>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's "theCUBE." (intro music) Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hello, everyone and welcome to this week's episode of Wikibon's CUBE Insights, Powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we're going to take a break from our traditional spending assessment and share with you our advice on how to deal with this crisis, specifically shifting your physical to digital in the age of Coronavirus. So, we're not going to be digging into the spending data. I talked to ETR this week, and they are obviously surveying on the impact of COVID-19, but those results won't be ready for a little bit. So, theCUBE team has been in discussions with over 20 companies that have events planned in the near term and the inbound call volume has been increasing very rapidly. Now, we've been doing digital for a decade, and we have a lot of experience, and are really excited to share our learnings, tools, and best practices with you as you try to plan through this crisis. So look, this is uncharted territory. We haven't ever seen a country quarantine 35 million people before, so of course everyone is panicked by this uncertainty but our message, like others, is don't panic but don't be complacent. You have to act and you have to make decisions. This will reduce uncertainty for your stakeholders, your employees, and of course, your community. Now as you well know, major physical events are dropping very fast as a risk mitigation measure. Mobile World Congress, HIMSS canceled, Kube-Con was postponed, IMB Think has gone digital, and so it goes. Look, if you have an event in the next three weeks, you have little choice but to cancel the physical attendee portion of that event. You really have three choices here. One is to cancel the event completely and wait until next year. Now the problem with that is, that type of capitulation doesn't really preserve any of the value related to why you were originally holding the physical event in the first place. Now you can do what Kube-Con did and postpone til the summer or kind of indefinitely. Okay, that's a near-term recision on the event, but now you're in limbo. But if you can sort out a venue down the road, that might work. The third option is to pivot to digital. It requires more thought but what it does is allow you to create an ongoing content ark that has benefits. The number-one complaint brands tell us about physical events is that after the event, they don't create a post-event halo effect. A digital strategy that expands time will enable that. This is important because when the market calms down, you're going to be able to better-leverage digital for your physical events. The key question you want to ask is, what are the most important aspects of that physical event that you want to preserve? And then start thinking about building a digital twin of those areas. But it's much more than that. And I'll address this opportunity that we think is unfolding for you a little later. Your challenge right now is to act decisively and turn lemons into lemonade with digital. Experiences are built around content, community, and the interaction of people. This is our philosophy. It's a virtuous cycle where data and machine intelligence are going to drive insights, discovery by users is going to bring navigation which leads to engagement and ultimately outcomes. Now, very importantly, this is not about which event software package to use. Do not start there. Start with the outcome that you want to achieve and work backwards. Identify the parts of that outcome that are achievable and then work from there. The technology decision will be easy and fall out of it if you take that path. So out of a high-level, you have two paths. One, which is the preferred path is to pivot to digital, on the right-hand side, especially if your event is in March or early April. Two is hold your physical event, but your general counsel is going to be all over you about the risks and precautions that you need to take. There are others better than I to advise you on those precautions. I've listed some here on the left-hand side and I'm going to publish this on Wikibon, but you know what to do there. But we are suggesting advising for the near-term events that you optimize for digital. That's the right side. Send out a crisp and clear communications, Adobe has a good example, that asks your loyal community to opt-in for updates and start the planning process. You want to identify the key objectives of your event and build a digital program that maximizes the value for your attendees and the maps to those objectives. We're going to share some examples that theCUBE participated in this week on what might look like the digital event, and we'll share that with you. Event software should come last. Don't even worry about that until you've envisioned your outcome. And I'll talk about software tools a little bit later. So new thinking is required, we believe. The old way was a big venue, big bang event, you get thousands of people. You're spending tons of money on a band. There's exhibitor halls. You're not going to preserve that, obviously. Rather, think about resetting the physical and optimizing for digital which really is about serving a community. Now let's talk about, again, what that might look like in the near-term and then we're going to close on how we see this evolving to a new era. The pattern emerging with our sponsors and our clients is, they want to preserve five key content areas from physical. Not necessarily all of them but in some combination. First is the keynotes. You bring together a captive audience, and you have your customers there, they want to hear from executives. Your customers have made a bet on you, and they want to feel good about it. So one is keynotes. Two is the breakout sessions, the deeper dives from subject matter experts. Third are technical sessions. A big reason customers attend these events is to get technical training. Four is to actually share news in a press conference-like format. And the fifth area that we've seen is, of course, theCUBE. Many of our customers have said, "We not only want you to turn to turnkey the digital event, we want to plug theCUBE into our digital production that we are running." Now these are not in stone, they're just examples of what some of the customers are doing, and they're blending keynotes into their press conference, and there's a lot of different news cases. I want to stress that, initially, everyone's mindset is to simply replicate physical to digital. It's fine to start there, but there's more to this story that we'll address later on. So let's have a look at what something like this might look like in the near-term. Here's an example of a digital event we did this week with a company called "Aviatrix." Small company but very nice look for their brand which is a priority for them. You can see the live audience vibe. This was live but it can be pre-recorded. All the speakers were together