>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, and we extract the signal from the noise. We're here at Knowledge18, ServiceNow's big customer event. 18,000 ServiceNow practitioners and partners and constituents here. As I say, this is day three. This is our sixth year at Knowledge. Jeff Frick and I are co-hosting. When we started in 2013 early on, we saw this ecosystem grow, and one of the first CIOs we had on from the ServiceNow customer base was Link Alander, who is here. He's the Vice Chancellor of College Services at Lone Star College. Link, always a pleasure. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming back on. >> It's always great to get back and talk with you, see what's happening in the industry, and follow you. But, once again, great conference. >> It really is, I mean, wow. Last year was huge. The growth keeps coming. We said that Dan Rogers, the CMO, K18, 18,000. How ironic. >> Yeah, wow, let's see, your first was six years ago, right? >> Dave: Yep, it was 2013. So my first would have been New Orleans, which had been I think 2012, 2011. >> Right, right, the year before we met 'em. >> Three to four thousand in this conference. Actually, that might be the high count. >> Yeah, I mean, it's quite amazing. And the ecosystem has exploded. What's your take on how, not only ServiceNow and the ecosystem have grown, but how it's affected your business? >> Let's start with the, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's start with the ecosystem part because, really, you've got so many more partners out there now. You've got so many more integration points. What was really exciting as we saw this morning with Pat, and some of the enhancements they're doing on the DevOps side, but also what we're going to see with the ability to integrate our cloud linkage, which is really the challenge for everybody as a practitioner today. How do you bring all these cloud services? I've got quite a few of them in my environment. How do I actually integrate those in with my ServiceNow, with my ERP, with all of the other instances? So, seeing what they're doing in that space is great. From the business standpoint, when we came onto ServiceNow, we came on like everybody else, a journey for IT service management. Can we improve our services? Can we help our customers out? In our case, that'd be our faculty and staff. What we didn't realize was the opportunity that came to us with the platform. And one of the first things we did when we brought the platform back to us was we built an app for students. We built a way to help students out with their student financial aid. Now I've got, I think we're roughly at about nine of our areas that are using Enterprise Service Management. I just came back from giving a presentation about legal, and what we've done in the legal space to where that's helped the organization to move forward faster. So that's really cool in what it does, but it also elevates the position of IT in the organization. It really does bring us forward. >> Yeah so, let's talk a little about Lone Star College, 'cause I love your model, you know, and we can both relate. Kids in college, and, you know, the cost of education, the ROI, which I think is a big focus of what you guys provide for your students, so how's that going? How's the model working? >> Well the model's working great. And you know, you hear the pressures out there, 'cause one of the first thing is, how do you help a student complete. So, we're really very focused on student completion, but then now, you've got another focus that, well, it's been there, but it's really getting stronger, on gainful employment. So not only that, how do you get a student in college, how do they complete on time, but then how do they come out and have a livable wage, an earnable wage? And so I'll give a plug on that always because that's what we're focused on. Whether you're just coming to us to transfer to another institution or whether you're coming in the workforce. And we have a very strong workforce development, and one of the things I got out of this conference that I've been working on for quite awhile was for us to become a ServiceNow train, to get that integrated into our curriculum. And I was really excited. We've talked to them before about this, and it's been a discussion, but now what we're looking at is a program that they put in France where they have a six week program that if people are going out of there, coming in, six weeks later, job retrained, 100% placement. A year later, they have 98% retention, and those 2% just went to another company. So I can't think of a better opportunity for us from our standpoints in our workforce development. And I'm really excited we're going to be starting to move that forward now. >> It's interesting to hear John Donahoe on Tuesday talk about their measurement of customer success. And we were asking him on theCUBE, well, your customers measure success in a lot of different ways, so how do you take that input? Your measurement of success is student success, as you just have indicated. >> Absolutely, absolutely. You know, my focus has always been is IT is just a support operation. We're not the mission of the college. And that's important. Because as long as we have that mindset, we realize that it's us helping the faculty to less stress on their life, or the staff, then we've improved their experience, which will improve the student experience. The same goes for the administrative systems. We want administrative systems to have a user interface that's intuitive to today's student. It wasn't designed by a person that was intuitive to today's student. So we have that challenge, and that's what I liked about the change this year and the user interface in ServiceNow and where they're going with UI and UX, and how much of an enhancement that makes for our customers. But it's also, that's the changes that are happening in industry right now. Coach K was at the CIO Decisions, and he was talking about he's headed to go through all this process, and 50 forward years of difference, and he's recruiting 18-year-olds, and he's sending emojis to them, his recruits. But like, yeah, because you have to relate to it. So, we started a process, and this is where coming to a conference like this helps me a lot, because it's like, yeah, I went down the right path. But my team came to me, and I've got a phenomenal team. They came to me and said, you know what, we really need to look at UI, UX, and design thinking. And I'm like, okay. Now let's discuss what we really want to do with this. One group was wanting design thinking to think about analytics. What does the customer need? How do they want to see this data come to them? And how can they make data-informed decisions? Well, we have then rolled that same design thinking into, how do we roll out the fluid technologies in our ERP? How do we become more of a user interface that today's student wants, to what we're trying to do next in mobile? >> That's a really interesting take, because we talk often about millennials entering the workforce, right? And consumerization of IT and expectations. But they're usually a pretty small and growing percentage of the workforce at a particular company. For you, it's like 90% of your customer base, right? And they're on the bleeding edge. They're coming in there 18, 17 years old. So you got to be way out front on this customer experience. So have you really taken that opportunity to redesign that UI, UX, and interface to the applications? That must be a giant priority. >> We've done a lot of incremental items, but really it's been a huge priority for us for the last, we have two really cool items coming down the path. One is the UI UX experience. How do we transform the student experience? The next is a process that our academic success side, the student services side have gone down, with guided pathways. Okay, you and I went to college. What did we do? We saw an advisor every single time we registered. Then we up to the thing, and we filled in a bubble sheet, right? >> Right, right. >> Well right now, the students are registering on a mobile phone while they're sitting down at a Starbucks. They're not seeing an advisor. We want them to see an advisor. So we push them those directions, but this guided pathway says, you know what, I want to do this degree. Then we just line out, here's the classes you're going to take, and whether we use program enrollment, whatever methodology, we can help guide them in their pathway to success and completion, which is a big difference. And that's what needs to happen today. >> Right, well it's interesting, I always like to talk about banking, right? 'Cause banking, you used to go see the banker, go into the teller, and, you know, deposit your check and get your cash. And now most people's experience with their bank is via electronic, whether it's online, on their phone, or their app. You have kind of the dichotomy, 'cause they still have their interaction with the teachers. So there's still a very people element, but I would imagine more and more and more of that administrative execution, as you just described, is now moving to the mobile platform. That's the way they interact with the administration of the school. >> Well, that's their expectation. So, that's what we have to deliver, and it's a challenge because we have resources, we have limitations in resources or capabilities, but it's really keeping that focus going to where you look at it. So as we're doing this UI UX right now, one of our major goals is going to be to bring students in the engagement as we go through the design process, and get their feedback. Not computer science people, not IT people. We want the normal student that's going to go register for a class. And since what you have is such a large transient population, you know, two years, they're in, they're done. 100,000 per semester. 