>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering ServiceNow Knowledge17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> We're back in Orlando, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. We're here at Knowledge17. I'm Dave Vellante, with my cohost Jeff Frick. Donna Woodruff is here, she's the service enablement leader at Cox Automotive. Donna, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Hi, thank you for having me. >> Good to see you, you're welcome. Tell us a little bit about Cox Automotive, and specifically your role. Are you an IT practitioner by trade, or business process person? Share with us. >> A little bit of everything, actually. First of all, Cox Automotive is a large, privately-held organization that's part of the Cox Enterprises family. We are changing the way the world buys, sells, and owns vehicles. We are made up of five key solution group areas. Everything from inventory solutions, which includes our auto auctions, and everything to get cars from dealerships to our auctions and back out again for their inventory. We have financial services, which provides floor planning to our dealerships so they can buy cars from our auctions. We have media services, which are all about how do you connect the cars that you're selling to retail customers, so autotrader.com, Kelley Blue Book are some notable brands as part of our organization. We develop software around analytics, and an ERP system for dealerships, to help them move their inventory and do their floor planning, so they can maximize sales in their dealerships. And then of course we have international. We are a global company. We have over 34,000 team members that we support. We're a very heterogeneous organization, and that can drive complexity into the organization. My role is, I am the service enablement leader. I am based out of technology, but I look at my role as much broader than that. It's about solving problems for our business and being able to deliver services internally and externally, and help the organization run more efficient and effectively. >> So you've seen, you know, the narrative in IT, and ServiceNow's described that very well over the years, IT getting beat up, and you only call IT when there's a problem, and obviously the platform and the adoption of that have changed a lot of organizations, presumably you experience something similar. So, take us back to the beginning days, the early days of what it was like, the before and after ServiceNow. What led you to that decision? What were some of the drivers, how'd you get there? >> Absolutely. Well, Kelley Blue Book was an acquisition for Autotrader group of companies about four or five years ago, and they had implemented ServiceNow as a help desk ticketing system. When we acquired them, we saw some great wins with the platform that we thought, hey, this really should be our help desk ticketing system. And so it brought under cross that small group of companies, but it was always viewed as a help desk ticketing system. Over time, just like many other platforms, it starts to get highly customized. Fast-forward to a couple of years ago, we had a need. I was supporting HR and communications from a technology liaison perspective. The problem that they were trying to solve was that they have two employee service centers, one on the East Coast, one on the West Coast, that were staffed by analysts, and they primarily helped our auto auction personnel deal with their benefits and questions around just HR. All the way down to time sheet corrections and things like that. They came to me with this problem, and they said, "You know, we've been using Remedy to some extent." We were in a transitional time in the organization where we were collapsing our help desk tools onto ServiceNow, and they said, "We need some help, here." "We just want to do a few requests." Well, we identified early on as that liaison that I really think that this ticketing platform can do what you need it do. Myself along with a business analyst and an intern sat down with the business, we understood the requirements, and that was the launch of our HR portal. While we were in there-- >> Just you, an analyst, and an intern. >> That's correct. That's correct. And we weren't developers. It was all about configuration. But we understood the tool, we understand that this is really no different than any other business process, and we set out to deliver the first service catalog around HR services. Since then, we haven't looked back. We learned a lot about the platform. We diagrammed out what was wrong with how the service desk had been highly customized, we sat down with our VP and we just showed him the diagram and said, "We think that this platform can do a lot more." He listened to us, and he turned to us, and he said, "Well, do you guys want the platform?" And I turned to my team, and I said, "Do you guys want it?" We took it on, and since then, in the last 18 months, we have expanded the platform very broadly. We've implemented performance analytics to improve our help desk services. Beyond the HR portal, we are now implementing governance risk compliance, a vulnerability management. We're now doing PPM as well. We are re-looking at our CMDB because we want to do more with automation. We've done some orchestration with storage agility and how we can get those engineers more productive by doing zero-touch ticket requests from our developers to expand file shares and to sunset file shares, or to request new file shares with other applications. >> So what'd you do with all the custom mods, when you talked about the Kelley Blue Book coming over. Did you sort of scrub the hose and start over, or-- >> Well, you know what, we took it back to out of the box, and it wasn't difficult to do. We just rationalized the things that were duplicated across requests and incident, we pulled it back to out of the box, we took an agile approach. My team now is very agile. We do weekly releases on the platform. By bringing it back to out of the box, it allows us to upgrade to the latest major feature releases within a two-week