>> Announcer: theCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. >> We're back at the formerly the Sands Convention Center, it's called the Venetian Convention Center now, Dave Vellante and John Furrier here covering day three, HPE Discover 2022, it's hot outside, it's cool in here, and we're going to heat it up with Rashmi Kumar, who's the Senior Vice President and CIO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, great to see you face to face, it's been a while. >> Same here, last couple of years, we were all virtual. >> Yeah, that's right. So we've talked before about sort of your internal as-a-service transformation, you know, we do call it dog fooding, everybody likes to course correct and say, no, no, it's drinking your own champagne, is it really that pretty? >> It is, and the way I put it is, no pressure to my product teams, it's being customer zero. >> Right, take us through the acceleration on how everything's been going with you guys, obviously, the pandemic was an impact to certainly the CIO role and your team but now you've got GreenLake coming in and Antonio's big statement before the pandemic, by 2022 everything will be as a service and then everything went remote, VPNs and all this new stuff, how's it going? >> Yeah, so from business perspective, that's a great point to start that, right? Antonio promised in 2019 that HPE will be Everything-as-a-Service company and he had no view of what's going to happen with COVID. But guess what? So many businesses became digital and as-a-service during those two years, right? And now we came back this year, it was so exciting to be part of Discover when now we are Everything-as-a-Service. So great from business perspective but, when I look at our own transformation, behind the scene, what IT has been busy with and we haven't caught a breadth because of pandemic, we have taken care of all that change, but at the same time have driven our transformation to make HPE, edge to cloud platform as a service company. >> You know, I saw a survey, I referenced it earlier today, it was a survey, I think it was been by Couchbase, it was a CIO survey, so they asked, who was responsible at your organization for the digital transformation? And overwhelming, like 75% said, CIO, which surprised me 'cause, you know, in line with the business and so forth but in fact I thought, well, maybe, because of the forced march to digital that's what was top of their mind, so who is responsible for, and I know it's not just one person, for the digital transformation? Describe that dynamic. >> Yeah, so definitely it's not one person, but you do need that whole accountable, responsible, informed, right, in the context of digital transformation. And you call them CIO, you call them CDIO or CDO and whatnot but, end of the day, technology is becoming an imperative for a business to be successful and COVID alone has accelerated it, I'm repeating this maybe millions time if you Google it but, CIOs are best positioned because they connect the dots across organization. In my organization at HPE, we embarked upon this large transformation where we were consolidating 10 different ERPs, multiple master data system into one and it wasn't about doing digital which is e-commerce website or one technology, it was creating that digital foundation for the company then to transform that entire organization to be a physical product company to a digital product company. And we needed that foundation for us to get that code to cash experience, not only in our traditional business, but in our as-a-service company. >> So maybe that wasn't confirmation bias, I want to ask you about, we've been talking a lot about sustainability and I've made the comment that, if you go back, you know, 10, 12 years and you were CIO IT at that time, CIO really didn't care about the energy bill, that was paid for by facilities, they really didn't talk to each other much and that's completely changed, why has it changed? How should a CIO, how do your your peers think about energy costs today? >> Yeah, so, at some point look, ESG is the biggest agenda for companies, regulators, even kind of the watchers of ISS and Glass Lewis type thing and boards are becoming aware of it. If you look at 2-4% of greenhouse emission comes from infrastructure, specifically technology infrastructure, as part of this transformation within HPE, I also did what I call private cloud transformation. Remember, it's not data center transformation, it's private cloud transformation. And if you can take your traditional workload and cloudify it which runs on a GreenLake type platform, it's currently 30% more efficient than traditional way of handling the workload and the infrastructure but, we recently published our green living progress report and we talk about efficiency, by 2020 if you have achieved three times, the plan is to get to 30 times by 2050 where, infrastructure will not contribute to energy bill in turn the greenhouse emission as well. I think CIOs are responsible multifold on the sustainability piece. One is how they run their data center, make it efficient with GreenLake type implementations, demand from your hyperscaler to provide that, what Fidelma just launched, sustainability scorecard of the infrastructure, second piece is, we are the data gods in the company, right? We have access to all kinds of data, provide that to the product teams and have them, if we cannot measure, we cannot improve. So if you work with your product team, work with your BU leader, provide them data around greenhouse gas and how they're impacting a mission through their products and how can they