(techy music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18 here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Dave Vellante. We're joined by CJ Desai. He is the Chief Product Officer for ServiceNow. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE again, CJ. >> Thank you, it's great to be here. First time I came was last Knowledge, which was my first Knowledge, so I'm a lot more educated and equipped this time as compared to firing round of questions from Dave last time. >> We will pick your brain, exactly. So you were up on the stage this morning, a great keynote, and you said, "Welcome to the era of great experiences." Unpack that a little bit. What do you mean by that? >> First of all, thank you for remembering that. That was supposed to be the idea. But on a serious note, we feel, if you think about even our company name is ServiceNow, so you provide service, and when you provide service, that's not a technology you provide, you provide an experience, whether it's IT service, customer service, employee, whatever the case might be. And, if you are not delivering experiences, then you are not that relevant. So we are trying to truly, and we are in the beginning of this journey, truly internalize that, that if people are using us, they call themselves service desk, insider organization, IT service desk, customer service desk, whatever the terms you want to use, there is about experiences. Rather than focusing on bits and bytes, we want to focus on experiences, deliver those experiences via our platform. It's not software as a service, it's software as an experience. It's software as an experience, that's the idea, correct. Thank you for-- >> You also talked about the eras. You know, we went back to the industrial era and then went through the ages of computing. Yeah, I was not sure if that was going to work or not, but the point I was trying to make, Dave, was just around the quality of work and how work has evolved. That's it, that was the idea. >> But I think my takeaway was even more than that, because we are entering, in my view, anyway, a new era, and I'd love to get your comments. We're moving from what is real tailwind for you, which is the Cloud era, and obviously, Cloud is an important part of the new era where you have a remote set of services to one where you have this ubiquitous set of digital services that do things like sense, hear, read, act, respond. That's a different world, and it's all about the experience, and I don't know how to define that yet. Digital, I guess, is how we define it. But what are your thoughts? >> The one thing, even simple things, and these are not simple things to understand. When I look at things like even genomic sequencing, that's so different. They are using technology to figure out how to sequence the human genome so that it can help you with your health, live longer, even things like knowing that somebody rings a doorbell at my home and I can see on my phone. Everything is connected, humans are connected, when mobile came and computer came and internet came. But things being connected is pretty exciting for me. That just transforms our lives and how we work, and I really like that it is all about us, and other than us being focusing on the technology itself. So that's the point. It's that we're humans, and let's focus on humans and experience, rather than worry about, oh, this runs two times faster than the other thing, or this thing is smaller than other thing. That's interesting, but not that interesting. >> At this conference, this is really the message that you're getting across. It's the new tag line, we are making the world of work work better for people. How does the Now platform really deliver on that promise? How does it make the employees life easier? I would say we have a bunch of use cases, but as you know, we started out early on with IT service management, and the whole idea was can we provide, as long as computers are there, as long as software is there, password reset is going to be there for a very, very long time. So, my point is that that's when it started. Okay, I need to do password reset, I want to upgrade my laptop. Every year there is a new laptop, every year there is a new phone, and that cycle will continue, and as long as we are using technology for our knowledge workers, IT help desk will be there, right? And where we are evolving is enterprise service management, because you don't, as an employee, you may deal with IT, you may deal with HR, you may have a contractual issue with legal, you may need something related to your payroll from finance. People think payroll is HR, but payroll is finance. And as you try to go across in a day in a life of an employee, you need to make it as easy as possible. So that's what we are focused on, deliver better experiences. You know, artificial intelligence that listen today, I believe, is more about optimization, rather than intelligence. Yeah, we want to use your data to be able to predict, like if you see in Gmail, I don't know if you use Gmail, but if you have Gmail, you get an email, it'll suggest auto-responses. Those auto-responses are almost positive. Have you noticed that? They are never negative. >> Yeah. >> Oh, of course. >> They're like, no, I don't want to come to your meeting. (laughing) It's kind of like trying to predict most likely what you would want to say, and I think if we can use intelligence to make people more productive, that's what we want. >> I mean, I use that function. I actually like it. >> CJ: Yeah, exactly. >> You know, it gives you three choices, and one of 'em is pretty close to what I would normally, and if I'm busy, I'm done. >> Yeah, right, exactly. >> I like that. This is the other thing we've talked about. We've talked about this with Farrel this morning. Try to anticipate my needs, right? So that means you've got to infuse AI into the application and identify specific use cases. You guys have done some M&A there, you talked to the financial analysts meeting, obviously, not disclosing anything, but watch for us to do some more M&A. You got to believe that that machine intelligence space is really ripe for innovation. >> And what we believe is if I look at the big Cloud providers, like Google, are investing a lot in deep learning and many, many other technologies, so whenever they expose it, and some of them do a really good job, we will just leverage their libraries. But there are things specific to enterprise, because there are things specific to enterprise, like if you use the word network at a hardware company, that's always in context of compute network and storage. If you use the word network at a healthcare company, that's a network of physicians, networks of hospitals, networks of whatever. And if you use the word network at a Telco company, that is a whole different network. My point is we want to understand those pieces, and if we can make it easier based on your data, so if all your cases, which are, Oh, part of your network is down. Ah, that's what you mean from the context end point, so we want to use wherever folks like Google are investing, we will leverage that, but if we need to leverage, we'll do that too. >> It's interesting, we were talking to a customer today, it might have been Worldpay, and they took the CMDV language and transformed it into the language of the business. What a rare and powerful concept for somebody from IT to do that, because if the lingua franca is business, then the adoption's going to go through the roof. >> So does that make sense? >> Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Well, I appreciate you talking about the value and the customer experience versus the technology. Certainly, it speeds and feeds you right. Boring. But the platform is important. Many products, one platform, that's unique for an enterprise software company, and you guys aspire to be the next great enterprise software company. Talk about how the platform enables you to get there. >> So I will tell you simple. You know our founder, Fred Luddy, started with the platform in 2004, so that was 14 years ago now, and his idea was you should be able to route work through the enterprise using our platform, and then we started with the IT service management and use case. The biggest advantage we have is that we are a very customer-driven organization. Many companies say that, but you see it here. Dave, you have been coming to Knowledge for a long time, I don't know about you. >> This is my first rodeo, but it's cool. >> It's the first thing you see. >> These are 80-plus person sessions, are customer sessions. They're not our sessions, where they are sharing best practices with them. So we get all these requests, CJ, we have built emergency response system using ServiceNow, CJ, we have built financial close using ServiceNow. Can you productize it? And we say, okay, thank you for the idea, which is great, thank you for the idea. How do I prioritize all of that? And, Dave, where platform comes in, because all the services I talked about today, service intelligence, service experience, user experience, they're all built in the platform, and I'm trying to be cautious, but if I want to create a brand new product on our platform, a brand new product on our platform, 40-use case, a 1.0 product where I feel comfortable the customers can use it, I would say 12 to 18 engineers. That's it. >> Rebecca: Wow. >> If I want to create one product, it's 12 to 18 engineers. So the R&D leverage, and that's the point I was trying to get across, that whether it's my own team creating product or whether our customer building apps on our product, because on platform, because we provide all the common services integration, the incremental cost to create something, now sales marketing, with my close friend, Dave Schneider, is much harder, because he has to scale it, build specialty in it and all that, but to create the product is not an issue for us on the platform. >> But this is where Cloud economics are so important, because at volume, your marginal costs go to practically zero. >> CJ: That's exactly right. >> But people may say, oh, 12 to 18, that sounds like a lot, but we're talking about an enterprise class software product here, and Fred Luddy, in the 2004 time frame, I mean, the state of enterprise software then, frankly, and now, was terrible. The guys at 37signals, I don't know if you know Jason, they made valid attempts, but it wasn't enterprise class software, it wasn't a platform. I've said, a number of times this week, the reference model for enterprise software is painfully mediocre, so you guys have done a great job, and now you've really got to take the next step and stay ahead on innovation. >> Correct on innovation card, that's what I said, innovation should be my top priority. You heard me at the Financial Analysts Day. Customer Service Management, brand new product, we actually launched it at Knowledge 16. Okay, that's when we launched it. It was engineers and teens who created that product, so many teens, the 1.0, now we have evolved quite a bit, 500 customers two weeks ago, 500 enterprise customers. You guys know that we don't go to the small line of the business. 500 in two years, eight quarters. >> And I found out last night, I think it was 75, or it might even be higher, reference customers. >> CJ: Yeah, already, using CSM. >> That's the difference. I do, we do, a lot of these shows. >> That's the platform impact. >> And you're talking about the customer focus. You do a lot of these shows. The customers talk about the impact on their business. They don't talk about how they installed some box, or like you say, runs faster. It's the business impact that really makes a difference, and that's why we're excited to be here. >> You saw today when I talked about Flow Designer and Integration Hub. IT wants to provide software so that business analysts can model business processes in a Cloud way with whoever you need to integrate with, so we are really keeping that as the north star for our customers, and how can we make their life easier, whatever they want to automate, some manual processes, all of manual processes. I remember speaking to Fred when I joined initially, and I said, "Fred, how did you think about TAM?" He said, "What do you mean, TAM?" You know, he's a funny guy, and he was serious. His point was there are so many manual workflows, how do you put a TAM around it? Every business is unique, their processes are complex, so don't box yourself and say, Oh, this is a $4 billion TAM and I'm going to get 20% of it. Every enterprise, as long as they exist, they will have manual workflows, you go and give it our platform so they can automate however they want. >> Well, I'm going to make you laugh about TAM. I'm a former industry analyst, so when you guys did the IPO way back when, well before your time-- >> CJ: 2012. >> when Frank was here, there was a research company saying this is small market, maybe it's a billion dollars and it's shrinking, so I, with some of my colleagues, developed a TAM analysis, and it was more than 30 billion. I published 30 billion, you can go on our old Wiki and see that, and the guy said to me, "Dave, you can't publish more than 30 billion. You'll look like a fool." The TAM is much, much bigger than 30 billion. You can't even quantify it, it's so large when you start looking at it. >> And now, because people are recognizing that we automate all the manual workflows in a enterprise on a Cloud platform, last week somebody published a report and I just saw the headlines, I didn't go through the details, 126 billion. So from in 2012 to that small number, and we don't know what the number is. >> Could it be bigger? >> I would have no idea. I would be completely disingenuous if I told you I know what my TAM is, but I don't think that way. I say what customer problems can I solve? >> Well, that's what I wanted to ask you. So you're here with so many different customers. Just on the show, we've had ones in payments, in insurance, in health care. What are you hearing from customers, and what are sort of your favorite applications of what you're doing? What makes you the proudest? >> Yeah, so I would say the proudest moments for me are when I'm like, wow, you do that with ServiceNow? I would have never thought that. So when I didn't expect, when I expect something, Oh, I had this routine email, text collaboration, and I switched it to ServiceNow, get it, like not a big aha moment. I had this one customer who said he has a big distribution network, all these partners, and those guys have ServiceNow, he has ServiceNow, and when they have problem with the product, their product, my customer's product, they all communicate via ServiceNow to each other. So they have created a whole ServiceNow network, truly a B2B kind of exchange, kind of, using ServiceNow. One of our median and entertainment customers who owns a bunch of parks, they refill the popcorn machine using ServiceNow. When the popcorn levels dip, they have those people who carry around the cart, Oh! The popcorn level dip, it marks the sensor, it routines the workflow, goes to the corporate, Ah, we need to fill up popcorn on by this particular ride. For me-- >> And even at my house, I love it. >> Yeah, so that's exciting to me. >> We talked to Siemens today. >> Yes, great customer. >> Awesome, and I want to run a line by you. We talk about AI a lot, machine intelligence. I wrote down during, you know, data is the fuel for AI. Well, you know we love data here at theCUBE, and he was describing that, he said, you know, even though CJ was not prescribing taking the data out, we could leave it in so it learns, right now, we take some of the data out. Well, you described that. Well, we put it to SAP HANA, we throw a little Watson in there, we do some Azure, machine learning, we use Tableau for visualization, he's probably got some Hadoop and Kafka in there, a very complicated, big data pipeline. And I said to him, Okay, in two years, do you want to do that inside of ServiceNow? He goes, "Absolutely. That would be my dream come true." So, I guess I'm laying down the gauntlet. Do you see that as a reality? >> So, we are talk to Siemens, great customer, they keep us honest, so I love that and I did actually meet the team who was in charge of their BI and reporting and they did share the same story a few months ago when I met them. And we are trying to figure out, Dave, if I knew the answer, I would have told you, but you know my style. I don't know the answer. We are seriously trying to figure out, Do we become an analytics hub? We are really good with ServiceNow data, we can build connectors with other data, but do I want to be in the BI and reporting market? Absolutely not. Do I want to help customers as their processes span across and provide them more visual credit tools than others, text-based searches, whatever they need, the answer is yes. Performance analytics, as you know, we have been moving along really at a good pace, and now we have what every single product, but this is something that Eric Miller, who runs that business, we talk about it all the time, because currently our analytics is building the platform, and now you know that data has a Cloud issue, so if you have data here, you have data there, you have data there, we are in our own Cloud. Can we build a connector, potentially, to OnPrem? Don't know the answer, but this is something, it's a fair gauntlet having to solve. >> Humbly, I'd like to give you my input, if I may. >> Yes. >> We see innovation, as I said before, it's data, applying machine learning to that data, and then leveraging Cloud economics. The project with big data projects, as you well know, is the complexity has killed them. Now you see the Cloud guys, whether it's Amazon or Microsoft, and that's where the data pipelines are being simplified and built. Now, I don't know if it's the right business decision for you guys, but wow, wouldn't that be powerful if you guys could do that, certainly, for your customers. >> And, truly, that is, as you heard me on Financial Analysts Day, I'm a huge fan of Geoffrey Moore's work, and he defines system of record, ERP CRM, system of action where we fall in, and then he has System of Intelligence, which is all the things around data and how do you harness the power of data. And that's something that I really, in our product teams, we talk about all the time, if I can solve Siemens problem with everything in ServiceNow, that'd be awesome, but is that something I want to prioritize right now, or is there something, we should give them the flexibility. I don't know. >> Well, you're one of the top product guys in our industry. It's why they found you. No, seriously, I put you up there with the greats. >> You're kind, thank you. >> It's true. You've got an incredible future ahead of you. But as a lead product person, you have to make those decisions, and you have to be very circumspect about where you put your resources. You can't just run to every customer requirement, right? >> And I tell, coincidentally, my wife asks me What's your job, by the way? I said, that's a good question. >> I'm married to a product officer, too, I feel the same way. What do you do all day? You do a lot of meetings. >> Yeah, exactly. So I said that I do a lot of meetings, and she said why do you do a lot of meetings? And I said I'm making a some decision or help my team make a decision because they already analyze a bunch of things. And I said, my hope is, as long as I can make more good decisions than bad decisions, specifically about product strategy, because you never know unless you make the chess pieces move and think of two or three steps ahead, and some things could be right and some things could be wrong. I have a simple framework on my whiteboard for every meeting. No jokes, right? So, my framework is very simple. Question number one, What customer problems we are trying to solve. If you cannot articulate that, for any new product idea you have, I don't go past that question, What customer problem we are trying to solve? Second is Why now? Why do we need to solve this problem now? Like you said, there are many problems, which one are you prioritize? And then, third, Why us? Why should we solve that problem? So, if you can articulate the problem, which always is a challenge because you kind of know what problems you have, but unless you really, really understand the customer pain point, you cannot articulate it. Then you say, why now? Like why is the time right now for us to invest in this, say, analytics, as a service? Why right now? And, third, why you, as in why us? Why is ServiceNow should solve it? That, at least, gives me a guiding compass to say because I have many products, as you know, I am very protective of our platform, and all these use cases come in, every product line wants to go deeper, rightfully so, because they are trying to solve for customers, and the new products want to be built on this platform. Sometimes I say maybe a partner should build it, so we made a decision, facilities product, Should our ISB partner build it? And that's the right place because we feel they are more suited, they have the skill set, all of that. But that's it, what problem, why now, why you? >> Rebecca: Really, I love it. >> Well, the Why you? it's a great framework. The why you is unclear for the Siemens problem, and I can understand that. You take the DemOps announcement that Pat stole from you today-- >> I know, that's not cool, man. >> But that's a problem that you guys solved internally, clear problem. >> He did a nice job of articulating it, very nice job. >> Yeah, definitely. >> But we feel that there always is a process when you need a workflow across, because in planning there are a bunch of companies, as the patch, or in build there are a bunch of companies in develop there are a bunch of companies. That's fine. They could be the system of records for those chevrons and we are the workflow that cuts across. So we feel loved. We showed our value to our customers by doing that. >> Rebecca: That's great. >> I know we've got to go, but lastly, it's roadmap. Last year, you talked about how you guys do releases by alphabet, twice a year. You were really transparent today, laid out the room and talked a lot about Madrid, you laid out well into the future what you guys are doing so, as an analyst, I love that. I'm sure you're customers love it, so-- >> A lot of people to picture, so that's nice. And Twitter, a lot of people posted on social media as well, so clearly there was a customer pain point, as we call it, that they needed a roadmap. In speaking to customers last one year, number one thing, if you tell us what you're building, then we don't have to build it. If you tell us when you're shipping, then we can plan around it, and then we will set aside resources to do testing. Any Cloud software company, whether it's us, CRM software or HR software, people still test, because you cannot mess up your employee experience or customer experience, and they just said give us a predictable schedule, please, so that we know. We did say two times a year, but we were not prescriptive which quarter. It could be four months and eight months, it could be six and six, it could be seven and five. I'm currently going with the quarterly-level fidelity, and eventually, I want to get to a month-level fidelity, where I say March and September, once our internal processes are organized. >> So the other subtlety there, and I know we got to go, is the ecosystem, because you're giving visibility, they have to make bets. They're making a bet on service, but then where's the white space? They're betting on white space. If you're exposing that to them, they can say, Oh, not going to solve that problem. ServiceNow's going to solve it in two quarters. >> I agree. >> Huge difference for them. >> You guys are wonderful. Thank you so much for inviting me. >> Rebecca: Thank you for coming on the show. We appreciate it. >> No, that's awesome, thank you, thank you. >> Dave: Great to have you. >> Rebecca: Great to have you. I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Vellante. We'll have more from ServiceNow Knowledge 18 just after this. (techy music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge17, brought to you by ServiceNow. >> And we're back in Orlando, everybody, this is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick, CJ Desai is here, he's the Chief Product Officer of ServiceNow, the newly-minted, 150 days in, CJ, great to see you off the