>> Man's Voice: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge17, brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back to Orlando, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract a signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Jeff Frick. This is theCUBE's fifth year covering Knowledge. We started in Las Vegas, a little small event, Jeff, at Aria Hotel, and it's exploded from 3,500 all the way up to 15,000 people here in Orlando at the Convention Center. This is day two of our three day coverage. And, we heard this morning, you know, day one was the introduction of the new CEO, John Donahoe, taking over the reins for Frank Slootman. And, actually it was interesting, Jeff. Last night, we went around to some of the parties and talked to some of the folks and some of the practitioners. It was interesting to hear how many people were saying how much they missed Fred. >> Right, right. >> And the culture of fun and kind of zaniness and quirkiness that they sort of have, and there's some of that that's maintained here. We saw that in the keynotes this morning, and we'll talk about that a little bit, but what are your impressions of sort of that transition from, you know, really the third phase now we're into of ServiceNow leadership? >> Right, well as was commented again last night at some of the events, you know, a relatively peaceful transition, right. So, the difference between an evolution and a revolution is people die in revolutions. This was more of an evolution. It was an organized handoff, and a lot of the product leaders are relatively new. We just saw CJ Desai. He said he's only 100 days ahead of where John is at 45 days. So, it is kind of a, I don't know if refresh is the right word, but all new leadership in a lot of the top positions to basically go from, as been discussed many times, from kind of the one billion dollar mark to the four billion dollar mark, and then, of course, onward to the 10. So, it sounds like everyone is very reverent to the past, and Fred has a huge following. He's one of our favorite guest. The guy's just a super individual. People love him. That said, you know, it's a very clear and focused move to the next stage in evolution of growth. >> Well, I think that, you know, Fred probably, I mean, he may have said something similar to this either in theCUBE or sort of in back channel conversations with us, is, you know, ServiceNow, when they brought in Frank Slootman, it needed adult supervision. And, Fred doesn't strike me as the kind of person that's going to be doing a lot of the, you know, HR functions and performance reviews and stuff. He wants to code, right. I mean, that was his thing. And, now, we're seeing sort of this next level of ascension for ServiceNow, and you seen the advancement of their product, their platform. So this morning, CJ Desai kicked off the keynotes. Now, CJ Desai was an executive in the security business. He was an executive at EMC, hardcore product guy. He's a hacker. You heard him this morning saying when he was at a previous company, he didn't mention EMC, but that's what he was talking about, I'm pretty sure. They use ServiceNow, and when ServiceNow started recruiting him, he said I opened up an instance and started playing around with it, and see if I could develop an app, and I was amazed at how easy it was. And, they started talking to some of the customers and seeing how passionate they were about this platform, and it became an easy decision for him to, you know, come and run. He's got a big job here. He run, he's basically, you know, manages all products, essentially taking over for Fred Luddy and, you know, Dan McGee as a chief operating officer even though he hasn't used that title 'cause he's a product guy. But, all the GMs report up into him, so he is the man, you know, on top of the platform. So, he talked this morning about Jakarta, the announcement, and the key thing about, you know, that I'm learning really in talking to ServiceNow over the years, is they put everything in the platform, and then the business units have to figure out how to leverage that new capability, you know, whether it's machine learning or AI or some kind of new service catalog or portal. The business units, whether it's, you know, the managers, whether it's Farrell Hough and her team, she does IT service management, Abhijit Mitra who does customer service management, the IT operations management people, the HR folks, they have to figure out how they can take the capabilities of this platform, and then apply it to their specific use cases and industry examples. And, that's what we saw a lot of today. >> But, it's still paper-based workflow, right? 'Cause back to Fred's original vision, which I love repeating about, the copy room with all the pigeonholes of colored paper that you would grab for I need a new laptop, I need a vacation request, I need whatever, which nobody remembers anymore. But, you know, at the end of the day, it's put in a request, get it approved, does it need to be worked, and then executed. So, whether that's asking for a new laptop for a new employee, whether that's getting a customer service ticket handled, whether it's we're swinging by doing name changes, it's relatively simple process under the covers, and then now, they're just wrapping it with this specific vocabulary and integration points to the different systems to support that execution. So, it's a pretty straightforward solution. What I really like about ServiceNow is they're applying, you know, technology to relatively straightforward problems that have huge impact