>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Application performance management AKA APM, you know it's been around since the days of the mainframe. Now, as systems' architectures became more complex, the technology evolved to accommodate client-server, web-tier architectures, mobile and now of course, cloud-based systems. A spate of vendors have emerged to solve the sticky problems associated with ensuring consistent and predictable user experiences. The market has grown, I mean it's decent size, it's about $5 billion globally. It's growing at a consistent 10% CAGR. It's got a variety of established companies and new entrants that are attacking this space. Hi everyone, welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. My name is Dave Vellante and today, we welcome back ETR's Erik Bradley, who was the chief engagement strategist at Aptiviti which is the holding company of our data partner, ETR. Erik, my friend, great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on and spending some time with us. >> Oh, always enjoy it Dave. Great to see you too and I'm just glad I got some fresh material for ya. >> As always, you have fresh data. Now, Erik just recently hosted an ETR VENN session and on this particular topic, APM. Now VENNs are an open round table, they're exclusively available to ETR's clients and what we do is we sometimes come in theCUBE and we summarize those sessions in our Breaking Analysis. Now Erik, yo let's start with a summary slide here, guys, if you could bring that up, we just want to make a couple of points and... So as I said Erik, I mean this started back, you know in the System/390 days. Now, distributed systems and cloud of course create a lot more complexity, you got data that's really fragmented. You got user data, you got application data, you have infrastructure data and it gets complicated and you've got guys in lab coats having to come in and diagnose these stuff, lot of tribal knowledge. What are you seeing in the space? >> Well yeah, you know to start back, you know it's funny when the panel I hosted, one of the guys even brought up Tivoli, how long ago that was right? Then of course you get, you know you have the solar winds and you had people like that trying to just kind of monitor your network. You know what we've heard a lot about now is infrastructure has really become code-based. So when that happens, you really start wondering to yourself the lines are blurring between infrastructure and application because at the end of the day, what you're really monitoring is code. So it has gotten incredibly complex, you have OnPrem, you have hybrid, you have multi-cloud approach so it has gotten extremely complex and there's also now a third wave of next-gen vendors getting involved in the mix as well. As you're aware, New Relic and Datadog, obviously, Splunk has been in logging and monitoring for a long time. You also had some of the traditional players throw their hat in the ring through acquisition, that you know AppDynamics gobbled up by Cisco and obviously Splunk trying to continue to reinvent themselves a little bit by SignalFx. So it is a very crowded, complex space, it is a complicated problem but it's also a problem that needs to be solved. You know, we were looking at, you said in your intro about, it's only about a $5 billion market right now but there's been a lot of data out there from industry analysts saying that that's going to grow quite handsomely over the next five years and it could get up to 13, 14, 15 billion. And when I asked my panel about that, I had one gentleman say without a doubt, they see the next 10 years that spending in this space will continue. And when you pry and ask why, they simply state that digital transformation is not going to stop, it's marching forward, whether anyone likes it or not and as it does, monitoring is going to be critical, it's only going to increase and increase and increase. So right now, to your point, it's a small market but it's a growing market and there's a lot of entrance in there and their whole goal is to reduce this complexity that you're talking about. >> Now, one of the things we heard from the panel, guys if you bring up that same slide again, you know the third point on that slide was what's closely tied to digital transformation. You heard a number of individuals say, "Look, your digital business is critical, it's all about monitoring your applications and your data and your infrastructure. And we heard a lot that they wanted a, a single pane of glass and you made a number of points about the market. What are your thoughts on both the digital transformation, maybe the COVID acceleration of that mandate and that notion of a single pane of glass, is that aspirational or is it, in your view, something that is actually technically feasible? >> Not only is it technically feasible, it has to happen. It's going to be demanded by the large enterprise, they can't continue to monitor hundreds and hundreds of applications. They need something that not only can give them observability through their entire stack, but they need to be able to view it in one way, there's enough fatigue in monitoring and logging. And actually it goes even further than one pane of glass, they're demanding that these systems can now actually employ machine learning algorithms to be proactive. It's not enough to just say, "Okay, I observed this," you have to let me know that this may happen in the future and what to do about it. So not only is it feasible, it's something that is being demanded by the end-user market and the players that survive are the ones that already have that in their roadmap. >> Now, as we always like to do in these sessions, we're going to bring up some ETR data and we like to position the companies. So what we do is, we're going to bring up some of the pure players, pure-play companies and you can see them on this slide. But Erik, and when we talk about companies in this space, they are well over a dozen. It's just again for reference, you know it's Cisco with AppD, you mentioned that before Dynatrace is one of the leaders, New Relic has been around for awhile and is doing well, Splunk, Datadog. Now of course, and we're not showing them here, AWS, Microsoft and Google cause they just sort of, they pollute the chart. But so I want to start with the guys that are on this view and maybe talk about a few. Elastic came up a lot, certainly AppD came up a little, Dynatrace was obviously mentioned, especially in large organizations. Lot of conversations about New Relic. So let's go through them. Where do you want to start here? >> Yeah there's a lot to go through and we did spend the majority of the panel talking about the individual players, the differences between them and also what we thought their longer term prospects were but yeah, we'll go through each one. I think maybe to start with, let's go back in time a little bit, right? Cisco is a wonderful acquirer, they do a great job at M&A. A lot of companies will acquire something and let it die on the vine. Cisco has proven recently that they are reinventing themselves as a full platform play, whether that be through, you know, kind of, their networking reach or whether it be through the security. And AppDynamics is one of those that actually kind of gives you a little bit of both with being able to monitor. It is a great play for people that are already involved with Cisco. Now, I don't think you're going to see too many people that are non-Cisco customers run out and buy it. There you're going to see some of them, maybe the pure plays or one of my guests called the third wave of vendors. And that third wave is really about a Datadog and a New Relic. Let's talk about Datadog first. >> Yeah let's bring that back up guys, if you would. Now let me just, sorry to interrupt you Erik (indistinct) The vertical axis here is net score, that's the ETR's primary metric, and that's an indication of spending velocity, the higher, the better. And on the horizontal axis is market share. Now we're showing the July data, the October data is in the field, you know once ETR releases that to its clients, then we'll share that with you. But the first thing that jumps out at me is other than Elastic Erik, I mean, I'm not blown away by the spending momentum in this space but let's talk about that and then some of your thoughts on the specific vendors. >> Yeah, you know I'll go back because you asked a little bit about the digital transformation, I don't think I answered it fully. So to your comment about maybe not being impressed with the spend, I think this is one where the spend is going to come, kind of as a laggard because you're not going to rush out and go buy the software to monitor until you've built out the, what needs to be monitored. So as we're seeing this increase in the digital transformation, and I think you and I had a conversation in the past, but when COVID first hit and I did a series of panels, we had one person say that this virus is going to increase digital transformation by five to 10 years. Now that was an amazing statement. Basically, if you were on the fence, if you didn't, if you weren't already heading down to digital transformation, you needed to play catch up quickly. So now that you are doing that right, now that you're moving from OnPrem to a multicloud or a hybrid cloud environment, you have to get observability, you have to get monitoring into it. So now these players start to play catch up and this is where you're going to see the proof of concepts and you're going to see people trying to decide which direction they're going to take their company. Now back to the actual vendors. I believe that there is some differentiation, right? So we'll just take, for instance, Splunk. Splunk is obviously probably the biggest boy on the block when it comes to just straight up logging and monitoring. They've leveraged that big boy position to really, you know, add some costs, kind of intimidate their customers they've been compared in the past of the type of things that Oracle used to do from their cost perspective. And that's opened up some new competition, Datadog is one of those. According to my panel, Datadog is viewed more for logging and monitoring than it is truly full end-to-end observability throughout your entire network and application system. So that is one of the areas that's there. Now, to stay on those two names for a quick second, Splunk obviously has some holes in what they're trying to offer, they went out and tried to buy SignalFx to fill one of those holes. Now according to my panel again, did a great job filling that hole, problem is if you have a boat with three holes, you can't put your fingers everywhere. So they think, hey listen, Splunk scrape, they're going to keep the company they have and I know that we can talk a little bit more about valuations and the equity side later, but I think it's very clear that their sales and revenue are trending flat to down, whereas some of these other names still have great acceleration in their sales. So Splunk and Datadog both are really facing pressure from Elastic or generally just open-source. >> I was struck by the panel and how much emphasis they, how much complaining they did about Splunk pricing. Generally, I feel like hey, if your price is too high is the biggest objection, that's actually not a bad thing for a company but the way they kept hitting on it and said, "Hey, we're actively looking for alternatives" and Datadog was one of those and given the momentum that Datadog has, I don't think that that's necessarily a positive. But you know Splunk has a lot of loyal customers but you know to your point if you go back to the slide, Elastic came up very, very strong and they are head and shoulders from a spending momentum above the rest of the crowd here. >> Right. And you know, so you're right. If the only problem with a vendor or a technology is cost, usually you live with it because that means it's giving you what you need. So okay, it's expensive but it's also the best in breed and that's where Splunk has been for a very long time. And I think they're resting on their laurels knowing that. Enter Elastic and you say to these guys, the panel, I asked them, well okay, you can make Elastic work but is it truly a viable alternative from a technology standpoint? And the answer to that was not only is it viable, it's half the price. So if you can bring something in that can do the job the same and it's half the cost, it's really difficult not to at least try. And I had one of the other gentlemen who was a Datadog customer said, "Listen, we love Datadog, we were a huge customer and then I started getting enormous bills and I just switched over to open-source, I switched to Elastic, I switched to Kibana, I switched to Kafka and I can do this search myself. Now the difference is not every enterprise has the human skillset to do so and I'm not saying Splunk's going to turn around to disappear tomorrow, not even close. Because there is a difference in spending that money with the vendor or spending that money developing the human skillset to use open-source. But the bigger backdrop here is there are more alternatives than there used to be, there's more competition and the space is getting very crowded. >> Yeah, comment on open-source. I mean open-source is free like a puppy. But the thing about that, and we had one of the panelists was a very senior consultant, exclusively work with very large companies, he told a story about one of the companies years ago, he came in to solve a problem. The problem was they had 70% availability and then they had no visibility on their infrastructure and there's really no great, no good monitor, they get them up to whatever, five nines or two, three nines or wherever they got them to, but dramatic improvement. And so, but he said, "Look it, I work with companies with billions of dollars, $3 billion IT budgets so they don't rely on open-source for this stuff, they're happy to spend." But there's a huge market, particularly in the mid size where we heard that New Relic plays in a big way, it might be more receptive to open-source. >> Couple of great points there Dave, honestly. I'm going to jump over to the use case that was given by that person who was in a healthcare role. And essentially the part I didn't write into my summary was that his CEO was two days away from shutting down the entire business because he was so frustrated that he had no observability and Dynatrace was the one that was able to step in and fix that. And this gentleman did say that the majority of the companies that he does work with which are all in the Fortune 100, Dynatrace has a stranglehold in that spot. So that's really interesting to note. Now on the flip side, when pushed a little bit more later in the panel, he said, "Dynatrace is sort of resting on its laurels from a product roadmap standpoint and that's going to open up the possibility of a New Relic getting in," a transition to New Relic as you mentioned on their small to medium sized business. They recently launched a new pricing strategy which is basically a free version to get you involved to kind of get their hooks into you and see if you can work it out. And basically what they're trying to do there I think is, you know, make up for their lack of marketing. As you saw the panel that we spoke about said, "New Relic's technology is fantastic." They have the ability to provide a single pane of glass which is the Holy Grail in this space and they have the ability to provide machine learning and proactive type of ability which again are the two things that all of the end-users are asking for. The problem is that most people might not be aware of it because New Relic doesn't have as flashy a marketing department, they don't have the dollars as much as the others to go out there and compete with the Splunk and Dynatrace and Cisco. But from a roadmap perspective, it was almost unanimous that our panel agreed, New Relic is by far, one of the leaders from a functionality standpoint. >> Yeah, if you guys bring that slide up one more time, the X Y. I mean, I look at where New Relic is and I'm like wow, I'm surprised. I mean this company, I mean they were the hot company for awhile and I think still have the capability. You're talking about the technology. NRDB, New Relic database is like, it kicks ass. In fact, you know Erik, somebody brought up in the panel that they thought that snowflake could compete in this market because essentially Snowflake's positioning is this data cloud. But you know, here's New Relic, they have a purpose-built database specifically for monitoring an APM so you would think that with that technology, they could really make some moves. And then I just want to bring in two other companies to the mix here. Honeycomb who I think even their founder and former CEO now CTO, she coined the term I believe, observability. And there's another company that is run by Jeremy Burton, company's called Observe, okay (indistinct) and it's funded by the Silicon Valley Mafia. So that's going to be an interesting one to watch, they're coming out, well they're out of stealth but they're doing a launch on October 7th. So I think those are two companies that could disrupt this space and I would expect to see, as you said, it's a latent momentum in net score from a dataset standpoint because people are trying to plug the holes cause of COVID, you know security, work from home, that pivot and now it's really on to digital transformation and that's where APM really comes in. >> It really does and again, it comes back to that comment someone made a long time ago that everything's becoming code as software eats the world and everything becomes code, you need the ability to kind of monitor that code, enter Honeycomb. And as you know, we have two different studies at ETR, one of them is for emerging technology. Honeycomb is in our emerging technology study that's more of a private series B to series E round stage whereas our main study is for companies that are pre IPO or already public. But Honeycomb is a little bit different in my opinion, that they're focused very much so on the developers or the software engineers. They're a very microservices oriented type of product whereas some of the other ones may have started as an infrastructure monitoring and then kind of work their way backward into application. But Honeycomb certainly needs to be observed and it's funny when you talk about that, the one thing I think is, "Oh great, more players." The crowded space gets even more crowded. And I think well you know, kind of foreshadowing something you and I will be speaking about in a little bit but there's a lot of players in this space and there's a lot of other possible interest in there. You mentioned Snowflake. It actually wasn't brought up from our panelists, it was a question that came from one of my clients that said, "Hey, I'm curious, can snowflake play in this space?" And the panel thought about it for a second and said, "There's absolutely no reason why they can't, they most certainly can." And we all know the cash they have so I mean the easiest way to play in that would maybe be to buy some of the technology, integrate it in and yeah, they have that portability. And if I can real quickly, they've just, one of the things that came out that was so important about this, we haven't spoken about the vendors is, is the public cloud. The public cloud offers this. They offer monitoring, they'll give it to you for free. If I'm going to run Kubernetes at Google, I'm going to get the monitoring for free which is super nice, right? But if I have an enterprise that has multicloud or hybrid cloud, and I'm working outside of that public cloud silo, it doesn't work. This is the exact conversation you and I had about Snowflake. AWS Redshift's fantastic but it doesn't work outside of AWS. So if every one of our enterprises continues on the digital transformation, they need portability. They have to be able to go across any architecture structure and that's why these independent providers are really starting to gain steam when you would think they could never compete with the public cloud. >> Yeah man, that's a great point. And we've talked about this in the context of Snowflake that who are you going to trust with your multi-cloud strategy? Are you going to trust AWS? Are you going to trust Google? Yeah, okay, they got Anthos but we kind of know why they're taking that posture. Microsoft, look, I'm probably going to partner with somebody who can, who's maybe I have a relationship with them with my OnPrem and that is really sort of agnostic to the various clouds so I'm glad you brought that up. And you know the point you're making about Honeycomb is a good one and I'll add that, again, it gets more complex with microservices and containers, that's spinning them up, spinning them down. Sometimes these, first of all, these microservices, sometimes aren't that micro and second of all, you're sometimes talking about hundreds of thousands of containers so it's a really increasingly complex environment. All right. What I want to do is-- >> You didn't even touch on serverless, we'll do that some other day. >> Oh, yeah, I mean absolutely. A hundred percent, right. So, now let's take a look at some of the valuations, guys if you bring that up for me. So I put this little chart together and it's always instructive. Now I like to, simple guy Erik so I like to... So you see, the company, I take a trailing 12-month revenue and then the market cap as of 9/25. And then just a simple revenue multiple, just to get a sense, it's not a hardcore valuation model but it's interesting and there usually is a correlation to the growth rate, I just pulled that off the latest quarterly growth rate. I mean, look at Datadog. I mean that's like Snowflake pre IPO valuations. I mean you're really, right around there with smaller revenue, smaller growth rate, Snowflakes up in the whatever 120% range but well eye-popping. You know the same valuation as Splunk, I mean that's just amazing. What do you make of this data? >> Well, you know