brian lily is here he's the cio of Equinix Brian thanks for coming on thanks I'm happy to be here that's so you've heard the keynote this morning yes you heard the excellent messaging Franklin was just on very crisp it seems like there's a passionate audience here so first of all let's start with with equinix you guys are you know interesting company you're sort of at the heart of a lot of this cloud action tell us more about equinix well Equinix is a global data center provider we have 97 data centers around the world in 15 countries and we have over 500 cloud providers that host with us around the world and we're network neutral which is really besides sort of being high-end operational reliability etc we have 900 carriers in our facilities so if you're a cloud provider a content provider and you want to provide information access in the lowest latency highest reliability way to eyeballs all over the world Equinix is the place to be you have a mega global footprint fact we were at the AWS some of the few weeks ago the Moscone Equinix kept coming up you know we had a number of company that netapp on they talked about their partnership with you another another number of other companies that are working with you to get for instance close to some of the Amazon data centers and provide that that presence and that low latency and so you guys are really you know crushing it in the cloud talk a little bit about what you're doing with with with service now you know this whole notion that I t is all these disparate processes and running on spreadsheets is was that kind of what your operation was like free service now or described a little bit yeah I'd be happy to it was exactly like that so I've been it I've been in equinix four and a half years and when I came we had really we had done some significant organic growth we'd acquired some companies in Europe and Asia and and really hadn't pulled that all together and so we had six or seven disparate systems everybody was on their own process and and actually a service now had this great marketing program it was called cloud for clunkers and the clunker I think was they were specifically talking about but it was cloud for clunkers and and I thought that was kind of catchy and my colleague I have a goal that everybody that reports to me directly becomes a CIO and the CIO of JDS Uniphase Chris Beatty he had implemented services out very sign after I had left and he said Brian whatever you've put into whatever you're doing stop go with service now you'll never regret it and it was the best advice ever got so I got to give props to Chris implemented it and now we have one global instance that we're running all around the world all of our information I have a CIO dashboard where we're now all demand all demand coming into IT comes in through service now we have a google-like interface I can track projects incidents events problems requests our entire change management process is run through there so we're actually one hundred percent compliant with that so how did you do before you said you had six or seven different systems try to do all this stuff that's right and we had manual I mean we had manual effort right so so the itl does sort of your classical break fix I need help was done on one system the server team was done on a different system the network team on a third system email was have a you know so so when it came time you know sometimes your guys come to you and say hey I need some I need some heads I'm dying here I'm like show me the data baby show me the data and they couldn't do it or they stopped work for 56 days to gather the data to prove to me that they needed more head count well well now we we have metrics that are that are actually amazing we know we know exactly what our SLA Czar against each incident problem requests whatever by group we know it by by region we know where we have hotspots we know where we should automate to address things I mean we actually are running it like a business now which we couldn't do before so how about visibility to things like the application portfolio or the project portfolio just ServiceNow help you you know give you line of sight into those sort of critical initiatives yeah so so we started with the infrastructure and I think most companies start with infrastructure it's maybe a little more straightforward and so we started there but but then the apps guys it was kind of nice to see the out sky saw the infrastructure guys starting to manage their business like a business and often I don't know if you know but in that sort of in the in the IT organization the apps guys are closer the business infrastructure guys are sort of the guys you know under the hood or behind the curtain don't pay attention them mechanics mechanic they were mechanics well they actually were running their business like the head of infrastructure for me was acting like the CIO I mean he had command of the business we call it at equinix you have to have command of whatever business you're running and the apps guy said you know I want that so so we actually did a couple things we changed our interface to the business to us to be through service now it used to be for projects for application projects it had a different mechanism we move that now to a very clean form in service now that we we built and so now all application demand comes in all of our business systems analysis for both support and projects manage now their business and service now so now they both come to me with their dashboards with the demand coming into the team's by functional area if it's if it's apps we can see that finance is heavily asking for apps versus operations or sales or marketing so we actually now I go to the east staff meeting I report to the CEO and I go in with data that says look here's the portfolio of applications we have here's the request you're asking me to do let's prioritize these together I have a recommendation based on what i think is impact and business value but at the end of the day I'm the steward of the company's money it's not my money so you know but but now we have the visibility we can have the conversation we couldn't have the conversation because I really is a business value conversation I'm so that's that's impressive so Jeff summers brian is a CIO there's so many transformative things happening right now there's there's cloud there's computing power as a service you guys were quite dialed in without since you had a lot of that infrastructure but as a CIO with all the transformative opportunities that you have how are you prioritizing thing and how does this fall within those priority priorities when you're making the changes to your business and implementing new technologies that's a great quote thats a great question because the CIO is that I talked to and it's pretty interesting they're pulling their hair out but yeah I was 642 lat a hair before I joined idea uh-huh a CIO colleague of mine he we had this exact conversation because he goes you know he came over actually came over to see our