and efficiency, and just getting away from email, getting away from so many notification systems that we have, getting away from phone calls, getting away from tech-- Trying to aggregate that into one spot, like we see it a lot of successful applications, sass applications. So, now you've got a single system of record for the execution of these relatively straightforward processes. >> Yeah, it really is all about a new way to work, and with the millennial work force becoming younger, obviously, they're going to work in a different way. I saw, when I tweeted out, was the best IT demo that I'd ever seen. Didn't involve a laptop, didn't involve a screen. What Chris Pope did, who's kind of an evangelist, he's in the CSO office, he was on... the chief strategy office, he was on yesterday. He came up with a soccer ball. Right, you saw it. And, he said >> Football. Make sure you say it right. He would correct you. (Jeff laughs) >> And, he said for those of you who are not from the colonies, this is a football. And then, he had somebody in a new employee's t-shirt, he had the HR t-shirt, the IT t-shirt, the facilities t-shirt, and they were passing the ball around, and he did a narrative on what it was like to onboard a new employee, and the back and forth and the touch points and, you know, underscoring the point of how complex it is, how many mistakes can be made, how frustrating it is, how inefficient it is, and then, obviously, setting up conveniently the morning of how the workflow would serve us now. But, it was a very powerful demo, I thought. >> Well, the thing that I want to get into, Dave, is how do you get people to change behavior? And, we talk about it all the time in theCUBE. People process in tech. The tech's the easy part. How do you change people's behavior? When I have to make that request to you, what gets me to take the step to do it inside of service now versus sending you that email? It seems to me that that's the biggest challenge, and you talk about it all the time, is we get kind of tool-creep in all these notification systems and, you know, there's Slack and there's Atlassian JIRA and there's Salesforce and there's Dropbox and there's Google Docs and, you know, the good news is we're getting all these kind of sass applications that, ultimately, we're seeing this growth of IPA's in between them and integration between them, but, on the bad side, we get so many notifications from so many different places. You know, how do you force really a compliance around a particular department to use a solution, as we say that, that's what's on your desk all the time, and not email? And, I think that's, I look forward to hearing kind of what are best practices to dictate that? I know that Atlassian, internally, they don't use email. Everything is on JIRA. I would presume in ServiceNow, it's probably very similar where, internally, everything is in the ServiceNow platform, but, unfortunately, there's those pesky people outside the organization who are still communicating with email. So, then you get, >> Exactly. >> Then, now, you're running kind of a parallel track as you're getting new information from a customer that's coming in maybe via email that you need to, then, populate into those tickets. That's the part I see as kind of a challenge. >> Well, I think it is a big challenge. And, of course, when you talk to ServiceNow people privately and you say to them, "Have you guys eliminated email?" Then, they roll their eyes and "I wish." (Jeff chuckles) But, I would presume their internal communications, as you say, are a lot more efficient and effective. But, you know, it's a Cloud app, and Cloud apps suffer from latency issues. And, it's like when you go into a Cloud app, you know, you log in. A lot of times, it logs you out just for security reasons, so you got to log back in and you get the spinning logo for awhile. You finally get in and then, you got to find what you want to do, and then you do it. And, it's a lot slower just from an elapse time standpoint than, actually not from an elapse time. So, from an initiation standpoint, getting something off your desk, it's slower. The elapse time is much more efficient. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> And so, what I think ends up happening is people default to the simple email system. It's a quick fix. And then, it starts the cycle of hell. But, I think you're making a great point about adoption. How do you improve that adoption? One of the things that ServiceNow announced this morning, is that roughly 30% improvement in performance, right. So, people complain about performance like any Cloud-based application, and it's hard. You know, when you even when you use, you know, look at LinkedIn. A lot of times, you get a LinkedIn request, and you go, "I'll check it later." You don't want to go through the process of logging in. Everybody's experienced that. It's one of those >> Right, right. >> Sort of heavy apps, and so, you just say, "Alright, I'll figure it out later." And, Facebook is the same thing. And, no doubt, that ServiceNow, certainly Salesforce, similar sort of dynamics 'cause it's a Cloud-based app. And so, hitting performance hard, as you say, the culture of leaving it on your desk. The folks at Nutanix, Dheeraj is telling me they essentially run their communications in Slack. (chuckles) and so, >> Right. >> You know, they'll hit limits there, I'm sure, as well, but everybody's trying to find a new way to work, and this is something that I know is a passion of yours, because the outcome is so much better if you can eliminate email trails