>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone, we are wrapping up three big days of the CUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Dave Vellante and Jeffrick. It has been such fun co-hosting with you both. It's always a ghast to be with you so three days, what have we learned? We've learned we're making the world of work work better for people. Beyond that what do you think? >> New branding you know there which I think underscores ServiceNow's desire to get into the C-Suite. Become a strategic partner. Some of the things we heard this week, platform of platforms. The next great enterprise software company is what they aspire to, just from a financial standpoint. This company literally wants to be a hundred billion dollar valuation company. I think they got a reasonable shot at doing that. They're well on their way to four billion dollars in revenue. It's hard to be a software company and hit a billion. You know the number of companies who get there ar very limited and they are the latest. We're also seeing many products, one platform and platforms in this day and age beat products. Cloud has been a huge tailwind for ServiceNow. We've seen the SaaSification of industries and now we're seeing significant execution on the original vision at penetration into deeply into these accounts. And I got to say when you come to events like this and talk to customers. There's amazing enthusiasm as much of if not more than any show that we do. I mean I really got, what's your take? >> We go to so many shows and it's not hard to figure out the health of a show. Right you walk around the floor, what's the energy, how many people are there? What's the ecosystem I mean, even now as I look around we're at the very end of the third day and there is action at most of the booths still. So it's a super healthy ecosystem. I think it grew another 4,000 people from this year of the year of year growth. So it's clearly on the rise. SaaS is a big thing, I think it's really interesting play and the kind of simple workflow. Not as much conversation really about the no code and the low code that we've heard in the past. Maybe they're past that but certainly a lot of conversation about the vertical stack applications that they're building and I think at the end of the day. We talked about this before, it's competition for your screen. You know what is it that you work in everyday. Right if you use, I don't care what application. SalesForce or any SaaS application which we all have a lot of on our desktop today. If you use it as a reporting tool it's a pain. It's double entry, it's not good. But what is the tool that you execute your business on everyday? And that's really a smart strategy for them to go after that. The other thing that I just think is ripe and we talked about a little bit. I don't know if they're down playing it because they're not where they want to be at or they're just downplaying it but the opportunity for machine learning and artificial intelligence to more efficiently impact workflows with the data from the workflow is a huge opportunity. So what was a bunch of workflows and approvals and this and that should all get, most of it should just get knocked out via AI over a short period of time. So I think they're in a good spot and then the other thing which we hear over and over. You know Frank Slootman IT our homies I still love that line. But as has been repeated IT is everywhere so what a great way to get into HR. To get into legal, to get into facilities management, to get into these other things. Where like hey this is a really cool efficient little tool can I build a nice app for my business? So seemed to be executing on that strategy. >> Yeah CJ just said IT will always be at our core. Rebecca the keynote was interesting. It got mixed reviews and I think part of that is they're struggling we heard tat from some of our guests. There's a hybrid audience now. You got the IT homies, you got the DevOps crowd and then you got the business leaders and so the keynote on day one was really reaching an audience. Largely outside of the core audience. You know I think day two and day three were much more geared toward that direct hit. Now I guess that's not a bad thing. >> No and I think that I mean as you noted it's a hybrid audience so you're trying to reach and touch and inspire and motivate a lot of different partners, customers, analysts. People who are looking at your business in a critical way. The first day John Donahoe it struck me as very sort of aspirational. Really talking about what is our purpose, what do we do as an organization. What are our values, what problems are we trying to solve here and I think that that laying out there in the way that he did was effective because it really did bring it back to, here's what we're about. >> Yeah the other thing I learned is succession has been very successful. Frank Slootman stepped down last year as CEO. He's maintained his chairman title, he's now stepped down as chairman. Fred kind of you know went away for a little while. Fred's back now as chairman. John Donahoe came in. People don't really put much emphasis on this but Fred Luddy was the chief product officer. Dan McGee was the COO, CJ Desai took over for both of them. He said on the CUBE. You know you texted me, you got big shoes to fill. He said I kept that just to remind me and he seems to have just picked up right where those guys left off. You know Pat Casey I think is understated and vital to the culture of this company. You know Jeff you see that, he's like a mini Fred you know and I think that's critical to maintain that cultural foundation. >> But as we said you know going the way that Pat talked about kind of just bifurcation in the keynote and the audiences in the building and out of the building. Which I've never heard before kind of an interesting way to cut it. The people that are here are their very passionate community and they're all here and they're adding 4,000 every single year. The people that are outside of the building maybe don't know as much about it and really maybe that aspirational kind of messaging touched them a little bit more cause they're not into the nitty gritty. It's really interesting too just cause this week is such a busy week in technology. The competition for attention, eyeballs and time. I was struck this morning going through some of our older stuff where Fred would always say. You know I'm so thankful that people will take the time to spend it with us this week. And when people had choices to go to Google IO, Microsoft build, of course we're at Nutanix next, Red Hat Summit I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of other ones. >> Busy week. >> The fact that people are here for three days of conference again they're still here is a pretty good statement in terms of the commitment of their community. >> Now the other thing I want to mention is four years ago Jeff was I think might have been five years ago. We said on the CUBE this company's on a collision course with SalesForce and you can really start to see it take shape. Of the customer service management piece. We know that SalesForce really isn't designed for CSM. Customer Service Management. But he talked about it so they are on a collision course there. They've hired a bunch of people from SalesForce. SalesForce is not going to rollover you know they're going to fight hard for that hard, Oracle's going to fight hard for that. So software companies believe that they should get their fair share of the spend. As long as that spend is a 100%. That's the mentality of a software company. Especially those run by Marc Benioff and Larry Ellis and so it's going to be really interesting to see how these guys evolve. They're going to start bumping into people. This guy's got pretty sharp elbows though. >> Yeah and I think the customer relation is very different. We were at PagerDuty Summit last right talked to Nick Meta who just got nominated for entrepreneur of the year I think for Ink from GainSight and he really talked about what does a customer management verses opportunity management. Once you have the customer and you've managed that sale and you've made that sale. That's really were SalesForce has strived in and that's we use it for in our own company but once you're in the customer. Like say you're in IBM or you're in Boeing. How do you actually manage your relationship in Boeing cause it's not Boeing and your sales person. There's many many many relationships, there's many many many