(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas It's theCUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018 brought to you by ServiceNow >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. What we do is we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. This is our sixth year at ServiceNow Knowledge. Jeff and I, Jeff Frick, my co-host, we started in 2013 I believe, Jeff. >> Yes. >> At the Aria, right? >> At the Aria, third floor. >> Small conference. 3,800 people, we were kind of tucked in the corner Now we're in the center, the ecosystem is burgeoning. As is ServiceNow, the company started with core IT service management and has been extending its applications on its platform into new areas and Abhijit Mitra is here, he's the general manager of the customer service management unit at ServiceNow. It's great to see you again my friend, welcome back to-- >> Great to see you Dave and Jeff. >> Great to see you, welcome back. >> So we met several times at headquarters, at shows like this, you've been educating me and us on your business, but let's start with customer service management, what is it to you guys? >> Interesting you ask the question because two years ago I remember explaining to you that it's not customer-service management. It's customer service-management. So, I want to go back to that once more and start off explaining what that was about. You know, I have been building CRM applications for a long time, in my career and especially in the customer service domain, I always felt there's something missing and I didn't quite really know what it was until I came to ServiceNow. And I discovered service management and what I realized, and after talking to so many customers what I realized is that traditional CRM solutions are meant for, they're very well architected for customer engagement which is about allowing customers to contact you by different channels, by phone or email and logging their issues as cases. And that's important, we need that in customer service. But what is also very important is, how do you streamline your underlying operational processes? So that it can close the loop and fix those issues or deliver to your customers request and that's what service management is fundamentally designed to do. So what we have done here is we've combined customer engagement with service management into customer service management to give you a solution that can cater to the end to end process, that's what it is. >> Okay, so we had your boss on earlier and he said, "I have three things on my whiteboard "when people walk in with a new idea. "First one is, what's the problem? "Second one is, why now? "And the third one is, why us?" So when you guys had that conversation, (laughs) what was the answer? >> So, the problem, it really has been that customer service has been fundamentally broken and we all experience customer service every day of our lives and as consumers, I can tell you, I expect that experience to be much better today. I don't know about you, but I expect that experience to be much better. >> I was going to say expectations are pretty low unfortunately. I'm going to have to tell you for the 18th time, my name, account number, and social security number, my mom's maiden name, but I just told the other four people that I got to before I got to you. (laughs) >> So, feel the pain. >> We feel the pain. >> Let's rest that argument, OK? Now let's go about, sort of a why now, right? So, what we are seeing in the industry is massive digital transformation. Now digital transformation is a heavily overused buzzword. When I talk about digital transformation, I am talking about products becoming services, services becoming connected services where you're offering solutions to consumers and customers digitally meaning they are powered by technology. In that kind of a world, when we are customers we expect our requests and our issues to be resolved and delivered instantaneously and we expect those digital services to be always on. Now this kind of a challenge was not there like you know five, 10 years ago, this is something new. And this is where, when you combine service management which is all about how do you deliver that end to end service in a technologically technically connected world to the customer through the different channels of their choice becomes truly differentiating. So that's why now, now is the right time for doing something like this. >> Well, why ServiceNow? >> Well, ServiceNow is a market leader in service management. We are the market leaders in IT service management. And so what we are doing is we are essentially taking the core capability of the service management and just to explain a little bit for people who are not so familiar with service management, service management is about automating repetitive requests through workflows, we apply that to what we say an effortless customer experience. So customers now through self-service for example, they don't need to call anybody, they can go to your website and they can sort of request services which get automatically delivered to them, right? So that's essentially something ServiceNow does very well because of our automation capabilities. Service management is about driving down root cause of customer issues through a structured process. Problem management, change management and we do that. Service management is about monitoring connected services and being proactive and taking actions to prevent business disruptions and we do that. So that's why service management is extremely applicable to the problem of offering services in our digitally connected world. >> So you said you've been doing it for a long time in your career, before was it just really thinking about the ticket as an individual transaction in customer service management versus trying to build really more robust processes that are integrated in service management that now you're applying to the customer problems? Is that kind of why this is a fundamentally different approach? What makes it so different? >> Yes, so service management is essentially the underlying operational process, you're right. And one part of that is the ticket. Customer engagement on the other hand is being aware of who your customer is. Who that person is, what's the customers 360, what is his purchase history, what's the service history of this customer? What service contracts do they have? What entitlement do they have? All the information. So, combining it together on one common platform is what's unique. >> OK, talk a little bit about how you're innovating in that platform. You guys announced virtual agent technology, you're infusing artificial intelligence into the platform. Discuss that a little bit. >> Yeah, so, let's talk about virtual agent. I said one of the things that we focused on is making that experience for customers as effortless, as simple and easy as possible, right? So, we know that, you know companies around the world like 75% of all organizations, they want the self-service to be the primary channel of help and mass consumers, we also want self-service, right? But self-service today is primarily very static because you get, what do you get? You go, look at a knowledge base article, some self-help article, right? >> Right, right. >> And OK, maybe you lock some cases, that's all you can do. With virtual agents, what's happening is self-service is becoming actionable. Because when you are in the self-service experience, a virtual agent can anticipate your needs and start helping you, you interact with the virtual agent and it's not just a human-like interaction with you, but it can also perform actions. Automated actions using workflow capabilities of ServiceNow. And this is very unique. Now it's an extension of the service process, it becomes a living, breathing entity. The website becomes a living, breathing entity. Not only does it reduce a lot of, on the organization side for example, the customer service organization side. Not only does it reduce a lot of repetitive work for customer agents, but it makes the experience for customers very simple and effortless. >> The thing I think is so interesting on the AI side of it is that, the system learns from every transaction and can apply that learning to the next transaction versus an individual interaction between myself and say a customer service agent where they might learn a little bit on how to solve that particular problem. But it's not shared system-wide. It's not necessarily learned by the machine to help the next person get that answer a little bit faster. So it seems like the application of AI, and machine learning to these workflows really opens up an efficiency gate that's like nothing that you've been able to do before. >> Absolutely, you know one of the features that we offer is something called agent intelligence I have not seen if you talked about that, but what agent intelligence is about is that when you do need an agent, right? And you need to find the right agent, you can essentially convert or route these cases essentially which is just descriptions of words or descriptions, right? You can categorize them, you can prioritize them, and you can route them to the right cues. So that the right people can actually now help you out to solve these issues. This is something that we are using machine learning for. To be able to learn from like past history and then be able to do that without writing any rules or thing like that. The machine simply learns and figures out the best way to categorize, prioritize, and route the cases to the right people. >> Based on real behavior, as opposed to trying to figure out the rules in advance. >> The thing is that you, every time you figure out a rule, it becomes outdated very quickly. So, it's very difficult to keep rules up to date. I know and I've been building rules engine for a very long time. I know exactly how it works, It's very difficult. If