>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow, Knowledge2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at ServiceNow Knowledge18, 2018. Been here for six years. It's amazing. It's like 18,000 people all over the Sands Convention Center. Huge ecosystem and we're excited to be back, as usual. Our next guest, Greg Deitrich. He's a VP of operations in engineering at DXC. Joined by Tim Henderson, director of automation engineering at DXC. Gentlemen, welcome. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, first off, just kind of impressions of the show. It's amazing. This thing grows like four or five thousand people, I think, every single year. >> Yeah, it's amazing to see 18,000 people here at a ServiceNow conference. I actually attended back in October of 2007 before they had Knowledge. I attended a first user group session in New York where there's about 70 people around... >> You and Fred and a couple other people, right? >> Fred, his brother who ran operations at the time, and a few more. >> That's right. And then, obviously, you guys... We interviewed traditional partners way back into the day. You got mopped by CSC and you guys have rebranded into DXC. So you guys have a long history in really making a bet on the ServiceNow value proposition. >> Yeah, that's right. CSC and now DXC has had a long history of partnership with ServiceNow and, as you said, as evidenced by some of these acquisitions that we did with Fruition and Logicalis, the guys with the green suits around here. >> Jeff: That's right. >> And that continues to be a very strong part of our business. >> Good bet. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> And what's interesting, and I'm sure back in the day, we used to talk to Fred. He had this great platform but nobody's got a line item budget for a new platform, right? So you have to build the application. Obviously, the story's well-known. He build the service-management application. But he still has that great platform underneath. And now we're seeing all these different kind of applications built on this platform beyond what the original application-- >> I think that what you see is the pivot to more focus on business and less about IT, right? And that's what we're doing with Bionics And Platform DXC. It's taking a completely different angle that we're trying to orchestrate business within an ecosystem which ServiceNow is a key construct of. And it resonates with clients. We've showed what we've done to several major clients and it's really trying to achieve, like John said, business outcomes and less about the IT. But how can you quickly bundle sequence workflows and capability to get efficiency and automation into the workplace. >> Right. So let's dig down a little deeper on that application. What problem did you approach? Why was this the right tool to go after this problem? >> Sure. So the big thing that Tim and I are driving across DXC is our DXC Bionics approach which is really centered on how can we digitally transform our delivery engine, right? So we're applying data and analytics and leaning out people on processes and applying technology automation tools to really drive intelligent automation across everything we do. To get better, faster, cheaper, more automated, scalable, repeatable. In doing that, it was really important that we took a platform approach and ServiceNow's been a cornerstone in that platform. And we call that platform Platform DXC. >> Why are you called Bionics? >> So, Bionics, for us, is that combination of data, people, and technology. It's not just automation as the silver bullet and just the technology. It has to be that combination of the data with the people and the technology and automation coming together to make people work smarter, work more intelligently. >> Jeff: Right. >> And I think some of that, too, is the muscle part of it, right? You think Bionics but, as Greg said, you've really got to understand the business problem or what's occurring. And a lot of people we've seen in the industry are applying just automation without really understanding the underlying problem. And a lot of companies have had IT implemented in a diversified portfolio for 20 years and these disparate systems are very siloed. And there's a lot of waste in the value stream of their company. If you really don't break that apart and look at that, you're really not helping them lead in their marketplace. >> Right. It's just fascinating how we continue to find these big giant buckets of inefficiency. All the way back to the original ERP days and you just keep finding so many giant buckets where things are just not working as smoothly as they could. >> You know, people will look at this somewhat and they'll say, "Well, automation is to get heads out." Well, actually, it's to free up heads, right, Greg? To where you can actually empower these people to go do other value-added things for that company and not sit here in this toil or managing technical data or inefficient waste. It's really liberating but it does take a good champion within a company to go pull that off. >> And clearly the people part's probably the hardest part, right? In the keynote yesterday, John touched on, kind of, best practices and one of them, I think number three, was a commitment to change process. And that's, obviously, a big part of you guys' business, helping people to get through that piece of it. I laugh. I have Alexa and I have a Google Home, and they send me emails on how I should interact with this thing to try to help me change my behavior to take advantage of this new technology. I'm like, "Oh, okay." So it's hard to change people's behavior. >> Yeah, see the