I was an equity analyst for almost 15 years on the Wall Street side. So the, my first caveat is a trailing revenue to the multiple is not always the same because people are looking at what the forward expected revenue will be but I actually do see the correlation here. And when you brought this up, my eyes popped open. I do not understand why Datadog has a 27 billion market cap on a trailing 350 million in revenue. I just don't know if their forward looking growth really warrants that and at the same time, then you look at a Splunk, right? I mean they have two and a half billion in revenue but their growth rate's down and truthfully, when I see a -5% growth rate, I don't know why you weren't at 12% sales either. I would argue that there's quite a few names on here that could be in for a reckoning, ETR actually as far back as a year ago caught this in our data and said, "Hey, there's some inflection points here and I think investors need to pay attention to them." And since we came out with the July report, a lot of these names we're talking about, despite insane valuations in the equity markets are flat to down. And, you know I do think that, hey if they stay stagnant and their technology is right but it's a crowded space, I think we're really leading to the point where as one of my panelists said, this industry is ripe for consolidation. These players are not all going to be here in 12 months, it's that simple. >> Yeah and by the way, thank you for mentioning that as a former equity analyst, you were right (indistinct) 12 months, it's kind of the rear-view mirror. But I'll tell you, two reasons why I do that. One is, I put the growth rate in there so you can pick your own growth rate and your own forward revenue. The other is it's really easy for me to get TTM off a Yahoo as opposed to >> Right exactly. >> And so truth be told. But, guys bring that back up one more time cause I want to make a point about New Relic. I mean I think they are potentially right for an M&A because they got great technology. Now remember Elliot Management is in there and when Elliot's is in there, stuff's going to happen. They're going to start cleaning house, they're going to really create changes, they don't just get in in a big way and sit back and watch, they are extremely active. And the New Relic, leader in this space, great technology, great heritage. So either they got to clean up and get that valuation back up maybe as you pointed out, little bit better marketing posture, et cetera or they get taken out. >> Yeah and let's think about the two things that coincide, right? You have one of the world's best activist funds get involved in Elliot Management. And as you said, they don't get involved to just sort of watch or observe as we're talking about here today, they are very active in trying to get some sort of a, you know, corporate action done. And at the same time, all of a sudden New Relic comes out with a new pricing model. They're trying to create a moat around the small to medium business, right? They're trying to grow their footprint. Now the great thing about getting involved in small to medium businesses, it starts off for free but you grow with them. So I don't think those two are a coincidence, let me just put it that way. I think that they're coming in, they're trying to entrench themselves in a new market and set themselves up for future growth and I truly believe that based on the product roadmap and the feedback we were getting from the end-users in my panel, New Relic has the ability to look across all architecture, it has the ability to provide a single pane of glass and it has the ability to incorporate machine learning for proactive response. Their roadmap is fantastic, they have an active manager inside as an investor, I don't think they're going to be around for much, much longer. And obviously that you look around and you wonder who the acquirers will be and it might be one of the major cloud players. >> Yeah that would be interesting. I mean it gives them a play in a multicloud world and either they're going to just use that for their own advantage or they will actually see that as an opportunity, we'll be itching to watch. Alright, anything we didn't cover that you want to touch on or give us your final thoughts, please Erik. >> You know I would also just sort of mention a little bit about Splunk. This is a company that has a tremendous amount of revenue, a tremendous installed customer base but many, many times we've seen it before and Oracle is the greatest example. They kind of forget about their customers and they don't treat them properly. And I can't tell you how many people I have mentioned to me said, "Hey when this all went down in the viral pandemic and I went to Splunk and I asked for a little bit of pricing flexibility, I asked for this, I asked for that and they just wouldn't give it to me." And I wrote an article once called (indistinct) never forget similar to an elephant. And when they come out the other side, they're going to find a way to replace them. And today I also wrote an article that it was our 200th interview and I entitled it, The Splunk Funk. And basically it's about all the alternatives that are now out there, not just open source, but other vendors, even the vulnerability management players like a Rapid7, like a Tenable are getting into this space now. Fortinet, which one guy called "Fortaeverything" is a company that's really expanding. So I would just really kind of caution some of those vendors out there that don't rest on your laurels, don't take your customers for granted because sooner or later, they're going to be in a position to bite the back. >> Well I'll say this about Splunk, I've been following the company since the early part of last decade and I've done a lot of Cube interviews at their shows. They do have a passionate, passionate customer base, they got the experts that run around with that crazy hat and I've seen Splunk killers emerge for the last decade and so... But I think your point is right. I mean they've, the SignalFx acquisition was something that, it was a hole to fill and it gets them into a subscription-based model, they're going through that transition now. But I think they have some real gravity with their customer base. So, all right, let me summarize. For years, the application monitoring and management, it's really relied on alerts, logs, traces and even what I call tribal knowledge. In that world of pre-distributed systems, that was fine, like I said a trace can tell you what was going on. But things have begotten much more complicated architecturally with cloud and mobile and they're really changing fast now. Erik mentioned serverless, we talked about containers. So, today it's much harder to understand the customer experience because it's difficult to get a full picture of the data. And what I mean by that is that the user data, the application data, the infrastructure data, they're all fragmented and the Holy Grail solution really takes all this disparate data, it ingests it, it transforms it. Connects the dots if you will, across clouds, Onprem and then it shapes it, brings in machine intelligence, really creating an organic systems view that can proactively tell you that there's a problem coming. And finally, nearly absolute Nirvana is doing this in a way that non-technical people are going to be able to understand the true user experience. You know in theory, this is going to allow organizations to remediate in 110th the time with much, much lower costs and that's going to be critical in this world of digital transformation. So thank you Erik, really appreciate you coming on today. >> Always enjoy it Dave, it's always great talking to you and hopefully we'll do it again soon. >> All right, I can't wait. And thank you everybody for watching this episode of theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Remember these episodes, they're all available on podcasts. We publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com so you got to check that out. And don't forget, go to etr.plus for all the survey action. Would appreciate if you kindly comment on my LinkedIn post or tweet me @dvellante or email at david.vellante@siliconangle.com This is Dave Vellante. Thanks so much to Erik Bradley, be well and we'll see you next time. (bouncy music)

>>Hello, everyone. Welcome to Entities Summit. My name is Ellen Komarovsky and I will talk about sparks So simple realizable arguments of knowledge. This talk is based on the joint work No, me, Frank, Cody, Freytag and Raphael past. Let me start by telling you what's the same documents are that's the same argument is a special type of interactive protocol between the prove prove er and the verifier who share some instance X, >>which is allegedly in some language. And the goal of the protocol is for the proper toe convince the very far that access indeed in the language for completeness, the guarantees that their guarantees that if X is indeed in the language, the verifier will in the end of the protocol indeed be convinced. On the other hand, for sadness we require that if X is not in the language, that no matter what the proper does, as long as it is bounded to run in polynomial time, the verifier will not be convinced. There is a stronger notion of sadness called an argument of knowledge, which says that the only way for the approval to continue the verifier is by knowing some witness there is a mathematical way to formalize this notion, but I will not get into it for efficiency. And what makes this protocol succinct is that we require the very far is running time and communication complexity between the program, the verifier Toby, both mounted by some political written function in T, where T is the time to verify the empty statement. In terms of the proof is running time, we don't require anything except that it's, for example, in normality. The goal of this work is to improve this polygonal overhead of the prove er, to explain why this is an important task. Let me give you a motivating example, which is just the concept of delegation of computation. So considering some small device, like a laptop or smartphone, that we used to perform some complicated computation which it cannot do. Since it is a big device, it wishes to delegate the computation to some service or cloud to perform the computation for it. Since the small device does not fully trust the service, it may want to ask the device the service to also issue a proof for correctness of the computation. And the problem is that if the proof it takes much more time than just performing the computation. It's not clear that this is something that will be useful in practice thinking. Think off an overhead, which is square of the time it takes to perform the computation. This will become, very quickly a very big number or very, very large delay for generating the We're not the >>first to study this problem. It has been studied for several decades, and at least from a theoretical point of view, the problem is almost solved or essentially solved. We have constructions off argument systems is great overhead, just bottle of arrhythmic multiplicity of overhead. This is obtained by combining efficient disappears. Together with Killian's arguments is there's a >>huge open problem in complexity. Theory of constructing PCP is with constant over namely, running just in linear time in the running, in the running time off just running the computation. But we argued that even if we had such a PCP and the constant was great, let's say it was just too. This would already be too much, because if you delegate the computation to takes a month toe complete, then waiting another month just for the proof might not be so reasonable. There is a solution in the literature for this problem in what we call using what we call a reliable PCP medicine. And I'll show that there is a recipe construction that has the following very useful property. Once you perform the computation itself without the just the computation and write down the computation to blow, then there is the way to generate every simple off the PCP in just only logarithmic time. So this means that you can, in parallel after computing the function itself, you can empire led, compute the whole PCP in just falling over it. Next time this gives you this gives us a great argument system with just t plus Polly locked parallel time instead of three times for luck tea time. But for this we need about the process service, which is prohibitively large. This is where sparks come in. We introduced the notion, or the paradigm off, computing the proof in part to the computation, not after the computation is done slightly more formally. What spark is it's just a succinct argument of knowledge, like what we said before, with the very fired and communication of Leslie being small but now we also require approval for which is super efficient. Namely, it can be paralyzed able. And it has to finish the proof together with the computation in Time T plus volatility, which essentially the best you can hope for. And we want to prefer to do so only with political rhythmic number off processors. You can also extend the definition to handling computations, which are to begin with a paralyze herbal. But I will not touch upon this. In the stock, you can see the paper. For the >>girls, we have two main results. The first main result is the construction of an interactive spark. It's just four rounds, and it is assumes Onley collisions is not hash functions. The second result is a non interactive spark. This result also assumes career resistant hash functions and in addition, the existence off any snark and namely succinct, non interactive argument of college that does not have to be a super efficient in terms of programming time. Slightly more generally, the two theories follow from >>combined framework, which takes essentially any argument of knowledge and turns it into a spark by assuming on a collision system, hash functions and maybe the multi behind the construction could be viewed as a trade off between computation time and process. Source. Winston. She ate theorem one using Killings protocol, which is an argument of knowledge, which is a four round argument of knowledge. And we insensate you're into using its not which is an argument knowledge. Just by definition, let me tell you what are the main ideas underlying our construction before telling you to control the ideas. Let me make some simplifying assumptions. The first assumption I will only be talking about the non interactive regime. The second example assumption is that I'm going to assume snark, which is a non interactive 16 argument of knowledge. And then we'll assume that's not the snark which is super efficient. So it will consumed other time to t for computation that takes 20 so almost what we want, but just not yet, not not yet there. I will assume that the computation that we want to perform a sequential and additionally I will assume that the computation has no >>space, namely its ah, or it has very low space. So think about the sequential computation, which MM doesn't have a lot of space or even zero for the for the time being, I would like to discuss how to simplify, how to remove this simplifying assumptions. So the starting idea is based on two works off a nettle and duckling. It'll from a couple of years ago. And here's how it works. So >>remember, we want toe performative time. Computation generated proof and we need to finish roughly by time. T. So the idea is to run half of the computation, which is what we can afford because we have a snark that can generate a proof in additional to over two steps so we can run the complete half of the computation and prove that half of the computation all in time T. And the idea is that now we can recursive Lee computer improve the rest of the computation in Parliament. Here's how it looks like. So you run half of the computation, started proof, and then you run a quarter of the remaining half of the remaining computation, which is a quarter of the original one, and prove it. And in parallel again, you take another eighth of the computation, which is one half of what's left and so on. And so forth. As you can see, that eventually will finish the whole computation. And you only need something like logarithmic Lee. Many parallel processors and the communication complexity and verifies running time only grow by algorithmic >>factor. So this is the main idea. Let's go back to the simplifying assumptions we have. So the first one was that I'm only gonna talk about the new interactive regime. You have to believe me that the same ideas extend to the interactive case, which is a little bit more massive with notation. But the ideas extent so I will not talk about it anymore. The second assumption I had was that I have a super efficient start, so it had over had two T >>40 time computation again. You have to believe me that if you work out the math, then the ideas extend to starts with quasi linear overhead. Namely, starts that working time tee times, Polly locked e and then the result extends to any snark because of a result because of a previous work will be tense. Kettle, who showed that a snark with the proof it runs in polynomial time can be generically translated into a snark where the programs in quasi linear with quasi linear overhead. So this gives a result from any stark not only from pretty efficient starts. The last bullet was about the fact that we're dealing with only with sequential Ram computations. And again, you have to believe me that the ideas can be extended toe tyrants And the last assumption which is the focus of this work is how to get rid of the small space assumption. This is what I'm gonna be talking next. Let's see what goes wrong. If the if the computation has space, remember what we did in the previous. In a couple of slides ago, the construction was toe perform. Half of the computation prove it and then half of the remaining computation prove it. And >>so on. If you write down the statement that each of these proofs proofs, it's something like that a machine m on input X executed for some number of steps starting from some state ended at some other state. And if you notice the statement itself depends on the space of the computation, well and therefore, if the space of the computation is nontrivial, the statements are large and therefore the communication will be large and therefore the very fire will have toe be running time, proportional to the space and so on. So we don't even get a saint argument if we do it. Neighborly. Here's a solution for this problem. You can say, Well, you don't have to include the space in the whole space. In the statement, you can include only a digest of the space. Think about some hash function of the space. So indeed, you can modify the statement to not include the space, but only a digest. And now the statement will be a little bit more complicated. It will be that there exists some initial state end state such that there hush is consistent with digest in the statement. And if you run the machine M for K state and for K steps starting from the initial space, you end up with the final space. So this is great. It indeed solves the communication complexity problem in the very far complexity problem. But notice that from the proof for site, we didn't actually do anything because we just move, pushed the complexity in tow. The weakness. So the proof is running. Time is still very large with this solution. Yeah. Our final solution, if in a very high level, is to compress the witness. So instead of using the whole space is the witness. We will be using the computation itself in the computation that we ran as the witness. So now the statement will be off the same form, so it will still be. It will still consist off to digests and machine. But now the the witness will be not the whole state. But it will be the case steps that we performed. Namely, it will be that there exists case steps that I performed such that if I run >>the machine m on this case steps and I started with a digest and I just start and I applied this case steps on the digest. I will end up with the Final Digest. In order to implement this, we need some sort off a nap. Datable digest. This is not really hard, not so hard to obtain because you could just do something like a miracle tree. It's not hard to see that you can add the locations in the medical tree quite efficiently. But the problem is that we need toe toe to compute those updates. Not only not only we need toe be ableto update the hash browns, the hush or the largest which don't also be able to compute the updates in parallel to the computation. And to this end, we introduce a variant of Merkle trees and show how to perform all of those updates level by level in the in the Merkel tree in a pipeline in fashion. So namely, we push the updates off the digest in toe the Merkel tree, one after the other without waiting for the previous ones to end. And here we're using the tree structure off Merkle trees. So that's all I'm gonna say about the protocol. I'm just gonna end with showing you how the final protocol looks like We run case steps of computations. Okay, one steps of computation and we compute the K updates for those case steps in violent the computation. So every time we run a step of computation, we also update start an update off our digest. And once we are finished computing all the updates, we can start running a proof using those updates as witness and were forcibly continuing this way as a conclusion this results with the spark namely 1/16 argument system with the proof is running Time t plus for you Look, team and no times and all we need is something like quality of arrhythmic number of processors. E would like to mention that this is a theoretical result and by no means should be should be taken as a za practical thing that should be implemented. But I think that it is important to work on it. And there is a lot of interesting questions on how to make this really practical and useful. So with that, I'm gonna end and thank you so much for inviting me and enjoy the sandwich.