activities, there's somewhere you're winning, somewhere you're losing. Somewhere you're new, somewhere you're old and so the opportunity there is way beyond simply managing you know a lead to an opportunity to a closed sale. That' just the very beginning of a process and actually having a relationship with the customer. >> The other thing is so you can, one of the measurements of progress in 2013 this company 95% of its business was in IT. Their core ITSM, change management, help desk etc. Today that number's down to about two thirds so a third of the business is outside of IT. We're talking about multi-hundreds of millions of dollars. So ITOM, HR, the security practice. They're taking these applications and they're becoming multi-hundred million dollar businesses. You know some of them aren't there yet but they're you know north of 50, 75 we're taking about hundreds of customers. Higher average price, average contract values. You know they don't broadcast that here but you know you look at peel back the numbers and you can see just tremendous financial story. The renewal rates are really really high. You know in the mid 90s, high 90s which is unheard of and so I think this company is going to be the next great enterprise software company and their focus on the user experience I think is important because if you think about the great enterprise software companies. SalesForce, Oracle, SAP, maybe put IBM in there because they sort of acquired their way to it. But those three, they're not the greatest user experiences in the world. They're working on the UI but they're, you know Oracle, we use Oracle. It's clunky, it's powerful. >> They're solving such different problems. Right when those companies came up they were solving a very different problem. Oracle on their relational database side. Very different problem. You know ARP was so revolutionary when SAP came out and I still just think it's so funny that we get these massive gains of efficiency. We had it in the ARP days and now we're getting it again. So they're coming at it from a very different angle. That they're fortunate that there are more modern architecture, there are more modern UI. You know unfortunately if you're legacy you're kind of stuck in your historical. >> In your old ways right? >> Paradigm. >> So the go to market gets more complicated as they start selling to all these other divisions. You're seeing overlay, sales forces you know it's going to be interesting. IBM just consolidated it's big six shows into one. You wonder what's going to happen with this. Are they going to have to create you know mini Knowledges for all these different lines of business. We'll see how that evolves. You think with the one platform maybe they keep it all together. I hope they don't lose that core. You think of VM world, rigt there's still a core technical audience and I think that brings a lot of the energy and credibility to a show like this. >> They still do have some little regional shows and there's a couple different kind of series that they're getting out because as we know. Once you get, well just different right. AWS reinvents over $40,000 last year. Oracle runs it I don't even know what Oracle runs. A 65,000, 75,000. SalesForce hundred thousand but they kind of cheat. They give away lot of tickets but it is hard to keep that community together. You know we've had a number of people come up to us while we're off air to say hi, that we've had on before. The company's growing, things are changing, new leadership so to maintain that culture I think that's why Pat is so important and the key is that connection to the past and that connection to Fred. That kind of carried forward. >> The other thing we have to mention is the ecosystem when we first started covering ServiceNow Knowledge it was you know fruition partners, cloud Sherpas I mean it. Who are these guys and now you see the acquisitions, it's EY is here, Deloitte is here, Accenture is here. >> Got Fruition. >> PWC you see Unisys is here. I mean big name companies, Capgemini, KPMG with big install bases. Strong relationships it's why you see the sales guys at ServiceNow bellying up to these companies because they know it's going to drive more business for them. So pretty impressive story I mean it's hard to be critical of these guys, your price is too high. Okay I mean alright. But the value's there so people are lining up so. >> Yeah I mean it's a smoking hot company as you said. What do they needed to do next? What do you need to see from them next? >> Well I mean the thing is they laid out the roadmap. You know they announced twice a year at different cities wit each a letter of the alphabet. They got to execute on that. I mean this is one of those companies that's theirs to lose. It really is, they got the energy. They got to retain the talent, attract new talent, the street's certainly buying their story. Their free cash flow is growing faster than their revenue which is really impressive. They're extremely well run company. Their CFO is a rockstar stud behind the scenes. I mean they got studs in development, they got a great CEO they got a great CFO. Really strong chief product officer, really strong general managers who've got incredible depth in expertise. I mean it's theirs to lose, I mean they really just have to keep executing on that roadmap keeping their customer focus and you know hoping that there's not some external factor that blows everything up. >> Yeah good point, good point. What about the messaging? We've heard as you said, it's new branding so it's making the world of work work better, there's this focus on the user experience. The idea that the CIO is no longer just so myopic in his or her portfolio. Really has to think much more broadly about the business. A real business leader, I mean is this. Are you hearing this at other conferences too? Is it jiving with the other? >> You know everyone talks about the new way to work, the new to work, the new way to work and the consumers they sort of IT and you know all the millennials that want to operate everything on their phone. That's all fine and dandy. Again at the end of the day, where do people work? Because again you're competing everyone has, excuse me many many applications unfortunately that we have to run to get our day job done and so if you can be the one that people use as the primary way that they get work done. That's the goal... >> Rebecca: That's where the money is. >> That's the end game right. >> Well I owe that so the messaging to me is interesting because IT practitioners as a community are some of the most under appreciated. You know overworked and they're only here from the business when things go bad. For decades we've seen this the thing that struck me at ServiceNow Knowledge 13 when we first came here was wow. These IT people ar pumped. You know you walk around a show the IT like this, they're kind of dragging their feet, heads down and the ServiceNow customers are excited. They're leading innovation in their companies. They're developing new applications on these platforms. It's a persona that I think is being reborn and it sound exciting to see. >> It's funny you bring up the old chest because before it was a lot about just letting IT excuse me, do their work with a little bit more creativity. Better tools, build their own store, build an IT services Amazon likened store. We're not hearing any of that anymore. >> Do more with less, squeeze, squeeze. >> If we're part of delivering value as we've talked about with the banking application and link from MoonsStar you know now these people are intimately involved with the forward facing edge of the company. So it's not talking about we'll have a cool service store. I remember like 2014 that was like a big theme. We're not hearing that anymore, we've moved way beyond that in terms of being a strategic partner in the business. Which we here over and over but these are you know people that header now the strategic partner for the business. >> Okay customers have to make bets and they're making bets on ServiceNow. They've obviously made a bunch of bets on Oracle. Increasingly they're making bets on Amazon. You know we're seeing that a lot. They've made big bets on VM ware, obviously big bets on SAP so CIOs they go to shows like this to make sure that they made the right bet and they're not missing some blind spots. To talk to their peers but you can see that their laying the chips on the table. I guess pun intended, I mean they're paying off. >> That's great, that's a great note to end on I think. So again a pleasure co-hosting with both of you. It's been a lot of fun, it's been a lot of hard work but a lot of fun too. >> Thank you Rebecca and so the CUBE season Jeff. I got to shout out to you and the team. I mean you guys, it's like so busy right now. >> I thought you were going to ask if we were going next. I was going to say oh my god. >> Next week I know I'm in Chicago at VMON. >> Right we have VMON, DON, we've got a couple of on the grounds. SAP Sapphire is coming up. >> Dave: Pure Accelerate. >> Pure Accelerate, OpenStack, we're going back to Vancouver. Haven't been there for a while. Informatica World, back down here in Las Vegas Pure Storage, San Francisco... >> We got the MIT's CTO conference coming up. We got Google Next. >> Women Transforming Technology. Just keep an eye on the website upcoming. We can't give it all straight but... >> The CUBE.net, SiliconAngle.com, WikiBon.com, bunch of free content.