period. Because of that, we're able to adopt and consume the new product enhancements that ServiceNow has to offer very, very quickly. >> So, obviously you had success, or you wouldn't have been able to expand the footprint so radically. How are you measuring success, how did you go from a little bitty thing to a very large thing? >> I think it's about visibility. Visibility and strong leadership support, and showing how we're getting better incrementally over time. I think one of the strategic things that we've done, probably in the last six months, is implement performance analytics, which that started to show the behaviors of how people were working within the platform, how they were addressing incidents, how they were responding to our mean time to response, to our mean time to closure of a ticket, the aging of these tickets. When we first implemented performance analytics, we found a lot of anomalies in the platform. We found orphaned assignment groups, which to the behavior of the organization, they weren't necessarily working the system the way they should be. >> Jeff: Orphaned assignment groups. >> Orphaned assignment groups. Tickets were going in and they were backing up, and nobody was working them. So, allowed us to change the behavior of the organization, to drive consistency in how they were using this, which then made the metrics more meaningful. Now people are running their areas of operation from the platform. >> So the next thing I got to ask you, we talked about it in the open, is behavior. Tech's hard, but it's not that hard compared to people and process. How did you get people at that moment of truth, when I need something, to not send an email like I'm used to, and to actually execute my work through this tool? >> Well, one thing we did that was very unique, and we've continued to do that is as we roll out major feature functionality, we actually create commercials about ServiceNow, about the platform. Internally, we call it Service Station. Everything is associated with a vehicle. We've promoted our brand around the platform as well, and our brand is about doing things more simply, getting things routed to the right people, that's why it's better than email, and demonstrating the power of what it will do to you, and getting those answers more quickly instead of going to your favorite IT person or your favorite HR person. How this platform is helping you get to your answers more quickly, as well as all the self-service capabilities and the knowledge articles around, hey, fix it yourself. You don't have to talk to somebody on the phone. But we still give that personalized touch if they really need help and they want to talk to an individual. >> So really, a lot more carrots than sticks. >> Lot more carrots than sticks, absolutely. It's if you can solve your problem faster, why not? 'Cause at the end of the day, that's ultimately what you want to do. Solve your problem, and get on to the rest of your day. >> How long does it take for a typical employee to go, "Ah, this is fantastic!", and to really shift their behavior and buy in and start selling it, as your advocate? >> I think we're doing a better job now, introducing it to our new hires as soon as they get engaged in the organization, about this is your platform to go to when and if you need help. And here's how easy it is to find the things that you need. It's something that just happens over time, and I think if you address some of those small wins, you create advocates in the organization, and when they have a good experience, they tell others. So some of it's word-of-mouth, some of it is internal promotion. A big part of it is leveraging the platform to get the work done and having a great user experience along the way. >> Donna, you mentioned Service Catalog and CMDB, these are consistently two components that allow customers like you to get more leverage out of the ServiceNow platform. So, specifically as it relates to CMDB, what are you doing there? Do you have a single CMDB across the organization? Is that something you're considering? >> That's probably one of our next big transformational areas. We do have a CMDB within the platform that's been used primarily around the linkages for incident, problem, and change management. But we know that we need to do more with it, and like I said before, we've grown through acquisition, so there's a number of other CMDBs. And we are in the process of bringing that all together onto the ServiceNow platform. Because we're seeing the power of everything else that that connects to. And that's also going to be a key on how we promote more orchestration, more automation, more about the health of our services. >> So, ServiceNow's obviously promoting you guys throughout this event, showcasing some of the things that you've been doing. What've you been talking to other customers about? What are you most proud of? >> Honestly, I'm really proud of my team (laughs), because we are responding to the needs of the organization, and the fact that you can add value through what you do on a day-to-day basis is great. I think one of the most unique things that, in terms of the application, is we actually built an application for our safety auctions. So, as you can imagine, we have a hundred auctions. There's a lot of people working in the auctions. We have everything that a dealership would have, and we have lanes of vehicles running through to be auctioned off with our dealerships. So we have service areas, we have vehicles and people moving about the auction. So safety is a very critical thing for our organization. About a year ago, the safety director came and said, "You know, we have this problem. "We are doing these auctions' safety checklist "around compliance, how can we make "our auctions a safer place?" "You know, we don't have a lot of money, "but we think there's a better way to do it." And they explained the process where they had six area safety managers that were distributed across these hundred auctions, and trying to get the safety message out there through making sure people were wearing their goggles, or that they had