in one place. You can see the very high production value. Now, some of our clients have said, "Look, soon we want to do this completely remote with 100 percent of the speakers distributed." And our feeling is that's much more challenging for high-value events. Our strong recommendation is plan to get the speakers into a physical venue. And ideally, get a small VIP/influencer audience to be there. Make the audience feel important with a vibe of a VIP event. Yeah, you can wait a few weeks to see how this thing shakes out, and if travel loosens up, then you can pull this off. But for your Brand value, you really want to look as professional as possible. Same thing for keynotes. You can see how good this looks. Nice stage, lighting, the blue lights, and a live audience. This is a higher-end production with a venue, and food, and music for the intros and outros, very professional audio and visual. And this requires budget. You got to think about at least 200 to 300 thousand dollars and up for a full-blown event that you bring in influencers and the like. But you have options. You can scale it down. You can host the event at your facility. Host it off at our facility in Palo Alto. I'll talk about that a little later. Use your own people for the studio audience. Use your own production people and dial back the glam, which will lower the cost. Just depends on the brand that you want to convey, and of course, your budget. Now as well, you can run the event as a live or as a semi-live. You can pre-record some of all of the segments. You can have a portion, like the press conference and/or the keynotes, run live and then insert the breakouts into the stream as a semi-live, or as on-demand assets. You have options. Now before I talk about technical sessions, I want to share another best practice. theCUBE this week participated in a digital event at Stanford with the Women in Data Science organization, WiDS, and we plugged into their digital platform. WiDS is amazing. They created a hybrid physical/digital event, and again, had a small group of VIPs and speakers onsite at Stanford with keynotes and panels and breakouts, and then theCUBE interviews all were streaming. What was really cool is they connected to dozens and dozens of outposts around the globe, and these outposts hosted intimate meet-ups and participated in the live event. And, of course, all the content is hosted on-demand for a post-event halo effect. I want to talk a little bit about technical sessions. Where as with press conferences and keynotes, we're strongly recommending a higher scale and stronger brand production. With technical sessions, we see a different approach working. Technical people are fine with you earbuds and laptop speakers. Here's an example of a technical talk that Dan Hushon, who is the Senior VP and CTO at DXC, has run for years using the CrowdChat platform. He used the free community edition, along with Google Handouts, and has run dozens and dozens of these tech talks designed for learning and collaboration. Look, you can run these weekly as part of the pre-game, up to your digital event. You can run them day of the event, at the crescendo, and you can continue the cadence post-event for that halo effect that I've been talking about. Now let's spend the moment talking about software tooling. There are a lot of tools out there. Some, super functional. Some are monolithic and bloated. Some are just emerging. And you might have some of these, either licensed or you might be wed to one. Webinar software, like ON24 and Brightcove, and there's other platforms, that's great, awesome. From our standpoint, we plug right into any platform and are really agnostic to that. But the key is not to allow your software to dictate the outcome of your digital event. Technology should serve the outcome, not the reverse. Let me share with you theCUBE's approach to software. Now first thing I want to tell you is our software is free. We have a community editions that are very robust, they're not neutered. And we're making these available to our community. We've taken a CloudNative horizontally scalable angle bringing to bear the right tools for the right job. We don't think of software just to hold content. Rather, we think about members of the community and our goal is to allow teams to form and be successful. We see digital events creating new or evolving roles in organizations where the event may end, but the social organization and community aspect lives on. Think of theCUBE as providing a membrane to the conference team and a template for organizing and executing on digital events. Whether it's engaging in CrowdChats, curating video, telling stories post-event, hosting content, amplifying content, visualize your community as a whole and serve them. That's really the goal. Presence here is critical in a digital event, "Oh hey, I see you're here. "Great, let's talk." There are a number of news cases, and I encourage you to call us, contact us, and we'll focus on how to keep it simple. We have a really simple MVP use case that we're happy to share with you. All right, I got to wrap. The key point here is we see a permanent change. This is not a prediction about Coronavirus. Rather, we see a transformation created with new dynamics. Digital is about groups which are essentially a proxy for communities. Successful online communities require new thinking and we see new roles emerging. Think about the protocol stack for an event today and how that's going to change. Today is very structured. You have a captive audience, you got a big physical venue. In the future, it may evolve to multiple venues and many runs of shows. Remote pods rules around who is speaking. Self-forming schedules is not going to be the same as today. We think digital moves to a persistent commitment by the community where the group collectively catalyzes collaboration. Hosting an online event is cool, but a longterm digital strategy doesn't just move physical to digital. Rather, it reimagines events as an organic entity, not a mechanism or a piece of software. This is not about hosting content. Digital communities have an emotional impact that must be reflected through your brand. Now our mission at theCUBE has always been to serve communities with great content. And it's evolving to provide the tools, infrastructure, and data for communities, to both self-govern and succeed. Even though these times are uncertain and very difficult, we are really excited to serve you. We'll make the time to consult with you and are really thrilled to share what we've learned in the last 10 years and collaborate with you to create great outcomes for audiences. Okay, that's a wrap. As always, we really appreciate the comments that we get on our LinkedIn posts, and on Twitter, I'm @DVellante, so thanks for that. And thank you for watching, everyone. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, Powered by ETR. And we'll see you next time. (outro music)

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