160,000 unique each year. You've got to create that rich experience, but the engagement, the bonding to the institution. And I like the bank for an example because not too long ago I switched banks because I didn't like their app. >> Dave: Absolutely. >> And it's easy to do, it's real easy to do. >> Airlines, you appreciate the good apps. >> Link: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. >> How does ServiceNow contribute to that user experience, that, your customer experience? >> Well right now from the student side, they don't see much of ServiceNow. They can submit requests, and we can handle their incidents, and those types of items. They have certain things. We have the student financial aid. But it really is about the Enterprise Service Management philosophy. I think if you go back to one of theCUBEs, maybe two or three years ago, I said, "Who would have ever thought they would come to IT to talk about service delivery?" Okay? Now, everybody at Enterprise is like, okay, how do you do this? How do you not let things fall through the crack? So that the legal app was a great one, because that was a challenge that our general council or our COO had when he came in. Everything was falling through the crack. So they worked through their workflows. They built a process. And then they built, we built an app for them in ServiceNow that handles everything. Now when I'm in a cabinet meeting, I get to hear about how legal's doing so great. I'm like, what about me? I think we're still doing a good job. (laughing) >> Well, Link, I'm curious too on, kind of the big theme has always been at this show kind of low code, no code developing, right? Enable people that aren't native coders to build apps, to build workflows. How has that evolved over time within your organization? >> Well, we still want to make sure when we're putting out code. What it's enabled for us is, of course, our developers, it makes it easier to get to time to completion of a project. But we still want to make sure that whatever's built is production ready. You know, so we're not opening up the tool case to everybody. (laughing) But, sad to say, I actually still go in, and I'll build my dashboards, and I'll build my interaction, and I use my performance analytics, which does enable people. And we're seeing that in some of our heavier Enterprise Service Management side, but as far as letting them dive into the no code environment, I still have to put some protection on us. And like any organization, we always have to think of IT security. That's the other piece of it. What are they putting out there? What could be a violation of privacy? How do we handle that? >> Jeff: Right. >> So, we stay completely engaged, but the speed to deliver is what the change is. Our legal app was a three month development project. Three months to go from a, they had a separate system. And to go through the process, redesign it, build it, and put it in production. Three months. >> Three months? >> How many people, roughly? How many people did it take to get there? >> Well, we use a development partner that used three, and then I had two at the time on my own. I still have only three individuals that actually handle our, that are primary to ServiceNow in my organization, as large as our installation base is. >> Really? And that includes the permeation of ServiceNow into the rest of the organization, or? >> Link: Yes. >> Dave: Really? >> 'Cause I added, and before that, if it has been last year, it was one and a half. >> Dave: Wow. >> That's what I had then. And technically, I probably have only two and a half because one person has another job, which is running our call center. >> So what are you using now? You got obviously ITSM, what else is in there? >> ITSM, ITBM, we got a great presentation we gave earlier on project portfolio management, and what we've done with that. And where we're going next. Business operations. We're actually launching this summer, if everything goes right. This is more of an internal, us doing it, but what I've been doing is I've been taking our contract management piece, utilization, incidents request change, and project. Now I'm going to roll it in and then do analytics against it to come back with what is the total cost per service per month per individual. On every license contract I hold. >> It's funny, the contract management software licensing management piece is a huge untapped area that we hear over and over and over again. >> So, two years ago we talked a lot about security. I think ServiceNow just at that point had announced its intentions to get into that business. What do you make of their whole SecOps modules, and is it something you've looked at? State of security, any comments? >> Well this is one of those situations I think we're just a little bit too far ahead of them again. 'Cause we actually had built a modular ourself that handled what we needed. In my environment, I've got an ISO, but I also have the partners that support us. My SOC is operated by a third party. So they feed in the alerts. We ingest the alerts into the security module, and then we take action from there. So basically, they were about, a little bit behind us. And we had just looked at the model saying we need a better way to manage that event. >> So you got that covered. Yeah, I want to ask you, you know, a couple years ago we, when the big data meme was hitting, we were, of course, asking you all these data questions. Now the big theme is AI, and in some regards it's like, same wine, new bottle. But it's different. What's your thoughts on machine intelligence? Obviously ServiceNow talking about it a lot. How applicable is it to you? >> Okay, so. (laughing) >> You know why, that's good. I had to ask. >> Augmented intelligence. Let's just not make it artificial, okay? 'Cause I, when Fred had that conversation during the fireside and he said, you know, a computer takes 10,000 images to know what a cat is. And of course, the computer's a mundane object that can look at 10,000 images to determine that's a cat. You showed me the other ones earlier today, I about rolled over laughing. >> It's allowed on the blueberry, check it out. >> You know, augmented intelligence is going to be a driver. There's no question about it. What we saw on the interface about it abled to, as the machine learning goes through the process, it's picking up the information, and it's helping the agent to get to the resolution faster, that's great. Knowledge bases that are integrated in with that. Can you think about how much quicker it would be for somebody like myself who's going to go to a chatbot, and I'm going to run through a chatbot in automated intelligence and do that type of work. So that's going to make a significant difference. One of the areas we think they will be dramatic, for especially this generation, the millennials coming into the school, will be to put that augmented intelligence in, in that process. Because, trying to explain to a student, you know, yeah, you go to the registrar's office to take care of this, and you go to the bursar's office to take, they have no clue what those mean. Well, if we can take it to their language, but then also add in augmented intelligence to guide them through those navigation points. So augmented intelligence over the next years, it's taking that big data now, it's actually put into use, all that machine learning, and making something happen out of it. >> You know, digital is one of those things where I actually think the customers led the vendor community. So often in the IT business, and the technology business in general, a lot of vendor hype, whether it's hyper converged or software to fund, they kind of jam it down our throats, and then sort of get it adopted. I almost feel like, you've been doing digital for awhile now because your student force has sent you in that direction. And I feel like the vendor community is now catching up, but is that a right perception? I mean that, the digital is certainly real, and then you guys are leaning in in a big way. >> I think between the three of us we could probably come up with all the different hype words that have been used, and probably fill this room with every one of those words, right? But the reality is, as practitioners, you're looking at what is your customer base, what do you need to be able to deal with. So, we've been into digital transformation, absolutely. Is it a good definition? Was cloud a good definition? I mean, what am I really? It's either I'm going to use software as a surface, a platform as a sur, I have a gigantic private cloud. Okay, that's great. We're talking about high availability and scalability. But when you put all those in, we've been in a digital transformation everywhere. Your banks did it, that's why you have a bank app. Airplanes did it because, you know, what was that ticketing system they used to use? >> Dave: Yeah, Sabre. >> Sabre, that's what it was, oh yeah. It's probably still out there somewhere. But the reality is, is that, if you're not transforming digitally, you're going to get left behind. And even some big IT companies, and I'm sure we got a list of those bit IT companies also, that have fallen off the face of the earth, or are struggling to stay on because they didn't go through that digital transformation. They tried to do the same thing the same way and move forward. You can't do that. >> You know, you just reminded me. I just got a, hey, it's been awhile since I goofed on Nick Carr, but you remember, as a CIO, Does IT Matter? Right, in the early 2000s, that book. I mean, IT matters more than ever, right? I mean, Nick Carr obviously very accomplished, but missed it by a mile. >> Well, it's funny 'cause then IT was a support organization. Now that IT is an integrated piece in the way that everything just happens, right? It's not keeping the lights on and support so much anymore. >> I can't remember who brought that up in the keynote. Talking about the fact that, basically, we permeate the organization, okay? 