- you heard it here first. >> There you go. >> For Rebecca Knight and Jeffrick and Dave Vellante this has been the CUBE's coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18. We will see you next time. >> Thanks everybody, bye bye.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCube's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18 here in Las Vegas. I'm your host Rebacca Knight along with my co-host Dave Vellante, and we are theCube. We are the leader in live tech coverage. We're joined by Sean Caron. He is the principal architect of Linium, at Linium. Thanks so much for coming on theCube again, you're welcome back. >> My second time, and thank you very much for the opportunity. I've really been looking forward to it all week. >> Awesome, Good to have you back. >> We love to hear that. So tell us about Linium and what you do as principal architect. >> Sure, so we are a gold services and sales partner of ServiceNow. Been in the ServiceNow space for about nine years total. And we specialize in helping organizations do digital transformations. So they want to take the platform and really get maximum value from that and that's both a technology discussion, but it's also a organizational change discussion, and you know can be a process discussion. All those kind of things are things that we help our customers with. >> We've been talking a lot about the technology but the organizational change is really what fascinates me. Can you tell, can you just talk about a lot of the organizational change challenges that customers are facing, and they come to you. >> You've got it right. So we've been in this business for 18 years. We started out as a Peregrine partner and also HP, when HP acquired Peregrine, and we noticed that we would get specs from customers and we would nail it. It would be a perfect technical delivery and then six months later when you talk to the customer, they weren't using the product. They didn't get any value from the investment that they made. So we started to engineer a process and we do that around, you know we look at the structure. Where is this project going to land? What's the structure around it? Who supports it? What's your culture? Do you have a culture of dedication to accuracy or customer service? If you don't have those kind of things, we can help build those in your organization. And of course that also gets to helping you find talent, right. So if you need the right people, we can help with that process. Helping you define business best practice process for your organization. Those are all things we work with customers every day and frankly we don't do technology projects. We only do a project where we know when we deliver the technology that that structure will be there to catch it and get value from it. >> So you were recently acquired by Ness Digital Engineering, >> Correct >> Which is really an interesting name for a company. Tell us more about the motivation for that acquisition and how things have changed, and what the future looks like. >> So for the first 17 years of our business we were a privately held company and we grew organically, and we did a great job at that. I mean we became several hundred employees across the U.S. and a couple in AMIA, and a couple in Canada. But to really take the next step right, we saw, we had a vision of what we wanted to do, to take that next step was going to require an equity investment of some type. So we started probably about this time last year, talking to organizations. Ness was one of the first ones that we met and it became immediately apparent that they were a great fit for us. So they have about, well with us about 4,000 people across the world. They're not a billion dollar company right. So their culture is very similar to our culture. They do digital engineering projects, industrial scale, you know hard core grade digital engineering projects, and they tend to focus on platforms that are front of the business, so customer touching. They own the platform under Standard & Poor's right, so they built that. So Standard Poor's ratings, all that information flows in, they do the ratings based on that. That's something they built. PayPal, they do a lot of work in the payments industry. But they didn't really do much on the backend right. The operations that keep all the lights on and obviously that's a great fit for Linium, where we would come in with the ServiceNow platform and help them with that process. So that really worked out well. It was a great fit for us. >> So how do you guys compete? What's your difference relative to, you've been here a while in this ecosystem. It's started to get crowded. How do you, what's your secret sauce? How do you guys compete? >> So our goal is always to try and stay 12 months ahead of where ServiceNow is going. In the past couple of years, that really has been around user experience. Really designing experiences with the platform that are intuitive, that don't require a lot of training, that allow people to approach the platform and get value from it very quickly. Whether that's end users, or our customer's customers. Those kind of things, really, and that's in our DNA. That's a big part of what we do is design these experiences and do them in a way that really help our customers get value. I would say, you know looking forward, so the buzzword that we've heard around here this week is DevOps right, and we see, and one of the things that Ness does very well is DevOps engineering. I think next year will be the knowledge of DevOps. It will be what everybody's talkin' about. ServiceNow will have a lot more throw-weight in that space. So really that's where we're going. We're helping people get that continuous integration, continuous deployment process using ServiceNow as a foundation. >> CJ Desai laid out the roadmap in more detail than I had seen publicly anyway, and we were talking to him and he said, "Look the motivation really came from the ecosystem." You know obviously the customers as well, but the ecosystem as well, wanted better visibility on what was coming, because you guys have to plan for that. You're tryin' to fill white space. You're tryin' to fill a vacuum. So I wondered if you could talk about that. It's a two-edged coin though right? I mean, but having that visibility has to be a godsend. >> Right and we found that when we are some number of months ahead of ServiceNow, we work very well with them. We, you know obviously, like any large ServiceNow partner, we're very plugged in to where they're going. Their roadmap sets our direction and the kind of things that we can do. But it enables conversations, especially DevOps, and user experience too, enabled conversations at new levels within the organization and that's a big differentiator for us. >> But so, what I'm trying to understand is you guys have to make a call on where to put your investments and your resources, and you don't want to, you've said a couple of times, you're ahead of ServiceNow by, let's say N months, six months, 12 months, 9 months, whatever it is. You don't want to develop something and put too much into something that they're just going to replace in a few months. >> Right. >> Dave: So how do you keep that innovation engine going on your end? >> That right, so it takes a lot of research. We have a person whose dedicated job at our organization is Chief Innovation Officer. She spends her entire day talking to customers, hearing what buzzwords are in the industry, looking and talking to ServiceNow, looking at where they're going. So how can we be positioned when