all the appropriate OSHA standards in place. So after having a lot of conversations around this, again, we found ServiceNow would be a great solution. We did work with a partner to help us build it, but we took a very manual process and we automated it on the platform. Now we've moved the safety business process to the auctions themselves, where they own it. The general manager's involved, the shop leads are involved in it. And what it's done, it's been a catalyst to reducing our workers' comp claims. We've seen a two basis point improvement over the number of workers' comp claims, which is cost-avoidance, you know. When your average worker comp claim can be around $10,000, that's a significant saving. With a very, very small investment, we saw a 3,000% ROI on this initiative alone. We're bringing visibility to the process, using the platform and the reporting capabilities. It's gotten the general managers and the shop leads engaged and having the conversation about safety. >> This is great, 'cause you got the platform piece of it, and went from basic application delivery to seeing that it is just a workflow tool. >> Donna: Exactly. >> And the benefit of the automation, and now applying it to, I don't think they announced a auto auction safety module this morning. >> No. (laughing) >> Not yet, but we are doing a session... (Donna laughs) >> It's pretty impactful that you were able to see that, execute it with a really small investment, like you said, your initial one with you, an analyst and an intern, and now, really grow and expand the footprint within the organization. >> Yeah, it's really just about business processes in general. You've got everything you need to collect some attributes, or some information, you need to route it or get approvals around it, and then you can measure it. And you can see what's going on with that business process, and then you focus on, how do we improve the business process? The tool helps enable that and facilitate that. >> And how has the conversation around IT value changed, since you started this journey, right? >> Yeah. >> It used to be very cost-focused, I'm sure. Has it evolved to more of a, you mentioned ROI? >> It is, look at it, it's still cost-focused. It's still about savings, but it's also about how do we get things done in an organization more efficiently, with less people pushing paper, and actually focused on solving problems. And being able to measure how we get better in the activities that we're supporting. And then the dollars will follow. >> Dave: Is there a recognition in the business units, that things are changing? >> You know, there really is. One of the areas that we're starting to see real recognition is we're now dipping our toe into customer service management. We brought two platforms together with one of our business units that we acquired in the last year. They were doing some things on Zendesk, they were doing some things on another tool, and they were the same team. So, we've taken that experience, we've brought those agents onto the platform. We didn't change the experience for the customer just yet, because we wanted our agents to be very successful and help them work differently than through email. We pull those channels onto the platform, and now they have a dashboard of these issues in supporting our lenders, who are our customers. Next is really around the portal, in changing the experience for those end customers. Moving it out of the reply to all with email and making it more measurable. We've gotten halfway there, and we see a big growth area there for us, and making a better experience around our customers' support. >> And are you sunsetting some of these other systems as you bring stuff in? >> We absolutely are. I mean, our goal is to eliminate all other ticketing-type systems. In fact, all of the people that are on those ticketing systems, like, "When can we get on the platform?" "We want to be there now." "Help us get there." But bringing things together is going to help us across all of our functional areas, in supporting our customers and our team members much more effectively. It really is becoming our system of action, where you go to get things done. >> Donna, what, from your perspective, is on ServiceNow's to-do list? >> ServiceNow's to-do list. You know, and I've been pretty vocal with ServiceNow, it's like, make it easier for us to use and consume the other capabilities of the platform much more quickly. Allow us to use the great capabilities with some of our external collaborators a little bit more effectively. And I think that's where it is. I think ServiceNow does a fantastic job of bringing more capabilities and maturing all of their service areas. I like the fact that they have two major feature releases a year, and we consume them as quickly as they can send them out, probably faster than some other customers do. And continue to listen to your customers. Just, listen to what our problems are, and our needs are, and continue to answer them. They're doing a good job of that. >> Well, Donna, I have to say thanks for all the great products you guys build. The Kelley Blue Book, we've used it for years-- >> Oh, wonderful! >> And Autotrader, it's a great way to shop for vehicles. So thanks for that! >> You're welcome! >> Dave: Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. >> Thanks for sharing your story. >> Keep it right there, everybody. Jeff and I will be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Knowledge17. We'll be right back. (energetic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18, here in Las Vegas. I'm your hose, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Josh Kahn. He is the General Manager of Platforms, ServiceNow. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE again. >> Yeah, really excited to be here. Thanks for being here and thanks for being part of our event. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. >> It's been a lot of fun. >> Newly minted. >> Yeah that's right. (laughing) >> Yes, congrats on the recent promotion. So tell us about your new role. >> Yeah, so I run the Platform Business Unit. We use the word platform a lot of different ways at ServiceNow and I think we're trying to get a little bit more clear about that. On the one hand, our platform is the core foundation that all of our applications and all of our customers' applications are built on. It's also a way that independent software vendors and our customers can build their own applications. So what my group is trying to do is really be more thoughtful and structured about how we go about gathering those requirements from our customers and our independent software vendor partners and make sure we're bringing the products to market that meet their needs, and that we're doing all of the things across the board as a company we need to do to make them successful because there's a lot that goes into long-term customer success from the sales teams to the solutions consultants to professional services and the Customer Success Management Team. We're bringing all those things to make sure that, as our customers are building applications, we're helping them be successful. >> I remember we had Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee on and they were making a point. This was years ago when they wrote their, I think, most recent book. They were saying platforms beat products, I'm like, okay, what do you mean? Look, you can make a great living doing products, but we are entering a platform era. It reminds me of the old Scott McNealy, car dealers versus car makers. If you want to be a car maker in this day and age, unfortunately Sun Microsystems never became that car maker, but you've got to have a platform. What's your perspective on all that? >> I totally agree. I think that every customer I talk to is looking for fewer, more strategic vendors and partners, and they're really saying, hey, be a strategic partner to me. Digital transformation is everywhere. Disruption is everywhere, and they're saying, hey, we need a few people we can really count on to help us build a strategy and execute on that strategy to get to the next place. Isolated, independent pieces of software tend to have a hard time becoming one of those strategic vendors, and I think the more you can be thought of as a platform, the more different kinds of workloads run on the same common shared infrastructure that provide shared data services, that can provide simple ways to get work across each other, the more value that you can bring and the more you can be thought of in that strategic partner realm. >> So you guys are a platform of platforms, we use that terminology a lot, and I think there's no question that for a lot of the C-level executives, particularly the CIOs that I talk to, you are becoming, ServiceNow is becoming a strategic platform provider. Who else is in there? Let's throw some... IBM, because of its huge services in certain industries, for sure, SAP because of its massive ERP estate. I mean, I don't know, Oracle, maybe, but it feels different, but maybe in some cases. Who do you see as your peers? >> The category of players that are in this space are really people that are investing big in the Cloud and investing big in intelligence and automation. And, I think, a lot of times automation can have kind of a negative connotation to it, but we really believe that automation can be used to serve people in the workplace and to make the world work better for people, not just make the world of work work without people. So when you look around at the people that are moving into that strategic realm, it's Cloud players, people who are providing either Cloud infrastructure or Cloud functions, a wide set of microservices capabilities, and people providing applications software as a service that start to cover a broader and broader portfolio. Clearly, Workday is thought of oftentimes as a strategic partner to their customers, because they provide a human capital management capability that's broader than just being a data repository. Salesforce is clearly a strategic partner to the sales and marketing organizations. The reality, though, is a lot of work that happens in the Enterprise cuts across these things, and so there's an opportunity for us to work with the Saleforces and the Workdays and the Googles and the Amazon Web Services of the world to help bring all of those things together. I think that what customers want is not only strategic technology providers, but strategic technology providers that will work with each other to solve customers' problems. >> John Donahoe on, I guess it was Tuesday, was saying we're very comfortable being that horizontal layer. We don't have to be the top layer, although I would observe that the more applications you develop, the more interesting the whole landscape becomes. >> Yeah, well, I think that's absolutely true. We're in the early stages of this, right? If you look at the amount of money that's spent in IT in the enterprise sector and then you start adding up all of these areas that I just mentioned, Cloud and SAS, it's still a very small amount of that overall spent. So clearly, big legacy technology vendors are incredibly relevant still today, but the challenge they'll have is making sure they stay relevant as this tide shifts to more Cloud, more intelligence, more automation in the workplace. >> I wonder if you could walk us through the process that you go through when you are working closely with customers, collaborating, trying to figure out what their problems are and solve them and then also solve the problems they don't even know they have, that you can provide solutions for. >> Actually, it's amazing, because in a lot of cases, the innovation, and this has been a phenomenal week, because I've gotten to meet with so many customers and see what they're doing. And what tends to happen with ServiceNow is the IT organization, oftentimes, it starts there. The IT organization brings it in for IT service management, and people start using that to request things that they need from IT, and they very quickly say, man, I have a process that would really benefit from exactly what you just did. Can you build my application on that? And