AI can actually solve this problem, there is a tremendous productivity gain. >> Talk about why I wouldn't use a CRM system to do this, I have all my customer information in there, everybody's using it, I got my sales guys involved and why not just use CRM? >> Yet again, goes back to the core value proposition of CRM. CRM was essentially invented as a methodology to enforce the sales process. So you track your leads, the opportunities, codes, convert MTRs, and that's what most companies use CRM for. Now, since we had your prospect data in there used, you know some customers would start thinking that okay, you know what? My customer database is in CRM, but actually if you think about it for most companies, the customer data is not in CRM. It's in their ERP system. >> It's in Oracle SAP. >> SAP that's where the data is so, in a service process, you're actually interacting with your customers. The customers are interacting with your system through self-service. In CRM, and in traditional lead opportunity management, there's no customer interaction. It's your company's internal process. So here, you are talking with a customer interacting with the system and you servicing that customer in an end-to-end process. So, I don't think for customer service, CRM was ever well suited actually. So specifically in the customer service domain, I think a service management approach is a much better approach. >> Abhijit, what are some of the KPIs? What are people using as yardsticks of success when they're doing these types of implementations? >> Yeah, so one of the key KPIs for our customers is, you know from a business stand point, it's Net Promoter Score and we have had, customers like Epicor, for example, who've implemented customer service management, actually retiring 15 CRM systems including everything you can imagine. And within 10 months of going live, they're seeing 10 percentage point improvement in Net Promoter Score, just by switching to CSM. These are unbelievable numbers, then we have had nice systems, by the way both these companies have won awards for innovating customer service. And they've seen more than a 70% reduction in cases because of self-service. 'Cause they are going to the self-service channel. So these are sort of the obvious, let's say customer satisfaction improvement or cost savings that some of our customers have seen from using our solution. >> That's great. >> Okay, takeaways from K18, what should we, what's the bumper sticker say in the back of the car as they're pulling away as it relates to customer service management. (laughs) >> You know, to summarize for customer service management, we essentially combine customer engagement with service management to offer and to help you offer an effortless connected and proactive customer service so this is really our key value propositions that we offer to companies. Effortless is all about simplifying the customer experience. Connected is about breaking down the silos in your organization. Getting everybody on a common platform to drive down root cause of customer issues and the customer service team support, and proactive is about monitoring the data and reacting to issues before customers are affected. And this is what makes customer service experience, a superior customer service experience. >> Jeff: Three word bumper sticker, it works perfectly. (laughs) >> Abhijit, it was great to meet, however briefly your team last night, we saw you guys, you took your team out to dinner, they seem motivated, really charged up, a lot of smiling faces, so congratulations on the progress that you've made. You're super excited, I can tell and it's really great having you back on theCUBE, thank you. >> Yeah, yeah, and if you wanted even the shortest bumper sticker, I would say customer service is a team sport. >> Beautiful that's a good one. >> The other won't fit. (laughter) >> That'll work, all right. >> Okay keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. We're live, you're watching theCUBE from ServiceNow Knowledge18, we'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> We're back. Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick, this is theCUBE. We're live from Orlando ServiceNow Knowledge 17. Our fifth knowledge, Jeff. Abhijit Mitra is here, the general manager of customer service management business unit. ServiceNow. Great to see you. >> Good, you too. >> Loved your keynote this morning. A lot of energy. CJ introduced you as enthusiastic as today as you were 20 years ago when he met you. >> And he said even more enthusiastic, it seems. >> Jumped off the stage, he got a good reason. >> Must be a solution. >> Business is good, you guys are rockin'. You got a hot, new business unit that you're managing. You started off your conversation with essentially saying customer service is broken. I mean, you had us all raise our hands at who's ever had a bad customer service experience. Every hand went up in the audience. Explain that a little bit. What's broken? >> So the thing is that you know, when you think about customer service today companies spend a lot of time and effort on customer service but not necessarily the end customers are seeing the result of that. And you know, when you talk to customers, I talk to a lot of customers asking them like, why is this happening for you. What they're telling us is that all the solutions that are available in the market today. Our solutions are really based on CRM systems and these are very well suited for allowing customers to contact through a multitude of channels we call home channel engagement. And then for support, agents to log their issues as cases. But they don't do anything more and as consumers, as customers, we are looking for solutions. And as customer service departments, customer service agents want to fix customer issues. So that is really where the problem is so the issues don't get fixed and customers keep on calling again and again and again. That's how case volume keeps on growing. >> But they always ask you at the end, are you satisfied with your service and will you hang on for the survey and give me a five please? That's the part that amazes me. That you solved none of the problems that I asked resolving. >> Gave me the NPS. Okay so how are you attacking this problem? >> So the way we're attacking this problem is, this is something that I didn't invent. It's something in which I learned, actually. Again after talking to a lot of customers after joining ServiceNow, what they told us is that they were looking for a service management approach and really the benefit of the service management approach is that it makes customer service a team sport. Because now not just customer service but every other department whether it's engineering or operations or financials, or legal or sales can come together on a common platform and the root cause of the customer issues are then assigned as tasks across enterprise. And once these root causes are fixed, then the issues are permanently resolved. And that reduces case volume. And that also includes customer satisfaction. >> You mentioned CRM based tools, people trying to use CRM based tools for customer service management, which essentially logs something. Logs customer service issues but doesn't give you the whole work flow. What's the difference? Can you give us the, you know CRM, why not CRM, why ServiceNow? >> Yeah like I said, it closes the end to end loop so just give me an example, just giving an example, is that in ServiceNow when customer has issues, these are logged as cases. And now, the customer support agent may be able to give a quick relief to the customer and close the case. And that's what you do with every other CRM system as well. And you do the same thing in ServiceNow. However closing the case is not necessarily the be-all and end-all because the root cause of this customer's issue may still be there. And that's how you assign these as problems to other departments. So that's really the fundamental difference. There is a follow up process that's happening. And follow up process may not just be problem, it may be also require a change of knowledge. It may require technician to go on-site through on-the-ground field service. So basically we close the loop. We allow companies to close the loop so that it's end to end customer service. >> Now I'm just curious, when you're out on the field talking to customers that are doing this, how receptive is kind of that next level of people and departments in terms of now being pulled more directly into a customer's role through you know, taking this service approach. Is it, are they happy? Is this new? Is it just a different way to execute what was inefficiently being done before? Because they don't, you know, I'm not in customer service. I'm in whatever department I'm in. Now you're asking me to help you resolve it because I'm part of the root cause. >> So underlying this is the philosophy that everybody in the company is responsible for customer service. And companies who do well as business actually enforce that philosophy in their different departments. And it is such companies who either have aspirations to transform themselves or who are already along this way that actually have an affinity towards the service management approach. Now in terms of the people who are actually working in the different departments, it's not that they're not working on their own systems anymore. Yeah those systems are there and for example, engineering would work with Gida, and there's nothing stopping them from doing that. But what is interesting here is that the work is getting assigned to them from customer service in the service management system of customer service management. That's really what it is. And that increases visibility. It's all about visibility. And reporting and other things. So that really shows, that okay, here are where the issues are and once you see the benefit