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