so there starts to become this tidal wave of people asking the IT organization if they can start hosting applications on the platform. I'll give you one example from a company called Cox Automotive. Donna Woodruff, who's an innovation leader there and leads the ServiceNow platform team, found a process where they had a set of safety checks they do at all these remote sites as part of a car auctions, and it was a very spreadsheet-driven process that involved a lot of people doing manual checks, but it also had regulatory implications, insurance implications, and workplace happiness implications. And they were able to take this, put it on ServiceNow, and automate a lot of that process, make it faster, I should say digitize it, 'cause you still need the people going through and doing the checks, but were able to digitize it and make that person's job that much better. These applications are all over the place. They're in shared email inboxes, they're in Excel spreadsheets, they're in legacy applications. We don't actually have to go drive the innovation and the ideas. They end up coming to the ServiceNow platform owners and our customers. >> I'd like you to comment on some of the advantages of the platform and maybe some of the challenges that you face. When I think about enterprise software, I would generally characterize enterprise software as not a great user experience, oftentimes enterprise software products don't play well with other software products. They're highly complex. Oftentimes there's lots of customerization required, which means it's really hard to go from one state to another. Those are things that you generally don't suffer from. Are there others that give you advantages? And what are maybe some of the challenges that you face? >> I think it's true. Enterprise software, you used to have to train yourself to it. It's like, hey, we're going to roll out the new system. How are we going to train all the users? But you don't do that with the software we use in the consumer world. You download it from the app store and you start using it. If you can't figure it out, it's not going to go. >> You aint going to use it. >> Josh: Exactly right. So we put a lot of that thought process from the consumer world into our technology, but not just the technology we provide. We're trying to make it easier for our customers to then provide that onto their internal and external customers as well. Things like the Mobile Application Builder that we showed earlier today, that's coming in Madrid, it's an incredibly simple way to build a beautiful mobile application for almost anything in the workplace. And, again, as I was saying before, a lot of the ideas for applications come from people in the workplace. We've got to make it easy enough for them to not only to identify what the application potential is, but then build something that's amazing. What we're trying to do is put a lot of those design concepts, not just into the end products we sell, but into tools and technology that are part of the platform and the Platform Business Unit so that our customers can build something just like it in terms of experience, usability, simplicity, and power without having to have as many developers as we do. >> You and I have known each other for a number of years now, and just as we observed the other day, off camera, that you've been forced into a lot of challenges. I say forced, but welcomed a lot of challenges. >> I love it, I love it. >> All right, I mean, it's like, hey, I'll take that. No problem. You've had a variety of experiences at large companies. Things you've learned, opportunities ahead, maybe advice you'd give for others, like the hard stuff. >> I think one of the biggest things I've learned here, particularly at ServiceNow, is just the importance of staying focused on customers rather than competitors. I think a lot of times when you're in the business roles or strategy roles, you can really think a lot about who am I competing against, and you can forget that you really just need to solve the customer's problem as well as you possibly can. Be there for them when they need it. Have something that's compelling that addresses their needs, and stay laser-focused on what works for them, and at the end of the day you're got be successful. So that's a strategy we've really tried to take to heart at ServiceNow, is put the customers at the center of everything we do. We don't worry that much about competitors. They're out there and we know they're there and we study them, but it's really the customer that gets us up every morning. >> You know, it's interesting, I've had this, as well as John Furrier has, had this conversation with Andy Jassy a lot, and they're insanely focused on the customer where he says, even though he'll say, we get into a competitive situation, we'll take on anybody, but his point was both methods can work. Your former company, I would put into the very competitive, Oracle, I think, is the same way. Microsoft maybe used to me, maybe that's changing, but to a great extent would rip your face off if you were a competitor. My question is this: Is the efficacy of the head-to-head, competitive drive as effective as it used to be, and are we seeing a change toward a customer-centric success model? >> I think there's two things going on. I think one is once a market really kind of reaches maturity, the competitive dynamic really heats up. >> Dave: 'Cause you got to gain share. >> Yeah, you got to gain share. And today, in the Cloud world, in the intelligence world, there's just so much opportunity that you could just keep going for a long time before you even bump into people. I think in mature markets it's different, so I think a lot of times, partly at EMC, that was one of the dynamics we had is a very, very mature market on on-premise storage, and so you had to go head-to-head every time. But I think there's also the changing tenor of the world. People have a lot less, they don't care for that kind of dialogue as much anymore. They don't like it when you come in and talk bad about anybody else. So I think there's both dynamics at one, and the markets we're in, they're so new, they're growing so fast that it's not as important, but also, people don't care for it. I don't think it helps, if anything, sometimes it makes people wonder if they ought to be, oh, I didn't think about talking to them, maybe we should go call the competitor you just mentioned. (laughing) so, all that said, when you get into a fight, you got to fight hard and you got to come with the best stuff, so I think that's the reality. >> Dave: Great answer. >> That's a good note to end on. Thanks so much, Josh, for coming on theCUBE again. It's been a real pleasure having you here. >> All right. Thank you, I really appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge 18 just after this. (techy music)

