a gap in the market and meeting it long before the rest of the world had begun to catch up. This first iteration was the story of the plucky start-up rising to become the industry titan. It was a true story of disruption and vision.

It was only over the year’s as I got to know then CEO Dave Yarnold better that I realised just how humble the origins had been for the company. I remember Yarnold recalling one story about their rented office in a tucked-away corner of Silicon Valley lovingly nicknamed the beige palace and having to head over to Best-Buy to pick up a TV so he and founders Hari (Subramanian) and Athani (Krishna) could give a presentation to their first-ever prospect.

Yet, from these humble origins, which can be traced back to a two-week project Athani and Hari initially built for a client under the moniker of Maxplore, ServiceMax quickly rose from start-up to genuine market leader in record time.

“We looked at what everybody was doing around service and we thought everyone was missing the point,” Yarnold explained in an interview with me back in late 2016. It was this confidence that they had found a missing piece of the puzzle that oozed throughout the business. The best way to describe how ServiceMax operated in this period was with the confident swagger of a youthful start-up that knew they were destined for the stars.

Of course, the rise was meteoric. By the time they had reached the top of the FSM tree, the value of that success was the acquisition of ServiceMax by GE for an eye-watering $915 Million. While rumours of various potential suitors to acquire the Pleasanton based company had been circulating for some time, this was an acquisition from the left-field not only regarding the price tag but also, who was paying it.

However, as the dust settled, increasingly the acquisition on the surface at least, seemed to make sense. As Scott Berg, former ServiceMax COO who took over the CEO mantle from Yarnold after the initial transition to GE had been completed, explained to me when I sat down with him at the Minds and Machines conference back in 2017.

“I think with GE being largely a company and culture built around engineers, we have both shared an asset centric perspective on service. For us, it was always about a system of assets in the field that customers wanted outputs and outcomes from - we were never about being your typical field service, scheduling only solution. For us it was an awareness of the people, the schedule and the asset. And certainly GE’s culture is grounded in engineering, machinery and assets - so we are on the same page.”

Indeed, if the first iteration of ServiceMax was characterised by a swashbuckling and pioneering approach to rethinking field service management, the GE period in their history was one better characterised by a more restrained and cohesive approach as part of a bigger, more holistic whole.

 

"If you look at GE as a company, I like to call it the largest field service company in the world. There are tens of thousands of technicians, and the vast majority of revenue at GE is derived from service contracts”

- Scott Berg, Former CEO, ServiceMax

 

As Berg had explained, “if you look at GE as a company, I like to call it the largest field service company in the world. There are tens of thousands of technicians, and the vast majority of revenue at GE is derived from service contracts”. Suddenly, the vision of the future of field service management that Hari, Anthani and Dave had successfully convinced our sector was the way forward was now backed up by an organisation that had the engineering gravitas to put it to the test and had backed that vision with an investment that broke all records within the FSM sector.

For many FSM companies, this is where the story may have ground to a halt. ServiceMax was increasingly aligned within the ill-fated GE Predix platform as part of GE Digital; this is the point in the story where all too often, rebrands occur, and the identity at the core of the acquired business is slowly eroded.

Yet, while the wider GE Digital business faltered (most notably Predix, which at the time was the archetypal solution for a problem no one had yet found), ServiceMax continued to report above industry earnings.

Indeed, when GE finally made the decision to carve out their GE Digital business into a standalone company (against a backdrop of analyst rumours of a distinct lack of buyers for the various elements of the portfolio and GE’s confidence in their move into growth tech markets appearing to wane), it is little wonder that ServiceMax, the jewel in the crown that had continued to shine in an ailing portfolio, remained the one valuable asset that GE could cash in on.

As such, SilverLake, the private equity firm with investment in significant technology brands such as Dell Technologies, Stripe and Peloton among many others, were able to take advantage of the uncertain future of GE Digital and introduce the third chapter into the ServiceMax story.

And the man shaping this latest chapter of the story is Neil Barua, current CEO of ServiceMax. I recall first meeting Neil within just a few days of his announcement as CEO as we met over a beer in the dry heat of the Palm Springs desert. It had been a long day for us both; I had been chairing the mainstream at Field Service USA; Neil had literally just arrived an hour or so before we met.

