>> 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)

[Music] hey welcome back everybody Jeff freek here with the cube we're in Reno Nevada at the inner bike show it's a big show all about bikes and mountain bikes but we're really to talk about ebike skuzzy bikes is this new class of really transportation not really new turns out that gazelles been making them since 2002 so we're at the Royal Dutch gazelle event that adjective in next to enter bike and we're excited to see they're releasing a bunch of new bikes and really dig into what are these e bikes all about we've been told that the United States a little bit behind you're starting to see them show up is it a last mile vehicle is it you know a primary vehicle what are the laws and regulations or we're really excited to have our first guest she's been dealing with this for years and years and years it's current wiener she is a co-owner of the new wheel Carn great to see you thanks thanks for having me absolutely so give us a little background on the new wheel where are you guys how long have been around what's your what's your focus yeah and the new wheel is located in San Francisco and Marin County and Larkspur we opened in 2010 so about eight years ago out of our excuse me out of our apartment because we realized that nobody was really seeing the opportunity in this transportation alternative right and so we were seeing what was happening in Europe which like you said has been happening for a while and we realized that gosh San Francisco is the perfect place it's it's an obvious match an electric bike which basically amplifies your pedaling power acts exactly like a bicycle except for you're always in your best shape and having your best day and having the most fun and so um we started with basically one bike who are three bikes and we had a mobile shop that we would ride from farmers market to farmers market then we opened our first store in 2012 and we're still in that location in Bernal Heights in San Francisco and we focus on curating high quality electric bikes that are going to work really well in San Francisco which as you know is a really rugged especially in terms of elevation gain environment right so what if you could talk about some things some miss or not miss so one thing is why we came here is we were really looking at e-bikes is really a last bio vehicle and that's kind of in the in the line of smart cities and in kind of multimodal transportation do you'd have a lime scooter to the Cal train maybe it's your car maybe you've got your own bike but what I'm hearing here is these things are a lot more than last mile vehicles these are actually substitution vehicles for a significant amount of car rides not just the two miles run down to the store to get some milk or to get some cereal or to get some coffee but a much heavier load on these things yeah it's very very interesting so if we look to Europe the ebike started as a replacement for bicycle trips in kind of urban environments for people who are maybe getting older or whatever and the Bison and any bike works really well for just in in turn inner-city transportation there's been an interesting kind of development in Europe in the last say four or five years which is the rise of the speed electric bike you can with a very small battery you can ride 40 to 60 miles 40 to 60 months yeah and that means that you can ride from one city to another so now what we're seeing is a clerk across the Netherlands actual bicycle super highways that cover maybe you know five to 20 miles and that becomes a reasonable bicycle ride on the daily basis and that's really exciting it's something that is unlike basically any other form of transportation it's not a motorcycle it's not that heavy-duty you don't need license or insurance or anything like that you're still getting exercise and you're getting where you need to get right so it's talked about the speed because the speed is interesting thing and I think the speed is what dictates some of the regulation so we see in San Francisco got inundated with the Lyme scooters and there's boosted boards and one wheels and all sorts of kind of contraptions with these great high-capacity batteries and these itty-bitty little little motors so the form factors are numerous but all of them seem to be gated around 20 miles an hour which I think is the regulation to keep them from being considered a scooter you know a internal-combustion scooter so you're talking about speed bikes so they've got bikes here today that goes like 28 miles an hour so how are the regulations keeping up with us a bike that goes 28 miles an hour so it's developing slowly it's developing based on models that have already been tested and used in Europe in California there was actually a model legislation passed I think three years ago which defined three types of electric bikes and defines them as bicycles so type 1 is a bicycle that goes to 20 miles an hour and basically it has to be you have to be pedaling type 2 is a bicycle it also goes to 20 miles an hour but can have a throttle now this is a very Asian type of electric bike it's not quite as polished but usually they're lower-cost okay and then type three is this 27 mile an hour type still a bicycle you're required to wear a helmet and there are