While the world was already moving in the direction of digital transformation, the global pandemic acted as a catalyst in this movement and brought in a new set of challenges to the global Inc. Companies started to work remotely, classes were happening from remote places and barring few essential services, everything went online. This created a need for rapid access to the data, burdening the data centers.
According to a report, the total amount of data created, captured, copied, and consumed globally is estimated to be 79 zettabytes in 2021. In 2020, the data centers market was valued at $48 billion, and it is estimated to cross $105 billion in 2026. Maintaining the availability and quality of online services while at the same time facing increasing demand in general, much of it driven by IoT growth, is no simple task. Companies like Tier44 Technologies have successfully overcome these challenges to cater to the growing need for data centers.
Tier44 Technologies is a leading data center management software developer for large enterprises, government agencies, and managed service providers. Tier44 solutions provide visibility, intelligence, analytics, and automation to help CIOs, IT directors, and facility managers dynamically optimize capacity and manage service levels and power consumption within and across data centers. Clemens Pfeiffer, President & CEO of Tier44 Technologies, shared their success story with the CEOViews team and the things that have enabled them to come this far.
The inception of Tier44 Technologies :
It was in 2014, Power Assure, an award-wining data center energy management company, shut down its operations. This came in as a new opportunity for the founders at Tier44 Technologies, and they were quick enough to acquire all of Power Assure’s intellectual property. At the same time, ServiceNow became more prominent as an ITSM workflow platform. During multiple discussions with ServiceNow, it became clear for the founders that they could add a lot of value to ServiceNow by adding their intellectual property as extensions/applications to ServiceNow. So they started Tier44 as a provider of data center management solutions on the ServiceNow platform. Tier44 showed their first solution at Knowledge 15, the annual ServiceNow user conference, and had the first release available for ServiceNow Geneva shortly after.
Trends and challenges in the industry :
For Tier44 Technologies, the adoption of ServiceN- ow as a platform for any and all workflows, the user experience that comes with it, and the overall rapid innovation cycles has been the main enabler for their own solution. It allows them to leverage all the capabilities of ServiceNow, add elements critical to the data center workflows and provide them to customers via the ServiceNow store. This means it’s a certified solution, readily available, easy to install, and maintain at a price/value ratio that standalone data center management applications just can not match.
Tier44 provides services that they call “Making Data Center Work Flow,” meaning applications that help organizations to more efficiently manage their data centers. These applications are built on ServiceNow, and they extend ServiceNow with visual elements, capacity planning, aggregation, monitoring, audit support, and as they are all “built on now” certified, the functionality can also be used in workflows, dashboards, performance analytics, and by any other ServiceNow module. This allows organizations to run all data center-related workflows across the lifecycle of assets in ServiceNow from install to decom. It further ties the data center, facility, and IT infrastructure assets to all the IT Services managed already in ServiceNow.
Key offerings :
Tier44 Technologies’ solutions extend ServiceNow with data center-specific capabilities like graphical floor plans, rack elevation views, capacity aggregation for space, power, and network. Also, their base product is available on the ServiceNow store. Some add-on modules are going to be added later this year. They do offer amongst others, services for streamlining asset audits in data centers to simplify human and automated compliance audits.
TIER44 TECHNOLOGIES IS A LEADING DATA CENTER MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE DEVELOPER FOR LARGE ENTERPRISES, GOVERNMENT AGENCIES, AND MANAGED SERVICE PROVIDERS.
Tier44 also provides its most powerful feature which helps users to automate tasks from their workflows by introducing an invention which they call “Digital Employees.”
With “Digital Employees,” instead of defining all task execution options in the main workflow, they recommend to setup “automation users” in parallel to the actual real users, so you can use tasks as a means to decouple the execution from the main workflow. The result is that Digital Employees will pick up tasks first, run their own execution, put the results into the task, which either was completed automatically or will be send to a real user with all the notes from the automation attached if further manual steps are required to complete the task.
Roadmap for the future
For Tier44 Technologies, innovation comes mainly from customer requirements; however, they try to set up small-scale, representative environments in the office to design, test, and implement new solutions. Further speaking about their plans for the future, Clemens Pfeiffer said that they are currently finalizing version 5.1 for ServiceNow San Diego. Next, they are packaging up monitoring of temperature, humidity, power, IT load, etc., to store such data in ServiceNow and leverage it for performance analytics. They also have a live manual and automated compliance audit solution that will be made available as a store application. They hope to get this all out before releasing 5.2 for ServiceNow Tokyo.