of your impact on customer satisfaction, on Netomoto scores, on revenues, then it becomes very, very compelling. >> Abhijit, you guys don't break out the revenues of your customer service management business unit. I understand that. But it's a real business unit. It's growing. You got real customers. You showed some logos today. What can you tell us about the business, the business momentum. Any proof points that you're seeing with customers? >> Well we're been in the market for a little more than a year now. I would say a year because we just launched at this even last year. And in the last year, one year we've seen customers from all over the world at our best solutions. All over the world. We have customers now in 28 countries. Over ten big industrial categories. And many of our customers, early adopters will be live with system for a while. They were here. They are here at this conference. There are eighteen of our customers who are here. They're speaking their own sessions and they're sharing their own experiences with other customers. So it's been a tremendous adoption of the solution so far. >> Okay. And how about the impact that you've seen on their business? Can you share any results? >> Yeah absolutely, some of our customers, without naming names, have had up to 70% production in case volume just because of self service, and case deflection. Another customer had a 40% improvement in their Promoter scores. And these are unbelievable statistics. And a third replaced a 50 different customer service portals. And 15 CRM systems with ServiceNow's customer service management. So these are just unbelievable results that our customers have achieved in the last one year. >> You call them light speed pioneers. >> Abhijit: That's right. >> That's the term you guys are using, light speed. But so you know, your customers don't say hey call you, Abhijit, I need to move at light speed. What are they saying that you guys, of course, translated into that rubric of light speed? >> It's really about business transformations. So most of the, many of our customers, I would say, are looking for a better way to run customer service. They have challenges in either improving customer satisfaction. The customers are telling them that your service is very disconnected. Your SMAs aren't being met. So either it's mostly that or reducing costs because they have too many different systems. Different business units who do, work in different ways. So it's about standardization. It's about increasing efficiency. Do more with less. Automate more. And it's also about the effectivity. So, if you complete the work, you complete it well. It's done. >> Yes, being able to reduce volumes like that is impressive. Especially given the amount of data that we have. The amount of complexity that there is out in the world today. You hear a lot of talk at these conferences about IOT. You know, that's going to create more data, more devices, more problems for customers. What are your thoughts about IOT and the impacts it has on customer service? >> I think IOT is going to force customer service to be proactive. And to some extent, IOT is an opportunity to be proactive because now you have access to data that you've never had before. Now you can analyze the data in real-time. You can find out any anomalies and for which you need to take an action. And if you can predict an outage, then you can essentially take action to avoid that, right? So IOT opens up totally new opportunities for customer service to be proactive now. >> Okay, so we're live. >> They're shutting us down here. >> As always, we shut down the expo hall. It's kind of a CUBE tradition. >> We're going to go way after. The lights will be out but we'll still be going. >> The forklifts will be driving in. >> So hearing a lot today about Jakarta. CJ was explaining sort of, the process that you guys use starts with the customer. You guys try to understand what the needs are and it comes back through the business units into the platform and then you guys take it back and reapply it. What are some of the things in Jakarta that you are going to be applying in your future releases for your customers? >> So one of things that I'm very excited about Jakarta is our communities product. And this is something that were are announced today, we're releasing in Jakarta. Now with communities, it increases the level of engagement that customers have with companies because it allows the companies to provide a totally personalized experience. And think about it. In your own personal lives, when you look for help, you turn to people who you trust the most, right? Your friends and your family. Similarly as customers, they would like to turn to people who they trust which is like, other customers like them, right? So that's why communities is a big step for us. Essentially. And giving that features to our customers to have a better experience for their customers. >> So how would that work? It's a feature within the platform. Your customers will then create communities and cultivate communities? >> Yeah, essentially it's a new product and we just, you just turn it on and then you administer that community. You monitor that community. You rule it out. So our customers would use it to create their own communities for their customers. That's how it would work. >> What are some of the objectives you have for the business unit? What are some of the things we should watching as observers, in terms of indications of success, momentum? >> Really there is only one goal. Which is for our customers to be our most outspoken references. That's really the only goal that I have for this business unit. And 18 of them are here today. They are speaking on our behalf and I hope to see many many more of them in this conference next year. Customer satisfaction as they say is one thing. Customer loyalty is everything. >> Jeff: In public. >> Thanks very much for coming to theCUBE and congratulations on the success you've had. >> Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. >> Alright keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest before the lights go out. ServiceNow Knowledge. It's theCUBE. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. (peppy digital music) >> Veritas Vision 2017 everybody. We're here at The Aria Hotel. This is day two of theCUBE's coverage of Vtas, #VtasVision, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stuart Miniman who is my cohost for the week. Stu, we heard Richard Branson this morning. The world-renowned entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson came up from the British Virgin Islands where he lives. He lives in the Caribbean. And evidently he was holed out during the hurricane in his wine cellar, but he was able to make it up here for the keynote. We saw on Twitter, so, great keynote, we'll talk about that a little bit. We saw on Twitter that he actually stopped by the Hitachi event, Hitachi NEXT for women in tech, a little mini event that they had over there. So, pretty cool guy. Some of the takeaways: he talked a lot about- well, first of all, welcome to day two. >> Thanks, Dave. Yeah, and people are pretty excited that sometimes they bring in those marquee guests, someone that's going to get everybody to say, "Okay, wait, it's day two. "I want to get up early, get in the groove." Some really interesting topics, I mean talking about, thinking about the community at large, one of the things I loved he talked about. I've got all of these, I've got hotels, I've got different things. We draw a circle around it. Think about the community, think about the schools that are there, think about if there's people that don't have homes. All these things to, giving back to the community, he says we can all do our piece there, and talking about sustainable business. >> As far as, I mean we do a lot of these, as you know, and as far as the keynote speakers go, I thought he was one of the better ones. Certainly one of the bigger names. Some of the ones that we've seen in the past that I think are comparable, Bill Clinton at Dell World 2012 was pretty happening. >> There's a reason that Bill Clinton is known as the orator that he is. >> Yeah, so he was quite good. And then Robert Gates, both at ServiceNow and Nutanics, Condi Rice at Nutanics, both very impressive. Malcolm Gladwell, who's been on theCUBE and Nate Silver, who's also been on theCUBE, again, very impressive. Thomas Friedman we've seen at the IBM shows. The author, the guy who wrote the Jobs book was very very strong, come on, help me. >> Oh, yeah, Walter Isaacson. >> Walter Isaacson was at Tableau, so you've seen some- >> Yeah, I've seen Elon Musk also at the Dell show. >> Oh, I didn't see Elon, okay. >> Yeah, I think that was the year you didn't come. >> So I say Branson, from the ones I've seen, I don't know how he compared to Musk, was probably the best I think I've ever seen. Very inspirational, talking about the disaster. They had really well-thought-out and well-produced videos that he sort of laid in. The first one was sort of a commercial for Richard Branson and who he was and how he's, his passion for changing the world, which is so genuine. And then a lot of stuff on the disaster in the British Virgin Islands, the total devastation. And then he sort of went into his passion for entrepreneurs, and what he sees as an entrepreneur is he sort of defined it as somebody who wants to make the world a better place, innovations, disruptive innovations to make the world a better place. And then had a sort of interesting Q&A session with Lynn Lucas. >> Yeah, and one of the lines he said, people, you don't go out with the idea that, "I'm going to be a businessman." It's, "I want to go out, I want to build something, "I want to create something." I love one of the early anecdotes that he said when he was in school, and he had, what was it, a newsletter or something he was writing against the