I'm going alive I'm live right now let's send you this link and see if you can get on here so this is private see if I can break this out this is [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hello they're coming you live from Chuck alley studio here in Mountain View California and I'm on YouTube live I hope I'm not securing anything outta been out there for two minutes now let's be able to do a live private stream and be able to have that account that link to people - yeah okay yes you see me voice what's up what's up what's up so this is a private link I don't know if you can hear me that's a private link and if you give the link to whoever you want to see it oh you can't hear me hmm one two one two one two three four stop that

>> 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)

>> Announcer: Live, from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> We're back. This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. Chris Bedi is here, he's the CIO of ServiceNow. Chris, good to see you again. >> Good to see you as well. >> Yeah, so, lot going on this week, obviously. You said you're getting pulled in a million different directions. One of those, of course, is the CIO event, CIO Decisions, it's something you guys host every year. I had the pleasure of attending parts of it last year. Listened to Robert Gates and some other folks, which was great. What's happened this year over there? >> So, CIO Decisions, it's really where we bring together our forward thinking executives. We keep it intimate, about a hundred, because really it's about the dialogue. Us all learning from each other. It really doesn't matter, the industry, I think we're all after the same things, which is driving higher levels of automation, increase the pace of doing business, and innovating at our companies. So we had Andrew McAfee, MIT research scientist, really helping push the boundaries in our imagination on where machine learning and predictive analytics could go. And then we had Daniel Pink talking about his latest book, To Sell is Human. And really as CIOs, we often find ourselves selling new concepts, new business models, new processes, new analytics, new ways of thinking about things. And so, really trying to help, call it exercise, our selling muscle, if you will. Because we have to sell across, up, down, and within our own teams, and that is a big part of the job. Because as we move into this new era, I think the biggest constraint is actually between our own ears. Our inability to imagine a future where machines are making more decisions than humans, platforms are doing more work on behalf of humans. Intellectually, we know we're headed there, but he really helped to bring it home. >> Well, you know, it's interesting, we talk about selling and the CIOs. Typically IT people aren't known as sales people, although a couple years ago I remember at one of the Knowledges, Frank Slootman sort of challenged the CIO to become really more business people, and he predicted that more business people would become CIOs. So, do you consider yourself a sales person? >> I do. Selling people on a vision, a concept, the promise of automation. You know, technology, people fear it, right? You know, when you're automating people's work the fear and the uncertainty endowed, or what I call the organizational anti-bodies, start to come out. So you have to bust through that, and a large part of that is selling people on a promise of a better future. But, it's got to be real. It's got to be tied to real business outcomes with numbers. It can't be just a bunch of PowerPoint slides. >> So we always like to take the messaging from the main tent and then test it with the practitioners, and this year there's this sort of overall theme of working at lightspeed, you and I have talked about this, how does that resonate with CIOs and how do you put meaning behind that? 'Cause, you know, working at lightspeed, it's like, ooh that sounds good, but how do you put meat on that bone? >> So, the way I think about working at lightspeed is three dimensions, velocity, intelligence, and experience. And velocity is how fast is your company operating? I read a study that said 40% of Fortune 500 companies are going to disappear in the next 10 years. That's almost half, right? But I think what's going to separate the winners from the losers is the pace at which they can adapt and transform. And, with every business process being powered by IT platforms, I think CIOs and IT are uniquely positioned to explicitly declare ownership of that metric and drive it forward. So velocity, hugely important. Intelligence. Evolving from the static dashboards we know today, to real time insights delivered in context that actually help the human make decisions. And, BI in analytics as we know it today, needs to evolve into a recommendation engine, 'cause why do we develop BI in analytics? To make decisions, right? So why can't the platform, and it can, is the short answer, with the ability to rapidly correlate variables and recognize complex patterns, give recommendations to the humans, and I would argue, take it a step further, make decisions for the humans. ServiceNow did a study that said 70% of CIOs believe machines will make more accurate decisions than humans, now we just got to get the other 30% there. And then on experience, I think the right experience changes our behavior. I think we in IT need to be in the business of creating insanely great customer and employee experiences. Too often we lead with the goal of cost reduction or efficiency, and I think that's okay, but if we lead with the goal of creating great experiences, the costs and the inefficiencies will naturally drop out. You can't have a great experience and have it be clunky and slow, it's just impossible. >> And it's interesting on the experience because the changing behavior is the hardest part of the whole equation. And I always think back to kind of getting people off an old solution. People used to say, for start ups, you got to be 10x better or 1/10th the cost. 2x, 3x is not enough to get people to make the shift. And so to get the person to engage with the platform as opposed to firing off the text, or firing off an email, or picking up the phone, it's got to be significantly better in terms of the return on their investment. So now they get that positive feedback loop and, ah, this is a much better way to get work done. >> It has to. And we can't, you know, bring down the management hammer and force people to do things. It's just not the way, you know, people work. And very simple example of an experience driving the right behavioral outcome, so ServiceNow is a software company, very important for us to file patents. The process we had was clunky and cumbersome. You know, we're not perfect at ServiceNow either. So we re-imagined that process, made it a mobile first experience built on our platform, of course. But by simply doing that, there was no management edict, you have to, no coercion, if you will, we saw an 83% increase in the number of patent applications filed by the engineers. So the right experience can absolutely give you the right desired economic behavior. >> You talked about 70% of CIOs believe that machines will make better decisions than humans. We also talked about Andrew McAfee, who wrote a book with Eric Brynjolfsson. And in that book, The Second Machine Age, they talked about that the greatest chess player in the world, when the supercomputer beat Garry Kasparov, he actually created this contest and they beat the supercomputer with a combination of man and other supercomputers. So do you see it as machine, sort of, intelligence augmenting human intelligence, or do you actually see it as machines are going to take over most of the decisions. >> So, I actually think they are going to start to take over some basic decision making. The more complex ones, the human brain, plus a machine, is still a more, you know, advanced, right? Where it's better suited to make that decision. But I also think we need to challenge ourselves in what we call a decision. I think a lot of times, what we call a decision, it's not a decision. We're coming to the same conclusion over and over and over again, so if a computer looked at it, it's an algorithm. But in our brains, we think a human has to be involved and touch it. So I think it's a little bit, it'll challenge us to redefine what's actually a decision which is complex and nuanced, versus we're really doing the same thing over and over again. >> Right, and you're saying the algorithm is a pattern that repeats itself and leads to an action that a machine can do. >> Yeah. >> It doesn't require intuition >> And we don't call that a decision anymore. >> Right, right. So, in thinking about you gave us sort of the dimensions of lightspeed, what are some of the new metrics that will emerge as a result of this thinking? >> Yeah, I don't think any of the old metrics go away. I'll talk about a few. You know, in lightspeed, working at lightspeed, we need to start measuring, for one, back on that velocity vector, what is the percentage of processes in your company that have a cycle time of zero, or near zero. Meaning it just happens instantaneously. We can think of loads of examples in our consumer life. Calling a car with Uber, there's no cycle time on that process, right? So looking at what percentage of your processes have a cycle time of zero. How much work are you moving to the machines? What percentage of the work is the platform proactively executing for you? Meaning it just happens. I also think in an IT context of percentage of self healing events, where the service never goes down because it's resilient enough and you have enough automation and intelligence. But there are events, but the infrastructure just heals itself. And I think, you know, IT itself, we've long looked at IT as a percentage of revenue. I think with all of the automation and cost savings and efficiencies we drive throughout the enterprise, we need to be looking at IT as a margin contribution vehicle. And when we change that conversation, and start measuring ourselves in terms of margin, I think it changes the whole investment thesis, in IT. >> So that's interesting. Are you measured on margin contribution? >> We're doing that right now. I don't, if an IT organization is waiting for the CFO or CEO to ask them about their margin contribution, they're playing defense. I think IT needs to proactively measure all of it's contributions and express it in terms of margin. 'Cause that's the language the CEO, and COO, and CFO are talking about, so meet them in a language that they understand better. >> So how do you do, I mean, you certainly can create some kind of conceptual value flow. IT supports this sort of business process and this business process drives this amount of revenue or margin. >> So I stay away from revenue, because I think any time IT stands up and says, we're driving revenue, it's really hard. Because there's so many external and internal factors that contribute to that. So we more focus on automation, in terms of hours saved, expressing and dollarizing that. Hard dollars, that we're able to take out of the organization and then bubbling that into an operating margin number. >> Okay, so you sort of use the income statement below the revenue line to guide you and then you fit into that framework. >> Absolutely. >> When you talk to other CIOs about this, do they say, hey, that sounds really interesting, how do I get started on that, or? >> I think it resonates really well, because, again, IT as percentage of revenue is an incredibly incomplete metric to measure our contribution. With everything going digital, you want to pour more money into technology. I mean, studies have shown, and Andrew McAfee talked about this, over the last 50, 100 years, the companies that have thrived have poured more, disproportionally more, into technology and innovation than their competitors. So, if we only measure the cost side of the equation we're doing ourselves a disservice. >> And so, how do you get started on this path, I mean, let's call this path, sort of, what we generally defined as lightspeed, measured on margin, how do you get started on that? >> First step is the hardest. But, it's declaring that your going to do it. So we've come up with a framework, you know, that maps at a process level, at a department level, and at a company level, where are we on this journey to lightspeed? If lightspeed is the finish line, where are we? And I define three stages, manual, automated, cloud, before you get to lightspeed. And then, using those same three dimensions of velocity, intelligence, and experience, to tell you where you are. And, the very first thing we did was baseline all of our business processes, every single one, and mapped it. But once you have it mapped on that framework then you can say, how do we advance the ball to the next level? And, it's not going to magically happen overnight. This is hard work. It's going to happen one process at a time, right? But pretty soon everything starts to get faster and I think things will start to really accelerate. >> When you think about, sort of, architecting IT, at ServiceNow versus some other company, I mean, you come into ServiceNow as the CIO, everything runs on ServiceNow, that is part of the mandate, right? But that's not the mandate at every company, now increasingly may be coming that way in a lot of companies, but how is your experience at ServiceNow differ from the some of the traditional G2000? >> Probably the unique part about being the CIO at ServiceNow is actually really fun, in that I get to be customer zero in that I implement our products before all of our customers. You know, get to sit down with the product managers, discuss real business problems that all of our customers are facing, and hopefully be their voice inside the four walls of service now, and be the strategic partner to the product organization. Now implementing everything, our goal is to be the best possible implementation of ServiceNow on the planet. And that's not just demonstrated by go lives, it's demonstrated by, again, the economic and business outcomes we're deriving from using the platform. So, that part is fun, challenging, and hard work all at the same time. >> So how's Jakarta lookin'? >> Fantastic. We're super excited about everything that's coming out, whether it's the communities on customer service, or our software asset management. That's been a pain, right, for IT organizations for a long time, which is these inbound software audits, from other companies, and you're responding to them and it's a fire drill. In my mind, our software asset management transforms software audits from a once a year, twice a year event, to always-on monitoring, where you're just fixing it the whole time. And it's not an event anymore. I mean, the intelligence that we're baking into the platform now, super exciting around the machine learning and the predictive analytics concepts, we have more analytics than we had before, I mean there's just so much in there, that's just exciting. We're already using it, I can't wait for our customers to get a hold of it. >> Well, CJ this morning threw out a number of 30-plus percent performance improvement. I had said to myself, your saying that with conviction, that's 'cause you guys got to be running it yourselves. >> Yeah, we are. >> What are you seeing there? >> That's not a trivial number, and I think the product teams have done a great job really digging in and makin' sure our platform operates at lightspeed. >> One of the things that Jeff and I have been talking about this week, and really this is your passion here, is adoption, how do you get people to stop using all these other tools like email, and kind of get them to use the system? >> I think, showing them the promise of what it can bring. I think it's different conversations at different levels. I think, too, an operator, someone who's using the email to manage their work, they're hungry for a different solution. Life, working, and email, and managing your business that way, it's hard, right? To a mid-level manager, I think the conversation is maybe about the experience, how consumers of their service will be happier and more satisfied. At executive level, it gets maybe more into some of the economic outcomes, of doing it. Because implementing our platform, you know, you're going to burn some calories doing it, not a lot. Our time to value is really really quick, but still, it's a project and it's initiative and it's got to have an outcome tied to it. >> You know, Chris, as you're saying that it's always tough to be stuck kind of half way. You know, you're kind of on the tool internally and it's great. >> We don't use the word tool. >> Excuse me, not the tool. The app, the platform, actually. But then you still got external people that are coming at you through text, email, et cetera. I mean, is part of the vision, and maybe it's already there, I'm not as familiar with the parts I should be, in terms of enabling kind of that next layer of engagement with that next layer of people outside the four walls, to get more of them in it as well. Because the half-pregnant stage is almost more difficult because you're going back and forth between the two. >> And our customer service product does a lot of that. If you look at what Abhijit showed today, which is fantastic, Communities is another modality to start to interact with people. Certainly, we have Connect, part of our platform, is a collaboration app within the overall platform, so you can chat, just like you would with any consumer app, in terms of chatting capabilities, and that mobile first experience. We're thinking about other modalities too. Should you be able to talk to ServiceNow, just like you talk to Alexa, and converse with ServiceNow, Farrell touched on this a little bit, through natural language, right? We all know it's coming, and it's there, it's just pushing in that direction. >> How about the security piece? You know, Shawn shared this morning, you guys are well over year in now, and he talked about that infamous number of 200 plus days-- >> Chris: Nine months, yeah. >> Yeah, compressing that. Are you seeing that internally in your own? >> We are. We use Shawn's product, we're a happy customer. The vulnerability management, the security incident response, and very very similar results. And just like the customer who was on stage said, go live in Iterate, and that's exactly what we did. Everyone has a vulnerability management tool, like a Qualys, that's feeding in. Bring in all those Qualys alerts, our platform will help you normalize them and just start to reduce the level of chaos for the SOC and IT operations. Then make it better, then drive the automation, so we're seeing very similar benefits. >> How do you manage the upgrade side, we've been asking a lot of customers this week in the upgrade cycle. Some say, ah, I'll do in minus one just to sort of let the thing bake a little bit. You guys are in plus one. How do you manage that in production, though? >> Sure, so we upgrade before our customers, and that's part of our job, right? To make sure we test it out before our customers. But I'll say something in general about enterprise software upgrades, which is, there is a cost to them and the cost is associated with business risk. You want to make sure you're not going to disrupt your business. There is some level of regression testing you just have to do. Now, strategies I think that would be wise are automating as much of that testing as you can, through a testing framework, which we're helping our customers do now. And I think with some legacy platforms, that was incredibly expensive and hard and you could never quite get there. Us being a modern cloud platform, you can actually get there pretty quickly to the point where the 80, 90% of your regression testing is automated and you're doing that last 10 to 20%. 'Cause at the end of the day, IT needs to make sure the enterprise is up and running, that's job number one. But that's a strategy we employ to make upgrades as painless as possible. >> That's got to be compelling to a lot of the customers that you talk to, that notion of being able to automate the upgrade process. >> For sure, it is. >> You're eliminating a lot of time and they count that as money. >> It is money, and automating regression testing, it's a decision and a strategy but the investment pays off very very quickly. >> Dave: So there's an upfront chunk that you have to do to figure out how to make that work? >> Just like anything worth doing. >> Dave: Yeah, right. >> Right? >> Excellent. What's left for you at the show? >> What's left for me? I love interacting with customers. I got to talk with a lot of CIOs at CIO Decisions. I actually enjoy walking through the partner pavilion and meeting a lot of our partners and seeing some of the innovation that their driving on the platform. And then just non-stop, I get ideas all day from meeting with customers. It's so fun. >> Dave: Chris, thanks very much for coming to theCube. >> Thank you. >> We appreciate seeing you again. >> Chris: Good seeing you. >> Alright, 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.

>> Narrator: Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> We're back in Orlando, I'm Dave Velanto with Jeff Frick and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go up to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Andrew Wilson is here, he's the CIO of Accenture and TV personality (laughing). Good to see you again. >> Good to see you gents again. Welcome, congratulations on a great show so far coming out of the Knowledge17. >> Yeah and back to you, we were at the Accenture event last night, it was pretty good. You had a lot of really great customers there and ServiceNow was there in force, so when a company like Accenture stamps it's impremature on a community like this, excuse me, that is a testament. So, how do you feel? >> We enjoy being a major player in the ecosystem. It's an ecosystem of platforms. We consume a lot of tech for ourselves. We have 400,000 people, we're in 55 countries, 200 cities around the world. So I've got to make them feel good, I've got to create great tech, I've also got to put tech out there that our clients see, and I've really got to get there first so that they can emulate us. I want to be a sandbox. So I'm here as a consumer but also as a service provider of ServiceNow. I think it's a great event so far. >> How do you spend your time as a CIO. I mean, especially inside a company like Accenture, I would imagine, you're getting pulled in a lot of different directions. >> I think the role and the time has changed. It used to be about running big programs, doing big builds, integration testing and big programatical old fashioned data center IT. The world's changed. I'm the Chief Experience Officer now. It's around orchestrating, brokering new experiences a lot that I'm procuring in and configuring, the platforms like ServiceNow. And other big, major brands like 0365 and Salesforce, etc. I'm focused on end to end experience, employee experience. We've got 100,000 new people arriving every year, they all bring their own tech. If mine isn't good, they will just use their own. So I want to compete with that, I want to be better than that, I want to be sticky, I want it to be like YouTube, Netflix, things like that. >> I wonder if you could dig into that a little bit because that's one of the themes we see over and over and over all the shows. The consumerization of IT and people's expectations of the way enterprise IT should work based on what I do on my phone and on my consumer apps. >> Well they should just work all the time, shouldn't it? It should work all the time, it should require no training, it should be fun, it should be bite-sized and it should all be there on my mobile device and upgrade automatically. And by the way, it's all free as well. (laughing) >> Little different than an old school SAP implementation from back in the day. >> Absolutely and, I mean SAP are a good platform provider, and we still...And they've had to change. The platforms deliver big agile releases now and we have to re-present tech. But those days of setting a course, annual spending, big functional requirements and then delivering and not course changing, that's all out the window. We have to listen, feedback, course-correct, be agile ourselves. And I also think inject fun. Tech has to be fun, modern, light-hearted, light-touch. It's a part of all aspects of life now. >> And has to have loud music. (laughing) >> Thumping in the background. >> You're a consumer, you said of ServiceNow as well. What's your ServiceNow experience like? >> We've been in production on ServiceNow for over a year. I like it, I think it's a good platform, well-architected for Cloud. It allows me to create rich moments of experience for my team. I bought it initially to do IT, SM type stuff. But I've had a learning experience that it's much broader. I like the adding analytics and intelligence into the platform that we've been hearing about here in Orlando. We're using it to power HR processes, legal processes, new contract set up. In the end, I want people to be enjoying the process and experience through life at Accenture. I don't want them to be thinking about what system I am, what platform I own? That's all under the hood. Experience first, experience only. Process based. ServiceNow is really helping us do that. >> One of the things as a CIO you're looking at, you said Chief Experience Officer, what are some of the things that are exciting you? You hear a lot of AI, nobody talks about big data anymore. It's all AI and machine-learning. >> It's all cognizance. >> Deep learning, right? Is it same wine, new bottle? Is it real? What do you see as a CIO? >> It is changing. A lot of... Like the Cloud a few years ago. A lot of talk but we're not all there yet. We're 71% in Cloud. We got on with it. I think we're about to get on with AI. I think about enterprise insight, that's what gets me excited. It's not a technology service anymore. It's a data and analytics service. The things are coming of age, we can now deliver it for the enterprise. >> When you think about strategy, vision, the role of the CIO, how do you see that changing? >> Well, I'm a broadcaster, like you. So I'm a Chief Communications person. I'm producing content. I'm not just running the cameras and the green-screen studios, I'm doing my own show. I'm not writing emails. We're popping up studios around the world. We're ingesting content into something which is beginning to feel a lot like a live network. And that's how people want to consume. They don't want to sit there and watch an hour long training course. And if they want to learn about security, and how we do it at Accenture, they want to watch something that looks and sounds like 24, we call it Hackerland. It's a series of dramatized episodes. That's the future of how we consume tech. >> So what are some of the topics that you're covering? First of all, what's the objective of your show and what are some of the things you're talking about? >> My show exists primarily to glue my family of eight or 9,000 IT workers around the world together so that they can stay current in a fast-moving, changing world of our own strategy. We course correct our strategy, we do hundreds of releases of different services every month. Being the CIO team that does that, I want them very aware so it's our internal, stay ahead, under the hood, stay ahead of our broader user base. By the way, practice new techniques because we're amongst friends with our CIO audience, before our CEO and the others start using the services as well. >> Have you done a show that related to service management? >> Uh not... oh well we've certainly talked about ServiceNow deployment, but the show we like to mix. So we'll have different teams and projects on. We'll have news reports, we'll have some humor. We don't do an hour of the same thing, because they'd switch off. >> You do a lot of events like this, I presume? >> I go to a lot of events like this. We don't do the show for most events. We take our show on the road. We've done the show live from India. We're about to go, two weeks time to Dublin in Ireland. And then we'll be going down Buenos Aires. So it's a global show. When I'm here, I'm typically on others' stage, like I'm here with you guys today. Talking about our work in the market and how we power all of our client work through these platforms. >> It's so different, cause I remember long time ago, at a small software company, we were trying to break in with Accenture and it was a roadshow. You guys had little shows all over the place, whether it be the Vertical Group, the Industry Group, the Horizontal Group. They'd bring the partners together and that was the way that new technologies were communicated. We'd set up a little expo, and they would all come in, we'd pitch our wares and that was it. So different than what you're talking about now in this communication, video-- >> Accenture's a global company, global brand. It's actually a series of businesses. Technologists, operators, strategists, consultants. I think we are platform practitioners and we are a major service provider. So we use ServiceNow to support hundreds of our own clients. So I'm not just using it to power Accenture, we're powering all our client work as well. It's a new Accenture. We talk about the new in our digital strategy and at least half of the work that we do for our clients is all in this brand new space of digital. That percentage is increasing rapidly every quarter. >> How much of your time is practice leads dragging you into clients? >> Quite a bit. We do hundreds of client dialogues. I come from a business, I spend more time talking to client's as CIO than I did when I was the business. >> Excellent. Andrew, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure having you. >> Great to see you guys, good luck. >> Good luck with your show, we'll be watching. >> Thank you. >> Ya, we'll be tuning in. >> Enjoy, thank you, take care. >> Alright keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is theCUBE, we're live from Knowledge17. We'll be right back.