and threads and lost work. >> Right. And, we're stuck now in this, in the middle phase which is just brutal 'cause you just get so many notifications from so many different applications. How do you prioritize? How do you keep track? Oh my God, did you ping me on Slack? Did you ping me on a text? Did you ping me on a email? I don't even know. The notification went away, went off my phone. I don't even know which one it came through its difficulty. The good news is that we see in sass applications and, again, it's interesting. Maybe just 'cause I was at AWS summit recently. I just keep thinking AWS, and in terms of the efficiency that they can bring to bear, that resources they can bring to bear around CP utilization, storage utilization, security execution, all those things that they can do as a multi-vendor, Cloud-based application, and apply to their Cloud in support of their customers on their application, will grow and grow and grow, and quickly surpass what most people would do on their own 'cause they just don't have the resources. So, that is a huge benefit of these Cloud-based applications and again, as the integration points get better, 'cause we keep hearin' it 'cause you got some stuff in Dropbox, you got some stuff in Google Docs, you got some stuff in Salesforce. That's going to be interesting, how that plays out, and will it boil back down to, again, how many actual windows do you have open that you work with on your computer. Is it two? Is it three? Is it four? Not many more than that, and it can't be. >> Yeah, so today here at Knowledge, it's a big announcement day. You're hearing from all the sort of heads of the businesses. Jakarta is the big announcement. That's the new release of the platform. Kingston's coming, you know, later on this year. ServiceNow generally does two a year, one in the spring summer, one in the fall, kind of early winter. And, Jakarta really comprises performance improvement, a new security capability where, I thought this was very interesting, where you have all these vendors that you're trying to interact with, and you tryin' to figure out, okay, "What do I integrate with "in terms of my third party vendors, and who's safe?" You know, and "Do they comply "to my corpoetics?" >> Right, right. >> And, ServiceNow introducing a module in Jakarta which going to automate that whole thing, and simplify it. And then, the one, the big one was software asset management. Every time you come to a conference like Knowledge, and you get this at Splunk too, the announcements that they make, they're not golf claps. You'd get hoots and woos and "Yes" and people standing up. >> Jeff: That was that and that was the one, right? >> Software SM Management was the one. >> Jeff: (chuckles) put a big star on that one. >> Now, let's talk about this a little bit because they mentioned in, they didn't mention Oracle, but this is a bit pain point of a lot of Oracle customers, is audits, software audits. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> And, certainly Oracle uses software audits as negotiating leverage, and clients customers don't really know what they have, what the utilization is, do they buy more licenses even though they could repurpose licenses. They just can't keep track of all that stuff, and so, ServiceNow is going to do it for ya. So, that's a pretty big deal and, obviously, people love that. As I said, 30% improvement in performance. And, yeah, this software asset management thing, we're going to talk to some people about that and see what their-- >> But, they got the big cheer. >> What their expectation is. >> The other thing that was interesting on the product announcement, is using AI. Again, I just love password reset as an example 'cause it's so simple and discrete, but still impactful about using AI on relatively, it sounds like, simple processes that are super high ROI, like auto-categorization. You know, let the machine do auto-categorization and a lot of these little things that make a huge difference in productivity to be able to find and discover and work with this data that you're now removing the people from it, and making the machine, the better for machine processes handled by the machine. And, we see that going all through the application, a lot of the announcements that were made. So, it's not just AI for AI, but it's actually, they call it Intelligent Automation, and applying it to very specific things that are very fungible and tangible and easy to see, and provide direct ROI, right out of the gate. >> Well, this auto-categorization is something that, I mean, it's been a vexing problem in the industry for years. I mentioned yesterday that in 2006 with the federal rules of civil procedure change that made electronic documents admissible, it meant that you had to be able to find and submit to a court of law all the electronic documents on a legal hold. And, there were tons of cases in the sort of mid to late part of the 2000's where companies were fined hundreds and millions of dollars. Morgan Stanley was the sort of poster child of that because they couldn't produce emails. And, as part of that, there was a categorization effort that went on to try to say, okay, let's put these emails in buckets, something as simple as email >> Right, right. >> So that when we have to go find something in a legal hold, we can find it or, more importantly, we can defensively delete it. But, the problem was, as I said yesterday, the math has been around forever. Things like support vector machines and probabilistic latent semantic index and all these crazy algorithms. But, the application