Vietnam War, and the school said, "Well, you can either stay in school, "or you can keep doing your thing." He said, "Well, that choice is easy, buh-bye." And when he was leaving, they said, "Well, you're either going to be, end up in jail or be a millionaire, we're not sure." And he said, "Well, what do ya know, I ended up doing both." (both laughing) >> So he is quite a character, and just very understated, but he's got this aura that allows him to be understated and still appear as this sort of mega-personality. He talked about, actually some of the interesting things he said about rebuilding after Irma, obviously you got to build stronger homes, and he really sort of pounded the reducing the reliance on fossil fuels, and can't be the same old, same old, basically calling for a Marshall Plan for the Caribbean. One of the things that struck me, and it's a tech audience, generally a more liberal audience, he got some fond applause for that, but he said, "You guys are about data, you don't just ignore data." And one of the data points that he threw out was that the Atlantic Ocean at some points during Irma was 86 degrees, which is quite astounding. So, he's basically saying, "Time to make a commitment "to not retreat from the Paris Agreement." And then he also talked about, from an entrepreneurial standpoint and building a company that taking note of the little things, he said, makes a big difference. And talking about open cultures, letting people work from home, letting people take unpaid sabbaticals, he did say unpaid. And then he touted his new book, Finding My Virginity, which is the sequel to Losing My Virginity. So it was all very good. Some of the things to be successful: you need to learn to learn, you need to listen, sort of an age-old bromide, but somehow it seemed to have more impact coming from Branson. And then, actually then Lucas asked one of the questions that I put forth, was what's his relationship with Musk and Bezos? And he said he actually is very quite friendly with Elon, and of course they are sort of birds of a feather, all three of them, with the rocket ships. And he said, "We don't talk much about that, "we just sort of-" specifically in reference to Bezos. But overall, I thought it was very strong. >> Yeah Dave, what was the line I think he said? "You want to be friends with your competitors "but fight hard against them all day, "go drinking with them at night." >> Right, fight like crazy during the day, right. So, that was sort of the setup, and again, I thought Lynn Lucas did a very good job. He's, I guess in one respect he's an easy interview 'cause he's such a- we interview these dynamic figures, they just sort of talk and they're good. But she kept the conversation going and asked some good questions and wasn't intimidated, which you can be sometimes by those big personalities. So I thought that was all good. And then we turned into- which I was also surprised and appreciative that they put Branson on first. A lot of companies would've held him to the end. >> Stu: Right. >> Said, "Alright, let's get everybody in the room "and we'll force them to listen to our product stuff, "and then we can get the highlight, the headliner." Veritas chose to do it differently. Now, maybe it was a scheduling thing, I don't know. But that was kind of cool. Go right to where the action is. You're not coming here to watch 60 Minutes, you want to see the headline show right away, and that's what they did, so from a content standpoint I was appreciative of that. >> Yeah, absolutely. And then, of course, they brought on David Noy, who we're going to have on in a little while, and went through, really, the updates. So really it's the expansion, Dave, of their software-defined storage, the family of products called InfoScale. Yesterday we talked a bit about the Veritas HyperScale, so that is, they've got the HyperScale for OpenStack, they've got the HyperScale for containers, and then filling out the product line is the Veritas Access, which is really their scale-out NAS solution, including, they did one of the classic unveils of Veritas Software Company. It was a little odd for me to be like, "Here's an appliance "for Veritas Bezel." >> Here's a box! >> Partnership with Seagate. So they said very clearly, "Look, if you really want it simple, "and you want it to come just from us, "and that's what you'd like, great. "Here's an appliance, trusted supplier, "we've put the whole thing together, "but that's not going to be our primary business, "that's not the main way we want to do things. "We want to offer the software, "and you can choose your hardware piece." Once again, knocking on some of those integrated hardware suppliers with the 70 point margin. And then the last one, one of the bigger announcements of the show, is the Veritas Cloud Storage, which they're calling is object storage with brains. And one thing we want to dig into: those brains, what is that functionality, 'cause object storage from day one always had a little bit more intelligence than the traditional storage. Metadata is usually built in, so where is the artificial intelligence, machine learning, what is that knowledge that's kind of built into it, because I find, Dave, on the consumer side, I'm amazed these days as how much extra metadata and knowledge gets built into things. So, on my phone, I'll start searching for things, and it'll just have things appear. I know you're not fond of the automated assistants, but I've got a couple of them in my house, so I can ask them questions, and they are getting smarter and smarter over time, and they already know everything we're doing anyway. >> You know, I like the automated assistants. We have, well, my kid has an Echo, but what concerns me, Stu, is when I am speaking to those automated assistants about, "Hey, maybe we should take a trip "to this place or that place," and then all of a sudden the next day on my laptop I start to see ads for trips to that place. I start to think about, wow, this is strange. I worry about the privacy of those systems. They're going to, they already know more about me than I know about me. But I want to come back to those three announcements we're going to have David Noy on: HyperScale, Access, and Cloud Object. So some of the things we want to ask that we don't really know is the HyperScale: is it Block, is it File, it's OpenStack specific, but it's general. >> Right, but the two flavors: one's for OpenStack, and of course OpenStack has a number of projects, so I would think you could be able to do Block and File but would definitely love that clarification. And then they have a different one for containers. >> Okay, so I kind of don't understand that, right? 'Cause is it OpenStack containers, or is it Linux containers, or is it- >> Well, containers are always going to be on Linux, and containers can fit with OpenStack, but we've got their Chief Product Officer, and we've got David Noy. >> Dave: So we'll attack some of that. >> So we'll dig into all of those. >> And then, the Access piece, you know, after the apocalypse, there are going to be three things left in this world: cockroaches, mainframes, and Dot Hill RAID arrays. When Seagate was up on stage, Seagate bought this company called Dot Hill, which has been around longer than I have, and so, like you said, that was kind of strange seeing an appliance unveil from the software company. But hey, they need boxes to run on this stuff. It was interesting, too, the engineer Abhijit came out, and they talked about software-defined, and we've been doing software-defined, is what he said, way before the term ever came out. It's true, Veritas was, if not the first, one of the first software-defined storage companies. >> Stu: Oh yeah. >> And the problem back then was there were always scaling issues, there were performance issues, and now, with the advancements in microprocessor, in DRAM, and flash technologies, software-defined has plenty of horsepower underneath it. >> Oh yeah, well, Dave, 15 years ago, the FUD from every storage company was, "You can't trust storage functionality "just on some generic server." Reminds me back, I go back 20 years, it was like, "Oh, you wouldn't run some "mission-critical thing on Windows." It's always, "That's not ready for prime time, "it's not enterprise-grade." And now, of course, everybody's on the software-defined bandwagon. >> Well, and of course when you talk to the hardware companies, and you call them hardware companies, specifically HPE and Dell EMC as examples, and Lenovo, etc. Lenovo not so much, the Chinese sort of embraced hardware. >> And even Hitachi's trying to rebrand themselves; they're very much a hardware company, but they've got software assets. >> So when you worked at EMC, and you know when you sat down and talked to the guys like Brian Gallagher, he would stress, "Oh, all my guys, all my engineers "are software engineers. We're not a hardware company." So there's a nuance there, it's sort of more the delivery and the culture and the ethos, which I think defines the software culture, and of course the gross margins. And then of course the Cloud Object piece; we want to understand what's different from, you know, object storage embeds metadata in the data and obviously is a lower cost sort of option. Think of S3 as the sort of poster child for cloud object storage. So Veritas is an arms dealer that's putting their hat in the ring kind of late, right? There's a lot of object going on out there, but it's not really taking off, other than with the cloud guys. So you got a few object guys around there. Cleversafe got bought out by IBM, Scality's still around doing some stuff with HPE. So really, it hasn't even taken off yet, so maybe the timing's not so bad. >> Absolutely, and love to hear some of the use cases, what their customers are doing. Yeah, Dave, if we have but one critique, saw a lot of partners up on stage but not as many customers. Usually