(sweeping electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's the Cube, covering ServiceNow Knowledge17, brought to you by ServiceNow. (sweeping electronic music) >> We're back in Orlando, I'm Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. Kerri Cullity is here, she's the Advisory Managing Director of Healthcare Solutions for KPMG. Kerri, good to see you. >> Good to see you. >> Dave: You're in Boston, the center of a lot of healthcare action going on in Boston. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Certainly your specialty. Give us the update, tell us about your role in the practice inside of KPMG. >> Yeah, absolutely. As you said, I work with KPMG as a Managing Director in Healthcare Solutions. I lead up our Enterprise Asset Management offering, our solution that healthcare organizations are now starting to actually take a look at. With all the mergers and acquisitions that have occurred in healthcare today, it's a good place for cost savings, and so we're seeing a lot of CFOs and other executive leadership really starting to take a look at their enterprise asset management strategy. >> How do you organize enterprise assets in healthcare? Hospitals are giant places, they've got a ton of assets from expensive MRI machines to lots of rubber gloves and everything in between. >> Yeah, so it's a big task. I mean, it's something that organizations haven't thought about. All these organizations are being asked to cut costs, and it's a really good place to start, because, as you said, there's some really high ticketed priced items such as MRI machines, IV pumps, also, so they look at it from a clinical perspective which is really clinical engineering, and they also look at it from a facilities perspective, which is the safety of not only your patients but also your customers as well. They're really looking at two different categories from a clinical and a facilities perspective. >> How does KPMG help these organizations? Maybe you could describe how they engage. >> Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that KPMG does is we come in and actually take a look at what their systems look like today, look at their current state and and look at where their future state wants to be, so really do an assessment of their workflows, processes, people, and technology, and help them really put a road map in place to be successful in getting an enterprise strategy in place. >> When you do an assessment like that, is it, this big data collection exercise, you're going to get the right constituents in the room, you herd all the cats. Can you describe that and some of the challenges there? >> Yeah, absolutely. Some of the challenges is that today is that they have multiple disparate systems across the organization, so they could have 10 legacy systems that are not cloud based, that aren't online, everything's very manually driven, so we go in and we conduct business analysis workflows with their certain teams. We start either in facilities or clinical, depending upon where their biggest pain point is. Then we actually gather all that data and information and understand where they're not in sync with each other, because getting all of your folks at the same time at the right time, thinking, how do we standardize and consolidate across the organization is probably one of the biggest challenges they have today. >> How granular do you get in an assessment like that? >> It can be very granular. Sometimes we actually do physical inventory, so from a clinical perspective, especially if they had gone through mergers and acquisitions, they could have 14 different facilities with 14 different pieces of equipment in it. We can get down to the granular level of actually doing physical inventory accounts, because a lot of times, these, leadership doesn't even know, they could have the same piece of equipment in 14 different places and they're paying duplicate maintenance contracts, which is really, comes down to the vendor management aspect of it. We can go as granular as the physical inventory all the way up to the putting together the entire strategy around people, process, and technology. >> How does ServiceNow fit? >> ServiceNow, that's actually a great question. One of the things that organizations that have made the investment in ServiceNow is typically, especially in the healthcare setting, has made it in the IT space. This really allows them to leverage that investment and bring it out into other parts of their business, such as the clinical engineering, the facilities, and really, you start to see that standardized and consolidated platform across the organization. >> You work with your colleagues, this is obviously, a ServiceNow practice, right, and then you sort of hunt within those guys that have adopted, say, for instance, ITSM, and then say, OK, hey, look what else we can do for you. Is that right? >> Yeah, so we're working with a lot of the vendors that actually have built the enterprise management software. ServiceNow actually has an enterprise asset management solution as well. They've also, they partner with other organizations that look at it from a workflow, a whole entire work life cycle aspect of it. We work very closely with our ServiceNow team, because a lot of these organizations have built their ServiceNow platform, and we've been able to take that and bring it into other parts of the businesses, it's critical for success. >> KPMG obviously is independent, you're agnostic to technology, you're not supposed to play favorites. But like John Donahoe said yesterday, "My daughter's my favorite." >> That was classic. >> It was good. How do you, now at the same time, of course, you know certain technologies fit a particular use case, they have their strategic fit. Where is the ServiceNow strategic fit? >> Yeah, ServiceNow is in a lot of healthcare organizations today. When cloud became the big thing, they're already in a lot of our customers, so what we do, is we actually work with our ServiceNow counterparts, both from a ServiceNow perspective and also from a KPMG ServiceNow team and understand what those road maps look and how do they continue to mature in the ServiceNow platform. I would say 99% of the time, ServiceNow is the platform of choice because it's so easy to use. I'm sure you've heard that quite a bit. They can customize it to make it fit for them. A lot of times, because of our partnership with ServiceNow, it just is a good fit for both the client and for us and for ServiceNow. >> Are you managing a global organization? >> I manage the US right now. We have spoken to other large healthcare organizations. What's happening now is that we're seeing our clients are really starting to look at, OK, how do we look at our enterprise asset management from a physical contractual, help us make better enterprise wide business decisions. Now we're actually starting to see that go into not only the healthcare providers, but also into the clients that actually support them as well. We've worked with some large, in Germany, we were talking to them about how they can kind of start to play in this whole space as well. >> Just shifting gears a little bit, healthcare always gets knocked for being laggards on technology. But we've had a couple people on the show the last couple days that are involved in healthcare. I'm kind of curious of your perspective. Is that a legitimate knock? Is that changing? If it is changing, kind of, where do you see the opportunities for them to catch up, get ahead? Because it's such a big industry, it's such a big spend, so much facility. >> I think we're seeing it shift a little bit. I think they have been a little bit slow as far as technology goes, because there's been so many competing projects such as regulatory issues, the whole, now we're in the repeal and replace, so everyone's trying to figure out exactly what that means for them as an organization. We do see that shifting because it's becoming a very customer focused, the customer's driving, whether it be the customer or the patient, they're driving a lot of these organizations to start saying, we need technology, because we need, it's a very competitive market, as you said. We need them to stay within our organization or they're going to go elsewhere for the care. We're actually seeing, really, us as consumers of healthcare really pushing them in that direction that they need to start looking at technology more seriously. >> What's the vision? Where do you take this, midterm, long term? >> I think the vision is that, one, first is, it gives them an opportunity, as we said, to leverage the investments that they've made in their current technology such as ServiceNow to bring it into other parts of their business. It also allows them to start really putting the challenges that they have and to make enterprise wide business decisions as they move forward. I think you'll see them starting to look at, not only just from a facilities and clinical perspective, I think you'll start to see that really branch out into that entire continuum of care. >> How about this show? I know you're kind of doing it in and out. But have you had a chance to walk around, check out your booth? >> It's been amazing, it's been great. It's amazing the amount of partners that ServiceNow has in their ecosystem. I've learned a great deal. The keynotes have been fantastic. I'm looking forward to see what they do next year. I know that when they, last year it was 12,000 and this year it's up to 15,000, so it's quite a growth. >> Back to Vegas. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Bigger hallway. All right, Kerri, thanks very much for coming to the Cube, we appreciate it. >> Thank you so much, thank you for having me. >> Jeff: Thank you for coming by. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Jeff and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. (sweeping electronic music)

[Announcer]: Live from Orlando, Florida, It's the Cube. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. (electronic music) >> Hi Everybody, we're back in Orlando, Florida. This is The Cube, the leader in live-tech coverage and we are covering ServiceNow Knowledge17, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and my co-host, Jeff Fricke. Jeff, our fifth year doing Knowledge. >> Amazing. >> We've talked over the years about ServiceNow extending its platform into the line of business, and one of those areas is HR. We've had a number of guests on the HR and we're pleased to invite Deepak Bharadwaj, who is the general manager of the HR business unit. Great to see you Deepak, thanks for coming on again. >> Thanks Dave, pleasure. >> So off from the keynote this morning, I had tweeted out it was the best IT demo I'd ever seen. No technology, just people with footballs, soccer balls, taking us through an HR example. But, so before we get there, the keynote today. A huge audience, a lot of interest in HR and bringing ServiceNow to HR. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think what we recognized is HR is where a lot of these processes related life events start and then that has implications to many other departments. So, you think about onboarding, off boarding, transfers, relocations, external leave of absence. Almost all of these processes cut across all departments. And the department that gets the biggest workload often times is IT. So, one of the reasons we see all that interest from IT in HR type use cases is because they are at the receiving end of all of that action, if you will, and if we can solve it for IT, we solve it for HR, we are ultimately solving it for the employee and that's what we're all about. So, it's truly exciting to see the interest both in my HR topic keynote yesterday, as well as today. There are slightly different audiences. My topic keynote was more geared towards the HR audience and we actually have a lot of them at the show, which is always encouraging. And today's keynote was more geared towards what we call our IT champions who want to integrate HR to impress the platform and that's absolutely work we like to see as well. >> Yeah, so the momentum in the business is quite good. I know you guys don't break out the numbers specifically for your business unit but you talk about a lot of Pioneer Lightspeed HR customers. You gave some examples. One of the examples you gave was your recent, your personal experience. Everybody can relate to HR, but your recent name change. >> Yup. >> So give us an update, sort of on the business and talk a little bit more about why HR is so critical to ServiceNow. >> I think the opportunity to transform the enterprise is huge with HR, and just looking at the traction that we're seeing from the market place, it's almost the next adjacency after IT where there's just a lot of inefficiency. If you think about our work and lightspeed model, we're really going after unstructured work patterns and guess where the most unstructured work happens today. It's in HR. It's a nice adjacency for us. Plays well with our platform, the core of what we do with service management. And it's a market that's been underserved for years. Customers have told us, "This is what we would like you "to do." And that's how the HR business unit itself was formed, that's why I came here, that's how I got this job. And since then, we've just seen just dramatic traction, especially as the emphasis moves more and more towards making that experience truly consumerized, the service experience for the employee consumerized across all of the departments within the enterprise. So how do you treat your employees just like you would your customers? That's kind of a theme that you see cut across the entire costumer base, and they're really wanting to get on that bandwagon. And ServiceNow is an excellent platform to be accomplishing that. >> It's just so interesting how we see these great successes built in companies recently, just attacking unidentified inefficiency. The Cloud identified just a ridiculously low utilization rate at corporate data centers, and unlocked the value of that efficiency. Uber unlocked the inefficiency of all these cars sitting around not being used. And as you guys have identified, there's so much inefficiency in these unstructured processes that go cross multiple channels. Phone, text, email, Slack, Gerub, pick your favorite thing, they're all over the place. So, it's really this huge value opportunity to grab because it is just grossly inefficient, and almost so inefficient we don't even recognize that there's a much, much better way, until you actually do it in a much, much better way. >> Yeah, no, Jeff, that's absolutely right. So, like you mentioned, there's a technology aspect to this, so, there's just multiple systems, and that leads to inefficiency. And then, when you don't get what you want from the technology, what do you do? You resort to people. And so, for years, HR has dealt with this problem by just throwing more people at it. And the way I like to think about it is we've gone from this era of trying to, essentially, create reincarnations of things that were already automated. So, I come from the HCM space, if you will. Talent management, recruiting, and so, we've taken a recruiting system, and then tried to make that better and better and better. Put it in the cloud, and so on and so forth. And if you look Code HR and some of these other technologies that's what they do, and they do a great job at that. But what we've recognized is, yes, that is obviously important and necessary, but really, like I said earlier, when you have a life event, you are looking for just information, so you can make the choices that you want to be making during that life event. You want step-by-step guidance. You want access to some person, a real person, that can help answer those questions. And when you don't get those types of things, now you're back to unstructured emails and sending text messages to somebody in HR, and that's not their job. Their job is to be helping you with providing strategic support. And so, how can we unlock the utilization, if you will, of those HR professionals, the people, as an asset, within HR, and make them more productive. That's what we're all about. >> And then jump on the latest, greatest trend, which is Cloud, obviously you guys have Cloud application, a little bit of software automation, a little bit data support into that automation, and then, ta-da. Hopefully, it's a whole lot smoother process. >> Yeah, yeah. >> What has to happen for a customer to take advantage of HR within ServiceNow? We had one guest on yesterday that they actually started at HR, but generally, that's not the case, right? Normally, it's an extension of ITSM. So, what's the typical case and what are the prerequisites for customers? >> I think in mind, a couple of things have to happen. One is HR has to be brought in. So, we got a lot of IT champions, which is great, but I encouraged them to go out and to give these HR people a hug, literally. Because they need to understand what the platform can do for HR and how it can unlock that productivity that he just spoke about, Jeff. And HR has to be brought in, they need to be educated on the problem that they have. A lot of times, they don't even recognize that there's a problem, because they've just gotten used to doing things a certain way, and now, there is this revolutionary platform that can help them, so getting them on board, getting that buy in is important. I think the other thing that has to happen is these organizations need to identify very specific set of problems that they want to go after because if you look at the problem set that we can address it's everything from just simple case management all the way to automating business processes like on boarding. You can start wherever you want in that spectrum, but you need to figure out what your priorities are and start there, and if it's case management, that's fine. You figure that out. Now, you can actually measure progress and move from there. If you want to start with on boarding and automating a business process, that's fine, as well. But very often, I find that our customers need some help in trying to identify the priority projects that they can tackle. And that's a blessing and a curse of having such a powerful platform. It can do everything, and often times, it's just getting to the right set of priorities that you want to tackle. >> The flexibility of the platform, like you say, it's a two-sided coin. But I want to ask you a question. You're a software executive, you've been in the business a while. You know one of the complaints of software, historically, is if I have a process that's fossilized, a lot of times when I bring in new software, I have to change that process to adapt to the way in which the software handles it, and that's been a headwind for a lot of adoption. If I have a process that's baked can I just sort of use that within ServiceNow, and apply the existing processes? And is that typically how it happens? Or do customers sit back and say, hey, there's a better way to do this? >> Yeah, I would say, there's probably a mix of the two. There is the where do I start? I have a process, can't I just take that and put it into ServiceNow? And absolutely. That's been happening since ServiceNow has been in its existence. That's the core of what we do, being able to structure work, being able to automate it through workflows, things like that. But oftentimes, what'll happen is then they get the analytics, using performance analytics or reporting solutions, you can now start to look at what's working, what's not, and then make some adjustments. So, for example, with HR, you might start off with, hey, everything is a general inquiry. And so, now you're getting a number of things that are tagged as general inquiries, but then you look at analytics data, and it says, well 30% of those are actually going to the payroll department. So guess what? Now we need to restructure our processes so that we've got some special handling for payroll, because that tends to be a friction point for employees. And that's how our platform can provide that visibility, so you can evolve as your needs evolve and you mature. >> I was going to say, and I'm sure people are wondering, there's other big HCM applications out there. You've worked with some of them. How does the ServiceNow offering suite fix into their existing HR application infrastructure. >> Great question. So, this is probably the number one question that our customers ask us. They're trying to figure out where does ServiceNow start and where do these other applications begin. And I think the answer is it depends. And we want to provide customers with choices. What we are trying to optimize for is that employee service experience. What does that look like, and how do we make it as consumerized as possible? So, there's maybe three broad use cases where these solutions fit in. So, one might be I am within one of these systems. So, let's say I'm doing a performance review within a work day or success factors, and now, I have a question, I'm stuck here. Now, you're in ServiceNow, and you're submitting a case, asking a question, searching a knowledge article, as an example. That's one use case. The second use case is something happened in my life. I'm going to have a baby, or somebody in my family is sick and I need to tend to them. Or I need to relocate an employee from a different country. Where do I even begin? So you start with ServiceNow, potentially. You figure out what you want to do, and then you submit the request, and eventually, you might end up completing a transaction in one of the systems. But what we do is help guide that employee to where they need to be going. And the third one really is the use case we explored this morning, which is around on boarding, off boarding, transfers, how