At Your Service: Why Fruition Partners Bet Big On ServiceNow

Fruition Partners CEO Marc Talluto
Fruition Partners CEO Marc Talluto

"From a culture and language perspective, and even from traveling, it can be done much easier from there," he said.

Long term, Fruition's presence in Colombia should help build business in Latin America. For now, though, the resources mainly support clients in North America and Europe.

Speaking of which, the United Kingdom was the location for Fruition's first international acquisition in early July, Partners in IT. Post-acquisition, the combined companies employ nearly 300 professionals focused on ServiceNow, cloud integration and service management. (At the end of 2013, Fruition had 200 cloud experts on staff; the UK acquisition and nearshoring hiring activities each brought an addition 50 employees.)

Culture, Culture, Culture

Once Fruition decided to take a trip across the Atlantic, its management team considered at least eight partners that looked right on paper before deciding that Partners in IT was the right fit culturally and intellectually speaking, Talluto said.

"We could find ways to relate to each other while respecting our differences," he said. "They have to be the interpreters of our brand, so there had to be trust."

Here are some of the things that Fruition's team considered carefully:

  • Services philosophy: Both companies prioritize consultative engagements, versus commoditized deployments.
  • Compatible technical skills: Partner in IT has more than 15 years of relevant expertise, dovetailing well with Fruition's extensive skills development investments.
  • Respect for strategic go-to-market differences: Fruition's U.S. management team doesn't dictate where its British counterparts should focus. Nor should it, since market adoption and maturation for ServiceNow isn't the same in the two geographies.
  • Sense of humor: IT projects can be intense enough, so Fruition seeks people to join its "FruCrew" who appreciate "camaraderie, creativity and charisma."
     

The union of these two companies has "changed the conversation" with a half-dozen of Fruition's largest clients, Talluto said, as well as with some of the large IT services firms such as Unisys and Ernst & Young for which the smaller company sometimes acts as a subcontractor.

Stay tuned for additional acquisitions over the next year, although he's not saying where.

Creating Vertical Value

Another theme you'll hear Fruition sounding over the next year centers on services automation for specific industries, starting with health care and reaching into the retail sector, Talluto added.

Like ServiceNow, the integrator is looking beyond IT automation and service management, seeking to define ways companies can streamline and optimize other service-related processes using technology.

For a hint of what that means, consider the company's AppFactory initiative. The idea is to redefine legacy applications with services that can be more easily provisioned and managed using the ServiceNow platform—starting with healthcare. Examples might include ways of tracking and managing all the assets used in a hospital, everything from imaging equipment to infusion pumps.

What's more, Fruition is working alongside ServiceNow on its App Showcase, which boasts predefined processes for everything from contractor management to patient resolution. They are trying to sell applications that are outside the IT department," Talluto said. "We're rethinking the question of 'what's an application and how is it management.' "

This broader focus will see Fruition work with vendors that are part of the ServiceNow ecosystem, such as Twilio, which can be used for layering voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) into application; or Bomgar, a technology that can be used for remote controlling devices such as point of sale (POS) systems or printers. "We build the connectors and can embed them into other applications," Talluto said.

So far, there are about 35 vendors that fall into this category but Fruition doesn't currently have plans to build significant practices around any of them.