keynote, fantastic job. >> Thank you, thank you, thank you. >> Very crisp, I was struck by your story about last October, when you were contacted by ServiceNow, you fired up the platform and started playing around and built an app. >> Yeah! (chuckling) >> And you found it was a good experience. >> It was a great experience, I'll tell you, Dave, from my standpoint, when you join a company that is built on a platform like ServiceNow, you want to make sure that you feel great about the foundational elements, because as always, you can build floors on top of a foundation, only when the foundation is strong. So ServiceNow always, I don't know if you know, but it started out as a platform company, and then they used the service management use case, and went deep in that use case, and then went to Operations Management and other products, as you know, and I just wanted to make sure that, hey, how easy it is, if I'm a customer, or if I'm in the product development organization, to create an app, and having that strong foundational layer, even simple things like, it's the cloud offering, first of all, you have a integrated development environment, you can start creating workflows, UI, all of that is so easy, and there's no headache of figuring out how to deploy the app, because it's right there, so you just publish it and you're done. >> Yeah, it's interesting, one of the first CUBE interviews we did at Knowledge was with Doug Leone, the famous VC, and he told the story of, he saw this, "What am I going to do with this?" And sent Fred away and said, "Build something on top of it," and that's what happened, but. But help our audience understand, CJ, because you talked about Jakarta today. >> Yeah. >> Now, Jakarta is a platform capability, and if we understand it correctly, we were talking about it earlier, the business units have to figure out, "Okay, how do we apply that capability "to our particular needs, and our customer needs," so explain that. >> Yeah, so ultimately, there are two things that happens in the products organization, right? First is, we do release this every six months, twice a year, so every six months, twice a year, and we go by alphabets, and we pick cities, just a fun factoid, we pick cities that go from North America or South America, to Europe, to Asia. So, H released last year, around this time, was Helsinki, after Helsinki was Istanbul, and then we have Jakarta, so are now in Asia, and then next will be Kingston, and the one after that is London, so you go alphabetically, and the reason we pick this city names in alphabets, we support our customers, because it's a multi-instance paradigm, n minus one and n minus two releases, so when you make, name of the cities, customers will have a conversation with me and say, "CJ, we went on Helsinki, we're upgrading to Istanbul, "or we're going to skip Istanbul, "and go straight to Jakarta," for example, so, first of all, that's our naming system that we use, every six months, you will see us talk about a specific release, and you heard from John yesterday, he was very clear in saying, "Listen, "our customers want to hear our roadmap, "they want to know what we are up to," and so we took that customer feedback to heart, and decided, why don't we just tell them what's coming in Jakarta? So Jakarta will be released this summer, and from a planning standpoint, Dave, to answer your question, we figure out first, what do our customers want, and is it in the applications that we talked about, like ITSM or CSM or security or HR, and for those applications to deliver the functionality, what do we need to do in the platform so that the functionality can be delivered? So the requirement process is a complex requirement process, the applications team will give requirements to the platform, customers also sometimes have requirements for the platform on scale, platform will build a functionality, applications team will build the features on top of it, so in Jakarta, which is coming out this summer, we have six new products, you saw some of them, software asset management and others, 30 major features, and that's close, so after Jakarta, we're already in planning for Kingston. After Kingston, I think I'm going to announce it for the first time, will be London, so it's Jakarta, Kingston, London, are the three-- >> Yeah, so when we go to these events, a lot of times, at the keynotes, somebody will make a product announcement and you get a little golf clap, it always happens at ServiceNow Knowledge that you get somebody hooting in the audience, today, the hoot came for software asset management, they were the three high level things you talked about today, performance with UX, and performance, and then the vendor risk management, which is very interesting, we'll talk about that a little bit, and then the software asset management, the guy must've been an Oracle customer hooting and hollering. But so, give us the high level overview. >> Alright, so, here is the thing, right? Our buyer is IT organization, we started with IT. We love our buyer, and CIO, to all the organizations that support CIO, head of infrastructure, the portfolio management team, the business management within IT. And one of the things that we saw, and this is the requirement that we got is, when we talk to CIOs about how to make the IT organization productive, because IT, it's a tough job, man, it's a tough job, things go down, you're like, "Okay, of course, IT," and technology's such an integral part of our life that people are always looking at IT to make sure they deliver great technologies. So, IT budget, and every, debated this all the time, everybody talks about IT budgets, what's happening to IT budgets, how the IT budget is going up or down, are you asked to do more with less, there are so many examples I can use, but as per Gartner, 25% of the IT budget is on software licensing. Then there is hardware and all the other infrastructure and people-related cost. 25%, so if, and as you know, some of the vendors put you through a pretty complex audit process, so why can't we, our chief buyer is IT, why can't we give them a platform, or a product, that allows them to discover how many products you are using by vendor, Microsoft, Oracle, some of you examples you used, for desktop, it's Adobe and others, you use these products, are you really utilizing all the licenses you have, or are you potentially in overage so that you actually have a sense of where you stand with every vendor that you're using that makes up your 25% budget. We talk to financial customers, manufacturing industrial customers, these are billions of dollars of budget, 25% is still a big number, any improvement in that 25% could go a long way, and what CFOs do not like is when CIOs go and tell the CFO, "Hey, we didn't clear this audit, "or potentially these guys may sue us "for a contract violation," so we decided we are going to create a product that helps you get a good posture on what your licensing is, does that make sense? And that's why, you know, I also saw on Twitter, a lot of people love this idea that, hey, can we automate this software as a management process, discover what's being deployed, allow you to reclaim, and at the end, help you save the cost. >> And the other one was the cloud management platform, which again, similar type of situation, especially with all the freemium services, and test dev, and card swiping, that they can get unruly pretty quickly. >> In my last job, as you are aware, I was in infrastructure space, and one of the things in speaking to customers, always realized that hey, IT was not agile enough, we decided, for some customers, we decided to go and use some of the public cloud services, re-enter infrastructure, because IT could not keep up with our demands, and you go and speak to IT, they say there is so much going on that sometimes it's not easy for devops communities, in particular, that you pointed out, so much going on. So, IT felt like they were losing control, developers, whether they're application developers in IT organization or in business units, just wanted agility, and IT felt like if they cannot deliver that level of service, you had the share-to-IT functions going on in the departments, and with cloud, we acquired a company called iTapp about a year ago in April. The first year was all focused on re-platforming, like I said today, I think many times, I'm sure people got sick of listening to me, is, we are going to re-platform every acquisition that we make, and we usually buy technologies in our business so far. And we re-platform it, and now, IT gets the control back, once for, you know, you help the developers, devops people, sure, go and use public cloud, but IT will still have a single pane of glass that allows you to look at your resource mapping, utilization, understanding the cost and the usage, whether you are on public cloud service, or in private cloud service. >> Well, it's huge, because it's very unpredictable, and people often complain, "Oh, I get the cloud bill at the end of the month," but a lot of times, there's not just one cloud bill, it's many, many cloud bills, and what happens, you know, you remember this, in the downturn, a lot of CFOs said, "Go to the public cloud, "eliminate Capax" and then, when we came out of the downturn, lines of business said, "I got to move fast, "and this cloud thing seems to be working for me." IT seems to have really, you know, in previous big picture trends like this, mega trends, IT oftentimes has been sort of pushing back, you saw that with client server. >> Yeah, their security concerns, compliances-- >> And today, they're announcing, okay, we have to embrace cloud, or we're toast. >> And Dave, I'll tell you, there are customers, I mean, some very large customers in regulated industries who tell me that, "CJ, we are now cloud first, "before we decide to do something," I mean, that's a pretty big statement, cloud first, I mean, if you remember 2008, '09, '10, '11, '12, '13, that journey, and how customers were reluctant, and they're like, "I don't know, my data losing from here," and this and that-- >> Well, I got to bring this up, so, I was reading an article on SiliconANGLE, EMC World is going on, Dell EMC World this week, and Michael Dell basically made this statement in his keynote, "If you're a cloud first, "you could be in trouble because of the expanse," and so forth. I don't buy it. I think the other, I love you, Michael, but the value that customers are getting out of going cloud-first, maybe, yeah, maybe the bill at the end of the month is high, but the other residual effects on your business, the speed, the agility, the processes, you're seeing it, aren't you? >> I mean, I'll tell you straight up, there are customers that are asking us, because, you know, again, IT's our key buyer, and key customer, and we appeal to the IT department, and the CIOs, even at the CIO dinner the night before, people are embracing cloud. Now, they are on a journey, some of them have maybe mode few percent of their workload, some of them may have mode a little higher, but they're on some journey, and they're trying to balance when the cost pros out with the cons, or the cons out with the pros, but, can you give us some kind of control plane to manage our cloud resources, understand the usage, understand the billing, which we do for financial management, and tie-in with IT processes, because that resource life cycle, that VMU provision, right, that VMU provision in the cloud, what happens to the life cycle of VM, can you create an incident, can you close it out, that's equally important besides just saying, "Yeah, I'm going to move this particular workload to cloud." So I feel that customers are on this journey of some kind of combination of public and private cloud, and it doesn't have to be zero-sum game, infrastructure continues to grow, I don't feel like, okay, if you do this, that means you do not do private, or if you do private, that doesn't mean-- >> Certainly both, and containers are going to just exacerbate the problem. >> Right, and the demand for compute, store, and networking is not going down any time soon. >> I'll tell you, my role environment, so my team lends cloud infrastructure, so our platforms runs on cloud infrastructure, and you saw some of the elevated numbers, I mean, our growth, we are trying to invest in compute network storage ahead of our growth, so it's not, and we are a cloud service, so I always look at it as, this doesn't have to be zero-sum game, customers are expanding, they want the agility, like you said, the agility, the business is asking, "Can you develop this app faster, "can you give me what I need," is what's driving-- >> It's a topline game for businesses, Jeff, I just want to inject some of those numbers on your cloud, 50,000 instances, 150 million active users, and 10 billion transactions per month. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, but I want to get, it's funny you're talking about Jakarta and London, I remember when we were doing interviews around Dublin, which I guess was a while ago, but I'm curious, 'cause there's this other trade-off, and get your perspective, is in a devops world, in kind of a continuous integration and development world, people want to push code frequently. On the other hand, in an enterprise world, and we've talked to a couple of customers, they can only take it so much, and so you've kind of got this yin and yang, and you want to get stuff out, and there's patches, and this and that, and you're on a relatively aggressive for current enterprise release schedule, on the other hand, the trend is clearly, just keep pumping it out, pumping it out, pumping it out, how do you see that kind of sorting itself out over time with these big enterprise customers? >> I will tell you, from a technology standpoint, there is nothing that prevents us from doing more frequent releases, yes, we have to mature our product release processes, we have to mature our cloud operations and how fast we can churn the code. There is nothing that prevents us, technically, from instead of two releases a year, maybe do four releases, it doesn't! But our customers, and we talk about customers first, listening to customers, you saw John today, I mean, we want to listen to them, and they will tell us, that I was at a large financial institution in Boston two weeks ago, and, your hometown, and they told me that, "I cannot do every six months, "I cannot do every six months, CJ, "we usually skip a release," right? And so we are just listening for specific use cases around service management, the processes, customer-run, same thing with operations management, right now, six months about feels right, every six months, release, we do quarterly patches, where we do not release features in those quarterly patches, and for emerging products, like you saw customer service, they challenge security, the team did a great job, when I look at those releases, is it potentially can we push things fast? Maybe, but right now, I'm okay, based on customer feedback. If customers come and say, "I want every three months," I hope to see what does that mean-- >> Let me run something by you, I told Jeff I've been sharing cabs with practitioners all week, it's great to just have wonderful conversations, and one said to me, "I've asked ServiceNow "if they can give me more granularity in the releases," I said, that doesn't sound trivial, in other words, if I can selectively choose features, is that even technically feasible? >> I mean, this is the isolating the feature, micro-feature development, making sure your schema is abstracted enough, I mean, there are companies in consumer world who do that, and push code out really fast. I would say, right now, one of the requirements I do get is, we're on IT service management, we have been a customer of ServiceNow for a while, but on this other thing, say, customer service, or HR, I want to take the new features, so my IT service management is at, say, Helsinki, but I want to take the HR, like the onboarding you saw, the onboarding, which is in Jakarta. So does that mean I need to upgrade this thing to leverage the HR feature? The answer is yes, because it's all built on single platform. Now, I do not want to do where customers, we give them two instances, and then we do a back-end pipe integration, a connector, so you can be on Helsinki for ITSM, and Jakarta, that-- >> Architecturally-- >> That breaks our model, and I do not want to do that. There are companies who, say, reside in different tenant, and will give you one for, I do not want to do that. >> I wanted to ask you about this too, CJ, because, you have a dogma, you have your own cloud, you see a lot of SaaS companies now saying, okay, you see Workday, a little bit of Salesforce, certainly Infor, putting their applications on AWS, for example. You guys, very proud of your cloud, you have availability, and I think when you show availability numbers, you downplay it, actually, people don't understand this, you're talking about application availability, you're not talking about the server light-- >> No. >> Okay, so you're very dogmatic about your cloud, and this issue here, you won't do something that maybe is going to help one customer but is going to ruin the experience down the road for all, and that dogma, is that a valid, it's not a criticism, it's an observation, and is that a good thing? >> So I would say there are some design principles, or operational principles that we live with, and we are going to stick to them, like we talk about acquisitions and re-platforming, think about, Dave, you have somebody coming in, you acquire a machine learning company, really smart kids, really smart people, machine learning or data sciences, an art more than a science, and looking at prediction accuracies and things like that. Now you tell them, "Welcome to ServiceNow, "here's your badge, you just got onboarded, "it's great what you've built, "we are not going to sell that standalone, "you need to re-platform," which typically takes one year, "Before we can launch your product." That's a tough message. That's a tough message for an engineering team to hear, that now I have to figure out how does this platform work, I mean, if I had a magic bullet, I would tell you, if I can wave the magic wand, I'll say, acquire this technology in machine learning AI, combine that with our organic development, it's a re-platform and I have a toolkit that does this thing, and it is a re-platform, but that's not easy. So on these kind of principles, whether it's re-platforming, how we do the releases, how we look at the cloud, and I want to answer your public cloud question. Right now, as you know, we're active, active, I've seen your interviews in the past here, we're active, active, we have eight pair of data centers, 16 around the world, and we make sure with our multi-instance architecture, the availability of the uptimes are very high for our customers, and when they upgrade, we know, they can pull the upgrade, "I'm going, CJ, "from Helsinki to Istanbul, or Helsinki to Jakarta," and that's available, but, can we potentially look at moving our footprint, and renting infrastructure in a public cloud? I'll never say never, but right now, there is no need for it. >> No, you see it, and there are advantages to having your own cloud. I want to ask about your role as Chief Product Officer. Fred Luddy had that title, we were sort of joking earlier, Fred was a coder, the company brought Frank in for adult supervision, and so you're inheriting that title, but I sense that you're a different type of manager, what do you bring to ServiceNow? >> I'll tell you, first of all, Fred, Frank, and even Dan McGee, who had this role last year, he was here, I saw his interview, he's here today, phenomenal people, I mean, I have interacted with all three of them, Dan McGee helped me transition into my role, Frank hired me, and just great, great guy, and even with Fred, going through this user experience, how do I think about the user experience based on the persona, he's always there to provide input with lots and lots energy and feedback. So let me just tell you for, in less than 30 seconds, what my role is, right? My role is, I help platform team, and the cloud infrastructure team, that's lead by Pat Casey, who is doing CreativeCon tomorrow, I have individual application general managers that you saw some of them today, and I also have the customer support organization, and the user experience teams. So that's my overall responsibility, so it's the responsibility that Fred Luddy had til last October, and Dan McGee had til last December, combined into one. So, it's a big job, and it comes with a lot of responsibilities on behalf of our customers, you talk about high availability number, we help to make sure that we keep our cloud service up and running secure, but at the same time, bringing this innovation in platform and the applications is my job. So, I'd done, fortunately, when I started out of college, makes me sound old, I know, but when I came out of college, I worked for a company that was doing business applications for a long time, eight years there, and I worked in that applications technology team, I worked in the CRM applications, did things for financial applications, and I went on security software, understanding how you protect the applications you write, all the way from OS up to the application stack, and then I worked for a infrastructure company, as you know. So that gave me a really good feel on the entire stack, how do you scale that stack, and be maniacally focused on, what do customers want? I mean, I am very fortunate to have great customer relationships, many companies around the globe, I reach out to them, ask them, tell me what you think, tell me what we are doing well, so customer focus, having done product development for 20-plus years now, and understanding all the way from application stack to the underlying infrastructure, is where I can help-- >> Yeah, it's like a triple threat that you have, the product innovation, the enterprise class, security, and scaling, as you mentioned, very, very important. Alright, CJ, I love having you on theCUBE, you're a great guest, we could continue, but we got to leave it right there. Great to see you again-- >> Thank you, thank you so much, I really appreciate it. >> Alright, keep it right there, everybody, we'll be back with our next guest, this is theCUBE, we're live from Knowledge17, we'll be right back.