of them was flawed, and the data quality >> Jeff: Right, right. >> Was poor. So, we'll see if now, you know, AI which is the big buzz word now, but it appears that it's got legs and is real with machine learning and it's kind of the new big data meme. We'll see if, in fact, it can really solve this problem. We certainly have the computing horse power. We know the math is there. And, I think the industry has learned enough that the application of those algorithms, is now going to allow us to have quality categorization, and really take the humans out of the equation. >> Yeah, I made some notes. It was Farrell, her part of the keynote this morning where she really talked about some of these things. And, again, categorization, prioritization, and assignment. Let the machine take the first swag at that, and let it learn and, based on what happens going forward, let it adjust its algorithms. But, again, really simple concepts, really painful to execute as a person, especially at scale. So, I think that's a really interesting application that ServiceNow is bringing AI to these relatively straightforward processes that are just painful for people. >> Yes, squinting through lists and trying to figure out, okay, which one's more important, and weighting them, and I'm sure, they have some kind of scoring system or weighting system that you can tell the machine, "Hey, prioritize, you know, these things," you know, security incidence >> Right, right. >> Or high value assets first. Give me a list. I can then eyeball them and say, okay, hm, now I'm going to do this third one first, and the first one second, whatever. And, you can make that decision, but it's like a first pass filter, like a vetting system. >> Like what Google mail does for you, right? >> Right. >> It takes a first pass. So, you know, these are the really specific applications of machine learning in AI that will start to have an impact in the very short-term, on the way that things happen. >> So, the other thing that we're really paying attention here, is the growth of the ecosystem. It's something that Jeff and I have been tracking since the early days of ServiceNow Knowledge, in terms of our early days of theCUBE. And, the ecosystem is really exploding. You know, you're seeing the big SIs. Last night, we were at the Exen Sure party. It was, you know, typical Exen Sure, very senior level, a bunch of CIOs there. It reminded me of when you go to the parties at Oracle, and the big SIs have these parties. I mean, they're just loaded with senior executives. And, that's what this was last night. You know, the VIP room and all the suits were in there, and they were schmoozing. These are things that are really going to expand the value of ServiceNow. It's a new channel for them. And, these big SIs, they have the relationships at the board room level. They have the deep industry expertise. I was talking to Josh Kahn, who's running the Industry Solutions now, another former EMCer, and he, obviously, is very excited to have these relationships with the SI. So, that to me, is a big windfall for ServiceNow. It's something that we're going to be tracking. >> And, especially, this whole concept of the SIs building dedicated industry solutions built on SI. I overheard some of the conversation at the party last night between an SI executive, it was an Exen Sure executive, and one of the ServiceNow people, and, they talked about the power of having the combination of the deep expertise in an industry, I can't remember which one they were going after, it was one big company, their first kind of pilot project, combined with the stability and roadmap of ServiceNow side to have this stable software platform. And, the combination of those two, so complementary to take to market to this particular customer that they were proposing this solution around. And then, to take that solution as they always do and then, you know, harden it and then, take it to the next customer, the next customer, the next customer. So, as you said, getting these big integrators that own the relationships with a lot of big companies, actively involved in now building industry solutions, is a huge step forward beyond just, you know, consultative services and best practices. >> Well, and they have such deep industry expertise. I mean, we talked yesterday about GDPR and some of the new compliance regulations that are coming to the banking industry, particularly in Europe, the fines are getting much more onerous. These SIs have deep expertise and understanding of how to apply something like ServiceNow. ServiceNow, I think of it as a generic platform, but it needs, you know, brain power to say, okay, we can solve this particular problem by doing A, B, C, and D or developing this application or creating this solution. That's really where the SIs are. It's no surprise that a lot of the senior ServiceNow sales reps were at that event last night, you know, hanging with the customers, hanging with their partners. And, that is just a positive sign of momentum in my opinion. Alright, Jeff, so big day today. CJ Desai is coming on. We're going to run through a lot of the business units. You know, tomorrow is sort of Pronic demo day. It's the day usually that Fred Luddy hosts, and Pat Casey, I think, is going to be the main host tomorrow. And, we'll be covering all of this from theCUBE. This is day two ServiceNow Knowledge #Know17. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. You can watch us live, of course, at thecube.net. I'm Dave Vellante, he's Jeff Frick. We'll be right back after this short break. (easygoing music)