people component comes down to a couple of things. One, it comes down to skills, right. And there's been a lot of discussion here this week around getting the right skills, the digital types of skill that are needed in this new economy. But the other piece that's more important, I think, around people is this cultural picot, right? So a big piece of our digital transformation has not been about technology, but is has been about a cultural change. Thinking differently, challenging the status quo. Working differently, right? That agile DevOps. Eliminating that fear of failure. Let's fail fast, let's learn from it in that continual incremental way of driving improvement. >> Right. And something we did when Greg and I experimented with this. We actually didn't know how it was going to work out. To put the platform itself together, we created this concept called a Buildathon. >> Jeff: A Buildathon? >> A Buildathon. >> Jeff: Not a hackathon. >> So we have our team. We have ServiceNow. We have AWS. Microsoft, Dell, other partners in there. And we write code together. It's no Powerpoint. You're doing scrum sessions. And we basically created the platform in 230 days which is phenomenal when you think about it. From inception to briefing Greg and the CTO of our company, Dan Hushon, to saying it's open for business. >> Right. >> And, as Greg said, empowering people, getting them to work. But one thing we're doing is getting our partners to build with us. We call it co-creation. I know it's a little dicey term if you take that the wrong way. But they're having fun with it because, instead of getting all caught up in contractuals and, "What am I going to make on this?", it's like, "Let's go try some things and build together "and then go, oh, well, I made that water glass "and I can go price this in here and everybody "understands what they're going to make in it "as a business." And it's huge. It transforms the workforce. Our partner network loves it. They're lined up to get into the framework. And, like Greg says, it's re-energized our workforce. It's been huge. >> It's interesting, the whole DevOps conversation. So all these terms, Moore's Law, et cetera, have a very specific application. But I think it's much more interesting in the more general application of that method. Whether it's Moore's Law and this presumption that we're just going to keep getting better, faster, cheaper, and driving forward. Or we really do have switches. No, we're not going to do a big old MRD, and we're not going to do a big giant PRD, and spread this thing out, and start our build, and someday down the road, hope to deliver something. It's like, "Let's start delivering now." >> Right. Gone are the days of those big requirements, and then go way, and then the big reveal. And, oh no, we missed all this. Right? It's got to be that more interactive, collaborative module way. >> Right. And the thing about the people... You know, we go to a ton of shows, right? Everyone's automation's going to take. But I've never heard anyone say, "We're overstaffed." That we have more people qualified in these new areas than we need. I mean, there's still such a demand for people across the board. Whether it's truck-driving or it's... >> It's unlocking the power of those people. Just to kind of share an example, when we went through the pilot for this to go get the funding, we took basically a womb-to-tomb situation where we would go do infrastructure to service a platform and have it in a client's hand for business. In the past, that would take us 2100 hours and eight teams and 53 hand-offs. In seven weeks, we've proved we could orchestrate that all the way through the last mile, getting to the client's network in two hours and 14 minutes to where the client could log in. >> Wow, that's a game-changer. >> It is a game-changer. But you free up those resources then to help that customer understand how to leverage that application and change their business versus all this toil of trying to figure out, "Well, did I get the network connected? "Well, who knows how to do the firewalls?" Everything is code. >> Right. >> And that's really, I said it earlier, we're really going towards business code, right? Because that's what John's talking about, is getting business processes code, and then empowering people to have that situational awareness. >> And then, hopefully, opening up their minds to, "Oh, my goodness. "If I can do this that easily, "what else can I do? "What else can I do." So, Tim, you've got an interesting background. Not that ServiceNow is not exciting. But you were involved in a very exciting business for years and years at Cape Canaveral. So what did you do there and what lessons did you learn there that you can apply right now? >> That's a great question. So it was actually an honor to support our country in that way. I was the IT director at Cape Canaveral for 12 years and supported Atlas, Titan, and Delta rocket launches for commercial and military purposes. But what I learned there a lot was two key things: systems engineering... That's almost like DevOps for aerospace and defense. It is people really building a system together and understanding what they have to achieve. The other thing is command and control. And that sounds a little rigid in today's world of agile. But when Greg and I talked about Platform DXC, what we felt is, we need and control system for business. Right? That has a complete loop. And we're going to talk about this Thursday at 1:30? >> 1:30. >> Right. So we took a lot of those constructs and we didn't even select ServiceNow when we put the platform together. We'd been a good partner with them. But then we said, "You know