Yet, at the time, I recall saying to him that his passion for the role he had just taken on and the belief he expressed in the importance of how the field service sector keeps the world turning had echoes of some of those earliest conversations I had held with Yarnold almost a decade earlier.

It’s hard to pinpoint, but there was already a distinct hint of the confidence, the belief and the sheer desire to be the change that the world needs that came across in that first conversation.

Of course, in the two years in between, our world has changed immeasurably. The appealing idea of another relaxed conversation in the Californian sun seems like a long way off still as the dust settles from the pandemic.

Yet, in many ways, everything Barua said to me that evening about the importance of the field service sector was laid bare for us all to see as we collectively made our way through what have been truly unprecedented times.

 

“This is a time period where partnerships really matter, so we’ve reached across the aisle on both sides to make sure we do right by our customers...”

- Neil Barua, CEO, ServiceMax

 

His point about field service engineers being the unsung heroes of industry, now seems more prescient than ever after a year where it has been the field service workers that have quietly kept things ticking over while the rest of us adapted to the monotony of lockdown life safe in our private bubbles.

Neil and I have spoken occasionally in the intervening period, most notably after the announcement that Salesforce Ventures invested a further $80 Million into ServiceMax at a time when the partnership between the two is being firmly re-established.

It is another interesting twist in the tale, and to return to our literary metaphor from the beginning of this article; it is almost the classic plot of lost love rekindled. The classic 90s rom-com story arc of a reunion between two high-school lovers that had grown apart as they made their own paths in the world before rediscovering their affinity for each other at a later point when they are now both mature enough to realise how much they genuinely compliment each other.

ServiceMax, as we’ve covered, have had their growing pains, especially in the fall-out of the uncertainty of the GE Digital restructuring, but so to have Salesforce.

Like ServiceMax, they are another industry pioneer who for so long had so much potential to dominate within the FSM space given their position as the world’s number one CRM. Yet, somehow they never quite managed to hit the mark in terms of truly understanding the market’s needs in the granular detail that their peers and competitors did. This very much changed with the acquisition of ClickSoftware.

While the technology acquired was well accepted as an industry leader in the scheduling space, it was the depth of knowledge from former ClickSoftware CEO Mark Cantini (now GM Field Service Salesforce) and down throughout the team that has since moulded Salesforce into a true giant in the industry.

With Silverlake’s backing of ServiceMax and a newly invigorated Salesforce working in closer harmony, each aware of their own particular strengths they bring to the table, it is a formidable combination – and as our industry goes through the birth pains of seismic change brought on by the global disruption of the pandemic, to be blunt, our sector desperately needs our brightest and best innovators on top of their game and pulling in the same direction wherever possible.

As Barua commented when I spoke to him about the partnership while we were still in the depths of the pandemic, “this is a time period where partnerships really matter, so we’ve reached across the aisle on both sides to make sure we do right by our customers.”

At the heart of that partnership is Asset 360, which was at the centre of our last discussion when we caught up on Zoom a little earlier in the month.

“What does successful service delivery look like?” It was a question that we had drifted into as we had started to discuss just how much the perceived value of field service may have changed as our industry adapted to a post-pandemic world.

 

"As we continue to grow rapidly and expand into new industries with Asset 360, our core tenant of customer obsession still remains central to everything we do. All decisions we make around product and partnerships are all done with our customers in mind..."

- Neil Barua, CEO, ServiceMax

 

“For me,” Barua replied, “it absolutely requires a collection of well-orchestrated actions and data - an all-encompassing solution that supports the post-pandemic world. Honestly, that’s precisely where Asset 360 comes in – there really is no use case that we cannot support in this new era of work.

“It is one of the many reasons, that I’m incredibly optimistic about ServiceMax’s future. Despite all of the challenges and hardships we’ve faced in the last 18 months, we’ve moved so far, so fast and now the momentum is strong, to build a future that will take advantage of technologies to drive service excellence to a whole new level.”