>> Voiceover: Live, from Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge17, brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back, this is Day 3 of ServiceNow Knowledge17, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, where we go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and my co-host this week has been Jeff Frick. Not only this week, Jeff, but for the last five years, we've been doing ServiceNow Knowledge events, really getting a sense as to what this company is all about, the evolution of the company, the transformation from really early days of IT, help desk, service management, to now just permeating throughout the enterprise. One of the key things, Jeff, that is notable, and that we saw a couple years ago, I think it was three years ago, when they had the first CreatorCon. In fact, actually, in 2013, I think you did a little sidebar, you went out-- >> It was the Hackathon, we went with Allan Leinwand and checked in on the Hackathon. >> The point I want to make is that we work with these events, we come to these events. We see a lot of large company events, And whether it's Oracle or IBM or HPE, even, in the past. Even EMC with its code initative, they are drooling over developers. They can't get enough developer action, and it's like ServiceNow builds this platform, they create, they open it up with this low-code development kit, essentially, throw their glove in the field, and everybody comes to the game. >> Right, right. >> It's just amazing, and so today, Day 3, is about CreatorCon, and it was hosted by Pat Casey, who's the senior vice president of DevOps, and really the closest, I think, to the Fred Luddy DNA. I mean that's really Pat, you know, Fred Luddy's the founder of the company and sort of the icon of ServiceNow, not here, you know? We're entering a new era and it's really underscored culturally by CreatorCon and Pat Casey. You were in there today. What'd you think? >> Was it Fred termed the citizen developer? I can't remember, I'll have to go back and check the tape, because he definitely talked about low code, and I think he may have been the one that said citizen developer. And it's funny, even with CJ Desai, right, when he was thinking about coming over, what was the first thing he did? He downloaded the app, and wanted to create a little app. So everybody here is a developer, and I think, just looking back at some of the interviews yesterday, Donna from Cox Automotive, she built a prototype app. It was her, one business analyst, and an intern to start a whole new perspective, so I think, you know, they're really trying to make everybody a developer. It's a different way to think, and not just the business analyst, then you have to pass it off to development, but using, again, a simple workflow tool, it's still a workflow tool, to let everybody automate processes. And we were just in the CreatorCon. The other piece that really strikes me, and it strikes me every time I look at my phone now, you know, my phone knows I follow the Warriors, and so it just automatically gives me an update. So it's kind of this soft, a push of AI and machine learning into your day-to-day activity without this heavy overlay. And that's really how they do it effectively, and then that's kind of the basis of what they're doing here with integrating the machine learning into the applications to collect the data, build the models, try to take some of the mundane, mind-numbing work off of your plate and get people doing it, real decisions based on the machine giving you better data. >> It's an incredible dynamic to me, Jeff, because it's not like this company has a blank sheet of paper and says, "Okay, let's go after developers." They have this impassioned community of people, and they just keep rolling out new function, and then of course, ServiceNow has some really killer developers, internally, and so they make those people available to inspire and educate other developers, and so, as they say, this platform just permeates throughout the organization. I mean, it's really hard to do platforms. We've seen it so many times, you know, companies saying, "Okay, we're developing a platform," and the platform gets a little traction and it gets bought out, but this company, ServiceNow, really has a foothold here. So 4,500 people at CreatorCon this year, it's up from 2,000 last year, so another example of just super meteoric growth. Pat Casey, I loved, he put up the, you know, he showed a mainframe. It actually looked like a VAX to me, but anyway he put up a mainframe, and then he showed the H-P-U-X, what did he call it, HPUX? And, oh yeah we thought that was better, and then client server, it kind of worked for a while, and then he put up "August of 1995," and of course I was immediately saying, that's Gabe Ryden. >> Right, right. >> And then he showed the NetScape logo, and that really changed the development paradigm. >> Just as a way to, you know, and I'm sure none of us thought of it, it was just kind of web bulletin boards with pictures now, when you saw NetScape back in the day, but really as an application delivery vehicle, when you think of what browsers have become, it's pretty fascinating. I had a friend who was working on Chrome, and they described it as kind of an OS in a browser, and I'm like, who would want an OS in a browser? Well, now we're basically