'Cause there's not a function that they're doing that doesn't have some type of IT. And the question is are you sewing it together correctly. Because in the end, what are they going to want? Well, you want a seamless student experience. You want a seamless employee experience. Nobody's perfect, everything needs improvement. I'll always say that. But then at the same time is, you want that data to be all tied together so you can take advantage of big data. You can take advantage of machine learning. And then you can come back and report on it. You know, what we've done, so I guess three years ago is when I took over. I was put in charge of our analytics team. And our focus was unlocking the data so that people could have access and make decisions that are informed. You know, it's not data driven. We need to see the data, look at it, and come forward from there. So things like what ServiceNow did in performance analytics. Our general council highlighted the performance analytics as soon as we, we missed it, as he said. We put it in the first app, we didn't do it. We needed to add it. So we added it in. And he's like, wow, what I always thought was one thing. But now that I'm seeing the data, and I'm seeing the patterns, it's totally different. Because we have assumptions just 'cause we think we're busy. Performance analytics is letting him see exactly what's happening in his organization. >> Let me ask you a question. If somebody on your staff, let's say somebody that you mentored, came up to you and said, "Listen, Link, I really want to be a CIO. I mean, it's my aspiration. What advice would you give me?" >> Well, it's kind of hard when you ask this one, because I've mentored and then partnered, I wouldn't even call it mentored anymore, a great friend of mine, and he's now a CIO at Spellman in Georgia, yeah. In fact I was just chatting with him earlier because I saw something, I was like, hey, you need to check this out. It'll solve your problem. You know, it's a simple key fact. If you want to be in IT, you've got to be agile. You really have to be agile. You can't be rigid. You can't close those doors and keep your focus, and you have to constantly learn. If you don't just constantly learn, then you fall off. And that's something, when we talk about digital transformation and these companies that haven't made the transformation, that aren't here anymore, they stopped learning. They thought they had it. It's the companies that have actually continued to learn, or the CIOs or people coming up the ranks that look at it. And they look at things differently. It really is. The digital transformation is about keeping the CIO transformed, and every one of the staff. Had a discussion not too long ago with one CIO about how does he energize his staff. He's trying to do a transformation, but his staff is entrenched in the old way we did things. And, you know, sometimes you just have to shake things and get 'em excited about this piece of it. And a lot of times, if you're especially in a college, I have the luck of bringing a student in. What was your experience with that application? What did you think about it? They think it's the greatest thing they've ever created. But when you get it in front of a student, it can be something totally different. So, the biggest one right there, you got to have agility, you got to constantly learn, and you really, you know I might have a laser focus about things, I have a very agile planning model I use, but at the same time is I try to keep the door open to any possibilities. >> Well, Link, you're a great leader, and a friend of theCUBE. Can't thank you enough for making some time out of your busy schedule to come back on. Great to see you again. >> Jeff: Good seeing ya. >> It was great seeing you again, as always. As always. >> Alright, keep it right here, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. We're live from Las Vegas, ServiceNow Knowledge18. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18, #Know18 we are theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We are joined by Dan Rogers. He is the CMO of ServiceNow. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE Dan. >> Thanks for inviting me. I always have a great conversation with you guys. >> Yeah, you're, you're back, you're back. So, this conference is amazing. There's so much buzz happening. 18,000 people. It gets bigger and better every year. >> How ironic, 18,000, K18. >> You got it. >> Oh my gosh. >> Well done. >> I didn't even, you did it you must've done it that's marketing genius, genius Dan. >> We might bend the curve next year though. We might bend the curve a little bit more. >> So, so what it, what in your opinion is the most sort of knew exciting things happening? >> Well you know we start the planning process as you can imagine, about six months prior. And we're really super focused this year on customer success. So, one of our principles was it's all about our customers, it's all for our customers. You probably know, unlike any other conference, most of the sessions are delivered by customers. So we have 85% of our breakouts are delivered by customers. So this is really our customers' event. And in the background here, you know we've created this customer success zone, which is where I've taken all the best practices from our customers and we're sharing that and you'll see we've got Genius Lounge, customer success clinics, customer theaters, and the whole vibe is supposed to be helping our customers be more successful. In some ways it's the anti-marketing conference. This isn't buy more stuff, this is we want to help you be successful. And so we wanted to keep the authenticity throughout. The keynotes were celebrating people, celebrating our users how users can use our products. The experiences that they can have. So I think that was the principle. Hopefully we pulled it off. >> So I wonder if you could talk about some of the challenges you have from a marketing standpoint. So let me just set it up. So, in the keynote this morning, if you didn't see it ServiceNow had kind of a fun little play on words where they had cave people in the cave trying to light a fire. We all know that, right? Light a fire under somebody's butt. And then fast forward to today's world and there's this thing called the saber tooth virus coming and so that was kind of really fun. And it explained things, you know, it resonated, I think, with a lot of people. But as you enter this new world beyond IT, I mean 2013, 5% of your business was outside of IT. You know, today it's you know, a third of your business. So you're reaching a new audience now. How do you handle sort of the marketing and messaging of that hybrid approach? That must've been a challenge for you. >> Well, you know I'm a story teller I love kind of starting with the stories. And, talking with our product leaders, the story that we're most deeply connected to really for our product road map is around experiences. So we knew this needed to be a conference about experiences. And we wanted to put a marker down that says this is the era of great experiences. You deserve great experiences at work. It really is the case that certainly when millennials come in to work they have expectations of what the work experience looks like and they arrive and it's like, wah, wah, wah, wah, No you can't, just swipe your finger, No, you have to stand in line. No you, yes, we really use telephones still, you know. And, chat experience isn't really what it ought to be. So we kind of said we're putting a marker down at this conference to say, Welcome to the Era of Great Experiences. You deserve great experiences, and we're going to create that. And if you look at our entire product roadmap, we're trying to create great experiences at work. CJ talked about the Now platform. He said there are three layers to the Now platform. The Now platform has user experiences. That's really how people want to interact with our, our products, how they want to interact with the world. Great service experiences that's all the stuff that's happening in the background. Customers, employees, they just want to touch their phone, the 20 things that happened behind, they need to be obstercated. And then, service intelligence. This idea of prediction. Now these things are not new in the consumer world, but they're very new in the enterprise world. Take the consumer world. You think about Uber, you think about OpenTable, they spend a lot of time on the user experience. Think about the service experience of something like Amazon. Amazon, you touch, you swipe, you click and they're orchestrating hundreds of processes on the, behind the scenes. And then service intelligence. Netflix is a great example. Stuff's predicting for you stuff's being recommended for you. Where are the recommendations at work? Where's the predictions at work? Where's the prioritization that's happening at work? And we've sort of said, that's what our Now platform is all about. It's about delivering those three great things that we think go into making great experiences at work. And that's what the show's about. And therefore, you see the people's centricity of the show. CJ celebrated four personas. He talked about the personas and their life. The IT topic, you know it's happening in a couple hours. We're going to talk about people. Real people and their lives, and how it's making it better. And that all rolls back to the central idea that we believe that technology should be in the service of people. Making work, work better for you. >> So that's the main spring. Love it, go ahead. >> No, I was just going to ask you, you were describing the millennial, or the post-millennial entering the workforce and this, wah, wah, wah, feeling of no it's not like that here, you got to, there's a lot of, onerous administrative tasks that you've got to do. So is that what's driving this, this change, this moment that you're saying that we're at