some places that you're not allowed to ride them like on shared pedestrian paths right and so what's good about this is it's creating a model for different local and regional governments to create rules it's taking time from but what's exciting is that there is a model so the scooters and the one wheels are all operating under cut-ins this DMV law that is kind of this type of as you describe it is kind of type 1 but it's also kind of skirt like it seems really unclear right I think there's an opportunity and electric bikes for it to be very clear and I think we're on the way to that it's just going to take something right now in terms of the actual utility obviously this is a Dutch company they don't have great weather in Holland as we know San Francisco as you mentioned is a rugged place not to mention the fact it's about as rough as it gets for parked cars getting broken into so what do you see from your customers in terms of the actual utility carrying stuff home from the store survivability in the streets you know not getting stolen inexpensive pieces of gear so what's kind of the experience you've seen with your kind of long history in this space in the city so what I've seen is that what you use matters a lot so the type of bike that you choose out of the gate is going to dictate first of all how well it's going to last and second of all how well it's gonna work in the first place right the other thing is that the way it's not only the bicycle you also have to have the right lock and you have to have the right bag and the right set up to give you the actual full utility potential of the bicycle and that's where you know specialists and retailers really come in you also need service so most people have owned bicycles in their lifetime and it may be stretched one train stretching a chain takes about 2,000 miles on a bike okay an e bike rider usually stretches a train in a little under a year because suddenly your bicycle is your preferred mode of transportation for thousands of miles of errands and and urban duties and and pleasure right that you never had before on a bicycle so it's a switch in terms of how people understand the maintenance that they need on their bike but also what kind of tools they need like a great lock and it turns out that you actually can lock a bike safely not overnight on the street but at any time of day there are locks that work really really well through the bike safe so next day on touch bases kind of the evolving technology yeah so we're hearing over and over that really the the battery technology is getting this just huge boost from autonomous cars because now there's huge investments in battery you've probably seen tremendous developments both in the batteries and the propulsion systems and the technology and these bikes since you've been out that's four for eight years how is that kind of changing and how is that opening up you know maybe the opportunity to people that maybe didn't wanna a shorter range you know six a 10 a 12 a 15 wherever the older kind of range models were battery technology that that originated in laptops and I was being used in cars and autonomous vehicles totally changed the potential for electric bikes and it changes it will change so many things about your bicycle for example not too far down the road I believe that there will be anti-theft devices on every electric bicycle that you buy you're gonna be able to track your bicycle you're gonna be able to track your heart rate you're gonna be able to do all these things seamlessly just as part of your life so when you put a battery on a bike it changes everything about what it can do right now it's assist in the future will be many things there was this switch about eight years ago from old very heavy very polluting batteries to lithium-ion batteries and it it means that you can have a bicycle that is that you can lift you know that weighs between maybe 35 and 60 pounds that will take you anywhere from 25 to 100 miles right right and that's a game-changer right so last question for you what is like the biggest surprise when somebody comes in the store you know you sit him down so any bike and they come back for their first maintenance whatever that they say how this thing has really impacted their lives integrating activity into your life can change your life in all sorts of ways it can reduce stress the funniest one was this this guy came in they'd had this family that had a baby like six months ago guy comes in buys a bike and he comes back for his new tuna and he goes Karen my wife owes you a big one she's a much happier woman now people love their bikes what surprises them I think the most most often is just how many miles they're accruing on their odometer and that makes them excited from a health standpoint from an environmental standpoint and just from a joy in your daily life standpoint when we all live with a lot of stress at a lot of multitasking and taking 20 minutes on your bike and just having a great relaxing time is unbeatable right well thanks for a card take it a few minutes and and sharing the story and nothing but success for the store alright cheese Caron I'm Jeff you're watching the cube we're at the Royal Dutch gazelle bike event outside of Interbike in Reno Nevada thanks for watching [Music]