Australia punching ‘way above its weight’ paving way for partner iteration

Australia’s economy is punching “way above its weight globally”, one of ServiceNow’s founders has said, which can provide partners the opportunity to improve on their offerings.

Speaking to ARN at ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2025 conference in Las Vegas, Pat Casey, one of the vendor’s founders and its current CTO and DevOps EVP, said at the broader macroeconomic level, the Australian economy “punches way above its weight globally”.

“It’s a rapidly growing economy, there is a lot more fresh capital being spent on fresh projects in the A/NZ [Australia and New Zealand] region than in, say, Europe, where there’s a lot less fresh capital,” he continued.

“Even though you might have a notionally bigger economy in Germany, for example, the fresh project budget in Australia is almost universally higher, which means you can have a lot more interesting conversations.”

In fact, Casey said that conversations around fresh capital can’t always take place in other locations around the world because, unlike Australia, it isn’t always available.

When that fresh capital is coming from profitable and growing industries, this can give partners the flexibility to keep iterating and improve their business model.

“I have universally seen that … in the Gulf states, because they have an awful lot of profits being thrown off from the oil industry,” Casey said. There is a similar case, frankly, in A/NZ, [where] there’s an awful lot of money being liberated by all those profitable industries and it’s being reinvested in growing the economy.”

Casey’s strong belief in Australia extends to ServiceNow’s own operations, as he said the country is one of its most significant regions.

“I’ve got a big global support centre there that does global cloud operations. So, during certain hours of the day, the global cloud is run by people sitting somewhere in a hill in Sydney,” he said.

“My experience is, in early days of ServiceNow, those are some of our best systems engineers for the folks we hired there. I don’t have any grand philosophical thought about why this would be, but my observation is we had some incredibly creative problem solvers in those early days that we managed to hire in A/NZ.”

Elaborating on this further, Casey said Australia’s success could be due to its isolated nature in regards to both geography and time zone.

“Maybe it’s just because there’s an engineering and a technical culture. They don’t have the Phone-a-Friend options you do here [in the US], because everybody else is asleep. Those people figured it out. So, that’s one of my top support sites,” he said.

Sasha Karen travelled to Knowledge 2025 as a guest of ServiceNow.