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone, we are wrapping up three big days of the CUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Dave Vellante and Jeffrick. It has been such fun co-hosting with you both. It's always a ghast to be with you so three days, what have we learned? We've learned we're making the world of work work better for people. Beyond that what do you think? >> New branding you know there which I think underscores ServiceNow's desire to get into the C-Suite. Become a strategic partner. Some of the things we heard this week, platform of platforms. The next great enterprise software company is what they aspire to, just from a financial standpoint. This company literally wants to be a hundred billion dollar valuation company. I think they got a reasonable shot at doing that. They're well on their way to four billion dollars in revenue. It's hard to be a software company and hit a billion. You know the number of companies who get there ar very limited and they are the latest. We're also seeing many products, one platform and platforms in this day and age beat products. Cloud has been a huge tailwind for ServiceNow. We've seen the SaaSification of industries and now we're seeing significant execution on the original vision at penetration into deeply into these accounts. And I got to say when you come to events like this and talk to customers. There's amazing enthusiasm as much of if not more than any show that we do. I mean I really got, what's your take? >> We go to so many shows and it's not hard to figure out the health of a show. Right you walk around the floor, what's the energy, how many people are there? What's the ecosystem I mean, even now as I look around we're at the very end of the third day and there is action at most of the booths still. So it's a super healthy ecosystem. I think it grew another 4,000 people from this year of the year of year growth. So it's clearly on the rise. SaaS is a big thing, I think it's really interesting play and the kind of simple workflow. Not as much conversation really about the no code and the low code that we've heard in the past. Maybe they're past that but certainly a lot of conversation about the vertical stack applications that they're building and I think at the end of the day. We talked about this before, it's competition for your screen. You know what is it that you work in everyday. Right if you use, I don't care what application. SalesForce or any SaaS application which we all have a lot of on our desktop today. If you use it as a reporting tool it's a pain. It's double entry, it's not good. But what is the tool that you execute your business on everyday? And that's really a smart strategy for them to go after that. The other thing that I just think is ripe and we talked about a little bit. I don't know if they're down playing it because they're not where they want to be at or they're just downplaying it but the opportunity for machine learning and artificial intelligence to more efficiently impact workflows with the data from the workflow is a huge opportunity. So what was a bunch of workflows and approvals and this and that should all get, most of it should just get knocked out via AI over a short period of time. So I think they're in a good spot and then the other thing which we hear over and over. You know Frank Slootman IT our homies I still love that line. But as has been repeated IT is everywhere so what a great way to get into HR. To get into legal, to get into facilities management, to get into these other things. Where like hey this is a really cool efficient little tool can I build a nice app for my business? So seemed to be executing on that strategy. >> Yeah CJ just said IT will always be at our core. Rebecca the keynote was interesting. It got mixed reviews and I think part of that is they're struggling we heard tat from some of our guests. There's a hybrid audience now. You got the IT homies, you got the DevOps crowd and then you got the business leaders and so the keynote on day one was really reaching an audience. Largely outside of the core audience. You know I think day two and day three were much more geared toward that direct hit. Now I guess that's not a bad thing. >> No and I think that I mean as you noted it's a hybrid audience so you're trying to reach and touch and inspire and motivate a lot of different partners, customers, analysts. People who are looking at your business in a critical way. The first day John Donahoe it struck me as very sort of aspirational. Really talking about what is our purpose, what do we do as an organization. What are our values, what problems are we trying to solve here and I think that that laying out there in the way that he did was effective because it really did bring it back to, here's what we're about. >> Yeah the other thing I learned is succession has been very successful. Frank Slootman stepped down last year as CEO. He's maintained his chairman title, he's now stepped down as chairman. Fred kind of you know went away for a little while. Fred's back now as chairman. John Donahoe came in. People don't really put much emphasis on this but Fred Luddy was the chief product officer. Dan McGee was the COO, CJ Desai took over for both of them. He said on the CUBE. You know you texted me, you got big shoes to fill. He said I kept that just to remind me and he seems to have just picked up right where those guys left off. You know Pat Casey I think is understated and vital to the culture of this company. You know Jeff you see that, he's like a mini Fred you know and I think that's critical to maintain that cultural foundation. >> But as we said you know going the way that Pat talked about kind of just bifurcation in the keynote and the audiences in the building and out of the building. Which I've never heard before kind of an interesting way to cut it. The people that are here are their very passionate community and they're all here and they're adding 4,000 every single year. The people that are outside of the building maybe don't know as much about it and really maybe that aspirational kind of messaging touched them a little bit more cause they're not into the nitty gritty. It's really interesting too just cause this week is such a busy week in technology. The competition for attention, eyeballs and time. I was struck this morning going through some of our older stuff where Fred would always say. You know I'm so thankful that people will take the time to spend it with us this week. And when people had choices to go to Google IO, Microsoft build, of course we're at Nutanix next, Red Hat Summit I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of other ones. >> Busy week. >> The fact that people are here for three days of conference again they're still here is a pretty good statement in terms of the commitment of their community. >> Now the other thing I want to mention is four years ago Jeff was I think might have been five years ago. We said on the CUBE this company's on a collision course with SalesForce and you can really start to see it take shape. Of the customer service management piece. We know that SalesForce really isn't designed for CSM. Customer Service Management. But he talked about it so they are on a collision course there. They've hired a bunch of people from SalesForce. SalesForce is not going to rollover you know they're going to fight hard for that hard, Oracle's going to fight hard for that. So software companies believe that they should get their fair share of the spend. As long as that spend is a 100%. That's the mentality of a software company. Especially those run by Marc Benioff and Larry Ellis and so it's going to be really interesting to see how these guys evolve. They're going to start bumping into people. This guy's got pretty sharp elbows though. >> Yeah and I think the customer relation is very different. We were at PagerDuty Summit last right talked to Nick Meta who just got nominated for entrepreneur of the year I think for Ink from GainSight and he really talked about what does a customer management verses opportunity management. Once you have the customer and you've managed that sale and you've made that sale. That's really were SalesForce has strived in and that's we use it for in our own company but once you're in the customer. Like say you're in IBM or you're in Boeing. How do you actually manage your relationship in Boeing cause it's not Boeing and your sales person. There's many many many relationships, there's many many many activities, there's somewhere you're winning, somewhere you're losing. Somewhere you're new, somewhere you're old and so the opportunity there is way beyond simply managing you know a lead to an opportunity to a closed sale. That' just the very beginning of a process and actually having a relationship with the customer. >> The other thing is so you can, one of the measurements of progress in 2013 this company 95% of its business was in IT. Their core ITSM, change management, help desk etc. Today that number's down to about two thirds so a third of the business is outside of IT. We're talking about multi-hundreds of millions of dollars. So ITOM, HR, the security practice. They're taking these applications and they're becoming multi-hundred million dollar businesses. You know some of them aren't there yet but they're you know north of 50, 75 we're taking about hundreds of customers. Higher average price, average contract values. You know they don't broadcast that here but you know you look at peel back the numbers and you can see just tremendous financial story. The renewal rates are really really high. You know in the mid 90s, high 90s which is unheard of and so I think this company is going to be the next great enterprise software company and their focus on the user experience I think is important because if you think about the great enterprise software companies. SalesForce, Oracle, SAP, maybe put IBM in there because they sort of acquired their way to it. But those three, they're not the greatest user experiences in the world. They're working on the UI but they're, you know Oracle, we use Oracle. It's clunky, it's powerful. >> They're solving such different problems. Right when those companies came up they were solving a very different problem. Oracle on their relational database side. Very different problem. You know ARP was so revolutionary when SAP came out and I still just think it's so funny that we get these massive gains of efficiency. We had it in the ARP days and now we're getting it again. So they're coming at it from a very different angle. That they're fortunate that there are more modern architecture, there are more modern UI. You know unfortunately if you're legacy you're kind of stuck in your historical. >> In your old ways right? >> Paradigm. >> So the go to market gets more complicated as they start selling to all these other divisions. You're seeing overlay, sales forces you know it's going to be interesting. IBM just consolidated it's big six shows into one. You wonder what's going to happen with this. Are they going to have to create you know mini Knowledges for all these different lines of business. We'll see how that evolves. You think with the one platform maybe they keep it all together. I hope they don't lose that core. You think of VM world, rigt there's still a core technical audience and I think that brings a lot of the energy and credibility to a show like this. >> They still do have some little regional shows and there's a couple different kind of series that they're getting out because as we know. Once you get, well just different right. AWS reinvents over $40,000 last year. Oracle runs it I don't even know what Oracle runs. A 65,000, 75,000. SalesForce hundred thousand but they kind of cheat. They give away lot of tickets but it is hard to keep that community together. You know we've had a number of people come up to us while we're off air to say hi, that we've had on before. The company's growing, things are changing, new leadership so to maintain that culture I think that's why Pat is so important and the key is that connection to the past and that connection to Fred. That kind of carried forward. >> The other thing we have to mention is the ecosystem when we first started covering ServiceNow Knowledge it was you know fruition partners, cloud Sherpas I mean it. Who are these guys and now you see the acquisitions, it's EY is here, Deloitte is here, Accenture is here. >> Got Fruition. >> PWC you see Unisys is here. I mean big name companies, Capgemini, KPMG with big install bases. Strong relationships it's why you see the sales guys at ServiceNow bellying up to these companies because they know it's going to drive more business for them. So pretty impressive story I mean it's hard to be critical of these guys, your price is too high. Okay I mean alright. But the value's there so people are lining up so. >> Yeah I mean it's a smoking hot company as you said. What do they needed to do next? What do you need to see from them next? >> Well I mean the thing is they laid out the roadmap. You know they announced twice a year at different cities wit each a letter of the alphabet. They got to execute on that. I mean this is one of those companies that's theirs to lose. It really is, they got the energy. They got to retain the talent, attract new talent, the street's certainly buying their story. Their free cash flow is growing faster than their revenue which is really impressive. They're extremely well run company. Their CFO is a rockstar stud behind the scenes. I mean they got studs in development, they got a great CEO they got a great CFO. Really strong chief product officer, really strong general managers who've got incredible depth in expertise. I mean it's theirs to lose, I mean they really just have to keep executing on that roadmap keeping their customer focus and you know hoping that there's not some external factor that blows everything up. >> Yeah good point, good point. What about the messaging? We've heard as you said, it's new branding so it's making the world of work work better, there's this focus on the user experience. The idea that the CIO is no longer just so myopic in his or her portfolio. Really has to think much more broadly about the business. A real business leader, I mean is this. Are you hearing this at other conferences too? Is it jiving with the other? >> You know everyone talks about the new way to work, the new to work, the new way to work and the consumers they sort of IT and you know all the millennials that want to operate everything on their phone. That's all fine and dandy. Again at the end of the day, where do people work? Because again you're competing everyone has, excuse me many many applications unfortunately that we have to run to get our day job done and so if you can be the one that people use as the primary way that they get work done. That's the goal... >> Rebecca: That's where the money is. >> That's the end game right. >> Well I owe that so the messaging to me is interesting because IT practitioners as a community are some of the most under appreciated. You know overworked and they're only here from the business when things go bad. For decades we've seen this the thing that struck me at ServiceNow Knowledge 13 when we first came here was wow. These IT people ar pumped. You know you walk around a show the IT like this, they're kind of dragging their feet, heads down and the ServiceNow customers are excited. They're leading innovation in their companies. They're developing new applications on these platforms. It's a persona that I think is being reborn and it sound exciting to see. >> It's funny you bring up the old chest because before it was a lot about just letting IT excuse me, do their work with a little bit more creativity. Better tools, build their own store, build an IT services Amazon likened store. We're not hearing any of that anymore. >> Do more with less, squeeze, squeeze. >> If we're part of delivering value as we've talked about with the banking application and link from MoonsStar you know now these people are intimately involved with the forward facing edge of the company. So it's not talking about we'll have a cool service store. I remember like 2014 that was like a big theme. We're not hearing that anymore, we've moved way beyond that in terms of being a strategic partner in the business. Which we here over and over but these are you know people that header now the strategic partner for the business. >> Okay customers have to make bets and they're making bets on ServiceNow. They've obviously made a bunch of bets on Oracle. Increasingly they're making bets on Amazon. You know we're seeing that a lot. They've made big bets on VM ware, obviously big bets on SAP so CIOs they go to shows like this to make sure that they made the right bet and they're not missing some blind spots. To talk to their peers but you can see that their laying the chips on the table. I guess pun intended, I mean they're paying off. >> That's great, that's a great note to end on I think. So again a pleasure co-hosting with both of you. It's been a lot of fun, it's been a lot of hard work but a lot of fun too. >> Thank you Rebecca and so the CUBE season Jeff. I got to shout out to you and the team. I mean you guys, it's like so busy right now. >> I thought you were going to ask if we were going next. I was going to say oh my god. >> Next week I know I'm in Chicago at VMON. >> Right we have VMON, DON, we've got a couple of on the grounds. SAP Sapphire is coming up. >> Dave: Pure Accelerate. >> Pure Accelerate, OpenStack, we're going back to Vancouver. Haven't been there for a while. Informatica World, back down here in Las Vegas Pure Storage, San Francisco... >> We got the MIT's CTO conference coming up. We got Google Next. >> Women Transforming Technology. Just keep an eye on the website upcoming. We can't give it all straight but... >> The CUBE.net, SiliconAngle.com, WikiBon.com, bunch of free content.- you heard it here first. >> There you go. >> For Rebecca Knight and Jeffrick and Dave Vellante this has been the CUBE's coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18. We will see you next time. >> Thanks everybody, bye bye.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCube's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18 here in Las Vegas. I'm your host Rebacca Knight along with my co-host Dave Vellante, and we are theCube. We are the leader in live tech coverage. We're joined by Sean Caron. He is the principal architect of Linium, at Linium. Thanks so much for coming on theCube again, you're welcome back. >> My second time, and thank you very much for the opportunity. I've really been looking forward to it all week. >> Awesome, Good to have you back. >> We love to hear that. So tell us about Linium and what you do as principal architect. >> Sure, so we are a gold services and sales partner of ServiceNow. Been in the ServiceNow space for about nine years total. And we specialize in helping organizations do digital transformations. So they want to take the platform and really get maximum value from that and that's both a technology discussion, but it's also a organizational change discussion, and you know can be a process discussion. All those kind of things are things that we help our customers with. >> We've been talking a lot about the technology but the organizational change is really what fascinates me. Can you tell, can you just talk about a lot of the organizational change challenges that customers are facing, and they come to you. >> You've got it right. So we've been in this business for 18 years. We started out as a Peregrine partner and also HP, when HP acquired Peregrine, and we noticed that we would get specs from customers and we would nail it. It would be a perfect technical delivery and then six months later when you talk to the customer, they weren't using the product. They didn't get any value from the investment that they made. So we started to engineer a process and we do that around, you know we look at the structure. Where is this project going to land? What's the structure around it? Who supports it? What's your culture? Do you have a culture of dedication to accuracy or customer service? If you don't have those kind of things, we can help build those in your organization. And of course that also gets to helping you find talent, right. So if you need the right people, we can help with that process. Helping you define business best practice process for your organization. Those are all things we work with customers every day and frankly we don't do technology projects. We only do a project where we know when we deliver the technology that that structure will be there to catch it and get value from it. >> So you were recently acquired by Ness Digital Engineering, >> Correct >> Which is really an interesting name for a company. Tell us more about the motivation for that acquisition and how things have changed, and what the future looks like. >> So for the first 17 years of our business we were a privately held company and we grew organically, and we did a great job at that. I mean we became several hundred employees across the U.S. and a couple in AMIA, and a couple in Canada. But to really take the next step right, we saw, we had a vision of what we wanted to do, to take that next step was going to require an equity investment of some type. So we started probably about this time last year, talking to organizations. Ness was one of the first ones that we met and it became immediately apparent that they were a great fit for us. So they have about, well with us about 4,000 people across the world. They're not a billion dollar company right. So their culture is very similar to our culture. They do digital engineering projects, industrial scale, you know hard core grade digital engineering projects, and they tend to focus on platforms that are front of the business, so customer touching. They own the platform under Standard & Poor's right, so they built that. So Standard Poor's ratings, all that information flows in, they do the ratings based on that. That's something they built. PayPal, they do a lot of work in the payments industry. But they didn't really do much on the backend right. The operations that keep all the lights on and obviously that's a great fit for Linium, where we would come in with the ServiceNow platform and help them with that process. So that really worked out well. It was a great fit for us. >> So how do you guys compete? What's your difference relative to, you've been here a while in this ecosystem. It's started to get crowded. How do you, what's your secret sauce? How do you guys compete? >> So our goal is always to try and stay 12 months ahead of where ServiceNow is going. In the past couple of years, that really has been around user experience. Really designing experiences with the platform that are intuitive, that don't require a lot of training, that allow people to approach the platform and get value from it very quickly. Whether that's end users, or our customer's customers. Those kind of things, really, and that's in our DNA. That's a big part of what we do is design these experiences and do them in a way that really help our customers get value. I would say, you know looking forward, so the buzzword that we've heard around here this week is DevOps right, and we see, and one of the things that Ness does very well is DevOps engineering. I think next year will be the knowledge of DevOps. It will be what everybody's talkin' about. ServiceNow will have a lot more throw-weight in that space. So really that's where we're going. We're helping people get that continuous integration, continuous deployment process using ServiceNow as a foundation. >> CJ Desai laid out the roadmap in more detail than I had seen publicly anyway, and we were talking to him and he said, "Look the motivation really came from the ecosystem." You know obviously the customers as well, but the ecosystem as well, wanted better visibility on what was coming, because you guys have to plan for that. You're tryin' to fill white space. You're tryin' to fill a vacuum. So I wondered if you could talk about that. It's a two-edged coin though right? I mean, but having that visibility has to be a godsend. >> Right and we found that when we are some number of months ahead of ServiceNow, we work very well with them. We, you know obviously, like any large ServiceNow partner, we're very plugged in to where they're going. Their roadmap sets our direction and the kind of things that we can do. But it enables conversations, especially DevOps, and user experience too, enabled conversations at new levels within the organization and that's a big differentiator for us. >> But so, what I'm trying to understand is you guys have to make a call on where to put your investments and your resources, and you don't want to, you've said a couple of times, you're ahead of ServiceNow by, let's say N months, six months, 12 months, 9 months, whatever it is. You don't want to develop something and put too much into something that they're just going to replace in a few months. >> Right. >> Dave: So how do you keep that innovation engine going on your end? >> That right, so it takes a lot of research. We have a person whose dedicated job at our organization is Chief Innovation Officer. She spends her entire day talking to customers, hearing what buzzwords are in the industry, looking and talking to ServiceNow, looking at where they're going. So how can we be positioned when ServiceNow gets there 'cause to deliver services, that's not an instant on right. If the technology shows up tomorrow in the next release, to be able to deliver services for that, you have to start well in advance to actually be able to do that, to understand the process, and the structure, and what's required. >> I see, okay so by being ahead of ServiceNow, what you mean is you're going to develop capabilities that plug in to their release when it hits. >> So that we can deliver to what they have, >> Not things that are duplicative, but things that are, add value when it hits. >> Yeah, I mean ServiceNow comes out with, let's say automated testing. That's something they want to really, they want to get into the automated testing market. That's a discipline. You can't be instant on with that and if you want to have credibility with customers, you have to have trained people. You've got to be six months ahead to be able to step into that world and get value from the platform. >> So take the DevOps example that