do we take what's happening within those systems, and extend that to all the other department? So, there may be aspects of on boarding, as an example, that's happening in a recruiting system. How do we take that and then extend it into IT and finance and facilities, and so on and so forth. >> Jeff: Great. That's a good question. >> Deepak, can you share with us some early customer experiences, some maybe metrics, proof points? >> Sure, yeah. I actually had a couple of those on the screen this morning so I'll use Sally Beauty as an example. Beauty supply retailer. And they started with the employee relations function, and trying to optimize that. And the challenge they were having is all of the employee relations questions from the field, and they got a number of stores, and all of these associates where sending in these questions and inquiries and complaints, in some cases, to the HR business partner. So, there were regional business partners in each of the regions, and they were getting all of these questions. So, as a result, that HR business partner, who is supposed to be thinking about how to help staff new stores, and just provide more strategic support to the managers, district managers, they are fielding first level questions about employee relations. And so, what they did was they centralized that function, the HR service delivering function, so that there is all these calls go to a central location, and they just had two people, now, manning it, and we did some value calculation with them, and what we recognized is they had saved the equivalent of seven people's worth of time, that could then be repurposed back into something else. So, the centralized the function, the moved work from high cost business partners to lower cost HR support personnel, and each person that you can free up is at least $100,000 a year, fully loaded. And so that math starts to add up pretty fast and pretty quickly. This is just employee relations. You extend that to benefits and payroll, and so on and so forth. You in millions of dollars a year. >> That's a pretty powerful example, and even though they're not getting rid of people, but they're avoiding potentially new hires, and as you say, they're driving new value. Every company we talk to is trying to do some kind of digital transformation. What they don't want to do is route paper. So, is that what you're seeing? Where are they putting the resources that they're saving. What are seeing? Some examples of what customers are doing. >> It's all sorts of things. I think analyzing the data is a big area. Just the data science piece of it. So, if you look at a service center, would you rather be looking at how to reorganize your resources, or would you rather respond via email to all these unstructured queries? Clearly, the former is a much more higher value added work. So that's one area that you see a lot of repurposing. The other that I talk about is how can you improve the quality of service itself. So, instead of you answering questions about my benefits plan, go find me a better benefits plan. Do some research and look at what else it out there. That's where you should be spending time. And the classic one is really around talent. There's just a lot of talent management type activities that need to take place from sourcing, recruiting, managing succession planning processes and thing like that. Again, you should not be telling me how to put a job requisition online, and what pay grade to select and what area to post this in. All of that should be available as some sort of a knowledge-based item. You should be actually going out there and doing your job of sourcing high-quality candidates. So, that's how these things really compliment each other and unlock the potential of the HR team. >> Yeah, spend your time sharpening the sod, not whackin' at the tree, right? >> Exactly. >> I got an automated tree whacker. I can actually focus on where I want to go next. >> All right, real quick, we have limited time here, but the announcements that you're makin' today, we haven't touched on that yet. So, give us the run down. >> What we've done, essentially, is looked at processes that require, and the way we categorize it is these are processes that are usually long running, processes that require action across multiple parties, multiple departments, and they have a specific sequence. So, we looked at that as the baseline, and we said, hey, what fits into this? Because if we could create a structure that models this out in a very easy to configure manner, than what problems could we solve. Obviously we used onboarding as the example of where we wanted to go, but we found out that that model is easily applicable for transfers or off boarding, things like that. And so, what we've done is taken the underlying workflow capabilities off the platforms. Underneath the covers, it's still a workflow that is running but we essentially created a very clean data model on top. The imagery that I use is when you go into these HR, visit any HR customer, if they are going through an exercise of revamping, let's say, their onboarding process, then you'll see a wall with sticky notes, Post-It sticky notes, different colors. And we took that and we said how can we get that into the software, where you'll see phases. There is day, offer stage, pre boarding, week one, month one, and so on and so forth, and each of those stickies, they actually represent activities within the application. So, we've created a model that lets you take that visual imagery and put it in the product, so it's just easy for them, easy for HR to be able to configure this without needing any technical expertise and that's where I think there's a lot of IP. It helps them with change management. It'll help with adoption. And hopefully, it'll bring a true transformation, not just to HR, but across the enterprise. >> Excellent, well, Deepak, thanks very much for coming back in The Cube. It's good to see you again. >> My pleasure, Dave, Jeff. Thank you so much. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is The Cube, we're live from Knowledge17, and we'll be right back. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's the Cube. Covering Servicenow, Knowledge 17. Brought to you by Servicenow. >> Welcome back to Orlando everybody this is the Cube the leader in live tech coverage, we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, and we are here for our fifth year at Knowledge this is Knowledge 17, Sean Convery's here he's the general manager of the security business unit at Servicenow, an area that I'm very excited about Shawn. Welcome back to the Cube, it's good to see you again. >> It's great to be here, thanks for having me. >> So let's see you guys launched last year at RSA we talked in depth at Servicenow Knowledge about what you guys were doing. You quoted a stat the other day which I thought was pretty substantial at the financial analyst meeting, 1.1 million job shortfall in cyber. That is huge. That's the problem that you're trying to address. >> Well it's unbelievable, I was- you know we were just doing the keynote earlier this morning and I was recounting, most people in security get in it because they have some, you know desire to save the world right? To to- they watched a movie, they read a book, they're really excited and motivated to come in- >> What's was yours, was it comic book, was it- >> It was, uh, War Games with Matthew Broderick, I was 10 years old which totally dates me, movie came out in '83 so nobody has to look it up. (laughing) And you know I was just, you know blown away by this idea of using technology and being able to change things and the trouble is analysts show up to work and they don't have that experience, and nobody's expected, but they're not even close right? They wind up being told okay here's all this potential phishing email, we'd like you to spend 20 minutes on each one trying to figure out if it actually is phishing. And there's 600 messages. So tell me when you're done and I'll give you the next 600 messages. And so it's not motivating >> Not as sexy as War Games. >> It's not as sexy as War Games exactly. And then the CICO's say, well I can't even afford the people who are well trained. So I hire people right out of school, it takes me six months to train them, they're productive for six months, and then they leave for double their salary. So you wind up with a, sort of a 50 percent productivity rate out of you new hires, and it's just, it's just a recipe for for the past right? You know, we need to think more about how we, how we change things. >> So let's sort of remind our audience in terms of security, you're not building firewalls, you're not, you know competing with a lot of the brand name securities like MacAfee or FireEye, or Palo Alto networks, you're complementing them. Talk about where you fit in the security ecosystem. >> Sure. So if you boil down the entire security market, you can really think about protection and detection as the main two areas, so protection think of a firewall, an antivirus, something that stops something bad, and think of detection as uh, I'm going to flag potentially bad things that I think are bad but I'm not to certain that I want to absolutely stop them. And so what that does is it creates a queue of behavior that needs to be analyzed today by humans, right? So this is where the entire SIM market and everything else was created to aggregate all those alerts. So once you've got the alerts, you know awesome, but you've got to sort of walk thought them and process them. So what Servicenow has focused on is the response category. And visualization, aggregation is nice, but will be much better is to provide folks the mechanism to actually respond to what's happening. Both from a vulnerability standpoint, and from an incidence standpoint. And this is really where Servicenow's expertise shines because we know workflow, we know automation, we know about system of action, right? So that's our pedigree and IT frankly is several years ahead of where the security industry is right now until we can leverage that body of expertise not just with Servicenow, but with now all of our partners to help accelerate the transformation for security team. >> So I got to cut right to the chase. So last year we talked about- and of course every time we get a briefing for instance from a security vendor, where- we're given a stat that is on average it takes 200 sometimes you've seen as high as 300 but let's say 200 days to detect an incident then the answer is so buy our prevention, or our detection solution. >> Yeah. >> I asked you last year and I tweeted out, you know a couple days ago is, has Servicenow affected that? Can you affect- I asked you last year, can you affect that, can you compress that timeframe, you said "we think so." Um what kind of progress have you made? >> Sure so you have to remember about that 200 day stat that that is a industry average across all incidents right? So the Ponemon institute pulls this data together once a year, they survey over 300 companies, and they found that I think it's 206 days is the average right now. And so to identify an- a breach, and then another 75 days to contain it. So together it's nine months, which is a frighteningly long period of time. And so what we wanted to do is measure across all of our productions security operations customers what is their average time to identify and time to contain. So it turns out, it's so small we have to convert it to hours. It's 29 hours to identify, 33 hours to contain, which actually is a 160x improvement in identification, and a 50x improvement in containment. And so we're really excited about that. But you know, frankly, I'm not satisfied. You know, I'm still measuring in hours. Granted we've moved from months to hours, but I want it from hours, to minutes, to seconds, and really, you know we can show how we can do that in minutes today with certain types of attacks. But, there's still the long breaches. >> That's a dramatic reduction, you know I know it's, that 206 whatever it is is an average of averages. >> For sure. >> But the delta between what you're seeing and your customer base is not explainable by, oh well the Servicenow customers just happen to be better at it or lucky year, it's clearly an impact that you're having. >> Well sure, let's be you know as honest as we can be here right? The, you know the people who are adopting security operations are forward thinking security customers so you would expect that they're better, right? And so your- there program should already be more mature than the average program. And if you look across those statistics, like 200 and some days, you know that includes four year long breaches, and it also includes companies that frankly don't pay as much attention to security as they should. But even if you factor all of that out, it's still a massive massive difference. >> So if I looked at the bell curve of your customers versus some of the average in that survey, you'd see, the the shift, the lump would shift way to the left, right? >> Correct. Correct. And, and you know we actually have a customer, Ron Wakely from ANP Financial Services out of Australia, who was just up on stage talking about a 60 percent improvement in his vulnerability and response time. So from identifying the vulnerabilities via Quaales, Rapid 7, Tenable, whoever their scanning vendor is, all the way through IT patching, 60 percent faster, and given that, I think it's something like 80 percent of vulnerabi- or 80 percent of attacks, come from existing vulnerabilities, that's big change. >> So do get- you got to level it when you're measuring things and you change the variable that you're measuring, as opposed to the number, right? That means you're doing a good thing. So to go from, from hours to minutes, is it continuous improvement, or are there some big, you know potential challenges that you can see that if you overcome those challenges, those are going to give you some monumental shifts in the performance. >> I, I think we're ready. I think when we come back next year, the numbers will be even better and this is why, so many of our customers started by saying "I have no process at all, I have manual, you know I'm using spreadsheets, and emails, and notebooks, you know, and trying to manage the security incident when it happens." So let me just get to a system of action, let me get to a common place where I can do all of this investigation. And that's where most of our production customers are so if you look across the ones who gave us the 29 hour and the 33 hour set, that really just getting that benefit from having a place for everybody to work together where we're going, but this is already shipping in our product is the ability to automate the investigation, so back to, back to the, you know, the poor 10 year old who didn't get to save the world, you know, now he gets to say, this entire investigation stage is entirely automated. So if I hand an analyst, for example, an infected server, there's 10 steps they need to do before they even make a decision on anything right? They have to get the network connections, get the running processes, compare them to the processes that should be on the system, look up on a reputation site all the ones that are wrong like all these manual steps. We can automate that entire process so that the analyst gets to make the decision, he's sort of presented the data, here's the report, now decide. The analogy I always use is the, the doctor who's sort of rushing down in an ER show, and somebody hands him an MRI or an X-ray and he's looking at it, you know, through the fluorescent, you know, lights as he's walking and he's like "oh" you know "five millileters of" whatever and "do this" right? >> Right. >> That's the way an analyst wants to work right? They want the data so they can decide. >> I tell you this is the classic way that machines help people do better work right? Which we hear about over and over and over. Let the machines do the machine part, collecting all the shitty boring data, um, and then present you know the data to the person to make the decision. >> Absolutely. >> Probably with recommendations as well right? With some weighted average recommendations >> Yeah and this is where it gets really exciting, because the more we start automating these tasks, you know the human still wants to make the decision but as we grow and grow this industry, one of the benefits of us being in a cloud, is we can start to measure what's happening across all of our customers, so when attack X occurs, this is the behavior that most of our customers follow, so now if you're a new customer, we can just say "in your industry, customers like you tend to do this". >> Right. >> Right? And really excited by what our engineering team is starting to put together. >> Do you have a formal, or at some point maybe down the road a formal process where customers can opt in to an aggregation of, you know we're all in this together we're probably going to share our breach data with one another so that we can start to apply a lot more data across properties to come to better resolutions quicker. >> Well we actually announced today something called trusted security circles. So this is a capability to allow all of our customers to share indicators, so when you're investigating an issue, the indicators are something that are called an indicator of compromise, or an IOC, so we can share those indicators between customers, but we can do that in an anonymous way right? And so you know, the analogy I give you is, what do you do when you lose power in your house? Right? You grab the flashlight, you check the breakers, and then you look out the window, because what are you trying to find out? >> Is anybody else out? >> Is anybody else out exactly. So, you can't do that in security, you're all alone, because if you disclose anything, you risk putting your company further in a bad spot right? Cause now it's reputation damage, somebody discloses the information, so now we've been able to allow people to do this anonymously right so it's automatic. I share something with both of you, you only see that I shared if it's relevant, meaning the service now instance found it in your own environment, and then if all three of us are in a trusted circle, when any one of us shares, we know it was one of the three, but we don't know which one. So the company's protected. >> So just anecdotally when I speak to customers, everybody still is spending more on prevention than on detection. And there's a recognition that that has to shift, and it's starting to. Now you're coming in saying, invest in response. Which, remember from our conversation last year is right on I'm super excited about that because I think the recognition must occur at the board room that you are going to get infiltrated it's the response that is going to determine the quality of your security. And you still have to spend on prevention and detection. But as you go to the market, first of all can you affirm or deny that you're seeing that shift from prevention to detection in spending, is it happening sort of fast enough, and then as you go in and advise people to think about spending on responding, what's their reaction? What are you finding is the, are the headwinds and what's the reception like? >> Sure. So you know to answer your first question about protection to detection, I would say that if you look at the mature protection technologies, right they are continuing to innovate, but certainly what you would expect a firewall to do this year, is somewhat what you expected it to do last year. But the detection category really feels like where there's a lot of innovation, right? So you're seeing you know new capabilities on the endpoint side network side, anomol- you're just seeing all sorts of diff- >> Analytics. >> Analytics, absolutely. And so uh, I do see more spent simply because more of these attacks are too, too nasty to stop, right? You sort of have to detect them and do some more analysis before you can make the decision. To your second question about, you know, what's the reception been when we started talking about response. You know, I haven't had a single meeting with a customer where they haven't said, "wow" like "we need that", right? It was very- I've never had anybody go "Well yeah our program is mature, we're fine, we don't need this." Um, the question is always just where do we start? And so we see, you know vulnerability management as one great place to start incident response is another great place to start. We introduced the third way to start, just today as well. We started shipping this new capability called vendor risk management, which actually acknowledges the the, you know we talked about the perimeter list network what five years ago? Something like that, we're saying oh the perimeter's gone, you know, mobile devices, whatever. But there's another perimeter that's been eroding as well, which is the distinction between a corporate network and your vendors and suppliers. And so your vendors and suppliers become massive sources of potential threat if they're not protected. And so the assessment process, you know, there's telcos who have 50,000 vendors. So you think about the exposure of that many companies and the process to figure out, do they have a strong password policy, right? Do they follow the best practices around network security, those kinds of things, we're allowing you to manage that entire process now. >> So you're obviously hunting within the service now customer-based presumably, right? You want to have somebody to have the platform in order to take advantage of your product. >> Sure. >> Um, could you talk about that dynamic, but also other products that you integrate with. What are you getting from the customers, do I do I