Every meaningful transformation begins with a decision: a moment when an organization chooses to invest not just in technology, but in the people and expertise required to make that technology matter. For Mergen, that moment arrived on July 31, 2025, with the launch of its ServiceNow Center of Excellence [CoE] in Hyderabad.
“For all of us at Mergen, the launch of ServiceNow Center of Excellence is not just a milestone. It’s a reflection of how far we’ve come and where we are headed,” said Mahanth Mallikarjuna, Founder & CEO of Mergen, at the launch event. One year later, that reflection became a track record worth celebrating.
Mergen was founded in 2015 as a consulting company, built on a simple mission: to help enterprises keep pace with technology. In the years that followed, that mission expanded steadily into business intelligence and data warehousing, CRM and QA services, cloud infrastructure on Azure and AWS, and robotic process automation and workforce solutions. Each addition reflected the same underlying principle: technology should serve outcomes, not the other way around.
Today, Mergen works across ServiceNow, cloud, and enterprise automation for clients worldwide, with delivery hubs spanning the US, UK, India, Australia, and the UAE. By 2025, that decade of groundwork made Mergen ready for its most ambitious investment yet.
The past year has given Mergen plenty to celebrate. Here’s how it unfolded.
July 31, 2025: The ServiceNow CoE Opens
Mergen committed $1 million, phased across two stages, to establish a 150-seat CoE within its Global Delivery Center in Hyderabad, with an additional 8,000 square feet reserved for future growth. More than 50 ServiceNow experts joined on day one.
“This new Center of Excellence is more than a facility,” Mahanth said. “It’s a platform for innovation, collaboration, and impact.”
The Center was built around four founding commitments: industry-specific ServiceNow solutions, reusable assets to accelerate delivery, training and mentorship for future experts, and co-innovation with ServiceNow and clients.
Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, ServiceNow’s Managing Director and Group Vice President for India and SAARC, attended the launch in person to lend ServiceNow’s own weight to Mergen’s investment. His remarks centered on a single idea: that AI’s greatest value in a market like India lies not in replacing people, but in closing what he called the service deficit, the gap between the services people need and the access they actually have.
He illustrated the point with an example from banking. Nearly every Indian citizen holds a bank account, he noted, yet only a select few have access to a dedicated relationship manager. AI, in his framing, is what makes that kind of personalized service possible on a national scale.
“India needs AI,” he said, “but AI needs India more than you think.”
His remarks echoed findings from ServiceNow’s own Enterprise AI Maturity Index, which found that 68% of Indian business leaders were still defining the skills and strategies needed to fully leverage AI. Mergen’s CoE, in Ganesh’s framing, was a direct response to that gap.
Less than a year after opening its doors, Mergen achieved ServiceNow Premier Partner status, ServiceNow’s highest partnership tier, a moment the team marked as proof of how far the Center had come in such a short time.
Depth, Not Sprawl
Rather than expand into new industries this year, Mergen chose to deepen its expertise within the sectors it already served: financial services, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and hospitality, public sector, energy and utilities, and business services.
For organizations in highly regulated, high complexity industries, that depth carries more weight than breadth. It reflects a partner who understands the sector's specific regulatory pressures, legacy-system challenges, and compliance stakes, built through sustained work across ITSM, AIOps, and Integrated Risk Management rather than surface-level expansion.
“Over the past year, we delivered 4 major ServiceNow transformation programs, with typical delivery timelines of three to four months, and improved our overall delivery speed by 30%,” said Hari Aeda, Director of Global Delivery & Operations at Mergen. “That is the clearest proof of what this Center has become. Not just bigger, but more capable.”
That capability spans the full ServiceNow platform, not one corner of it.
It shows up across IT workflows: IT Service Management, IT Operations Management, and IT Asset Management. It extends into employee workflows like HR Service Delivery, and customer workflows such as Customer Service Management and Field Service Management. And it reaches creator workflows too, from App Engine to Now Assist and other AI-driven capabilities, alongside Security Operations, Governance, Risk, and Compliance, and Strategic Portfolio Management.
Mergen’s teams bring the same rigor to every module they touch, helping clients modernize service delivery, strengthen operational resilience, and manage risk and compliance from a single, connected platform. For organizations weighing what a mature, outcomes-first ServiceNow partnership looks like, this is where that conversation starts.
Growth, Measured in People
“When we opened the doors of this Center, we set out to double our team by early 2026,” said Bharat Kumar, Global Head at Mergen. “We didn’t just hit that number. We crossed 200+ experts, twice what we originally promised. What matters more than the number is what growth enabled: delivery speed improved by 30%, client confidence rose by 50%, and the depth of expertise behind both is what our clients notice most. That is the difference between growing a team and building a bench the market can rely on."
At the launch, Ganesh Lakshminarayanan offered a reflection that has stayed with the team since. “I always work for entrepreneur-led companies," he said. "I think founder-led companies are the best place to work, because there's a lot more heart in this." Mahanth echoed the sentiment in his own words: "When we lead with empathy and purpose, we build companies that grow and give back."
The Story Continues...
Before closing the launch event, Mahanth returned to the same idea that had opened it. "It is people who really create the impact," he said.
One year on, that is exactly what Mergen’s ServiceNow Center of Excellence has been doing. Fifty experts became two hundred. A single facility became a Premier Partner. And a decision made in a room in Hyderabad became a story still being written.
Here’s to the year behind us, and everything still ahead.
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