ServiceNow gets there 'cause to deliver services, that's not an instant on right. If the technology shows up tomorrow in the next release, to be able to deliver services for that, you have to start well in advance to actually be able to do that, to understand the process, and the structure, and what's required. >> I see, okay so by being ahead of ServiceNow, what you mean is you're going to develop capabilities that plug in to their release when it hits. >> So that we can deliver to what they have, >> Not things that are duplicative, but things that are, add value when it hits. >> Yeah, I mean ServiceNow comes out with, let's say automated testing. That's something they want to really, they want to get into the automated testing market. That's a discipline. You can't be instant on with that and if you want to have credibility with customers, you have to have trained people. You've got to be six months ahead to be able to step into that world and get value from the platform. >> So take the DevOps example that we heard Pat Casey talk about yesterday. So you guys are preparing for that now obviously. >> Yes. >> And how will you go about it? How will that change your customers world? If can take us through an example. >> So obviously DevOps is, you know it's the big accelerator. It's the idea of we're going to do what we've always done and we're going to do it in timeframes that are minutes or hours, as opposed to weeks, or months, or even years right, so it's a big ramp up. So understanding how to put that in play is a big deal. If you're a startup, alright so one of the themes of DevOps is the two pizza team right. You should never have teams bigger than you can feed with a couple of pizzas. If you're a startup and you already got a two pizza team it's easy to do DevOps. You build it into your culture and away you go. But our customers, you know many of our customers, one we were talkin' about here, talking to here at the show, 130 year old firm and they want to do DevOps. So what's that on-ramp? How do you figure that out? One of our new colleagues from Ness, who has been in the DevOps world for a while says, "You know, it's all about unlearning stuff." Because in order to move into this world, you got to unlearn that old world. >> Well right, it is a mindset. >> It is, it's a culture. >> So how, and one that will be very tricky for a 130 year old firm that maybe doesn't order pizzas that often (chuckling) for it's team. So how do you do that? I mean that's a challenge. >> We're working diligently on having a roadmap to onboard DevOps into existing organizations. The secret really tends to be, start with a NET new project and introduce DevOps into those kind of projects. Build one, build two, build three now you've got a culture of DevOps and you can start then to do some of the unlearning and the retrofitting right. But it's very difficult. You can't really take an existing projects and transform how they do their work. Which is what DevOps is all about. >> No, but in a lot of the companies that I've talked to that have, you know hundred plus year old companies that want to do DevOps right. A lot of times, and I wonder if this has been your experience, it's the Ops guys learning Dev, as opposed to the Dev guys learning Ops. I mean the Dev guys like, "Yeah, yeah we can do infrastructure as code, that's fine", but then you've got all these Ops guys runnin' around. So it's a urgency to retrain the Ops guys, who are eager to learn, most of 'em. The ones that aren't probably in trouble. >> Will do something else. >> So I often joke about OpsDev versus DevOps. What's your experience? >> So I think the big difference is Ops guys are trained from the day they take that job to, you know shun failure right. Failure of a system is a big problem. In DevOps it's going to happen. Not only is it going to happen but the best DevOps practitioners create failure. >> Break stuff (laughing) >> Yeah, you know Netflix kind of has this famous program called Chaos Monkey, when it runs running, turn stuff off right, and how do you respond to that. And that's a big leap culturally and structurally for the Ops guys to get over that. You know the idea is we break stuff, but we learn from that, and not only do I learn from that, but I spread that knowledge across the organization. And that's where ServiceNow steps in right, because they know when things are broken, 'cause they're tied to monitoring, and they got this great knowledge capability to hook up the information we learn from how that broke. So what better testing could we have done so that we could have avoided that break? Or if it's a enforced break, what could we have learned about how to respond to that more quickly? You know the classic example is when AWS lost their east availability center and Netflix kept tickin' because they had lost their east availability center through Chaos Monkey a half a dozen times. >> Right >> It was old hat, and everybody else kind of went dark right. So that idea, and enabling that with the ServiceNow platform is a great opportunity. We really see ServiceNow as the context, the engine with all the knowledge about when things happen, how to fix them, and how to record the knowledge that you learn. >> Give us an example of a company, I mean you're talking about simple, streamlined, intuitive tech, no-training required, so give us some examples of some of the most creative uses. >> I'll give you a great example. So, we have a center in Atlanta. We have some folks in Atlanta. And of course if your in Atlanta, you love Chick-fil-a, and maybe if you're anywhere else you love Chick-fil-a. And they had an issue, which was they have franchisees, and their franchises are different from McDonald's, where you might have one franchisee at McDonald's that owns 200 restaurants. They have a lot of power, market power, and they don't share information with any other franchisee, 'cause that's differentiating for them. Chick-fil-a doesn't do that. The maximum number of restaurants you can own as a Chick-fil-a franchisee I believe is three. It's a number like that. So their franchisees are incented to talk to each other and share information. "Hey I found a better way to clean the ice cream machine", or something like that or to fix a problem. So they were looking to build a portal that they could use to both answer questions from the organization to the franchisees, but allow the franchisees to talk to each other. That kind of a thing has to be zero training right, because the people who are on that might be store managers, but it could be, you know the teenager who runs the point of sale terminal and is havin' a problem with that, so it's really got to be intuitive. So we spent a lot of time with them. We actually, it was we brought one of our designers, so we have UI, UX designers, experience designers, and we were in the sales meeting, and we're having a discussion about what they need, and he's kind of heads down typin' on his computer. And they're kind of lookin' at him like, what's up with this guy right, he's not payin' attention. >> He's designing the interface. >> These guys pay attention to everything. He's lookin' at the logo as we're walkin' in, the colors that are on the wall, the way they talk about themselves. So about an hour into the meeting we got a pause and he just kind of picks his head up and goes, "You mean like this?" And turned his computer around and he had a prototype that he built in the meeting of this really easy to use process. >> Very cool. >> Sean: So that was our intro to Chick-fil-a. >> Your sales guy must'a hated that. (hosts laughing) >> No, no, it was, I'll tell you what, so it was competitive, we have multiple competitors, who were going for that business, when he turned that computer around, the sale was done. >> Dave: Boom. >> We were done, right. They looked at that and said, This is, you know it's not perfect clearly, but this is what we need. >> This is the kind of company we want to work with. >> Exactly, well and that, you know part of that is there are partners in the ecosystem who come in and say, "We can do anything. "Tell us what you want." We are much more consultative and we'll come in and be prescriptive and say this is what you should do, and it's a differentiator for us. It's something we do differently. >> Well Sean that's a great note to end on. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE again. >> It's been great, I really enjoyed my time. >> We'll look forward to having you back at Knowledge 19. >> Terrific, I will certainly be here. >> Great, I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18 in just a little bit. (electronic music)