have this capability- this is who I use for firewall who I use for detection do you integrate them, I'm sure you're getting that a lot. Maybe talk to that. >> Sure sure. So first off, it's important to share that the Servicenow platform as a whole is very easy to integrate with. There's API's throughout the entire system, you know we can very easily parse even emails, we have a lot of customers that you know have an email generated from an alert system, and we can parse out everything in the email and map it right into a structured workflow, so you can kind of move from unstructured email immediately into now it's in service now. But we have 40 vendors that we directly integrate with today and when I was here about a year ago, I think that number was maybe three or two. And so we're up at 40 now, and that really encompasses a lot of the popular products so we can for example, you know, a common use case, we talked about phishing a little bit right? You know, let me process a potential phishing email, pull out the URL, the subject line, all the things that might indicate bad behavior, let me look them up automatically on these public threat sources like Virus Total or Meta Defender, and then if the answer is they don't think it's bad, I can just close the incident right? If they think it's bad, now I can ask the Palo Alto Firewall, are you already blocking this particular URL, and if the Palo Alto Firewall says "yeah I was already blocking it", again you can close the incident. Only the emails that were known to be bad, and your existing perimeter capabilities didn't stop, did you need to involve people. >> I have to ask you, it goes back to the conversation we had with Robert Gates last year, but I felt like Stuxnet was this milestone, where the, the game just got escalated big time. And it went from sort of harmless, sometimes not harmless, really up the level of risk. Because now others, you know the bad guys really dug into what they could do, and it became pretty substantial. I was asking Gates generally about some future warfare in cyber, and he, this is obviously before the whole Russian hacking, but certainly Snowden and Wikileaks and so fourth was around. And he said, "The United States has to be very careful about how it responds. We have maybe many more capabilities but if we show our hand, others are going to see those weapons, and have access to those weapons, cause it's digital." I wonder as a security expert if you could sort of comment on the state of security, the future of that threat generically, or generally. Where do you see that going? >> Well there's a couple of things that come to mind as you're talking. Uh, one is you're right, Stuxnet was an eye opener I think for a lot of people in the industry that that, that these kinds of vulnerabilities are being used for, you know nation state purposes rather than, you know just sort of, uh random bad behavior. So yeah I would go back to what I said earlier and say that, um, we have to take the noise, the mundane off the table. We have to automate that, you're absolutely right. These sort of nation state attackers, if you're at a Global 2000 organization, right your intellectual property is valuable, the data you have about your employees is valuable, right all this information is going to be sought by competitors, by nation states, you have to be able to focus on those kinds of attacks, which back to my kind of War Games analogy, like that's what these people wanted to do, they wanted to find the needle in the haystack, and instead they're focusing on something more basic. And so I think if we can up the game, that changes things. The second, and really interesting thing for me is this challenge around vulnerability, so you talked about Gates saying that he has to be careful sort of how much he tips his hand. I think it was recently disclosed that the NSA had a stockpile of vulnerabilities that they were not disclosing to weaponize themselves. And that's a really paradoxical question right? You know, do you share it so that everybody can be protected including your own people, right? Imagine Acrobat, you find some problem in Acrobat, like well do you use it to exploit the enemy, or do you use it to protect your own environment? >> It's quite a dilemma. >> You- it's a huge dilemma cause you're assuming either they have it or they don't have the same vulnerability and so I'm fascinated by how that whole plays out. Yeah, it's a little frightening. >> And you know, in the land of defense, you think okay United States, you know biggest defense, spends the most money, has the, you know the most, you know, amazing machines whatever. Um, but in cyber, you know you presume that's the case, but you don't really know, I think of high frequency trading, you know, it was a lit of Russian mathmeticians that actually developed that, so clearly other states have, you know smart people that can you know create, you know, dangerous threats. And it's, it's- >> You only have to live once to, that's kind of the defense game. You got to defend them all, you have to bat 1000 on the defense side, or you know, get it and react, from the other guys side, he can just pow pow pow pow pow, you just got to get through once. >> So this is why your strategy of response is such a winner. >> Well this is where it comes back to risk as well right? At the end of the day you're right, you know a determined adversary you know, sorry to break it to everybody at some point is going to be able to find some way to do some damages. The question is how do you quantify the various risks within your organization? How do you focus your energy from a technology perspective, from a people standpoint, on the things that have the most potential to do your organization harm, and then, you know there's just no way people can stop everything unless you, you know unplug. >> And then there's the business. Then there's the business part of it too right? Cause this is like insurance when do you stop buying more insurance, you know? You could always invest more at what point does the investment no longer justify the cost because there's no simple answer. >> Well this is where, uh you know, we talked to chief information security officers all the time who are struggling with the board of directors conversation. How do I actually have an emotional conversation that's not mired in data on how things are going? And today they often have to fall back on stats like you know we process 5 million alerts per day, or we have, you know x number of vulnerabilities. But with security operations what they can do is say things like well my mean time to identify, you know was 42 hours, and this quarter it's 14 hours, and so the dollars you gave me, here's the impact. You know I have 50 critical vulnerabilities last quarter, this quarter I have 70, but only on my mission critical system, so that indicates future need to fund or reprioritize, right? So suddenly now you've got data where you can actually have a meaningful conversation about where things are from a posture prospective. >> These are the assets that we've, you know quantified the value of, these are the ones that were prioritizing the protection on and here's why we came up with that priority, let's look at that and, you know agree. >> Exactly. You know large organizations, I was talking to the CISO of a fortune ten, 50 I guess and he was sharing that it takes 40 percent of their time in incident response is spent tracking down who owns the IP address. 40 percent. So imagine, you spent 40 percent of a, you know 25 hour response time investigating who owns the asset, and then you find out it's a lab system, or it's a spare. You just wasted 40 percent of your time. But if you can instead know, oh this is your finance reporting infrastructure, okay you super high priority, let's focus in on that. So this is where the business service mapping, the CMDB becomes such a differentiator, when it's in the hands of our customers. >> Super important topic Sean Convery, thanks very much for coming back in the cube and, uh great work. Love it. >> It's great to be here, thanks for having me. >> Alright keep it right there everybody we'll be right back with our next guest, this is the Cube, we're live from Servicenow Knowledge 17 in Orlando. We'll be right back.

>> 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)

>> 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)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge17 brought to you by ServiceNow. >> We're back this is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick Rob McDonnell is here he's the head of Enterprise Products at Air New Zealand Rob thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> My pleasure thanks for having me. >> So Air New Zealand you know energy costs are down that's good for the airline business isn't it. >> Anything that's good for the barrel price of oil. >> It's priced like a tax cut to the consumer, we all go traveling. Tell us a little about the organization and your role. So we're in New Zealand headquartered out of Auckland in New Zealand Asia Pacific based but we have routed that travel to London as well. Asia Pacific is our core business. I'm part of the Digital Leadership team in the Enterprise Products, that's products like a typical IT function would run, like a CIO would run. So we have a product organization which we've had in place for the last year and a half. One of the product managers looks after our customers. So for online booking, mobile app and customer experience, one of my colleagues looks after the operational products another colleague looks after air points products with the frequent flier program. And I look after everything else internally so you've got HR products, you've got finance, help desk, incident management, we've got mobility, offices, workspace and collaboration, so there's really quite a bit in there. >> So what are the big drivers in your business that are affecting those things that you look after. >> Probably the primary one now is the new focus and a renewed focus on the internal customer. Since we started in this role a year and a half ago I've been mandating and championing the cause of the internal customer. Typically, it's about the revenue and the external customer but for me it's about the internal customer. And I've got 12 and a half thousand Air New Zealanders that I consider my customers. Those guys are the ones that wake up in the morning, they look at their Apple watch and check a message, or they login in the morning and that experience has to be correct, it has to be right when they walk into the office and when they swipe in with a badge or want to do something like get a payroll slip or something. That experience is my primary driver. So, we're looking at typifying what we have so fixing the pain-points is probably my first thing. Remove all the pain points out of the way of my customers my users, make sure they can operate. Make the job the challenge, not the tools they are using. Focusing on mobility, so focusing on the more mobile workforce that we have. I'd reckon about 60% of my user base is considered mobile. We got crew and pilots that you wouldn't see in the head office from one day to the next. A big push on cloud for obvious reasons, and then future workspace. >> So tell us about your ServiceNow journey, when did that start? >> So our ServiceNow journey started just over a year and a half ago. We had quite a frustrating environment where we had a bad reputation for digital services. People weren't too happy calling our help desk. The name of the product we had was called assist an internally branded product, people called it Cease and desist, the reputation was, we had a bad reputation. So one of our primary goals was to get that reputation back, earn it back and really try and delight out customers. So we had gone through some product selection and ServiceNow came right on top and was the product of choice for us to implement. So we were able to replace four platforms with ServiceNow. We had one platform we buying parts off the internet a couple things to keep it going, so was a bit of a shaky situation. Bad user experience, so implementing ServiceNow we made sure that we took a, when we did the reorganization for digital, we stopped the project and changed it to be a business organizational change project not an IT project. So it wasn't IT delivering a product to the business it was a business choice and a business decision so we changed, stopped the project, introduced and implemented change management as part of the project, we brought in different skills in terms of Agile ways of working and we changed the product structure as well to suit. We went live with an MVP last year, we pushed out redesigned platform January last year, was about 70% ready, so again it was a new feeling for Air New Zealand staff having a product that wasn't perfect, but just suited for going live. And then we went live with the full suite of what we were doing in June, July last year. It's been an awesome journey. >> So you made the decision to sweep the floor of these four other platforms. At the point at which you made that decision you did a contract with ServiceNow. What happened, how long did it take you to get to that MVP, what did you have to do. I mean the old saying is God created the world in six days but he didn't have an install base. You had to deal with that existing infrastructure how did you go from that point to the MVP how long did it take? >> Our approach was to, we were trying to de-risk or learn more about what the experience is going to be for our customers, so we went live, onboard in Helsinki so one of the first customers to go live on the Helsinki product. In the interim, we took the existing platform and we reskinned it with a brand new look and feel. The brand new look and feel was around how we wanted our customers to experience service management. So we followed them in terms of their role rather than just rolling out the product. So we reskinned the existing product and we reiterated and reiterated on what they wanted. Changing the features in the screen and rolling that one out. So we knew we had a really really good product and on the day we went live, we just basically flipped the switch. We didn't carry over any existing tickets, migrated hardly any of the data, started from scratch basically by flicking a switch. The product we went live with on the ServiceNow platform looked exactly like the one we reskinned in preparation for when we de-risked it. >> How long did that take to get to MVP? >> MVP was about two months and we included design. Then the remainder was about three months. >> What are some of the things you're measuring in terms of the customer satisfaction? Obviously nobody is saying cease and desist anymore. But what are some of the things you are measuring getting feedback from your internal customers? >> People like the product they like the platform. They like the fact that we can access it on a mobile phone. Which again, is a new thing for internal staff and Air New Zealanders. Along side the digital changes we were making some physical changes too. So we introduced a new help desk along side both at the airport and in the city offices. So again, people were getting physical and digital experience when we went live. And like I said I like the product, I like the simplicity and our business partners enjoy the speed that they can get catalog items up and get their teams more efficient and more effective. The ability to do pre-approved changes has driven a lot of efficiency, I think we have over 75% of pre-approved changes. We had things like I think 26% of our calls to the help desk were for password resets we're using this took to help reduce those numbers. We introduced a new MPS score as well or a digital happiness score for our internal customers. So we have it for external, so we've introduced that for internal. We promote that on the front of our portal as well so people can give us feedback in terms of what they like and what they don't like. So it's fairly responsive in how we react to what they want in the product. >> You avoided custom modules or did you do some custom modification to the platform? >> Mainly configuration to get it where we wanted to go. The look and feel in the portal was fairly custom but using code components available on the platform. >> Yeah, so when you upgrade you don't have to do the heavy wrestling with the modules. >> No it was an easy journey. >> And then how about a single CMDB is that something that you guys have adopted. >> So CMDB we delayed until this year. We're actually starting it next month. >> What's the conversation like internally around CMDB? Is it, you got a lot of different parts of the organization and is it going to be a single CMDB for the entire organization or are there going to be multiple CMDB's? >> So it's a big, scary topic, and the lady we're getting on, we're talking about it in iterative approach start small and build out. Primarily it will be the core enterprise stack, shared services stack, then we need to look at, and again it's wonderful being here at Knowledge and learning how far people are pushing it in terms of their external customers, so I'm looking at operations, I'll be looking at IoT and figuring how I can use that platform to be more effective. Having the CMDB will be a good starting block for that. >> You said IoT. >> So opportunities for us are around, we're an airline we have plans, we have power machines, we have engines on planes so you would have heard GE being mentioned quite a bit here. So what's the opportunity with those products and how can we use service management for event management of those stacks? When we think about the digital workplace environment and the connected devices, how do we use ServiceNow in that environment and how do we use it effectively? I think there's a great opportunity for us there. >> Can you take us back into the discussions internally when you had to sell the project internally to the management. Who did you have to involve, what was the business case? >> I think the business case was primarily lead by IT. Or the old IT because it was our product. All the onus on the project resided in IT, so I think the sale around the cost of the platform the duration on implementation, it wasn't too hard to sell in terms of the risk we were carrying on the legacy platforms. I think the opportunity if you flip it around the other side it was an easier conversation to our customers to say this is what you're getting and they were quite keen and quite eager to get involved in the implementation. >> What have you seen so far, it's early days but what kind of results have you seen? Can you share any metrics with us? >> I'll give you some indications early on about pre-approved changes and we have a bit of a, I'll defer on the exact numbers on our desk, we have so many parameters going on in New Zealand it wouldn't be fair to anybody. >> Well so just generally the business impact how would you describe that? >> Very positive, so we use it in the GSS area so Group Shared Services, so they're finding it far more effective to engage with their teams allocating work and automating the workflow. We have quite a queue, quite a backlog of other areas that want to get involved and automate and optimize. >> Where do you see this platform going? Do you see it driving into different parts of the business? We hear a lot about that at this conference is that something that you guys are looking at? >> Yeah, we rolled out to a group, our ground service equipment team, so they use it for example, a rampload or someone on the tarmac notifying a vendor that there is something wrong with a piece of equipment. So that optimizes that flow. So we're saving them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. So that's quite an efficiency gain. So looking to push into again, more HR and finance, Group Shared Services. Looking to optimize against our work day implementation in July, so make sure those two platforms work together very well and build a platform appropriately. >> OK, so you'll bring in the HR piece, is that right? >> Yeah, we'll need to find a, I've been having lots of conversations the last few days around how those two behemoth products fit together how you use them effectively and that's where we need to get to. So how do you use a portal on the front end to make it easier for the customer or the user to do what they want without having to think about what platform they need to go to. >> How about the show? You mentioned it's great being here, as a quasi-noob. Is this your first? >> This is my first Knowledge. I think it's fantastic. >> Things you've learned? What kinds of things are exciting you here? >> I like the ServiceNow people amazing, passionate, including the guys back in Australia and New Zealand a few of them are here, I can see the passion back there and I can see it here so it's quite collegial and it's amazing to see. I think the event's awesome, it's massive. Keynote was fantastic, it was really good. And just the energy with the vendors and the passion that people have for their customers and the business value they can get from this product, that's one of the key things I'm hearing from all the conversations. >> It sounds like you're getting what's been talked about over and over which is such the peer input in terms of helping you figure out where you're going to go next. >> Yeah, lot's of people are here to learn, but also lots of people are here to share and I'm learning that time and time again. Which is great. >> Rob thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your story. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. >> Alright keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Knowledge17. Be right back.