we heard Pat Casey talk about yesterday. So you guys are preparing for that now obviously. >> Yes. >> And how will you go about it? How will that change your customers world? If can take us through an example. >> So obviously DevOps is, you know it's the big accelerator. It's the idea of we're going to do what we've always done and we're going to do it in timeframes that are minutes or hours, as opposed to weeks, or months, or even years right, so it's a big ramp up. So understanding how to put that in play is a big deal. If you're a startup, alright so one of the themes of DevOps is the two pizza team right. You should never have teams bigger than you can feed with a couple of pizzas. If you're a startup and you already got a two pizza team it's easy to do DevOps. You build it into your culture and away you go. But our customers, you know many of our customers, one we were talkin' about here, talking to here at the show, 130 year old firm and they want to do DevOps. So what's that on-ramp? How do you figure that out? One of our new colleagues from Ness, who has been in the DevOps world for a while says, "You know, it's all about unlearning stuff." Because in order to move into this world, you got to unlearn that old world. >> Well right, it is a mindset. >> It is, it's a culture. >> So how, and one that will be very tricky for a 130 year old firm that maybe doesn't order pizzas that often (chuckling) for it's team. So how do you do that? I mean that's a challenge. >> We're working diligently on having a roadmap to onboard DevOps into existing organizations. The secret really tends to be, start with a NET new project and introduce DevOps into those kind of projects. Build one, build two, build three now you've got a culture of DevOps and you can start then to do some of the unlearning and the retrofitting right. But it's very difficult. You can't really take an existing projects and transform how they do their work. Which is what DevOps is all about. >> No, but in a lot of the companies that I've talked to that have, you know hundred plus year old companies that want to do DevOps right. A lot of times, and I wonder if this has been your experience, it's the Ops guys learning Dev, as opposed to the Dev guys learning Ops. I mean the Dev guys like, "Yeah, yeah we can do infrastructure as code, that's fine", but then you've got all these Ops guys runnin' around. So it's a urgency to retrain the Ops guys, who are eager to learn, most of 'em. The ones that aren't probably in trouble. >> Will do something else. >> So I often joke about OpsDev versus DevOps. What's your experience? >> So I think the big difference is Ops guys are trained from the day they take that job to, you know shun failure right. Failure of a system is a big problem. In DevOps it's going to happen. Not only is it going to happen but the best DevOps practitioners create failure. >> Break stuff (laughing) >> Yeah, you know Netflix kind of has this famous program called Chaos Monkey, when it runs running, turn stuff off right, and how do you respond to that. And that's a big leap culturally and structurally for the Ops guys to get over that. You know the idea is we break stuff, but we learn from that, and not only do I learn from that, but I spread that knowledge across the organization. And that's where ServiceNow steps in right, because they know when things are broken, 'cause they're tied to monitoring, and they got this great knowledge capability to hook up the information we learn from how that broke. So what better testing could we have done so that we could have avoided that break? Or if it's a enforced break, what could we have learned about how to respond to that more quickly? You know the classic example is when AWS lost their east availability center and Netflix kept tickin' because they had lost their east availability center through Chaos Monkey a half a dozen times. >> Right >> It was old hat, and everybody else kind of went dark right. So that idea, and enabling that with the ServiceNow platform is a great opportunity. We really see ServiceNow as the context, the engine with all the knowledge about when things happen, how to fix them, and how to record the knowledge that you learn. >> Give us an example of a company, I mean you're talking about simple, streamlined, intuitive tech, no-training required, so give us some examples of some of the most creative uses. >> I'll give you a great example. So, we have a center in Atlanta. We have some folks in Atlanta. And of course if your in Atlanta, you love Chick-fil-a, and maybe if you're anywhere else you love Chick-fil-a. And they had an issue, which was they have franchisees, and their franchises are different from McDonald's, where you might have one franchisee at McDonald's that owns 200 restaurants. They have a lot of power, market power, and they don't share information with any other franchisee, 'cause that's differentiating for them. Chick-fil-a doesn't do that. The maximum number of restaurants you can own as a Chick-fil-a franchisee I believe is three. It's a number like that. So their franchisees are incented to talk to each other and share information. "Hey I found a better way to clean the ice cream machine", or something like that or to fix a problem. So they were looking to build a portal that they could use to both answer questions from the organization to the franchisees, but allow the franchisees to talk to each other. That kind of a thing has to be zero training right, because the people who are on that might be store managers, but it could be, you know the teenager who runs the point of sale terminal and is havin' a problem with that, so it's really got to be intuitive. So we spent a lot of time with them. We actually, it was we brought one of our designers, so we have UI, UX designers, experience designers, and we were in the sales meeting, and we're having a discussion about what they need, and he's kind of heads down typin' on his computer. And they're kind of lookin' at him like, what's up with this guy right, he's not payin' attention. >> He's designing the interface. >> These guys pay attention to everything. He's lookin' at the logo as we're walkin' in, the colors that are on the wall, the way they talk about themselves. So about an hour into the meeting we got a pause and he just kind of picks his head up and goes, "You mean like this?" And turned his computer around and he had a prototype that he built in the meeting of this really easy to use process. >> Very cool. >> Sean: So that was our intro to Chick-fil-a. >> Your sales guy must'a hated that. (hosts laughing) >> No, no, it was, I'll tell you what, so it was competitive, we have multiple competitors, who were going for that business, when he turned that computer around, the sale was done. >> Dave: Boom. >> We were done, right. They looked at that and said, This is, you know it's not perfect clearly, but this is what we need. >> This is the kind of company we want to work with. >> Exactly, well and that, you know part of that is there are partners in the ecosystem who come in and say, "We can do anything. "Tell us what you want." We are much more consultative and we'll come in and be prescriptive and say this is what you should do, and it's a differentiator for us. It's something we do differently. >> Well Sean that's a great note to end on. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE again. >> It's been great, I really enjoyed my time. >> We'll look forward to having you back at Knowledge 19. >> Terrific, I will certainly be here. >> Great, I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18 in just a little bit. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone, day two of the CUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18. Here at the Venetian in Las Vegas Nevada, I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Dave Vellante. >> Dave: Still have my voice. >> You still have it yes okay well we'll see how you do tomorrow but you're still going strong. But I'm really excited about this panel we have Pharrel Howe she is a GM in IT service management, asset management, business management. Have I forgotten one? >> Nope. >> Rebecca: I got it all at ServiceNow. >> Dave: This week. >> Exactly, at ServiceNow. You run the biggest business for ServiceNow. >> Yes. >> Thanks for joining us Pharrel. >> Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here. >> So I want to talk about employee experience which is really. It's just the cornerstone of this conference but really ServiceNow's purpose. Why has it become so increasingly important in IT today? >> Okay well in IT really you saw it today in CJ's keynote. The era of great experience is here and in IT we've been really really great at managing productivity and managing cost and making sure we were running efficiently and that we still do that and do it really well. But now we have to also make sure not just our customers have a great experience but our employees do too. And companies that do that well have the competitive advantage. It's absolutely required that we're able to do that now and so you know ServiceNow's paving the way for great experiences on our platform. For customers and employees and we're excited to be leading the next era of great experience. >> So I don't want to minimize the accomplishments that ServiceNow has made because they're phenomenal. >> Pharrel: Alright I'm happy for you not to minimize them. >> But I want to say this, you have thrived. I mean when Fred Luddy developed the platform. You thrived in the sea of mediocrity and you drove a ship through that sea and just mopped up a lot of business. Awesome, congratulations and in this world we live in it's like now it's becoming table stakes. If you guys have pointed out our home lives we live with these consumer interfaces we expect that now so as a leader of ServiceNow's a largest business. How do you continue to push the innovation levier? We expect now so much more, how do you continue to differentiate. Because your competition has woken up, the world was waking up. How do you stay ahead? >> Well you saw, you know earlier today CJ talking again and we're going to, you'll continue to see this theme from us. It is all about the platform. We are a platform company and when we build and innovate, acquire and then innovate. It is all within the platform and that I our competitive advantage. So then every application that was in existence today or that we build in the future can take advantage of that innovation natively. It's all integrated and seamless and there's nobody else out there who is able to do that and deliver those experiences. And so that is going to continue to be our strategy moving forward. >> So let's double click on that a little bit. Maybe get some examples. So clearly there's a big emphasis on UX and design. I think you guys have made some investments in design firms. >> Pharrel: Significant. >> There's machine intelligence I'll call it, AI. You're infusing AI throughout the platform and those are just two examples. >> Yeah. >> Maybe talk about those and give us some others if there are them. >> Sure well you know in the IT keynote that I'm going to have this afternoon. It's all about the era of great experiences and taking the roles that are in IT. It will be about the fulfiller, the requester, the planner and the operator in IT and how we've taken to the road and gone and done user research out with our customers and we're building great experiences in the platform for those roles. You no longer is it going to stand for you to just use your best judgment and go and build product and hope everybody will come. You've got to get out there side by side with your customers. Truly understand the work that they're doing and then build that back into the product and iterate again and again and again. And so that's the direction we're going from a design standpoint to build those experiences. >> So let's unpack this era of great experiences something that's simple, easy, intuitive but what are we really talking abut here. How do you define a great experience? >> Yeah well let's take it from something that we can relate to, we're all requesters of services one way or another right? And me as an employee I need services from IT in order to do my job. The thing is the channels that we have today are not enough. Phone and email aren't going to cut it and a lot of times if I'm in the carpool line waiting to pick up my daughter and her friends from school. I and you know I'm trying to check in on the ticket status for a laptop that I need immediately and I happen to think of it right then. I'm not going to call IT, I'm not in front of the laptop. I need more channels on more devices anytime anywhere at my convenience not someone else's. And so that's the kind of stuff that were talking about. We can't, it can't just be good enough anymore it has to be prolific. >> I'm interested in how you're using and applying machine intelligence. It seems like you're trying to anticipate my needs, put things in front of me that I might. You know I might shorten my search time or might be relevant that I hadn't even though of. Is that the right way to be thinking about how you're using machine intelligence and second part of the question is. What ar you finding that machines can do better than humans and how do they compliment each other? Srt of a long question. >> Sure I love this question. That's okay love it. Okay so our initial approach to agent and to machine intelligence, artificial intelligence. All of that is to you heard CJ say it today. You'll here micro-moments are moments that matter and we're looking to inject intelligence right there. Right there, those are very very practical use cases. They're not a panacea. They are not the answer but they are an answer in a moment that critically matters and so a perfect example of how that would play out would be my example previously of checking in on my laptop. The virtual agent that we're bringing to the market in our London release is all conversation based. And so I can very quickly see what topics that agent can handle and I can you know immediately engage on what that looks like and get the confidence that I need back and forth engaging with the virtual agent in m convenience wherever I am. Whether I'm at work or I'm at home and so you know that is a moment that matters for me because it's not, it eliminates the mental overhead for me to keep track of the administration of just trying to do my job everyday. Now take the flip side of that. The person who's on the other side of that virtual agent or would have been had that virtual agent not be there. They are not having to answer those kind of questions. Is my laptop coming please just assure me. They're not answering questions and so you know maybe that's not necessarily deflecting it an incident. It could be, but it's also reducing the administrivia that's happening when, and so it's cutting down the time it takes to resolve incidents and it's reducing friction and frustration. Between fulfillers and requesters of service ad so that's how we're looking at it. In those moments that matter and then as technology evolves and gets stronger. There may be bigger and larger use cases. >> And the machine verses human thing. I hate to say it that way but things the machines are doing. You're seeing categorization obviously is one at scale. Other things, I mean how do you see that evolving. What are the things that increasingly machine are going to do that humans can't do as well. >> Well I would say a use case besides maybe the virtual agent and those conversation based topics which really are just guided flows for conversation. Another thing might be being able to you know if there's just so much data that would take me a while. Or I would need a business analyst to maybe go and look for insights. That's something that machines can do and that's not replacing humans that's scaling our ability to act. And so that I think is the next foray to really move into and we'll start poking in different areas of insights as well and the moments that matter for work getting done in the enterprise as well. >> Because that is really what we're trying to do is help people get their work done. >> Pharrel: Yes. >> Quicker. >> Pharrel: And more easily. And when we talk about employee experience it's simply that. Please just let me get my work done and let me have some choice. I'm going to have a personal tool chain. Don't force me to use you know ServiceNow, please don't force me to use your messaging client. Our connect chat if I want to Microsoft Teams or Slack let me do that and let me keep that UI. So we're really when we talk about employee experiences it's a very broad arena there and its a great partnership between IT and all the other lines of business to deliver what employee experience is going to look like. >> And you know Rebecca, we talked about this yesterday. John Donahoe took on the machine replacing humans and was very transparent. The example I would use is search. When IDC we had a big library. We had like three or four librarians. They're not there anymore but nobody is saying oh wow. Search I mean search is a machine. It made our lives better, it created new opportunities. I think that's a good example, a small one but one where. I'm an optimist even though things are getting complex. >> Pharrel: Me too, absolutely an optimist on that and so for example with our virtual agent. Go do a search on LinkedIn and you will find for conversation designer. There are new jobs being created to be able to support this kind of technology. You know, jobs are evolving not going away. >> So speaking of jobs. You have been a very successful leader in a high growth organization. >> Thanks. >> I think on your Twitter it says I'm on a rocket ship ride of a lifetime. >> Pharrel: I am, I'm here to tell you. >> I'd love to hear what your advice is for other leaders who are trying to affect transformational change in their IT organizations. >> Alright I think whether it's personal change for yourself, you're trying to evolve or you need to evolve your organization. The first thing you need to do is check your assumptions. You know the older we get and the more we're barraged by noise we think we know. Make sure that you're really clear on and have some self reflection but also go and check that with people around you and get some clarity around alright is this really the reality. What's our reality that we're trying to transform? And when you're talking about transformation it doesn't necessarily happen overnight. It can happen overnight and that's called disruption but transformation that you are initiating. Give yourself a little bit of breathing room. You got to know that this is a marathon and you cannot be doing it at a sprint pace. You will burn out so keep your eye on the horizon and what you're trying to accomplish and just get started. Don't sit there and wait and try to have the perfect plan. You're going to attack your way through it, it's going to change anyway. Just get started. >> The rapid iteration we were hearing about that's so important. >> Yeah absolutely DevOps and you know personal digital transformation. You got it. >> I also want to talk to you about women. There is a dearth of women leaders in technology. You are one of them, what are you doing personally to promote diversity and inclusion at ServiceNow and then what is the company doing and finally what should the tech industry be doing to face this challenge head on? >> Yeah you know my take on it is, it's all about belonging and I got that word from Pat Waters. So diversity, inclusion and belonging. That's something that she's championing and we are so fortunate to have her as our chief talent officer. Prior to having that word I was just really focused on connection. You know really engaging just with people and trying to understand where they're coming from and really making sure that you're practicing active listening. That has been like the key for my success I will say throughout my career. Is just being able to constantly reflect back what I'm hearing. One to make sure I didn't put any filters on it obviously and then two people want to feel heard and so you know whenever I get into the conversation around women in tech. Yes there are some very real facts, fact based, data based challenges ahead of us but where I choose to put my focus is a much broader conversation that includes you know everyone. And really just focusing a lot more on connection and belonging over all makes a huge difference. >> What you're saying is really resonating because I mean that's what we keep hearing is happening but perpetuates the old boys club is that oh I know this guy because we went to college together. Or some other kind of biases that you hold that it's just oh he's like me. I want to promote him and bring him along and there are fewer women in positions of power who they can bring up the people that they see are like them. So I think that's another problem too is that you have to... >> Yeah that goes back to a really great HR practice which is you cannot just reach deep into your network every time you get in trouble. Rely on a great HR standard practice that says no you know we need to go out there and there's great talent out there that you just didn't even think of. So you know when you're going back to, we talked about transformation earlier in this conversation. Check your self awareness, be clear about wait a minute. Do I really know right now what I need. I'm not sure let me broaden my perspective here and HR's been a great partner to be able to do that. >> So that's a great point because gender and race and sexual preference are part of that diversity and certainly other factors. But like a financial advisor when the portfolio gets over balanced in one area he or she has to rebalance that portfolio. And again it sounds formulaic but I think Pharrel your point is what you're looking for is to open up that network to a wider audience. >> Absolutely. >> And not just the good old boys network. >> I have a little bit of a bias here, you know my background. I'm an English major and I'm running the large business for ServiceNow. >> We need to open the diversity to English, it's a liberal arts background. >> I don't want kids these days to think that if they pick one path they're stuck in that path and their locked into certain jobs. It's not true, you can you just need, it's the way that you think, it's having critical thinking skills. Now listen, you're not going to go put me on the platform although I probably could. Go in and start coding, you're not going to rely on me to do that right away. I can learn it but allowing us, allowing yourself to start to believe. That hey wait a minute, you know the labels that I've grown up with and put on people. Maybe I can remove a couple and I love it when I'm surprised and are able to bring an employee on my time that I'm like ah it doesn't necessarily make sense on the paper but look at you. You're amazing. >> Well one of the things that supports that is digital. For years if you were in the financial services business or the manufacturing business or the automotive business. You were there for life but if you have digital skills you can traverse now much more easily. >> Yes absolutely. >> Kids today just have phenomenal opportunities. >> I know, I know it's great. I think it's so cool and I love making. I love opening tech a bit more to make it more accessible. More appealing, that there are so many different roads to come in and it's important that we get people who think differently, creative you know people who are good strong communicators. Who can bring clarity to a situation. We need all of that and that to me is the first step for diversity. >> And because that's the stuff that robots aren't very good at. Is the empathy, the creativity, that kind of broad thinking. >> That's right. >> Awesome way to bring it home. >> Found full circle. Pharrel thanks so much for coming on the program. What a fun and enlightening conversation. >> Oh my gosh, super fun. I really appreciate it. >> And you're speaking today at 1:30, good luck with that. >> And by the way we have a diversity and inclusion belonging lunch with Pat Waters and CJ Desai which will be at I think 12:30 as well so. >> Great plug, excellent. Thank you so much again. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante we will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge 18 hashtag know 18 just after this.

