(intro music) >> Hi everybody. Dave Vellante, back with Day Two coverage, we're live at the ARIA Hotel in Las Vegas for fal.con '22. Several thousand people here today. The keynote was, it was a little light. I think people were out late last night, but the keynote was outstanding and it's still going on. We had to break early because we have to strike early today, but we're really excited to have Stephan Goldberg here, Vice President of Technology Alliances at Claroty. And we're going to talk about an extremely important topic, which is the internet of things, the edge, we talk about it a lot. We haven't covered securing the edge here at theCUBE this week. And so Stephan really excited to have you on. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're very welcome. Tell us more about Claroty, C-L-A-R-O-T-Y, a very interesting spelling, but what's it all about? >> Claroty is cybersecurity company that specializes in cyber physical systems, also known as operational technology systems and the extended internet of things. The difference between the traditional IoT and what what everyone calls an IoT in the cyber physical system is that an IoT device has anything connected on the network that traditionally cannot carry an agent, a security camera, a card reader. A cyber physical system is a system that has influence and operates in the physical world but is controlled from the cyberspace. An example would be a controller, a turbine, a robotic arm, or an MRI machine. >> Yeah, so those are really high-end systems, run, are looked after by engineers, not necessarily consumers. So what's what's happening in that world? I mean, we've talked a lot on theCUBE about the schism between OT and IT, they haven't really talked a lot, but in the last several years, they've started to talk more. You look at the ecosystem of IoT providers. I mean, it's companies like Hitachi and PTC and Siemens. I mean, it's the different names than we're used to in IT. What are the big trends that you're seeing the macro? >> So, first of all, traditionally, most manufacturers and environments that were heavy on operations, operational technology, they had the networks air-gapped, completely separated. You had your IT network for business administration, you had the OT network to actually build stuff. Today with emerging technologies and even modern switching architecture everything is being converged. You have the same physical infrastructure in terms of networking, that carries both networks. Sometimes a human error, sometimes a business logic that needs to interconnect these networks to transmit data from the OT side of the house, to the IT side of the house, exposes the OT environment to cyber threats. >> Was that air-gap by design or was it just that there wasn't connectivity? >> It was air-gap by design, due to security and operational reasons, and also ownership in these organizations. The IT-managed space was completely separate from the OT-managed space. So whoever built a network for the controllers to build a car, for example, was an automation engineer and the vendors, that have built these networks, were automation vendors, unlike the traditional Ciscos of the world, that we're specializing in IT. Today we're seeing the IT vendors on the OT side, and the OT vendors, they're worried about the IT side. >> But I mean, tradition, I mean, engineers are control freaks. No offense, but, I'm glad they are, I'm thankful for that. So there must have been some initial reticence to them connecting up these air-gap systems. They went wanted to make sure that they were secure, that they did it right, and presumably that's where you guys come in. What are the exposures and risks of these, of this critical infrastructure that we should be aware of? >> So you're completely right. And from an operational perspective let let's call it change control is very rigorous. So they did not want to go on the internet and just, we're seeing it with adoption of cloud technologies, for example. Cloud as in industry four ago, five ago, cloud as in cyber security. We all heard Amol's keynote from this morning talking about critical infrastructures and we'll touch upon our partnership in a second, but CrowdStrike, CrowdStrike being considered and deployed within these environments is a new thing. It's a new thing because the OT operation managers and the chief information security officers, they understand that air-gap is no longer a valid strategy. From a business perspective, these networks are already connected. We're seeing the trends of cyber attacks, IT cyber attacks, like not Patreon, I'm not talking about the Stoxnet, the targeted OT. I'm talking about WannaCry, EternalBlue, IT vulnerabilities that did not target OT, but due to the outdated and the specification of OT posture on the networks, they hit healthcare, they hit OT much harder than they did IT. >> Was Log4J, did that sleep into OT, or any IT that. >> So, absolutely. >> So Log4J right, which was so pervasive, like so many of these malwares. >> All these vulnerabilities that, it's a windows vulnerability, it has nothing to do with OT. But then when you stop and you say, hold on, my human machine interface workstation, although it has some proprietary software by Rockwell or Siemens running on it, what is the underlying operating system? Oh, hold on, it's Windows. We haven't updated that for like eight years. We were focused on updating the software but not the underlying operating system. The vulnerabilities exist to a greater extent on the OT side of the house because of the same characteristic of operational technology environments. >> So the brute force air-gap approach was no longer viable because the business imperative came in and said, no, we have to connect these systems to digitally transform, or advance our business, there's opportunities to monetize, whatever it was. The business laid that out as an imperative. So now OT engineers have to rethink how they secure it. So what are the steps that they're taking and how does Claroty help? Is there a sort of a playbook, a sequential playbook? >> Absolutely, so before we discussed the maturity curve of adopting an CPS security, or OT security technology, let's touch upon the characteristic of the space and what it led vendors like Claroty to build. So you have the rigorous chain control. You have the security in mind, operations, lowered the risk state of mind. That led vendors, likes of Claroty, to build a solution. And I'm talking about seven, eight years ago, to be passive, mostly passive or passive only to inspect network and to analyze network and focus on detection rather than taking action like response or preventative maintenance. >> Um-hmm. >> It made vendors to build on-prem solutions because of the cloud-averse state of mind of this industry. And because OT is very specific, it led vendors to focus only on OT devices, overlooking what we discussed as IoT, Unfortunately, besides HMI and PLC, the controller in the plant, you also have the security camera. So when you install an OT security solution I'm talking about the traditional ones, they traditionally overlook the security camera or anything that is not considered traditional OT. These three observations, although they were necessary in the beginning, you understand the shortcomings of it today. >> Um-hmm. >> So cloud-averse led to on-prem which leads to war security. It's like comparing CrowdStrike and one of its traditional competitors in the antivirus space. What CrowdStrike innovated is the SaaS first, cloud-native solution that is continuously being updated and provide the best in cloud security, right? And that is very much like what Claroty's building. We decided to go SaaS first and cloud-native solution. >> So, because of cloud-aversion, the industry shows somewhat outdated deployment models, on-prem, which limited scale and created greater diversity, more stovepipes, all the problems that we always talk about. Okay, and so is the answer to that, just becoming more cloud, having more of an affinity to cloud? That was a starting point, right. >> This is exactly it. Air-gap is perceived as secured, but you don't get updates and you don't really know what's going on in your network. If you have a Claroty or a crosswork installer, you have much higher probability detecting fast and responding fast. If you don't have it, you are just blind. You will be bridged, that's the. >> I was going to say, plus, air-gap, it's true, but people can get through air-gaps, too. I mean, it's harder, but Stoxnet. Yeah, look at Stoxnet right, oh, it's mopping the floor, boom, or however it happened, but so yeah. >> Correct. >> So, but the point being, you know, assume that breach, even though I know CrowdStrike thinks that the unstoppable breach is a myth, but you know, you talk to people like Kevin Mandia, it's like, we assume you're going to get breached, right? Let's make that assumption. Yeah, okay, and so that means you've got to have visibility into the network. So what are those steps that you would, what's that maturity model that you referenced before? >> So on top of these underlying principles, which is cloud-native, comprehensive, not OT only, but XIoT, and then bring that the verticalization and OT specificity. On top of that, you're exactly right. There is a maturity curve. You cannot boil the ocean, deploy protections, and change the environment within one day. It starts with discovering everything that is connected to your network. Everything from the traditional workstations to the cameras, and of course ending up with the cyber physical systems on the network. That discovery cannot be only a high level profile, it needs to be in depth to the level you need to know application versions of these devices. If you cannot tell the application version you cannot correlate it to a vulnerability, right? Just knowing that's an HMI or that's a PLC by Siemens is insufficient. You need to know the app version, then you can correlate to vulnerability, then you can correlate to risk. This is the next step, risk assessment. You need to put up a score basically, on each one of these devices. A vulnerability score, risk score, in order to prioritize action. >> Um-hmm. >> These two steps are discovery and thinking about the environment. The next two steps are taking action. After we have the prioritized devices discovered on your network, our approach is that you need to ladle in and deploy protections from a preventative perspective. Claroty delivers recommended policies in the form of access control lists or rules. >> Right. >> That can leverage existing infrastructure without touching a device without patching it, just to protect it. The next step would be detection and response. Once you have these policies deployed you also can leverage them to spot policy deviations. >> And that's where CrowdStrike comes in. So talk about how you guys partner with CrowdStrike, what that integration looks like and what the differentiation is. >> So actually the integration with CrowdStrike crosses the the entire customer journey. It starts with visibility. CrowdStrike and us exchange data on the asset level. With the announcement during FalCon, with Falcon Discover for IoT, we are really, really proud working on that with CrowdStrike. Traditionally CrowdStrike discovered and provided data about the IT assets. And we did the same thing with CPS and OT. Today with Falcon Discover for IoT, and us expanding to the XIoT space, both of us look at all devices but we can discover different things. When you merge these data sets you have an unparalleled visibility into any environment, and specifically OT. The integrations continue, and maybe the second spotlight I'll put, but without diminishing the other ones, is detection and response. It's the XDR Alliance. Claroty is very proud to be one of the first partners, XDR Alliance partners, for CrowdStrike, fitting in to the XDR, to CrowdStrike's XDR, the data that is needed to mitigate and respond and get more context about breaches in these OT environments, but also take action. Also trigger action, via Claroty and leverage Claroty's network-centric capabilities to respond. >> We hear a lot. We heard a lot in today's keynote note about the data, the importance of data, of the graph database. How unique is this Stephan, in the industry, in your view? >> The uniqueness of what exactly? >> Of this joint solution, if you will, this capability. >> I told my counterparts from CrowdStrike yesterday, the go-to market ones and the product management ones. If we are successful with Falcon Discover for IoT, and that product matures, as we plan for it to mature, it will change the industry, the OT security industry, for all of us. Not only for Claroty, for all players in this space. And this is why it's so important for us to stay coordinated and support this amazing company to enter this space and provide better security to organizations that really support our lives. >> We got to leave it there, but this is such an important topic. We're seeing in the war in Ukraine, there's a cyber component in the future of war. >> Yes. >> Today. And what do they do? They go after critical infrastructure. So protecting that critical infrastructure is so important, especially for a country like the United States, which has so much critical infrastructure and a lot to lose. So Stephan, thanks so much. >> Thank you. >> For the work that you're doing. It was great to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> All right, keep it right there. Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll be right back from fal.con '22. We're live from the ARIA in Las Vegas. (techno music)

>> We're back in Las Vegas at the ARIA for Fal.Con 22, CrowdStrike's big user conference. I'm Dave Vellante and you're watching the cube. Sven Krasser is here as the senior vice president and chief scientist at CrowdStrike and we're going to get a masterclass in AI for security, Sven. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Thanks for having me. >> So I love the title. I just, I'm excited to have you on, I understand you were like employee number two or, you know, really early on >> Among the initial nine. Yeah. >> 11 years ago and I think two days you started. >> Yes. >> What was that like? You know, was that, you know, did you know George beforehand or you kind of? >> Yeah, I, I knew I knew George before, like not as well as I know him now. >> Yeah. >> And it, it sounded like a pretty good proposition about what he was having in mind. Like things security wise didn't really work that well back in the day. And we wanted to try something new, like cloud native, data driven, AI, and use that to stop, to stop breaches. So yeah, like it was very exciting. Like you go there, you have nothing there. First day, you open your laptop and you try to reinvent security. >> Yeah. So, I mean, I know he never, he talks about this. I never said we're going to be an AV company. But of course, you know, you start with antivirus and when at an endpoint and known malware, okay. But unknown malware at the time wasn't really being addressed. And if I understand it you guys brought in machine intelligence from the start. Explain that. >> That's that's right. And like, the way we, we looked at it is like, back then we said, you don't have a malware problem. You have an adversary problem. Just like recognizing that it's not malware but there's people behind it that act on objectives that you need to, that you need to counter and you don't want to run after them. You want to be ahead of them. Like that was, that was the approach, like at a very high level that we were taking and you know, now we have it a little bit more summed up and we say, we stop breaches. So like, that's, that's the end result. >> So how do you specifically leverage AI? Which parts of the portfolio, is it across the portfolio and you know, where did it start? How did it evolve? >> Yeah, we are very, we're very data driven. So we are working hard to use the, the proper tools to work with data wherever we can. And AI being one of these, these tools that we like to bring to bear. The, the cloud, the CrowdStrike security cloud at the moment we're doing about roughly 2 trillion events, with a T, per day. Like that, that volume of data, like going through our platform, that that's not something that you can, that you can work with manually, right? So we need, we need to bring the heavy machinery, like that's, that's how we're bringing AI to bear. >> 2 trillion events per day. I mean, there aren't a lot of organizations that see that many events a day. I mean, maybe, maybe some of the hyperscalers possibly. I don't know. That's a... >> Yeah. I think, I think it really allows us to get unprecedented insights into what's actually going on out there in the, in, in the landscape. And, you know, it's, it's like, it's like with a camera or a telescope, the bigger your aperture the fainter signals you can detect. And that's why like, that's why the volume is, is critical. And that's why we, that's why we from the get go, set out to build a cloud native platform so that we can actually aggregate this type of data and analyze it in one spot, basically where where everything comes together that we can draw these connections. >> Will we ever see security without humans? >> I don't, I don't think so. This, this, this notion that machine intelligence is so intelligent that it just takes these jobs over. To me it's more like a tool, right? Like these, these algorithms, they do need to learn from something they need to learn from human expertise. The way at CrowdStrike we have things set up is like our, our human teams our threat hunters, our MDR staff, our incident responders, like whatever they do, we, we are taking these insights and we're feeding them into the AI algorithms. So if there's, if there's a new type of attack and we have an incident response team on the ground and they find something, that gets leveraged put into a database and our AI can learn from that. I, I, I really like that in the keynote, Kevin Mandia actually talked to that, you know. Like get the incident responders out there, get their knowledge, bake it into products. And that that's, that's the approach that we're taking with, with with our AI. >> So in my head, I'm thinking okay, what do humans do better than machines? I mean, humans are creative, right? Machines really aren't creative, right? I mean, and adversaries are very creative. So, so I guess flip side question, what is, what does AI do? What does the machine intelligence do that that humans can't do? Is it scale? Is it just massive volumes? Help us understand what humans do well and machines do well and how they compliment each other. >> Yeah. So AI is, is very good at working with extremely large amounts of data. Again, like cloud native platform, like that's where you get this AI advantage. It can work with data that is a lot more complex like more facets of data. So we talked about XDR here at Fal.Con a lot, right? Like you get data from all these different products, from all these different angles. Like the more different facets you add to that like it becomes overwhelming for the human mind. It's just like so much complexity that a human can put together in their brain. With AI you don't have these limitations. It's just math. It's just like multiplying big matrices and you can work with a lot larger data sets, like those 2 trillion events that we do per day on the on the CrowdStrike security cloud. But also data that is a lot more complex, that has more facets, looks at the problem from different angles. That's where AI is especially useful. >> I want to ask you as a topic I haven't asked anybody this week and I've been meaning to, is, you know there's this concept of, of living off the land, right? Using your own tools against you. How are you able to detect that? Is that cuz of lateral movement or, I mean I'm sure there are many, many factors, but but how are you addressing that problem? That kind of stealthy using your tools against you? >> Yeah, so adversaries, this is, again there's motivated humans behind that. They figured if they drop a malware file on the machine that's an artifact, an indicator of compromise, right? And that can be detected. So they're avoiding dropping files on disc that could be detected or to bring their to bring their own tools. They try to work with the tools that they find on the machines. They need to act on objective though. There's something they want to accomplish. Like they're not, they're not logging in just to, you know, like do nothing. And this is where indicators of attack come in, right? Like we know what their objectives are and we're trying to capture this. We're describing this in an abstract way. What is it that they try to accomplish? That's what indicators of attack describe and when they act on these objectives then we can catch them. >> So I, I think that the the term indicators of attack, I, I, you may have coined it. I'm, I'm not sure. I think it was you announcement at, at black hat. Those indicators are not static, right? To your point, the humans on the other end are motivated. Are you a can, can AI help predict future indicators of attack maybe working with, with humans? >> Yeah, this is, this is something that we recently rolled out where we are connecting our AI intelligence to our indicator of attack framework. Where basically the AI crunches the big data and then the indicators, the, the knowledge that the AI generates, understanding the context of the situation, can feed into the indicators of attack that we're evaluating to see if an adversary is acting on a specific objective. And then if an IOA triggers, that can feed back into the AI and the AI can use that information to derive for more precise results. We have a good feedback loop between these two, these two systems and they're more tightly integrated now. >> As a, as an AI expert, I want to ask you, is is the intelligence, is AI actually artificial? Or is it, is it real? >> Well, it, it is artificial cause I guess we, we build it right? Like it's a human made. I, I think a lot of people get hung up on the term intelligent and it, it's not really intelligent in the say, in the sense that it acts on agency with, with agency like you would look at a problem, right? It's good at solving specific types of tasks and problems that we can define in ways that these algorithms work on it. But it is not the same level of creative thinking that a human brings to the problem. And this is, going back to the beginning of the conversation, this is where we like to have humans involved in the teaching of the AI. The AI connect autonomously in real time stopping threats. But there's humans that take a look at what is going on to give the AI input and feedback and, and improvements because we are up against other humans, right? You don't want to have a human kind of press the buttons of the AI until they found a way around it. But that's called adversarial machine learning. Very real threat as well. Like we are, we're looking at the problem as humans against humans. Like what, what tools do we need to bring to the battle to keep the adversaries out of our customer's networks? >> Okay. So my follow up is, but there are systems of agency for our detection is a, as an example. But your, I think your point is that that never would've been possible without humans. Is that right? Or... >> Yeah, like on, on the one hand, these systems get trained with human knowledge. On the other hand, there, there are humans that take a look at, if the systems give the right responses. Like there, there isn't like if you talk to your smart speaker, like, like for me, like I'm, I'm asking my smart speaker to turn a specific light on in my living room and it, it, half the time doesn't work, right? Like that, that wouldn't happen with a human. There's like a lot more context and understanding and humans are more robust. Like it's, it's harder to fool a human. The limitation that we humans have is complexity, complexity and volume. So we're trying to make like a peanut butter and cookie approach, a peanut butter and chocolate approach rather, where we want to use the human creativity alongside the AI, which can handle scale complexity and volume at unprecedented, unprecedented scales. >> And when you bring it out to the edge, we, we were just talking to Stefan Goldberg about IOT and extended IOT. When you think about, you know, AI, a lot of lot of AI today is modeling that's done in the cloud and then applied. But when you go out to the edge, you you're starting to see more AI inferencing and near realtime, or even real time. Will that change the equation? What's the future of, of, of AI and cyber look like? >> I think, I, I think it would be pervasively applied. So we are using it already on the edge, on our sensors, but also in the cloud, right? On the sensor, we want to be able to act very quickly on the endpoint, want to be able to act very quickly without any delay with local inflammation. Or if the system is offline for a period of time, right? So we have AI models running there. In the cloud, we have the advantage of being able to work with vast amounts of data without slowing down our customer's machines. So like models will be applied everywhere where there's data, like that's kind of the name of the game. Like let's bring, let's bring this, this type of artificial intelligence, this type of, of like refined digested expertise, wherever the data sits on the end point, in the clouds, where you have it. >> And CrowdStrike doesn't care, right? I mean, it's... >> We care about stopping the breaches. >> Yeah. But you're agnostic to the physical location of >> That, that's correct. >> The activity. So last question is, how should we as humans prepare for the future of AI in, in cyber? >> That's a, that's a good question. I, I would say like, stay, stay creative and like figure out how we can get that knowledge that you have like formalized into, into databases, right? AI, the way I look at it is an amplifier of human expertise. You do something at a small scale as a human, the AI system can do it at a big scale, right? Like it's kind of like digging with a spoon whether it's digging with an excavator, with a, with a backhoe. So I I'd say stay, stay creative and see how we can take things that we do as humans in the small scale and let's do it in the cloud, like with with large data volumes. >> Great advice, creativity, I think is, is a key. Sven, thanks so much for coming on the cube. Really appreciate your time. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're very welcome. Okay. Keep it right there. Listen, by, by the way, I meant to to tell our audience a lot of resources at siliconangle.com, thecube.net, wikibon.com, has a ton of research all available at for no charge. No, no, no password needed. Just access that. Check it out. We're live from the ARIA hotel in Las Vegas, Fal.Con 22, Dave Vellante for the cube. We'll be back after this short break. (calming xylophone music)