Yet, for all the technological innovation that has come out of the ServiceMax team across the years and various iterations, there is one thing that remains consistent throughout. One thing that has become so woven into the company’s DNA that it has permeated through every incarnation and continues to shine through under Barua’s leadership.

That is an intimate understanding of the importance of customer-centricity, both for ServiceMax themselves but also for the industry they serve.

“As we continue to grow rapidly and expand into new industries with Asset 360, our core tenant of customer obsession still remains central to everything we do. All decisions we make around product and partnerships are all done with our customers in mind,” Barua explains.

“Our priority will always be to help them run more profitable, efficient service operations and ensure uptime on the world’s most important assets,” he adds.

If the first iteration of ServiceMax had the brash confidence of the arrogant start-up set to conquer the world, and the second iteration of ServiceMax had the confidence of being part of one of the world’s most iconic and successful brands, then this third iteration of ServiceMax has the confidence of a company that has been at the forefront of the industry for so long that they don’t just get the t-shirt, these guys make the t-shirts now.

Despite the significant investment from both Silverlake and Salesforce Ventures, ServiceMax distinctly has an air of entrepreneurship back in the mix and that stems no doubt from Barua’s own personal flair.

The entrepreneurial innovator is a role that just seems to suit the company better perhaps than the smaller cog in the corporate wheel that they had become under GE. It is hard to explain why, but some companies just have a natural persona and this third iteration of ServiceMax just seems to have found the right blend that fits with their corporate DNA.

Indeed, it is this blend of individual flair met with genuine passion and deep subject matter expertise that for me personifies ServiceMax and it is one that permeates across many members of the team I have grown to know well over the years (such as senior members of the Global Customer Transformation team like Kieran Notter and Coen Jeukens two of the brightest minds in the industry.)

Yet ServiceMax, also are making more measured movements this time around, perhaps having gone through the corporate machine, but equally in no small part down to Barua’s leadership and previous experience as CEO at fintech provider IPC Systems.

As our industry moves through yet another mass evolution, once again at a breakneck pace, indeed at a more incredible pace than ever before, I fully expect Barua’s iteration of ServiceMax to be at the vanguard of the innovation once more.

Whatever comes next, though, in the ServiceMax story, it almost certainly won’t be part of the standard script

As part of our ongoing series where we go beyond the industry headlines to dig deeper into the news that matters for field service management professionals, Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News talks to ServiceMax's Neil Barua and Stacey Epstein about the recent announcement of a deeper relationship with one time competitor Salesforce... 

 

A Compelling Move by Two of the Big Names in Field Service Technology:

The last time I spent time with ServiceMax's Neil Barua and Stacey Epstein in person was nearly 18 months ago, where, in the desert heat of Palm Springs we shared a beer towards the end of a long day of discussions, presentations and interviews at the Field Service USA conference.

Fast forward to today, and the memory seems like a relic from a different time. Such casual catch-ups, indeed, even simple business conferences seem like a luxurious relic of another time. A time where we weren't restricted by a pandemic that no-one saw coming.

Yet, for all the pain, suffering and heartache COVID-19 has brought us, in the field service sector at least, in equal measure the pandemic has sharpened us, refined our offerings and pushed us singularly as an industry towards the adoption of what were, not too long ago, seen as best-in-class technologies, processes and strategies.

When a market is disrupted, we see innovation flourish. COVID-19 has been the most significant disruptor the world has ever seen.

 

"While others may want to talk about the great reset, I see what we are currently going through more akin to hitting the fast forward button..."

 

It feels like we are living in triple time at the moment. While others may want to talk about the great reset, I see what we are currently going through more akin to hitting the fast forward button (for those of us old enough to remember the halcyon days of analogue tape). In a major research project for which I am currently authoring the report, I see evidence of this. What we are seeing emerge around us in many ways is not the sudden emergence of new thinking and new technologies. It is the natural endpoint of a journey we have been on for a long, long time. We are just getting there a lot quicker than we ever thought we might, because, quite simply, we have to.