live from Las Vegas it's the cube covering service now knowledge 2018 brought to you by service now welcome back to the cubes live coverage of service now knowledge 18 here and Las Vegas Nevada I'm your host - Rebecca night along with my co-host Dave Volante we are joined by dr. Mateus Egelhoff he is the program director at Siemens AG thanks so much for coming on the problem yes great to see you again my friend veteran these two go way back they have a bromance brewing so Mateus at Siemens the now platform is really a key pillar of your digital transformation why is service integration so so it's such an important element of your vision of your strategy because service integration is really the place to be in the former days we concentrated to manage one service one provider but if you really want to integrate and be responsible end-to-end you really have to own the whole chain from the demand side to the supply side so you really have to span the whole value chain from the customer to the provider and back from the provider to the customer that's why it is so important to play the integrator role because if you own that whole value chain end-to-end you can optimize the value chain and also do some dramatic changes in that value change to kick out some of the providers that do not really add high value or you can optimize costs by combining some of the steps and that's why service integration is so key because then you have the whole end-to-end view and you gain the whole inside of that value chain and also the net the next topic I want to add is the typical service management topic is also changing over time because what to do with for example Microsoft Exchange Online you don't have to do much management on that one because that is used by millions of users so what to do actually and that's why it comes more important to have the overall view of the whole venue changer what if I could ask you as a seasoned ServiceNow practitioner you've seen a lot we were talking just kind of joking about sometimes tech company marketing is ahead of you know what they I can actually do service now obviously tremendous platform that makes it sound easy but it takes a lot of work to get there but once you get there you get a flywheel effect and you can add more and more because of the platform so talk a little bit about kind of where you started and how long it really took you to get to a point where you could really start driving major value for your organization so we we started our ServiceNow journey in January 2014 so roughly four years ago yeah and we started with the typical incident problem change service request portion but my goal was from the beginning to really have a high degree of automation and integration in that platform that's why we we set up the platform already in the integrated way of having not single processes single databases but rather having single source of record in the system and when we started of course we thought hey it's a great technology and it is a great technology it's a excellent tool but the challenge is not setting up the tool it is as Sean Donahoe said it's the change in the organization because by implementing such a huge tool with one process having it completely across all organizations in 149 countries with three hundred seventy seven thousand employees this is a scale where you need to have a focus on the change topic that they are really applying the process is because otherwise it's not of usage and this had a big impact on how we are providing the services because ServiceNow is more or less the window where it gets obvious how your services are looking like so it's not only about setting up ServiceNow you have to change the processes you have to change the organization you might simplify also the services they are quite a little bit too complicated to be handled in the portal and all that work has to be done in parallel and I always use the phrase there the dark side is coming up of an organization and I'm pretty sure each organization has a dark side of legacy system gaps in the process steps the data is not correct the data is not validated it is not one scene DP and all that stuff has to be pulled away connected otherwise you don't have the end-to-end chain you don't have the degree of automation that you want to leverage and this roughly took us two and a half years and and you knew that going in with ServiceNow kind of transparent or helpful in that or was it just gonna drop off the software and give us a call if you need help exactly we didn't you because otherwise we would have not started all those challenges and therefore ServiceNow was really helpful because there is out-of-the-box functionality that you can kick-start however if you want to leverage ServiceNow in that environment the out of box functionality is nice and a good starting point but you have to add some of the functionality like the integration layer is not there like data analytics not there yet so you have to add some of the topics but therefore it is good that ServiceNow was there that that's why we also procured licenses but on the other hand we engaged also professional services because we also wanted to make ServiceNow responsible for the implementation that this is really a lighthouse project also for ServiceNow and of course for us so it was a win-win so Evans now learned a lot and it was good to have them onboard and you're able to show quick enough value to get credibility in the organization to really fulfill your vision exactly so what we basically did we set up a road map based on savings because it's always easy to introduce a new tool a new portal a new process whatever always nice but when it comes to shutting down existing ones this is the difficult and nasty personnel but that's why I made a road map of clearly showing hey now we can shut down this portal now we can shut down this legacy tool and based on that the savings kicked in and the people really saw hey it works hey we really can shut down and get rid of some of the legacy dark side topic and then typically to a platform then the platform momentum starts where everybody wants to get on hey I have an additional provider I have initiative process I have additional services hey this country also wants to set em then the platform starts to grow and gain some momentum so that everybody gets up and this is also challenging then regarding the release how to handle all those demands I want to talk about data and because we just heard CJ Desai up there on the main stage preaching one thing but I know before the cameras are rolling yours you were telling us that you're actually doing a lot with the data that you're collecting so so talk about stop what it is you're doing it's because the collecting the data is the easy part in a lot of ways it's then figuring out okay what is the data telling us and then what do we do about it exactly so CJ in this main keynote mentioned that is not a good idea to pull out all the data outside of ServiceNow I'm agreeing but unfortunately only in two years or three years time when the intelligence is in service now that's why Siemens has decided to pull out really on a daily basis all the data from ServiceNow into a separate SQL database and then a first important step starts the qualification of the data is the data quality correct because the high degree of automation only works if the data is correct and of course if you wanted and display the data and do the analytics it's also key that the data is correct that's why we have established a data health - want to visualize is the data correct first step second one is then then we are displaying the data in tableau so with visualization layer doing the typical reports where you can slice down by division by country by service by cost cent or whatever the typical reporting but we are also doing that data and feeding it into for example Watson so we used Watson to see how intelligent he is so we gave Watson 1.3 million tickets and said hey Watson tell us what is exciting about 1.3 million tickets and that the first reaction was I don't understand because we have 5 languages a mix of languages Portuguese using Portuguese and English German and English and then Watson had some issues with understanding the tickets then we said ok then let's use just English portion 700,000 tickets and said hey Watson tell us now and he said issue ticket problems complained and whatnot and then I thought hey Watson you are telling me that those are tickets that is not the expectation I had based on what the Watson team is telling but to be fair to Watson that's not my point that I'm saying Watson is stupid I'm just saying 2 messages are important you really have to learn how to leverage that new technology and it really takes time so prepare your organization to apply those technology because also your organization needs a learning curve to apply that technology and the second example was with Asia so we gave or that the thesis was hey Asia can you tell us how to increase customer satisfaction and again we gave Asia with some nice mathematical formulas a lot of tickets and based on that model we learned what are the key success factors of satisfying a customer so it's of course how many times a ticket was routed how fast the ticket was picked up but we got really timestamps so we can also now adopt our SLA is to the providers to more satisfy the users and more excitingly based on four criterias we can now predict the satisfaction of the user so we can really say with 86% will that be rating between one and three what is not that good and if so this is now the next step we will feed that back into service now giving that ticket Aflac so the service desk agent can act on it and I think that is the exciting one not only collecting data learning out of it and then acting on it and now based on if a ticket is open we already can predict the customer satisfaction that is great providing guidance to the ServiceNow user so if I understand it correctly you're extracting data out of ServiceNow I think you've mentioned off-camera you bring some of that data into si P Hana yeah you mentioned your Watson tableau is the viz and you said Microsoft Azure exactly as well so like many big data problems you're solving it with a variety of tools that's challenging but you really have no choice is not one out-of-the-box solution is there nope well that's why we are now applying different technology to really learn what is in for us and quickly do is on POC check is it feasible is it a quick win or takes it longer or is the technology not that mature and then really follow up what is most promising is your expectation and desire that ServiceNow does sell all this in the platform for you and is that what you're pushing him to do I think the ratio which will get higher and higher what ServiceNow will be capable to do like the prediction of tickets and the route the automated routing that should be negative in ServiceNow but in regards to artificial intelligence I think there are other companies out there who are more at the front runner and really the lead us so I think it will be always a mixture out of ServiceNow but also pulling out some of the data to leverage other technology it's gonna be interesting to see what kind of merger and acquisition activity ServiceNow does certainly Mike Scarpelli and John Donahoe in the financial analysts meeting were hinting of acquisitions you would imagine they've done some in AI you would expect they do others I wonder if we could ask you about the climate in Germany with regard to machines replacing humans and cognitive functions obviously it's a very employee friendly environment what's the narrative like there what are you seeing yeah I think also big discussions in Germany about that digitalization is that disruptive to the job market and as I said with the example of Asia that is a core only artificial intelligent can do yeah no sense to use humans with a pocket calculator to do that doesn't make sense but on the other side I have also set up a team of 20 people who are doing let's say manual work they are monitoring the tickets for example three people and based on their experience and human factor to speak with the different resolve our groups applications they already reduced the ticket number they reduced the cycle time the number of the closing time was decreased by 20% so these are examples where you need humans because on the other side there are also humans and this optimization of looking at the data speaking with different people that have domain expertise this is really necessary where I see that humans are much more advanced than the machine learning so that's why I see balances of yes we are using Azure Watson and all those nice technologies but we are also ramping up people that really act on the data that they have at hand so there is less anxiety to this idea would you say exactly exactly so and that's why I am saying yes it will reduce some of the chops but hopefully the Nestea more administrative work and on the other hand it will create new opportunities especially in the integration layer where you need human intelligent and people who can act on and keep the ecosystem alive that is nothing a machine can do it is thanks so much for coming on the program it's always fun to have you on thank you we will have more from ServiceNow knowledge 18 of the cubes live coverage coming up just after this

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018, brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back to theCUBE live coverage of ServiceNow. We are here at the Venetian in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Dave Schneider. He is the Chief Revenue Officer of ServiceNow. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Oh, it's my pleasure. >> You're a CUBE veteran, so- >> It's good to be back. >> Not your first rodeo. No, it's really fun to be with you. >> So, I want to talk with you a little bit about the growth of the company, which has been really astonishing. Why has it grown so stupendously? What makes ServiceNow so special in your mind? >> I think the key to any great company is having really strong focus on the client, and the whole notion that the client's at the center of our universe. We build technology and service the people, and we act as one in service of our customers, because we know that in turn, our customers are serving their employees, their partners, and their ecosystems. So, just having that unified view as our true north is really empowered the growth. Great technology helps. Being in the Cloud really helps, but then also linking it back to who we are as an organization, what our purpose is, and what we're all about as a culture and a team. >> So, John Donahoe said, "Customer success is an important priority for us." So, I wonder, how do you define customer success? What are the metrics that you use to measure? >> There are a couple, and I think there's various phases of this. For one, are customers getting the value that they were hoping to achieve from the project, and more importantly, are they establishing that value clearly and in the front of that project, in the first place? Because some people just want to buy new technology for technology's sake, but that's not good enough. They need to really have a business value in mind, and we should be helping them to think about that, and then measuring that along the journey. Because if we achieve it, then they have more ammunition to go fight the next battle, the new automation to solve another problem. >> So, having said that, every customer's different. I mean, I'm sure there are patterns. So, how do you guys discern what matters to the customer? Do you have a process to do that? What is that process? And how much is the go-to-market team involved in that through the life cycle? >> It starts in the selling motion, it starts in the pre-sales motion, trying to understand the priorities of the executive team and the issues that are facing the customer. As we understand that, we're doing what they call a value assessment, and we share that back and forth with the client to make sure that we're onto the important issues that need to be solved. And then as the deal is structured and happening, and then they are going live, either with our PS people or our partners, which are such an incredible resource to our clients. We're then measuring the outcomes. Now, the measuring the outcomes part is a newer part of our motion, and you can see in our Customer Success Center, which was new as well, a value calculator, so customers are actually able to understand what the potential value is for a product with ServiceNow on different aspects of their business. >> I want to actually talk to you a little bit more about the Customer Success Center. It is new, newly launched. What was the impetus for launching it and then how is it being used? >> One of the things our customers had asked us for over the years is give us best practice. Be more prescriptive. You heard John talk about that on stage today. Tell us what other great customers, how do you recommend that we implement ServiceNow along the following domains? So, what we did is we picked 10 to 15 of the highest kind of gain items and focused on those first, being as prescriptive as possible. What's coming next is these little micro-focused burst ideas, so little things around what's good form design or other ideas great customers have done. But we'll be continuously publishing to that Customer Success Center, and then our community is now answering over 5,000 questions a week on what best practice is. >> They're crowd-sourcing these ideas. >> They are. >> Wow. >> And that's one of the secrets to this event to ServiceNow as a community is that the customers are helping other customers on their journey. >> Dave, organizationally, Customer Success management, professional services, training, and a partner ecosystem are all under sales. Talk about that a little bit. What precipitated that and how is that going? >> So, I actually reverse it. Customer Success is the overarching goal of the company. We happen to put sales, pre-sales, PS, Customer Success team, the technical training advisory piece, all within this group, knowing that it's about the journey. So, we didn't want to just focus on the selling motion. We want it to be inclusive of all aspects of what we think a great customer is going to expect of ServiceNow. So that's how we structure it. >> And how's that going? >> I think it's going pretty well. We're learning some motions on this, but I think the customers who are in that high-touch pilot that we have going on right now are experiencing some really good results from additional resources we're putting on it. They're appreciative of the fact that we have been very prescriptive in certain areas, and then we're organizing ourselves to be more unified to the client. I will say on the training and development front, the investments we're making around curriculum-designed, the mechanisms of getting that material out there, the better and more complete training that we have for our partner community is also yielding really great results. >> Frank Sleuben used to talk about IT are our peeps. >> They are. >> But still, the majority of your business from IT, much, much larger proportion outside of IT, but still a core chunk of the business's IT. You guys talk about digital transformation. My question is who's leading the digital transformation within your customer base? >> It's interesting, a lot of times we do have a group of IT professionals that are leaning in and leading the digital transformation, but they're usually partnered with someone else on the line of business, somebody who's got a goal, a desire to changes something, they're leaning in with that. One of the best examples is the Human Resources element around, they're being asked to change the digital experience for employees, to make the place a better place to work, more inclusive and belonging place to work. And they're using technology to help bridge that gap and get efficiency, so HR's been a real strong suit, and then we're seeing customer service re-imagining how they're going to reach out to customers with a service discipline. So this isn't just inside the company, but it's about how service disciplines can help with customer-partner relationships as well. >> Such a huge part of digital is getting digital right, whatever that means, and a lot of that involves, obviously, strategy at the board level, the C-Suite. When we first started doing this show, you didn't see a Deloy, E&Y, etc, certainly not as prominent as they are now. Those companies get heavily involved in that kind of digital transformation work. Where do you guys fit, how do you guys partner at that strategy level, and then where does ServiceNow come in as a platform? >> It's a great question, and I do think that what's happening here is that our customers, some of the early customers, really were just looking for new technologies to replace legacy technologies. The best of the best were taking that opportunity of transforming processes, either on their own or with partner communities, some of which are now here as larger sponsors and partners of ServiceNow. And now what we're seeing is this next generation of customer and/or our legacy customers, people who've been on the platform for a while, are recognizing that to get true value they've got to think about process. So, the bigger the SI, the ones who have process experience are going in with those customers really thinking about the art of the possible. You've heard Extensor talk about a human centric design, the human first with the heart centric design, making sure they're focused on the people and the process, rather than just the technology, and we're seeing that time and time again. >> I want to talk a little bit about not just the digital transformation, but the cultural transformation, and that has been a real talking point here at the conference so far. I want to hear how you, as the Chief Revenue Officer, are thinking about culture, the culture of ServiceNow, and making sure that culture is really pushed down throughout the organization. How do you do it? What are your best practices as a manager? >> Every day you have an opportunity to lead from the front and model the behaviors that you're expecting others to have, and I think one of the things that we're really proud of at ServiceNow is that we not just say that we're customer-focused, but we have evidence of really spending our time as an executive team, focused on the issues and directly with customers, making sure they're being heard and listened to actively. The other thing, inside the company, we have a tendency to describe ourselves as hungry and humble, that we want to keep achieving and keep pushing ourselves to the art of the possible, but we don't have a big ego about it, and I think when you see companies that are truly listening, the ego is pushed down and they're really focused on the outcome of the customer. And then that makes us feel good, and that's what's driving us forward. There are way too many companies with big egos that forget about the customer, and I think that's the beginning of the end for them. >> The fiefdoms, the egos, the the outdated policies and procedures, how do you kind of get rid of those, not just at ServiceNow, but at your customers that you're working with so closely? This is, again, we're practicing what we call the East-West motion at ServiceNow, between the leadership team, so myself and CJ Desai, or Mike Scarpelli, we have problems we're facing every day as we've grown the business. I've been with the company now almost seven plus years. The processes we had a year ago aren't sufficient to meet the needs of where we need to go tomorrow. So we have constant conversations at our levels about where we can use automation, where we can change process, or where we can use our own technology. As we do that, we're practicing that good East-West motion as executive team, and that's being modeled down beneath us in our people. The other thing I'll say is we often find ourselves listening like we're wrong, and I think that's important as a good leader or a good business person is that if you spend the time to understand the other person's perspective as an active listener, and understand their view, don't be so fixated that you're right all the time, and that allows us to really come together and solve tough problems. >> One of the key measures of success is renewal rates, and you guys are off the charts. I oftentimes get into Twitter debates. We were talking about Twitter and LinkedIn before, trying to help people understand the Mike Scarpelli math of how you count renewal rates, it's a dollar-based renewal rate, which is the only way to count for growing SaaS company, folk. You can't count units, do the math, it doesn't work. Check out the 10K and you can get the exact math, but astoundingly high renewal rates, increasing average contract values, to those numbers, it plays out in the financials. I know that's an outcome of the work that you're doing, but it underscores the success that you're having. >> When you start off and deliver great technology to solve a problem, and then you've got passionate customers, the things we have historically and continued replacing aren't things that change very often inside the enterprise, so it's very important to get it right on the way in, and then as you do that, customers do start to think of you as a 10 to 20-year relationship. And we should trust and treat each other as a 10 to 20-year relationship versus a transactional relationship. I think you're seeing that in our renewal rates, you're seeing that in our growth, you're seeing that in the traction of this event, and then that's really what's driving us forward. But as a sales professional, someone who has to go out there working with customers, the worst thing for a sales person is to have a non-renewal, because it's not just the loss of dollars, it's the loss of reputation. We take that really seriously as an organization. >> Well, Dave, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It's always a pleasure to have you here. >> Thank you for having me. It's great to see you guys. >> Great to see you, Dave. >> All right, bye-bye. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from ServiceNow just after this. (techy music)

>> Voiceover: Live, from Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge17, brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back, this is Day 3 of ServiceNow Knowledge17, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, where we go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and my co-host this week has been Jeff Frick. Not only this week, Jeff, but for the last five years, we've been doing ServiceNow Knowledge events, really getting a sense as to what this company is all about, the evolution of the company, the transformation from really early days of IT, help desk, service management, to now just permeating throughout the enterprise. One of the key things, Jeff, that is notable, and that we saw a couple years ago, I think it was three years ago, when they had the first CreatorCon. In fact, actually, in 2013, I think you did a little sidebar, you went out-- >> It was the Hackathon, we went with Allan Leinwand and checked in on the Hackathon. >> The point I want to make is that we work with these events, we come to these events. We see a lot of large company events, And whether it's Oracle or IBM or HPE, even, in the past. Even EMC with its code initative, they are drooling over developers. They can't get enough developer action, and it's like ServiceNow builds this platform, they create, they open it up with this low-code development kit, essentially, throw their glove in the field, and everybody comes to the game. >> Right, right. >> It's just amazing, and so today, Day 3, is about CreatorCon, and it was hosted by Pat Casey, who's the senior vice president of DevOps, and really the closest, I think, to the Fred Luddy DNA. I mean that's really Pat, you know, Fred Luddy's the founder of the company and sort of the icon of ServiceNow, not here, you know? We're entering a new era and it's really underscored culturally by CreatorCon and Pat Casey. You were in there today. What'd you think? >> Was it Fred termed the citizen developer? I can't remember, I'll have to go back and check the tape, because he definitely talked about low code, and I think he may have been the one that said citizen developer. And it's funny, even with CJ Desai, right, when he was thinking about coming over, what was the first thing he did? He downloaded the app, and wanted to create a little app. So everybody here is a developer, and I think, just looking back at some of the interviews yesterday, Donna from Cox Automotive, she built a prototype app. It was her, one business analyst, and an intern to start a whole new perspective, so I think, you know, they're really trying to make everybody a developer. It's a different way to think, and not just the business analyst, then you have to pass it off to development, but using, again, a simple workflow tool, it's still a workflow tool, to let everybody automate processes. And we were just in the CreatorCon. The other piece that really strikes me, and it strikes me every time I look at my phone now, you know, my phone knows I follow the Warriors, and so it just automatically gives me an update. So it's kind of this soft, a push of AI and machine learning into your day-to-day activity without this heavy overlay. And that's really how they do it effectively, and then that's kind of the basis of what they're doing here with integrating the machine learning into the applications to collect the data, build the models, try to take some of the mundane, mind-numbing work off of your plate and get people doing it, real decisions based on the machine giving you better data. >> It's an incredible dynamic to me, Jeff, because it's not like this company has a blank sheet of paper and says, "Okay, let's go after developers." They have this impassioned community of people, and they just keep rolling out new function, and then of course, ServiceNow has some really killer developers, internally, and so they make those people available to inspire and educate other developers, and so, as they say, this platform just permeates throughout the organization. I mean, it's really hard to do platforms. We've seen it so many times, you know, companies saying, "Okay, we're developing a platform," and the platform gets a little traction and it gets bought out, but this company, ServiceNow, really has a foothold here. So 4,500 people at CreatorCon this year, it's up from 2,000 last year, so another example of just super meteoric growth. Pat Casey, I loved, he put up the, you know, he showed a mainframe. It actually looked like a VAX to me, but anyway he put up a mainframe, and then he showed the H-P-U-X, what did he call it, HPUX? And, oh yeah we thought that was better, and then client server, it kind of worked for a while, and then he put up "August of 1995," and of course I was immediately saying, that's Gabe Ryden. >> Right, right. >> And then he showed the NetScape logo, and that really changed the development paradigm. >> Just as a way to, you know, and I'm sure none of us thought of it, it was just kind of web bulletin boards with pictures now, when you saw NetScape back in the day, but really as an application delivery vehicle, when you think of what browsers have become, it's pretty fascinating. I had a friend who was working on Chrome, and they described it as kind of an OS in a browser, and I'm like, who would want an OS in a browser? Well, now we're basically here. It's like the old Sun Ray machine, right? Anytime you log onto your browser, you're basically into everything in your world. Whether it's your phone, your tablet, my computer, your desktop computer. It's pretty fascinating. The other thing that Pat talked about was, you know, these things that we grew up with kind of in our imagination. He talked about flying cars, and then he adjusted it to maybe electronic cars, this vision, and now, you know, electronic cars are here, and Tesla's the highest-selling luxury nameplate out there. But in my old world it was flat TVs. The Jetsons had flat TVs. The concept of a flat TV was completely bizarre, and I remember seeing the first one in Chicago, at the Consumer Electronics show. It was like nine inches, you had to have secret passes to get back to see it, but now look what happened. I can't help but think of a Mar's Law, Dave, and he's Gartner's Trough of Disillusionment. I like a Mar's Law better, which is we overestimate the impact in the short term, but way underestimate the impact in the long term. Look at flat screens now, compared to, well, it didn't even exist now. And that's going to happen in AI, it's going to happen in machine learning, and in a very short period of time, especially with the advances in compute-store, networking, cloud, speed of networks, IOT, it's going to be a phenomenal amount of horsepower driving your interaction with all these various objects. >> Look at even the dot-com, you know, how overhyped that was, when really it was underhyped. >> Jeff: Right, in the long term. >> So, the other thing I loved, we've been talking about data for quite some time, and every time we came to a Knowledge show, we'd say, is there a big data angle here? Eh, well kind of, and it's really now coming into focus what the machine learning and AI and big data angle is, and Pat threw up a really nice infographic. He went back to 1969, he gave some interesting stats that I wasn't aware of. I knew the 2k, the moon landing was done on a computer with 2k of memory, that I knew. What I did not know is that it had two programs: one for docking and one for landing, and there wasn't enough memory on the computer to have both programs, so they had to reprogram the computer after the dock. >> Not even reload, right? They couldn't just put the USB stick into it. >> They had the code, which is kind of cool. So that was 2k, he had an intern download the 1982 census, and it was 182 megabytes. And then the human genome project was 53 gigabytes, which he's right, it wouldn't have fit on your previous iPhone, but it will fit on this one. And then, I didn't know this stat, the spell-checker in all of our phones and the red lines and so forth, the back end of that, that's sitting in the cloud, is four terabytes. So you're seeing this explosion of data. These are just some simple examples. So this company, again, it's not just starting from scratch saying, here's some kind of machine learning tool, apply it. What they're doing is saying, we're going to build this into the platform, take the existing corpus of data that you have, now what is that corpus of data? It's a bunch of incidents, it's a bunch of categories and people and it's going to autocategorize, for example, all these incidents, on an existing corpus of data. That's not how most people are using machine learning today. What many people are talking about is a use case of real time continuous applications and doing machine learning in real time to try to affect an outcome, which means try to get you to buy something, or try to detect fraud, or whatever it is. Some healthcare outcome, even. Although you'd think healthcare could be some more post process, but essentially that's what ServiceNow is doing. They're using a post-process methodology on top of this corpus of data to add instant value that lives inside of the platform. It's very compelling, simple, and practical in my view. >> And that's the part I love the best, Dave, is simple and practical and delivers immediate results. Allen Leinwand, who we'll have on later and we've had on a number of times, made a mention that the other thing that's very different is now the apps are listening in real time, and they're adjusting what they're doing and rejiggering their algorithm based on stuff that's happening in real time. So it's a different way to think about applications. And just a couple of things I wanted to touch on from yesterday, with some of the guests we had, a great reason we love the show is the number of customers we get is so high. And I was just struck by Donna Woodruff from Cox Automotive, how much she understood innately that it's a platform. Yes, she bought some applications, but she really understood the platform component and was able to drive from it. And the other one I just wanted to touch on was Eresh from Vitas Healthcare, and the impact of mobile. All I could think about when he was talking about was delivery service. Where's my truck, I had my fridge fixed the other day, where's the guys he close called me, and then to apply that to something as powerful as the work they're doing around hospice and to enable that nurse to get to one more stop per day. Wow, what an impact, just by getting on mobile. And the funny part, he said, is some of their older nurses, when they saw the mobile device, said, "I'm done, I'm not doing it anymore. I'd rather schlep around 25 pages of case information and then go back and forth to the hub in between every stop." So again it's this combination of all this power, all this coming to bear along the three horses of compute that are now delivering phenomenal transformation to people that are willing to think of things in a slightly different lens. >> Yeah, and when you look at the problems that ServiceNow is solving, they are in the boring but important category. And that's why I think that this company for a long time sort of flew under the radar, and is still misunderstood. I mean, even CJ, who's basically in charge of all the products, when he was first approached by ServiceNow, he's like "Meh, I don't really know." And then he dug into it and said, "Wow." So a lot of people don't understand it. I talked to a lot of people in the software business, software sales, people that just don't understand the power of what this company does, and I would make a prediction, is that like Salesforce before it, and we've been talking about this for years, how these guys are on a collision course, and they'll say "No, no, no" but very clearly, the power of the platform that Salesforce has, for example, and ServiceNow is replicating, in some way is much much different. Because Salesforce has a lot of bulldogs, sorry, we love it, we use it, but my point is, my prediction is that over time this company is going to become a very well-known company because of the impacts that it's having on the business. It's going from boring but important to, you know, fundamental transformation of organizations. And I tell you, CRM, I even put it up there with ERP. I think that what ServiceNow is doing is as big as the ERP trend, potentially bigger when you put in all the IOT stuff and the machine learning capabilities and the like with what is a relatively modern platform. >> Well, we're in an attention game, right? On the consumer side it's about attention. The thing that people have the least amount of anymore is time, so how do you get their attention? Do they spend their time on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, watching TV, looking at YouTube videos? Watch your kids. How do they spend those hours of their day? On the work side, what screen are you interacting with in your day? Are you in Salesforce all day? Are you in email all day? Are you in Salesforce all day? Are you in Marketo all day? That's where the competition is going to come. And there's only going to be two or three primary applications in which you engage and get work done, and they're making a hard play to say, "We are the application that we want basically in your face, that you're using to get stuff done all day long." >> One of the things, too, I wonder, you always wonder, is think about blind spots to a company like this. They're on this amazing ascendancy. What could come in and disrupt ServiceNow? And you think about the millenials, there's no question that ServiceNow is on to the new way to work. I call it the new way to work, I don't think they use that term. And the millenials are going to come in, and they don't want to use email. They're going to be much more open to adopting a platform. Now, is that platform going to be something like ServiceNow or is it going to be too boring but important? Are they going to do something more like Facebook? My feeling is this is enterprise, and as we talked about yesterday, is it possible that enterprise could actually begin adopting a lot of these consumer-like interfaces and user experiences and leapfrog in some regards because of the use of AI and the enterprise nature and the security capabilities that a company like this can bring? I don't know, maybe that's a stretch, but the gap between consumer and enterprise has to close. It is closing, and I think it will continue to close. >> I think it's the automation piece, to automate themselves out of their customer base. As more and more things are automated, there's going to be less and less and less people looking at the screen to do fewer tasks in terms of just an in. Blind spots always come where you're not looking, that's what's going to hit them, but certainly as more and more of this mundane stuff can be automated, if they can actually execute their vision so these autocategorization and autorouting and things are getting solved before they get to a customer service agent, happen, then their C-base licenses, but that's why they're trying to find other places to go. Facilities management, HR management, integration on the human connection across multiple applications, and to even these other systems, like we've heard about on the HR side, etc. So, I think that's, as the nature of work changes, what will people be doing with their work, or are they just going to be getting assigned tasks to go execute what the machines can't do? It's going to be interesting to watch it evolve. >> Well, and then coming back to the top of this segment, the developers, and that's really where the innovation occurs. The developer ecosystem here continues to grow. The importance of developers is very well understood. We've seen it previously with companies like Microsoft. We see all the big enterprise companies trying to appeal to the developer community. Certainly Amazon, Google, having great, very strong developer ecosystems, Apple as well, Facebook, and so forth. Enterprise guys continue to struggle, frankly, in that regard, and IBM's done a good job with Bluemix, but it's been a real heavy lift for IBM, HP. We've talked to, from Kadifa to all their software execs, and they just never were able to figure it out. Oracle kind of lost its developer edge, despite the fact that it owns Java now, and it's trying to get that back, whereas, as they say, ServiceNow just says, "Hey, let's have a game," and they throw their glove in the field and boom, everybody shows up. >> Think of the focus of a SaaS software company, or even like an Amazon, AWS, right? Everyone here in the company is working on platforms and derivative products from that platform. They don't have this hardware group, that hardware group, this software group, that software group. It's a single application at the end of the day. Salesforce is a single application at the end of the day, work day, single application at the end of the day. AWS, infrastructure for customers at the end of the day. So I think that gives them a huge advantage in terms of focus, everybody going in the same direction, and ability to execute. >> Everybody talks about platform as a service, and it's really, a lot of people say that whole market's collapsing. It's IaaS+, think Amazon, and it's SaaS-, think Salesforce and ServiceNow. All right, we've got to wrap. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest at theCUBE, we're live, Day 3 from Knowledge17. We're 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)