make it better going forward, and that can be done through technology, right? All the measurements come from technology. So what technology we need to provide to our manufacturing lines so that they can monitor and improve on the sustainability front as well. >> You mentioned data, I wanted to bring that up 'cause I was going to bring that up in another top track here, data as an asset now is at play, so I get the data on the sustainability, feed that in, but as companies go to the cloud operating model, they go, hey, I got the hyperscalers, you call microscale, Amazon for instance, and you got on-premises data center, which is a large edge and you got the edge, the data control plane, and then the control plane and the data plane are always seem to be like the battle ground, I want to control the data plane, will customers own the data plane or will the infrastructure providers control that data plane? And how do you see that? Because we want to power the machine learning, so data plane control plane, it seems to be like the new middleware, what's your view on that? How do you look at that holistically? >> Yeah, so I'll start based on the hyperscaler conversation, right? And I had this conversation with one of the very big ones recently, or even our partner, SAP, when they talk about RISE, data center and how I host my application infrastructure, that's the lowest common denominator of our job. When I talk about CIOs being responsible for digital transformation, that means how do I make my business process more innovative? How do I make my data more accessible, right? So, if you look at data as an asset for the company, it's again, they're responsible, accountable. As CIO, I'm responsible to have it managed, have it on a technology platform, which makes it accessible by it and our business leader accountable to define the right metrics, right kind of KPIs, drive outcome from that data. IT organization, we are also too busy driving a lot of activities and today's world is going to bad business outcome. So with the data that I'm collecting, how do I enable my business leader to be able to drive business outcome through the use of the data? That's extremely important, and at HPE, we have achieved it, there are two ways, right? Now I have one single ERP, so all the data that I need for what I call operational reporting, get hindsight and insight is available at one place and they can drive their day to day business with that, but longer term, what's going to happen based on what happened, which I call insight to foresight comes from a integrated data platform, which I have control of, and you know, we are fragmenting it because companies now have Databox, Snowflake, AWS data analytics tool, Azure data analytics tool, I call it data torture. CIOs should get control of common set of data and enable their businesses to define better measurements and KPIs to be able to drive the data. >> So data's a crown jewel then, it's crown jewel not-- >> Can we double-click on that because, okay, so you take your ERP system, the consumers of data in the ERP system, they have the context that we've kind of operationalized those systems. We haven't operationalized our analytics systems in the same way, which is kind of a weird dynamic, and so you, right, I think correctly noted Rashmi that, we are creating all these stove pipes. Now, think I heard from you, you're gaining control of those stove pipes, but then how do you put data back in the hands of those line of business users without having to go through a hyper specialized analytics team? And that's a real challenge I think for data. >> It is challenge and I'll tell you, it's messy even in my world but, I have dealt with data long enough, the value lies in how do I take control of all stove pipes, bring it all together, but don't make it a data lake which is built out of multiple puddles, that data lake promise hasn't delivered, right? So the value lies in the conformed layer which then it's easier for businesses to access and run their analytics from, because they need a playground because all the answers they don't have, on the operation side, as you mentioned, we got it, right? It'll happen, but on the fore site side and deeper insight side based on driving the key metrics, two challenges; understanding what's the key metrics in KPI, but the second is, how to drive visibility and understanding of it. So we need to get technology out of the conversation, bring in understanding of the data into the conversation and we need to drive towards that path. >> As a business, you know, line of business person putting that hat on, I would love to have this conversation with my CIO because I would say, I just want self-service infrastructure and I want to have access to the data that I need, I know what metrics I need to run my business so now I want the technology to be just a technical detail, you take care of that and then somebody in the organization, probably not the line of business person wants to make sure that that data is governed and secure. So there's somebody else and that maybe is your responsibility, so how do you handle that real problem? So I think you're well on the track with GreenLake for self-serve infrastructure, right, how do you handle the sort of automated governance piece of it, make that computational? Yeah, so one thing is technology is important because that's bringing all the data together at one place with single version of truth. And then, that's why I say my sons are data scientist, by the way, I tell them that the magic happens at the intersection of technology knowledge, data knowledge, and