Big Four consultancy Ernst & Young has nabbed a partner award from ServiceNow, one of the most important software companies in its business ecosystem.

ServiceNow is a fairly obscure but highly profitable tech firm with a SaaS platform that big companies use to manage their backend operations. Its platform powers the work of HR departments, legal teams and IT admins at the world’s largest corporations.

Rolling out complex software products like ServiceNow is a lot of work even for big companies. Consequently, they call in external consultancies like EY to help them with the task.

ServiceNow has a strong incentive to build good relationships with consultancies like EY. To foster such relationships, the software vendor runs an annual award program through which it recognizes consulting partners that made particularly major contributions to its business.

EY recently took part in that award program, winning the Worldwide Financial Services Industry and Accelerated Growth Partner accolade.

EY won the award because it generated a particularly significant amount of revenue for ServiceNow over the past 12 months. The Big Four firm drove that revenue by convincing its clients to buy ServiceNow’s software.

EY says that a number of other achievements also factored into its award win. When deciding which consultancy should get the award, ServiceNow takes into account not only the amount of revenue each firm generated but also looks at how much “client business value” they drove.

The award is good marketing for EY. It will give companies adopting ServiceNow one more reason to choose EY as their implementation partner over the numerous other firms that compete in the same area.

ServiceNow implementation projects represent a big source of revenue for consultancies like EY. The reason is that ServiceNow’s software is generally bought by large companies and often ends up being used by thousands of workers or more.

A company’s employees can’t simply start pick up ServiceNow’s software but have to be trained in using it. That’s one revenue opportunity right off the bat for EY.

Companies often also need to customize ServiceNow’s software to their needs, which likewise requires hiring a consultancy. That customization might involve integrating ServiceNow’s platform with a company’s internal systems or tailoring the interface to simplify common tasks for employees.

“It is an honor to be recognized by ServiceNow as the Worldwide Financial Services Industry and Accelerated Growth Partner of the Year,” remarked EY exec Hank Prybylski. “We are pleased to continue to collaborate with ServiceNow to help clients become more efficient, drive new capabilities and help improve their operating margin.”

ServiceNow is such an important partner for EY that the Big Four firm even has a branded consulting offering specifically for the former company’s software. The offering, EY NextWave GBS, is designed to ease ServiceNow rollouts for global business services organizations, which are large departments inside multinational companies that handle backoffice tasks like HR.

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