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's The Cube. Covering Service Now Knowledge 17. Brought to you by Service Now. >> we're back, welcome to Orlando, everybody, this is Service Now Knowledge 17, #Know17. I'm Dave Vellante with my cohost, Jeff Frick. Dave Wright is here, he's the chief strategy officer of Service Now and a long time Cube friend. Good to see you again, David. >> Good seeing you again, guys. So off the keynote, we were just talking about intelligent automation and what's new in your world. New way to work is really kind of the broader theme here, people are changing the way they work. So what is intelligent automation and how does it fit in? >> So what we did when we built intelligent automation is we wanted to come at it from a different angle. So we didn't want to build a product and then look for a solution that it'd work with, we wanted to go out and speak to people and see what are the challenges that they faced. So what we did was we came up with kind of four key areas where people wanted to be able to improve or do things differently. We wanted the capability to be able to predict when something was going to happen from an event perspective. We wanted to be able to use machine learning to be able to augment it. So to be able to perhaps order, categorize, or provide severity, or in the case of change, provide risk analysis. We wanted to be able to do that at a machine level rather than use a human triage level. Then people were coming back saying we feel we're doing a good job, but we want to understand if we're doing a good job, so that was the concept of expanding out the benchmarks program to include more and more benchmarks for people to see how they compared against their peers. And the final element was people wanted to set themselves performance targets, but then they wanted to understand when am I going to get to that target. So what we have to do then was augment the whole performance analytics suite to be able to do predictive analytics. So they're kind of the four core areas that sit in the intelligent automation engine. We can go into as much detail as you want around them, but it's pretty interesting. >> So help us understand, 'cause I get a little confused about, you know, when I hear something like a big announcement coming up at Jakarta, platform, but then I see bits and pieces hit the various products. Can you maybe set that up for us and help us understand. >> Yeah, so what'll happen is the benchmarking, the predictive analytics capability, and the ability to do predictive service usage, they will all appear in Jakarta. And then the actual ML side where we can do the auto-categorization, that will appear in the Kingston release. So by the end of the year, everything that's shown will be available. >> And it hits the platform and then the modules take advantage of that, is that correct? >> Yes, so what is happening at the moment is the initial use cases have gone through around IT. So it's IT looking at well how do we process events so that we can get a precursor to a bigger issue and predict the bigger issue. How do we categorize when someone comes in with an IT request or an IT incidence, how do we make sure it goes to the right people and gets the right categorization. And then what'll happen over time is we'll be able to use that for the security module, we'll be able to use it for customer service, for human resources, because it's all, in the same way we said, it's all a different type of service, it's exactly the same process to be able to categorize, to prioritize, to put a severity on something. And then more long term, we can use this technology to look at all kinds of different files on the system. >> And when you say IT first, it's ITSM and ITOM, is that right? >> Yes, ITSM and ITOM. >> Okay, and so good, I like this, this is a very practical example of, generally, AI, as people don't really know what it is. You're going to tell us that something's going to break before it breaks is usually the use case here. >> What we realized is because we can now start to look at time series data and analyze time series data, there's a few things we can do. So the first thing is we can do corelation, so we can start to link events together, so people didn't spend ages just trying to fix the symptoms, they could go right down to the disease and say well, this is what's causing everything else. The other thing we could build in because we could understand what normal looked like is we could build an anomaly detection. So normally, an event says hey, this has got a high CPU, or this switch has gone down. Now we could say this just looks weird. We've got an activity that never normally happens to this level, or it never normally happens at this time of day, or we've never seen this before on a Saturday. And we can actually generate an anomaly alert at that point. Now, the anomaly alert might be a precursor to a traditional alert where you might get. I think the example used in the actual keynote was we get a large number of user threads on a system, that's probably a precursor to high CPU. So once we've started to be able to do that correlation, the more and more examples you get, the more you can start to predict. So you can say as soon as I get that precursor, I have a level of confidence of when we're going to see the next event. So now you get a brand new type of incidence, you'll get an incident for a predicted failure. So the system will say I've seen this, this, and this, I'm 86% confident we've got two hours and we're going to lose this service. So the whole concept of this was how do you work at light speed. And my whole challenge was what happens when you do it before it happens, is that beyond light speed, it was very difficult to try and wrap your mind around it. >> The speed of light is too damn slow. >> Yeah, it's too slow, no one's going to wait for it. >> I did get a tweet back where someone said if you fix everything before it happens, we'll get no budget because everyone will say nothing ever happens. >> If a tree falls and nobody's around. And so there's a risk, sort of risk scoring algorithm in there that helps you say okay, this one is going to fail and you better take advantage of it. >> Yeah, so if you imagine seeing a precursor to something, you look how many times that precursor has caused that event, that allows you to give a degree of probability as to how likely you think it's going to happen. And it might be you decide to set a threshold and say look, if it's below 50%, don't bother doing it. But if it's above 70%, do it. Or if it's a specific type of issue, if it's something around security, and you're above 90% confidence, I want it flagged as a priority one issue. >> Yeah, but if it's my picnic wiki, so can you inject the notion of value in there, I guess the question. >> Dave: Yes, yeah, you can. >> I want to ask you about this categorization piece, even though it's coming down the road with Kingston. That's been a challenge for organizations in so many different use cases. I mean, the one I can think of, you know, is like email archiving and the federal rules of civil procedure, all that stuff when electronic records became admissible. And everybody sort of scrambled to categorize. But it was manual, they were using tags, it just didn't work, it didn't scale. So the answer was always technology to auto-categorize at the point of creation or use. But even then, it was complicated and the math kind of worked but you couldn't apply it. What's changed now and what's the secret sauce behind it? Was that part of the DX Continuum acquisition, maybe you can explain that. >> So we acquired DX Continuum, that gave us eight really bright math Ph.Ds who were data scientists, who could come in, who could look at data in a different way. But I think technology also drove it. So you've got the ability to have the compute power to be able to do the number crunching, but you've got the volume of data as well, I think the more volume of data you get, the more accurate it is. So we found if we're going to train auto-categorization, we need between 50 and 100,000 records to be able to get to a degree of accuracy. And then obviously, we can just keep on doing it again and again and that accuracy gets better and better over time. But even when we ran this out of the box on our system for the very first time before we'd rewritten it on the platform, first time we ran it through, it was 82% accurate straight off. Now, the real interesting thing about when you do something like categorization, it's almost as important what you get right as not guessing when you're going to get it wrong. So we wanted to be be very sure that they system would say I am 100% confident that this is where this is. But if I don't know it, I'm not going to guess. I'm not going to say well, it's 75% confident, so I'm going to say it's this. At that point, you want to say I just don't know. So these, 18%, for example, in this case, I don't know. And then over time, you get to reprocess the things that you don't know, and that percentage gradually goes up. So now, I think in-house, we're running into the 90% region. >> So the math, though, has been around forever. I mean, things like support vector machines and there are other techniques. What is it about this day and age that has allowed us to effectively apply that math and solve this problem? >> So I think what you get now, if you look at the DX Continuum technology used, I think it was five different methodologies for being able to interrogate. And it was neural nets, it was using base, but I think what gives you the big advantage is people have always taken live data and then tried to do this prediction. That's probably the wrong way to do it. If you take historical data and then run it, you just find out which one works. And if this algorithm is working the best for you based on the way you structure your data, then that's the algorithm you focus on. And that's exactly the way predictive analytics works. What we do is we were initially looking, saying okay, well we've got these three different models we can use. We can use projection, we can use seasonal trend lows, we can use AREMA with the auto-regressive moving average type solution. Which one are we going to use? And then we realized we didn't need to guess. What we could do is we could give the system historical data and say which one of these most accurately maps and then use that algorithm for that data set. Because every data set is different, so you might look at one data set where it's really spiky, so you don't want to use projection because if you choose the wrong points, your projection of them is effectively out. So it might be, in that case, you want to use STL and be able to smooth out some of the curves. So you have to, every time you want to do predictive analytics around a specific data set, you need to work out what mathematical model you need to use. >> So the data is then training the models and the models are your models, correct? >> Yes, yeah. >> And now you tell the customer, and I'm sure you do, that this is your data and your data is not going to be shared with anybody outside of your instance. But the model, the gray area between the model and the data, they start to blend together. Is there concern in your customer base about oh, I don't want the model that you train going to my competitors, or is this a different world where they feel as though hey, I want to learn, like, security. What are you seeing there? >> So this is the uniqueness that we, you don't get a generic ML where we look at everyone's instance and train across that. We can only train for your instance. And that's because everyone does things differently. You go to some companies where their highest priority issue is a sev-9, whereas another customer would have sev-1, so you've got people doing different implementations like that. But let's say I tried to do everyone's, and I went through and I said look at this description, this is a networking issue, so I'm going to categorize it as networking. And you haven't got a networking category, you've got networking infrastructure or networking hardware, then it fails. So I have to build a model that's very specific to your instance. So every time we do this, we'll build it for each customer. So it's kind of customized artificial intelligence machine learning models that sit within your instance. >> So my data, your model that you're basically applying for me and only me. Period, the end. >> Yeah, so we do the training on your data and we inject that model, which is your model, back into your instance. >> And now, the benchmarks, you guys have been talking about benchmarks for a while, this is sort of taken it to a new level. So how do you roll that out, how do you charge for it, what's the strategy there? >> So what people do is they effectively subscribe to it. So they're willing to share their data, we're at that point, allowing them, so it's almost a community issue, at this point, everyone is sharing data across the systems. Now, we added another nine benchmarks in the Jakarta release and now I think there's 16 benchmarks. Ive been mainly focused around IT and ITOM, but as we get more and more customers coming on in CSM and more on HR and more on security, we'll be able to start to introduce the whole concept of benchmarking those as well. But the thing you can do now is you don't just see the benchmark and how you perform, we can also use analytics to show how you're trending as well. So you might be better than people of a similar size or people in the same industry, but it might be that you're trending down and you're actually going to start to get close to being worse than them. So the concept here is you can take corrective measures. But also, it gives a lot of power to customers, not just to be able to say I think I'm doing a good job, but to be able to go to senior management and say this is how customers that look like us are currently performing. This is how customers in the finance sector perform. This is how customers with 100,000 people or more perform. And they can see look, we're leading in this, this, and this area, and they can see where they're not leading, and they can actually start to see how they'd address that. Or it might even be that you start to build relationships where they could say to their account manager who are the people who have got this best in performance type thing, could we meet with them, could we exchange with them? The evolution of this will be on the performance analytics side when we start to get to Kingston and beyond will be to be able to do not just the predictive analytics, but to be able to do modeling and to be able to do what-if. And the end goal is we've gotten to the point where we've got predictive, you want to get to the point where you get to prescriptive. Where the system says this is where you are, if you do this, this is where you'll get. >> That's what I was going to ask you, is it intuitive to the client, what they should do, and what role does Service Now play in advising them. And you're saying in the future, the machine is actually going to-- >> Yeah, could be able to say hey, well, if you want to, let's say you want to improve your problem closure rates, you could say well, when you look at other customers, an indicator of this is people have gotten much better first call incident closure. So what you need to do is you need to focus on closing first call incidents because that's going to then have the knock on effect to driving down the way you resolve problems. So we'll be able to get to that, but we'll also be able to allow people to actually model different things. So they could say what happens if I increase this by 10%? What happens if I put another 10 people working on this particular assignment group, what's the effect going to be, and actually start to do those what-if models, and then decide what you're going to do. >> To prioritize the investment to get the numbers down. It's interesting too, 'cause it's a continuous process, as you mentioned, it's this whole do the review once a year, do your KPIs. That's just not the way it works anymore, you don't have time. And to use the integration of the real time streaming data, which is interesting that you said not necessarily always what you want to use first compared to the historical data that's driving the actual business models and the algorithms. >> I think the thing about the whole benchmark concept is it's constantly being updated. So it's not like you take a snapshot and you say okay, we can improve and move here, you see if everyone else is improving at the same time. So there might just be a generic industry trend that everyone is moving in a certain direction. It might be that as we start to see more things coming online from an IOT perspective, I'll be interested to see whether people's CMDBs start to expand. Because I don't know if people have yet established whether IT is going to be responsible for IOT. Because it's using the same protocol for its messaging, how are you going to process those events, how are you going to deal with all that. >> So I guess it's the man versus machine, machines have always replaced humans. But for the first time, it really is happening quickly with cognitive functions. And one of your speakers at the CIO event, Andrew McCafee and his colleague Erik Brynjolfsson have written a book. And in that book, they talked about the middle class getting kind of hollowed out and they theorize that a big part of that is machines replacing them. One of the stats is the median income for U.S. workers has dropped from $55,000 to $50,000 over the last decade. And they posited that cognitive functions are replacing humans, and you see it everywhere. Billboards, the kiosks at airports, et cetera. Should we be alarmed by that? What is your personal opinion here? And I know it's a scary topic for a lot of IT vendors, but it's reality and you're a realist and you're a futurist. What are your thoughts, share them with us. >> People have different views on this. If you look at the view of executives, they see this see this as potentially creating more jobs. If you look at the workforce, I completely agree with you, there's a massive fear that yeah, this is going to take my job away. I think what happens over time is jobs will shift, people will start doing different things. You can go back 150 years and find that 90% of America is working farmland. And you can come now and you can find out they're like 2%. >> Not too many software engineers either back then. >> Not too many. Hard to get that mainframe in the field. What I think you can do is you can not just use AI or machine learning to be able to replace the mundane jobs or the very repetitive jobs, you can actually start to reverse that process. So one of the things we see is initially, when people were talking about concepts like chat bots, it was all about how do you externalize it, how do you have people coming in and being able to interface to a machine. But you can flip that and you can actually have a bot become a virtual assistant. Then what you're doing is you're enabling the person who's dealing with the issue to actually be better than they were. An interesting example is if you look at something like the way people analyze sales prospects. So in the past, people would have a lot of different opportunities they were working on. And the good sales guys would be able to isolate what's going to happen, what's not going to happen. What I can do is can run something like a machine learning algorithm across that and predict which deals are most likely to come in. I then can have a sales guy focusing on those, I've actually improved the skills of that sales guy by using ML and AI to actually get in there. I think a lot of times, you'll be able to move people from a job that was kind of repetitive and dull and be able to augment their skills and perhaps allow them to do a job that they couldn't have done before. So I'm pretty confident just based on the impact that this is going to have from a productivity perspective, where this is going to go from a job perspective. There's a really cool McKinsey report and it talks about the impact of the steam engine on what that drove on productivity and that was a .3% increase in productivity year and year over 50 years. But the prediction around artificial intelligence is it'll produce a productivity increase of 1.4% for the next 50 years. So you're looking at something that people are predicting could be five times as impactful as the industrial revolution. That's pretty significant. >> Next machine age, this is a huge topic. We're out of time, but I would love for you, Dave, to come back to our Silicon Valley studio and maybe talk about this in more depth because it's a really important discussion. >> I'm always around, happy to do it. >> Thanks very much for coming on The Cube it's great to see you again. >> All right, thanks, guys. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody, we're back with our next guest right after this short break. Be right back.