expect a few more customers to be out there. Part of it is they're launching some new products, not talking about very much the products they've had in there. I know in the breakouts there are a lot of customers here, but would have liked to see a few more early customers front and center. >> Well, I think that's the key issue for this company, Stu, is that, we talked about this at the close yesterday, is how do they transition that legacy install base to the new platform. Bill Coleman said, "It's ours to lose." And I think that's right, and so the answer for a company like that in the playbook is clear: go private so you don't have to get exposed to the 90 day shock lock, invest, build out a modern platform. He talked about microservices and modern development platform. And create products that people want, and migrate people over. You're in a position to do that. But you're right, when you talk to the customers here, they're NetBackup customers, that's really what they're doing, and they're here to sort of learn, learn about best practice and see where they're going. NetBackup, I think, 8.1 was announced this week, so people are glomming onto that, but the vast majority of the revenue of this company is from their existing legacy enterprise business. That's a transition that has to take place. Luckily it doesn't have to take place in the public eye from a financial standpoint. So they can have some patient capital and work through it. Alright Stu, lineup today: a lot of product stuff. We got Jason Buffington coming on for getting the analyst perspective. So we'll be here all day. Last word? >> Yeah, and end of the day with Foreigner, it feels like the first time we're here. Veritas feels hot-blooded. We'll keep rolling. >> Alright, luckily we're not seeing double vision. Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back right after this short break. This is theCUBE, we're live from Vertias Vision 2017 in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (peppy digital music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the Aria in Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. We're here at Veritas Vision 2017, #VtasVision. Jyothi Swaroop is here. He's the vice president of product and solutions marketing at Veritas. Jyothi, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Thanks, Dave. I'm an officially an alum, now? >> A CUBE alum, absolutely! >> Two times! Three more times, we'll give you a little VIP badge, you know, we give you the smoking jacket, all that kind of stuff. >> Five or six times, you'll be doing the interviews. >> I'm going to be following you guys around, then, for the next three events. >> So, good keynote this morning. >> Jyothi: Thank you. >> Meaty. There was a lot going on. Wasn't just high-level concepts, it was a lot of high-level messaging, but then, here's what we've done behind it. >> No, it's actually the opposite. It's a lot of real products that customers are using. The world forgets that Veritas has only been out of Symantec, what, 20 months? Since we got out, we were kind of quiet the first year. That was because we were figuring our strategy out, investing in innovation and engineering, 'cause that's what Carlyle, our board, wants for us to do is invest in innovation and engineering, and build real products. So we took our time, 18 to 20 months to build these products out, and we launched them. And they're catching on like wildfire in the customer base. >> Jyothi, Bill came on and talked about, he made a lot of changes in the company. Focused it on culture, innovation, something he's want. What brought you? You know, a lot of places you could've gone. Why Veritas, why now? >> Well, Bill is one of the reasons, actually. I mean, if you look at his history and what he's done with different companies over the years, and how the journey of IT, as he put it during his keynote, he wants to make that disruption happen again at Veritas. That was one. Two was just the strategy that they had. Veritas has a Switzerland approach to doing business. Look, it's granted that most Fortune 500 or even midmarket customers have some sort of a Cloud project going on. But what intrigued me the most, especially with my background, coming from other larger companies is, Veritas was not looking to tie them down or become a data hoarder, you know what I mean? It's just charge this massive dollar per terabyte and just keep holding them, lock them into a storage or lock them into a cloud technology. But, we were facilitating their journey to whichever cloud they wanted to go. It was refreshing, and I still remember the first interview with Veritas, and they were talking about, "Oh, we want to help move customers' data "into Azure and AWS and Google," and my brain from previous storage vendors is going, "Hang on a minute. "How are you going to make money "if you're just going to move all of this data "to everyone else?" But that's what is right for the customer. >> Okay, so, how are you going to make money? >> Well, it's not just about the destination, right? Cloud's a journey, it's not just a destination. Most customers are asking us, "On average, we adopt three clouds," is what they're telling us. Whether it's public, private, on-prem, on average, they have about three separate clouds. What they say is, "Jyothi, our struggle is to move "an entire virtual business service "from on-prem to the Cloud." And once we've moved it, let's say Cloud A is suddenly expensive or is not working out for them. To get out of that cloud and move it to Cloud B is just so painful. It's going to cost me tons of money, and I lost all of the agility that I was expecting from Cloud A, anyway. If you have products like VRP from Veritas, for example, where we could move an entire cloud business service from Cloud A to Cloud B, and guess what. We can move it back onto on-prem on the fly. That's brilliant for the customers. Complete portability. >> Let's see. The portfolio is large. Help us boil it down. How should we think about it at a high level? We only have 20 minutes, so how do we think about that in 15, 20 minutes? >> I'll focus on three tenets. Our 360 data management wheel, if you saw at the keynote, has six tenets. The three tenets I'll focus on today are visibility, portability, and last, but definitely not the least, storage. You want to store it efficiently and cost-effectively. Visibility, most of our customers that are getting on their cloud journey are already in the Cloud, somewhere. They have zero visibility, almost. Like, "What applications should I move into the Cloud? "If I have moved these applications, "are they giving me the right value? "Because I've invested heavily in the Cloud "to move these applications." They don't know. 52% of our customers have dark data. We've surveyed them. All that dark data has now been moved into some cloud. Look, cloud is awesome. We have partnered up with every cloud vendor out there. But if we're not making it easy for customers to identify what is the right data to move to the Cloud, then they lost half the battle even before they moved to the Cloud. That's one. We're giving complete visibility with the Info Map connectors that we just announced earlier on in the keynote. >> That's matching the workload characteristics with the right sort of platform characteristics, is that right? >> Absolutely. You could be a Vmware user, you're only interested in VM-based data that you want to move, and you want role-based access into that data, and you want to protect only that data and back it up into the Cloud. We give you that granularity. It's one thing to provide visibility. It's quite another to give them the ability to have policy-driven actions on that data. >> Jyothi, just take us inside the customers for that. Who owns this kind of initiative? The problem in IT, it's very heterogeneous, very siloed. You take that multi-cloud environment, most customers we talk to, if they've got a cloud strategy, the ink's still drying. It's usually because, well, that group needed this, and somebody needed this, and it's very tactical. So, how do I focus on the information? Who drives that kind of need for visibility and manages across all of these environments? >> That's a great question, Stu. I mean, we pondered around the same question for about a year, because we were going both top-down and bottoms-up in the customer's organization, and trying to find where's our sweet spot. What we figured is, it's not a one-strategy thing, especially with the portfolio that we have. 80% of the time, we are talking to the CIOs, we are talking to the CXOs, and we're coming down with their digital transformation strategy or their cloud transformation strategy, they may call it whatever they want. We're coming top-down with our products, because when you talk visibility, a backup admin, he may not jump out of his seat the first thing. "Visibility's not what I care about, "the ease of use of this backup job "is what I care about, day one." But if you talk to the CIO, and I tell him, "I'll give you end-to-end visibility "of your entire infrastructure. "I don't care which cloud you're in." He'll be like, "I'm interested in that, "'cause I may not want to move 40% of this data "that I'm moving to Cloud A today. "I want to keep it back, or just delete it." 