AWS Marketplace ‘Excited’ To Offer Cherwell’s ‘Enterprise Grade’ ITSM

‘It isn’t just a matter of our product sitting in the marketplace,’ Cherwell Chief Marketing Officer Scott Gainey says. ‘AWS has a managed service business that is quite large that is also managing the Cherwell environment. So, when a customer goes and purchases Cherwell through the marketplace, AWS Managed Services will do the day to day management of that environment.’

In a blockbuster announcement for automation up-and-comer Cherwell, Amazon Web Services today revealed that the Colorado-based company will be the first ITSM-as-a-service offering on AWS Marketplace, a move that Cherwell called “a massive” deal that is expected to spur growth for years to come.

“Our strategy around this was, go with the market leader. Certainly, it’s AWS first and foremost,” Cherwell Chief Marketing Officer Scott Gainey told CRN. “This is big for us. Their customer base is obviously an order of magnitude larger than ours, there’s also some really strong synergies where their market today is predominantly mid-enterprise, that is the lion’s share of their marketplace, which fits very well into our historical market.”

Gainey said this deal represents more than posting a product for sale online, but rather it is a collaboration between the two companies that entails AWS selling the Cherwell product as well as handling the implementation via AWS Managed Services. Cherwell said the deal is expected to grow revenue five percent this year, and into the double-digits next year. Cherwell is a privately held company and does not report its financials.

“It isn’t just a matter of our product sitting in the marketplace,” Gainey said. “AWS has a managed service business that is quite large that is also managing the Cherwell environment. So, when a customer goes and purchases Cherwell through the marketplace, AWS managed services will do the day-to-day management of that environment.”

AWS Managed Services automates many of the routine interactions with a network, such as change requests, monitoring, patch management, security, and backup services, and provides full life cycle services to provision, run, and support IT infrastructure.

“We are excited to have the Cherwell SaaS offering on the AWS Marketplace. Offering an enterprise grade ITSM solution on Marketplace will provide customers with an easy way to procure a SaaS ITSM service in an efficient transaction,” said Dave McCann,vice president, AWS Marketplace. “We are seeing our customers want a more enterprise approach to their service management journey, and Cherwell can help fulfill that for them.”

Gainey said once customers purchase Cherwell via AWS Marketplace, they will have greater visibility into their AWS network which will allow them to manage consumption and deployment in a way that keeps costs down.

“It comes into providing greater visibility and control over AWS-related services that are being utilized across the organization,” he said. “If you have a single service catalog whereby any AWS resource has to be initiated through, you’re running those requests through our portal and we can turn around and provide you visibility and insights into those utilizations. That’s really the primary use case is to be able to monitor usage of AWS across an organization.”

Cherwell ITSM can be automatically deployed on AWS Cloud via AWS Quick Start which, according to a joint statement, provides a “reliable and fault-tolerant integration point between” an AWS account and its Cherwell Service Management system.

“The Quick Start builds a serverless architecture that extends current IT management and asset tracking processes into a single AWS account, to support compliance, governance, and auto-remediation,” the statement said. “After launching this Quick Start in your AWS environment, you can deploy AWS Service Catalog products, monitor AWS resources, and run AWS Systems Manager Automation documents from your Cherwell Service Management system to auto-remediate issues.”

Gainey said the use case AWS wanted to pursue with Cherwell is providing a service-catalog interface into AWS, such that anyone within the organization can go to the Cherwell service catalog and initiate a request to get AWS services, and then through Cherwell’s workflow automation, that request would translate all the way through to the provisioning of an AWS environment.

“That’s where the relationship began,” Gainey said. “We worked on some initial integration there. It really translated from there to a go-to-market discussion. They came back and said we don’t have a ITSM offering within our marketplace today, and we’ve got thousands of customers today that have deep procurement relationships with AWS Marketplace, and they would like to have a way to utilize that relationship to also purchase an ITSM solution.”

Cherwell is establishing itself as a rival to automation king ServiceNow, but due to the runaway growth of ServiceNow and high rate of adoption among the Fortune 500, Cherwell is racing from behind.

“Both companies are very well aligned to that mid-enterprise market,” Gainey said. “I think the way that our software is licensed and packaged is more conducive to their customer base, compared to ServiceNow, so it’s massive for us. They’re a big player. They are leaning in on us in a heavy way.”