Data centers are at the thick of the data revolution. Today, almost every business and government entity has built its own data center or at least has access to one. But CIOs, IT directors, and facilities managers need visibility, intelligence, analytics, and automation to dynamically optimize capacity manage service levels and power consumption within and across data centers.Tier44 Technologies’ expertise in Data Center Management helps large enterprises, government agencies, and managed service providers with this.

Tier44’s award-winning products, data centers, owners, and operators can achieve ultimate application reliability using holistic data center management rather than isolated facility and IT hardware modules. The company takes a two-step approach. First, monitoring and baselining the existing configuration and in the second step, automating standard operating procedures using sophisticated runbooks, making the implementation and rollout seamless, non-intrusive, and fast. Furthermore, by being able to shift applications from one data center to another at a moment’s notice, and by adjusting hardware capacity for applications dynamically, a new level of application management possibilities opens up, which can increase application reliability while reducing overall cost and energy waste.

Headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, the company was founded by former Power Assure employee Clemens Pfeiffer, the President and CEO/CTO of Tier44 Technologies. We recently interviewed him to know more about the company’s work and innovation. Read on for the excerpts from the interview.

Q. How do you optimize and update your application regularly? How do you gather insights from clients directly?

The way we gather information is by talking with clients where we help with the implementation. During such engagements, we gather a lot of details about the various use cases organizations try to implement. Whenever we see similar use cases from multiple customers, we start doing some research into best practices, we look if other ServiceNow applications or modules already exist and if there is nothing available but the perception of importance on the features/workflows, we start to design a potential solution based on our own use of ServiceNow.

Over the years, working with ServiceNow we not only created our core visualization and aggregation application, but we also created reusable elements and best practices that can easily be combined for other purposes and as we move forward they will be released as new add-on application modules to make it easy for customers to install them and use them for their own benefits.

Q. How do you plan to fund all your innovations? Are you planning to go with VCs again?

Most of the innovations come out of our customer engagements and up to this point; the annual subscription along with some of our implementation services is the source of our funding. At this time, we are not actively reaching out to VCs or investors; however, we are open for discussions and someone who can help accelerate customer rollout/adoption.

Q. How do you streamline your services without compromising with data security?

All our services are built on the ServiceNow platform and certified by ServiceNow before they are made available on the ServiceNow store to make sure that we adhere to all compliance and security requirements from ServiceNow. We also do not store or even distribute identifiable data to services outside of ServiceNow without organizations being able to define and verify all details within ServiceNow. We do not require access to ServiceNow or ServiceNow data unless an organization hires us for specific implementation tasks at which point you usually have to go through regular contractor on-boarding procedures including potential certification and training.

Q. Product customization is the key to serving your customer base successfully. How flexible are your products and services for customization?

As with ServiceNow itself, all our products are designed to extend ServiceNow with key features and functionality required for data centers that can be used within any other ServiceNow module and use case. For example, the application renders racks with images of servers from the front and back. This view can be used for capacity planning to see what’s available; it can be used in a workflow to select a rack position for a new server, it can be used in an incident to pinpoint a device in the data center – be it a server in a rack or a cooling unit in a room. Adding a capability to ServiceNow makes it available to a variety of use cases and allows the organization to maximize the value of the Tier44 application and honestly, the overall ServiceNow solution.

Q. If any updates and amendments take place in technology, training is given to cope up with those changes. Tell us about your training module for up-skilling employees?

For us the primary source of training is ServiceNow. Anyone certified in ServiceNow has to be re-certified with each release, every 6-months depending on their roles and certifications, like system administrators, architects, developers. We also want our employees to grow their skills and capabilities, so the various roles and training paths in ServiceNow are great, be it for developer, architect, or business owners and the various ServiceNow modules. There are various levels and long-term career path options available for all of them.

About the Leader

Clemens Pfeiffer, President and CEO/CTO

Clemens started his professional career at Hewlett-Packard in Germany, first in a central European support role and later in a more pro-active consulting role for compiler and database technologies. Subsequently, his role expanded to workflow and business process automation technologies helping multi-national corporations with enterprise business process reengineering initiatives and implementation technologies. After leaving HP, Clemens started his first company and created a business process automation platform and web-based application environment. In 2007, he co-founded Power Assure as CTO with focus on innovative energy management solutions. Utilizing automation technology for energy management of data centers, Power Assure demonstrated power consumption reduction by over 50% for large-scale load-balanced application environments, winning multiple awards including Gartner cool vendor and the first ever double winner at the California Clean Tech Open. This led to patents, a multimillion-dollar DOE grant and VC/strategic investments. In 2014, Clemens started Tier44 Technologies, acquired all intellectual property, patents, software, and most assets from Power Assure, taking the technology to the ServiceNow ecosystem by building data center management functionality on the ServiceNow platform that is now available as “built for now” certified applications from the ServiceNow store.

"With Tier44's award-winning products, data centers, owners, and operators can achieve ultimate application reliability using holistic data center management rather than isolated facility and IT hardware modules."