business knowledge, and that's where the talent, which is very hard to find who can connect dots across these three kind of circles and focus on that middle where the value lies and pushing businesses to, because, you know, business is messy, I've worked on pharma companies, utilities, now technology, order does not mean revenue, right? There's a lot more that happen and pricing or chargeback, rebates, all that things, if somebody can kind of make sense out of it through incremental innovation, it's not like a big bang I know it all, but finding those areas and applying what you said, I call it the G word, governance, to make sure your source is right and then creating that conform layer then makes into the dashboard the right information about those types of metrics is extreme. >> And then bringing that to the ecosystem, now I just made it 10 times more complicated. >> Yeah, this is a great conversation, we on theCUBE interview one time we're talking about the old software days where shrink-wrap software be on the shelf, you wouldn't know if was successful until you looked at the sales data, well after the fact, now everything's instrumented, SaaS companies, you know exactly what the adoption is, either people like it or they don't, the data doesn't lie. So now companies are realizing, okay, I got data, I can instrument everything, your customers are now saying, I can get to the value fast now. So knowing what that value is is what everyone's talking about. How do you see that changing the data equation? >> Yeah, that's so true even for our business, right? If you talk to Fidelma today, who is our CTO, she's bringing together the platform and multiple platforms that we had so far to go to as-a-service business, right? Infosite, Aruba Central, GLCP, or now we call it it's all HPE GreenLake, but now this gives us the opportunity to really be a alongside customer. It's no more, I sold a box, I'll come back to you three years later for a refresh, now we are in touch with our customer real time through Telemetry data that's coming from our products and really understanding how our customers are reacting with that, right? And that's where we instantiated what we call is a federated data lake where, marketing, product, sales, all teams can come together and look at what's going on. Customer360, right? Data is locked in Salesforce from opportunity, leads, codes perspective, and then real time orders are locked in S4. The challenge is, how do we bring both together so that our sales people have on their fingertip whats the install base look like, how much business that we did and the traditional side and the GreenLake side and what are the opportunities here to support our customers? >> Real quick, I know we don't have a lot of time left, but I want to touch on machine learning, which basically feeds AI, machine learning, AI go together, it's only as good as the data you can provide to it. So to your point about exposing the data while having the stove pipes for compliance and governance, how do you architect that properly? You mentioned federated data lake and earlier you said the data lake promise hasn't come back, is it data meshes? What is the architecture to have as much available data to be addressed by applications while preserving the protection? >> Yeah, so, machine learning and AI, I will also add chatbots and conversational AI, right? Because that becomes the front end of it. And that's kind of the automation process promise in the data space, right? So, the point is that, if we talk about federated data lake around one capability which I'm talking about GreenLake consumption, right? So one piece is around, how do I get data cleanly? How do I relate it across various products? How do I create metrics out of it? But how do I make it more accessible for our users? And that's where the conversational AI and chatbot comes in. And then the opportunity comes in is around not only real time, but analytics, I believe Salesforce had a pitch called customer insight few years ago, where they said, we have so many of you on our platform, now I can combine all the data that I can access and want to give you a view of how every company is interacting with their customer and how you can improve it, that's where we want to go. And I completely agree, it ends up being clean data, governed data, secure data, but having that understanding of what we want to project out and how do I make it accessible for our users very seamlessly. >> Last question, what's your number one challenge right now in this post isolation world? >> Talent, we haven't talked about that, right? >> Got to get that out there. >> All these promises, right, the entire end to end foundational transformation, as-a-service transformation, talking about the promise of data analytics, we talked about governance and security, all that is possible because of the talent we have or we will have, and our ability to attract and retain them. So as CIO, I personally spend a lot of time, CEO, John Schultz, Antonio, very, very focused on creating that employee experience and what we call everything is edge for us, so edge to office initiative where we are giving them hybrid work capabilities, people are very passionate about purpose, so sustainability, quality, all these are big deal for them, making sure that senior leadership is focused on the right thing, so, hybrid working capability, hiring the right set of people with the right skill set and keeping them excited about the work we are doing, having a purpose, and being honest about it means I haven't seen a more authentic leader than Antonio, who opens up his keynote for this type of convention, with the purpose that he's very passionate about in current environment. >> Awesome, Rashmi, always great to have you on, wonderful to have you face to face, such a clear thinker in bringing your experience to our audience, really appreciate it. >> Thank you, I'm a big consumer of CUBE and look forward to having-- >> All right, and keep it right there, John and I will be back to wrap up with Norm Follett, from HPE discover 2022, you're watching theCUBE. 