we're back at vemma in 2022 we're here at the aria hotel in las vegas this is thecube's continuous coverage we're day two welcome to the cxo session we have ceo cto cso chief strategy officer brett diamond is the ceo justin jardina is the cto and dante orsini is the chief strategy officer for 11 11 systems recently named i guess today the impact cloud service provider of the year congratulations guys welcome thank you welcome back to the cube great to see you again thank you great likewise so okay brett let's start with you tell give us the overview of 11 1111 uh your focus area talk about the the the island acquisition what that what that's all about give us the setup yeah so we started 11-11 uh really with a focus on taking the three core pillars of our business which are cloud connectivity and security bring them together into one platform allowing a much easier way for our customers and our partners to procure those three solution sets through a single company and really focus on uh the three main drivers of the business uh which you know have a litany of other services associated with them under each platform okay so so justin cloud connectivity and security they all dramatically changed in march of 2020 everybody had to go to the cloud the rather rethink the network had a secure remote worker so what did you see from a from a cto's perspective what changed and how did 11 respond sure so early on when we built our cloud even back into 2008 we really focused on enterprise great features one of which being uh very flexible in the networking so we found early on was that we would be able to architect solutions for customers that were dipping their toe in the cloud and set ourselves apart from some of the vendors at the time so if you fast forward from 2008 until today we still see that as a main component for iaz and draz and the ability to start taking into some of the things brett talked about where customers may need a point-to-point circuit to offload data connectivity to us or develop sd-wan and multi-cloud solutions to connect to their resources in the cloud in my opinion it's just the natural progression of what we set out to do in 2008 and to couple that with the security um if you think about what that opens up from a security landscape now you have multiple clouds you have different ingress and egress points you have different people accessing workloads in each one of these clouds so the idea or our idea is that we can layer a comprehensive security solution over this new multi-cloud networking world and then provide visibility and manageability to our customer base so what does that mean specifically for your customers because i mean we saw obviously a rapid move toward endpoint um cloud security uh identity access you know people really started thinking rethinking that as opposed to trying to just you know build a moat around the castle right um what does that mean for for your customer you take care of all that you partner with whomever you need to partner in the ecosystem and then you provide the managed service how does that work right it does and that's a great analogy you know we have a picture of a hamburger in our office exploded with all the components and they say a good security policy is all the pieces and it's really synonymous with what you said so to answer your question yes we have all that baked in the platform we can offer managed services around it but we also give the consumer the ability to access that data whether it's a ui or api so dante i know you talk to a lot of customers all you do is watch the stock market go like this and like that you say okay the pandemic drove all these but but when you talk to csos and customers a lot of things are changing permanently first of all they were forced to march to digital when previously they were like we'll get there i mean a lot of customers were let's face it i mean some were serious about it but many weren't now if you're not a digital business you're out of business what have you seen when you talk to customers in terms of the permanence of some of these changes what are they telling you well i think we go through this for ourselves right the business continues to grow you've got tons of people that are working remotely and that are going to continue to work remotely right as much as we'd like to offer up hybrid workspace and things like that some folks are like hey i've worked it out i'm working out great from home right and also i think what justin was saying also is we've seen time go on that operating environment has gotten much more complex you've got stuff in the data center stuff it's somebody's you know endpoint you've got various different public clouds different sas services right that's why it's been phenomenal to work with veeam because we can protect that data regardless of where it exists but when you start to look at some of the managed security services that we're talking about we're helping those csos you get better visibility better control and take proactive action against the infrastructure um when we look at threat mitigation and how to actually respond when when something does happen right and i think that's the key because there's no shortage of great security vendors right but how do you tie it all together into a single solution right with a vendor that you can actually partner with to help secure the environment while you go focus on the things they're more strategic to the business i was talking to jim mercer at um red hat summit last week he's an idc analyst and he said we did a survey i think it was last summer and we asked customers to your point about there's no shortage of security tools how do you want to buy your security and you know do you want you know best to breed bespoke tools and you sort of put it together or do you kind of want your platform provider to do it now surprisingly they said platform provider the the problem is that's aspirational for a lot of platforms providers so they've got to look to a managed service provider so brett talk about the the island acquisition what green cloud is how that all fits together so we acquired island and green cloud last year and the reality is that the people at both of those companies and the technology is what drove us to making those acquisitions they were the foundational pieces to eleven eleven uh obviously the things that justin has been able to create from an automation and innovation perspective uh at the company is transforming this business in a litany of different ways as well so those two acquisitions allow us at this point to take a cloud environment on a geographic footprint not only throughout the us but globally uh have a security product that was given to us from from the green cloud acquisition of cascade and add-on connectivity to allow us to have all three platforms in one all three pillars so i like 11 11 11 is near and dear to my heart i am so where'd the name come from uh everybody asked me this question i think five times a day so uh growing up as a kid everyone in my family would always say 11 11 make a wish whenever you'd see it on the clock and uh during coven we were coming up with a new name for the business my daughter looked at the microwave said dad it's 11 11. make a wish the reality was though i had no idea why i'd been doing it for all that time and when you look up kind of the background origination derivation of the word uh it means the time of day when everything's in line um and when things are complex especially with running all the different businesses that we have aligning them so that they're working together it seemed like a perfect man when i had the big corner office at idc i had my staff meetings at 11 11. because the universe was aligned and then the other thing was nobody could forget the time so they gave him 11 minutes to be there now you'll see it all the time even when you don't want to so justin we've been talking a lot about ransomware and and not just backup but recovery my friend fred moore who you know coined the phrase backup is one thing recovery is everything and recovery time network speeds and and the like are critical especially when you're thinking cloud how are you architecting recovery for your clients maybe you could dig into that a little bit sure so it's really a multitude of things you know you mentioned ransomware seeing the ransomware landscape evolve over time especially in our business with backup and dr it's very singular you know people protecting against host nodes now we're seeing ransomware be able to get into an environment land and expand actually delete backups target backup vendors so the ransomware point i guess um trying to battle that is a multi-step process right you need to think about how data flows into the organization from a security perspective from a networking perspective you need to think about how your workloads are protected and then when you think about backups i know we're at veeam vmon now talking about veeam there's a multitude of ways to protect that data whether it's retention whether it's immutability air gapping data so while i know we focus a lot sometimes on protecting data it's really that hamburg analogy where the sum of the parts make up the protection so how do you provide services i mean you say okay you want immutability there's a there's a line item for that um you want faster or you know low rpo fast rto how does that all work for as a customer what what am i buying from you is it just a managed service we'll take care of everything platinum gold silver or is it if if you don't mind so i'm glad you asked that question because this is something that's very unique about us years ago his team actually built the ip because we were scaling at such an incredible rate globally through all our joint partners with veeam that how do we take all the intelligence that we have in his team and all of our solution architects and scale it so they actually developed a tool called catalyst and it's a pre-sales tool it's an application you download it you install it it basically takes a snapshot of your environment you start to manipulate the data what are you trying to do dave are you trying to protect that data are you backing up to us are you trying to replicate for dr purposes um you know what are you doing for production or maybe it's a migration it analyzes the network it analyzes all your infrastructure it helps the ses know immediately if we're a feasible solution based on what you are trying to do so nobody in the space is doing this and that's been a huge key to our growth because the channel community as well as the customer they're working with real data so we can get past all the garbage and get right to what's important for them for the outcome yeah that's huge who do you guys sell to is it is it more mid-sized businesses that maybe don't have the large teams is it larger enterprises who want to complement to their business is it both well i would say with the two acquisitions that we made the go-to-market sales strategies and the clientele were very different when you look at green cloud they're selling predominantly wholesale through msps and those msps are mostly selling to smbs right so we covered that smb market for the most part through our acquisition of green cloud island on the other hand was more focused on selling direct inbound through vars through the channel mid enterprise big enterprise so really those two acquisitions outside of the ip that we got from the systems we have every single go-to-market sale strategy and we're aligned from smb all the way up to the fortune 500. i heard a stat a couple months ago that that less than 50 of enterprises have a sock it blew me away and you know even small businesses need one they may not be able to afford but certainly a medium size or larger business should have some kind of sock is it does that stat jive with what you're seeing in the marketplace 100 if that's true the need for a managed service like this is just it's going to explode it is exploding yeah i mean 100 right there is zero unemployment in the cyberspace right just north america alone there's about a million or so folks in that space and right now you've got about 600 000 open wrecks just in north america right so earlier we talked about no shortage of tools right but the shortage of head count is a significant challenge big time right most importantly the people that you do have on staff they've got alert fatigue from the tools that they do have that's why you're seeing this massive insurgence in the managed security services provider lack of talent is number one challenge for csos that's what they'll tell you and there's no end in sight to that and it's you know another tool and and it's amazing because you see security companies popping up all the time billion dollar evaluations i mean lacework did a billion dollar raise and so so there's no shortage of funding now maybe that'll change you know with the market but i wanted to turn our attention to the keynotes this morning you guys got some serious love up on stage um there was a demo uh it was a pretty pretty cool demo fast recovery very very tight rpo as i recall it was i think four minutes of data loss is that right was that the right knit stat i was happy it wasn't zero data loss because there's really you know no such thing uh but so you got to feel good about that tell us about um how that all came about your relationship with with veeam who wants to take it sure i can i can take a step at it so one of the or two of the things that i'm um most excited about at least with this vmon is our team was able to work with veeam on that demo and what that demo was showing was some cdp-based features for cloud providers so we're really happy to see that and the reason why we're happy to see that is that with the veeam platform it's now given the customers the ability to do things like snapshot replication cdp replication on-prem backup cloud backup immutability air gap the list goes on and on and in our opinion having a singular software vendor that can provide all that through you know with a cloud provider on prem or not is really like the icing on the cake so for us it's very exciting to see that and then also coupled with a lot of the innovation that veeam's doing in the sas space right so again having that umbrella product that can cover all those use cases i'll tell you if you guys can get a that was a very cool demo if we can get a youtube of that that that demo i'll make sure we put it in the the show notes and uh of this video or maybe pop it into one of the blogs that we write about it um so so how you guys feel i mean this is a new chapter for you very cool with a couple of acquisitions that are now the main mainspring of your strategy so the first veeam on in a couple years so what's the vibe been like for you what's the nighttime activity the customer interaction i know you guys are running a lot of the back end demos so you're everywhere what's the what's the vibe like at veeamon and how does it feel to be back look at that one at dante as far as yeah you got a lot of experience here yeah let me loose on this one dave i'm like so excited about this right it's been it's been far too long to get face to face again and um veeam always does it right and i think that uh for years we've been back-ending like all the hands-on lab infrastructure here but forget about that i think the part that's really exciting is getting face-to-face with such a great team right we have phenomenal architects that we work with at veeam day in and day out they put up with us pushing them pushing and pushing them and together we've been able to create a lot of magic together right but i think it's you can't replace the human interaction that we've all been starving for for the last two years but the vibe's always fantastic at veeam if you're going to be around tonight i'll be looking forward to enjoying some of that veeam love with you at the after party yeah that's well famous after parties we'll see if that culture continues i have a feeling it will um brett where do you want to take 11 11. a new new phase in all of your careers you got a great crew out here it looks like i i love that you're all out and uh make some noise here people let's hear it all right let's see you this is the biggest audience we've had all week where do you want to take 11 11. i think you know if uh if you look at what we've done so far in the short six months since the acquisitions of green cloud and ireland obviously the integration is a key piece we're going to be laser focused on growing organically across those three pillars we've got to put more capital and resources into the incredible ip like i said earlier that just and his team have created on those front ends the user experience but you know we made two large acquisitions obviously mna is a is a key piece for us we're going to be diligent and we're probably going to be very aggressive on that front as well to be able to grow this business into the global leader of cloud connectivity and security and i think we've really hit a void in the industry that's been looking for this for a very long time and we want to be the first ones to be able to collaborate and combine those three into one when the when the cloud started to hit the steep part of the s-curve kind of early part of the last decade people thought oh wow these managed service providers are toast the exact opposite happened it created such a tailwind and need for consistent services and integration and managed services we've seen it all across the stack so guys wish you best of luck congratulations on the acquisitions thank you uh hope to have you back soon yeah thank you around the block all right keep it right there everybody dave vellante for the cube's coverage of veeamon 2022 we'll be right back after this short break

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Veritas Vision 2017, brought to you be Veritas. (light music) >> Welcome back to the Aria Hotel and Veritas Vision 2017. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Stewart Miniman. Rama Kolappan is here, he's the Vice, worldwide Vice President of Product Management and Global Alliances. Rama, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. So, 360 is a big topic of conversation. It's a fundamental, strategic evolution for Veritas. Why is 360 Data Management needed? >> So, 360 Data Management is an integrated set of products and solutions, if you will, that helps you with data protection, also with copy data management use cases. If you want to move the data and workload for some of the resiliency services as well, and if you, if a customer is also looking for any of the data visibility, which is a very important part of the 360 Data Management. So, we can offer all of it as part of one platform. So it is a very powerful integrated solution set, if you will. >> So we should think of it as a platform, not a product. Everybody talks about platforms today, the API Economy, Platforms beat Products is sort of the mantra, right? Is that the right way to think about it? >> Correct. And, also, we make sure that the different solutions, which is part of 360 Data Management Suite, works with each other, right? For example, if you actually back up your data, you should be able to use the same copy to do a DevTest. So we have a solution called Velocity that is part of our copy data management solution. It should be used, you should be able to use the backup data to do your disaster recovery if you can, right. >> So how does that resonate with customers? I mean, I get the platform perspective, certainly from a vendor view, you got to have the platform. Do the customers see it the same way? Or do they just want to buy products? >> No, so it is a suite, right? And what customers want, especially enterprise customers, they're looking for, to partner with a vendor, like, for example, us. One is for data protection, primarily, in many cases. Once you protect your data, they're looking for instead of finding the products to use, I can use the same data and how can I get value out of it? So I need to have the visibility about the data itself, so we have our InfoMap solution as part of 360 DM suite, to give you the visibility of what that data is with all the metadata information through that, and once they back up the data, they also have other things to do with respect to moving your data, moving your workload, and especially with the cloud adoption, many of them are going through the transformation. There are some pre-consolidation cloud adoption, and so on, so forth, and they need to move their data and workload, say, from on-prem to cloud, and you can also do it from cloud to cloud also, which is coming soon. So, some of those challenges are very critical, and they are looking for someone like Veritas who can offer that solution for them, which is essentially protect it, move your data, workload, be able to do copy data management on it for DevTest use cases, be able to provide visibility, and the digital compliance is a big factor, which I haven't even gone deeper into. There are lot of solutions to offer for the customers. >> Rama, take us inside how 360 Data Management fulfills the vision that was laid out a year ago. I think back to early in my career it was, like, it was the hardware, you know, you follow the Tick-tock of Intel. Today, software, we can usually talk a little bit further about the roadmap but, you know, customers are going to hold you well, "Can I use it now?" Do you have all those pieces, you know? What kind of pieces have been filled in this week, and, you know, where are the pieces where it's more aspirational than where we are today? >> I'm surprised you remembered the Tick-tock Model, which is essentially go through the process and architecture change, alternating with Intel, right? That's the model, I was there for like nine years or so. >> Marching to the cadence of Moore's law, that's what we used to do as an industry. >> Exactly. So, for 360 Data Management, we announced it last year at Vision and at that point, we are putting in the solutions and the use cases together. And what we did, we worked really hard the past one year to make sure that we put these solutions together. One, they should work with each other. Two, we have a tighter integration. And three, we should be also adding more solutions together and we made it also easier for a customer to buy, it's one SKU, right? So, you don't need to have multiple SKUs to do 10 different things. It's much easier to buy. It'll do all the things that an enterprise customer want with all the stuff that I talked about earlier, and from there on, they should be also, we should be able to also cater to some of the newer problems that customers have, which is, essentially, we launched CloudPoint, for example, which does a snapshot management, and we're adding more capabilities to it, and going forward, you will see that the 360 Data Management will evolve to cater to the customer needs. We always place customer in the forefront and make sure that their needs are met first, and that's the stuff that will design the solution, based on their needs. >> We spoke to Mike Palmer this morning and one of the things he said that kind of matured a little bit is, "That interaction with the cloud, when you get down into it, it's nice to talk about public clouds and people use many clouds but they're all a little bit different." So, maybe take us inside, there's a couple announcements you made, maybe give us a little bit of color on that and, you know, come on, tell us how is it working with all these big players? >> So, I run the technology alliances team here as well, so my team works with the various cloud vendors, which is essentially Azure through IBM to Google, AWS, and so on, so forth, right? So we are already working with AWS on multiple product integration, deeper integration. With Azure we are making sure that from some of the roadmap, like when recently we launched EnterpriseWorld, to make sure that it supports Azure, and then also we launched the VIP release that happened very recently. Support for Azure, as well. And we make sure that the other products that I talked about have the cloud as a significant piece of it, part of the roadmap. We have other vendors that are, we have partners that we are working with like IBM, Google, et cetera. They have their own strengths and we are initially going to go, we already sell on a backup as part of our, with IBM. We've been doing that business with them for more than 10 years, right? So there's a lot of moving parts in the sense that they are coming up with a lot of innovation. We are coming up with a lot of innovation and we make sure that we deliver what the customers want with those cloud vendors. And a very simple example is that if you want to do a data and workload migration on-prem to cloud, we can help with that very critical use case for anyone who's going through, looking at cloud transformation and journey to cloud. And, likewise, basic use cases also like backup to cloud, backup in cloud, disaster recovery, migration, DevTest, and these use cases is what we target, and it is part of the 360 Data Management suite itself. >> Can I ask you, it's kind of a wonky question, but it's something I'm curious about, and we talked to Mike Palmer a little bit about it, the challenge of integrating to various cloud services, in the non-trivial nature that, his answer was actually quite interesting. He said, "Listen, it was a lot harder "when we had a gazillion OS's, a lot easier now." But I want to understand that better. So, when you look at, and I am going to pick AWS only because I know it a little bit better and their services, but when you look at the myriad of data, sort of services that they have, are you just targeting the data stores? Like, an S3 or an EBS or a Glacier, or do you have to also think about integrating with other data types, DynamoDB, Kinesis, RedShift, Aurora, et cetera, et cetera. How far do you have to go, and what are the complexities of doing that? >> It's a very interesting time, right. There are various cloud service providers who are there, and each of them have their own services and their own storage, right? So, there's no one standard. S3 has been a standard for last one or two years or so. What we are doing is that we're looking at the portfolio, and we look at the use cases for what we are trying to solve for the customers in the cloud and based on that, we actually have some basic use cases which you don't need a full integration. You need some integration with some of those services, which is where we have people that are doing a lot of closer integration with AWS, and other service providers as well. Going forward, we will be using some of those, you mentioned about many DynamoDB, and other services that they have, machine learning services that they have. >> Stu: Sure. >> And different cloud providers have their own strengths and where they, what they offer. So, we will be looking to integrate with our existing portfolio with some of those services so that it is beneficial for customer. For example, if a customer wants to use only AWS, we are tightly integrated so that they get the best experience in AWS, same thing with Azure, same thing with Google cloud, same thing with IBM cloud, same thing with Oracle public cloud. So, that's our direction. First things first, get all of these basic use cases catered to for the customer. Going forward, have a tighter integration with their services. >> And your value in that chain is visibility and management. It's not so much optimization of that service, is it? >> So, I wouldn't call it as optimization of services. We focus a lot on the data visibility. I think in the keynote, and in my keynote, you might have heard also, is that some of the things that customers, we talk with customers a lot and we find that many of the, many times, they don't know what they have it. Everyone knows that it's called dark data, right. We provide the visibility so that they know what data they have before they do any migration. They know what needs to be migrated. And, as you all know, there are different storage tiers in cloud, like your S3, S3IA. You have your Glacier and it is expensive to bring data back from, say, Glacier to any other storage tier all on-prem. So, you need to have the visibility before you send the data out, right? So, we helped with that as well. So, visibility plays a very critical role in so many areas, not even just cloud but also on-prem as well. >> Rama, 360 Data Management's vision was laid out a year ago. A lot of the pieces are in place now. How are you tracking success, you know? Can you give us how many customers you're doing or just kind of growth, adoption, and how should we be looking forward to kind of measure and say how good this is doing? >> So, we actually launched 360 Data Management not too long ago. In the sense we put the package together, program together, and, as part of it, we saw extremely a lot of good traction not just from one geo, we actually saw a lot of traction in Asia Pacific, in MER, in Americas as well. A lot of the customers are looking for, I mean, there are three tiers to it, as well. We have bronze, gold, silver, right? And we see equal traction across the board. And, right now, I can't give you the numbers numbers, but, having said that, we see a lot of traction from customers on adoption and we have a huge pipeline where customers are very interested. These are backup customers who are looking to do many other things like resiliency services, like copy data management, and so on, so forth. So, the 360 Data Management really solves the problem, what they're looking for. >> Yeah. Can you give us a little color to that packaging and pricing? It's a subscription model to my understanding. >> It is a subscription model but-- >> Which is a little different than if you have a traditional and, you know, what are you seeing, what's the feedback been from customers? >> So, it is a subscription model when we went to market. We are going to be offering as a perpetual as well. So there is a gold, silver bronze tier, I had mentioned it. We have a Backup, InfoMap, and also EBFile as part of the bronze. And then you have, we have P as part of the silver plus bronze together and then in the gold, we have Access, also, as part of the solution. So, they can pick what they want and from our... Going forward, we do hear feedback from customers that they want perpetual as well. So, we already, we heard them. We'll make it happen. >> How about the small, midsize business, what are you, what are you doing for them? And can you talk about that a little bit? >> I'm glad you asked that because a lot of the 360 Data Management is centered around net backup, right? And with net backup, adark, all the good releases. There are also a lot of SMB and mid-market customers, and we have a solution called BackupExec, and I'm sure most of you are aware of BackupExec, it's been there for many years. So, BackupExec solves their problem and within BackupExec, we make sure that there are a lot of SMB customers who have like three or four backup products. And we want to make sure that there's one product that can protect the physical, virtual, and cloud environments. So, BackupExec does that. >> Last question. So, the ecosystem, it's evolving. You guys have great ambitions. Microsoft was here, had a big, big presence. Maybe just general thoughts on the ecosystem and, specifically, your relationship with Microsoft and other cloud suppliers. >> So, we work very closely from a strategic level with the CSPs. We call them the Cloud Service Providers. With Microsoft, we are doing a lot of, not just product integration for Azure, we'll also be supporting many things for AzureStack going forward. We're working with them on that. Also, I mentioned about BackupExec, we're also going to market. We are spending a significant amount of money to define the goal, to go to market with them, with their partners, and so on, so forth. Not just for BackupExec but across for all other products. That said, we also have other partners from the Cloud Service Provider point of view. There is a lot of effort happening from product integration, defining goal market, and as we define that, we're also engaging with their channel partners, who are also our channel partners, to help with the goal market. >> Cool, alright. Well, listen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, Rama. Really great to meet you and great to talk to you. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> You're welcome, alright. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from Veritas Vision 2017. Be right back. (light music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's The Cube! Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas, everybody. We are covering Veritas Vision 2017, and this is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, with Stu Miniman and Mike Palmer is here, he's the Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Veritas. Mike, thanks for coming to The Cube. >> Thank you for having me here. >> Great keynote, yesterday. We see hundreds, if not thousands of these discussions, and talking head presentations, and yours was hilarious. Let's set up for the people who didn't see it, yesterday. Mike gets up there, and he's talking about the, there's a video that's playing about the end of the world. And the basic theme is that you didn't take care of your data, and now the world's coming to an end. Las Vegas was in shambles, and there were waterfalls running through the hotels, drones attacking people, and then you picked it up from there and then took it into, just a really funny soliloquy. But, where'd you come up with that idea? And, how do you think, I thought it went great, but how did you feel afterwards? >> Well, I can take only partial credit. I have an amazing creative team, and when you work at a company that's been doing, you know, large-scale enterprise data-center stuff, we know that part of our obligation for our audience is kind of making it more palpable for them, making it feel a little bit more, bringing the emotion to it. So we want to have a little bit of excitement in there. But at the same time, we have a real message, you know, and hopefully that came across, too. >> It did, and then, you know, but again, a lot of good humor, the megabytes, gigabytes, you know, up to zetabytes, yadabytes, Mike Tyson-bytes, on and on and on. (laughing) Very clever, so congratulations on that... >> Mike: Oh, thanks! >> We really enjoyed it. Mixed things up a little bit. So, and again, very transparent. We talked about the UX, not the best. You're not happy with it. >> Mike: Right. >> And again, very transparent about that, I think that's a theme of many successful companies, today. But, so, let's start with, sort of, what does it take as the Chief Product Officer, to transform a company from somebody who's been around since 1983, into a modern, you know, cloud-like, hyper-scale, you know, set of service and software offerings. >> That's a big question, but I can tell you the first thing that it takes, the most important thing that it takes, is the best engineering team in the world. You can do a lot of things around the outside, we need to fix our UX, we know that, often considered that to be the kitchens and bathrooms of our house remodel. But if your foundation's broken, if your framing isn't there, you really don't have much of an asset to put on the market. We have a great engineering team, we are releasing products at a velocity that is incomparable in the enterprise ISV space, and we're super proud of that. So I think that's the number one thing. I think number two is the other thing, that we're the envy of the industry, for, and that is, an amazing install-base of customers. Very hard to name a fortune 2000 company that isn't a significant customer of Veritas, so we have a great basis to collaborate and innovate. You know, the rest, we know we have some work to do as we bring it into the modern age. You know, we talked a lot about the fact that workloads are changing in data centers, architectures are changing, we're establishing new partnerships with some of the sponsors that you see here today, like Microsoft, like Google, like IBM, and Oracle, and others. And, you know, it takes a village and they're helping us move into the next 10 years. >> Stu: You know, Mike, talk a little bit about the transition from, you know, software that lived on servers, to now, well, cloud is just isn't somebody else's servers, I think, is the word for that. >> Mike: Right. >> You know, it definitely, we've talked many times this week, you know, Veritas was software-defined before there was such a thing, used to be the FUD from the traditional players, that it was like, oh, you can't trust stuff like that, and now, of course, they're all software-defined and, you know, talking about that, too, so, what does that mean, going to kind of, being completely agnostic, for where things lived, and some of the intricacies of trying to work with, you know, some of the big and small cloud-players? >> A lot of questions in there, and I think David Noy, who I know you guys are going to talk to later, is going to talk a bit more specifically about this, but one of the first things you have to keep in mind, is if you're building software to be software-defined, then you have to build it without considering the hardware platform that you may deliver it on. And I think that's where some of our competitors get it wrong, they can say that they're software-defined, but the litmus test is, can I really pick up this software without modification, and go run it in one of those hyper-scalers? Or put it on one of the white boxes that I went into the market and procured and integrated myself? Veritas has been doing that for a long time. In fact, if you really look at Veritas's core, we're an integrator. We've been an integrator of applications, through the protection space, in our file-system and our info-scale technologies, we are integrators of operating systems, when you look at hyper-scalers, they're just the next operating system. Someone else's hardware, as you said. So we look to protect our customers in terms of their choices, make flexibility a real part of the multi-cloud architecture they're putting together, still doing the things we do well with protection, and ultimately layer on that last little bit when we're talking software-defined and that is not just focus on the infrastructure, but really aspire to this, how do I better manage data and get value from data? >> You know, Mike, I want to dig one level deeper on that. So, the cloud providers, it's all well and good to say, yeah, I'm agnostic, but each of them have their own little nuances. It's, at least today, it's not like, oh, I choose today to wake up and this one has cheaper prices, and it's not a commodity, it's not a utility, and each one of them have services that they want you to integrate with, have to have deeper, how do you balance that, you know, integration, how much work's done, where the customers are pulling you, how does that product portfolio get put together? >> That's an excellent question and I will be fully honest, that a year ago we thought about the answer to that question very differently than we do today. You know, a year ago, I think we were somewhat naive, and thought, hey, we're going to throw a thin layer of capability on top of the clouds, and in effect commoditize them ourselves, and hope our customers just move around as if there were no underlying services. And obviously if you're a cloud-provider, that is not an approach that you're a big fan of. (laughing) And frankly, it's a disservice to the customers, because they are building some really valuable services, and they are differentiating themselves. Our approach has changed, our approach today is a very deep-level integration with each cloud provider, and the specialization they're bringing to the market, without sacrificing the portability, without sacrificing the built-in protections that the cloud providers aren't putting on their platforms and don't want to put on their platforms. And again going back to this idea of data, ultimately, if it's someone else's hardware, in effect, in some cases, someone else's application, it's always your data, and how we are servicing that data is really the key. >> So, that's really hard work. In a lot of cases, you have to interface with very low-level, primitive APIs from the cloud service providers. How do you, sort of, balance your resources, or a portion of your resources, between doing that, because you guys, I call it the compatibility matrix, all kinds of data stores, all kinds of clouds, every one of those is engineering resources. And it seems that's a key part of your strategy, but you got to be sacrificing something, which is maybe, you know, the next widget on your existing products. How do you think about proportioning those? >> You know, at Veritas, in a way, the emergence of the cloud ecosystem actually improves that situation for us. We're carrying 30 years of operating systems that have come and gone, that have incremented versions, and our customers often strand or isolate single examples of those boxes, from 20 years ago that they expect us to test all of our software against, on their behalf. (laughing) For example, right, and so when you look at where we are today, there are five or 10 cloud providers, versus hundreds of operating system versions, and application, we have no problem supporting the proliferation in cloud, we actually welcome the ability to support those... >> Stu: You're much happier with the one version of AJUR, as opposed to the old Patch Monday. >> Exactly right, and you know, they upgrade the whole thing at once... >> Yeah. >> They issue a couple new services, and we adapt 'em, no problem. >> Am I thinking about it the wrong way? Because, while that's true, and I understand that, but within an individual cloud, you could have 15 data services. I think about AWS data services, their data pipeline is increasingly complex, so. Doesn't that complexity scale in a different direction? >> Mike: It scales differently for sure, but I would give a lot of credit to the cloud providers, because they're taking a lot of the regression testing that we used to have to do, for example, with application providers and operating system providers who didn't think about us when they were building their products. The cloud providers take accountability for regression testing all of the things that they release to their customers. So when we adopt an API, we're fully confident that that API works in the context of that cloud environment. So that's off our plate. It really isolates the need for us to simply test that API against our environment. >> Dave: OK, so much more stable and predictable environment for you. I want to ask you, I've heard the term modern data protection a lot, what is modern data protection? Everyone wants to be next-gen, how do you define modern data protection? >> Mike: And this is something we're super passionate about, because our industry has been around for quite a long time, and you get terms thrown out there, like legacy or modern, and everyone's fighting for brand recognition, and kind of, end of the growth spaces in the market. For us, it actually is very simple. We recognize that there are a lot of different techniques to protect data, we think of these protection schemes like lots of different insurance policies, and lots of different tools in your toolbox. Where Veritas is going to win, and continues to win, is that we can offer our customers all of those techniques. We're not trying to convince them that one technique is so much more special than another one, that they need to diversify and create complexity in their environment, so we talk about modern data protection as the ability to choose snapshots, or back-ups, or copy data management, or workload migration, in the future there will be other ways to do this: continuous data protection, or scale-out platforms for cloud providers. These are just techniques inside of a Veritas portfolio, as opposed to stand-alone companies that create complexity for our customers. So, modernization is choice. >> Dave: OK, so you have this awesome install-base. Bill Coleman said to us yesterday, in response to a similar but related question, that it's ours to lose. And the question that we have is, as you look at that install base, you got to get them onto this modern data platform. How do you do that? Do you write some abstraction layer? You talked about that thin layer in the cloud, you must have thought about doing that. Is that what you're doing? How is that going? What does that journey look like? >> Mike: You know, that is one of the most fundamental strategy questions for Veritas. And one of the things we recognized early on, is that while we do have an amazing install base of customers, and those customers are hyper-scaled themselves, you're talking about customers with tens of thousands of servers running our software, both on the storage and the protection site, so the thing that we cannot ask them to do is continuously upgrade their environment to take advantage of new features. We will put out one-to-two major releases of our software, particularly on a protection side, annually. But we're innovating at a far greater pace than that, so we've made some conscious choices to create new architectures for our customer that are workload-specific, so Cloud Point, being a great example, coming out in July, our Object Store announcements, underpinning our next generation protection solutions. So they have modern storage capabilities, our second example. But pulling them together is where only Veritas can offer a customer a complete catalog of that data. So, combining your net back-up catalog with Cloud Point, for example, with your storage, with what you've put into cloud, provides a customer, for the first time, kind of a complete view of the secondary estate. And so, as long as we get that right, we don't have to upgrade, we don't have to seed, what we have to do is enable our customers, through simple adoption of new tools, provide that visibility over the top, and I think that they'll be good to go. >> So that's kind of like a, I think of a term, backward compatibility, is essentially what you're providing for your install base, is that right? >> Mike: That's exactly right. Providing, and this is where API-based infrastructure and service-driven architectures help us a lot. We don't have to fully instantiate a code-base every time that we want to offer a service to a customer. >> Dave: There aren't many independent, in fact there aren't any independent, is one, two-and-a-half billion dollar software companies in your space, but there are many emerging guys, who are getting a lot of attention, well-funded, some, you know, hitting that kind of, 100 million dollar revenue mark, at least it appears that way. How do you look at those guys? What do you learn from them? You know, Branson said today, you know, you learn by listening and watching, in this case. You're watching the market, obviously, what are you seeing there, it's the hottest space in the infrastructure market right now, is your space and security. Are the two, you know, smoking hot spaces. What are you observing, and what are you learning? >> And I think the direct answer to your question is probably the user. You know, and I think that's the lesson of the industry even over the last 15 years, is that when a new workload arises, it's creating a new user inside the enterprise IT department. And that user often gets to determine all of the services that they need to make themselves successful. If that is a cloud workload, and they need availability services, or they need protection services, they want that to integrate in the same place that they buy in provision their cloud workload. If it's a container workload it's the same. We saw the rise of some of our competitors that got to multi-hundred million dollar revenue streams, by focusing on a single user, and a single type of transaction, with a single type of interface. And Veritas kind of lost its way, I think, a little bit, back in that time. So what we are watching today, is who are our users? What workloads are emerging? What sort of interfaces do we need to develop for those users? Which is why we made our UX statements as strongly as we did. We're committed to those. That is going to be the future of Veritas, it's serving the broadening user-base inside of enterprise. >> Dave: You're seeing a lot of discussion in the industry around design thinking, I know we're out of time, here, but, you know, you see companies, like, for instance, Charles Phillips's company, Infor, bought a company called Hook and Loop, and they're all about design, and, how is design thinking fitting into your, sort of, UX/UI plans? >> I mean, the parlance that we use internally is jobs to be done. Right, we clearly want to create a very consistent user experience, and look and feel, we want our customers to be proud to be Veritas customers. But we have to be super cognizant of, what is the job they're trying to get accomplished? And allow the system to be designed around accommodating that. If that is, I want three workflows in three steps or less, can I do that? It could be, I have a very complicated job and I want the ability to control very granular things, do I have an interface to do that? So, if we know the user and the job to be done, we can create a consistent look and feel, I think that we are, we're going to not only ride the wave, of change inside of our particular industry, but I think we're going to wind up in a consolidation space where we're a big winner. >> All right, last question, the bumper sticker on Vision 2017, as the trucks are pulling away from the area, what's the bumper sticker? >> Mike: Secondary data is your most under-utilized asset, and a platform provider is what you need to take advantage of it. >> Dave: All right, Mike, thanks very much for coming to The Cube. Congratulations, and good luck. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, you're welcome, keep right there, buddy, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. The Cube, live we're live from Veritas Vision 2017. Be right back.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's The Cube, covering Veritas Vision 2017 brought to you by Veritas. (mid tempo electronic tones) >> Vegas everybody, this is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're covering Veritas Vision 2017 at The Aria Hotel. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman. Eric Kessels is here, he's the CTO for Fairbanks, a partner of Veritas' out of the Netherlands and Carlos Carrero is Senior Principle Product Manager at Veritas and we're going to talk OpenStack. Gentlemen, welcome. >> Thank you. >> We love this topic, I mean five years ago Stu, it was the hottest thing in the planet, OpenStack came out, many people including John Furrier called it a Hail Mary against Amazon, which it kind of was and now the narrative around OpenStack is well, it's kind of, nobody is really doing it, blah, blah, blah. But there are definitely pockets of interest. The developer community is still, you know, passionate about it and service providers are you know, still glomming on to OpenStack. So Carlos, give us the update from Veritas' perspective. What's your interest in OpenStack and your role at Veritas? >> Yeah, so the good thing is what Veritas has been doing with OpenStack and also what Veritas is doing with containers solves emerging problems for emerging technologies and one of the key things is, with our partners Fairbanks, all the things we have been doing to validate the product and to bring the product into market. So for us, Fairbanks is one of the perfect partners because what the value that we bring with that. So they are OpenStack experts and he will go through all the content, you know, what they do, but they really understand about OpenStack. They really identify the issues that customers have with OpenStack and how they collaborate with Veritas to build HyperScale as a product to bring those gaps into a solution and deliver those enterprise class services to customers that-- >> I mean it's the ultimate in true private cloud visions too but Eric, you guys use to be VMware experts and decided to move beyond VMware to OpenStack. What was that journey like? >> Yeah right, so that was about I think five years ago where we did a lot of VMware implementations but we, at some stage we wanted to be a different chapter in the market, so a lot of people knew VMware was more a commodity in the IT so, we started to design a Blue Ocean Strategy for our company and then we went looking in the OpenSource market, which Open Source initiative was feasible for us to move forward with. We're knowledgeable about infrastructure, so then we went into OpenStack and we did a technical validation and we looked on what the attention was is the market. So from that stage we transferred completely our company from being a VMware house to a complete OpenSource company, but it took us a while of course because it was not like a switch of a couple months. I think it took us about three years to make that complete transition from being a VMware shop to being a complete OpenSource company. >> Eric, can you talk to us about your customers? Did they come saying "I want OpenStack" or are they coming saying "You know, I need to digitally transform." What's the conversation you're having with them that leads to your solution and what are your customers doing these days? >> So when we decided for OpenStack, at that stage we had already made a decision that we would move forward for the private cloud decision, so we were not focusing on public cloud initiative for OpenStack. So we think that OpenStack was initially built for private cloud environments. So one thing that we saw is that the VMware login for VMware or for Microsoft was pretty big and customers didn't like that anymore and the costs were pretty high for the VMware licensing. So then we started talking with those customers and say, "Okay hey, there's a different kind of way of running "your workloads in a different kind of environment. "Would you be interested in it if we can "cut the cost 50 percent?" for example. And of course that's always a good trigger to get in contact with our customers and what we see is that our customers are more like enterprise customers. They're not big service providers but just companies like a customer that is running a customer site so that they can do customer, a call center for that, so that's really an enterprise-like company and I just want to add that for them, that they decided to move to OpenStack because they needed to expand their infrastructure with like, with 20 nodes and if they did it with OpenStack, it was one-third of the price in doing that, so. >> So more than 50 percent. So are these cloud service providers predominantly, or? Describe the customers. >> Yeah, we have of course customers that are service providers because they have a huge price pressure on providing virtual machines, so they need to cut costs on their infrastructure and I think that OpenStack is really suitable for that because it's flexible, it is open, you can incorporate your management systems into OpenStack very fairly easily. So for those companies, OpenStack was a really good choice of doing that. And we have also other kind of customers that are, like we have packaging company, so they print the packaging for McDonald's, for example and they have developer departments in their company that want have really fast VMs for developing their own software and if you go by more the traditional route, it takes too long before that all is in place, so they want to have some self-service functionality and that's also what OpenStack can provide, providing self-service for their departments so to make it more easy. >> Carlos, this morning your CEO Bill Coleman said that the future is software defined, multi-cloud and HyperScale. I'm sure you're sitting there, well my product is HyperScale. So maybe, you've launched the product HyperScale at the OpenStack show in Boston. We got to talk with you on The Cube there. Bring us up to speed as to that product and how it fits into really the portfolio of you from Veritas. Especially I'm kind of curious, the multi-cloud world as opposed to this is very specifically and on premises, you know, type offer. >> So we talked in Boston. In Boston we launched the 1.0 version, last week we launched the 1.1 version. We're going to launch the next one together with Red Hat. It is one of the key things we're doing together working with them and as Bill mentioned, you know it's multi-cloud and it's software-defined. So if you understand the architecture for HyperScale, for OpenStack, HyperScale for containers, it's really pure software. So what that means is that it's the hardware of your choice, we don't have any locking. As Eric mentioned there's no locking into any specific platform, that's one of the key things. But also the architecture we're building is the perfect thing for your private cloud because in a multi-cloud environment you still have to have something in house, so that's the private cloud. With all the data management capabilities that we have with Veritas, we can move the data however we want. So typically and that's the challenge you have with OpenStack, you get the locking, you get a closed environment, how do you move the data? We've got things already with net backup where we can just move the data from the data plane, move workloads somewhere else, do the recover and allow customers to just one click and recover that workloads wherever they want. So that's a perfect thing in all, the 360 Data Management that we got with Veritas. >> So what do you hear from customers around the function? I mean obviously we hear about the V-tax. People don't want to pay the VMware tax. But Eric, you're talking about when you started the conversations with your customers, what if you could save 50 percent? You must've had conversations with customers who said "Well, but I like the functionality of VMware. "I like V-Motion, I like the recovery capabilities and "they're doing a good job of adding capabilities and stuff." So where are we, CTO perspective, in terms of the functionality of OpenStack private clouds versus sort of where VMware is. >> That's a good question because the reason that we get in contact with Veritas for this kind of functionality is because the customer will start running work loads on their OpenStack environment and in the beginning, they don't worry about backups. They don't worry about quality of service and then they get into production and then they get problems with performance. They kept, "Hey, I need to have a backup, how do I do it? And oh, we don't have a backup. So these kind of gaps that were really not good resolved in OpenStack and these were the gaps that HyperScale filled in. So then on functional comparison with VMware, we took away those concerns and have a real good comparison on the functional level between OpenStack and VMware. >> I think that it was interesting. Last week we launched in the OpenStack Benelux Days. I had a keynote presenting HyperScale and I was talking about quality of service and backup data protection really, so focused on that, right? After that we had a panel with three customers and the moderator asks the three customers, "What is your biggest challenge now "you've got OpenStack, what do you need?" And the first answer was backup and the moderator said, "What do you mean, there is no backup?" And the answer for 400 people in the room, he said "No, you got Freezer but that's a project." Well now we can get it from Veritas. So that's the thing is that you need to move those workloads, you need data protection and they saw the demo where with one click, you can recover your workloads and the third customer mentioned that it is quality of service and that's a customer that Eric has been working already, they are already working on installing a HyperScale and they need quality of service because they have a workload and running on the cloud and they have to make sure they get the performance that they need for some critical workloads. And again it's a solved problem that again all the work, what we did together with Fairbanks validate and what needs they have is coming all together now. >> Eric, one of the knocks on OpenStack has been I want simplicity and OpenStack, it's got all these pieces, how do I put it together? Oh it's all software, wait backup, I didn't even think of that. How does Fairbanks help? What does kind of your stack look like and how much is it you can just roll this out and how much is it The customers actually? Some customers like that flexibility. Service providers, oh I've got my management layer and things like that. What's kind of the typical environment? And give us some of the variables. >> So based on of course the journey that we made and of course there were a good projects and bad projects, that's the learning curve that we also needed to do but we managed to build a best practice for OpenStack, so we now can do an implementation of OpenStack in less than two weeks because we know the components, we know what you should do and what you don't have to do and so we have a good starting point about an environment where you have 11 nodes in total as a good starting point for having a production environment for OpenStack and then with HyperScale included, then you need two add to data nodes additionally because then it's necessary for the copy that you need to have. But a 10 or 11 node configuration is from our perspective a very good starting point where you start with different customers with different sizes of course. >> Do you deploy the OpenStack distribution? Does the customer have preference on that? I know Veritas has a couple of options, so. >> So we have a preference for a canonical distribution because it's very open. I think the good thing from canonical is that the function set that they provide as an OpenSource product is exactly the same if you want to add that with the managed service from canonical to it and I think that the real cool thing about canonical is their way of deploying OpenStack because it leverages a really consistent way of deploying OpenStack. So for us it's very important that when we deploy OpenStack, that the result is the same on every customer's side and that's what the tools from Canonical provide us with. >> So I want to ask you about what you just said about you could do an OpenStack deployment in two weeks. I can hear some cloud guy going, "Oh I'll just go to Amazon and speed it up." So I wonder if you could address that and as well, how does that compare for instance to a VMware installation of a deployment of a private cloud? Those two examples. >> I think that when you look at the private cloud from VMware, I think for the installation it takes about the same time I think. But that's all about the knowledgeability of the partner that's doing the installation. Because that's the journey that we had so they can do the implementation fast and that they can rely on that environment because as you know in OpenStack, in the beginning there was a little bit of doubt about if it was production ready or not. And to take that away, it must be a solid implementation and that they can rely on that and then they can make sure that they can put their really important workloads also on top of OpenStack instead of making a decision, yeah, should I run it on that or not? >> So from your standpoint, it's parity in terms of just deployment ease and functionality, we could debate that all day long. What about the public cloud example? How do you respond to somebody who says "Oh, we'll just spin it up in AWS or Azure." >> Yeah, I think the public cloud is still a good thing. It's not a bad thing to have public cloud because I think in most companies you have a hybrid cloud environment, so you will have firmware and maybe you have a public cloud and a private cloud in one company. But it all depends a little bit on the type of workloads that you're going to run inside of that environment. So I think there are workloads that you should, that you can't run on a public cloud. >> Eric, does Fairbanks get involved with how they manage that, you know, kind of hybrid or multi-cloud environment? We know Carlos wants to jump in with the Veritas answer. >> Yeah, we get the question a lot of course because we know the infrastructure, how it works and as you probably know, there are a lot of cloud orchestration products in the market that can do the multi-cloud management. But to be honest, at this moment there is not one real good product that handles all the clouds correctly and managing all the bits and pieces that you need to have for an infrastructure. So, we're still looking on that to find the one that can do that. >> Yeah, what's on your wish list? What are you looking for from the ecosystem? >> I think it's really good to have, that there is no difference anymore about the type of workloads that you can run on different kind of environments. So that you choose based on functionality, what you are going to run on that. Now you see there's a lot about a focus on virtual machines but actually it all goes about the application because that's the, on the end that's something what needs to be run on that environment and having that manageability to manage the application. I think that's more important than managing the infrastructure underneath it. >> How about jumping in with the multi-cloud commentary? >> Well I think it's the customer's choice and what we do as a company is being able to give them the choice is that we don't care and that's in our DNA really. With that in the past as Mike Farmer explained today is that we didn't care about two apparatuses at the beginning, now we don't care if you are using OpenStack containers and what you want to run those. So that is the way we're building products nowadays with Veritas is that user choice. So we don't care about that anymore. >> All right Carlos, Eric, thanks very much for coming to The Cube, appreciate it. >> Thank you >> All right, you're welcome. >> Okay, keep it right there. My buddy Stu and I will be back with our next guest. We're live from Veritas Vision. Hashtag VtasVision. This is The Cube, be right back. (mid tempo electronic tones)