This sentiment is echoed in Neil Barua's words as we reconnect. "If you recall, when we last me 18 months ago, that was only the first week of my taking on the CEO role with ServiceMax although it feels like 6 years ago, a lot has happened since then."

It certainly has. The very world in which we all exist has changed. However, even without the backdrop of a global pandemic, you have a feeling this was going to be a big period of evolution for Barua and ServiceMax either way.

"I'm really proud of this team and what we have achieved since I've been here and candidly, the tail-winds of service transformation that you have been following for many years, if not decades, is now truly upon us and COVID, while the tragedy continues, has really driven the need for our customer base to adopt new tools to both be competitive and also to be able to serve the essential workers out there in a way that is modern that can support them out there on the frontline," Barua adds.

This is an important point. In our sector, we have always known that our field service engineers are the unsung heroes of our industry, long before the term 'essential workers' ever entered into our everyday lexicon. However, as that value is magnified even further, we must be able to offer our engineers the latest technologies. Technologies that not only allow them to do what they do best and keep the world working but to be able to do it safely and effectively.

 

"This announcement is the evolution of the reconnection with Salesforce that began back in February that is a far greater partnership..."

- Neil Barua, CEO  ServiceMax

 

The role technology will play in allowing us to do that will, of course, be huge. So the recent announcement of a much deeper working partnership between two of the industry behemoths in ServiceMax and Salesforce was met with great fanfare. Add into the mix that we are now seeing Salesforce acquisition of ClickSoftware begin to bear fruit and we have something coming close to an FSM supergroup. There are a lot of very experienced, knowledgeable people now working alongside each other, pulling in the same direction. This can only be a good thing for the wider industry. To use a quote that I am particularly fond of, as JFK once said, 'a rising tide lifts all boats'.

"This announcement is the evolution of the reconnection with Salesforce that began back in February that is a far greater partnership," Barua explains. "We're taking a significant part of the eighty million dollars coming from Salesforce Ventures and began the continuous communication between the two companies to think about what more can we do beyond the transfer of money to make value for customers and to do more than what either company has ever done before.

"When we look at this market opportunity, Salesforce are really excited about the opportunity, it [FSM] is the fastest growing product in the history of Salesforce, we are also seeing extremely fast growth in our core busines and we decided to put our product teams together in collaboration," Barua added.

Yet, having seen the initial press statements from both organizations, and reading between the lines of those statements, which as with all such press announcements carry a slightly sanitized tone, polished by corporate communications departments, I couldn't escape the feeling that there was far more to the announced partnership than the standard industry collaboration.

 

"This is a time period where partnerships really matter, so we've reached across the aisle on both sides to make sure we do right by our customers..."

- Neil Barua, CEO, ServiceMax

 

Personally, knowing both companies and a number of the key players involved, I had a sense that this partnership ran far deeper than similar partnership announcements. This was more I felt than a formal agreement to share a go-to-market strategy. It seemed to be something far more engaged at the micro-level, rather than the usual surface-level macro approach.

I was keen to see if this truly was the case.

"We've brought together our R&D teams, our marketing teams and our sales teams and the announcement earlier this month,  of ServiceMax Asset 360 for Salesforce, is an announcement of a really strategic partnership which unleashes the most complete field service solution in the market out there. It brings to the table the strengths that they bring to bear, particularly the appointment centric capabilities and all the platform technologies that they are evolving and building our asset-centric capabilities on that platform. Putting this together, there is no use case we cannot serve now. We now have execution in front of us to really take advantage of the strengths of both companies."

With this in mind, then it truly is a genuinely exciting proposition for the industry to see such a complete solution come to the fore. It is also perhaps the perfect example of a solution borne in 2020 – a year where in the face of all the adversity we have begun to understand the importance of true business partnerships. As Barua wisely comments "this is a time period where partnerships really matter, so we've reached across the aisle on both sides to make sure we do right by our customers."

Again, the cynical old journalist listening to soundbites about 'doing the right thing for customers' might just see a selection of play-book quotes ready to hand. Yet, there is an earnestness and excitement to the way Barua communicates that makes it hard to stay cynical. While undoubtedly like every great CEO, Barua knows what to say and how to say it, you also get a feeling that his words are built on a foundation of honesty and a belief in doing things the right way.