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(upbeat music) >> Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live!, Europe, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona, this is Cisco Live 2019, and you're watching theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost Dave Vellante and John Furrier is here, three days wall-to-wall coverage, and we are absolutely thrilled to welcome to the program, for the first time the CIO of Cisco, Guillermo Diaz, Jr., also a senior vice president. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> What's your key priority today, some of the big challenges that you're focused on, Guillermo? >> Yeah, so I think the key challenges are really around. I would say for me it starts, it's in between, and it ends with the people. And I think it's the cultural shift that happens along this journey as well so, a lot of folks says, "yeah, we're IT, we're the leaders "in technology in the company." And I think moving from that back office to, now every business, the foundation of which, if you're going to be a digital company, is technology, so who in the company is the best suited to really help that conversation is IT. So IT is now becoming part of the business transformation of every business, whether you're in technology, like myself, whether you're in oil and gas, whether you're in retail, whether you're in finance, etc. Technology's driving the digital business transformation. So, it's really about how, that we not only use technology, but what is the impact on our processes, how we digitize, if you will. But more importantly is, how do you bring the people? How do you cultivate the best people and talent so that you can actually move up the stack, and it's not easy for someone that's been hugging routers for many, many years, and now you tell them, "Hey, you have to do drive programmability." And they're like, "What does that mean?" Well you have to learn >> Python and Ansible >> Yeah. >> Code that infrastructure. >> Now you need to code this thing because you need to provide that thing you provided in eight weeks, now you have to provide it in eight minutes. >> Right. >> And that's a big shift in mindset as well. >> Yeah, so, Guillermo, I know that STEM is a passion of yours, talk to us a little bit about that pipeline, and we love large technology companies like Cisco is to, how do you get down to not just the universities, but even some of the more elementary schools and help make sure that they're ready so that when, we're not sitting here saying, "I've got thousands of jobs and nobody "that is prepared to take that job." >> Yeah, well again, when you think about what you just said, with STEM, well what are you cultivating? You're cultivating the pipeline of people, and the more people that you have trained up in those technologies, and we do a lot with not only universities, but even below, even before university. We have a program, a work-study program that we have in Cisco IT, and we have several partners, one of which is called Cristo Rey Academy, and what we do is, part of the curriculum is four days a week you go to school, one day a week you work at Cisco. And these are kids from 14 years old to 17, 18. And they are learning now, some of these kids come from really low income or underserved communities, and now they're coming in and they're learning about, "How do I set up a wireless infrastructure? "How do I set up a telepresence environment?" And when they walk out, they're not only going to a university that they never thought of going to, like Cornell or like Humboldt State or whatever it might be, but they also have this skill, they also have this experience, because now you're putting them in an environment, and they're like sponges, and it's amazing what we can do, and now you fast forward that into a university pipeline. We bring in about, in Cisco IT, and broadly across Cisco many more, but 200 university hires every year, and they're providing instant value, because they're challenging us. They're like, us dinosaurs, I don't like to think of myself as a dinosaur, but I've been there 19 years, and sometimes I think a certain way, and I have to unlearn some things, and when I hear these people talk, I'm learning and I'm relearning things, and I'm unlearning some things. >> Well if you surround yourself with millennials and gamers, you do learn new things, you can't help it. >> Yeah, you learn new ways of thinking, new design thinking methodologies, stuff like that. >> I want to ask you about the organization. When we get the CIOs of large technology companies on, a lot of times you guys have implemented best practice, and we get a lot of questions around, what's the right organization? For instance, do you guys have a Chief Data Officer? Do you have one? >> So, what is the right organization? >> Well, do you have a Chief Data Officer? >> First, I don't know that there's a right organization. >> Is that, you know right, put that in quotes, but so do you have a CDO? >> Yeah. >> And where does that CDO fit in the organization, what's your relationship with her or him? >> Yeah, so why I say