this, this point in time where employees are demanding better and demanding more from their workplace. I mean, is that what's driving the change in your opinion? >> I think we have just this confluence of technologies around AI, around machine learning and a lot of the services being delivered by Cloud platforms. And then we have this contrast between people's work life and their home life. I have a nine-year-old son. I'll share a little experience with him. So he uses things like Khan Academy. Khan Academy, he uses his finger to write the answers and that gets converted into text. Well now when he tries to interact with any application, he's trying to use his finger and he's wondering, why you guys all using keyboards? What is this keyboard thing? And you know, and then when he interacts with any application, TV screen, he's trying to swipe on the TV screen. He can't understand why he can't swipe on the TV screen to get to the next show to the next channel. I look at that, and I'm like, it's so obvious this is where we're going, this is, this next generation, they want to interact with their applications in a very different way. And we need to get to that in the Enterprise. And we want to be first to get there in Enterprise. The acquisitions that we've made five acquisitions that we've made in the last nine months or year. I was actually just walking with some of the guys that, you know from Boas, from SkyGiraffe. SkyGiraffe, DxContinuum, Parlor, Parlo. And these are just kind of adding to our ability to create the experiences that we deserve, opposite all of those technologies, so you can just get your work done, get your work done. Get to the actions that you need. John I thought did an amazing job of explaining what it takes to create great experiences. And he had this, what I call the UX iceberg. This idea that, appearances are on the top, Anyone can make an app, mobile app that has great appearances. Just put nice skin on there, nice colors on it. But the hard work happens below the water line, which is where you think about the behaviors. How do people actually want to work? And we've filmed people, we've watched people, in their daily lives how they want to work. Go down a layer, the relationships who do they need to work with? Who do they interact with? And then, the work flows, what are the systems they need to interact with. And when we think about their entire paradigm of UX experience and then design from that paradigm, we end up not just with a pretty skin, we end up with actually something that fundamentally changes the way you get your work done, and that's what we're going after. >> So I've kind of resigned myself to the fact that I'm not going to be a ServiceNow customer anytime soon. When Jeff and I first saw it in like 2013, we were like, we want this. It's not designed for 50 person companies like ours. Okay, I can live with that. You guys aspire to be the next great Enterprise software company. As a marketing executive, you got to kind of be in Heaven, right now, because now, you and I have talked about this, I don't have the marketing gene, I find marketing very challenging, but for someone who has that marketing gene, if I compare you to, the great software companies in the Enterprise, it's Oracle, it's SAP, it's Sales Force. Our HR system, our provider, it's Oracle, it's clunky. We use Sales Force, it's Oracle, right? I don't use SAP. I don't want to use SAP. Okay, so laying down the gauntlet on experience is I think brilliant because you're living in a sea of mediocrity when it comes to experience. Now, you have to stay ahead of the game. Acquisitions are one way to do that. But how does that all play in to your marketing. >> You know, it actually starts with purpose. So we, about nine months ago began a journey to, I'd say get to the essence of our purpose. We talked to all of our employees, went on road shows around the world, Talked to our customers around the world. And we kind of said, both what do we actually do for you, what do you want us to do for you, and we grounded ourself in this central idea we make the world of work work better for people. It turns out, that is a rallying cry a firing signal for everything we do as a company. So when I think of marketing, marketing is about bringing that promise through our brand expression to life. We make the world of work, work better for people. That's a bar, a standard. This conference needs to feel like it's making work, work better for people. This conference needs to exude humanity and their experiences. This isn't a technology conference. You see the thing behind you, very deliberately. We're celebrating people, people's lives, people's work lives, so I think of the connection between our purpose and marketing. It's the standard, it's the bar for us. My website, which we refreshed in time for Knowledge, is no longer a taxonomy of products. It's talking about people, their lives, how we make their experiences better. So I think of it as this show, our keynotes, very deliberately focusing on those personas. I think of it as a watermark that kind of says make everything true to your purpose. It's also a watermark for our products. It's a litmus test for our products. Is this product ready to ship yet? Does it make the world of work work better for people? Yes, no? Yes, let's ship it. No, let's not. It's the litmus test for our sales engagements. Are you talking about how you're making experiences better for people? Or are you talking about some other abstract concept? You talking just about cost savings, you're talking about, if you're not talking about experiences, you're not living our purpose. So, it's going to exude through everything that we do. I think it's a really foundational idea for us. >> It's powerful when a brand can align its sales, its marketing, and its product and its delivery, you know to the customer. >> And the timing too just because we were really at low unemployment, we have this war for talent, particularly in technology but in other industries as well where employees are saying what can I do to attract and retain the best people. Make, make their work lives easier, more fun, more intuitive, simpler. >> I always joke that, you know, there's something that's written on a job description. And if you read the job description, You're like, yeah, I want to do that. I get to lead this thing, drive this thing, duh de tuh. The job description doesn't say, oh and by the way, you're going to spend 2.4% of your time filling in forms and you're going to spend 1.8% of your time handling manual IT requests. 4.2% of your time, you're going to, if it did, you wouldn't take the job. So we actually deserve the jobs just on our job description. And that's kind of what I think is that, you know, where we need to get to with work. >> Right, right, exactly. >> So what have we got goin' the rest of, of K18 here? You got a big show, I think Thursday night, you got the customer appreciation. What else is going on here that we should know about? >> Well the way we structure the event is we have these general session keynotes. And you can kind of think of it as John is explaining a lot about why we're doing what we're doing. CJ's explaining a lot about what are we doing. What have we been doing? What's our innovation road map look like? And then Pat Casey's going to pick up on how. How can you build those experiences that CJ's previewed, that fell into the reason why we're doing the things that CJ previewed. So there's kind of a method to the madness to the, to the three days as it were. And then below that, we have these things called topic keynotes, and as you remember we have these five Cloud services now. Of course HR, customer service, security operations, IT, and then really intelligent apps allowing me to build those up. So you have topic keynotes across each of those five Cloud services. And then beyond that, it's really the customer, customer breakouts. Interspersed amongst that is your ability to go along and have a session or success clinic in this customer success area. Or go into the Genius Lounge. Drop by the pavilion, have demos of our products. So those are some of the really, kind of exciting structural things we have around the conference. And then on Thursday night, you know, we wanted to go bigger and better than ever before, and we call it Vegas Nights. So Thursday night, instead of having, you know, the band, you know, of yesteryear, which many conferences, kind of love to do, we decided to have this kind of experiential thing. You can go and see Cirque De Soleil. You can go to the Tower Night Club. You can go to Topgolf. So there's a little menu you can choose from. We've actually reserved the Cirque De Soleil for the whole night so they're running multiple performances just for ServiceNow customers, which is pretty fun. >> So tailored to the individual. Whatever you want to do. Whatever will make your life better. >> That's the idea. Just drop it in, put it in your agenda and you're good to go. >> I love it. Well Dan, thanks so much for coming on the show. It was great to have you. >> Thank you, I enjoyed the discussion. >> Good to see ya again. >> Good to see you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18 coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat music)