(lively music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. We're here at The Aria Hotel covering Veritas Vision. This is day one of our two day coverage. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. Tyler Welch is here, the Director of Communities at Veritas. He's joined by Justine Velcich who runs the VIP program for the VOX community and advocacy. Folks, welcome to theCUBE and thanks so much for coming on. >> Hi. >> Hi. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, Tyler, let's start with you. What is VOX, what does it stand for, what's it all about? >> Yeah, so VOX is Veritas Open Exchange. It is our customer community where our customers, our partners, employees are sharing knowledge and information. VOX in Latin means voice. If you think about Veritas in terms of truth, this is a place where we're being very open. We want people to come, share their knowledge, help each other and learn. >> Yeah, so I see the three bullets: seek answers, share insights, and make informed decisions. So these are practitioners in your community and your ecosystem just sharing ideas and helping each other grow. Is that the basic idea? >> Absolutely. If you think about digital transformation, right? To transform means your going from somewhere to another location and if we're sharing knowledge and information, these individuals are saying, "Hey, there's a lot of complexity right now." Right, we know things are changing in our industries. How we store our data is changing. And in VOX, we've got users that are saying, "Hey, I understand this complexity, I can simplify that, "I can help you, and I'm going to share my experience so "that others can benefit from that." >> Alright, Justine, let's bring you into the conversation. What's your role, what's the VIP program all about? >> My role within the VOX team is I lead the community and advocacy programs for VOX. So the VIP programs, so Veritas Information Professionals is an award program. It's a program essentially rewarding our super users, our top users in the community who are making outstanding contributions within the VOX platform. Some of them log in every single day and jump in to produce content and help out the community answering questions and whatnot. So it's a recognition program just to say thank you. >> I find some people that aren't in IT don't understand the communities that are built. It still amazes me how much people give back. I think back when Dave actually found Wikibon, it was around online communities and we said, "I don't need you full time." One of my favorite stats is if you took .02 percent of the United States television watching in one year, you could create all of Wikipedia. It's like tiny little bits ... Can you give us the size of the community? I heard some people are coming on every day, tell us a little bit to help us get our arms around the voice of your community? >> So VOX actually launched just over a year ago. We actually took a lot of the content from the Veritas technologies that were part of Symantec. We brought them over, we brought those users over and since then we've actually seen an increase of over 10,000 users coming to the site. It's something that we've got a lot of active employees, a lot of partners, a lot of customers that are there asking questions. >> So, coming to the site, they've come, they've registered? Well actually you have information on them already but they've agreed to participate in some way, shape or form? What's the hurdle they have to go through to become a member? >> Well to join VOX just come to the site and hit the join button, pretty easy. Create a user name and start asking questions. Most of our users actually come because they actually have a question. They'll come through Google, right? "Hey, help me do this or I'm trying to figure out this "type of deployment," and they'll land there and they'll realize "Hey, there's a lot of good information here. And there's people here that are actually really knowledgeable and I want to come back because I'm able to get answers to questions. Or I'm able to learn how to actually do things better than maybe I was doing them in the past." >> And the computer community comprises generally IT practitioners, storage admins, data center managers ... >> All of the above. We also have blogs on VOX where our employees at Veritas are actually sharing their perspectives as well. So we actually have a lot of different audiences that run from our executives that are blogging. Will Coleman has a blog. We're talking about what we're doing all the way to storage admin, "Hey I'm looking to do a deployment, "what does this mean? "How do I administer these types of things?" So through VOX, you'll see there's a lot of ways to make different connections with different audiences. >> Justine, what are you seeing as far as some of the content trends? What kinds of things are people producing? Is it sort of forum posts? You mentioned blogs, Tyler, videos, what's the content makeup? >> So from the VIP side of things, in terms of the content, and the types of participation in the program, like I said, it's our super users, it's our very active subject matter experts that are very passionate about sharing a community with like minded individuals that are just like them. They are doing everything from creating blog posts to jumping in answering troubleshooting questions and discussion boards. Actually discussions are probably one of our busiest, high traffic areas. It's quite technical in nature which is what our audience is looking for. So it's everything, all of the above really. >> What's the reward system look like? >> It's not really a reward, it's more of an award for thanking them for the last year of their outstanding contributions. We didn't want it to be a do this, get that type of an economy. It's more of a genuine effort when they can come in and just share their knowledge based on their passion for being part of a community that they get to fuel and grow. >> So their incentive really is that community feel? >> Justine: Absolutely. >> That's the primary motivation for them right? >> It's also reputation around ... You know if you're a partner and you're active in the community and you're sharing information you've got that credibility and that's important. Some people, as they're looking at the next phase of their career, these are things I'm doing, this is how I'm contributing to the industry that I participate in. I think, especially with what's going on right now and how this industry is transforming, nobody's just one thing, we all have multiple hats. This is a place where people can expand some of the things they're talking about, they're learning, and they're sharing back. >> Is there a reputation system? Does the community measure itself on the quality of the contributions or the frequency? How does that reputation get translated into ... Or quantified, or does it? >> In terms of ... Again, speaking from the VIP program, our super users, we didn't want to launch the program with a thousand qualified super users. There probably are a thousand super users on the platform but we're really looking for quality content. So we launched actually just last night so that was a big milestone for us. We launched last night with 28 individuals welcomed into the program so we kept it small for a thoughtful reason. They are everywhere from, when you asked the type of people that are part of the community but in terms of the VIP program, they're everywhere from a VP of a medium to large organization to a functional IT from an enterprise organization to a consultant and everything in between. They actually are represented across 13 plus countries and some of these people actually have known each other for decades being parts of other communities where they're talking about the same types of products. So they already have built relationships and that's kind of what makes the community unique. >> Tyler, please if you want to ... >> It's interesting you said rewards because I thought about that. The reality is these individuals are out there sharing their knowledge, we're actually just thanking them for what they're already doing. They're already there. I think that's the purpose of our program is then to give additional access to information, better connection with each other, and allow those connections and those relationships to flourish because it's a community, that's really why we're here is to help make those connections for those individuals. >> Obviously you've launched the VI program here, what else is happening at Vision? You've got the VOX online program, I always see with communities, a lot of times, there's planful things like "Hey, let's get a meetup together "or let's do something." So what's happening around this this week? >> This week at Vision, our VIPs are obviously plugged in to the sessions and they're attending those sessions. We're actually here on the Vision live floor talking to the session attendees talking about VOX. They're coming into the booth, we're showing them the platform. Again we just launched a year ago so we're still relatively new. One of the things we're doing is if you are here at vision and you're watching, come by the booth, we're doing professional head shots. Those can be things that are used in your LinkedIn profile. I don't know about you guys but I think the last time I did my LinkedIn profile, I was on vacation and I got a good light shot and I'm going to use that and I cropped it a bit so we thought, "Hey, we could do a little bit better." >> Better than the selfie. >> We're providing that right now. No selfies. >> We use cube shots. >> That's true. >> So that's one of the things we're doing to actually bring people together and share that experience of what community actually means to them and we've got some interesting responses so far from our audience. >> That's great and maybe when they update their profile they won't have that pixelated photo from like 15 years ago. I saw even there was one customer on the keynote and they blew it up on the screen and it was a little pixelated so stop by the booth and they'd get that. >> Yeah, pixelation's not really in style, I don't know if it was ever in style. I don't know, throwback. >> So you said you launched a year ago? >> Yeah. >> Is that right? >> So talk about network effects, any community like this you want to achieve some kind of scale and you get this sort of flywheel effect. I mean, 10,000 in 12 months is pretty good number. Of course, there's the number and then there's the activity and those are two different sort of dimensions. But do you feel like you're on the steep part of the S-curve or just heading there or have surpassed that? Talk about the network effect. >> Absolutely, so in my experience with launching communities you do have that hockey stick where in the very beginning a lot of people are coming and they're joining. The great news is we're seeing high activity on a monthly basis of people coming back. No surprise in a community in the very beginning you're coming through search, Google, because you're typing a question into that box, where do you land? We want them to land on Veritas Open Exchange so we can be part of that broader conversation around what's going on for information management. At Veritas, we believe that a connected experience across our different platforms. If you think about what we're sharing on social media, what we're sharing in our communities, those users that are logging in to get information out of our different portals, we want to start to blend some of those connections together and we see community as a way to do that. A great example is if you're on a product page and you want to look at information about a particular product, net backup, being able to access blogs, some of the community content's really important because there's a lot of authenticity that comes from a community voice, a user voice, alongside our voice as Veritas as well. >> You talk a little bit about how you seeded it when you had some relationship with the Symantec data but how did you actually get the seedling to not die? What was that secret because that's the hardest part I think or at least one of the hard things about building a community is cultivating it so it doesn't wilt early on. >> Yeah, communities are about the value for those individuals. The value for us in the very beginning was the content that was there and the content that was created by the community. And so as we set out, and our roadmap was to launch VOX one of the early decisions was we need to make sure we can bring all of the content over with us that's relevant. And that felt like an easy decision at the beginning but it got harder as you started to look at database structures ... >> Dave: Yeah, content migration. >> Yeah, it would be a lot easier to start over. And we stayed true to that. I think we would have launched earlier in the year had it not been for some complexity there. But I think we've been able to continue to grow because we've got good content and I want to stress the fact that that content is coming from our customers, our partners, and our employees. And those are the individuals that are sharing their experience which is so valuable and it's authentic. >> Did you have an existing CMS or did you choose a new one when you started? A content management system? >> We went from one platform provider to another and there were some differences as you would suspect in those database structures. But we realized is we're thinking about a better experience from a mobile device. How do we actually start to connect our community into Veritas.com. Integrated into our support portal, we wanted to have flexibility across some of those touchpoints realizing that our customers and our partners are going to define where they want to go and we want to be able to take that content and make it easier for them to access. >> Well, and Justine, you just launched the VIP program, you may have some new requirements or feature requirements. What are you seeing there? What kinds of things do you envision your VIPs are going to require out of the system? >> Requirements out of the system ... >> Right, you follow me? So it's sort of a new thing, the VIPs, does the system accommodate those? Do you have to add new features? These are challenging problems, right? There's underlying infrastructure that you have to deal with. How do you sort all that out? >> I think in terms of being able to maybe plug in new requirements especially with different types of technology, we're trying to introduce new types of content into the community as well that would hopefully be appealing to newer advocates that would be welcomed into the program in the future. >> Dave: Like what? >> Podcasting is something that we're actually doing. We've paired up with the social team, as well and we're running podcasts here on the Vision Live floor which is really exciting. So we're going to have new content up on the community shortly. Hopefully we'll be able to plug our VIPs into those new types of content and provide different avenues for digesting content. >> Where do you want to see this go? What's the vision? >> Success for us is we make Veritas Open Exchange, VOX, an integrated part of being a customer, a partner, or even an employee of Veritas. There's relevance there. This is a place where I have presence, I'm able to share what I know and participate in a broader conversation. Talk a little bit about roadmap, one of the beautiful things about having a close relationship with a very passionate group of individuals is they want to make things better. They want to make it easier and we see that through requirements that are coming in and questions about how to make VOX better. But also about our products and services at Veritas. There's a rich dialogue that we can have with them as result of that. So we're constantly evaluating, looking at those things, of how do we just actually make things easier. It's so easy to make things complicated these days with features, right? Let's do this, let's do that. We're looking at how do we actually make this simpler, provide a better experience so you can be on your mobile device, you can be on your tablet, you can be at your desk and find the information that you're looking for. >> Great. Alright folks, we have to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> Alright, you're welcome. Keep it right there, everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. As theCUBE, we're live from Veritas Vision 2017. Right back. (techno music)

>> Man's Voice: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge17, brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back to Orlando, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract a signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Jeff Frick. This is theCUBE's fifth year covering Knowledge. We started in Las Vegas, a little small event, Jeff, at Aria Hotel, and it's exploded from 3,500 all the way up to 15,000 people here in Orlando at the Convention Center. This is day two of our three day coverage. And, we heard this morning, you know, day one was the introduction of the new CEO, John Donahoe, taking over the reins for Frank Slootman. And, actually it was interesting, Jeff. Last night, we went around to some of the parties and talked to some of the folks and some of the practitioners. It was interesting to hear how many people were saying how much they missed Fred. >> Right, right. >> And the culture of fun and kind of zaniness and quirkiness that they sort of have, and there's some of that that's maintained here. We saw that in the keynotes this morning, and we'll talk about that a little bit, but what are your impressions of sort of that transition from, you know, really the third phase now we're into of ServiceNow leadership? >> Right, well as was commented again last night at some of the events, you know, a relatively peaceful transition, right. So, the difference between an evolution and a revolution is people die in revolutions. This was more of an evolution. It was an organized handoff, and a lot of the product leaders are relatively new. We just saw CJ Desai. He said he's only 100 days ahead of where John is at 45 days. So, it is kind of a, I don't know if refresh is the right word, but all new leadership in a lot of the top positions to basically go from, as been discussed many times, from kind of the one billion dollar mark to the four billion dollar mark, and then, of course, onward to the 10. So, it sounds like everyone is very reverent to the past, and Fred has a huge following. He's one of our favorite guest. The guy's just a super individual. People love him. That said, you know, it's a very clear and focused move to the next stage in evolution of growth. >> Well, I think that, you know, Fred probably, I mean, he may have said something similar to this either in theCUBE or sort of in back channel conversations with us, is, you know, ServiceNow, when they brought in Frank Slootman, it needed adult supervision. And, Fred doesn't strike me as the kind of person that's going to be doing a lot of the, you know, HR functions and performance reviews and stuff. He wants to code, right. I mean, that was his thing. And, now, we're seeing sort of this next level of ascension for ServiceNow, and you seen the advancement of their product, their platform. So this morning, CJ Desai kicked off the keynotes. Now, CJ Desai was an executive in the security business. He was an executive at EMC, hardcore product guy. He's a hacker. You heard him this morning saying when he was at a previous company, he didn't mention EMC, but that's what he was talking about, I'm pretty sure. They use ServiceNow, and when ServiceNow started recruiting him, he said I opened up an instance and started playing around with it, and see if I could develop an app, and I was amazed at how easy it was. And, they started talking to some of the customers and seeing how passionate they were about this platform, and it became an easy decision for him to, you know, come and run. He's got a big job here. He run, he's basically, you know, manages all products, essentially taking over for Fred Luddy and, you know, Dan McGee as a chief operating officer even though he hasn't used that title 'cause he's a product guy. But, all the GMs report up into him, so he is the man, you know, on top of the platform. So, he talked this morning about Jakarta, the announcement, and the key thing about, you know, that I'm learning really in talking to ServiceNow over the years, is they put everything in the platform, and then the business units have to figure out how to leverage that new capability, you know, whether it's machine learning or AI or some kind of new service catalog or portal. The business units, whether it's, you know, the managers, whether it's Farrell Hough and her team, she does IT service management, Abhijit Mitra who does customer service management, the IT operations management people, the HR folks, they have to figure out how they can take the capabilities of this platform, and then apply it to their specific use cases and industry examples. And, that's what we saw a lot of today. >> But, it's still paper-based workflow, right? 'Cause back to Fred's original vision, which I love repeating about, the copy room with all the pigeonholes of colored paper that you would grab for I need a new laptop, I need a vacation request, I need whatever, which nobody remembers anymore. But, you know, at the end of the day, it's put in a request, get it approved, does it need to be worked, and then executed. So, whether that's asking for a new laptop for a new employee, whether that's getting a customer service ticket handled, whether it's we're swinging by doing name changes, it's relatively simple process under the covers, and then now, they're just wrapping it with this specific vocabulary and integration points to the different systems to support that execution. So, it's a pretty straightforward solution. What I really like about ServiceNow is they're applying, you know, technology to relatively straightforward problems that have huge impact and efficiency, and just getting away from email, getting away from so many notification systems that we have, getting away from phone calls, getting away from tech-- Trying to aggregate that into one spot, like we see it a lot of successful applications, sass applications. So, now you've got a single system of record for the execution of these relatively straightforward processes. >> Yeah, it really is all about a new way to work, and with the millennial work force becoming younger, obviously, they're going to work in a different way. I saw, when I tweeted out, was the best IT demo that I'd ever seen. Didn't involve a laptop, didn't involve a screen. What Chris Pope did, who's kind of an evangelist, he's in the CSO office, he was on... the chief strategy office, he was on yesterday. He came up with a soccer ball. Right, you saw it. And, he said >> Football. Make sure you say it right. He would correct you. (Jeff laughs) >> And, he said for those of you who are not from the colonies, this is a football. And then, he had somebody in a new employee's t-shirt, he had the HR t-shirt, the IT t-shirt, the facilities t-shirt, and they were passing the ball around, and he did a narrative on what it was like to onboard a new employee, and the back and forth and the touch points and, you know, underscoring the point of how complex it is, how many mistakes can be made, how frustrating it is, how inefficient it is, and then, obviously, setting up conveniently the morning of how the workflow would serve us now. But, it was a very powerful demo, I thought. >> Well, the thing that I want to get into, Dave, is how do you get people to change behavior? And, we talk about it all the time in theCUBE. People process in tech. The tech's the easy part. How do you change people's behavior? When I have to make that request to you, what gets me to take the step to do it inside of service now versus sending you that email? It seems to me that that's the biggest challenge, and you talk about it all the time, is we get kind of tool-creep in all these notification systems and, you know, there's Slack and there's Atlassian JIRA and there's Salesforce and there's Dropbox and there's Google Docs and, you know, the good news is we're getting all these kind of sass applications that, ultimately, we're seeing this growth of IPA's in between them and integration between them, but, on the bad side, we get so many notifications from so many different places. You know, how do you force really a compliance around a particular department to use a solution, as we say that, that's what's on your desk all the time, and not email? And, I think that's, I look forward to hearing kind of what are best practices to dictate that? I know that Atlassian, internally, they don't use email. Everything is on JIRA. I would presume in ServiceNow, it's probably very similar where, internally, everything is in the ServiceNow platform, but, unfortunately, there's those pesky people outside the organization who are still communicating with email. So, then you get, >> Exactly. >> Then, now, you're running kind of a parallel track as you're getting new information from a customer that's coming in maybe via email that you need to, then, populate into those tickets. That's the part I see as kind of a challenge. >> Well, I think it is a big challenge. And, of course, when you talk to ServiceNow people privately and you say to them, "Have you guys eliminated email?" Then, they roll their eyes and "I wish." (Jeff chuckles) But, I would presume their internal communications, as you say, are a lot more efficient and effective. But, you know, it's a Cloud app, and Cloud apps suffer from latency issues. And, it's like when you go into a Cloud app, you know, you log in. A lot of times, it logs you out just for security reasons, so you got to log back in and you get the spinning logo for awhile. You finally get in and then, you got to find what you want to do, and then you do it. And, it's a lot slower just from an elapse time standpoint than, actually not from an elapse time. So, from an initiation standpoint, getting something off your desk, it's slower. The elapse time is much more efficient. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> And so, what I think ends up happening is people default to the simple email system. It's a quick fix. And then, it starts the cycle of hell. But, I think you're making a great point about adoption. How do you improve that adoption? One of the things that ServiceNow announced this morning, is that roughly 30% improvement in performance, right. So, people complain about performance like any Cloud-based application, and it's hard. You know, when you even when you use, you know, look at LinkedIn. A lot of times, you get a LinkedIn request, and you go, "I'll check it later." You don't want to go through the process of logging in. Everybody's experienced that. It's one of those >> Right, right. >> Sort of heavy apps, and so, you just say, "Alright, I'll figure it out later." And, Facebook is the same thing. And, no doubt, that ServiceNow, certainly Salesforce, similar sort of dynamics 'cause it's a Cloud-based app. And so, hitting performance hard, as you say, the culture of leaving it on your desk. The folks at Nutanix, Dheeraj is telling me they essentially run their communications in Slack. (chuckles) and so, >> Right. >> You know, they'll hit limits there, I'm sure, as well, but everybody's trying to find a new way to work, and this is something that I know is a passion of yours, because the outcome is so much better if you can eliminate email trails and threads and lost work. >> Right. And, we're stuck now in this, in the middle phase which is just brutal 'cause you just get so many notifications from so many different applications. How do you prioritize? How do you keep track? Oh my God, did you ping me on Slack? Did you ping me on a text? Did you ping me on a email? I don't even know. The notification went away, went off my phone. I don't even know which one it came through its difficulty. The good news is that we see in sass applications and, again, it's interesting. Maybe just 'cause I was at AWS summit recently. I just keep thinking AWS, and in terms of the efficiency that they can bring to bear, that resources they can bring to bear around CP utilization, storage utilization, security execution, all those things that they can do as a multi-vendor, Cloud-based application, and apply to their Cloud in support of their customers on their application, will grow and grow and grow, and quickly surpass what most people would do on their own 'cause they just don't have the resources. So, that is a huge benefit of these Cloud-based applications and again, as the integration points get better, 'cause we keep hearin' it 'cause you got some stuff in Dropbox, you got some stuff in Google Docs, you got some stuff in Salesforce. That's going to be interesting, how that plays out, and will it boil back down to, again, how many actual windows do you have open that you work with on your computer. Is it two? Is it three? Is it four? Not many more than that, and it can't be. >> Yeah, so today here at Knowledge, it's a big announcement day. You're hearing from all the sort of heads of the businesses. Jakarta is the big announcement. That's the new release of the platform. Kingston's coming, you know, later on this year. ServiceNow generally does two a year, one in the spring summer, one in the fall, kind of early winter. And, Jakarta really comprises performance improvement, a new security capability where, I thought this was very interesting, where you have all these vendors that you're trying to interact with, and you tryin' to figure out, okay, "What do I integrate with "in terms of my third party vendors, and who's safe?" You know, and "Do they comply "to my corpoetics?" >> Right, right. >> And, ServiceNow introducing a module in Jakarta which going to automate that whole thing, and simplify it. And then, the one, the big one was software asset management. Every time you come to a conference like Knowledge, and you get this at Splunk too, the announcements that they make, they're not golf claps. You'd get hoots and woos and "Yes" and people standing up. >> Jeff: That was that and that was the one, right? >> Software SM Management was the one. >> Jeff: (chuckles) put a big star on that one. >> Now, let's talk about this a little bit because they mentioned in, they didn't mention Oracle, but this is a bit pain point of a lot of Oracle customers, is audits, software audits. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> And, certainly Oracle uses software audits as negotiating leverage, and clients customers don't really know what they have, what the utilization is, do they buy more licenses even though they could repurpose licenses. They just can't keep track of all that stuff, and so, ServiceNow is going to do it for ya. So, that's a pretty big deal and, obviously, people love that. As I said, 30% improvement in performance. And, yeah, this software asset management thing, we're going to talk to some people about that and see what their-- >> But, they got the big cheer. >> What their expectation is. >> The other thing that was interesting on the product announcement, is using AI. Again, I just love password reset as an example 'cause it's so simple and discrete, but still impactful about using AI on relatively, it sounds like, simple processes that are super high ROI, like auto-categorization. You know, let the machine do auto-categorization and a lot of these little things that make a huge difference in productivity to be able to find and discover and work with this data that you're now removing the people from it, and making the machine, the better for machine processes handled by the machine. And, we see that going all through the application, a lot of the announcements that were made. So, it's not just AI for AI, but it's actually, they call it Intelligent Automation, and applying it to very specific things that are very fungible and tangible and easy to see, and provide direct ROI, right out of the gate. >> Well, this auto-categorization is something that, I mean, it's been a vexing problem in the industry for years. I mentioned yesterday that in 2006 with the federal rules of civil procedure change that made electronic documents admissible, it meant that you had to be able to find and submit to a court of law all the electronic documents on a legal hold. And, there were tons of cases in the sort of mid to late part of the 2000's where companies were fined hundreds and millions of dollars. Morgan Stanley was the sort of poster child of that because they couldn't produce emails. And, as part of that, there was a categorization effort that went on to try to say, okay, let's put these emails in buckets, something as simple as email >> Right, right. >> So that when we have to go find something in a legal hold, we can find it or, more importantly, we can defensively delete it. But, the problem was, as I said yesterday, the math has been around forever. Things like support vector machines and probabilistic latent semantic index and all these crazy algorithms. But, the application of them was flawed, and the data quality >> Jeff: Right, right. >> Was poor. So, we'll see if now, you know, AI which is the big buzz word now, but it appears that it's got legs and is real with machine learning and it's kind of the new big data meme. We'll see if, in fact, it can really solve this problem. We certainly have the computing horse power. We know the math is there. And, I think the industry has learned enough that the application of those algorithms, is now going to allow us to have quality categorization, and really take the humans out of the equation. >> Yeah, I made some notes. It was Farrell, her part of the keynote this morning where she really talked about some of these things. And, again, categorization, prioritization, and assignment. Let the machine take the first swag at that, and let it learn and, based on what happens going forward, let it adjust its algorithms. But, again, really simple concepts, really painful to execute as a person, especially at scale. So, I think that's a really interesting application that ServiceNow is bringing AI to these relatively straightforward processes that are just painful for people. >> Yes, squinting through lists and trying to figure out, okay, which one's more important, and weighting them, and I'm sure, they have some kind of scoring system or weighting system that you can tell the machine, "Hey, prioritize, you know, these things," you know, security incidence >> Right, right. >> Or high value assets first. Give me a list. I can then eyeball them and say, okay, hm, now I'm going to do this third one first, and the first one second, whatever. And, you can make that decision, but it's like a first pass filter, like a vetting system. >> Like what Google mail does for you, right? >> Right. >> It takes a first pass. So, you know, these are the really specific applications of machine learning in AI that will start to have an impact in the very short-term, on the way that things happen. >> So, the other thing that we're really paying attention here, is the growth of the ecosystem. It's something that Jeff and I have been tracking since the early days of ServiceNow Knowledge, in terms of our early days of theCUBE. And, the ecosystem is really exploding. You know, you're seeing the big SIs. Last night, we were at the Exen Sure party. It was, you know, typical Exen Sure, very senior level, a bunch of CIOs there. It reminded me of when you go to the parties at Oracle, and the big SIs have these parties. I mean, they're just loaded with senior executives. And, that's what this was last night. You know, the VIP room and all the suits were in there, and they were schmoozing. These are things that are really going to expand the value of ServiceNow. It's a new channel for them. And, these big SIs, they have the relationships at the board room level. They have the deep industry expertise. I was talking to Josh Kahn, who's running the Industry Solutions now, another former EMCer, and he, obviously, is very excited to have these relationships with the SI. So, that to me, is a big windfall for ServiceNow. It's something that we're going to be tracking. >> And, especially, this whole concept of the SIs building dedicated industry solutions built on SI. I overheard some of the conversation at the party last night between an SI executive, it was an Exen Sure executive, and one of the ServiceNow people, and, they talked about the power of having the combination of the deep expertise in an industry, I can't remember which one they were going after, it was one big company, their first kind of pilot project, combined with the stability and roadmap of ServiceNow side to have this stable software platform. And, the combination of those two, so complementary to take to market to this particular customer that they were proposing this solution around. And then, to take that solution as they always do and then, you know, harden it and then, take it to the next customer, the next customer, the next customer. So, as you said, getting these big integrators that own the relationships with a lot of big companies, actively involved in now building industry solutions, is a huge step forward beyond just, you know, consultative services and best practices. >> Well, and they have such deep industry expertise. I mean, we talked yesterday about GDPR and some of the new compliance regulations that are coming to the banking industry, particularly in Europe, the fines are getting much more onerous. These SIs have deep expertise and understanding of how to apply something like ServiceNow. ServiceNow, I think of it as a generic platform, but it needs, you know, brain power to say, okay, we can solve this particular problem by doing A, B, C, and D or developing this application or creating this solution. That's really where the SIs are. It's no surprise that a lot of the senior ServiceNow sales reps were at that event last night, you know, hanging with the customers, hanging with their partners. And, that is just a positive sign of momentum in my opinion. Alright, Jeff, so big day today. CJ Desai is coming on. We're going to run through a lot of the business units. You know, tomorrow is sort of Pronic demo day. It's the day usually that Fred Luddy hosts, and Pat Casey, I think, is going to be the main host tomorrow. And, we'll be covering all of this from theCUBE. This is day two ServiceNow Knowledge #Know17. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. You can watch us live, of course, at thecube.net. I'm Dave Vellante, he's Jeff Frick. We'll be right back after this short break. (easygoing music)

>> Announcer: From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow, Knowledge17, brought to you by ServiceNow. (upbeat music) >> In 2004, Fred Luddy had a vision. He was the founder of ServiceNow, and his vision was to create software that was really simple to use, to automate workflows within organizations. Two years later in 2006, was the first ServiceNow Knowledge. He rented out a room at a hotel that could support 50 people. 30 minutes before that event, nobody was in that room. By the time, the time came to start the first ServiceNow Knowledge, 85 people were in the room, talking to each other about this transformation that was occurring in their business. And as they started talking to each other Fred Luddy stepped back and said, you know what, to have a successful conference I just need to let people talk to each other. And here we are today, in 2017. 15,000 people at the ServiceNow Knowledge. Welcome to Orlando, everybody. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host Jeff Frick. This is, I believe, our fifth Knowledge, Jeff. >> Just look at that. 14, 15, 16, 17. Fourth or fifth. (laughing) >> Fourth or, no. We started at the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas, with about 4,000 people and now we're up to 15,000. This is a story of a company that did an IPO right around 100 million, brought in an excellent CEO, Frank Slootman. In six years his company has exploded to 1.4 billion dollars. They're on a path to do 4 billion dollars of revenue by 2020. They've got a 17 billion dollar market cap. If you look at software companies over a billion dollars, there is no software company that's growing as fast as ServiceNow, 30 plus percent a year, and throwing off as much free cash flow as ServiceNow, growing at about 45%. So they are incomparable in terms of comparing to other software companies. They're on a tear, the stock prices are up. Lo and behold Frank Slootman, the CEO, is getting out at the top. Bringing in a new CEO, John Donahoe. I feel like it's you know, an NFL quarterback, It's Bill Walsh handing the reins over to George Seifert. Maybe, and as I say, getting out at the top. John Donahoe, totally different style. We're going to be talking to him on theCUBE, just finishing up his keynote now. But, Jeff, here we are. Our fourth year, I guess, at Knowledge. And, pretty amazing transformation in this company. >> It is a pretty amazing transformation. We talk a lot about big data, and we talk a lot about cloud in many of the shows we go to but what we probably don't talk about enough, and we are going to for the next three days, is the success of SASS apps. And, as I always like to joke, there's a 60 storey building going up in San Francisco that Salesforce is completing to show you the power of SASS apps. And I think, with the ServiceNow story, is, more of that same story, you know. They started out with a relatively simple idea, Fred wanted to make work easier. And he started with the ITSM because that was an easy place to get going. But really, it's about simplifying workflow in a SASS application, letting people get work done easier. And it's pretty interesting, Because now, as you look around, day of the conference, they've got five bubbles, or five balls, or five posters, to really symbolize how they've moved beyond just ITSM into HR, customer service, biz apps and security. And applying the same foundation, the same method, the same software, to get after more and more of the workloads that are happening inside the enterprise. >> From a company perspective, this story here is about execution. The company, as I said, I gave you, shared with you the financials, they've penetrated the Global 2000, over 50% of their average contract value comes from the Global 2000. And there's significant upside there, as well. In addition, their average contract value is growing very dramatically. I was speaking to some customers and asking them, what was your deal size when you first started with ServiceNow? They were like, it was small, it was like 60,000 contracts. Now they have many, many customers, well over a million dollars, several customers over five million dollars, so this is a company that is largely focused on large organizations, but also governments and mid-sized companies. Not small businesses, yet, Jeff. You and I have been dying to get a hold of ServiceNow for small business. They announced Express a couple years ago, but what Express really was, was a way for larger companies to try, you know, get their feet wet before they really jump all in. So, we are still waiting for that day, but in the meantime, ServiceNow has a lot to do. As they say, their goal now is to be four billion by 2020. It feels like, when we first covered ServiceNow Knowledge, we said wow, this company reminds us of the early days of Salesforce, they've got this platform you can develop on this platform, you know, call it paths, or whatever you want to call it. But, we at the time said they were on a collision course with Salesforce. Now, there's plenty of room for both of those companies in the marketplace. Salesforce obviously focused predominantly on Salesforce automation, ServiceNow really on workflow automation. But you can see, though, two markets coming together. >> Right, right. >> People really, you know SalesForce, we try to use it for a lot of different things. And so giant markets built on the cloud built with flexibility to add volumes we started at problem change management help desk type of things within IT service management, and we're seeing that expand dramatically. And one of the things that you've always emphasized, Jeff, is the ecosystem. Take us back to the early days, of when we walked the floor of the original Knowledge that we did, that was four or five years ago. The companies that you saw there are much different than what you see today. >> But the passion is still the same, and that's why we've loved coming to this thing for so many years. It's because it's one of the companies that has a real passion. There was a shout-out to Fred, which is where it all started you know, I think Frank did a great job continuing that, and now clearly John is a really polished guy. Did his time at Bane, eBay, which he talked about as a community based environment, and that was built on the strength of it. But the other part in terms of their expansion, their TAM expansion, which is always a popular topic is, John talked about IT living at the intersection of interconnectedness across departments. And they've really done a good job of leveraging that. And he talked about a simple HR on-boarding process, to highlight all the departments that are taught. Securities, facilities, you need to get your badge, you need to get your laptop, you need to get checked in. So, they're leveraging this and coming up from the bottom, and we talk about IT being an agent of transformation and not a cost center, well what better way to do that than to continue to simplify all these basically mundane processes. But, again, just start eating them up, and pulling more and more processes into the ServiceNow platform. >> The key to success from a customer standpoint is to adopt a single CMDB, and to adopt a service catalog. Jeff, when we first started following ServiceNow, and we talked to the customers, not everybody was adopting a single CMDB. That was a very political, sort of football. When I talk to customers today, many more, just anecdotally, have adopted the CMDB. What that gives the customer and ServiceNow, is tons of leverage. Because you essentially have that single source of truth, and then you can use that as a ripple effect across all the other innovations that you drive with ServiceNow. So, for example, you start with help desk and change management and problem management, and then you move onto, maybe, IT operations management. And you're automating those tasks. Then might you move onto HR. You might move onto logistics, or marketing. You're now dealing with security. The perfect example they often give is on-boarding. When you on-board a new employee, there's six or seven or eight departments that you have to talk to. There's at least eight, nine, 10 processes. You got to order your laptop, you got to get a phone, you've got to get your office, you've got to get on-boarded to HR. All of these things that have to occur, that are generally separate phone calls, or you're walking down the hall. ServiceNow when you on-board, they give you the example, they're eating their own dog food. You go into the portal and you do all these things. And it has a ripple effect because of that single CMDB, throughout the organization. And so that's given ServiceNow a lot of leverage within these companies. What you hear from customers is: one, it's complicated to install this stuff. And in the early days especially when there weren't as many experts in ServiceNow. So it used to take a couple years to implement this. Second is your price is too high. You know, you hear that a lot. If that's your biggest hurdle, you're in good shape. What ServiceNow has to do in my view, Jeff, is two things. One, is got to tap the ecosystem. And you've seen companies like CSX now, DX Technology, and Accenture, KPMG, EY, join the fray. I always joke that SIs love to eat at the trough. Well, ServiceNow is becoming a big, robust ecosystem, with a giant TAM. So, ServiceNow has to lean on those partners very heavily to go in and accelerate implementation, convey best practices. ServiceNow has a program called Inspire. Which is a lost leader. It's one of the best freebies in the industry. Where they will go in and share best practice with their largest customers. And in doing that in conjunction with the SIs, to accelerate adoption on the price side, this company and I think John Donahoe is perfect for this, really has to increasingly emphasize the value. I think to date Jeff, it's been a comparison. Well, I can get this from BMC for this much, or HPE for this much, or IBM's got versions of that. Or, other competitors in this space. ServiceNow has essentially, their pricing has been compared to them. What they have to do is shift the conversation from cost, and price, to the value of the delivery. >> Biggest surprise. You got to spend a little day, kind of, behind the curtain in the analyst day. Biggest surprise that came out of that, for you? >> I don't know if it's a shocker, but it was certainly underscored, is the actual amount of upside that this company has, because they have, you know, penetrated the Global 2000 pretty substantially. But what struck me was their ability to add new capabilities, and add, expand their TAM. You know, I think I wrote a piece in 2013 basically sizing the TAM. When ServiceNow first IPOed, Gartner came out and said this is a dead market, help desk is an 8 billion dollar market, where are they going? I followed that up with a piece that said you know, this TAM is quite large, it's probably about 30 million. And I shared with the Wikibon audience how it could get there. I think I underestimated that. I think the TAM is 60 to 100 billion dollars. And the reason is that ServiceNow is able, Fred Luddy said when we first interviewed him, it's a platform. I took it out there and said here it is. >> Right. >> And the VC said what can you do with it? And he said anything! >> Revolutionized platforms. >> And they said, well, we're not going to fund it. Right, and so what they've been doing now is adding modules, and one of the ones I'm most excited about is security. And it's not competing with the FireEyes, and the Palo Alto Networks and the McAfees. It's actually automating a lot of the response to security. Automating the run book, automating the incident response. And doing so in a way that actually builds that ecosystem up, and is the glue that hangs it together. So, I guess the biggest eye-opener for me, Jeff, I talked earlier about the revenue growth, and the free cash flow growth, for a billion dollar plus company. What was surprising, the biggest eye opener or surprise to me, was the sustainability, in my opinion, of that upside. >> Right. But if it works, right, no one's going to give it up. And if the efficiencies are so much better, no one's going to give it up. I just, like, it does other huge categories of software, right? There's CRM which they're playing a little bit into not coming at it from kind of a sales perspective, but kind of coming at it from a customer management perspective. There's HR, which they're clearly going after. There's ERP, which they're probably not in a position to do in the immediate term. But there's still a lot of work getting done in large enterprises that can use a significant amount of customization, automation, with a little big data twist in the back. And, a real eye to the customer experiences, as the millennials more and more in the workforce, and the expected behavior of enterprise apps needs to mirror more, what we get on our phones. So I think they're in a pretty good position. >> TSM is the core. Everything stems from that. That's sort of the main-spring. And really, IT are their peeps, as Frank Slootman used to say. (laughing) ITOM, IT operations management, is another large and substantive business. Not as big as ITSM, but bigger than the others. Customer service management is a new and growing area. Security is a huge upside in my opinion. HR they've been at it for a while, we've talked to Jen Straud many times. And that's a big growth area. So these line-of-business entries are what's going to power the growth of ServiceNow going forward. There's also MNA, we haven't talked about MNA. When we first walked around the ecosystem on the exhibit floor at the Aria, four or five years ago, what we saw were a number of companies that could fit right into the ServiceNow platform, so one of the more prominent companies that ServiceNow acquired was DX Continuum. It's sort of an intelligent AI, machine-learning system. They're deploying that to help predict outages, part of their IT operations management service. And they'll use that elsewhere. So it's a very specific AI, we cover AI, we cover autonomous vehicles, and so forth. That's actually a great use case. So much of AI is fuzzy. So much of deep learning and machine learning is like how is that applied? Well, predictive analytics, to say OK this component is going to fail, replace it. Or, move the work off of that server. That's a real tangible use of AI. So we've seen ServiceNow use MNA. So what it does when it acquires a company, it has to go through cycles of re-platforming. ServiceNow doesn't just bolt on third-party products. We basically rebuild them from scratch on the platform. >> Right, right, ease into the platform. Which is what you have to do. Which is, kind of partner what SASS is all about, and in the early days of SASS there was a lot of push-back, because everybody thought they needed customization. Well, you didn't really need customization because you can't have 47 versions of the platform out there. What you need is the ability to configure. And have great configurability, and that's what good platforms do. And that's what Fred tried to build. And oh by the way I got to get started, so I went with the ITSM. So I think they're in a great position, Dave, and, as we know, cloud economics of which this is a big, giant application, get good, as the thing gets bigger and bigger and absorbs more and more functionality. Again, interesting change of management. We're going to talk to John, really look forward to it, fresh new energy. I think they're off to, off to the races, they've been racing for a while. (laughing) >> Some of the other things, let's talk about customers for a minute. So, some of the other things I get from customers when I talk to them is, and again, CMDB, and service catalog, those are two critical. If you want to get the value out of ServiceNow, you got to implement those two things, and others. But as well, this idea of multi-instance, allows you to upgrade at your own pace. What a lot of SASS companies will do, and we know this, as a customer of a lot of SASS companies, they say new upgrade coming, beware. And boom, the function hits, or often times hits, with a price increase. What ServiceNow claims is that because you're in a multi-instance, as opposed to a multi-tenet environment, you can plan your upgrades. Now, having said that, what a lot of customers will do, is they will try to avoid custom-mods, custom modifications, and they will try to take ServiceNow function out of the box. The desirability of that is when a new upgrade comes, you don't have to worry about the modifications you've made. However, it's not always that simple. I talked to a customer this morning on the way over here, they're a big SAP user, and they're doing a lot of custom-mods with their implementation. And I said aren't you worried about that? Yes, we're very worried about that, because that's going to be problematic for us when we upgrade. But they're wed to SAP. So, my advice to customers is always try where possible to avoid custom modifications. You hear that a lot from, for instance, IN4 customers. You frankly hear it a lot from Oracle customers, trying to avoid the modifications. Mods can drive value for your business, but in the cloud world, the cloud era, they can really create problems for you. >> And everyone thinks that they're special, but the reality is that a lot of processes are repeatable across businesses. And actually if you're sitting as a SASS offer provider, you see it across a lot of customers, try to go with what's the standard out of the box, with basic configuration changes, and try to keep away from the customization, or like you said, you can get yourself in serious trouble. And not really take full advantage. 'Cause you want to take advantage of the upgrades, you want the security upgrades, you want the functionality upgrades, you want the latest plug-ins from the ecosystem, so stick with the core and try to really avoid. And you've got stuff that needs to be kept up, and it's old and it's legacy, try to shield it as much as you can from this new-age application. >> So we're here for three days, theCUBE, Knowledge17, #know17, and so we will be covering all the innovations it's an interesting conference because the roles here are IT practitioners, CIOs, line-of-business professionals like those within HR, and other lines of business. So really a diverse crowd. There's a developer conference, a lot of events within the event. There's a women in tech luncheon hosted by John Donahoe, so a lot of stuff going on that we're going to be covering, Jeff Frick and myself. We are going to be right back with John Donahoe, the new CEO of ServiceNow coming fresh off the keynotes. Keep right there everybody. This is theCUBE, we're at Knowledge17, be right back.