there's not a right organization is, we didn't have a real focus on data. Data was the database crew, the people that did the big data platform, and one of the evolutions we did, in about 2015 we actually brought data up to the CIO level, and we said that that was going to be a strategic pillar, along with how do we simplify, how do we automate, how do we get the data insights to be able to make decisions and then secure our business. Those are the five pillars of our digital strategy. So data and the insight was the big key strategic pillar for us. And so that helped us really start to accelerate our agile motion into you know. And as we learned in the last year, we actually elevated that role. We actually moved it from IT into the next level of operations. >> So it's a peer level to you, is that right? >> So now we've taken that role from my team, which was the Chief Data, now it's the Chief Data Officer, named Shanthi Iyer, and Shanthi was working in my team, and now she's working under the COO, because we believe that data's such a critical asset. It's the oil, it's the fuel of the business. >> Yeah. >> You know, it's the foundation, so we've elevated it up to that level, and now, really driving it >> That's awesome. >> From a business perspective. >> Great. Guillermo, we've seen Cloud go through a lot of changes both as an industry as well as Cisco's relationship to what you've been building and where you've been partnering. How's that impacting things on the IT side? >> Oh, I think Cloud is, it's interesting, I get to talk to many of my peers. Every day I'm talking to one of my peers, and many of us go, "We have a Cloud-first strategy" or "We have a Cloud strategy." And a lot of times you'll go, "We have a Cloud Strategy." And it's like, "What's up in the? What's?" Because if you think about it, Cloud is in some data center somewhere, but the impact on that is pretty tremendous because there's so many now "Clouds". And they come in the form of Saas, they come in the form of infrastructure as a service, and so you have put a wrapper around it or it could get out of control. And for us, we have what we call a "multi-cloud strategy." Luckily, we learned Cloud early on, and we initially called it virtualization, right? So we automated network compute and storage, and that wasn't good enough, because then we needed to automate the application infrastructure level, and then we needed to automate how we actually deliver, so as we moved up the stack, we learned how to virtualize, or, fast-forward, how to Cloudify our environment, so we grew up in our private Cloud, and then we extended that to, Okay, now you can go provision if you need to, you can provision public Cloud services if you want to do experimentation or whatever the use case might be, but Cloud is now changing the business. We have to move fast, but at the same time, you have to be secure, because we have in Cisco, just to give you an idea, we have 442 applications in the Cloud. The question is, how do you stitch those together? How do you make them secure? Because data is traversing across that, so it's really about Cloud, data, and security, all in one wrapper that you have to be thinking about. >> Enforcing that consistent policy, the corporate edicts. So it's interesting, you talked about multi-cloud. We saw this week a number of announcements from Cisco around multi-Cloud, ACI anywhere, HyperFlex, At the Edge. Over the years we've seen innovations around, we were talking about this before, programmable infrastructure, are you a Petri dish for those products coming to market? >> We're Cava. We drink our own Cava >> Yeah, not dog food. >> No, we don't like dog food, we like Cava. So we call ourselves "Customer Zero", and so the first order of battle, though, is we have to run our business. We're running a 50 billion dollar business, and that's the first order of battle. The second is, oh by the way can we use our own, what we're talking about here, to run that 50 billion dollar business, and that's sort of our multiple hats that we wear. We're the enabler, but we're also a large consumer. And being able to put that together, we call it "Customer Zero." We used to say, "We're the first and best customer." But for us that's too late, so we said, "We need to be Customer Zero, we need to be the first to take on some of these solutions and products, so that we can provide feedback to our engineering teams, our sales teams, our services teams, but more importantly, how do we become the reference, and we have an IT management program going on right now where we're talking about a lot of these things to 800 customers for a three day period. So those are the kinds of things that we do. >> Right. >> So, we love to hear you're using the products, we're here in the DevNet zone, and we've been hearing a lot over the last four or five years, Susie Wee and the team, how does that >> Right, she's my other partner in crime. >> Great, so talk about how the developer movement, DevNet specifically, DevSecNet, how that impacts your business. >> Yeah, so again, if you go back to programmability, if you go back to Cloud, it's all about having the ability to put all of these components together, so that we can all be productive. And the skill of the future is How do I program this? How do I make all of these things work in the easiest way, and it's coding. And you look around here, and there's coding classes. There's basic coding classes, and a lot of times a network engineer goes, "Why do I need to do that?" And you start to influence them to say, "Well, you need to move up the stack. "You need to be the one that