[Music] hi I'm Peter Burroughs welcome to another cube conversation from our beautiful Palo Alto studios today we're talking with Dan Rogers who's the chief marketing officer of ServiceNow good to say pietà Dan thanks very much for being here so Dan you as a CMO we're gonna spend some time talking about what the CMO does with the CMO doz now at ServiceNow and but give us a little bit of your background who are you where'd you came from how'd you get to where you are sometimes I joke that I was born in the clouds I come from the north of England it does rain there a lot but professionally I spent all my time in cloud companies so Salesforce Amazon Web Services and now of course so is now and what is ServiceNow do give us a little bit of background how is ServiceNow doing where is it going how our customers working with you well I think the way to answer that is by saying every company is undergoing a digital transformation and as they undergo digital transformation they realize that all the great stuff that they have in people's personal lives great user experiences great service experiences they want that at work as well so ServiceNow really brings those great experiences to work we have a platform which is called the now platform now platform basically is a set of services that deliver great user experiences the ability to request things easily help me fix my X helped me get a common answer to a question around say an employee question and then great service experiences so we create great workflow underneath so that all of those activities orchestrated across the organization and then great service intelligence so that over time were predicting things and recommending things just like you have with your consumer services today bringing all of that to the enterprise so let's talk a little bit about the CMO role because ultimately the there's you mention digital transformation and there's been for quite some time predictions made by various folks that you know the CMO is going to spend more money on technology than the IT manager well that clearly hasn't happened but that does not mean that the CMOS role and the marketing function hasn't changed as a consequence of technology how has technology how has a data orientation how has speed and alignment with data and how the organization operates it serves now on others change the CMO job changed marking I think in both a b2c context it's a very rich data environment a lot of that's happening through the web so you have instant data data you can make you know changes on the fly do a/b testing dialing your forms improve your completion rates dialing your conversions the same is also true in B to B and B to B a lot of what marketers are doing is providing the pipeline to the sales team and that has a funnel mindset a discipline around how much is converting at each stage why is it converting what's not converting row the leads going which leads are the most effective and where should we ultimately spend differently to help get those leads into meetings and on to our sales teams so they can execute against the opportunities now it used to be the b2b he was characterized by what Peter Drucker would have called value in exchange that you would sell a product and the product imbued the value of the company and that was up to the customer to figure out how to get value out of it we now seem to be moving to a value in utility model where instead of selling products were increasingly selling outcomes or increasingly it's actually taking the form of services serves now is at the vanguard of that change tell us a little bit about how that notion of value in exchange to value in utility is changing your job in quite frankly changing service now so yeah I'll actually take us right back to the founding of our company in 2004 our company was founded by Fred ludie and it was founded on a simple idea that we were going to make work better for people and what we would do therefore is listen to our customers about the problems that they had and design solutions with them for the to get them to answers so in my world that means that I'm not just going to describe the speeds and feeds of the products in fact I'm going to dial in to the solutions that our customers want to talk to us about and the business outcomes that they need there are seven solutions that we go to market where they'll just briefly tell you a little bit about those the first one is modernize IT Service Management customers are asking us we have a legacy IT service management infrastructure how get help desk from IT help us to modernize that we know we can do better than our antiquated process that's what you started that's where we started thank you and then you know we've migrated in IT to a much richer conversation around help you eliminate service outages how can we predict anomalies before they happen in your IT environment and then I want to run IT like a business I know you're gonna be talking to our CIO later in the series a lot of what modern CIOs are thinking about is looking at all the projects across the companies how can I support those with IT to transform the organization those are our IT conversations we have conversations happening in HR and they want to consumer eyes the employee experience and then customer service how can I improve customer satisfaction by resolving those underlying issues faster in security operations how can I resolve vulnerabilities and incidents faster and finally we open up our our whole platform to allow anyone to build applications that are intelligent and smart take advantage of all those platform capabilities around great user experience those are the seven solutions that would go to market with and our customers care about those outcomes against those seven solutions so increasingly the marketing organization is talking in the language of business value to what extent are our customers doing those seven things what business value of they had have they increased IT productivity by 20% have they resolved those security incidents 45% faster and we're talking in that language and we're helping customers accelerate their time to get to those outcomes increasingly the modern marketer I think is stepping into that role not just get the leads get them to our sales team but really thinking about the whole way through getting those customers to this end outcomes yeah I want to talk to you about that a little bit but let me take a quick Waypoint here that you mentioned earlier the biggest sea world the market has always been familiar with the role the data could play within our organization simply because in most b2c circumstances you have a lot of customers that are doing that value in exchange you know I'm buying dumb a lot of people are buying go but one of the things that's interesting about the b2b world especially as we move to this notion of value in utility this solution the ongoing service provisioning is we don't have a lot of customers with limited engagement we have perhaps fewer customers but with a lot of engagement because now it's at a service level and that creates new forms of data new types of data a much richer set of insights and what customers are doing how are you using that to inform marketing do a better job of serving customers do a better job of service sales do a better job of serving Cheryl yeah and it's a question I love and you know I'll interpret the questions how do we get customer insight how do we make sure that our marketing is customer centric and not generic we have a few feelers for that you talk about a data obviously from a web perspective we have really good fidelity on where customers are going what they're interacting with what demos they're doing what the conversion rates of those are we also have a lot of physical world interactions so my organization runs the EBC it's policy yeah executive briefing center drive so it's probably the executive briefing center we have hundreds of customers joining us we actually survey them and ask them what's top of mind we begin every one of our ABCs for the section called voice of customer where we hear from them what's most important for them as our product teams come and have those discussions they're gleaning from those customers what are they most want to talk about what are they most want to hear about and because all of that data is captured on a platform that she becomes rich and actionable for the rest of my product marketing organization that's a set of customer insights our knowledge event so we have an annual user conference called knowledge this year knowledge 18 will actually have around 18,000 registrants so you know these are become small little intimate a huge huge event but what's very unique about our event is 95% of the sessions are designed by and delivered by customers this isn't a marketing event this is a peer group event of customers teaching customers telling customers what they've learned sharing their experiences so when we do a we do a call for content for knowledge we're really building our agenda based on exactly what the data is telling us what our customers want to hear about what do they want to say again that's really from marketing perspective just such rich ground for us to learn exactly what they care about we have customer feelers of course you know through all of our our activities that we're doing in the field in fact not a single field activity that my team does is without a customer so every time we're getting that rich insight you know to the point which I'd say we are a customer centric marketing organization is there any other way well some would say that there there might be but they're probably gonna get eaten by ServiceNow over the course of the next few years but let me really tie this back because again historically marketers have been asked to get engaged customers generate leads that funnel you know get us that original group that's going to want to talk to us and marketers have sometimes taken some very annoying approaches to make this happen one of the things that our research shows is that increasingly the sustained engagement requires that marketing also has to be a source of value to customers you mentioned the community approach at your big conference and the fact that you're providing content providing information that the customers will find valuable do you subscribe to that notion that marketing should be a source of value to customers in addition to others what do you think yeah absolutely I think if you have this limited mindset that somehow you're getting a lead and leaders victory I think it's game