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE covering Service Now Knowledge 17 brought to you by Service Now. >> Welcome back to Orlando everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage and this is Knowledge 17 #know17. Daniel Pink is here, best selling author, speaker at the CIO forum here. Daniel, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> It's great to be here. >> So, you were tellin' us about an audience of a hundred CIOs hanging out, kicking back, listening to you. Give him the love on the Persuasion, the Art of Persuasion and Selling. He wrote a book to sell us humans. So, share with us the premise and what you were talking to the CIOs about. >> Well, I mean the premise was that a lot of persuasion influenced in selling is more science than art. There's this rich body of social science that gives us some clues about how to be more persuasive, whether we're persuading up, whether we're persuading down in an organization, whether we're persuading side to side. And, these CIOs are persuading in multiple, multiple directions. They're talking to their CEO. They're talking to their Board. They're talking to their team. They're talking to other business units. They're talking to vendors and so, I want to look at what does the science tell us about how to persuade effectively. >> Well, I mean typically you don't think of, now maybe this is different, a little bit different for CIOs, but IT people generally are not great salespeople. >> That's what we think, right. Yeah, exactly. And yet, it you look at some of the data we have, we find that in general, this is the whole swath of the U.S. work force, people in a variety of functions are spending about 40 percent of their time persuading, influencing and selling, in general. They might not necessarily be, not necessarily selling a product or service in a cash exchange, but they are doing things. They are at a meeting and they are trying to persuade someone to do something different or do something in a different way. They're a boss trying to get their employee to do something. They're an employee trying to get their boss to stop doing something. They're dealing with people they need to get, enlist help from someone in another department. You need to recruit someone to come and work for you rather than for a competitor. And so, if you look at the content of a lot of white collar work, a huge portion of it is this thing that's kind of, sort of, like selling. It's not denominated in dollars, but the transaction is the denomination is time, effort, attention, energy, zeal, belief, whatever and it's a big part of what we do. And, as I said, you don't have to go with your intuitions about what's effective and what's not, you can actually look to this rich body of social science for some clues about how to do it more effectively. >> So, why does selling have the black eye when it's really persuasion and, as you said, we're all persuading all the time? Not only at work, but also at home with our kids, our spouse, everybody. >> I would say it's a black eye and a bloody nose. I mean, it's looked at, people really really look at sales in a negative way. It's quite remarkable. I think that that's. I'll give you the reason and I'll tell you why the reason is outdated. The reason is that most selling and buying for most of our lifetimes, for most of human civilization has been in a world of information assymetry where the seller always had more information than the buyer. When the seller had more information than the buyer the seller can rip you off. Alright, when the seller has more information than the buyer, the buyer doesn't have any choices. The buyer doesn't have a way to talk back. The seller can really rip you off. Information assymetry is why we have the principle of buyer beware. Buyers have to beware 'cause they're at a disadvantage because of information. Alright, this is basically the history of commerce until like ten years ago when all of a sudden, we went from a world of information assymetry to a world of information parity. And so, and this is true in every domain. It's true for selling a product, you know, selling a car, selling b to b services. It's true in the dating market. It's true in the hiring market. It's true at a meeting where, it drives baby boom managers crazy, they'll be in a meeting and they'll say something and some 28 year old sitting in the back will say, excuse me, and hold up her phone and say, no, what you said isn't right. Alright, and so the reason it has this black eye and bloody nose is because we're used to this world of information assymetry. One of my points was, okay we're in a totally different era now of information parity and that's a different terrain. And so, again you can use the science to navigate this terrain. >> So, people ask me what's this digital transformation all about. I say, well it's attempt by brands to achieve assymetry again. >> I mean listen, if you are a seller assymetry is awesome, alright. I mean, you want to do everything you can to preserve it. What I'm saying is that the tide is so ferocious here that it's a very difficult thing to hold back. So, it's possible in certain kinds of industries and certain kinds of products and services, you can do some things to kind of hold back that tide. My view is like holding back tides is difficult work. And, usually in the long run it doesn't work very well. So, my view is like, okay what do you in this world of information parity and this world, you know the old world was buyer beware, I think this new world is seller beware. And, I think that today what sellers have to do is they have to take the high road. I mean, you want to take the high road because it's the right thing to do, but now there's a very pragmatic reason to take the high road. It's 'cause the low road doesn't lead anywhere. >> Right. Well, the other thing that you're touching on which is again, within the last ten years it's instinct versus data base decision making and processing. So as you said, you don't have to make this up. There's plenty of science to support this effort and the instinctual guy in the corner is no longer necessarily the authority. >> Absolutely right, and what's interesting is a lot of this, some of this research confirms our instincts. Some of this research doesn't. For instance, we tend to believe that strong extroverts make the best sales people. Not true, it's an absolute abject myth. Strong extroverts, in general, are terrible sales people. Now, it doesn't mean that strong introverts are better. People who are the best, and I was talking to these somewhat more introverted CIOs, the people who are the best, and there's some good research on this, are what are called ambiverts, which are people who are in the middle, not heavily extroverted, not heavily introverted. And, the great thing about the ambiverts is that they are ambidextrous, so they know when to speak up, they know when to shut up. They know when to push, they know when to hold back. So, even though the mythology or instincts, to use your word, is that, oh strong extroverts make better sales people. If I want to sell more I got to be more extroverted. The evidence doesn't say that. The evidence says, in fact, to the contrary. The evidence points to ambiverts as having an edge in selling. >> So, what's the formula for the high road? Is it transparency a part of that? >> Well, on a personal level, yeah, I think transparency is getting to be not even a choice. It's basically like, transparency is no more a choice than say, oxygen is a choice. >> Yeah, okay, stable stakes. So, yeah, exactly. So, if you look at the research there are three personal qualities that seem to be important. Attunement, which is, can you get out of your own head into someone else's head, understand their perspective? Okay, so you don't have any coercive power today. Buoyancy, they're a b c, attunement, buoyancy, total luck, attunement, buoyancy and clarity. Buoyancy is in any kind of persuasive effort there's a huge amount of rejection and human beings don't like rejection. I don't like rejection, nobody likes rejection. So, one sales person who I interviewed described his job as looking out into an ocean of rejection. So, buoyancy is, how do you stay afloat in that ocean of rejection. How do you deal with rejection? And, there's some good science behind that. And then, clarity has two dimensions. Clarity is, it used to be that if you had access to information, you had an edge. But, now everybody has access to information. >> Right, right. >> So, the edge comes from being able to curate information, being able to make sense of information. Separate out the signal from the noise and information. The other thing is that you were talking again, this goes directly to your point about instinct versus data and machine. You know, a lot of sales people like to say, old fashioned sales people say, oh, I'm a problem solver, and that's cool. It's just that problem solving is becoming less important. Because if your customer or your prospect knows exactly what their problem is they can find a solution without you. They don't need you. You know, and so the premium has shifted to the skill of problem finding. Can you service latent problems? Can you look down the road and anticipate problems? Can you see around corners? And, that's going to be incredibly important in this world of machine learning and AI, where simply expressed problems will be solved that way. And, what we human beings have to do is figure out the right problems to solve, anticipate problems, you know really, see around corners and do that kind of thing. >> So, you basically advised the COs to tune in, deal with rejection and make things more clear and curate. >> Absolutely, absolutely, right, right, right. And, the information thing is big because, you know, in anything, not only the CIOs but in any realm. It used to be that expertise came from having access to information. Think about in the world of finance, at a certain point only stock brokers could find out what the stock price was. Only stock brokers had certain kinds of information about how a company was performing. So, I'm an expert. Why? 'Cause I have the key where the information is locked up. Now, everybody does, so what do you do if you want to be a financial professional? Well, you'd better be really good at synthesizing information, making sense of it, separating the signal and the noise from the information. >> What were some of the more interesting question that you got from the CIOs audience? >> There was a couple of interesting questions about well, there was a couple of questions about introversion, extroversion and how much you can change your personality, which is minimally. I mean, you can make a small move to, you can make a small move to the middle. There was a question about, a very good question for these CIOs in particular 'cause most of them are dealing with multi-national firms and employees and customers all around the world, is how much national differences make a, how much national differences are important. And, there is some, there's some very interesting stuff on that. For instance, if you look at, it's not a shocker, but if you look at like if you're selling or persuading say in a Japanese, East Asian culture, very much more hierarchical than it would be here. Like you guys would not be Jeff and Dave from the get go, you know. >> Right, right. >> It would be like, oh wait a second, wait a second. These guys have ear pieces and ties. Whoa, wait a second, I better you know, be much more hierarchical in how I deal with them. Or, in certain Latin cultures, Brazil is a good example, if you and I were to do business together we wouldn't even talk business at our first meeting. We would go out to dinner. We would have a meal. So, there's that kind of cultural nuance stuff. There's one thing that I tried to explain to them that Americans stink at. It's one of the biggest cognitive errors that Americans make and it's this. When we Americans try to explain people's behavior or predict people's behavior we almost always overstate the importance of someone's personality and understate the importance of the context that they're in. So, we look at, oh, Jeff did that 'cause he's a jerk. Dave did that 'cause he's a nice guy. Freida did that because she's mean, you know. And, we don't and we disregard what context they're in and when we look at our own behavior we behave very differently in different contexts. If you were to drive with me you would think I was the worst person on the planet. I mean, truly, like in that context I'm just miserable, I'm mean spirited 'cause I can't stand doing it. Otherwise, I'm okay, you know. And so, again if you go to East Asian cultures, East Asian cultures will look at the entire fish tank rather than the fish that's in the foreground. And so, as a consequence, they say, oh well, Pink Sun was you know, maybe he was having a bad day or maybe Pink Sun doesn't like to drive or when Pink Sun's with his family he's a nicer guy and that kind of stuff. Americans, they say, that guy's a jerk. >> Alright, we got to wrap up. What Jeff really and I want to know is, does this work on our kids? >> The short answer, absolutely. >> Alright, Terry. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Alright, thanks you guys. >> Alright, keep it right there. We're going to be back with our next guest right after this. This is Knowledge17. Be right back.

(exciting, upbeat music) >> (Announcer) Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge '17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> We're back. Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. This is theCube and we're here at ServiceNow Knowledge '17. Stanley Toh is here, he's the Global IT Director at semiconductor manufacturer Broadcom. Stanley, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Nice to be here. >> So, semiconductor, hot space right now. Things are going crazy and it's a good market, booming. That's good, it's always good to be in a hot space. But we're here at Knowledge. Maybe talk a little bit about your role, and then we'll get into what you're doing with ServiceNow. >> Sure. You're right. Semiconductor is booming. But we don't do anything sexy. Everything is components that go into your iPhones and stuff like that. They do the sexy stuff. We do the thing that make it work. So, I'm the what we call the Enterprise and User Services Director, so basically anything that touches the end user, from the help desk to collaboration to your PC support desk, everything is under. Basically anything that touches the end user, even onboarding, and then, now with the latest, we actually moved our old customer support portal to even ServiceNow CSM. >> Okay, so what led you to ServiceNow? Maybe take us back, and take us through the before and the after. >> Okay. Broadcom Limited, before we changed our name to Broadcom, we were Avago Technologies. We are very cloud centric. Anything that we can move to the cloud, we moved to the cloud. So we were the first multi-billion dollar company to move to Google, back in 2007. That was 10 years ago. And then we never stopped since. We have Opta, we have Workday. And if you look at it, all this cloud technology works so well with ServiceNow. And ServiceNow is a platform that has all the API and connectors to all these other cloud platforms. So, when we were looking and evaluating, first as just the ITSM replacement, we selected ServiceNow because of the ease of integration. But as we get into ServiceNow, and as we learn ServiceNow, we found that it's not just an ITSM platform. You can use it for HR, for finance, for legal, for facilities. Recently, probably about six months ago, we launched the HR module. And then three weeks ago, we went live with a CSM portal for the external customer. >> When you say you go back to 2007 with Google, you're talking about what, Google Docs? >> Everything. >> Dave: Everything. >> Email, calendar, docs, sites, Drive, but it was unknown. >> Dave: All the productivity stuff. >> Everything. >> Dave: Outsourced stuff. >> They were unknown then, >> Jeff: Right, right, right. >> And it's a risk. >> So what was the conversation to take that risk? Because obviously there was a lot of concern at the enterprise level on some of these cloud services beyond test/dev in the early days. Obviously you made the right bet, it worked out pretty well. (Stanley laughing) But I'm curious, what were the conversations and why did you ultimately decide to make that bet? >> Okay. So 2007 was just after the downturn. >> Jeff: Right. >> So everyone was looking at cost, at supportability. But at the same time, the mobile phone, the smart phone is just exploding in the market. So we want something that is very flexible, very scalable, and very easy to integrate, plus also give you mobility. So that's why we went with Google as the first cloud platform, but then we started adding. So right now, we can basically do everything on your smart phone. We have Opta as our single sign-on. From one portal, I go everywhere. >> Dave: Okay, so that's good. So you talked about some of the criteria for the platform. How has that affected how you do business, how you do IT business? >> See, IT has always been looked upon as a cost center. And we are always slow, legacy system, hard to use, we don't listen to you. (Jeff laughing) >> Dave: What do those guys do? >> You know, why are we paying those guys, right? And then you look at all the consumer stuff. They are sexy, they are mobile, they have pretty pictures. Now all your internal users want the same experience. So, the experience has changed. The old UNIX command key doesn't work anymore. They want something touch, GUI, mobile. They want the feel, the color, you know. >> That might be the best description (Stanley laughing) of the consumerization of IT, Dave, that we've ever had on theCUBE. >> It's really honest. Coming from an IT person, it is, it is honest. And now you've driven ServiceNow into other areas beyond IT. >> Stanley: Yes. >> You mentioned HR. >> HR. We went live six months ago. >> Okay. And these other areas, are you thinking about it, looking at it, or? >> So we are also looking with legal, because they have a lot of legal documents and NDAs and stuff like that. And ServiceNow have a very nice integration to DocuSign and Vox. So we are looking at that. But the latest one, we went live three weeks ago, is the CSM, the customer support management portal. And that one actually replaced one of our legacy system that has a stack of sixteen application running. And we collapsed that, and went live on ServiceNow CSM three weeks ago. >> And what has been, two impacts - the business impact, and, I'm curious, is it the culture impact. You sort of set it up as the attitude. We had fun with it, but it's true. What's the business impact? And what has the cultural impact been? >> The last few years, we have been doing a lot of acquisition. So we have been bringing in a lot of new BU's. Business units. And they want things to move fast, and we want to integrate them into one brand. So speed and agility is key when you do acquisitions. So that's why we are moving into a platform where we can integrate all these new companies easily. We found that in ServiceNow and we can integrate them. So for example, when we acquired Broadcom Corporation, they have 18,000 employees. We onboarded them on day one, and usually when you do an acquisition, they don't give you the employee information until the last minute. Two days, all I need, is to bring them all on, onboarded into my collaboration suite. I only need two days of the information, and on day one, Turn it on, they are live. Their information is in, they have an email account. All their information is in ServiceNow. They call one help desk, they call our help desk, they get all the help and services. So it's fully integrated on day one itself. >> And you guys also own LSI now, right? >> Yes, LSI. >> Emulex? >> Emulex, PLX. >> PLX. >> The latest acquisition is Brocade, which we will close in the summer. And then, the rumored Toshiba NAND business. So, yeah, we are doing a lot of acquisitions. >> Yeah, quite a roll-up there. >> Correct. So as you can see, they are all very different companies. So when they come in, they have different culture. They have different workflow, they have different processes. But if you integrate them into a platform that we are very familiar right now, it's the consumerized look and feel, it's very easy to bring them in. >> And that is the cultural change that has occurred. >> Yes, it's a huge, >> So do people love IT now? >> They still hate IT. (Jeff and Dave laughing) They still say iT is a cost center. But right now, they are coming around. They see that we are bringing value to them. So right now, IT is just not to provide you the basic. IT is to enable the business to be better and more competitive. >> A true partner for the business. >> Yes, correct. >> Stanley, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to hear your story, we appreciate it. >> Stanley: Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from ServiceNow Knowledge '17. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: 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. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Jeff Frick, our cohost. This is Knowledge17, #Know17. Jim Hebb is here, the Advisory Director for People in Change at KPMG. And he's here with Nate Channel, the Enabling Technology Lead at JM Smucker and Company. Systems integrator, customer, gents, welcome to theCube. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> So let's hear the story, JM Smucker, you told me off camera that you just started in November. Right? >> Nate: Right, we went live in November. >> Take us back to that decision point, where you said, "hey we need to do something here." What was that like? >> Well, I guess we were asked by the CHRO of Smucker to look into a current state assessment of their HR Organization. And from that, one of the things we discovered was that, the company is a family owned company, had grown organically over the years, had a very family type os environment, and while that is a big selling point for the company, it also resulted in a more relaxed approach to delivering HR services. >> Love the vocabulary. (group laughing) Relaxed approach. >> Relaxed approach, so essentially, if you were an employer manager and needed help from HR, you had to know who to go to. So you had to have a name, you had to go find them, if they weren't the right person, then you got passed to the next person. Certainly there was no way to record, track, have a collaborative, sort of tool to use for HR service requests. There was no way to report on information related to where things stand. Employees couldn't see where their service requests are it was email, phone call, stop by the desk. That was a gap that we thought, if you really wanted to transform the organization and really ratchet up the level of service, we needed to do something. >> A lot of tribal knowledge. But, now you're in IT, is that correct? >> I'm actually in HR. >> You are in HR. >> Is that where you guys started? You started in HR or? >> I actually joined the company a little less than a year ago. So the project was was already under way, when I came in. Yes, I did start in HR, and I think that, just coming into the organization, kind of seeing it where it was when I came in, and how everything was kind of fractured because we had gone through a lot of acquisitions and that's how we grew, and we grew very quickly. Nothing was really consolidated, so seeing this transformation has really been fantastic. >> But did you guys have ITSM installed or no? >> No, no. >> Okay, so the company started at .. >> Which is unusual right. >> Yeah, I was going to say. >> It started with HR and from there they have now decided to adopt the IDSM platform, >> Right. >> And are going live in a month or so I think. >> Yes. >> It's really interesting that they started with HR. >> So tell us about the implementation, how did it go, I mean a lot of people will share with us, it's sometimes very complex to implement, you chose a partner, to obviously reduce the complexity, share the risk. >> Yeah, so it felt very fast for us. From an IT perspective, we're not prone to doing anything agile. I think having that agile development life cycle come in was a shock to the system. It put us into the position where we had to really focus on what wanted and needed, very quickly. And we were able to do that, and I think we were able to put something in place that will benefit us in the future. And I think, it's benefiting us now. We've transformed our organization. >> And how did you get it in? Were things just breaking or how did you get the opportunity to provide the initiative to bring in this agile new tool? >> So it was really part of a broader HR transformation that we were doing with the company. We were looking at everything top to bottom, their entire HR operating model, their HR org structure, all of their HR processes, all of the HR technologies that we were conturently doing, a Workday implementation with them. Building a new shared services center, looking at their entire North American models. As part of that, this was just a natural piece of the puzzle that needed to be added. >> So a lot of people are confused and ServiceNow's trying to constantly explain to people, we don't compete with Workday. Talk to the practitioner, where does Workday leave off and ServiceNow pick up, if I'm an employee of Smucker, what do I interface with, am I talking to ServiceNow, am I talking to Workday, both? >> Actually our design, we have the portal in place. We have the HR service portal and that's really our gateway for our employees. So it's part of ServiceNow, but it leads them into Workday, and a lot of our employees associate those two as one. They think that if they're having a problem, or anything like that they need to access something, they go through HR Home, but they're thinking they're going right into our deck. >> Dave: It's an HR portal to them. >> Right, exactly. >> Dave: They don't really know or care what's at the back end. >> Exactly. >> Nor should they really. >> Nor should they. And that was presumably the design point? >> Nate: Right, right. >> Again, not always common, right, you hear different stories of different stovepipes, but you seem to have some success with this approach. >> We have, we always try to take it from the perspective of what does the employee manager need, and how do they want to interact with HR. So it's not about, HR often has more of an insular approach to, well, we're thinking compensation or benefits, or providing this type of function. Employees and mangers come and say, I have an issue and I need help with it. They don't really need to know, if this is comp or benefits, they can say, I have an issue with my paycheck, it might be a benefit deduction, it might be an incorrect calculation from payroll, it might be something related to retirement plan, so they don't need to figure that out and have to find where they need to go, they should be able to come to HR and get help, right from the start. >> So onboarding is the classic example. How has that, as a relatively new employee, how has it affected the onboarding process? >> We are still kind of hashing through onboarding right now. We're really focusing on the Workday side to get everything kind of ironed out perfectly before we truly bring ServiceNow as a part of that into it. But from any perspective where there's any kind of problem, we're directing our future employees to utilize the tool, as possible. >> Take us through the project, when did it start and how long did it take? >> It actually started with an RFP process. So we facilitated that, so we had five different providers that we were helping Smucker evaluate. Methodology approach, functionality, technical alignment, business and cultural alignment, cost. And from that RFP process ServiceNow came out on top. That was the selection point that was earlier in 2016, first quarter 2016. Because we were doing an entire transformation, we staged everything in sequential order in terms of what we were doing with Workday, Shared Services, redesign of operating model, all of that good stuff, and we ended up, as Nate said, launching, doing a soft launch, right after Thanksgiving for the ServiceNow platform, full launch with Workday, ServiceNow, Service Center, everything on the December 14th. >> And the business impact, so far is early days, but so far, and what's expected? >> It was completely different than anything we're used to, >> Dave: In a good way. (laughing) >> Yeah, absolutely, it was fantastic. I think our employee population really jumped on board very quickly. Instead of following that traditional HR, you know, pick up the phone or send an email, they're calling a Service Center, and they're following up on cases, instead of following up on emails. >> Jeff: Total relief. >> Yeah, I think we've definitely consolidated all of that into the ServiceNow platform. >> Alright gents, we got to leave it there. Yet another happy customer. It actually doesn't get boring after a while, I love to hear the stories, because things change so much, it used to be ITSM, and now we're talking lines of businesses et cetera, so gents, thanks very much for coming on theCube, appreciate it. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> Thank you, thank you. >> You're welcome. Keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. It's theCube, we're live from ServiceNow Knowledge17. Be right back.