(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)

>> 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)