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

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone, day two of the CUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18. Here at the Venetian in Las Vegas Nevada, I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Dave Vellante. >> Dave: Still have my voice. >> You still have it yes okay well we'll see how you do tomorrow but you're still going strong. But I'm really excited about this panel we have Pharrel Howe she is a GM in IT service management, asset management, business management. Have I forgotten one? >> Nope. >> Rebecca: I got it all at ServiceNow. >> Dave: This week. >> Exactly, at ServiceNow. You run the biggest business for ServiceNow. >> Yes. >> Thanks for joining us Pharrel. >> Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here. >> So I want to talk about employee experience which is really. It's just the cornerstone of this conference but really ServiceNow's purpose. Why has it become so increasingly important in IT today? >> Okay well in IT really you saw it today in CJ's keynote. The era of great experience is here and in IT we've been really really great at managing productivity and managing cost and making sure we were running efficiently and that we still do that and do it really well. But now we have to also make sure not just our customers have a great experience but our employees do too. And companies that do that well have the competitive advantage. It's absolutely required that we're able to do that now and so you know ServiceNow's paving the way for great experiences on our platform. For customers and employees and we're excited to be leading the next era of great experience. >> So I don't want to minimize the accomplishments that ServiceNow has made because they're phenomenal. >> Pharrel: Alright I'm happy for you not to minimize them. >> But I want to say this, you have thrived. I mean when Fred Luddy developed the platform. You thrived in the sea of mediocrity and you drove a ship through that sea and just mopped up a lot of business. Awesome, congratulations and in this world we live in it's like now it's becoming table stakes. If you guys have pointed out our home lives we live with these consumer interfaces we expect that now so as a leader of ServiceNow's a largest business. How do you continue to push the innovation levier? We expect now so much more, how do you continue to differentiate. Because your competition has woken up, the world was waking up. How do you stay ahead? >> Well you saw, you know earlier today CJ talking again and we're going to, you'll continue to see this theme from us. It is all about the platform. We are a platform company and when we build and innovate, acquire and then innovate. It is all within the platform and that I our competitive advantage. So then every application that was in existence today or that we build in the future can take advantage of that innovation natively. It's all integrated and seamless and there's nobody else out there who is able to do that and deliver those experiences. And so that is going to continue to be our strategy moving forward. >> So let's double click on that a little bit. Maybe get some examples. So clearly there's a big emphasis on UX and design. I think you guys have made some investments in design firms. >> Pharrel: Significant. >> There's machine intelligence I'll call it, AI. You're infusing AI throughout the platform and those are just two examples. >> Yeah. >> Maybe talk about those and give us some others if there are them. >> Sure well you know in the IT keynote that I'm going to have this afternoon. It's all about the era of great experiences and taking the roles that are in IT. It will be about the fulfiller, the requester, the planner and the operator in IT and how we've taken to the road and gone and done user research out with our customers and we're building great experiences in the platform for those roles. You no longer is it going to stand for you to just use your best judgment and go and build product and hope everybody will come. You've got to get out there side by side with your customers. Truly understand the work that they're doing and then build that back into the product and iterate again and again and again. And so that's the direction we're going from a design standpoint to build those experiences. >> So let's unpack this era of great experiences something that's simple, easy, intuitive but what are we really talking abut here. How do you define a great experience? >> Yeah well let's take it from something that we can relate to, we're all requesters of services one way or another right? And me as an employee I need services from IT in order to do my job. The thing is the channels that we have today are not enough. Phone and email aren't going to cut it and a lot of times if I'm in the carpool line waiting to pick up my daughter and her friends from school. I and you know I'm trying to check in on the ticket status for a laptop that I need immediately and I happen to think of it right then. I'm not going to call IT, I'm not in front of the laptop. I need more channels on more devices anytime anywhere at my convenience not someone else's. And so that's the kind of stuff that were talking about. We can't, it can't just be good enough anymore it has to be prolific. >> I'm interested in how you're using and applying machine intelligence. It seems like you're trying to anticipate my needs, put things in front of me that I might. You know I might shorten my search time or might be relevant that I hadn't even though of. Is that the right way to be thinking about how you're using machine intelligence and second part of the question is. What ar you finding that machines can do better than humans and how do they compliment each other? Srt of a long question. >> Sure I love this question. That's okay love it. Okay so our initial approach to agent and to machine intelligence, artificial intelligence. All of that is to you heard CJ say it today. You'll here micro-moments are moments that matter and we're looking to inject intelligence right there. Right there, those are very very practical use cases. They're not a panacea. They are not the answer but they are an answer in a moment that critically matters and so a perfect example of how that would play out would be my example previously of checking in on my laptop. The virtual agent that we're bringing to the market in our London release is all conversation based. And so I can very quickly see what topics that agent can handle and I can you know immediately engage on what that looks like and get the confidence that I need back and forth engaging with the virtual agent in m convenience wherever I am. Whether I'm at work or I'm at home and so you know that is a moment that matters for me because it's not, it eliminates the mental overhead for me to keep track of the administration of just trying to do my job everyday. Now take the flip side of that. The person who's on the other side of that virtual agent or would have been had that virtual agent not be there. They are not having to answer those kind of questions. Is my laptop coming please just assure me. They're not answering questions and so you know maybe that's not necessarily deflecting it an incident. It could be, but it's also reducing the administrivia that's happening when, and so it's cutting down the time it takes to resolve incidents and it's reducing friction and frustration. Between fulfillers and requesters of service ad so that's how we're looking at it. In those moments that matter and then as technology evolves and gets stronger. There may be bigger and larger use cases. >> And the machine verses human thing. I hate to say it that way but things the machines are doing. You're seeing categorization obviously is one at scale. Other things, I mean how do you see that evolving. What are the things that increasingly machine are going to do that humans can't do as well. >> Well I would say a use case besides maybe the virtual agent and those conversation based topics which really are just guided flows for conversation. Another thing might be being able to you know if there's just so much data that would take me a while. Or I would need a business analyst to maybe go and look for insights. That's something that machines can do and that's not replacing humans that's scaling our ability to