what? "They have a market-leading solution. "They're going to fit into the orchestration "of business." And then, there's an intelligence pillar, and an automation pillar. But we're seeing huge gains. Every client we get in front of is like, "Wow, we didn't think about that." And we also have, our partners are actually wanting to put their IP into our platform so people can just consume it and we could wrap another service wrapper around it. So it kind of turns into an IT marketplace in a way. So we're pretty excited about it. >> I'd love to just kind of drill down on the command and controls. Interesting. I talked to a company a couple of weeks ago and they were in aviation. And the guy's like, "You know, in aviation, "if they want to innovate around ticketing "or AV systems in the planes, "they can innovate all day long. "It doesn't really matter if somebody "can't print their ticket if it doesn't come up "on their phone." But in terms of the safety, it's not to say, in terms of the regs, and the maintenance, of the aircraft. It's super-rigid. You can't take risks. I would imagine at Cape Canaveral, although, some missions have people, some don't, it's still big, expensive missions and you really aren't failing fast... >> We actually move pretty quick, believe it or not. You can build a rocket in six months. They'll fly it in and you can erect it and test it in thirty days and launch, which is pretty crazy when you think about it. And a rocket's a lot of hardware and software, right? What they have is that value stream, through systems engineering and situational awareness. So, for example, they know every time a torque wrench is used, who used it. So if it went out of calibration, they can immediately go back and say it was used on this guidance system, on that rocket. We need to go back and check it before it launches. And it's really a pedigree. You know, who was the tech? Were they assigned? Did they have the right skills? Did they capture the data for the test? And you really have a pedigree. And we've actually built some of that into the Platform DXC. We call it the Digital Thread, which is something we'd worked on with the Air Force. So if you take compliance, right, and you have this thread of everything that's occurred, whether it's the people, an asset, an application, you have a thread. So you look at compliance radically different. So we capture a lot of telemetry, whether it's technical, business, or security. And that's where the intelligence pillar has this whole AI engine and machine learning and things to just start pivoting radically. So it's really a closed-loop system which is what a rocket has. The airplane that probably everybody in this room flew here in, right? It's always sensing itself and adjusting. And if it has a failure potentially coming up, it notifies Boeing before that plane lands that they need something to go look at. That's what we're trying to do here for business. >> It's funny. Another interview, this gal came. She was a lawyer. She was a homicide detective. And we talked to her about chain of possession. What an important concept chain of possession is. And I'm just curious about how cumbersome was that before when you started versus with the tools that we have now in terms of sensors and networks, and basically unlimited networking and unlimited storage? What percentage of it really was chain of command versus actually doing things, and that kind of followed along? >> I think you asked a question, how cumbersome was it? I think it was so difficult that, in many cases, it was not there. Right? So you had these big gaps. And you didn't know what happened and you didn't have the integration of the data. And now, in today's world, with these more real-time cloud-based, integrated systems, you're able to get that at, more and more, a commoditized price. It's no longer as expensive and difficult to get that. It's being commoditized where, in the past, in some cases, you didn't have it because it was too hard or too expensive. >> Right. So you didn't have that closed-loop kind of feedback mechanism to make sure that things go well. >> Tim: You needed people and paper. >> Yeah. >> Alright, so I can't believe we're, like, May 9th. The year's halfway gone. So what's next up in the balance of 2018 on this journey? If we talk a year from now, what are we going to be talking about? >> Yeah, so our strategy for this year ahead of us is really to continue driving Bionics, or intelligent automation across our whole business unit. So DXC, the world's leading largest independent services company across infrastructure, apps, and BPS. So we're transforming how we deliver and deploying that at scale. So intelligent automation at scale across your business. The second key piece for us this year is to work across all of our offerings and our industry solutions to ensure that they're built for operations and built on Platform DXC so all that efficiency, effectiveness, automation is built into the offerings. So that what we have ahead of us for this year. Alright. Should be fun. And it has been so far. We'll watch Elon Musk's car keep going through space because that's very entertaining. >> Tim: It is pretty cool. >> Well, what's cool, too, is that everyone's excited to watch the launches. They're going to get up at six in the morning and count it down and it is very cool. Alright, Tim, Greg, thanks again for taking a few minutes and stopping by. >> Thank, Jeff. >> Alright, Tim and Greg. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from ServiceNow Knowledge2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada. We'll be right back after this short break. Thanks for watching.