Perhaps the highlight of the ServiceNow Knowledge 2014 event being held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco was the awarding of the Innovation of the Year award after the live vote of attendees in this morning’s general session. It was certainly the highlight for Plat4mation, the company upon which this award was bestowed. And Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick, co-hosts of SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE welcomed the Managing Consultant for Plat4Mation, Elmer de Valk, fresh off his company’s win.

Plat4mation’s app, Facility4U is designed to onboard Facility Management to the ServiceNow platform. According to Plat4mation, the functionality of their app has several uses, including a room reservation module, an inventory capability for administering important facility assets, a service catalog function, a planning capability for recurring tasks that sends schedules automatically to the proper departments, among several other uses.

As Vellante noted, the culling of the 51 submissions down to the final six had to be like deciding which kid to cut from a little league team. “It’s not easy, I’m sure,” he said. Beginning the conversation he asked de Valk to share a little bit about the history of Plat4mation.

History might not have been the right term, however. “We are a small start up,” de Valk stated. “We founded our company seven months ago and we see today’s award as a David versus Goliath match up.” That analogy is appropriate when you consider that one of their co-finalists this year was Yahoo. “We have 9 people on our team and are mainly focused on consultancy around customer service technology,” de Valk continued. “We believe that will transform how businesses operate. IT can become an enabler for future companies.” He stated their decision to opt for ServiceNow was really a no brainer because of how powerful a platform it is.

Plat4mation’s business model typically centers around building applications that are specific to their individual customer’s demands. “But if we recognize a need, we don’t wait for customers. We build it out,” he said.

The idea for Facility4U was borne from a conversation Plat4mation had with their partner manager at ServiceNow who directed them to an underserved need on the platform. “We picked up the challenge and built today’s winning application,” de Valk said.

Back in November/December of 2013, Plat4mation took the idea and travelled to Bahrain where, over five days, they engaged in a mini hackathon. Bahrain was chosen due to their having development resources in the Middle East. After those five days, Plat4mation had the app as it basically was today. “We then submitted it to the market to get feedback. By getting feedback, it helped us to evolve the system and tweak it to where it is now,” de Valk stated.

Perhaps in a moment of supreme humility, de Valk described his role in the Bahrain hackathon saying, “I was primarily responsible for cheerleading and supplying coffee. The other guys did most of the work in building the system. I helped define the requirement.”

As noted above, Plat4mation really saw their partnering with ServiceNow as an easy decision. And de Valk cited two specific reasons for their decision. “First, we have a decade of experience consulting around ServiceNow and we know it very well,” he stated. “And second, we fell in love with ServiceNow. That may sound corny but that’s what it is,” he said. “It’s such a powerful platform.”

Plat4mation expects to offer their award-winning application both as a pre-packaged product and as a single offering through their ServiceNow partner page on ServiceNow’s Share site. Individuals can opt to install the application themselves or have it hosted by Plat4mation. “We also have the support models in place that once companies are using the application, if there are questions we can address them,” de Valk noted.

Answering Vellante’s final question of what comes next for Plat4mation, de Valk said, “We are delighted to have won the Innovation of the Year award and hope companies will show interest in the application.”

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