act. And so that I think is the next foray to really move into and we'll start poking in different areas of insights as well and the moments that matter for work getting done in the enterprise as well. >> Because that is really what we're trying to do is help people get their work done. >> Pharrel: Yes. >> Quicker. >> Pharrel: And more easily. And when we talk about employee experience it's simply that. Please just let me get my work done and let me have some choice. I'm going to have a personal tool chain. Don't force me to use you know ServiceNow, please don't force me to use your messaging client. Our connect chat if I want to Microsoft Teams or Slack let me do that and let me keep that UI. So we're really when we talk about employee experiences it's a very broad arena there and its a great partnership between IT and all the other lines of business to deliver what employee experience is going to look like. >> And you know Rebecca, we talked about this yesterday. John Donahoe took on the machine replacing humans and was very transparent. The example I would use is search. When IDC we had a big library. We had like three or four librarians. They're not there anymore but nobody is saying oh wow. Search I mean search is a machine. It made our lives better, it created new opportunities. I think that's a good example, a small one but one where. I'm an optimist even though things are getting complex. >> Pharrel: Me too, absolutely an optimist on that and so for example with our virtual agent. Go do a search on LinkedIn and you will find for conversation designer. There are new jobs being created to be able to support this kind of technology. You know, jobs are evolving not going away. >> So speaking of jobs. You have been a very successful leader in a high growth organization. >> Thanks. >> I think on your Twitter it says I'm on a rocket ship ride of a lifetime. >> Pharrel: I am, I'm here to tell you. >> I'd love to hear what your advice is for other leaders who are trying to affect transformational change in their IT organizations. >> Alright I think whether it's personal change for yourself, you're trying to evolve or you need to evolve your organization. The first thing you need to do is check your assumptions. You know the older we get and the more we're barraged by noise we think we know. Make sure that you're really clear on and have some self reflection but also go and check that with people around you and get some clarity around alright is this really the reality. What's our reality that we're trying to transform? And when you're talking about transformation it doesn't necessarily happen overnight. It can happen overnight and that's called disruption but transformation that you are initiating. Give yourself a little bit of breathing room. You got to know that this is a marathon and you cannot be doing it at a sprint pace. You will burn out so keep your eye on the horizon and what you're trying to accomplish and just get started. Don't sit there and wait and try to have the perfect plan. You're going to attack your way through it, it's going to change anyway. Just get started. >> The rapid iteration we were hearing about that's so important. >> Yeah absolutely DevOps and you know personal digital transformation. You got it. >> I also want to talk to you about women. There is a dearth of women leaders in technology. You are one of them, what are you doing personally to promote diversity and inclusion at ServiceNow and then what is the company doing and finally what should the tech industry be doing to face this challenge head on? >> Yeah you know my take on it is, it's all about belonging and I got that word from Pat Waters. So diversity, inclusion and belonging. That's something that she's championing and we are so fortunate to have her as our chief talent officer. Prior to having that word I was just really focused on connection. You know really engaging just with people and trying to understand where they're coming from and really making sure that you're practicing active listening. That has been like the key for my success I will say throughout my career. Is just being able to constantly reflect back what I'm hearing. One to make sure I didn't put any filters on it obviously and then two people want to feel heard and so you know whenever I get into the conversation around women in tech. Yes there are some very real facts, fact based, data based challenges ahead of us but where I choose to put my focus is a much broader conversation that includes you know everyone. And really just focusing a lot more on connection and belonging over all makes a huge difference. >> What you're saying is really resonating because I mean that's what we keep hearing is happening but perpetuates the old boys club is that oh I know this guy because we went to college together. Or some other kind of biases that you hold that it's just oh he's like me. I want to promote him and bring him along and there are fewer women in positions of power who they can bring up the people that they see are like them. So I think that's another problem too is that you have to... >> Yeah that goes back to a really great HR practice which is you cannot just reach deep into your network every time you get in trouble. Rely on a great HR standard practice that says no you know we need to go out there and there's great talent out there that you just didn't even think of. So you know when you're going back to, we talked about transformation earlier in this conversation. Check your self awareness, be clear about wait a minute. Do I really know right now what I need. I'm not sure let me broaden my perspective here and HR's been a great partner to be able to do that. >> So that's a great point because gender and race and sexual preference are part of that diversity and certainly other factors. But like a financial advisor when the portfolio gets over balanced in one area he or she has to rebalance that portfolio. And again it sounds formulaic but I think Pharrel your point is what you're looking for is to open up that network to a wider audience. >> Absolutely. >> And not just the good old boys network. >> I have a little bit of a bias here, you know my background. I'm an English major and I'm running the large business for ServiceNow. >> We need to open the diversity to English, it's a liberal arts background. >> I don't want kids these days to think that if they pick one path they're stuck in that path and their locked into certain jobs. It's not true, you can you just need, it's the way that you think, it's having critical thinking skills. Now listen, you're not going to go put me on the platform although I probably could. Go in and start coding, you're not going to rely on me to do that right away. I can learn it but allowing us, allowing yourself to start to believe. That hey wait a minute, you know the labels that I've grown up with and put on people. Maybe I can remove a couple and I love it when I'm surprised and are able to bring an employee on my time that I'm like ah it doesn't necessarily make sense on the paper but look at you. You're amazing. >> Well one of the things that supports that is digital. For years if you were in the financial services business or the manufacturing business or the automotive business. You were there for life but if you have digital skills you can traverse now much more easily. >> Yes absolutely. >> Kids today just have phenomenal opportunities. >> I know, I know it's great. I think it's so cool and I love making. I love opening tech a bit more to make it more accessible. More appealing, that there are so many different roads to come in and it's important that we get people who think differently, creative you know people who are good strong communicators. Who can bring clarity to a situation. We need all of that and that to me is the first step for diversity. >> And because that's the stuff that robots aren't very good at. Is the empathy, the creativity, that kind of broad thinking. >> That's right. >> Awesome way to bring it home. >> Found full circle. Pharrel thanks so much for coming on the program. What a fun and enlightening conversation. >> Oh my gosh, super fun. I really appreciate it. >> And you're speaking today at 1:30, good luck with that. >> And by the way we have a diversity and inclusion belonging lunch with Pat Waters and CJ Desai which will be at I think 12:30 as well so. >> Great plug, excellent. Thank you so much again. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante we will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge 18 hashtag know 18 just after this.