When I first met Barua, one observation I made was that there was a feeling of continuation from the preceding CEO's he had taken the mantle from. Initially being Dave Yarnold, and then during the GE period, Scott Berg.

That is not to say that under the stewardship of Barua the ServiceMax story isn't evolving, it most evidently is. However, the ethos that underpinned the organization's previous meteoric rise, a focus on understanding the challenges that their customers, and the field service sector at large face remains. That ethos has been key to ServiceMax's approach to building solutions to meet those customer needs which has remained consistent across the various chapters of this compelling story.

I also commented at the time, that I felt a large factor in maintaining a consistent ethos would be the return of Stacey Epstein, now CMO and Chief Experience Officer at ServiceMax to the fold. 

Epstein was part of the early team at ServiceMax under Yarnold, who went on to become an impressive CEO in her own right, nurturing communications platform start-up Zinc to becoming an innovative tool that again addressed the needs of modern field service organizations.

 

"Integrated isn't even the right word, these solutions are all built on one data model leveraging all the same native objects... "

- Stacey Epstein, CMO & Chief Experience Officer, ServiceMax

 

ServiceMax's subsequent acquisition of Zinc was thus doubly important.

It not only brought another piece of the FSM puzzle into Servicemax's suite of solutions, but it also brought back another experienced voice and mind, one who understood the 'special sauce' that made ServiceMax such a success, back into their senior leadership team. 

"I've been in this space for decades," Epstein reflects.

"Well before ServiceMax I was selling field service software for Clarify in the nineties. Field service has been around forever; probably people were going around in wagons and on horses to offer services for people! But I think technology has just continued to fuel the maturity of what field service teams can do. In the past everything was client-server, there was no such thing as mobile. So then it was all about optimizing and tracking parts.

"When ServiceMax came along, it was one of the first Cloud-based FSM solutions and the first vendor to offer a mobile solution. Then Salesforce started building, and Click had great scheduling, and now we have really combined all of this into one very integrated solution.

"In fact, integrated isn't even the right word, these solutions are all built on one data model leveraging all the same native objects." Epstein adds as she considers the point further.

"The things that companies were buying piecemeal before, they can now access on one platform, which will mean a much faster time to value for customers. There are more features out of the box, so there is less customization, and it puts our customers in the position to adopt the new things that come up, like ScopeAR's augmented reality tools, like Aquant's artificial intelligence tools and like the Zinc communication tools.

"If my core features and functionality, asset-centricity, resource -centricity, are all covered in a very robust platform integrated into my CRM then it is not a big step to leverage the cutting-edge tools that allow me to achieve a digital transformation.

"In some ways it is a maturity, but in another way is that it doesn't mean we are 'there' yet . In a sense it simply means that when new technologies emerge, companies are really ready to adopt."

This final point of Epstein's is a good reflection on the place that FSM technology has arrived at today. Much has been refined within recent years, the foundational building blocks of what we now perceive as an FSM platform are in place and proven to be robust and reliable. However, we are also entering a new era of FSM solutions, and thanks in no small part to the pandemic our arrival at this new point came sooner than the majority of us might have anticipated.

The next iteration of FSM will involve remote diagnostics, augmented reality, artificial intelligence and more. However, without a cohesive platform to build upon these tools cannot live up to the value propositions they promise. We are entering a new phase of FSM technology, and the partnership of Salesforce and ServiceMax will see both companies play a leading role in shaping how technology in our industry is set to evolve.

---

Further Reading:

• Read the initial announcement about the partnership @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/blog/servicemax-announces-new-offering-asset-360-for-salesforce-bringing-asset-centric-capabilities-to-all-types-of-field-service-organizations
• Read news and articles about ServiceMax @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/hs-search-results?term=servicemax
• Read more about Digital Transformation in Field Service @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/blog/tag/digital-transformation
• Find out about the solutions ServiceMax offer field service companies @ https://www.servicemax.com/uk
• Follow ServiceMax on Twitter @ https://twitter.com/ServiceMax