over you talked about community I'll just build on that real quick ServiceNow as a very active community itself online with 150,000 community members my team run the community we literally provide advice to the community that's one of the most joyful things that we can do similarly my relationship with sales isn't you know her over the lead we're working with the sales team to understand how they want to develop those accounts what are the accounts need from them and that really influences my marketing plan so I see us definitely as part of value exchange with customers so we believe pretty strongly also that the marketing function because of this orientation towards outcome because of the you know a services increasingly a services approach an ongoing sense of value and the fact that you have this rich opportunity to capture data has to take a more broader whole lifecycle role in customer engagement that doesn't mean that sales is less important which is I think a mistake that many of maids at OU fewer sales people and I think that sales gets more focused that much more important more of a problem-solving function for customers but talk to me a little bit about this idea of marketing becoming more a part of the entire customer journey and not just that discover and evaluate phase first of all do you agree with me and second of all how's it playing out for your team well I'd say you know one of the amazing things about a subscription business and you know we're in a subscription businesses customers get to vote with their feet every month Venus is a subscription the great news is service now our neural rates are over 97 percent which is you know yeah well in a lot of other businesses they talk about 85 and b2b they talk about 85% being good but 97% is almost be to see like churn numbers there is only one way to get that and that is the entire company needs to be focused on customer success the way we think about how we develop products through our sales team is engaged in their marketing teams engage is around customer success so I think it's almost like if you don't have that hat on and the executive seat you never get to get those numbers so my role half three quarters is customer success ultimately that's what I'm doing and you may start to see a lot more of how we go to market you know really having a lot more of that success mindset I'm looking forward to knowledge 18 I think you'll see a very different orientation from us at that conference you'll see things like success clinics things like office hours and a whole bunch of other best practices that we're going to be sharing with our customers and that helping customers get to value quicker is very much something I care deeply about and that's really a big orientation for my team so you mentioned if they don't have the hat on then it's not going to work that says something about culture and says something about the type of people that you hire and bring in service now is growing very very rapidly give us a couple of key things if we had a group of marketers here and you said the one thing you need in the culture beyond just customer centric but the one thing you need is this and then one thing you need about when you look for people what's the one thing you need in the marketing culture you know it's such a fast-moving space I'd actually say me this combination of innovation and execution execution is clear that means you do have a relationship with a product team your relationship the sales team your relationship with your customers and they have needs and those things need executing on but also because it's such a fast moving environment the nature of the job is changing the nature of the toolset is changing what our customers need which is ultimately driving it is changing very fast you have to have this sense of innovation this idea you know Jeff Bezos of Amazon talks about it this idea of day one so it's really day one for how you do those traditional things in marketing because they're not being done in the same way everyone needs to come with that day one mindset you learn you go and we can execute that so a culture performance and nonetheless is porous and open to change people what kind of people what kind of things are you looking for when when you sit down an interview potential service now marketing employee and of course we have those different functions so there's functional skills sort of harder skills but again I'd probably say the same thing it's that ability to innovate because a lot of what we're doing hasn't been done before or it's not done well and we want to do it better we want to reimagine and reinvent so that idea of dynamism and flexibility and then this underlying execution is can you get it done we want to be an organization that commits to things and gets them done so in the thing that's the combination of those two things and then those functional disciplines of course we've got product marketing we have digital marketers we have some of the you know folks we're qualifying the leads we call those ad hours they'll have a very different functional disciplines and then some of those underlying values I think so you and I are having the same conversation in twenty eight twenty three what is the one thing that you're doing more of in 2023 than you're doing today what is the one thing you're doing less of in 2023 than you're doing today you know I'm going to use the customers the North Star on that as well I think will be even more intimate with our customers in 2023 that's how I'm grounded some organizations grounded that's how my company's grounded I don't think we can go far enough on that they're spending more time with them looking at the data more engaging with sales more to understand what's working what's not working ensuring they get to value that's really as possible being so speed the value time to value and increase the level of value that serves and I was able to provide yeah okay what's one thing you're doing loss of talking to me that's great this is a great question I want to give it to giver the right you know the right mindset you know I think so much is going to change I think the way we go about what we do is going to change fundamentally I think the way we think about events is going to be different I think away we think about meetings is going to be different the way we engage is going to be different it's going to be all driven by that North Star of the customer so I can't even imagine what it's going to look like and that's why it's such an exciting profession it really is more or less how about outbound more or less outbound I think that will look just different I think we'll be doing outbound I think I'll have a different flavor and that's one of the things I love about my job that's why I get up every day because it's all going to be different what we're doing now is entirely different than it was two years ago but it's super exciting so reflecting what you said about the culture that you want the people that you hire you yourself are performing great growth in service now while at the same time being very porous very flexible to change and anticipating expecting it that's it paid off all right Dan Rogers thank you very much for come on on in Dan Rogers service now and his great cube conversation Dan again thanks very much for coming here and we look forward to I'm Peter burns from our Palo Alto studios and we look forward to having another cube conversation with you [Music] you

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge17 brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back to ServiceNow Knowledge17 everybody this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage my name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host Jeff Frick. Dan Rogers is here as the CMO of ServiceNow. Dan, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, great to be here with you both. >> Yeah, it's an awesome show we were just talking about the numbers, let's run it down, give us the top line. >> We'll have about 15 thousand attendees for this year, and of course a lot more on the livestream. That's customers, prospects that's new customers that's prospects, it's existing customers. Some of our customers have been here with us 10, 11 years. Truly a show for all our customers. >> You know what struck me, when John Donohoe asked first timers like himself, it was impressive. >> Jeff: It was a big number. >> I don't know how many hands went up. >> Jeff: I was surprised actually. >> Did it surprise you? >> You know obviously I have the registration data so I had a little advantage on you guys. It didn't surprise me, and we've had such phenomenal growth that's going to be the case when you grow 39,40% year on year every two years you have you know as many new customers as you had existing customers. Not only that you know we broadened our aperture in the last 12 months from just IT to customer service, security, HR, and more generally business applications. That attracts a new set of audiences, we were kind of hoping for that really. >> You know what else is interesting, I love sharing cabs with practitioners so I can pick their brains. I think this week, I've shared a cab with a hardcore ITSM guy, an HR person, a CIO, and some other person in a line of business that I'm not even sure really what the role was but it was very clearly not IT. So you really get a diverse set of folks here, and you have events within the event, so talk about that and how you're programming to those multiple channels. >> Yeah so you know John's keynote he really talked about our heritage that we started in ITSM and we got to keep to our heritage so we're keeping on doing a lot of innovation around ITSM. But then more broadly in IT we've done a lot of transformation around operations management and around business management so truly end-to-end IT transformation. And then we said, this service management thing this cutting across the