Tier44 Technologies
PayPal using ServiceNow/Tier44 for Data Center Management

In the backdrop of a continuously evolving data center landscape, proper management of data centers enables IT professionals and company stakeholders to work efficiently, respond to incidents quickly, and manage capacity effectively. Helping companies achieve this is Tier44 Technologies, provider of the leading data center management solution built on top of ServiceNow and utilized by managed service providers, government agencies, and large enterprises. Combining ServiceNow’s efficacious IT service & operations management with data center expertise, Tier44 delivers intelligence, visibility, analytics, and automation to assist CIOs, IT directors, and facilities managers in tasks such as optimizing capacity, managing space usage and power consumption, and automating processes across data centers.
Available in the ServiceNow store, Tier44’s EM/8 solution offers data center monitoring and visualization functionality and provides data center infrastructure management (DCIM) to ServiceNow users. EM/8 supports various panels visualizing IT and facilities equipment, front and back of racks, floor plans, and dashboards. In one customer success story, Tier44 helped payment solutions behemoth PayPal to manage their data centers, assisting them in adopting the ServiceNow platform to integrate the information and data that was scattered across multiple systems and spreadsheets. PayPal operates a two-sided proprietary global technology platform that links customers—consisting of both merchants and consumers—around the globe to facilitate the processing of payment transactions, and has an annual payment volume of over half a trillion USD. Tier44 provided functionality and services to assist PayPal in adopting ServiceNow that enabled them to visualize, validate, and automate data center management in a centralized manner.

PayPal’s data center operations wanted to increase cloud data integrity, reduce disparate applications and tools, and automate manual efforts. The company needed the ability to visualize a digital model of its configuration management database (CMDB). They also wanted the ability to forecast future space and power capacity requirements for planned installation and decommission activity for its data centers. Tier44 took a systematic approach in identifying the data that needed to be aggregated, monitored, and validated. This data was then presented so as to emphasize actionable intelligence for PayPal.

“I joined PayPal over a year ago after Tier44 & Deloitte first set up ServiceNow as the central environment for IT service and operations management,” says Larry Osakwe, data center automation program manager at PayPal. “Initially, the focus was on setting up DCIM functionality, enabling visualization, capacity planning and forecasting. Since I joined, we’re focusing more on intelligent process automation.

We recently released Tier44’s automated asset management solution in production, which manages the process of receiving, installing, and auditing racks and hardware and achieves 7 digit savings per year.”

The value proposition of Tier44 is straight forward. Tier44 is certified as a premier technology partner by ServiceNow. Tier44’s primary offering on the ServiceNow Store is the EM/8 platform, which provides visualization and dashboards, offering specific extensions for ServiceNow for capacity planning, space allocation, and infrastructure management function. The company is building additional application modules and products that will be added to the ServiceNow Store for monitoring of IP and facility components in the data center and providing automated asset management, which utilizes bar code scanners and Raritan automated asset management strips.

“Over the years, we have learned that it is nice to have a service provider to implement solutions, but you still have to provide your product-specific consulting services to ensure that they leverage your functionality in a way that is consistent with your assumptions,” says Clemens Pfeiffer, President and CEO of Tier44. Further, he adds that feedback from the customer on implementations and additional functionality enables them to understand the exact needs and desires of their clients. Once the data management platform is implemented, enterprises look for data and automation, i.e., automated asset management.

As Larry Osakwe pointed out, “Using Tier44 on ServiceNow has already provided PayPal with annual 7-digit savings. We certainly continue to enhance the functionality to unlock further savings and improve our team members efficiency as we leverage new features from ServiceNow and Tier44 in years to come.”

Tier44 enables organizations to leverage ServiceNow’s industry-leading ITSM, ITBM, and ITOM functionality for their data center operations. Earlier, many data centers have operated on their own separate from the rest of the organization, but now single platform such as ServiceNow are in demand and have become valuable for a single set of IT processes. Therefore, Tier44 builds new partnerships with enterprises looking to leverage ServiceNow IT process management in their data center. The company also offers graphical, interactive elements that can be placed directly into custom ServiceNow forms. This functionality enables the integration of real-time visualization and metrics with ServiceNow ITSM or ITOM processes and workflows. Furthermore, by adjusting hardware capacity for applications, leveraging dynamic capacity shifting capabilities, and moving individual applications between servers and data centers, Tier44 increases application reliability while reducing overall cost and energy waste in application management. With their holistic expertise, Tier44 continues to help clients such as PayPal in managing their data centers by delivering actionable intelligence with its solutions, achieving real returns, reducing failures and outages while increasing efficiencies.

Recommending Tier44 to other companies and entities, Larry Osakwe says, “Tier44 is highly supportive, they know data centers in addition to their ServiceNow expertise, and they will be of great benefit to anyone, especially regarding data center efficiency and automation. In fact, for 2020 PayPal plans to further extend ServiceNow/Tier44 to the full asset lifecycle using the recently released ServiceNow workspace as an integrated UI. This will further enhance CMDB validations, automated power, space, and network allocation along with another significant reduction of human touches”.