hi everybody we're back after that break and we're here at the ServiceNow knowledge conference in Las Vegas with the aria hotel i'm here with my co-host and colleague Jeff Frick as you know we've been broadcasting also live from sa p sapphire now in orlando we're also out of google i/o today markers and Hopkins and Kenny Bowen are out there so we get it all covered for you check out SiliconANGLE calm for all the blogs and all the news check out Wikibon org for all the research youtube.com SiliconANGLE youtube.com slash SiliconANGLE for all the videos that we're doing here and we are going to continue to unpack the ServiceNow messaging the marketing messaging and test the alignment with the customers Craig Wishart is here he's the CIO of service stream an Australian company and customer of service now Greg welcome to the cube thank you very much mortals yeah so we've been talking to a number of practitioners this morning about the show about sort of how they're using service now but before we get into that tell us more about service stream and tell us about your role there is a CI L show so service stream is a Australian listed business and we really have three unique business divisions so we have a telecommunications business which specializes in rolling out and managing fiber across the country nationally we have a mobile communications business which specializes in building mobile communications towers in fact this year we'll do around about fifteen hundred of those towers and upgrading to the new LTE standards and we have an energy and water business which in itself is quite diverse but everything from in-home services from solar installations on roofs and hot water service through to read or out 40 million meter reads a year initiator coming with over 400,000 smart meter replacements we have a field force of about 4,000 plus people which makes us one of the largest in the country for field force and of course you know service stream by nature graph through acquisition and one of the challenges that we found well when I first joined 12 months ago was it by default you end up with very different cultures very different platforms very bespoke architectures and that sort of led us down the path in many ways to looking for a platform that could start to consolidate business but start to give us some leverage through commonality of process and also some synergies through the way in which the businesses work together bespoke is a good description of the way that a lot of IT operations their own so you guys are seriously into infrastructure obviously well that's true you know in terms of what we do as a technology team we saw our our objectives is being very closely aligned with the business unit in terms of being able to build commonality and drive costs out you know one of the one of the key premises that we offer to our clients is that we manage your customers customer and we do it very well and we do it on the basis of delivering to the expectations of our clients and you know to do that you really need a platform that can get you from the back of house if you like from the data center right out to parts of Australia which is still going through connectivity issues with telecommunications so we have a very mobile workforce you know if people working from right up the north end to write down into the metros so you were at the the CIO decisions conference that was taking place here i guess the i call it conference but it's like a sub advantage yeah sort of a breakout if you will at this event before we get into sort of your implementation of service now talk a little bit about what was shared at that little side event what kind of themes were struck and you know what was on the minds of the cios that were in that yeah look that's a good question and it was it was firstly it was a terrific event to be a part of and around people who are like-minded in a sense of you know one thing you find when you start talking to people regardless of where you work you've faced the same challenges you know you're under increase in cost pressures to not only take cost out but to deliver value the other challenges you're facing too often are how do you compete very quickly you know the market is moving so quickly and your competitors are moving quickly that often what you're trying to do is not only keep pace but innovate at the same time so innovation was a key theme I think the other thing that came out is you know how do we start to leverage what each of us are doing and how do we start to learn more from one another and I found that quite refreshing because in most instances when you're ten these sorts of conferences people are very guarded and one thing I've really taken out of this one in particular is that people are very open and want to share so you know the three key themes i took out here is you know how to CIOs lead and how do you get business connectiveness second piece is around how do you drive innovation often when you're competing against taking cost out and I think the third thing that you know became quite obvious to is how can we start to work together to leverage the capabilities of this platform which seemed to be developing you know week by week so let's talk about some of those themes I want to start with good leadership yeah what has changed in the last 10 years as far as CIO leadership look that's you know that's something to that is being discussed quite openly in Australia to the role of the CIO and in many ways I think the title itself will change over time but you know I think if we go back 15 20 years you know cos typically evolved from being infrastructure applications people and they grew up with specific knowledge around how to build stuff and you know over the last five years I think what we've seen is a transition of you know the CIA role being very much the person in the business who has accountability for information systems and technologies but really they're there to provide coaching and leadership to our business units on how they can best leverage new technologies you know to increase their profitability drive revenue take costs out but also increasingly how do you manage your workforce it's a very diverse role and I think one of the challenges and I'm talking about this later today my presentation the CI roll roll by default can also lock you into a paradigm that restricts you from being innovative and you know one of the things I'm talking about today is that you know be careful in a sense if you define yourself as a cell role in fact you may define yourself as being out of the business I see the role of the CIO now really being another business executive at the table who really just has accountability for systems and process so that leads me to the next you know piece that you mentioned which is innovation I want to talk about the role of the CIO at innovation jeff's from from Silicon Valley where there's a lot of innovation going on and one of the one of the montreux Silicon Valley right right Jeff is if you're going to fail fail fast you know failure is oftentimes not something that's part of the cios DNA in fact oftentimes they're trying to avoid failure yeah so talk about that dissonance how in your view can the CIO both lead and drive innovation in a climate that is frequently thought of as you know de-risking themselves yeah what you know when we talk about the themes and what's what's obvious and I put into this context you know there's there's three things that have really come up over the last six months which continue to resonate no matter where you are and they are you know how do we solve for mobility how do we solve for you know what is effectively going to be big data and how effectively you know do we solve for what is going to become predominantly these cloud-based services so if I talk about de-risking you know I think I think one of the challenges here is where we run at either end at times we run from right at legislation end which is what can you do and of course in Australia we often face into the context of you know data sovereignty it's always a big issue in terms of when you speak to you know the legal team wears it hosted who's got the data how can we protect the data in the IP right through to I think the role that Sarah plays in terms of you know taking investments and turning them into things that you know make sense for the business I think the challenge around de-risking is often about relationships and you know I think there's a lot of things that you can read about it but at the end of the day the position you take as a chief information officer as a big you know business executive how do we take an investment strategy and how do we translate into something it's going to mean something for the business either in adding value to the share price or taking costs out of the business so that we can do more with the money that we save you know I think by many default you know we are constrained sometimes what legislation but I think often it's just the questions we ask that helps us solve for those problems now of course we the third area want to talk is the collaboration we do a lot of these events and a lot of them are you know at a big boom vendor shops like IBM or HP or EMC and by the very nature of this their heft they're running into partners and there you know the whole cooperation yeah what's the cios attitude on collaboration in terms of I mean though the peer-to-peer thing is very strong you guys culturally very strong with your peers but how do you collaborate with competitors as that hole co-op titian thing hit your your world and talked about it specifically in terms of collaboration within the service now can yeah I think I think we're very much on the start of our service now journey we've we've been going now really for about six months and like most we started with the night esm instance from what I've been able to see we're very well progressed on what we do and obviously we'll talk about that as well but you know we I don't think there's anything that we're doing that hasn't been done elsewhere and I think the challenge is how do you apply that in your own context we've been very open with a lot of our people in terms of you know even some of our competitors are watching what we do and of course we watch what they do at the end of the day I think the measures of success are very simple for our clients and that is deliver the services that we ask you to do deliver them very well the technologies that you use regardless well you know what that's up to you so Craig talk a little bit about mobile and you know you mentioned that you've got 4,000 field guys out there and Australia for those who don't know still doesn't have a road that goes all the way across right i mean there so there's some desolate areas is a bumpy one at one point is there a bumpy one if you have a if you have a range rover hope it's about anyway so talk about you know one the challenges of having this field force and then to how the current trends and mobility are impacting your ability to know that help them do their jobs perhaps a couple things on this one that you know and I'll start at the telecommunications in the public internet level you know we we do run into challenges around the breadth of and the size of our country and we do run into coverage issues but you know if you put that aside where that seems to be growing and some people may be familiar with what the federal government's doing around their national broadband network program which is in our 36 billion dollar program to provide connectiveness around the country that aside you know from our perspective we want to have people in the field we want them working and the way to do that is to provide them with infield devices a lot of our people for so long have been working off paper they literally print paper out they'll take it with them they'll fill it out in some cases they'll roll it over the bonnet of a four-wheel drive in Western Australia they'll mark it up with a texture I'll probably spill some toffee on it at the same time that will then be post packed back into the main office where will render that back into autocad and then we'll figure out six weeks later that actually we really don't understand what you've done and we'll send them back out again it's probably not the best way to do things so you know if I think about what we're doing there very shortly our people will take out a tablet they'll mark it up on the fly will be using surface now to drive the service autumn side of that and as mediately as they submit that will render that in autocad in have an infield collaboration which is just going to take out six weeks of a cycle time just at the front end and you know to reduce 0 error rate by at least eighty percent the second piece which i think is really interested in terms of how we're using the product within the next six months will have nearly 250 million dollars of revenue flowing through service now whilst it's being used for itsm we're standing it up as a business platform with 250 million million dollars in revenue I'd say within a month the target will be half a billion so our revenue base will be flowing through the platform now to give you an example of what we're doing there we will do in home services for one of the utilities companies in Australian will drive about 70 to 80 million dollars worth of revenue through it this year and we are putting all of our service orders in there we're running asset management through the platform serialization of stock integrated into Division Microsoft's and vision persol are set we then take that information and we push that out to a tablet for our Enfield people who accept or reject the job now one great example of where service now so given us power that we didn't have is if you think for every hundred jobs that we do our technicians have to fill out 2,000 pages of a 4 it's a compliance issue that we've had to face into we service now we're driving it from form-based they mark it up on the tablet they then asked the custom to sign it they physically draw the house and mark up where the panels will go on the roof and they submit it for every job we do we take 20 pages of a 4 out and we take out back a house after you had to read that it's a remarkable thing to be able to do I think this year will take out 40,000 pages of a for that need review wow that is amazing i'm having saying all week that to me service now is about scaling your business and it's about delivering business value i try no you just gave two examples for its enabling you to reach means the scale and this i really like this value discussion is that is the value discussion in your mind something that its service now isn't is enabling additional value or is it just enabling you to actually see the value flow or a combination you know one of the things that i really liked about service now when i first saw it meant it's resonated with me since we started the journey is the simplicity of the interface and you know i was just talking to one of one of the service providers downstairs about some reporting and analytics software and i said what do you want to use for as it actually I don't want to use it I want my business execs to use it right because I don't want to be sitting there writing reports i think you know i need to be able to empower my people and my colleagues at the table as well as my board to be able to construct reports with information that makes sense to the problems they're trying to solve for you know and i think when we look at servicenow in terms of the value it derives its the simplicity of the way in which the information could be presented back and you know the information is then providing a framework for taking decisions and more importantly I want a framework from which our clients can see the value that we're pushing out to them we were talking earlier this morning to Fred ludie after his keynote and the internet of things came up he indicated that is one of the interesting trends yes he's tracking and then he sort of tied it back into service now as part of the vision they basically he wants to touch virtually you know everybody out there and you know presumably potentially every device out there yeah you guys are in this sort of Internet of Things business of instrumenting you know the the infrastructure energy infrastructure can you talk about that a little bit and talk about the whole you know this big data theme what this all means to your company I think you know the big big diet is interesting because I don't think it's really been defined I think it's still it very much at a concept stage so people talk about it in terms of what do we know about what we know they talk very broadly about social networks and interactions and information you can extract but perhaps I can give you a really good example of where we're going to take the platform next that will play into the big data piece you know over the next six months we will stand up a self-management workforce interface for our people so if you can imagine this which doesn't exist today I think we're really going to be first in the southern hemisphere to stand this up people will be able to register with our business putting in place in fact their skills their capabilities the insurances they hold the compliance as they hold the type of work that they want to do so for example I only want to work on a thursday sat down sunday and by the way I only work on single story houses I don't do doubles by the way here's my contracting model and the subset of contractors that I have and this is the rate that I'll work for now today we have a very heavy process-driven hey char you know I've got to talk to everyone and then I'll employ you and that process just takes too long we'll get to self managing of not only the registration cycle but also how I self-managed my profile now once i get to there think our workforce reach will move from 4,000 to 20,000 or 30,000 people will register with our business to do work for us that we can then go out and capture so you'll be able to essentially funnel down those candidates right so you didn't add so then you talk about Big Data right and you say so now that I know who you are what else do I know about you in the public internet world and I can start to look at what people say about you on facebook so i can say ok you're a plumber terrific we need that sort of skill and capability what else do you know out there and how do you represent yourself out there because if i'm going to put you out there with one of our clients customers i need to know that you're going to represent us the way that i want you to be represented how about all this how about all the data that's going to come up with smart meters how do you envision using that that's the bets a great question when you're going to this year do somewhere around about 400,000 smart meter replacements and you know those sorts of jobs funny enough they take about twenty eight minutes each they're a very quick job the data that comes back off the smart meter obviously goes back into the utility providers but one thing that the utility providers in Australia doing very now is that they have what's called an in-home display device you put that device on your wall I don't know if you've got it in the US but you put it on your wall and you can look at it you know every minute and tells you how much energy you're consuming in your house and you can start to take decisions around the way in which you use your appliances but you know if you look at us we are very much the intermediary there to get that data to the house and back to the utility company and and for us of course service now will then form the backbone of the asset management cycle so we now know where that asset is we know when that s it needs to be treated and then we can proactively go back and help these people manage their devices both at a consumer and at the business end ya think you're a little bit of head up from New England we just finally get rid of our windmills yeah I know Austin you know the folks down at austin energy of doing some cool stuff like that yeah i think you know generally you're a little bit ahead of the companies now you're actually implementing those today is absolutely so we are doing the ship packing dispatch of the in-home devices today in australia and then we're also been doing the smart meter replacement for two or three years now we've got a large cycle to come so it appears that service now has great potential of the i likened to a tick it's not the best analogy sort of embedded into the organization yeah and then you know it's like a ticket of virus but but not really I mean you know it's funny because you talk about you know Salesforce and that's kind of how Salesforce happens right here by two licenses and then three seasons and five seats and then you got a million seats it seems like service now actually doesn't take that that sort of approach but nonetheless this whole not idea of a platform of the ability to develop other applications seems to be something that your organization could take advantage of our time where do you see that going I think from my perspective is and other things that we need to get right you know the first thing is we've got to be able to capture a workforce so you know really we need a workforce of people with skills and capabilities that we can leverage back into the market we want our clients to see the value in which we hole I think the second thing for us very much is that we have to be able to move information around very quickly and we need to capture the information in terms of the work that we perform push that information out get the information back and then pass that back to our clients and of course like any business we need to be run a very effective billing cycle so to give an example again how service now is helping us we've built in what's called an RCT I process which effectively is just a taxi invoicing so when I go out and do a job once I close that job in service now that kicks a process that starts the billing cycle so I will immediately know that I've just been paid for that job you know and we run some assumptions around the quality and the work that you've done so that part is also next steps for us in terms of just maturing it I think the third piece which is probably one of the challenges of I think we're all going to face in tosa 6 to 12 months is so we've got all this data now what do we do with it you know do we do we understand the information that we've got and you know one of the things that I really like about the platform that will start to work on more is how can you extract the data and such you know such a format if you like for our business leaders they can start to take decisions I really think that the growth of the platform is not going to come from my team I think I'm going to be surpassed by my business leaders and executives are going to ask me to do more and I think they're going to ask me to do more in the field and the space of mobility and they're going to ask me to do more and how can they start to interpret the data they've got to drive business performance yeah in the example you gave it so this is a great example of instrumenting your business and that seems to be where it's headed yeah taking out costs in efficiencies and dry new revenue opportunities yeah I'll go everything alright great so Craig thanks very much for for coming to thank you thank you John says we talked a little bit about Big Data go to Wikibon 02 / big data you'll get all the free research that we've done we've got a new infographic out just today that actually Forbes did on our data so that's kind of cool check out the blog of Craig Bashar thanks very much for coming on this is the cube right back after this work

[Music] [Music] okay we're back after that nice break here from knowledge we're here in Las Vegas at the Aria hotel this is service now's big customer conference about 4,000 folks here mostly customers most of the content at this event comes from customers its practitioners talking to practitioners which is quite rare actually at these conferences I'm Dave Volante everybody thanks for watching with wiki Bond org I'm here with my co-host Jeff Frick this is Silicon angles the cube we go to these events we extract the signal from the noise we love to bring you tech athletes and Fred ludie is here he is a tech athlete he's the founder of ServiceNow he started this platform around 2003 Fred welcome to the cube thank you very much so we really want to hear the story you know but we've been asked to sort of hold that off because we got another segment with you tomorrow but I just I have to ask you I mean seeing how this conference and ServiceNow as an organization has grown you just must be so thrilled in particular with the customer enthusiasm <Fred>  you know fundamentally I've got a personality flaw and I call it a kindergarten mentality I want to see my art on their refrigerator and the only way you can do that is by making somebody happy and so to see these people here with the excitement the enthusiasm and the smiles on their faces really is satisfying that kindergarten mentality cakes oh good stuff we were talking about that earlier Jeff had not seen the cakes before and was was quite amazed today no I think that's an industry-first actually good well be yeah announcements today you know that's if so you guys had some you're gonna transform an organization you got to have mobile I mean the whole world to go on mobile five billion devices and and growing what you guys announced today <Fred> well we announced the ability to run all of our applications on the iPad and you know I think people's reasonable expectations these days are that they should be able to manage anything anywhere anytime using the device that they currently have now I I like to think of an iPad as something that you use when you're pretending to be attending a meeting or when you're pretending to be watching TV with your family and when you are pretending to do that it'd be nice if very efficiently and very effectively you could manage whatever you needed to manage to get your job done and so today what we've announced is the ability to run everything that ServiceNow has on that iPad  <Dave> yeah I mean it seems to mobile is basically a fundamental delivery model and maybe even the main delivery model going forward wouldn't it be I <Fred> I think it will be a main delivery model and it's a it's a user interface that that requires complete rethinking about how you're going to do things you know for the longest time we we looked at screens with 24 by 80s you know these character screens and then we got big pixel monitors and then we got bigger pixeled monitors and we got very accurate Mouse's and everything got small and got hovers you've got you know this massive amount of data and now the form factor is completely shrunk and you're looking at this as my major input device so how am I going to get you know everything I used to do with a mouse where I'm hovering over things to see what they do or I'm touching you know 16 by 16 pixels which you by the way you can't hit with your fingernail how am I going to get all of that stuff how am I gonna be able to work with all that stuff using only my thumb or thumbs so how are you specifically taking advantage of that smaller form factor and you know the feature sets that you see in things like iPad <Fred> well I think it's a matter of rethinking so we're trying to get the user to be to be able to accomplish their task by doing considerably less work and one of the things that our system is actually very comprehensive it's very big and we create in the browser and our first user interface it was really created in 2005 we treat all the elements of the system equally so now what we've done in the in the mobile which I think is very unique it does MySpace I mean Facebook doesn't have this Lincoln doesn't have this we know exactly what you do as a user and we remember those things that you do edit of Li and so we're able to create shortcuts or we're able to remember the system is able to remember what you do and then very quickly present you back with those tasks which are repetitive so we're trying to simultaneously compress the information and reduce the interactions yeah so that doesn't sound trivial it sounds like there's some secret sauce behind that talk about that a little bit <Fred> well it's not trivial and it's a there there is secret sauce but it does it just requires you to rethink and for me you know if you if you read the jobs biography there were a couple of interesting things in their number one when he met dr. land they had both agreed that everything that had been invented was going to be invented had already been invented right the other thing that they that they pretty much agreed on are what job said and a quote that I've used for years is that great artists copy good artists copy and great artists steal and I've been a thief all my life I just I'm gonna admit it right here it's not on camera live and so what we do is we go ahead and take a look at who's doing this great Amazon is doing it great Zappos is doing it great asan is doing it great you know we and we capture those ideas and then what they meant by great artists steal is that you take them and you reformulate them for the task that you're trying to solve for the problem that you're trying to solve and the rich the artist won't they probably the original artist probably won't even recognize that as their work but yet they're they're deeply inspirational to us an artist so do you fancy yourself as a bit of  <Fred> well I think it's interesting  down down the road and you know to I was watching the Bellagio fountains create something like that if you think about the physics and the art that had to go into that to create that beautiful masterpiece you know it's not just a painting right think about the physics that goes on to shoot something seven its water seven hundred feet in the air and then cut it off instantly and have that all choreographed I mean it's phenomenal amount of engineering but it took also a phenomenal amount of art just to make that interesting so that we were we actually stood there in rapt amazement of you know look how all this is choreographed so yes I do in fact I don't think I take exception to the term engineering software engineering I don't think we haven't progressed to the point where this is an engineering this is this is an art this is a craft you know it's something that people practice and we try to get better at it and better at it and better at it but I don't think it's anywhere near an engineering discipline <Jeff> yeah the other interesting from the jobs book that I never really got until I read the book was like the iPod shuffle because when I first saw the iPod shuffle and you can't do anything you can't manage your playlists on it you all you can do is change songs I don't get it and then in reading the book as you just said you know what is what is it you're trying to accomplish with that form factor right and don't just automatically try to replicate what you can do a one form factor to another form factor but really rethink what's that application and it sounds like you're kind of taking advantage of that opportunity as you take the app to the mobile space into the iPad specifically to rethink what is the best use case for that platform you'll see tomorrow the iPad was really  <Fred> that's right and as as the inspirational first step that we're taking toward a totally mobile app and just like the Apple evolution of building all of this note wonderful new capabilities into iOS and then bringing them back into OS X we're going to be doing the same thing so you'll see tomorrow on stage not only in an iPad app but you will see a native iOS app running and you'll see that it does even more things than the iPad app does and much faster it's a wonderful user experience and those those notions will be also coming back into the browser etc the same way that apples been bringing a lot of the capabilities of iOS back onto OS X <Dave> I was talking to an IT practitioner last month at a large grocer and I asked him what's your what's your biggest challenge what excites you the most and he said the same thing he said both of X what's my biggest challenge is embracing all this pressure from my users for mobile and that's what excites me the most because I have a mobile addict I got in it pulls out all those devices so how do you see this announcement within your user base changing you know the lives of IT  prose.    <Fred> well it'll you know technology since the dawn of time has been used really for two things it's been it's been used to streamline make make tasks more efficient and more streamlined and it's been used to create business differentiators and so our our product really is about process and moving process through an organization and so we want to streamline that as much as possible so if I can we do things like change management change management has multiple levels of approval if I can get it to the point where a manager can pull his phone out of his pocket and do five approvals between meetings he's become significantly more efficient right the changes are going to be done in a more timely fashion and the bottom line improves it's as simple as that <Dave> yeah it's interesting we were those of you watching no we were earlier the today broadcasting from sa P sapphire event and if you go to sapphire are you here to to get huge doses of two things one is Hana of course which is there in memory database but the other is mobile he's all you hear and it's interesting to hear you guys talk about the ERP of IT and your si PE they know the poster child for ERP and all their customers are going to mobile whether it's retail manufacturing you know across the supply chain and so it sounds like you've got sort of similar mentality but more focused obviously with it within IT but of course now you're also reaching beyond IT do you see you're a mobile app a push going beyond the IT community <Fred> yeah absolutely you know our underlying all of our applications we have a platform that say it's a forms based workflow platform that's really purpose-built for something that we would characterize as a service service relationship management so pretty much any request response fulfillment type workflow can be handled by our platform and what our customers have done over the years is create different applications that help them streamline that workflow typically that workflow is handled by by people creating a spreadsheet emailing it to somebody else having a TA back perhaps they built a Lotus Notes app but yes everything that that that or I will say that our platform usage has been expanded by our customers sometimes beyond our wildest dreams and and we love it so you talked about you know some of the greatest artists we stole rights of and so now you guys put up this platform I've said a number of times today it's not trivial to it to actually get a CMDB working in the way that you wanted to get it to work so now you've had this platform out for quite some time your successes started to you know you get a lot of press people are starting to see it do you worry sometimes that people gonna say okay I can do that too I'm gonna I'm gonna you know rip it off what gives you confidence that you can stay ahead of those those thieves out there <Fred> well I have great confidence in that you know we have a very broad base of applications that are very deep in functionality but if that's really something that you want to happen yeah because you want some young people with fresh new ideas to try to unseat you because they will come at the come at this from a completely different perspective and a completely different angle and they will do things that you never thought of and so the race is then on are they going to become more relevant than me or am I going to be inspired by their ideas incorporate them into our platform and stay ahead of them see welcome that all right absolutely welcome back yeah we we wouldn't be where we are today if Edison and Bell weren't weren't the jobs and gates of their time I mean they had just and I think jobs and gates as well right they had this great rivalry that really caused technology to move ahead a lot faster than when it was just I be am selling mainframes and so you need those rivalries you need that you need that competition you know I'm I'm watching these young guys from asana it's a great little platform for for tasking and you know they came out of Facebook they have a very Facebook mentality and they have phenomenal ideas and believe me guys from asana I'm watching you those are just that's where great ideas come from >> <Dave> Wow we always like to say we love sports analogies here in the cube and Jeff your kids are into sports well as our mind you always want to see and play that more competitive you know environment it sounds like Fred you have the same philosophy yes very much so yeah excellent all right Fred well listen we really appreciate you coming by now you come back Fred's gonna be back again tomorrow we're gonna go through the story of service now that's why we really didn't touch up on it and in any kind of detail today but to it but but but Fred actually started the company we give him a little preview Fred so you started the company really not to go solve an IT service management problem right you came up with this sort of idea this platform and and then you you that was really the first application that you developed right up a step in for that oh great you see give us a little tidbit we're gonna back >> every day I wake up that's all I really >><Fred> I've been a programmer now for 40 years want to do why do I program because I want somebody to take a look at the technology that I build and say hey that's pretty helpful I like that I can use they're gonna put that in my fridge fridge so the real strategy behind the company was to build some software that somebody wanted that hopefully they would pay me so I could build more software that was the entire strategy and so you know on one hand I love technology and on the other hand it really irritates me when it makes me feel stupid or it makes other people feel stupid so what I wanted to do was to create an enterprise platform that people could use and they would feel empowered they could walk up and use it like they'd walk up and use an ATM like they'd walk up and buy something from Amazon etc so a completely you know consumer eyes thought process and then that was the thought process really in O 3 and no 4 and then what we do really figured out was that a platform is a very hard sale you know it's tough to convince somebody that they should take this it'd be like selling you an Intel processor and telling you can do anything you want right I want to solve a business problem and so we decided to go after the ITSM space first it was a space that was very underserved very lucrative and and growing significantly <Dave> amazing so so join us tomorrow we're gonna Fred back on and we're going to here this story the founding story of ServiceNow and how we got to where we are today so Fred thanks very much for coming on and sharing the news and I'm gonna change it all by tomorrow good all right so so keep it right there I will be up next we've got Douglas Leone coming on which is a partner at Sequoia Capital and and and one of the better-known DC's out in the valley so so keep it right there will be back with Doug just in a minute this is ServiceNow this is the cube this is knowledge right back

okay we're back this is painful on time with Wikibon org and this is the cube silicon angles continuous production we here at knowledge service now's big customer event i'm here with my co-host Jeff Frick this morning we were broadcasting live from sa p sapphire my colleague john furrier jeff kelly and david foyer were down here but we're here in Las Vegas at the aria hotel we're here with dave schneider who's the senior vice president of worldwide sales and services at service now Dave welcome to the cute thank you for having me a lot of good energy here talking to customers said Brian Lily on from from Equinix great case study great story we were Jeff and I were at the you know the customer event last night just cruising around talking to customers talking to prospects everybody's really excited what are they what are they telling you I think what the colonists is that what what we're all about which is making customers successful in their journey both the IT Service Management and allowing IT to be helpful to the entire organization is actually working and that the value they're getting from the investment around our technology is yielding really good results for their country so when you go to meet customers you know describe paint a picture for us of you know new customers new prospects what's the environment like no I think it range is a lot between customer experiences so as people are becoming more and more comfortable to cloud idea service we're seeing people really just rotate naturally to that wanting to get away from fixed fixed offerings and traditional and hosted systems internal there into internal their networks so we're seeing a lot of excitement about that and then there's some disbelief there's some displeased but actually after all these years of trying that they can actually make IT an effective part of an organization and our tools and our solutions really help them do that so when you say all these years of time what have they tried that's not work it seems like they've tried everything they've tried they tried remedy the tribe Peregrine they tried I have a corona motor tool right absolutely so I think what happens in IT is it you know they've been the Forgotten ones they've been the ones that didn't have the opportunity to invest as the other lines of business for a below best to keep themselves competitive in the marketplace now we're giving them best-in-class tools so that they are no longer hindered by the lack of sophistication they want that so you get your getting penalized in a sense by you know the past failures of other initiatives right that's the big barrier that you have to come over it is that inertia the existing disbelief is that right I think there's some disbelief also I think I T is often starved for resources i T is a cost to an organization not necessarily seen as a benefit by the financial parts of the organization however if used correctly they can be turned into an asset class and make the whole organization more competitive this morning we had GE talking on stage and they were able to do a massive transformation using the tool to generate millions of dollars of cost savings and additional revenue streams yeah I mean I've been saying to me this is all about global scale and demonstrating IT value and excellence throughout the organization are you finding that you're so we talked about sort of your prospects when you go in when you go in after customers implemented let's say for a year or so what's different what's changed and particularly i'm interested in that notion of IT value is their heightened awareness of IT value throughout the organization well so i think part of what happens is IT changes the perception of IT and organization gets changed through the transformation with our tool they go from as we we often say the Department of node or the Department of now that's a real thing and that that kind of confidence the swagger that the people have nit for IT kind of gets reestablished and you see people really proud of doing what they're doing and knowing that they're bringing a real value to their their customer is really an important part of what we do so the new confidence that these organizations have on delivering value of their customer the ability to support and integrate hundreds of tools potentially into a single platform record that's transformative to a CIO or to an IT executive who didn't know where things were in when the bad things would happen they couldn't tell what was causing the event and know how to fix it so what questions do you ask prospective customers what's your sort of list of top two or three questions that you start with I think first of all is why would you continue down the path that you are if there is something better what what would keep you from doing it and then we also look for other initiatives that are important to the business where what's driving them so if they've done a lot of integrations through acquisitions that's a huge opportunity for cost savings and aggregation into one one set of tools okay let's talk a little bit about your sort of sales organization you guys I think have these show you let's let me back up a little bit so you start with it I presume incident management problem management maybe even change management is that right is that the starting point so we get brought in to solve a lot of different problems now in an IT organization so it's not uncommon that someone would think about replacing their old help desk or incident management system we always say help desk is sort of like to four letter words you really try to make the desk go away because our customers don't want us sitting behind desks they want us to be out talking to them or they want to self help themselves and so we start maybe with looking at the historical systems very quickly we try to get into a much broader conversation okay and then my understanding is your sales organization has evolved where you will both look at existing customers helping them utilize the platform further beyond maybe just the core helpdesk an incident management problem management and utilize service now as a platform for other areas can you talk about that a little bit so went once when we get involved with a customer the customer is a customer for life so we kind of have a mantra inside of service now which is love that customer and if you love the customer and you do things for and on behalf of them teaching them about the technology and how they can benefit from it we get additional businesses they're more and more successful so every time we interface with the customer it's an opportunity to throw them an opportunity to make them more successful every time they do something to add technology around us they're saving money and probably growing their license business with us but having a pretty good at bit so it's interesting when we were at the event last night for the people who weren't here there were pictures of cakes all over the place there was there was cakes on the table and there was a slideshow with cakes and I said so what is the story with the cake what's in it and I kind of know the stories but it's good to follow till you said about what's really cared about a lot of us like sugar so there is that there's this common desire to celebrate so actually it was solving not not coming tonight well it's not common IT but it actually started with one customer or a couple different customers well when we went go lives the customer actually themselves they didn't go buy a store-bought cake they baked their own cake and they would decorate the cake in various ways and most of them had service now or Thank You service now it's part of it they really viewed this as a setting free element and so they were celebrating like a birth or a wedding like anything else that we celebrate in life they were celebrating with a kick and so it became a tradition I can't tell you how many hundreds of cakes I've now eaten but it's really a fun thing to do and it kind of keeps on a life about life of its own and sometimes I'll do interim cakes when they do go live with a new module or other aspects and call those cupcakes it's it's interesting as they said we were down at the event last night talking to a lot of customers and potential customers and the vibe is very good and the other vibe that's that that picked up this morning I mean the Kino started at 8am right this is not a sleep and group of people these are people that are up and ready to go everyone was waiting to eat at six thirty they were on the ground and so these are people that are working you know they're they're getting stuff done this is not kind of a hangout tech crowd well I mean there was some hanging out last night there was all hang out last night however I will say this event is all about the customer more than eighty percent of the content is taught by customers to customers they come up with the content they're here because they want to learn and so they don't want to miss a thing they're going to bring the ideas back to their companies and implement change and so they view themselves through service now is an opportunity to make a massive the organization it's obviously a pretty darn good career move for a lot of the customers as well who gets successful with us but most importantly they want to be here and we're thrilled to have them because you know quite honestly I get energy i sat in that keynote presentation and I got so much energy listening to the panel I was fired up and ready to go David you guys have a ninety-six percent renewal rate which is that's the same how is it that you've been able to achieve that what what's the secret sauce behind that what a customer's tell you so it fluctuates a little bit but it's been a 95 plus 4 13 quarters in a row I think really the issue is if you do right by the customers where why would they go somewhere else the alternatives just aren't that good but most importantly if you're delivering value every day through an engagement if you're bringing technology to bear to solve a problem once you solve the problem you don't need to Joe try something else you look two ways to leverage what you've already built and moved forward so the four or five percent of customers that disappear many of those are through acquisitions right companies got acquired and went out of business very rarely is that they made a choice to go with a different technology you guys don't and maybe used to in the early days but you don't sort of overwhelm your messaging with with cloud you know some of these some of the SAS companies do can you talk about sort of how you sell to organizations and a little bit more more depth it's not a it's almost night not a hard core technology sell its really around business process and value can you talk more so we sell to multiple levels in a company so there there are folks that are functionally responsible for different aspects of what we do let it be incident management or help desk let it be people that are trying to build knowledge management systems or trying to do employee self-service those are different constituents that will talk to in a sales campaign and then we often will try to reach the CIO or an executive NIT you give them the message of what we can really provide because you know people don't start off thinking you know I want to replace my helpdesk them and end up with the RP for IT we've got to convince them or give them the possibility that that's or sorry paint the picture that the possibilities are real so to customers do they do I mean a lot so many projects today are not not IT projects their business driven yes and there's a business case around them and the whole ir r and r roi etc and pv whatever it is how do people conduct a business case for service now it ranges dramatically depending on what problem they're trying to solve but you know some of what we do is sort of like an oxygen water problem right you can't live today without breathing or drinking some water you can't live in IT without solving some of these problems so it's an oxygen issue the nice to have things are quickly becoming oxygen issues employee self-service are you kidding me you're not gonna have a system that lets employees help themselves why wouldn't you do that why wouldn't you have an automated password reset process to save money why wouldn't you do cloud provisioning to save money these are these are oxygen issues can't live without them type of problems for IT organizations and the reality is they're not getting the job done today so being able to show them a way to make it transformed is great we do intercede a lot of times during an upgrade process or during that consolidation phase where they realize we've got hundreds of tools and they're all in little islands they're not talking to each other and they don't have any data that they can trust so you strive for this consumer like experience we're hearing that a lot what are your customers telling you about oh how well you're doing that I think the exciting things we're going to see tomorrow with Fred's keynote presentation on the handheld on tablet device interfaces are really all about continuing that push towards consumerization nobody wants to use a green screen interface that was designed in the 80s anymore our customers are wanting the same kind of tools they had or they have when they go home when they use google or they use amazon they want the same kind of experience when they're at work and so we provide them the ability to make that happen and that's really transformative to how people perceive IT it is it is it more the IT staff that wants that type of experience or their their customers their clients and their own company are telling them this is our expectation if she said only use Google is only amazon is no I mean I go as far to say is if I'm going to an old guard custom or the old tools and I'm trying to recruit the generation that's coming into the workforce today and I'm showing user interfaces that looking at acquitted and old that employee base isn't going to stay there very long so if you want to be able to grow your business with today's talent on a global scale you need tools that look familiar and that people want to use I'm looking at your screen over there it looks pretty sexy it doesn't look anything like it did 10 years ago Yeah right so did your workforce like Frank's Lupin you're hiring by Mars what are you hiring what are you looking for we're hiring athletes we're hiring people to care we love that Natalie yeah absolutely i'll check out i mean if i could say it one way is if you want to love your customer and sell transformative technology and you want to be part of something that's bigger than you because that's what i'm looking for i'm looking for people that want to join us create something special make a difference not just in our lives which is nice and fun we're really focused on the customer is when you change your customers experience in their perception it has gifts beyond cakes it has gifts beyond making a great company these are lifelong relationships you'll have and even opportunity to that at service now well the enthusiasm here at knowledge is palpable you talk to the customers and they all smiles on their faces they want to be here they want as you said David share their stories most of the content coming from customers and then of course the cube so keep it right there I'll be back with Jeff brick David thank you very much for coming in the cube and sharing your story this is the cube this is knowledge we're here live in Vegas we'll be right back with our next guest right after this great thanks good