enterprise to drive work, that's applicable to lots of other departments. So you saw that for HR, you saw that for security, you saw that for customer service. Those things got launched last year. But this year was really the year where we were going to come out big with our message around that. So in terms of how the conference is organized it's pretty simple. You know when I first started here 10 months ago as the CMO I met with a bunch of customers and said, hey, what does marketing need to do? They said, you've got lots of products now your pace of innovation is really fast, help us make sense of that. What are your solutions, what are the conversations I should be having with you? We said, there are nine conversations. Nine customer conversations. Codified what those are, then we said, why don't we use those nine customer conversations as the rails for all of our marketing. So earlier this year we had a sales kick-off guess what, there were nine tracts. At Knowledge there were nine tracts, our website has nine solutions. So those things become the rails upon which we were having those conversations. How is Knowledge organized? It's organized across those nine conversations. You can easily select a tract and just follow that follow that journey. >> So we probably don't have time to go into all nine, but any stand out? Any ones that really excite you? >> Well of course we've got our five cloud services so there's a conversation there, many conversations around IT, around service management, around operations management, around being able to measure, to optimize and improve. Then also our newer conversations, how do you deliver customer service at light speed? How do you help employees have a great experience in HR? How do you resolve security issues at light speed? And then how do you build business applications that have this contextual workflow that cut across. >> It's an interesting twist to go to your existing customers as marketing and say what do you need from us, and for them to come back and say help us buy more from you because you have so much stuff I don't understand. You usually think of marketing as much more external focus. Give us the messaging and we can go out and get new customers, but that's a really different tact that really speaks to the flexibility of the platform, as well as peoples desire to do more with it. >> I think the other thing is really cultural thing. Our product teams are very customer-centric they are lead by our customers, you heard that, kind of, history from Fred Luddy, that's kind of how he started. We listen, we build, we learn. That mentality happens in the product team in the sales team, of course they're very dialed in to the customer. My ethos is, that should really happen in the marketing team too. We shouldn't be driven by what the product team are developing we should be driven by what are the conversations our customers want to have with us. Being dialed into that is really important. Now there's nine conversations that I talked about every year they'll change a little bit. What they want to talk to us about but the idea that we are going to have rails on which you run along marketing, those rails are going to be decided by our customers I think there's a big breakthrough in how to do B2B marketing. >> So talk about light speed, it's a good marketing term but what does it mean, put some meat on the bone for us. >> Yeah so, in a way I think it's a way of describing three different concepts. The first concept is, you need to streamline and automate. And again, that's what our customers are saying they want to do with their processes. The second is drive great end-user and customer experiences. You saw John kind of point out this idea that a lot of work today is trapped inside an organization, inside silos. The customer doesn't care, they just want a great experience that cuts through that. Them the third thing is this idea of innovation. We're going to innovate, so that you can stay ahead. Those three concepts com together to be work at lightspeed. A smarter faster way to get work done. So that big epiphany is the idea that those are the three things customers are trying to do. If you give that a label we know it's got something to do with work. Something to do with the way work's getting done across the enterprise, and that work is getting done in a different way. It's going to be a combination of machines and people that are doing that work. So we said look, let's call that work at lightspeed. So I think it's a nice holder for us to make that description of those three things our customers are asking us to do. >> So you really build it up from the ground up. It wasn't kind of a top down hey this would be a cool term let's try to force fit it into what we're doing you started with what the customers are saying and then said, alright how do we describe that. >> That's right, no customer is saying lightspeed and hey lightspeed like there's a little bit of marketing in there, the things that are underneath that as you unpack it is exactly what they're trying to do. >> Excellent, so tell us a little bit more about some of the events within the events at Knowledge. That's always been something that's been fascinating to us. See how that's blossoming. >> So would you believe this thing is 29 work streams and I had the good fortune of last week every one of those work streams turned green. >> I know. >> I read online. >> And until then we were all crossin' our fingers that those things would go green exactly. I wish it all were automated, but unfortunately some real hard craft that goes on underneath. But if you're the highlight cell I can point out the first thing you see is that this year of course we have more keynotes. So last year we just had three general session keynotes. Well now underneath that we have topic keynotes. The topic keynote for IT because we just felt like we're doing so much innovation in IT we need to tell that story, so on the main stage Farrell's going to be going through all of those. We've got a bunch of additions we're doing in security so security has it's own topic keynote. That's going to be a lot of fun. There's going to be a live talk show. They're going to do a, I won't give too much away but they're going to do a little bit of a bake-off. >> Dave: But give a plug. >> I don't remember the time but they are going to do a bake off. The old way of resolving security incidents versus the ServiceNow way. They'll do a little bit of a competition between the two. >> That should be fun. >> I'll give you a little clue, one of the people might not be finished by the time the competition finishes. That's all I'm going to say. And then we have our customer service keynote again, actually , that happened just this morning we made a big announcement around communities there, and we have an HR keynote. Then of course day three is our celebration of developers. We have still got creative, we've got five thousand developers here. In fact, the labs are packed upstairs of people that are really you know, building code and building applications real time. Lots of things going on from the keynote perspective which is really around what is our story how does this all come together. Then of course we've got the CIO decisions program where we invite 100, 120 leading CIO's from around the world. They have their own conference, they're spending a lot more time to support leadership. Where does this thing end? This industry of interaction between machines and humans. What does that world look like? We talk about this idea of the role of IT changing you kind of heard that in the keynote today that IT knows the most about business process transformation it turns out, IT knows the most about service delivery. So it's IT that needs to sort of, step in to the HR world, into the customer service world, make sure they're delivering those great transformative experiences. I spent time with some customers at dinner last night at the CIO Decisions event. I asked them to describe their role. Three of the four people said we're actually Chief Transformation Officers, and in fact two of them had that I their title. This is the idea that they've started their lives in IT but increasingly they were driving these service projects across the organization. So I think that, you know, if anything that's the big epiphany for is this year. Is this idea of transformation, and that IT needs to have a different role in that than they've had before. No longer just about infrastructure management but really around that end-to-end business transformation. >> So those Chief Transformation Officers are they reporting kind of back up duty to CIO within the house that they probably were originally or they now jumping in the COO to CEO's? >> CIO's were reporting into them. >> Really? >> So it's fascinating. >> Dave: Yeah, I'll bet. >> And you know sometimes, you saw Scott Mason today Scott Mason from Novartis, he's a COO and Chief Transformation Officer from a bunch of processes across, he's really parallel to the CIO. Lot's of different ays that we're seeing this play out. >> You know when Jeff and I did our first Knowledge I remember the close and we were talking about one of the things, many things, but one was the ecosystem. At the time you had, you didn't really have any big name SI's, you do today. And the ecosystem is jut exploded. There are some epic ecosystem examples in our industry obviously Microsoft, I think VMware, I love the stat VMware gives for every dollar spent on a VMware license 15, at the peak anyway, is spent on the ecosystem. Those are the kinds of thins we look for. It appears that you aspire to build similar epic eco system. I wonder if you could affirm that and tell me how you're going to do it. >> Well I don't know if you guys can see at home but the backdrop here is the Partner Expo. At the Partner Expo we have about 160 partners on demonstration today and you know really people