actually provides "an infrastructure in five seconds, versus five weeks, and in order to do that, "you need to develop these new skills." And what Susie and the team have done with DevNet has provided a platform for all of us, around the world, to be able to learn these things, and not just become the network engineer, but become the orchestrator of these capabilities, right? >> When you think about your portfolio. You know, obviously you've got an application portfolio, you've got 400 plus applications in Saas, many more, I'm sure, on Primm. We like to think of this framework of run the business, grow the business, transform the business, and I wonder if you could, first of all, does that framework make sense? It's simple, obviously, but how do you think about your business in terms of running, growing, and transforming, and how you allocate resources to those three areas? >> I think that's been the historical legacy model. And I think when you start to segment it that way, you start to segment innovation as well, because in run the business, as an example, maybe you heard this term, "AI Ops". >> Mm-hmm (affirmative) >> What is the future of operations? Well the future of operations is how do I take all of these monitoring tools that I have, the same thing I've done with network computing storage. How do I stitch them together so that I can actually correlate where an issue is? In order to do that, what we've done is we've taken our operation team, and we've now deployed them into the development teams. This is the, we're not calling it DevOps, it's called DevSecOps, because at the same time, we want you to have a mindset of security first. Think about, as your developing, think about security as you go through the process. So now the operator, the one that used to actually sit there and watch the thing go, now no, I want you to actually be the coder, so that the problem that you're looking for, that you're waiting for, that you're helping solve that proactively. And that you get new skills as well. So the same thing with the network engineer, the operations person now is learning about Python and Ansible and how to stitch the infrastructure, the application, the data, all of that, into more of a monitoring system. >> So what I'm hearing is that you're taking that notion of run the business, grow the business, transform the business, bring it together, and everybody's responsible for running the business, growing the business, and transforming the business. >> And you're responsible for innovation. >> So it's continuous innovation model versus a stovepipe segmentation model. >> Continuous innovation, continuous improvement, continuous learning. >> Guillermo, I want to give you the final word. Here we are at the beginning of 2019. When you talk to your peers, the CIOs out there, whether it be tech, enterprise, startups, what are some of the biggest challenges, biggest opportunities that are on their plate. >> Yeah, I think it's, we're in an interesting time in IT in the world, where technology's foundational to every business. So my call to action is, there's one organization in the company, in every company, that knows technology, and that's IT. And they know the infrastructure and they know the ops. So the more that we can put those together into helping solve the secure digital business transformation, and not just talking about it from a technology perspective, but how do we use that to really articulate and translate that into business outcomes. And there's a lot in that, it's how do we use our own technology, how do we change our skills? How do we unlearn some things to relearn how to communicate with the business so that we can learn to go faster. >> Guillermo Diaz, Jr, thank you so much for sharing the viewpoint of Cisco and the changing role of the CIO. Dave Vellante and I will be back with lots more coverage here from Cisco Live 2019, in Barcelona, Spain. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (futuristic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCube, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back to The Cube's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18, I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost, Dave Vellente. The biggest conference of ServiceNow, 18,000 people here at the Venetian. We're joined now by Marc Talluto, he is the DXC Fruition Global Practice Lead at DXC. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you for having me, appreciate it. >> So let's start out by telling our viewers a little bit about what you do in your role within the organization. >> Sure, you know, just a brief history, so I was one of the co-founders and CEO of Fruition Partners. So we were acquired by CSC, now DXC, about almost three years ago and within DXC, you know, DXC made a very conscious decision to use ServiceNow as kind of a pivot point to digital transformations for the customers. So by acquiring Fruition and then further investments, so we've done acquisitions in Australia, mainland Europe, the Netherlands, we've really consolidated a lot of the best regional partners inside one DXC Fruition practice. So within this practice, that's where we do a lot of our transformation work with customers that are starting or continuing their ServiceNow journey. >> Marc you and I met in the early part of this decade when this show was a lot smaller and it was, you know, well under, maybe around 5,000, probably even a little bit smaller than that. And it was companies like Fruition that got in early. You didn't see the CSC/DXCs and the other big systems integrators and this thing has just exploded. What's