okay we're back this is Dave vellante I'm with Wikibon organ this is silicon angles the cube the cube is a live mobile studio we come into events we're here at knowledge service now's big customer event we're here at the aria hotel in Las Vegas and we've got wall-to-wall coverage today tomorrow and part of thursday as many of you know we were at sapphire now the big SI p customer show were simulcasting that on SiliconANGLE too but we're here in Las Vegas the ServiceNow conference is all about transformation transforming from no to now we've kind of got a double whammy segment here virtually every industry is transforming and certainly Big Pharma is transforming quite dramatically as well as the IT components of many industries Ross rexer is here he's the managing director at kpmg the global consultancy and T Juan Lumpkin who's an IT practitioner for Eli Lilly gentlemen welcome to the cube okay thanks for you so Ross let's start with you at a high level what's happening in the pharmaceutical industry in general Big Pharma how is the industry itself transforming and then we'll get into the I TPS sure so many of the Big Pharma's find themselves today in a situation that is unique to their their business industry and market where a lot of blocked blockbuster drugs which have been significant sources of revenue over the years are starting to come on with that it brings competition and a loss of revenue so the big farmers are all in a very coordinated methodical process right now to resize their business and at the same time enable the R&D function to bring new drugs to market focusing on patient outcomes that will happen in different ways in them they probably ever done before so the business model itself has changed and along with it all the support functions like ITA of course too so in that so it's all about the pipeline right and and the challenge if I understand it is that historically you got the big pharma companies they would you know go do about go about their thing and develop these drugs and they get a blockbuster and it was a relative today a relatively slow paced environment that's that's changing if I understand it correctly what's driving that change so the the innovation around medicines today is much different than it has been over the last 10 20 years in that composition around in the use of different biotech components to create a to create medicines is now being sourced in different ways historically Pharma built itself and really invested and was really a research and development company almost entirely in-house right so all the support systems and everything the way that the business was run was around that nowadays these the farmers are collaborating with smaller providers many of them in ways that again they just historically have never done everything was done in house to build to bring drugs to market and now it's it's shifted absolute to the opposite side where big farmers are relying on these providers these third-party providers for all stages of R&D and ultimately FDA and the release of these so t1 I introduced you as an IT practitioner and Lily so talk about more specifically about your role there you focused on infrastructure I teach em a list or more about them yeah so my rules are about service integration think about those services that we deliver to our internal customers within lily and how do we do that across our complex ecosystem where you have multiple different IT departments you have multiple suppliers who have different rigs and complexities in that space and so our job is how do we minimize that complexity for our internal business partners and making sure that the way we build variety is seamless for our internal customers okay so we heard Ross talking about the the pressures in the in the industry from a from an IT practitioner standpoint what how does that change change your life what are the drivers and what's the business asking you to do but just like anyone we need more volume but we also have to do that under under constraint and so for us how do we get more fishing so you think about this basically gone under you can only do so much outsourcing you only do so much change and so you have to see how do I start running my business more efficiently and I think that's the big shift and I tias you're moving from a from an internal infrastructure towers are truly looking at how do we deliver IT services and part of living IT services and making sure that we're a value-added partner and also being assured that we're competitive with other sources of our businesses have to get services from an IT perspective yeah so 10 years ago we used to talk a lot about demand management and to me it's that's why i love this from now from know to now because demand management is actually ended up just being no we just can't handle the the volume so you mentioned constraints you've got constraints you've got to be more efficient so so talk a little bit about what you did to get more efficient for us it was all about standardization so how do we how do we build standardization across our IT infrastructure nikka system within our IT partners empower external partners what that does it gives us flexibility so that we can deliver our systems and be more agile they think about our internal space we had a lot of complexity we had multiple procedures multiple processes different business units operating or delivering IT services in a consistent manner what we've been able to do it being able to streamline that we've been able to be more consistent internally in a line on the comments that are processes and how we deliver those ikea services to our customers so Ross you're talking about the sort of changing dynamic of what I would call sort of the pharmaceutical ecosystem right so so that's that sounds like it's relatively new in pharma it used to be sort of a go-it-alone the big guys hey we're multi-billion dollar companies we don't need these little guys you see all these startups coming out there really innovative there faster so take us through sort of how that's evolving how companies are dealing with the ecosystem and what kind of pressures that puts on IT what are you seeing out there so as t1 was was mentioning as well this was pushing to IT service integration as a kind of one of the next frontiers of now right being able to have the single pane of glass single system of record of IT and our ability to bring standardized services up and down in a coordinating consistent way has allowed for the bigger more monolithic type companies in be able to interact with with these smaller more agile more tech-savvy appeal partners and be able to not overburden them so the little provider who has maybe less less overhead of IT infrastructure and their processes would find it hard to be able to collaborate electronically with a big pharma if we had to adopt the big pharma's old-style processes so service integration is all about allowing for the the easy plug-and-play of these providers and establishing the reference set of processes and the supporting data that's needed to govern those transactions or the length of the of the outsourcing arrangement with with that provider in a way that doesn't get overburden them but provides the company Big Pharma the ability to have transparency ability to see risks before they're happening and to enter manage the cause so talk about your practice a little bit how do you what's role do you play it's obviously you've got this increasingly complex ecosystem evolving they've definitely got different infrastructures um how do you sort of mediate all this so Kim G what are our go-to-market offering and our solution set is based around a set of leading practices that that we have established over the past 17 years for example that we've been in the IT service management consulting and advisory business so we have these accelerators that we can we bring to a project and engagement like like the one we're at Eli Lilly where we can quickly faster than ever establish a common ground for those processes the operational processes first and foremost that would don't require years and years of consultancy process engineering 20 years ago type of thing so our role in that is to provide the basis for the are the operating model that's going to go forward and allow the core customer as well as these other providers to get there fast to get operating faster so t1 we've been hearing a similar pattern from the customers that we've talked to a lot of stovepipes a lot of legacy you know tools a lot of uncoordinated sort of activities going going on is that what what Lily with you would you describe that as an accurate depiction of the pasture i think i think that i think you're being kind yeah I'm sure we kind on the cheer we don't like to feed our guests up what I think it not to over use the ERP for IT term but this is something I t we've done for our business partners over the years we haven't done for our so if you think about the essay peas of the world where you get your CI CFO a one-click look at the the financial assets of the company you think about from a CRM perspectively doing that for our sales force we've done that from an HR perspective but we haven't taken the time to look at from an IT perspective and how do i give the cio that same visibility across our portfolio services so that he can ask those same questions you can have that same visibility so i want to add a little color to this whole erp for IT though of course on the one hand you know the sort of single system of record that's a positive but when you think of erp i say we were at SI p sapphire there's a lot of complexity in erp and with that type of complexity you'd never succeed but so what's your experience been thus far with regard to you know the complexity in my senses it's not this big monolithic system it's a cloud-based SAS based system talk about that a little bit well for us it's getting to a set of standards it actually helped reduce the complexity where you have complexity when you have multiple business procedures across the organization delivering services and so to get to that single source that single record it is actually help to reduce a lot of complexity on our part help it make it easier for us to deliver customer service for customers the other piece of that to which is the the singularity of vision of how we deliver I team so right now within our business we're depending on what area in you may get IT servers that delivers slightly differently from each area we've been able to streamline that and say this is how you're going to receive IT services and make it a more predictable experience for our internal users I saw Rus I want to talk about this notion of a single system of record before I ask you why it's so important what are we talking about here because today you've got a single system of record for your transactions you might have a single system of record for your your data warehouse all these single systems are at a record so what do you mean by a single system of record so when we're talking with service now and specifically in the IT Service Management domain what we're talking about is having integrated the capability to see data across the different data domains if you like so operational data performance data service level data with that coupled with the IT finance data as well as a zesty one put 360-degree vision of your assets as well so linking all those sources of data together in a way that can be used for analytics maybe for the first time ever so we we we use the analogy of IT intelligence right so what we've given our business partners and business intelligence over the years mmm it's-- never had that so the ability to provide IT intelligence that allows for the leadership due to to have data have information that they can take decisions and then ultimately become predicted with that right so be able have the knowledge to know what we're doing to make the right choices and in the future be able to do some predictive analysis again back to the point about the demands really never got one hundred percent right over the years we've talked about a lot but having the ability to understand the consumption and have the levers to influence demand and see it grow I want to go back to this business process discussion you were sort of reference the 20 years ago the whole VPO of movement and you know business process reorganization it seems to me that what what occurred was you had let's say a database or some kind of system and maybe there was a module and then you build a business process around that and so you had relatively inflexible business process they were hard to change is are you seeing that change it we at the cusp of the dawn of a new era where I can actually create whatever business process I want to around that single system of record is that truly a vision that's coming to fruition we believe it is and our experience it is it is starting to happen and I think service now with their platform is one of the emerging leaders in this space that's allowing for that to happen percent of the day so you have you have a concise platform that allows you enough flexibility to build new processes but has the common data structure has the common user interface as the common workflow set in a and all wrapped in and easy to maintain type of platform is what I think 20 years ago we wished we had and we tried to build in many different ways and ended up mostly cobbling things together but we really believe that and again our starting to see success out there David the platform question is solved and that we're now able to get to the prosecutor historically we you know delivered value plenty of value the problem is so much of that value was sucked by the infrastructure and and and not enough went into the innovation around it do you want my question to you is so people don't like change naturally now maybe it's different and nit maybe they want change in IT but did you see initial resistance I'll know we have this way of doing it we don't want to change or are people enthusiastic about change talk about that a little quite you hit it spot-on and absolutely the technology is the easy part of it it's really the change part that that's the most difficult piece of it and I would say we've done to a lot of work just a line organization and we've had a lot of support for from not only our internal IT people but also our senior leadership team so we've gotten support we've seen a lot of buy-in not saying still them not going to be easy not gonna be easy but I feel that we've got the right momentum now to make this type of change to get the business volume part of its been able to articulate the value that we're going to receive from from from this initiative so it's early days for for Lily and you guys should just get started on this journey not yesterday but you know you you're in an inference perience to give some advice to your fellow practitioners so my ask you guys both start with t1 what advice would you give to fellow practitioners that are looking to move in this direction great I would say first of all you have to have the business alignment so I need to make sure that you can clearly articulate the value of the change of the company so I can I can talk not in terms of process but in terms of outcomes that we're going to drive for our business partners once you're able to describe those outcomes then you can have the conversation on what's the work it's going to take to get there it's not an easy journey to be able to paint that picture accurately for for our teams and also talk about how we're going to support them through the process and so we're going to talk about the value we're going to we're going to paint the picture the journey we're not going to tell you how I want to support you throughout that process okay Ross you're talking to CIOs what's your what's your main point of advice for CIOs in this regard is look at the transformation as transformational right so it's it's it can be a set of tactical projects and tactical wins based on outcomes that you're looking for however to in order to truly change the way your IT functions runs as a business do all these these great things that we're talking we're talking about today is you have to have the vision and understand that it is there are series of building blocks that we will get you incremental value along the way but this is not a quick you know product slam then again maybe 20 years ago was about let's swap this software for that software and we're going to be good it's not about that and that's not going to get you the transformation so it's about transformation it's about the metrics to be able to prove that you are transforming and continuous improvement Ross do you want thanks very much for coming on the cube and sharing your story we could go on forever we're getting the hook but really appreciate you guys coming up thanks thanks for having right thanks for watching everybody we right back with our next guest Chris Pope is here who's the director of product management for service now so we're going to double-click on the platform and share with you some greater information about that this is the cube I'm Dave vellante we're right back

okay we're back this is Dave vellante Wikibon org i'm here with jeff Frek we're here at knowledge service now is big customer event we're at the aria hotel a lot of enthusiasm a lot of great stories we're seeing a pattern emerged IT is essentially this collection of disparate processes we have a lot of activity going on spreadsheets people using email to really keep track of what's going on many many systems trying to keep track of inventory assets process these problems incidents changes etc etc and it's just this big web of mess here comes service now a single system of record a cmdb that allows you to essentially tailor your processes to your business as opposed to some kind of technology module or some other kind of software system jason wu yan is here he's the vice president of operations for a cloud sherpas works within the ServiceNow business unit at Cloud Sherpas was a big sponsor of the show Jason welcome to the cube thank you very much so you heard my little intro of guys must be excited big sponsor a lot of a lot of action going on in this this event how do you feel we feel outstanding we're happy to be a part of the the event this is my third knowledge conference and of course as the director of training in service now I like to say there are more people in training at this conference that attended the entire knowledge 11 conference so it's a pretty phenomenal event so how was it progressed over the years this is my first knowledge and so I don't have that history I'd say that you know we leave a long legacy with service now all the way back to some of the very first knowledge conferences that occurred in first knowledge conference we probably could have had a the entire conference in this table right and of course today with almost four thousand attendees it's it's certainly grown tremendously we've got somewhere the neighborhood 1,200 people that have gone through training at this event alone we did a big part of providing that training for on behalf of service now with other partners as well and it's an exciting event there's a large buzz here as I'm sure you've seen there really is yes sir Cloud Sherpas other than a great name you know tell us about the company it's a great it's a great story to tell Gartner likes to turma cloud services brokerage and so first and foremost we're cloud services brokerage we have three strategic partnerships we are a Salesforce a partner we are one of the largest Salesforce partners in the world actually top five from a certification standpoint we're the largest Google Enterprise integrator in the world we're actually Google Google's partner of the year in 2011 and 2012 of course we like to think we're pretty good at servicenow as well a little background on us in the ServiceNow business unit we were the first partner in the United States Forest Service now we are the first partner to achieve preferred status at servicenow and the only partner to achieve that status globally today so how's it work so a customer wants to implement service now or google enterprise or Salesforce you basically are that brokerage layer in between so talk about how that works well we help customers adopt manage and enhance their cloud solutions of course focusing on this particular context service now and we are there from day one we're there to help them bring the platform into their environment we're help there to help them refine their processes and practices and of course ultimately align that to the service now a tool and help them manage that through their life cycle so how do you get ready for this what do you tell customers they need to do I tell customers commonly it's best to start where you're at with any improvement activity and ultimately in an enterprise deployment of software you're going to take that as an opportunity to improve I say start where you're at take the time to understand how you do things today you'd be surprised to see how often customers don't aren't all on the same page as to how they perform incident or what the key processes are underneath that or even what the key performance objectives are for that of course we recommend starting where you're at of course we have requirements workshops opportunities we have a number of I tell practices and other types of areas where we can help elaborate those requirements and better align them to their business needs but first and foremost you need to understand what you want your environment to look like some a requirement standpoint the workflows are key so what are the big obstacles that you see people running into when they try to do implement like this I would say in general taking too big of a bite you know there are over twenty two applications as an example in service now you don't want to start day one with 22 applications it's not because ServiceNow wouldn't be able to handle it ServiceNow can deploy very rapidly you really start simple start where you're mature or start where you have the most profound opportunity to improve and align to better practices get the foundation of the platform in place stabilize that and then move on to your next phase and progressively adopt more and more of the application so it's with the pattern that's emerging here we're hearing from customers people starting with incident problem management change management you know why there why why do we see that pattern emerging I think more across the industry that it tends to be a place where customers have have focused on over time so that tends to be where they're more mature they tend to have a better understanding of maybe what their shortcomings are today in those spaces so they tend to be an easier place to start what percentage of them are displacing some other legacy software versus we've heard about I'm not counting excel in that in that list or lotus notes because we hear a lot about that but I would presume there's other software out there that they're displacing we see a lot of software that gets this place down there of course point solutions where there's a lot of databases and homegrown applications handling change your change approvals or cab boards or those types of things of course it's a good opportunity to consolidate that and of course you know service now is known within the industry is being a pretty proficient solution but there are other solutions and we are offering seen that we're offsetting those as well you have we have the steam of no.2 now do you have any you know favorite examples that you can share with us or what are you some of your customers doing ha we've got a lot of good examples i would say probably most recently we just helped a very large clothing manufacturer an american good american company that had nine support environments globally and they had nine different ways of doing everything and they look use this as an opportunity to consolidate those and get to a single source of record get to a single workflow globally and in that they also transformed and improve their processes and and that was something that they couldn't have accomplished with really any other project or really any other tool in the market they of course chose to go down the path with with service now and you know a short few months later they're implemented across incident problem changed service request Service Catalog a very profound Service Catalog spanning literally hundreds of request items employee self-service portal that's been branded to their to their corporate brands there's been a lot of excitement in their injuries or community because they look like their company when they're when they're asking for support and they get a much more automated and in much more efficient process what was the genesis of that was it again something was breaking they had to change it was it let's just take a step back there's opportunity that we wanted to do this or were the easing service now and some other minor role and said wow you know we can actually use this tool to take advantage and do something transformation and generally what we see is service now it's really the enabler it's the enabler to transition transform now we've seen global sis do this forever that's their big thing we're going to help you consolidate and get your hands around it I think service now gives you the ability to to do that neutral of a partner or neutral of an outsourcing provider you can get your arms around it on your own and again many customers are relatively mature and incident problem and change and so it's a good opportunity for them to find those areas where they can aspire to better practice better process and to implement that into service count tool how was your business involves I mean it's so interesting because the poster child of SAS and Salesforce you guys obviously you know chose well that was 1999 may we are in 2013 it's really taking a long time Google Enterprise okay that's make sense but Google you know big whale I see you know guys like workday you know service now come out why do you think it's taken such a long time for these applications to catch on and and how has cloud sherpas you know progressed over those over that time frame well what i would say is the notion of a cloud services brokerage didn't exist eight to ten years ago right that that aggregation point didn't really exist it was those point solutions were always provided by those point providers or their tightly coupled partners in that space and of course with the emergence of this notion of a brokerage that's helping aggregate and manage and enhance low solutions you know we're seeing a lot of degrees of freedom so you know where we started we started as a firm that was focused on Google that emerged into Salesforce and now is through in a company called Navitus a few earlier or late last year now the ServiceNow practice as well and you know moreover it's it's it's where things are going right the truth is is that end-users and corporations and and whether it's you on your iPhone and for personal use or business use you want those applications available you want to have a solid user experience ServiceNow was really first in this space to be able to offer that in a way that was truly platform neutral that just worked whether it was a smart phone or an iPad or a desktop or laptop of what happened so talk about your strategy clouds share purrs and talk a little bit about how you differentiate well we differentiated in a number of ways but specific in the ServiceNow business unit and III don't think it's it could be said enough the cloud services brokerage is a huge differentiating point for us right having the scale that we do globally having you know several key strategic partners enables us to see areas and aspects of the industry that I don't think other partners can but from a service town business you know perspective I think we have a live a couple a couple differentiating points when is we were one of the first adopters of the platform from a partner perspectives so obviously we have a lot of deep skills in this we've done over 320 implementations of service now to date to have and of course 320 over 320 and through that history we've seen we've seen a lot of heuristics we've seen a lot of customer success stories we've seen a lot of things in the platform that customers are asking for time and time again and we've been able to fit that need both by my IT service management but also by industry as well a great example of that is we've got a number of custom applications that we've developed one of them as is a document management document processing application that a lot of legal firms are using in fact what we found is we built it for one company a few years ago Morrison forest or better known as mofo and now five or six legal firms later they've all asking for that same application and so we're finding that there's also you know real opportunity from an industry perspective to align to some of those point solutions extend the platform and just include those in the solution here's so much today about Big Data and you know it's all about this unstructured mass of information a bring structure to unstructured data maybe lending structured and unstructured some people don't even like those terms because it's all sort of blending how does analytics play into this whole IT Service Management IT automation there's a lot of metrics so they get this automating this forms based process is there a place for that or is is there not right now because everybody's kind of doing their own thing you know ten years ago I t was all about the tnit right it's all about the technology now it's all about the eye it's all about the information a great examples we're seeing a lot of partner solutions emerge in the ServiceNow ecosystem that are trying to better rationalize data there are tools like mere 42 for example which it's whole purpose is to is to bolt onto service now and provide a more comprehensive analytic package and there are many other examples of that as well in truth it's a services lead operation at this point it's not a technology led operation the only way to really ensure that you're delivering any quality of services or support is the quality of data that you provide and that starts with your requirements and those requirements need to bridge the performance measures in those performance there is just being an easy way to be accessible transparent and manageable and of course that's a big part of what service now does so how do you see this cloud brokerage you know space evolving over the next three to five years what's going to change you're going to hear a lot more from Cloud Sherpas in the space in the next three to five years that's for sure you know I think what we're going to find is is that more and more you're going to you're going to see gsis and other types of firms moving to this sort of model right I mean we're only we're going to take a lot of business away from them and and in that process you know it's going to get the right levels of attention you know what what I really think that cloud services brokerage is is it's a firm that is extremely experienced in the platform and the products they sell but more importantly the underlying reason for selling that product in the first place you know services IT services in this case it's a company that's known for being a little bit more nimble than some of those GS is you know getting the proposals out quickly and being effect effective and efficient and not looking to establish this enormous agreement but but a series of agreements that gets a customer to to where they need to go and I think what we're going to see is it is time and time again that the the early adopters in the cloud services brokerage spaces are going to be are going to be growing at rates like our business unit for example are business units currently growing at one hundred and fifty percent it's a tough tough job to keep up with but tools like ServiceNow certainly help us manage that and keep us on track with our own projects your own time carts and our own tasks yeah so you guys are great on the rocket ship with good service now pulling them along are they pulling you along a little bit of both like bikers drafting yeah so hexcel and I Jason we'll listen thanks very much for coming on the cube and sharing the cloud sherpas story will give you the last word here what advice would you give to folks that are you know maybe kicking the tires and mostly thirty percent of the audience here are not ServiceNow customers they're thinking about it what would you tell those guys have a good understanding of where you're at have a good vision of what you want to achieve and don't be afraid to go to the cloud it's not as not as hard as it sounds its clouds not scary just jump right in the water's fine hi Jason thanks very much for coming on really appreciated a good luck with managing that crazy growth and pleasure meeting you thanks very much all right Jeff reckon I'll be back with our next guest keep right here this is the cube we drop it of these events and we're covering the wall-to-wall service now knowledge will be right back from Las Vegas right after this