implementation wanted to talk through how we had gotten there and sort of our journey was service now and and he said you know I really want to be where you guys are and he says we just haven't bubbled up in the priority yet because they're so busy either fixing or dealing with just organic growth or whatever so it's a really good question we we try and have a balance we have you know clearly operations of our data centers comes first so so that consumed so anything we can do there too and we're doing some really interesting innovation there with big data we've built some reference architectures with Accenture specifically around helping us manage that data center platform then sales and marketing I mean clearly got to bring revenue in the door and so the last but not least is finance legal HR and IT but but at the end of the day I try and do i call it the cio sprinkle where you know you even if you put large clumps of money or resources here you got a sprinkle a little bit everywhere and and service now was sort of our sprinkle where I said we have to do this to run efficiently as a global organization and and it was really the best decision I ever made and what's interesting is is now the business sort of looks over our shoulder and says hey hey what is that and we've now implemented service now for our HR function for our finance Shared Services Center for facilities now several different business functions want what we have so yeah we implemented it for us but it's we're spreading it yeah the other thing is because your data center Frank talked about the lights out aspect of as many processes as you can without people clearly running a big data center the less people you have running around those machines the better so with that as a reference within your own business you know how effective have you been using this this platform to kind of take people out of all these processes well I think I think we have so we we have a program called equinix on Equinix and what it is is it's how we use our own global platform to run our own business and you know we've got distributed because you can get real economies of scale if you distribute as opposed to just clumping into large data centers you can actually even if you have one of those you can have small footprints all over the world and increase performance and network hubbing and all that so we've done that for us well we don't necessarily have IT people in all those locations so we we've implemented a couple of things one is monitoring tool called science logic very very good very good tool that we've integrated with service now so all of our incident event monitoring is done on science logic but it integrates into service now so we have and I'll show this later today we have a incident p1 scroller we're right into service now these tickets are automatically open they scroll in front of everybody we have them on the wall absolutely we so in a go to door knock and everybody is aware of them and now that's a part of our sort of hands-off in these remote locations in particular but it just helped us manage our business again commander the business CIO has to have it so is that how it works with you mentioned HR is you have some other HR system sure there it's peoplesoft their workday whatever it is that you use work dank workday good love workday how you to hell awesome I do to their smoking hot yeah and getting it right I said happening so it's okay so you use workday so how does get just like that example how does the service now you know integrate with the workday how does that all work so so I think in most we're not a huge enterprise where over 3,000 employees now and we are global but I think as you start to of any scale you start to centralize into shared services so it you know in a previous company of mine it was called HR front line at equinix called HR direct and what this is it's a you know think of it as a small help desk for HR questions so if you have a question about benefits or pay or whatever you can call this number or you can submit an email to HR direct a tektronix calm and and we've taken those male aliases and and put that right into service now so they see and can track all the requests and what they've used so so it's it's in that sense of stand-alone how it's integrated is is they do a couple of things with the data the first thing they do is they say wow this question keeps getting asked how do we improve our FAQ s improve our communications to the employees because actually the data is there the information is there but they're not getting it so it helps them with their faq second is is sometimes it could be related to a workday piece of data that is wrong about the employee or whatever and and so then they can go and actually update workday so today we don't I don't believe we've got it integrated other than work days our source of truth for employees and so it with Active Directory actually is integrated with service now so we have all of our employees who can submit requests or who can act as technicians in the system I Brian so running low on time but last question I have is what advice would you give to your CIO peers that are thinking about you know automating their their their service management and kind of struggling with all these disparate systems people that are in a similar situation is you what advice would you give them maybe things that you would have done differently help help your peers out here sure I I would say this is something that is sort of table stakes you have to do this and if you have to do this start with something you know you can get your arms around so in our case I think why we're successful is is we started with number one sort of a Service Catalog like what are the services that you offer as a CIO that you're going to offer the business and mask the complexity of who provides those services to the end-user don't make them choose they know they want a computer they don't know which group so mass that you can marry that together I think the other thing is is as a CIO you've got to be a leader it's just like the sales exec who says to the rep you must put the data into salesforce com but then they never use it right so if you're the CIO I mean I've told my guys if it's not in service now don't even come talk to me don't even talk to me so now we run our project meetings out of it we run our our metrics meetings out of it you got to be a leader and and number one is demand that the data is in their number to demand that we have one process one system one set of processes consistent you're going to get people say well it's different in Germany it's different in Singapore baloney delivering IT is delivering IT that's my advice right fantastic listen thanks for stopping by the cube really appreciate the advice the insides the energy all right Jeff Frick and I'll be right back we're live at Las Vegas the knowledge conference this is service now's big event big customer event this cube silicon angles flagship telecast keep it right there boom right back with our next guest