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18, I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Dave Vellante. We're joined by Chris Bedi, he is the CIO of ServiceNow. Thanks so much for coming on the show Chris. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, we're hearing so much about improving employee experience and this is the goal, your goal, and also the collective goal of CIO, so can you tell us a little bit about why this, and how do you see your role in this? >> Yeah for sure, I mean if I rewind three or four years I don't think experience was really on anybody's agenda, or not high on the list. I think, you know, what we've come to realize or I've come to realize is that experience is critical to actually getting the right behavioral and economic outcomes. It is not optional anymore because with the amount of transformation that we're driving through technology it's changing processes, changing the way customers interact with us, suppliers interact with us, and that change needs to be easy. And not just easy for easy sake, but otherwise we don't get the business outcomes we are looking for. So, for me it's very purpose driven to say that for us to get those economic outcomes we have to focus on experience. >> I feel like the CIO role is evolving, and we've talked about this before, I'd love your thoughts on it. You know, it kind of used to be, alright we're going to keep the lights on, granted that's still part of the role but it's table stakes. >> It doesn't go away. (Rebecca laughs) But yes, still part of the role. >> You know, we can outsource our email, you know, what are we going to do with the cloud, okay. That's shifting, you know, with the digital economy, machine intelligence, the economy booming, this war on talent especially in Silicone Valley. Things are changing, how do you see the role changing and where do you see it evolving to? >> Well, I think the CIO role is changing. It's driven really by what's going on in every industry. If you think about it, everything, how fast your company operates, how efficient your processes are, how engaged your employees are via employee experiences, the mode in which you're able to interact with your customers, how digital your supply chain is, everything is powered by technology platforms and CIO's are the ones governing and managing and those technology platforms to deliver those outcomes, and I think it's only going to increase where technology has a bigger and bigger impact and I think that is really driving a shift in the CIO role where CIO's need to be front and center. There is no more, here's the business strategy, here's the technology strategy. They are one and the same thing and I think in our consumer lives we talk about the digital divides or the have's and have nots. I think the same thing is going to play out in enterprises where those enterprises that can figure out how to harness these newer technologies to drive meaningful business outcomes are going to start to separate themselves from the competition and that separation's only going to get bigger with time. So I think there's a tremendous amount of urgency on this topic as well. I was reading a recent article which talked about CEO's priorities for IT and saying favoring speed over cost, and I don't think that's because all of a sudden we're going to become frivolous with our spending. But I think again it just speaks to the urgency and the need for businesses to transform and it's now. >> It's not just harnessing the technologies, it's also harnessing the employee behaviors that need to change in order to create these cultural shifts that you're talking about, right, or? >> Yeah, for sure, and I would say and we had our CIO Decisions yesterday, one of the key topics was, you know, driving cultural transformation and I find that's a lot of what I'm doing and that involves a lot of selling, quite frankly. I mean, I don't have sales in my title, but by the very definition of it we're saying this technology has the promise to unlock a new business model, unlock a new process. Get to that next level of efficiency or productivity. But, you're selling a vision, right, and that means change, and people don't like change. As long as someone else is changing they're fine with it, once it's themselves, so we have to focus a lot and really double down on transformation efforts and play a key role in that, and to link it back to your first question, that transformation gets so much easier if we can deliver compelling experiences, right? So, it's all kind of tied together. >> Four years ago at K15, Frank Slootman sort of threw down the gauntlet to CIO's in the audience and said, you must become business leaders, if you don't become business leaders you'll be a dinosaur. How are you a business leader, and how are you becoming a business leader? >> I think it's really shaping IT's agenda based upon what's important to the organization. And, that's going to be different for different organizations but largely it's going to be things tied to customers, how productive and engaged are the employees, what can we do to drive margin, which is top and bottom line improvement in the economic model, and making sure that IT's goals and objectives are one and the same with the business goals and objectives. So, for example we do at ServiceNow in IT, we have a shared contract with every function. Marketing, sales, you know, professional services, that here's the business outcomes. On my dashboard, you'll seldom see a whole bunch of IT metrics, it's all about did we get to the business metric or not. Cuz if you're not measuring that then I'm not sure what you're measuring. >> Okay, so you, and I'm sure you have a lot of IT metrics, too, but you're able to then tie those IT metrics to business metrics >> Sure. >> And show how a change in one flows through the value to affect another. >> Yeah, I mean, where the role was, that doesn't go away and it's a critical part of the role and I don't want to undermine it which is, all the invisible things that just happen in corporations, you know, the utilities of, is the networking, and phones and all that, that has to be rock solid. That's table stakes, but yeah, for the next part of that, it's really driving those transformational business outcomes. >> So you're a big proponent and advocate of machine learning, how do you see machine learning transforming the modern work experience, the modern workplace and then the employee experience of the modern workplace? >> I think at a very high level, it's around speed and effectiveness of decision making. And, machine learning, I think has the promise or the opportunity for all of us to unlock that next wave of productivity. Just like in the late '90s we had ERP's and they drove a lot of automation, and supply chain and finance organizations around the world got better. They got faster, more efficient. I think machine learning can do that for the entire enterprise by leveraging platforms to help people make faster and better decisions. I know there's a lot written about replacing humans and things like that. I don't buy into that, I think it's just helping us be better and I think there's used cases all over the enterprise. The biggest barriers to machine learning in my mind typically come with talent. How do you do it, and the good news is here, I mean what we embedded with machine learning in the ServiceNow platform, you don't need an army of data scientists that are super hard to find, almost democratizing the ability to leverage machine learning. Second biggest one that when I talk to CIOs, it's lack of the right data, and they don't have the right data perhaps because they haven't yet digitized their processes, so that's a critical precursor. You got to digitize your processes to generate the right data to then feed the algorithms to get the outcome, but yeah machine learning I think is going to materially transform how we operate dramatically over the next three to five years. >> And, I mean, IT systems continue to get more complex. They in many cases becoming more of a black box. I wonder if I could get your thoughts on this. I mean, I remember reading Michael Lewis's book, Flash Boys, and he talked a lot about the flash crash, and nobody could explain it. They chalk it up to a computer glitch, and his premise was a computer glitch is computers are so complex we can't explain them anymore. >> Yeah. >> AI, machine learning, machine