were clawing to be in that space. Because they know this is a community that's driving transformation, and they want to be part of that. So, I'd say we have all kid of partners here. We have systems integrators, you've seen that in some of our diamond and platinum sponsors. But ISV's that are building applications on the platform. As I said, day three is going to be a lot more about people that are building your applications. But there's really no end to these workflow applications that people can build, it's about creating those great experiences. So, yeah, the core of what we've done, and you probably saw hat I call the family portrait today family portrait basically says the middle layer of all of this us the now platform. The way that we've architected it, I don't know if you're having CJ on here later, the way we've architected ourselves is our cloud services use that common platform for IT, for customer service for HR. But anyone who's building applications can also take advantage of all of those platform elements. Ww announced intelligent automation today. That's in the Now platform. That means that anyone who's building applications can take advantage of it. Anyone can take advantage of the services for requester, for providers, for the service owners, as they build business applications. We've really architected with that in mind, that idea that there are going to be many different ways to express what you're trying to do. Some of which we'll build cloud services around many of which our partners will build on top. >> I want to shift gears just a little bit. You've been in the industry for a long time you worked for a lot of leading companies. What did you see 11 months ago, and probably a little bit more, that brought you here. Because you've worked for some successful cloud companies, people can look up your LinkedIn. What did you see that brought you here? >> Obviously a couple of things, the phenomenal growth is just, that's an obvious one right, this is a rocket ship and a rocket ship is a fun place to be for your career because you just don't now where it's going to go, but there's going to be more opportunities. So that's one, but specific to ServiceNow this customer mentality, this customer mindset was really the secret sauce. I spoke to a bunch of customers, my former employer was a customer. I said, you know, if all the software products you're using which one is growing the fastest, and why do you like it the most? They said ServiceNow and the reason they said ServiceNow is because they loved the engagement with the sales team, but also they could see the extensibility of the platform. They realized that it was going to be at the core of their infrastructure. There will probably be as this kind of all shakes out in the next 10 years, five or six enduring technology companies, technology platforms, my bet is that ServiceNow is going to be one of them. When you talk to customers that make our retention rates at 98, 99% because we're delivering a lot of value. There's something very special there, and we take that seriously, we don't take that for granted. You heard John start out by saying, give us the feedback and we're going to improve it. He loves getting feedback, we love getting feedback. That is a part of our culture. I think that's part of the magic, something I enjoy. That customer centricity, it changes the way you do marketing, it keeps it very fresh. Nothing can happen in an ivory tower. You constantly outward facing outward connecting. >> I want to talk about that a little bit. Specifically the role of the CMO, personally I find marketing very difficult I don't; have the marketing gene, so I think your role is quite challenging, especially given what we talked about as the different personas that you have to target. Now you're a billion dollar company, and you're starting to act like a billion dollar company you aspire to be a four billion dollar company. You have this developer ecosystem as well. You mentioned CreatorCon, so how do you think about from a marketing standpoint addressing all those different personalities? >> First of all, I do think you guys do a great job at marketing yourselves. >> Oh, thank you. >> So I wouldn't say >> It's just the content. >> The CUBE precedes itself. >> Well, like ou we focus on our guests. >> I guess that's how just focus on the customer. >> It's how you build your brand, it's interesting, the quality of the questions. I can't guarantee the quality of the response. So anyway you get out there and do a great job with that. No, I think it's this idea that, it's all about getting the aperture right. So two years ago, three years ago, the aperture for us was really around IT and IT service management. It was very important that we shared the road map around service management and where we were going. As we broaden the aperture to include those other cloud services, you have to do so in a way that stays true to your core. It's no surprise that we're going to spend a lot of time on the IT keynote talking about the innovation that we're doing there. That's a big part of our show, Mot of the attendees of the show are in IT and are in service management. Staying true to that and what we're doing there we're never going to lose that kind of backbone of our relationship with those customers. But then we need to have a more expansive way of describing ourselves so that when you look at our website, yes IT's in the center we have a new kind of cloud image that shows all these five cloud services. This work at lightspeed idea, it kind of transcends work as it's getting done across the enterprise. I think it's being aligned to the idea of staying true to those bits, allowing ourselves to expand, then allowing that maybe far right of that to extend even further. With the possibility of all kind of great business applications, all kind of great ecosystem partners some of the partners in the appstore, just absolutely incredible things that they're building. That we cannot possibly imagine or try and constrain. I'd say that's kind of part of the mission for marketing. >> The other thing I wanted to ask you was about this gauntlet of four billion, in fact John Donohoe actually at the financial analyst meeting even threw out hey, we aspire to even greater, I think he threw out 10 billion. Why not? >> Why not? >> Why not think big. You've got the platform, certainly the TAM is there to support it, how do you get there? >> It's funny, someone actually, I can't remember who it was, I was meeting yesterday said to me the way that they think about it is not TAM but TAP, Total Addressable Pain. It's really interesting because you know you've got these specifically defined areas that maybe analysts are looking at, and you've got this other thing called service management which customers across all those other pre-described things. And so, that doesn't have a TAM, because it's a pain, it's absolutely the biggest pain that our customers have but no one's put a number on that thing. >> Jeff: You'll find it by emails maybe. >> Right, exactly, who knows the pain? Everyone know when they see this back and forward of this stuff trapped in email, stuff trapped in phone calls, stuff trapped in messengers, that back and forward on any process that really deserves to be streamlined, simplified, automated to deliver great experiences. Everyone knows the pain, I don't think anyone's sized that thing up you know and couldn't possibly. Because those are all in the future. This is all going to be a new market space. I think that's probably an interesting answer to your question is this idea that as we move towards that, those lofty numbers, we going to be recategorizing what needs to happen inside an enterprise and maybe that traditional view of how an enterprise works is somewhat antiquated and broken today. >> You know it relates to this question Jeff and I, when we first heard about ServiceNow when we were a small company we were like oh my God I want this. There's always talk about how small companies can now access the cloud and they get access to the same tooling as large companies. I read an article the other day where that is calling into question that the rich are getting richer, that the large companies are driving productivity faster to the extent that they adopt ServiceNow, it seems like they will have an advantage over small companies. I guess two part question one is do you buy that, and two, is there ever going to be a day where little guys like us can get ServiceNow? >> I'd say part of the things we've articulated to financial analysts is to say that around 50% of our 20/20 number is going to come from large enterprise and 50% is going to come from commercial smaller companies. So that's still going to be our bread and butter The reason that's out bread and butter is cuz that's who's kind of leading us on our development you remember 2004 the stories of Fred when he was founding the company. There were a couple of marquis customers, he's actually vacation with them now. It's absolutely no joke, he goes on vacation with our early customers because they were such a tight family. They lead him to where the company goes. And we've kept that family relationship where some of our largest enterprise customers and they're going to pull us and they're going to lead us and that will extend those advantages and benefits do extend to commercial. We haven't codified a specific SMB strategy, but I'd say that partnership with our large companies is how we're innovating on their behalf. >> Excellent, Dan thank you so much for taking some time out and coming to theCUBE really appreciate it. >> Thank you really enjoyed the time. >> Excellent, congratulations for all the success and you know looking for more. Alright keep it right there, we're going to be back with our next guest right after this. We're live from Knowledge17, we'll be right back.

>> 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)