your perspective on the last five, six years? >> Oh boy, well I will say a lot of this is driven, a lot of the growth, not just from ServiceNow but from the GSIs, the global system integrators, that really see ServiceNow, how it can really be applied to their customer base. And so in the last five years you went from people that were interested but really didn't understand what it could mean, 'cause you know, if it's perceived only as a ticketing tool it's like, oh, that's not important. But as it's now seen as a, really a service manager platform, that getting in and servicing IT is just a way to go help HR, to go help suck ups, all these other venues. So what we're seeing is really an explosion of the GSI community here trying to do acquisitions like we've done. So there's been about, in the last five years, 17 different acquisitions of all those regional players into those various global SIs. But then those global SIs themselves, as we've seen on some of the presentations here, I and DXC ourselves, we're now using ServiceNow internally as a way to automate a lot of our internal processes. Used to be what we called Customer Zero or the Lighthouse Account is now the GSI themselves. So I think they've really embraced the message we've been kind of saying all along, which is, yes it's good for IT, but it's really good for how you operate all your shared services' businesses. So that's been, and it's been just accelerating every year. >> Yeah, remind me, so when you started Fruition did you start with ServiceNow or did you have, had you had experience with other platforms before that? >> Yeah, so we actually started in 2003, so about five years before we ever met ServiceNow. >> Dave: There was no ServiceNow, really. >> No, yeah, so we were used to using the remedies of the world, I mean, the other kind of various tools that were out there. But we also weren't a system integrator when we started. We were an, it's funny 'cause you hear the messaging now, organizational change is more important, customer success is more important. Those are really the roots of our company. We were like, listen, the process needs to be better. You know, we're pouring in to governance and all these things, we could use Remedy, we could use other tools but we need to really figure out why people are choosing to engage to do service management or they just kind of go off and do their own thing. So for those five years that's all we did was talk to organizations about crawl, walk, run. How are you maturing from fragmented service offerings, fragmented support, to really kind of being able to centralize those operations and then extend outside of IT? And when we met ServiceNow it was like, it's like they were telling us what we've been telling customers for years so I was like, that's great. >> The lack of a tool, a platform, that really does what ServiceNow does, in a way it might've been a tailwind for your business 'cause complexity, but on the other hand you had to respond and you jumped on it early. I mean I would think a lot of SIs might've said, oh no, that takes complexity out, complexity is cash for us. You guys had a different philosophy, you said were going to get in early, talk about that journey, that position. >> True, well you know when we first met ServiceNow, like I said, 2008 when they were about 40 people total, you know, their entire company. And I think we were 10. So we were almost, you know, similar sizes. But you know what we were able to provide ServiceNow was explaining the customer journey. That the technology was very important, it was very lightweight and nimble but that customer journey, that customer needed to understand, what should I do first, what should I do next? What should my one year, two year, three year look like? And that's something that we've always kind of held, that we saw ServiceNow also as being this platform. We believed in the Glidefast story which was ServiceNow before ServiceNow, maybe we were one of the first ones to say, there's IT service managers, let's just talk about cloud service management, enterprise service management. So I feel like their story and our story, we've kind of been maturing together as we've seen customers really adopt the platform. And some of the great case studies that we've seen over the years, those have been our customers that we've helped encourage to say, what's the difference between an asset that's in IT and an asset that's in manufacturing, right? These are the same disciplines so let's help them go out there and do that. So it's been, it's obviously been a tidal wave of work. It's been very interesting expanding globally and you know, this is just a result of a lot of hard work on everybody's part. >> We're sort of, at this conference we're hearing that this is a real moment in time, when you were describing talking to companies, trying to understand those who were sort of happy to operate in this fragmented way versus those that were truly committed to a technological change and bringing things together. Is that true in your mind, that there really is a recognition on the part of companies and employers? This is, we need to get better at this. >> You know what we're hearing? We're hearing from very large enterprises, some of them and even Aerospace and Defense that are like, we have to recruit younger talent. They do have aging populations that'll be exiting their workforce. I see this from universities that recruit, obviously students, but it's then the workforce. The expectation is now so much higher that their experience with IT inside their employer is much closer to their experience as