here. It's like the old Sun Ray machine, right? Anytime you log onto your browser, you're basically into everything in your world. Whether it's your phone, your tablet, my computer, your desktop computer. It's pretty fascinating. The other thing that Pat talked about was, you know, these things that we grew up with kind of in our imagination. He talked about flying cars, and then he adjusted it to maybe electronic cars, this vision, and now, you know, electronic cars are here, and Tesla's the highest-selling luxury nameplate out there. But in my old world it was flat TVs. The Jetsons had flat TVs. The concept of a flat TV was completely bizarre, and I remember seeing the first one in Chicago, at the Consumer Electronics show. It was like nine inches, you had to have secret passes to get back to see it, but now look what happened. I can't help but think of a Mar's Law, Dave, and he's Gartner's Trough of Disillusionment. I like a Mar's Law better, which is we overestimate the impact in the short term, but way underestimate the impact in the long term. Look at flat screens now, compared to, well, it didn't even exist now. And that's going to happen in AI, it's going to happen in machine learning, and in a very short period of time, especially with the advances in compute-store, networking, cloud, speed of networks, IOT, it's going to be a phenomenal amount of horsepower driving your interaction with all these various objects. >> Look at even the dot-com, you know, how overhyped that was, when really it was underhyped. >> Jeff: Right, in the long term. >> So, the other thing I loved, we've been talking about data for quite some time, and every time we came to a Knowledge show, we'd say, is there a big data angle here? Eh, well kind of, and it's really now coming into focus what the machine learning and AI and big data angle is, and Pat threw up a really nice infographic. He went back to 1969, he gave some interesting stats that I wasn't aware of. I knew the 2k, the moon landing was done on a computer with 2k of memory, that I knew. What I did not know is that it had two programs: one for docking and one for landing, and there wasn't enough memory on the computer to have both programs, so they had to reprogram the computer after the dock. >> Not even reload, right? They couldn't just put the USB stick into it. >> They had the code, which is kind of cool. So that was 2k, he had an intern download the 1982 census, and it was 182 megabytes. And then the human genome project was 53 gigabytes, which he's right, it wouldn't have fit on your previous iPhone, but it will fit on this one. And then, I didn't know this stat, the spell-checker in all of our phones and the red lines and so forth, the back end of that, that's sitting in the cloud, is four terabytes. So you're seeing this explosion of data. These are just some simple examples. So this company, again, it's not just starting from scratch saying, here's some kind of machine learning tool, apply it. What they're doing is saying, we're going to build this into the platform, take the existing corpus of data that you have, now what is that corpus of data? It's a bunch of incidents, it's a bunch of categories and people and it's going to autocategorize, for example, all these incidents, on an existing corpus of data. That's not how most people are using machine learning today. What many people are talking about is a use case of real time continuous applications and doing machine learning in real time to try to affect an outcome, which means try to get you to buy something, or try to detect fraud, or whatever it is. Some healthcare outcome, even. Although you'd think healthcare could be some more post process, but essentially that's what ServiceNow is doing. They're using a post-process methodology on top of this corpus of data to add instant value that lives inside of the platform. It's very compelling, simple, and practical in my view. >> And that's the part I love the best, Dave, is simple and practical and delivers immediate results. Allen Leinwand, who we'll have on later and we've had on a number of times, made a mention that the other thing that's very different is now the apps are listening in real time, and they're adjusting what they're doing and rejiggering their algorithm based on stuff that's happening in real time. So it's a different way to think about applications. And just a couple of things I wanted to touch on from yesterday, with some of the guests we had, a great reason we love the show is the number of customers we get is so high. And I was just struck by Donna Woodruff from Cox Automotive, how much she understood innately that it's a platform. Yes, she bought some applications, but she really understood the platform component and was able to drive from it. And the other one I just wanted to touch on was Eresh from Vitas Healthcare, and the impact of mobile. All I could think about when he was talking about was delivery service. Where's my truck, I had my fridge fixed the other day, where's the guys he close called me, and then to apply that to something as powerful as the work they're doing around hospice and to enable that nurse to get to one more stop per day. Wow, what an impact, just by getting on mobile. And the funny part, he said, is some of their older nurses, when they saw the mobile device, said, "I'm done, I'm not doing it anymore. I'd rather schlep around 25 pages of case information and then go back and forth to the hub in between every stop." So again it's this combination of all this power, all this coming to bear along the three horses of compute that are now delivering phenomenal transformation to people that are willing to think of things in a slightly different lens. >> Yeah, and when you look at the problems that ServiceNow is solving, they are in the boring but important category. And that's why I think that this company for a long time sort of flew under the radar, and is still misunderstood. I mean, even CJ, who's basically in charge of all the products, when he was first approached by ServiceNow, he's like "Meh, I don't really know." And then he dug into