Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Amit Jain, Chief Product Officer, ServiceMax (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’m seeing it everywhere right now. The investors are talking about it. They want to see vertical cloud products. Your insights are very timely. What are the open problems from where you sit? ServiceMax has achieved quite a bit of scale. What is your current ARR?

Amit Jain: We’re over $150 million ARR.

Sramana Mitra: I haven’t followed the recent state of the company. Are you public?

Amit Jain: We are privately owned with Silverlake Partners being the majority owner.

Sramana Mitra: How do you think about this right now given where you are and the scale? What TAM are you working with? Do these verticals that you’re already in have a lot of growth opportunities? Do they have a lot of addressable markets still left? What is your long-term strategy?

Amit Jain: We have a lot of runways even in our existing TAM of field service. The markets we serve are slow to adopt digital transformation. Not because of intention but because we’re dealing with manufacturers. Every system they’ve had historically, it’s very difficult to replace. With the inroads we make on our install base today, we have a very good track record of landing and expanding.

Once the manufacturer sees the benefit in one division, they can roll it out globally. We do have customers who are on the cutting edge. Over the last decade, medical device companies have done well in the market. They are high margin and they’re also very sophisticated products. If we go to some of our industrial manufacturer profiles of the customers, it takes them a little bit longer.

From an expansion opportunity, what’s fascinating is field services has always been more about how I create an experience for a technician to keep something up and running. We are already expanding more downstream. When the asset is first manufactured, what kind of information from how the asset maintenance can we bring back to product design? All these things are siloed. The manufacturing has no visibility into that.

We are in a unique seat where we are starting to take a lot of that information that’s happening to the asset and show it with product design so that they need to issue a recall on some sort of malfunction. The service side has the best information on where the assets are installed so you can issue an accurate recall. What if we try to pipe that information of what’s happening to the asset and how it’s performing back to product lifecycle management so that when you’re designing the next generation, you’re doing so with that information? That’s going to be the new direction.

In the short term, we have the runway in terms of growth in field service. Growing outside the definition of field service and more within the asset lifecycle is interesting to us.

Sramana Mitra: Do your manufacturing verticals include aerospace and automotive?

Amit Jain: It does. We’re trying to grow our footprint in aerospace. To date, automotive is something we’ve been evaluating and haven’t moved in.

Sramana Mitra: The workflow is different. The technician is not going to the car. It’s in the dealership.

Amit Jain: That’s right. It’s funny. The analogy from a car maintenance schedule is the easiest for people to understand. Your point about the dealer network is spot on. Aerospace is interesting to us because it’s less of a technician going on site. That happens, but the lion’s share is in what they call MRO. It’s within a hangar. That’s something we’re interested in.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Amit Jain, Chief Product Officer, ServiceMax
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