a consumer. We've been saying it for years but now it's really become a business imperative as customers, I should say as our customers, they are trying to make their workforce happier. Well not only just more productive, more engaged, but also, you know, retention. It's, I feel like it's the moment of the worker themselves. And look at other economic factors, unemployment's at a historic low. Finding people, you're competing for your own workforce to come work for you. They can't show up and you give them a Windows 95 machine or like an Office 2001 product suite, they're like, that's a reflection of how you as a company actually operate so all of those are kind of coming together in to this consumer like experience for the employees of our customers. >> And a lot of talk about new ways to work, the future of work. So what's your expectation going forward for how that affects business, affects your business, organizations? Sounds like they're closing the gap between consumer experiences and enterprise experiences, what's next? >> So you know, big word, friction, been frictionless. Right, like where's the efficiency, what is the friction in different departments working together? I think as people really do adopt this, call it the service manager platform, that system of engagement, once those silos start to come down, once they start to share that data, we see it in individual customers, they kind of go through this aha moment. They've cleaned up their data sources, they realize everything's on one platform, and then they're like, can't I build this, can't I build that, can't I build that? Yeah, you can, and it really starts to accelerate. So I think we'll see the barriers of these business units really fall, I think IT's role is going to shift to be almost a, we talk about a service management office not a project management office. So the service management office is, how well are all of my services, whether it's HR, whether it's finance, how are those services being consumed by my employees? So I think we'll see that pivot, it gets away from IT being more T, the technology, and more to the I. Like what information and services am I providing? I think really we are at that catalyst and as people start to adopt that it moves much more quickly from here. >> What's next, what is, going forward what do you see as the DXC ServiceNow strategy? >> Boy, so this is something that we've been working, so DXC's only been in existence for one year, right? But it came from HBES, it came from CSC, right, 26 billion dollar company, 180,000 people. DXC is putting all of their investment strategy around digital transformation, behind ServiceNow. So we have another team here that focuses completely on building ServiceNow offerings that are behind all the other DXC offerings. So what do I mean by that? The difference is whereas Fruition will go up to a customer and say, we'll help you do ServiceNow work, the platform DXC team says, we want to deliver cloud orchestration, we want to deliver desktop and mobility workforce call centers, but all of those are powered by ServiceNow at the back end, all of our analytics so we do a lot of other things as DXC, obviously billions of dollars worth but we're switching that all to be standardized on ServiceNow. So we're actually breaking down the silos in our own company of how our different departments work together. So if a customer buys a cloud orchestration platform and they're also a workplace and mobility customer and they also have maybe the HR BPO, that's all on ServiceNow. The DXC platform, DXC, built on ServiceNow. So that's everything DXC's throwing at it is to be that player. >> And do you see ServiceNow, is that the platform of platforms? >> Marc: Yes. >> And I mean, you guys really are a technology agnostic. But if it fits you'll use it. >> Well we're an independence offer provider. We don't create our own products like an IBM might or somebody else might and basically put those products in front of a customer when they're really not the right fit. >> So, I mean, you think we had John Donaho on early and he said, look, there's WorkDay and there's SalesForce and there's SAP, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We want to be the connective tissue to those platforms. Software companies are funny though, they all want to be the connective tissue. But if this is what ServiceNow does, so, do you feel like they are in a unique position to be that platform of platforms and-- >> I really do, and we've worked with a lot of other software companies that want to connect in to that ServiceNow ecosystem because what we find is other software products are like, listen, I might be really good at security, intrusion detection, but do I want to create a work flow? And I want to create the CMDB, that means that I have to go build an entire almost secondary product to my core competency. So if I'm really good at anti virus, if I'm really good at intrusion detection, even if I'm really good at reporting I still need people to act on the information I'm providing them. But I don't want to build that action engine, so that's what they're almost setting up their own boundary, saying let ServiceNow be the action engine for me and we'll just plug in to them. They're becoming the standard for how customers work between silos. >> Great, well Marc, thank you so much for coming on the show, this has been really fun talking to you. >> It's my pleasure, thank you, great to see you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, we will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge18 just after this. (upbeat techno music)