'Cause GDPR in Europe gives the citizens the right to delete their data. Doesn't matter which company the data's present in. The citizen can go to that company and say, "You have to delete my data." How will you delete the data if you just don't know where the data is? >> It's in 20 places in 15 different databases. Okay, so that's one. You had said there were three areas that you wanted to explore. >> The second one is, again, all about workload data and application portability. Over the years, we had storage lock-ins. I'm not going to name names, but historically, there are lots of storage vendors that tend to lock customers into a particular type of storage, or to the company, and they just get caught up in that stacked refresh every three years, and you just keep doing that over and over again. We're seeing more and more of cloud lock-in start to happen. You start migrating all of this into one cloud service provider, and you get familiar with the tools and widgets that they give you around that data, and then all of a sudden you realize this is not the right fit, or I'm moving too much data into this place and it's costing me a lot more. I want to not do this anymore, I want to move it to another local service provider, for example. It's going to cost you twice as much as it did just to move the data into the Cloud in the first place. With VRP, Veritas Resiliency Platform, we give our customers literally a few mouse clicks, if you watched the demo onstage. Literally, with a few mouse clicks, you identify the data that you want to move, including your virtual machines and your applications, and you move them as a business service, not just as random data. You move it as an entire business service from Cloud A to Cloud B. >> Jyothi, there's still physics involved in this. There's many reasons why with lock-in, you mentioned, kind of familiarity. But if I have a lot of data, moving it takes a lot of time as well as the money. How do we handle that? >> It goes back to the original talk track here about visibility. If you give the customer the right amount of visibility, they know exactly what to move. If the customer has 80 petabytes of data in their infrastructure, they don't have to move all 80 petabytes of it, if we are able to tell them, "These are the 10 petabytes that you need to move, "based on what Information Map is telling you." They'll only move those 10 petabytes, so the workload comes down drastically, because they're able to visualize what they need to move. >> Stu: Third piece of storage? >> Third piece of storage. A lot of people don't know this, but Veritas was the first vendor that launched the software to find storage solution. Back in the VOS days, Veritas, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems, we had the first file system that would be this paper over rocks, if you will, that was just a software layer. It would work with literally SAN/DAS, anything that's out there in the market, it would just be that file system that would work. And we've kept that DNA in our engineering team. Like, for example, Abhijit, who leads up our engineering, he wrote the first cluster file system. We are extending that beyond just a file system. We're going file, block, and object, just as any other storage vendor would. We are certifying on various commodity hardware, so the customers can choose the hardware of their choice. And not just that. The one thing we're doing very differently, though, is embedding intelligence close to the metadata. The reason we can do that is, unlike some of the classic storage vendors, we wrote the storage ground-up. We wrote the code ground-up. We could extract, if you look at an object, it has object data and metadata. So, metadata standard, it's about this long, right? It's got all these characters in it. It's hard to make sense of it unless you buy another tool to read that object and digest it for the customer. But what if you embed intelligence next to the metadata, so storage is not dumb anymore? It's intelligent, so you avoid the number of layers before you actually get to a BI product. I'll just give you a quick example in healthcare. We're all wearing Apple Watches and FitBits. The data is getting streamed into some object store, whether it's in the Cloud or on-prem. Billions of objects are getting stored even right now, with all the Apple Watches and FitBits out there. What if the storage could predictively, using machine learning and intelligence, tell you predictively you might be experiencing a stroke right on your watch, because your heartbeats are X and your pulse is Y? Combining all of the data and your history, based on the last month or last three months, I can tell you, "Jyothi, you should probably go see the doctor "or do something about it." So that's predictive, and it can happen at the storage layer. It doesn't have to be this other superficial intelligence layer that you paid millions of dollars for. >> So that analytic capability is really a feature of your platform, right? I mean, others, Stu, have tried it, and they tried to make it the product, and it really isn't a product, it's a byproduct. And so, is that something I could buy today? Is that something that's sort of roadmap, or, what's the reaction been from customers? >> The reaction has been great, both customers and analysts have just loved where we're going with this. Obviously, we have two products that are on the truck today, which are InfoScale and Access. InfoScale is a block-based product and Access is a file-based product. We also have HyperScale, which was designed specifically for modern workloads, containers, and OpenStack. That has its own roadmap. You know how OpenStack and containers work. We have to think like a developer for those products. Those are the products that are on the truck today. What you'll see announced tomorrow, I hope I'm not giving away too much, because Mike already announced it, is Veritas Cloud Storage. That's going to be announced tomorrow, and we're going to go deep into that. Veritas Cloud Storage will be this on-prem, object-based storage which will eventually become a platform that will also support file and block. It's just one single, software-defined, highly-intelligent storage system for all use cases. Throw whatever data you want at it. >> And the line on Veritas, the billboards, no hardware agenda. Ironic where that came from. Sometimes you'll announce appliances. What is that all about, and when do you decide to do that? >> Great question. You know, it's all about choice. It's the cliched thing to say, I know, but Veritas, most people don't know this, has a heavy channel revenue element to what we do. We love our partners and channel. Now, if you go to the channel that's catering to midmarket customers, or SMBs, they just want the easy button to storage. Their agility, I don't have five people sitting around trying to piece all of this together with your software and Seagate's hardware and whatever else, and piece this together. I just want a box, a pizza box that I can put in my infrastructure, turn it on, and it just works, and I call Veritas if something goes wrong. I don't call three different people. This is for those people. Those customers that just want the easy button to storage or easy button to back up. >> To follow up on the flip side, when you're only selling software, the knock on software of course is, I want it to be fast, I want it to be simple, I need to be agile. How come Veritas can deliver these kinds of solutions and not be behind all the people that have all the hardware and it's all fully baked-in to start with? >> Well, that's because we've written these from the ground up. When you write software code from the ground up, I mean, I'm an engineer, and I know how hard it is to take a piece of legacy code that's baked in for 10, 20 years. It's almost like adding lipstick, right? It just doesn't work, especially in today's cloud-first world, where people are in the DevOps situation, where apps are being delivered in five, 10, 15 minutes. Every day, my app almost gets updated on the phone every day? That just doesn't work. We wrote these systems from the ground up to be able to easily be placed onto any hardware possible. Now, again, I won't mention the vendor, but in my previous lives, there were a lot of hardware boxes and the software was written specifically for those hardware configurations. When they tried to software-define it forcefully, it became a huge challenge, 'cause it was never designed to do that. Whereas at Veritas, we write the software layer first. We test it on multiple hardware systems, and we keep fine-tuning it. Our ideal situation is to sell the software, and if the customer wants the hardware, we'll ship them the box. >> One of the things that struck me in the keynote this morning was what I'll call your compatibility matrix. Whether it was cloud, somebody's data store, that really is your focus, and that is a differentiator, I think. Knocking those down so you can, basically, it's a TAM expansion strategy. >> Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, TAM expansion strategy, as well as helping the customer choose what's best for them. We're not limiting their choices. We're literally saying, we go from the box and dropboxes of the world all the way to Dell EMC, even, with Info Map, for example. We'll cover end-to-end spectrum because we don't have a dollar-per-terabyte or dollar-per-petabyte agenda to store this data within our own cloud situation. >> All right, Jyothi, we got to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming back on theCUBE. It's good to see you again. >> Jyothi: No, it's great to be here. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. We're live from Veritas Vision 2017. This is theCUBE. (fast electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> We're back. This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. Chris Bedi is here, he's the CIO of ServiceNow. Chris, good to see you again. >> Good to see you as well. >> Yeah, so, lot going on this week, obviously. You said you're getting pulled in a million different directions. One of those, of course, is the CIO event, CIO Decisions, it's something you guys host every year. I had the pleasure of attending parts of it last year. Listened to Robert Gates and some other folks, which was great. What's happened this year over there? >> So, CIO Decisions, it's really where we bring together our forward thinking executives. We keep it intimate, about a hundred, because really it's about the dialogue. Us all learning from each other. It really doesn't matter, the industry, I think we're all after the same things, which is driving higher levels of automation, increase the pace of doing business, and innovating at our companies. So we had Andrew McAfee, MIT research scientist, really helping push the boundaries in our imagination on where machine learning and predictive analytics could go. And then we had Daniel Pink talking about his latest book, To Sell is Human. And really as CIOs, we often find ourselves selling new concepts, new business models, new processes, new analytics, new ways of thinking about things. And so, really trying to help, call it exercise, our selling muscle, if you will. Because we have to sell across, up, down, and within our own teams, and that is a big part of the job. Because as we move into this new era, I think the biggest constraint is actually between our own ears. Our inability to imagine a future where machines are making more decisions than humans, platforms are doing more work on behalf of humans. Intellectually, we know we're headed there, but he really helped to bring it home. >> Well, you know, it's interesting, we talk about selling and the CIOs. Typically IT people aren't known as sales people, although a couple years ago I remember at one of the Knowledges, Frank Slootman sort of challenged the CIO to become really more business people, and he predicted that more business people would become CIOs. So, do you consider yourself a sales person? >> I do. Selling people on a vision, a concept, the promise of automation. You know, technology, people fear it, right? You know, when you're automating people's work the fear and the uncertainty endowed, or what I call the organizational anti-bodies, start to come out. So you have to bust through that, and a large part of that is selling people on a promise of a better future. But, it's got to be real. It's got to be tied to real business outcomes with numbers. It can't be just a bunch of PowerPoint slides. >> So we always like to take the messaging from the main tent and then test it with the practitioners, and this year there's this sort of overall theme of working at lightspeed, you and I have talked about this, how does that resonate with CIOs and how do you put meaning behind that? 'Cause, you know, working at lightspeed, it's like, ooh that sounds good, but how do you put meat on that bone? >> So, the way I think about working at lightspeed is three dimensions, velocity, intelligence, and experience. And velocity is how fast is your company operating? I read a study that said 40% of Fortune 500 companies are going to disappear in the next 10 years. That's almost half, right? But I think what's going to separate the winners from the losers is the pace at which they can adapt and transform. And, with every business process being powered by IT platforms, I think CIOs and IT are uniquely positioned to explicitly declare ownership of that metric and drive it forward. So velocity, hugely important. Intelligence. Evolving from the static dashboards we know today, to real time insights delivered in context that actually help the human make decisions. And, BI in analytics as we know it today, needs to evolve into a recommendation engine, 'cause why do we develop BI in analytics? To make decisions, right? So why can't the platform, and it can, is the short answer, with the ability to rapidly correlate variables and recognize complex patterns, give recommendations to the humans, and I would argue, take it a step further, make decisions for the humans. ServiceNow did a study that said 70% of CIOs believe machines will make more accurate decisions than humans, now we just got to get the other 30% there. And then on experience, I think the right experience changes our behavior. I think we in IT need to be in the business of creating insanely great customer and employee experiences. Too often we lead with the goal of cost reduction or efficiency, and I think that's okay, but if we lead with the goal of creating great experiences, the costs and the inefficiencies will naturally drop out. You can't have a great experience and have it be clunky and slow, it's just impossible. >> And it's interesting on the experience because the changing behavior is the hardest part of the whole equation. And I always think back to kind of getting people off an old solution. People used to say, for start ups, you got to be 10x better or 1/10th the cost. 2x, 3x is not enough to get people to make the shift. And so to get the person to engage with the platform as opposed to firing off the text, or firing off an email, or picking up the phone, it's got to be significantly better in terms of the return on their investment. So now they get that positive feedback loop and, ah, this is a much better way to get work done. >> It has to. And we can't, you know, bring down the management hammer and force people to do things. It's just not the way, you know, people work. And very simple example of an experience driving the right behavioral outcome, so ServiceNow is a software company, very important for us to file patents. The process we had was clunky and cumbersome. You know, we're not perfect at ServiceNow either. So we re-imagined that process, made it a mobile first experience built on our platform, of course. But by simply doing that, there was no management edict, you have to, no coercion, if you will, we saw an 83% increase in the number of patent applications filed by the engineers. So the right experience can absolutely give you the right desired economic behavior. >> You talked about 70% of CIOs believe that machines will make better decisions than humans. We also talked about Andrew McAfee, who wrote a book with Eric Brynjolfsson. And in that book, The Second Machine Age, they talked about that the greatest chess player in the world, when the supercomputer beat Garry Kasparov, he actually created this contest and they beat the supercomputer with a combination of man and other supercomputers. So do you see it as machine, sort of, intelligence augmenting human intelligence, or do you actually see it as machines are going to take over most of the decisions. >> So, I actually think they are going to start to take over some basic decision making. The more complex ones, the human brain, plus a machine, is still a more, you know, advanced, right? Where it's better suited to make that decision. But I also think we need to challenge ourselves in what we call a decision. I think a lot of times, what we call a decision, it's not a decision. We're coming to the same conclusion over and over and over again, so if a computer looked at it, it's an algorithm. But in our brains, we think a human has to be involved and touch it. So I think it's a little bit, it'll challenge us to redefine what's actually a decision which is complex and nuanced, versus we're really doing the same thing over and over again. >> Right, and you're saying the algorithm is a pattern that repeats itself and leads to an action that a machine can do. >> Yeah. >> It doesn't require intuition >> And we don't call that a decision anymore. >> Right, right. So, in thinking about you gave us sort of the dimensions of lightspeed, what are some of the new metrics that will emerge as a result of this thinking? >> Yeah, I don't think any of the old metrics go away. I'll talk about a few. You know, in lightspeed, working at lightspeed, we need to start measuring, for one, back on that velocity vector, what is the percentage of processes in your company that have a cycle time of zero, or near zero. Meaning it just happens instantaneously. We can think of loads of examples in our consumer life. Calling a car with Uber, there's no cycle time on that process, right? So looking at what percentage of your processes have a cycle time of zero. How much work are you moving to the machines? What percentage of the work is the platform proactively executing for you? Meaning it just happens. I also think in an IT context of percentage of self healing events, where the service never goes down because it's resilient enough and you have enough automation and intelligence. But there are events, but the infrastructure just heals itself. And I think, you know, IT itself, we've long looked at IT as a percentage of revenue. I think with all of the automation and cost savings and efficiencies we drive throughout the enterprise, we need to be looking at IT as a margin contribution vehicle. And when we change that conversation, and start measuring ourselves in terms of margin, I think it changes the whole investment thesis, in IT. >> So that's interesting. Are you measured on margin contribution? >> We're doing that right now. I don't, if an IT organization is waiting for the CFO or CEO to ask them about their margin contribution, they're playing defense. I think IT needs to proactively measure all of it's contributions and express it in terms of margin. 