it and said, "Wow." So a lot of people don't understand it. I talked to a lot of people in the software business, software sales, people that just don't understand the power of what this company does, and I would make a prediction, is that like Salesforce before it, and we've been talking about this for years, how these guys are on a collision course, and they'll say "No, no, no" but very clearly, the power of the platform that Salesforce has, for example, and ServiceNow is replicating, in some way is much much different. Because Salesforce has a lot of bulldogs, sorry, we love it, we use it, but my point is, my prediction is that over time this company is going to become a very well-known company because of the impacts that it's having on the business. It's going from boring but important to, you know, fundamental transformation of organizations. And I tell you, CRM, I even put it up there with ERP. I think that what ServiceNow is doing is as big as the ERP trend, potentially bigger when you put in all the IOT stuff and the machine learning capabilities and the like with what is a relatively modern platform. >> Well, we're in an attention game, right? On the consumer side it's about attention. The thing that people have the least amount of anymore is time, so how do you get their attention? Do they spend their time on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, watching TV, looking at YouTube videos? Watch your kids. How do they spend those hours of their day? On the work side, what screen are you interacting with in your day? Are you in Salesforce all day? Are you in email all day? Are you in Salesforce all day? Are you in Marketo all day? That's where the competition is going to come. And there's only going to be two or three primary applications in which you engage and get work done, and they're making a hard play to say, "We are the application that we want basically in your face, that you're using to get stuff done all day long." >> One of the things, too, I wonder, you always wonder, is think about blind spots to a company like this. They're on this amazing ascendancy. What could come in and disrupt ServiceNow? And you think about the millenials, there's no question that ServiceNow is on to the new way to work. I call it the new way to work, I don't think they use that term. And the millenials are going to come in, and they don't want to use email. They're going to be much more open to adopting a platform. Now, is that platform going to be something like ServiceNow or is it going to be too boring but important? Are they going to do something more like Facebook? My feeling is this is enterprise, and as we talked about yesterday, is it possible that enterprise could actually begin adopting a lot of these consumer-like interfaces and user experiences and leapfrog in some regards because of the use of AI and the enterprise nature and the security capabilities that a company like this can bring? I don't know, maybe that's a stretch, but the gap between consumer and enterprise has to close. It is closing, and I think it will continue to close. >> I think it's the automation piece, to automate themselves out of their customer base. As more and more things are automated, there's going to be less and less and less people looking at the screen to do fewer tasks in terms of just an in. Blind spots always come where you're not looking, that's what's going to hit them, but certainly as more and more of this mundane stuff can be automated, if they can actually execute their vision so these autocategorization and autorouting and things are getting solved before they get to a customer service agent, happen, then their C-base licenses, but that's why they're trying to find other places to go. Facilities management, HR management, integration on the human connection across multiple applications, and to even these other systems, like we've heard about on the HR side, etc. So, I think that's, as the nature of work changes, what will people be doing with their work, or are they just going to be getting assigned tasks to go execute what the machines can't do? It's going to be interesting to watch it evolve. >> Well, and then coming back to the top of this segment, the developers, and that's really where the innovation occurs. The developer ecosystem here continues to grow. The importance of developers is very well understood. We've seen it previously with companies like Microsoft. We see all the big enterprise companies trying to appeal to the developer community. Certainly Amazon, Google, having great, very strong developer ecosystems, Apple as well, Facebook, and so forth. Enterprise guys continue to struggle, frankly, in that regard, and IBM's done a good job with Bluemix, but it's been a real heavy lift for IBM, HP. We've talked to, from Kadifa to all their software execs, and they just never were able to figure it out. Oracle kind of lost its developer edge, despite the fact that it owns Java now, and it's trying to get that back, whereas, as they say, ServiceNow just says, "Hey, let's have a game," and they throw their glove in the field and boom, everybody shows up. >> Think of the focus of a SaaS software company, or even like an Amazon, AWS, right? Everyone here in the company is working on platforms and derivative products from that platform. They don't have this hardware group, that hardware group, this software group, that software group. It's a single application at the end of the day. Salesforce is a single application at the end of the day, work day, single application at the end of the day. AWS, infrastructure for customers at the end of the day. So I think that gives them a huge advantage in terms of focus, everybody going in the same direction, and ability to execute. >> Everybody talks about platform as a service, and it's really, a lot of people say that whole market's collapsing. It's IaaS+, think Amazon, and it's SaaS-, think Salesforce and ServiceNow. All right, we've got to wrap. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest at theCUBE, we're live, Day 3 from Knowledge17. We're right back. (upbeat music)