>> Voiceover: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. (upbeat electronic music) >> Welcome back to sunny Orlando, everybody. This is ServiceNow Knowledge17 #Know17. I'm Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. John Donahoe is here as the newly-minted CEO and President of ServiceNow, fresh off the keynote, fresh off 49 days in. John, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you very much, it's great to be here. >> John: So how'd you feel up there? You had the theater in the round, you were working the audience, I loved how you walked on the stage and really got into it. How's it feel? >> Well, what I love about ServiceNow, is it's a community-based business and a community-based company. And so, we had 15,000 members of our community out there, and that community feeling is, I think, one of the real powers of the movement that's called ServiceNow and of the ethos of this company. So, I loved that, I fed off that energy. >> So, at the risk of some repetition, a little bit of background about yourself, a former Bain, former eBay CEO, you shared that with the audience. What is relevant about your background to the ServiceNow experience that you expect to have? >> Well, you know it's funny Dave, I spent the first 20 years of my career at Bain doing business transformation. And a lot of what I talked about today was digital transformation, that is, every company is trying to transform. And I spent the first 20 years of my career focused on that. And then we talked a lot about great customer experiences. Well, the consumer world and consumer-based applications like eBay, or PayPal, or many other consumer applications, are defining the new standards of what kind of easy, simple, intuitive experiences are possible. And employees are consumers at home and they're increasingly expecting the same kind of great experiences they have at home at work, and as customers of enterprises. And so I think you're going to see the world of consumer and enterprise converging. And so that's why I'm very excited about being a part of ServiceNow. >> So, you talked to the audience, as I say, about your background. You're a family man, you've got Four children. >> John: Yeah >> Jeff: Pictures on stage; which I love. You know, it really kind of goes with the folksy, you know, history of this company and the community base. Not too many people put their family photo up on the keynote. I thought it was great. >> John: Yeah, well, they're my bosses, so... (all laughing) >> Dave: Well, like you said, they make you humble >> John: Yeah. >> Dave: and you learn a lot from them, so... So I appreciated you starting that. I've got Four kids, Jeff's got kids, and so... >> John: That's great. >> Dave: And you're hosting a women in tech breakfast tomorrow, a real passion of ours, so, maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Well, I just think it's really, really important. And, people ask me: "Why do you think that way?" I think it's good business, right? At the end of the day, the ultimate thing we do to succeed in business is we need to attract, develop, and retain the very best people, >> Dave: Right. >> John: and by definition, 50% of the workforce is female. And so, to not be aggressively trying to cultivate that part of our team is to miss an opportunity. And doing it well is hard, but if you do it well, it could be a source of competitive advantage. So, I care deeply about it professionally, and then also personally as a father of a daughter, the question I ask men that have daughters and say: "Do you want your daughter to grow up and be part of a work environment that's even better than the one they would have been if they'd come at your time?" And almost all of us say, "Yes!" >> Jeff: Of course >> John: So, it's a responsibility we all share. >> So, I want to ask about your management philosophy. You know, I've heard the term, of course you have too, "benevolent dictator". You use the term, >> "servant leadership". >> "servant leadership". >> John: Yeah. >> Dave: Which starts at the customer on top. Explain your philosophy there. >> Well, it's a way I learned to lead early in my career; which is: that it's the opposite of a classic pyramid. Right, where the CEO's on top and everything's underneath. No, this is an upside-down triangle, where the reason we're here is to serve our customers, to serve our employees as they serve our customers, to serve the purpose and to the extent you can, to serve the communities in which we are part of. And my experience is that: building that deeply into the culture of a company breeds a level of commitment and a level of long-term orientation that's really important. And ServiceNow's had that from the beginning. Think about Fred Luddy embodied that. He was a brilliant technologist, and he said, "You know what, I'm going to recruit a CEO" "before the company goes public who has those skills." So, he recruited Frank, right? And Fred stayed involved. Frank embodied servant leadership. Frank could've stayed forever. Frank said I was the right CEO to serve this purpose from 75 million to a Billion Four. And then he started to looking for someone that's the right person to serve for the next generation; which is me. So this notion of stewardship, we're all here to serve our customers and try to make our purpose come alive over a long period of time. And I think it's the most enduring motivation and inspiration we can have. And it keeps the customer front and center. >> Well, so one of the first things you did in your first 100 days, you said you wanted to see 100 customers, you actually accomplished that in 45 days. So, first of all congratulations, first of all how'd you do that? (all laughing) >> Well, I went at a roadshow to 10 cities across the U.S. and just packed my days full of meetings with customers. And they were individual meetings, and we had some group meetings, some lunches and dinners. And those are some of the best because you get a conversation going. I had Four or Five, Six customers around a breakfast table or dinner table and we start talking about their issues. And, the dynamic in every situation was they would start sharing with each other. They would say, "Well, how are you addressing this?" And they'd starting saying they have similar issues, similar challenges, similar ideas of how they're going to address it. So, the power, that community power, I was seeing firsthand in smaller settings. And for me, it was just so energizing because our limitation of how quickly we can get better is well we understand our customer's needs, and also understand their feedback about where we can get better. >> Well it's interesting, you said you were a customer when you ran eBay... >> John: Yes. >> Jeff: of ServiceNow, so that's kind of some of your background knowledge of the company. When you went out on your tour, what were some of the things that surprised you that you didn't know even though you had been kind of a ServiceNow customer in the past? >> Well, I think what I hadn't fully understood was the power of the ServiceNow platform, and how it's getting pulled into new areas across the company. So, it's getting pulled to customer-facing applications, customer-facing processes like Ashley at GE is talking about. >> Jeff: Right. >> John: And it makes sense, right? I know at eBay and PayPal, we really worried a lot about how do we handle inbound contacts from our users. And password reset was the #1 inbound contact. (dave laughing) Well, password reset is a perfect process that can be handled in an automated in a self-help way; which is ultimately what the customer wants. >> Jeff: Right. >> John: And ServiceNow can help enable that. And so, as I was sort of surprised and delighted by how this platform is getting pulled into new use cases, that in many ways are back to what Fred Luddy imagined when he founded the company. The interesting thing is, Fred founded the company as a platform to serve all services, businesses, business processes across the enterprise. And then, but platforms don't generate revenue, They don't sell. So, he found an application: ITSM; which was the first application, and it took off. And so ServiceNow began to be known as the IT company. But that was never what Fred envisioned. It was a company that enabled and empowered IT to simplify and automate and transform the entire company. >> It's interesting, password reset. Because it seems like such a simple process. And it doesn't necessarily seem like a high-value process. But in fact, it's hugely high-value for the customer. It's hugely cumbersome in terms of the time it takes. So, to automate something that seems so simple as password reset, has huge implications in terms of efficiency inside and customer satisfaction on the outside. What a great example. >> Well, and here's what's so interesting about that example: Is, it touches multiple parts of the company. Because, people actually, your password is your security. And you could automate changing it in a way that was insecure. But, you've got to do it in a way that it's the convenience that we want to reset our passwords, but we want to know we're safe. And so, that password reset flow has to touch security, it has to touch engineering, it has to touch operations and customer support, it has to touch the customer's record, and so it's a classic multi-function, multi-discipline flow, but you want to make that easy and simple for a user, and yet also have them feel safe. Simple and safe is hard to do. >> John, you mentioned Ashley from GE, I want to talk about digital transformation. It's one of those terms you hear a lot at these conferences, sometimes it's amorphous, it's kind of like A.I. We'll talk about that if we have time. But Jeff, I love your quote. We follow GE quite closely, and Jeffrey Immelt said: "I went to bed an industrial giant," "and I woke up a software company one day." >> John: Yep. >> Dave: And you see this everywhere. So what is digital transformation to you and the customer's that you've been talking to? >> Well, here's, technology and software in particular on one hand is disrupting every company in every industry. I view that as a motivation. I view that as a wake-up call for all of us, including a software company. And, software is an opportunity. An opportunity to make changes and advancements at a pace and a magnitude that's been unparallelled in business history. So every company needs to define how they're going to use technology, how they're going to use software, how they're going to use digital capability to their advantage. To their advantage with their own consumers, their own customers, either industrial customer or a consumer in a consumer business, and how to use it to change the employee's experience and improve it. So, employees are spending time not on manual tasks; which now can be done by technology, but on higher value-added activities, and then how you can operate a global enterprise in an effective and efficient manner. And so, technology is an offensive weapon if you will, an offensive tool, is something that's on the mind of every CEO, and every company. And that's where they're looking for how do they have a few trusted partners. A few trusted technology partners that help them navigate their way through that, help them drive their way through, and that's ultimately what ServiceNow is. >> So these are big ideas, and they involve a lot of different constituencies within your customer base. Obviously, your IT peeps, as we like to say, but the CIO, who's role is changing, and also the line of business folks. So these are big, heavy lifts that you can't do alone. You've got to have an ecosystem to do that. When we did our first Knowledge in 2013, the SIs were a lot of companies frankly that we never even heard of. And now, you're seeing all the big SIs. I don't even want to name them because I'll forget some. But, your partner strategy is critical to achieving that vision that you just laid out, isn't it? >> Absolutely, Absolutely. Because it takes both of us. It takes our software and then their capabilities to help our shared customers, shared clients, implement the software, and do it increasingly in a way that is as configurable as possible; which means as minimum customization as possible, and also as quickly as possible. And our partner ecosystem's an essential partner in doing that. And there's the big SIs, and then also some of the smaller ones. I spent some time with customers in some smaller cities where they're saying having local capabilities, local teams, that were trained and certified on ServiceNow was really important to them. Often they end up being acquired by or joining the bigger SIs over time, but that sort of grass roots opportunity. Because that's also job creation. That's job creation in communities. I got to see how talented, computer-literate, software-literate people in different cities around the world are seeing an opportunity to create a livelihood by helping customers integrate ServiceNow in the most effective way. >> So two years ago, Frank Slootman in his keynote said that the CIO's role is changing and they're becoming business people. >> John: Yes. >> Dave: And kind of challenged CIOs, if you don't speak wallet you better start learning that language, the "lingua franca" of the business. So, you obviously agree with that. But, how is the CIO role changing, and how does it support other roles within the organization, that you're trying to apply ServiceNow to? >> Well, I have a really, Jeff, a really outside-in... Or, Dave, really outside-in...sorry about that. >> Dave: It's alright. >> John: I've had a lot of names this morning. >> Jeff: I'm sure you have. >> Dave: That's pretty good. >> John: Outside-In view of this. Which is through the eyes of the customer, alright? The CEO is thinking about: "Alright, I've got to serve our customers better," "I've got to retain our customers" "and serve our customers better." "And then I've got to tract and retain employees" as we've been talking about. "And I need the digital capability," "I need technology to help us do that." Their going to turn to the most technically-literate person in the C-suite to help do that. That's the CIO, right? And so the CIO by very definition has to play a broader role of partnering with the business unit leaders, with the functional leaders, to drive that end-to-end business transformation or digital transformation. And the CIOs that I met are ready to take on that challenge. They couldn't have done that before the cloud technologies that give them the ability to play offense. But these cloud technologies now cut across, they don't just sit in IT, they cut across all of the enterprise. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> John: And so, I would say there's almost this gigantic sucking sound, if you will, to use an old Ross Perot-ism, that IT and the CIO are being asked to play this role, be change agents, strategic change agents, across the enterprise. And they're ready to do that, but they do need to speak business in business terms, and business value, and business value means: Are we serving our customers better? What's our customer NPS? What's our customer response time? What's our customer retention? They need to speak employee value terms: What's our ability to retain our best employees? What's their satisfaction? And then of course they have to speak the business terms of efficiency, right? Are we being more productive and more efficient as we're serving our customers and as we're serving our employees? And so, the CIOs I met and the IT professionals I met, are asking for help to translate what they do into that business language. And the very best ones are doing it. And I think you'll see that trend continue more and more. >> And they've got to have automation, and they've got to have efficiency because their budgets aren't going up commiserately with their increased responsibility to drive this digital transformation. So they've got to wring that extra value out of the tools and processes and people that they have, and that's where you really help them quite a bit. I think I saw a quote the other day that someone went from 60 days to Two days in a business process, amazing. >> Well, and it's interesting because companies are investing more in technology than they ever have. If you take the broad technology spend, they're investing more in technology. But, they expect to get productivity and efficiency, not just out of IT, but across the entire enterprise. >> Jeff: Across the board. >> John: And that's the opportunity: More investment, greater productivity, greater value for customers and employees. >> You talked yesterday to the financial analyst about the sort of execution machine that you inherited. Personally, I think you have a great CFO, one of the best if not the best in the business. So I presume you're not going to be spending a lot of your time trying to restructure reporting and counting beans, no pejorative intended there. So, what do you bring to the organization? Where are you going to spend your time? And what are your main goals over the next mid-term and long-term? >> Well, as you said, I'm blessed. Mike Scarpelli, I think, is a world-class CFO and the best in the industry and I'm honored and thrilled to work with him. Same with Dave Schneider and Kevin Haverty who run our sales force. And now CJ Desai, our Chief Product Officer, Dan Rogers, we've got a really strong team. My focus is to have us continue our current momentum, continue the current execution that we're focusing on. But then, to begin to sort of chart a course for 2018, 2019, 2020, and beyond as we go from being a billion-dollar company, to a four, to five-billion dollar company, to beyond to a 10-billion dollar company. And the nice news is that it's building on top of this very solid foundation. As we evolve from being what has been an IT-focused platform company to be more of a digital transformation platform and company. And helping our clients, helping our customers, achieve their aims and their goals, and being one of the few trusted technology partners. Every company has a few trusted technology partners and we want ServiceNow to be one of those. And, to do that, you've got to be viewed as mission-critical and adding real value, both of which I think we are. >> Dave: So you could joke, you know, don't mess it up. >> John: Yes. >> Dave: Okay, and take it to another level; which really is kind of what seems to be your expertise. Bringing it into the line of business is talking to the CEO and other C-level executives. And actually, marrying the expertise of the CIO has cross-organizational purview, leveraging that capability and super-powering that. >> Exactly. Exactly. You know, it's interesting. If I were to look back on the last 15 years, the C-suite role that has changed the most in the last 15 years has been that of the CFO. 15 years ago CFOs were being counters. >> Dave: Yeah. >> John: Right? Today, as you said, as Mike Scarpelli and Bob Swan, my previous CFO at eBay and the best CFOs, they drive value across the enterprise. Right? They're almost COOs in their mindset. They work with business units, and they add enormous value. So that job has become significantly more important and powerful. I see the same thing happening with the CIO over the next Five to 10 years where the CIOs role with grow, and expand, and broaden. And that's exciting. >> Well, you know, one of the things, actually, you know, we come to these conferences, and there's obviously a lot of messaging, but we try to understand how that messaging actually fits with what customers are doing. One of the things that you guys are messaging this year is light speed. And so, when you talk about the CFO and the changing role, it brings up, to my mind anyway, light speed requires a new set of metrics, and listening to, like Scarpelli, talk yesterday, he's all over the metrics. And these aren't, you know, your typical, you know, EBITDA metrics, they are just a new set. Do you see that happening within, not only ServiceNow, but within your customer base, where the so-called, I'll call them, "light speed" metrics are emerging? >> Absolutely. I mean, you saw the example of Dave Wright going through the machine learning, and how the machine learning capability, when applied to the ServiceNow platform, applied to specific problems, helps you fix problems before they happen in an automated fashion. Imagine that, right? That's light speed. Dave said it so well on stage. (all laughing) That's even faster than light speed. And so, you begin to see, alright, how do you measure, in delivering a great customer experience, how do you measure the reductions of problems? How do you measure the prevention of problems that provides greater availability, greater reliability, greater consistency, of a customer's experience? Now, ultimately that measure will be in customer NPS or some other customer metrics. But, some of the subordinate metrics I think you will see a growing number of what I would call L2, L3 metrics, that is, a dashboard of how to run a great company around customers, employees, and financials. >> Alright John, I know you're super busy, we've got to leave it there. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE and congratulations on the role, great keynote, and best of luck. We'll be watching. >> John: Thanks very much Dave, thanks >> You're welcome, alright. >> From me, congratulations. Keep it right there, buddy, we'll be right back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from ServiceNow, Knowledge17. Be right back. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Hello everyone, welcome to the Cube special coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. This is the Cube Silicon Angle's flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. This is our eighth year of covering EMC World, but now called Dell EMC World. I'm John Furrier, your co-host on our set one and with my co-host Paul Gillin this week as well as Kieth Townshend and John Walls and Rebecca Knight on set two. Double barrel shotgun of content here at Dell EMC World with you. Thanks for joining us for three days of wall to wall coverage. Paul, so much to talk about here this week. Digital transformation, little bit boring theme, it's being played out in real time. But this is a historic moment because one, the Cube started at EMC World in 2010, eight years ago. But, this is the first official EMC World where it's Dell EMC World, kind of a mini event in Austin, but since Michael Dell took over, or I'm sorry, merger of equals, a combination. >> Paul: Combination, as they call it. >> (chuckling) Combination. This is the first instantiation of EMC World as Dell EMC World. Jeremy Burton's now the CMO of Dell Technologies which is the holding company for all the companies. It's the same EMC World flair, now the integrated content. Notable absent Cube alumni and executives from EMC. We'll talk about that in the EMC Mafia segment shortly, but (chuckling) your thoughts because now Michael Dell's puttin' the rubber to the road. Kind of nothing earth shattering in his keynote, but certainly private company, all guns blaring, smiling and dialing, he's got the swagger on stage. >> Well, Michael is nothing if not an optimist. He's always good at seeing a brighter future, and at his keynote this morning, as you said it was blissfully free of content, but it did talk a lot about digital transformation which is of course the buzzword of the year in the IT industry. Little surprised that Dell adopted the same buzzword that HP and Cisco and all these other big companies are adopting. What happened in the keynote is less interesting than how the mood changes here, and this is the coming out party for Dell EMC. Yeah, there was a conference last October, a month after the merger, but this is really, things have finally settled out, now six months later and it's a chance for customers and for the partners to get a sense of how well this is all working out. >> And one of the things I'm watching is how the story's unfolding 'cause now you're starting to see the big companies, certainly in the consolidation side of the business market of infrastructure and data center and enterprise IT, it's a consolidating mature market. It is transforming, there is a cloud story requirement, there are new software requirements, software defined data center, as well as new growth opportunities, so what I'm looking at is what is the story? What is Michael packaging and how does that compare to the competition? We're going to hear from HPE at HPE Discover coming up, the Cube will be covering that for the seventh consecutive year. We're seeing Amazon's story playing out in real time. Oracle's story, everyone's got their story. And it's certainly digital transformation but what's interesting is Michael's got the packaging. He's packaging it up, your thoughts. >> And Michael kind of dissed the cloud this morning, actually in his presentation. He said, you can't have a successful business, or your business is not going to grow as quickly if you're 100% cloud based. He was very much making a pitch for data center infrastructure. Really not surprising coming from Michael. One thing that will be a sub-theme here I think is how this merger is working out, and as we wrote on Silicon Angle this week, if you go back to the history of big mega mergers, particularly in the hardware industry, going back to Burroughs Sperry, DEC Compaq, HP Compaq, Wellfleet Synoptics and NCR AT&T. I mean, it goes on and on and on. Pretty much all disasters, and we really haven't seen a merger anywhere near this scale between two IT companies that has worked well. All indications are now that they're doing the right things, they even have some people on board with Dell EMC who went through some of those mergers. But it's going to be interesting to see how they break a pattern that has been decidedly negative. >> Great point, I loved your post by the way, and I would add that interesting observation, at least from my perspective is, as we sit down with these billionaires and interview them one-on-one on the Cube is, you look at Amazon, Andy Jasse and Jeff Bezos, Bezos in particular. Larry Ellison and Michael Dell, you have essentially captains of industry at the helm. Michael Dell is no spring chicken, but he's also not over the hill either, he's 51 years old. >> Paul: He's a kid relative to most leaders in this industry. >> You know, you hear Jeff Bezos talk and I was watching his talk in DC just this week, he's saying we're taking the long view. If you look at Amazon.com's CEO, Bezos, look at Michael Dell, look at what Ellison's doing, they're all playing the long game card. Now I don't know if that's a hedge against we don't have our story right, or give us more time to bake out our stuff, but I think what's different about Dell Technologies is, Michael's 33 years into the business, one trillion dollars later in sales and he's young, so I think that is a wild card. Ellison's still running the show, Bezos is still running the show, Dell's certainly running the show. I think the wild card on this is the fact that you got a strong founder, and a privately held company. >> And Ellison, it's questionable how long Ellison will be able to run the show, I mean he is over 70 at this point. Dell certainly will be around for a long time. You have to take a long term strategy. If you're not Amazon, you have to take a long term strategy 'cause what other choice do you have? You've lost in the short term, so it's not surprising to hear these guys going that way. I'll be interested to hear from Michael and from his team about the cloud and how they really design and differentiate its strategy. I think IBM has staked its position in cloud out pretty well. Even HPE has got a differentiated position. HPE of course has the configurable hardware, that's a point that Dell I think has to come back on, and the big question is software. John, as you pointed out the other day, VMware is worth more than HPE, by a substantial margin at this point. They've got this huge asset in VMware, not to mention Virtuestream and Pivotal and the other good software assets they acquired. What are they going to do with them? Are they just going to let 'em go free like Michael has done in the past, or are they going to try to mold these into some kind of coordinated whole? >> Well, great point one is on the HPE valuation thing market cap, VMware's actually worth more on market cap and public markets than HPE. Interesting, but not significant in my mind yet, but it does point to the fact that Michael Dell's rhetoric on stage today, he didn't take any shots at HP. Last year he took a big shot at HPE. It's been his rival from day one. I used to work at HP when he was just a mail order company selling white boxes and then he grew that business, obviously the rest is history, but no shot at HP because VMware has to work with HP. Right, (chuckling) so that's interesting. Two is, on the software side, Dell is a hardware company, let's face it. But they have more software now than they've ever had before so that is a good point, we're going to be getting into this date software defined data center to find out how much they actually have. A couple core themes that I see already popping out of the keynote, one, Pivotal. Pivotal and Cloud Foundry's instrumental in the keynotes. NSX was mentioned, Pat Gelsinger's going to be on tomorrow. NSX is VMware's secret play. If you look at what NSX is doing with the Amazon public cloud deal that they did recently this year, NSX could be the real lever in that intellectual property, that lock in, that kind of differentiation. The cloud is not a place, it's a way of doing IT is another message we heard all day today. To me, and your point about bashing cloud, I actually think that's a stake in the ground to kind of hold the line, because they have no cloud strategy. Now, their cloud strategy is kind of hand waiving right now with multi-cloud, which I buy, but multi-cloud is still a fantasy in my mind. Latencies are too low, there just isn't the kind of plumbing yet in place on the clouds for multi-cloud, but certainly hybrid-cloud I think will be multi-cloud roll, so those are the key things and then I'm going to ask Michael directly. You blew 60 billion dollars on this deal. Is there any cash left for M&A? >> Paul: Acquisitions, yeah. >> M&A right now is hot market, you can do some nice tuck ins, fill in the white spaces on the products. Get those software assets and really start cobbling together a growth strategy. There's no doubt in my mind, Paul, that they're going to win the mature, classic business school move of consolidated market. Own the consolidated market, and try to get a growth strategy. To me, that's going to be the big question. What is Dell Technologies and Dell EMC's growth strategy? >> And you would have to think it's either through M&A, perhaps an acquisition of HPE if the valuation continues to go down. Or it's in software It's a good point you made about VMware. Vmware also has a strategic alliance with IBM, so if you're Michael Dell, it's hard to give a compelling keynote speech these days because you can't really offend anybody. His companies now are in cahoots with all these other firms, and of course dissing the cloud is even dangerous because Cloud Foundry is such a critical part of the Pivotal strategy. I think it's an important point, you've got a company that is almost trying to reassemble the old IBM, the old IBM of the '80s which dominated every segment that was important Dell is almost doing that now, I mean the only piece they really don't have is networking. To make a big play, to become the mongo IT company in the world, can they raise the kind of funds for that? >> Yeah, and we're also going to talk about the cloud transition as well as what I'm calling the EMC mafia, folks that have been on the Cube and big executives at EMC. We'll get to that in a minute, but I just want to talk about that cloud play, because you're right, the growth strategy has to come from software. I just don't see the cloud growth yet for these guys, although Michael, in the hallway, conversations are growth in the cloud is doing really well for EMC, not sure. But on the growth strategy, Pivotal, Boo-Mee, Vmware, Virtuestream, and Software Converge Infrastructure are interesting plays, so I think that's where we have to look here. I still think there's a lot of holes in the product line. To me that's important. Now, trends so far, and what we're expecting to hear at the show is, some of my notes Paul, I'll share with you, and get your reaction on. All flash arrays are going to be big, continuing to grow that. Hyperconverge VX rail, we heard that on stage today, claiming to be number one. Power edge 14G. Again, back to speeds and feeds, (chuckling) you know. Storage. Storage is the bread and butter of EMC and now Dell EMC I still think is going to be a real critical beachhead that they going to continue to expand, storage is not going away. Obviously the ice lawn all flash is coming out, and then SSD's, data protection in the cloud. You're starting to see them going where their roots are. Cloud stuff is coming out of the data domain, kind of their core storage first, make sense strategy wise, while they buy their time to fill in the cloud. >> Well, it's a good point about storage. They have a comfortable lead in storage. According to the latest IDC figures, they're a good 15 points ahead of their next biggest competitor. They have a comfortable lead in the hyper converge infrastructure. Four different product lines in that area. These are beachheads that they have to shore up. They have to be sure that their market share doesn't erode in those areas. The question is where does the growth come from? You look at a company that's going through a very similar transition right now, Cisco, which has finally really bought in to software defined networking and is remaking its company around it. That company is having to change the whole culture in response to a technology trend. Now the same thing's going on in the data center. Everything's being remade as virtualized and Vmware is at the center of that, so Michael Dell has the asset to be able to lead that conversion, but are they psychologically going to get there? >> Great point. One, I would agree with you that the whole Cisco example proves the same channel that Dell EMC is. Can they move up the stack? In this case, they're hardware guys, can they add software. Cisco, they're transforming themselves to be more cloud native. The classic move's happening. Cisco have been trying to move up the stack for over a generation. They're plumbing guys, they're networking guys. These guys are hardware guys. Can they get the DNA to truly become software providers, not in the sense of selling software, just providing a software fabric that's going to be the key differentiators, because digital transformation is about IT transformation. That is certainly the reality, what we're seeing when you start to peel back the onions. And that to me is going to be the big discussion because as David Gooldun said on stage, apps provide the value. As the enterprises build more apps, you got to have a platform, you got to have a cohesive horizontal end to end software fabric, and the question is, do they have it? >> Well, they certainly have the foundation for it, I mean they have Pivotal, there's a whole developer community around Pivotal. Dell itself doesn't have a developer community, nor does EMC but they have elements of that to build upon. The interesting thing about the conversion to software, about software defined infrastructure, is that it requires thinking from an application perspective and that's not something hardware companies have ever been inclined to do. So, how does Michael Dell make that transition, has he made it himself, is there other leadership he's going to have to bring in who are going to make it for him? The whole leadership of the Dell EMC company right now is ex-Dell and EMC people, it's hardware guys. >> I'm going to put pressure on Dell, the question on software. But you wrote a two part series on SiliconAngle.com, worth checking out, getting a lot of viral buzz around open source and the value of open source, because if you look at say Cisco for instance, what they're doing with the cloud native strategy, they have actually pivoted and Chuck Robbins, the CEO has acknowledged, actually re-tweeted one of my tweets the other day, with as we were talking about this new program called DevNet Create. They're taking the developer program from Cisco and moving it into an open community model, which basically is the toe in the water for saying, we have to figure out open source. All the critical, big vendors that are transforming from called the old guard, as Amazon calls 'em, Amazon Web Services, Andy Jasse. Dell's an old guard guy, but still young, but they got to get to open source. What are you finding is the success parameters there because you got to play in the open source, be a contributing member. Again, back to the DNA of the culture, and two, there's real value there. >> Well, there's no question that open source has won when it comes to infrastructure. I mean, the biggest IT companies in the world which are Google and Facebook, are both built on open source platforms. Game over. This is where IT infrastructure is headed. Cisco, interesting case because they are an infrastructure company, and they are being eroded, their traditional market is being eroded by open source, they've chosen to embrace it through their developer community. Cisco is one company I would never bet against. They're such a great company. If anyone's going to make the transition, they will. Open source is still an infrastructure play. I don't see open source in the applications area being a major driver, but Dell is an infrastructure company, so you have to assume that everything they're doing in managing, in securing storage and servers is going to be under pressure from open source at some point. They have to embrace that as Cisco is doing. >> Paul, we had thought leader chat with some experts on our digital panel, software crowd chat, everyone knows crowdchat.net, check it out. And comment and conversation was taking place among the influential folks saying, what is a software company? You go back to the web, shrink wrapped, download software, to now fully SAS based and Saas now platform, what is a software company? So, the question was, is Facebook a software company? Or are they an app company? Which begs the question, you have to be a software company, but it's not the classic software company category, business model. You need software (chuckling) to run stuff, so you can be a hardware guy, like Michael Dell, and have Dell Technologies. You can be a network company like Cisco, but you've got to be a software company in the new way. >> Well, I spoke to a Forester analyst in writing that piece on open source who had a great point, he said Facebook and Google are two big successful software companies, neither of which makes. >> Any money. >> Any money, a little bit in Google's case licensing software. They created business models that have nothing to do with the traditional software model, but that have leveraged their expertise in the software that they've developed. And maybe that is the business model, ultimately the business model is building software in order to do something else with it that customers will pay for. >> I think you're on to something. I think your post illuminates that. I think that this is going to be one of those things where in the history books of the tech generation, as we're on our whatever wave of open source generation, this is it, it's not about the business model of the software, it's how the software's being used in the business model of the transformation. That is really really key. Paul, I want to just talk about, really quickly about my observation at EMC. A little bit of editorial moment here. Because, Dell took over. Dell EMC. We've interviewed now eight years, pretty much all the executives at EMC over the years, but there's an EMC mafia developing. There's a lot of people who have left EMC, that we know, we're friends with. Guy Churchwood, CJ DeSai, Josh Conn, Rich DePellatano, Brian Gallagher, BJ Jenkins, Sanjay Murchandani, and many more have left because of the consolidation. Certainly you can't, EMC's going to get consolidated down, but no major layoffs but still enough that some eagles have flown from the nest, as they say and are running other companies. So you have this EMC culture out there of very sales oriented, very customer centric, now running other companies, and I want to give a shout out to all those EMC alumni and mafia out there. Good luck on your new ventures, but the impact here to Dell is a mashup of the two cultures. What's your observation, what's your reaction of that. Have you heard anything? I have some thoughts, but I want to get your reaction because okay, some eagles fly away, you still got the worker bees inside EMC, and now Dell coming together. Thoughts on the culture clash. >> Well, I live in Boston, and so I've been through the acquisition of Prime Computer, through EMC acquiring Data General, through the DEC acquisition by Compaq. All of which were disasters, and all of which where the cultural issues were much bigger than the technology issues. So, I think that that is something that Dell has to be front and center for Michael Dell, is how do you mash up these two cultures. As you pointed out, EMC, very aggressive, take no prisoners, enterprise-oriented sales force. Their sales people make a lot of money. I used to live in a neighborhood where everyone was EMC salespeople. >> John: Buying new houses. >> They were making a million dollars a year. And you've got Dell with its direct model, with its channeled model, and without a particularly strong roots in enterprise sales force and how do you coordinate those. It's not surprising to see people leaving. Of course, in the early days after an acquisition, choices get made, people get promoted and moved in new positions. Those who lose out tend to leave the company. But, I think the sales issue would be something to delve into too. Does Dell want to adopt EMC's sales style, or the other way around? Or is there some way that they can live both in harmony? >> You know, I follow a lot of companies in Silicon Valley as well, I'm out there on the west coast, left coast, as they say. Where all the crazy ones are, as they say. But I got to say, there's been some shrinkage on EMC, but for the most part, I haven't really heard any really negative horror stories. Actually, it's been going pretty well, and I think you bring up an issue of effectiveness with the sales folks. Dell's an efficiency guy, right so you got effectiveness and efficiency coming together. But I think they've handled it well. I really haven't heard any real horror stories. Again, I think that has to do with the founder being actively involved, they're a private company, so they have some room. And I think they've invested in making that happen, so I think generally, props to EMC folks and for the Dell folks on the acquisition. Still not clear the woods yet, it's going to surely be in the products and the revenue, but for the most part, we're going to unpack that. So Paul. >> But you can't, I just wanted to jump in just quickly. You can't minimize customer touch, and EMC was always a high touch company. Outstanding service, they put people on a plane in the middle of the night, charter a private jet in the middle of the night to get someone on site at a customer to fix a problem. As you mentioned, Dell is an efficiency company. That's not a very efficient way to operate. Can they absorb the best of EMC and the best of Dell at the same time? >> Yeah, well we'll certainly tell, I mean they got a lot of competition, Michael Dell saying on stage. (mumbling) startups, essentially what's he's saying is Amazon, there in my opinion, although that's not probly what he really meant but that's my interpretation. But I'm expecting to see the same old EMC world with a twist, and that is, we're doin' good, the messaging's out there, we're going to see how the products compare vis a vis the competition. I'm interested in Vmware piece. Paul, what are you looking forward to? >> I'm looking forward to hearing how this is all going, how this company is culturally, what kind of a cultural chimera they're putting together here that's going to make sense, that the market is going to understand. I also want to hear how they're going to differentiate in cloud, internet of things, we just heard a little bit about that this morning. That's something where I think you're seeing Cisco. The way Cisco's dealing with the cloud these days is to say, don't worry about it, it's all going IOT. It's all going to distributed intelligent devices, the cloud is already history, is what they're saying. So, does Dell have a similar differentiated position on that. I'm least interested in hearing about the new products because it's speeds and feeds. But really, how is this company going to dominate an industry, how is it going to get over some of the speed bumps that we've been talking about for the last 20 minutes that have foiled so many merger attempts in the past. >> One of the tell signs that I look at a conference when I see a lot of AI washing. The good news is, there's not a lot of AI being talked about here, 'cause usually that's just lipstick on the pig, as they say. Except for the case of Google and Amazon Web Services, they do have some AI story, with some real products to back it up. For the most part, you're not seeing EMC glob on the whole machine learning, rah rah. They did talk about it but it wasn't like a big theme. I think they really talked about the packaging of the value. Of the brands together, comments around costs for public cloud, nice little ding there. I'm going to dig into the story. I'm going to really test the story, and I'm going to look at the customer traction. I really want to see who they have on stage, I really want to hear who's really going down the road, how that growth strategy, 'cause I think they're going to win the data consolidation market pretty handily, and the question between HPE and Dell, for instance, 'cause that's really to me the two big horses on the track. Who's going to win the growth. Who's going to be able to lock in their beachhead on the core market, traditional market, and have access to the growth of what cloud will bring and IOT and among other things. >> I think at this point, HP has a better story in that area with their configurable infrastructure, with their pay as you go on site model, really interesting models. I was at HP World in Europe in December, and I came away from that feeling like these guys have some unique talking points here. At least they have a strategy that I think I understand and that is different. Dell is still working through this huge merger and that's a big catch. >> Bottom line is, Dave Donatelli, who's an executive at Oracle told me, he also was an EMC executive, and HPE. The business of provisioning servers and storage (laughing) is not going to be the growth strategy. Now, it might be a component of the overall business model, like software, but ultimately, that business is in decline, and that's a fact. Okay, this is the Cube, bringing you all the coverage of the kickoff from day one at Dell EMC World 2017. Our eighth year, three days of wall to wall coverage. We have two sets, the blue set and the white set. Go to SiliconAngle.tv to find the coverage, also go on Twitter, follow us on the Cube, I'm John Furrier with Paul Gillin, kickin' off Dell EMC World 2017, back with more, stay with us after this short break. (atmospheric instrumental music)