'Cause that's the language the CEO, and COO, and CFO are talking about, so meet them in a language that they understand better. >> So how do you do, I mean, you certainly can create some kind of conceptual value flow. IT supports this sort of business process and this business process drives this amount of revenue or margin. >> So I stay away from revenue, because I think any time IT stands up and says, we're driving revenue, it's really hard. Because there's so many external and internal factors that contribute to that. So we more focus on automation, in terms of hours saved, expressing and dollarizing that. Hard dollars, that we're able to take out of the organization and then bubbling that into an operating margin number. >> Okay, so you sort of use the income statement below the revenue line to guide you and then you fit into that framework. >> Absolutely. >> When you talk to other CIOs about this, do they say, hey, that sounds really interesting, how do I get started on that, or? >> I think it resonates really well, because, again, IT as percentage of revenue is an incredibly incomplete metric to measure our contribution. With everything going digital, you want to pour more money into technology. I mean, studies have shown, and Andrew McAfee talked about this, over the last 50, 100 years, the companies that have thrived have poured more, disproportionally more, into technology and innovation than their competitors. So, if we only measure the cost side of the equation we're doing ourselves a disservice. >> And so, how do you get started on this path, I mean, let's call this path, sort of, what we generally defined as lightspeed, measured on margin, how do you get started on that? >> First step is the hardest. But, it's declaring that your going to do it. So we've come up with a framework, you know, that maps at a process level, at a department level, and at a company level, where are we on this journey to lightspeed? If lightspeed is the finish line, where are we? And I define three stages, manual, automated, cloud, before you get to lightspeed. And then, using those same three dimensions of velocity, intelligence, and experience, to tell you where you are. And, the very first thing we did was baseline all of our business processes, every single one, and mapped it. But once you have it mapped on that framework then you can say, how do we advance the ball to the next level? And, it's not going to magically happen overnight. This is hard work. It's going to happen one process at a time, right? But pretty soon everything starts to get faster and I think things will start to really accelerate. >> When you think about, sort of, architecting IT, at ServiceNow versus some other company, I mean, you come into ServiceNow as the CIO, everything runs on ServiceNow, that is part of the mandate, right? But that's not the mandate at every company, now increasingly may be coming that way in a lot of companies, but how is your experience at ServiceNow differ from the some of the traditional G2000? >> Probably the unique part about being the CIO at ServiceNow is actually really fun, in that I get to be customer zero in that I implement our products before all of our customers. You know, get to sit down with the product managers, discuss real business problems that all of our customers are facing, and hopefully be their voice inside the four walls of service now, and be the strategic partner to the product organization. Now implementing everything, our goal is to be the best possible implementation of ServiceNow on the planet. And that's not just demonstrated by go lives, it's demonstrated by, again, the economic and business outcomes we're deriving from using the platform. So, that part is fun, challenging, and hard work all at the same time. >> So how's Jakarta lookin'? >> Fantastic. We're super excited about everything that's coming out, whether it's the communities on customer service, or our software asset management. That's been a pain, right, for IT organizations for a long time, which is these inbound software audits, from other companies, and you're responding to them and it's a fire drill. In my mind, our software asset management transforms software audits from a once a year, twice a year event, to always-on monitoring, where you're just fixing it the whole time. And it's not an event anymore. I mean, the intelligence that we're baking into the platform now, super exciting around the machine learning and the predictive analytics concepts, we have more analytics than we had before, I mean there's just so much in there, that's just exciting. We're already using it, I can't wait for our customers to get a hold of it. >> Well, CJ this morning threw out a number of 30-plus percent performance improvement. I had said to myself, your saying that with conviction, that's 'cause you guys got to be running it yourselves. >> Yeah, we are. >> What are you seeing there? >> That's not a trivial number, and I think the product teams have done a great job really digging in and makin' sure our platform operates at lightspeed. >> One of the things that Jeff and I have been talking about this week, and really this is your passion here, is adoption, how do you get people to stop using all these other tools like email, and kind of get them to use the system? >> I think, showing them the promise of what it can bring. I think it's different conversations at different levels. I think, too, an operator, someone who's using the email to manage their work, they're hungry for a different solution. Life, working, and email, and managing your business that way, it's hard, right? To a mid-level manager, I think the conversation is maybe about the experience, how consumers of their service will be happier and more satisfied. At executive level, it gets maybe more into some of the economic outcomes, of doing it. Because implementing our platform, you know, you're going to burn some calories doing it, not a lot. Our time to value is really really quick, but still, it's a project and it's initiative and it's got to have an outcome tied to it. >> You know, Chris, as you're saying that it's always tough to be stuck kind of half way. You know, you're kind of on the tool internally and it's great. >> We don't use the word tool. >> Excuse me, not the tool. The app, the platform, actually. But then you still got external people that are coming at you through text, email, et cetera. I mean, is part of the vision, and maybe it's already there, I'm not as familiar with the parts I should be, in terms of enabling kind of that next layer of engagement with that next layer of people outside the four walls, to get more of them in it as well. Because the half-pregnant stage is almost more difficult because you're going back and forth between the two. >> And our customer service product does a lot of that. If you look at what Abhijit showed today, which is fantastic, Communities is another modality to start to interact with people. Certainly, we have Connect, part of our platform, is a collaboration app within the overall platform, so you can chat, just like you would with any consumer app, in terms of chatting capabilities, and that mobile first experience. We're thinking about other modalities too. Should you be able to talk to ServiceNow, just like you talk to Alexa, and converse with ServiceNow, Farrell touched on this a little bit, through natural language, right? We all know it's coming, and it's there, it's just pushing in that direction. >> How about the security piece? You know, Shawn shared this morning, you guys are well over year in now, and he talked about that infamous number of 200 plus days-- >> Chris: Nine months, yeah. >> Yeah, compressing that. Are you seeing that internally in your own? >> We are. We use Shawn's product, we're a happy customer. The vulnerability management, the security incident response, and very very similar results. And just like the customer who was on stage said, go live in Iterate, and that's exactly what we did. Everyone has a vulnerability management tool, like a Qualys, that's feeding in. Bring in all those Qualys alerts, our platform will help you normalize them and just start to reduce the level of chaos for the SOC and IT operations. Then make it better, then drive the automation, so we're seeing very similar benefits. >> How do you manage the upgrade side, we've been asking a lot of customers this week in the upgrade cycle. Some say, ah, I'll do in minus one just to sort of let the thing bake a little bit. You guys are in plus one. How do you manage that in production, though? >> Sure, so we upgrade before our customers, and that's part of our job, right? To make sure we test it out before our customers. But I'll say something in general about enterprise software upgrades, which is, there is a cost to them and the cost is associated with business risk. You want to make sure you're not going to disrupt your business. There is some level of regression testing you just have to do. Now, strategies I think that would be wise are automating as much of that testing as you can, through a testing framework, which we're helping our customers do now. And I think with some legacy platforms, that was incredibly expensive and hard and you could never quite get there. Us being a modern cloud platform, you can actually get there pretty quickly to the point where the 80, 90% of your regression testing is automated and you're doing that last 10 to 20%. 'Cause at the end of the day, IT needs to make sure the enterprise is up and running, that's job number one. But that's a strategy we employ to make upgrades as painless as possible. >> That's got to be compelling to a lot of the customers that you talk to, that notion of being able to automate the upgrade process. >> For sure, it is. >> You're eliminating a lot of time and they count that as money. >> It is money, and automating regression testing, it's a decision and a strategy but the investment pays off very very quickly. >> Dave: So there's an upfront chunk that you have to do to figure out how to make that work? >> Just like anything worth doing. >> Dave: Yeah, right. >> Right? >> Excellent. What's left for you at the show? >> What's left for me? I love interacting with customers. I got to talk with a lot of CIOs at CIO Decisions. I actually enjoy walking through the partner pavilion and meeting a lot of our partners and seeing some of the innovation that their driving on the platform. And then just non-stop, I get ideas all day from meeting with customers. It's so fun. >> Dave: Chris, thanks very much for coming to theCube. >> Thank you. >> We appreciate seeing you again. >> Chris: Good seeing you. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. Jeff and I will be back with our next guest. This is theCube, we're live from Knowledge17. We'll be right back.

>> 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)