intelligence, going to make that even more complex and more of a black box. Is that a problem for us mortals? >> I think it's a problem, (laughs) for us mortals, but I think it's a problem and I'll tie it back to the transformation in human behavior. We're, I'll call it prototyping and rolling out and leveraging machine learning in our own enterprise, and one of the things we've observed is that us humans, us mortals as you call us, we need to know why, so if a machiner is making an algorithmic based recommendation or a decision we need to know why. And, our employees had a hard time accepting the ML based recommendation without knowing the why. So, we had to go back and rework that, and say how do we surface the why in the context of the recommendation and that got people over the hump. So I think it is a super important point where, as these algorithms get more and more sophisticated, our human brains, the way we interpret it, is we still need the why. >> Yeah, so you're trying to white box that, is what you're saying, which again is not easy. I often use the example of, a computer can tell me if I'm looking at a dog, or I joke Silicone Valley if you watch Silicone Valley >> Yeah yeah yeah, >> Hot dog or not hot dog. >> Hot dog, exactly. >> But, try to explain how you know it's a dog, it's hard >> It is challenging. >> To do that. >> Right. >> Especially if you think about data scientists, they are incredibly cerebral and way smarter than me and, they often have a hard time simplifying it enough where its consumable if you will. So, it is a challenge and I think, you know, it's something that'll evolve as we start to use more of it cause we'll just have to figure it out as an industry. >> I want to ask you about, one of the things that we're hearing so much about this conference is the neat things that you're doing around eradicating employee pain points and taking care of all those onerous, annoying, tedious tasks that we have to do, the filling out of paperwork and all of that sort of thing. What are sort of the next things you're thinking about, the other parts of the work day that are annoying for all of us when you sort of think ahead to the product lineup? >> I think, one of the things we do is figure out where you are and you know, digital transformation, right, is great, but it has so many different meanings depending on your company or your industry. So what we did internally is we actually gave definition and an answer to the question of how digital are you? So we take every process and a collection of processes to a department and bubble it up and so on forth, and we rate every process on how fast it is, how intelligent is, which is a measure of machine learning, and what's the experience we're delivering. And taking those three measures, we're able to come up with a score and more than anything it gave us a common language around the enterprise to say, how do we move this from a score of 50 to 70, how do we move this from a 60 to a 90, and which processes are most important to move first, second and third, right, and without that it gets really hard because digital transformation can just feel like this abstract concept and as business leaders, we do better when we have measurement. And once we have a number and a target and a goal, it's easier to get people aligned to that. So, that's been helpful for us as well on a change management aspect. >> So true. Coach K, you guys always have great outside guests come in and speak at your CIO Decisions Conference, I mean Robert Gates is one that, you know, I mean as much as you've accomplished in your life you haven't accomplished nearly as much as that guy. >> Yeah. >> Very humbling. Coach K was your, one of your guests this week, you host that event. >> I do. >> Share with us some of the, some of the learnings from Coach K. >> We had Coach K, Duke's basketball coach, I would argue best coach, best basketball coach >> I'm a Tarheel. >> Sorry, Tarheel here. >> Yeah exactly, Dean Smith. >> We had a couple in the audience- >> He said he's no Dean Smith the other day, (Rebecca laughs) well you know I don't know. >> And I am a college hoops junkie so for me, it was a massive treat. I just wanted to talk to him about so many games and things like that. But he, he really gave a great talk about just how to be a better leader, how to constantly be learning and applying yourself. I mean he's 71 years old and how he needs, he talked about how he had to reinvent himself at least ten times, he's been coaching for 42 years. To meet the players where they are, and changing himself. And every season, the day after the season ends, having a meeting with his managers saying, what do we need to change? And it could be they just won the national championship. So, never resting on his laurels, constantly learning, and he had really interesting anecdotes about when he coached the U.S. Olympic team, and the difference of 18-year-olds right out of high school versus these are the superstars of the NBA, massive egos, and one of the interesting things, he said so many interesting things I could keep going on but just, you know, he said don't leave your ego at the door. Bring your ego, cause that what makes you great. I need you to have that ego Kobe when you're taking that last second shot cause that's what makes you, you. But, also what he spent a lot of time is getting them aligned on values. Here's the core values that which we are going to operate as a team and that are going to allow us to be successful. And I think that leadership lesson applies to any team. He applied it in a very difficult environment while millions of people are watching but, and he talked about how he took that collection of individuals and made them a unit, and that was super powerful. >> Yeah, he coached the first dream team which was Magic, >> Yeah I think he's coached four or five, and >> and I think Byrd might have been hurt but he played, >> yeah. And how he would just >> and Jordan I mean that, try and bring that eclectic mix together. >> And then to hear, have someone be so, you know, I've done all these things, and then be articulate enough to be able to say, and this is what I did >> Yeah and just super humble >> this is how I brought out the best in people. >> Super humble and just, again, constant learning right, I mean John our CEO talks about be a learning animal. I think Coach K embodied that in spades. >> West Point grad too, right, with a lot of discipline >> Yeah. >> That's right, yeah, yeah. >> in his background and >> for sure, >> and it's really inspirational. >> And then he talked about that, that's where he learned a lot of his leadership lessons. >> Really, yeah? >> At West Point. >> Well, Chris it's been so fun talking to you we could, maybe we should get Coach K on with you. A little like, Mike Krzyzewski, yeah >> That would be a treat for me, you and me could talk about Duke Tarheels. >> Yeah, well okay, alright, if you insist. >> We could bring John Wooden into the greatest coaches ever conversation in fairness >> We could, we could. >> to the wizard of Westwood I mean. >> Cool, well thank you. >> Chris, thanks again for coming on. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge '18 coming up just after this. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube! Covering ServiceNow, Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone to The Cube's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18 in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Gaurav Dutt Uniyal, who is the North American practice head of service management for Infosys. Thanks so much for joining us, Gaurav. >> Thanks, Rebecca for hosting me. >> So first, this is your second time on The Cube, so I should say welcome back. >> Yes, thank you. >> So tell us about what you do at Infosys and what, sort of what the strategy is in this space. >> Sure, sure. So I lead our practice for North America, and Infosys is our technology services company. And we help our organizations go through their digital transformation journey. And with ServiceNow I've been working for the last 10 years, so we have seen this platform evolving from a basic ticketing tool to a platform that can be used by IT, and now it has reached a point where it's being adopted by, across the organizations, right? All the business owners, be it HR or customer services or program managers, portfolio managers, and so on and so forth. And interestingly, you know, the theme which we have adopted for this year, is how do we help our clients accelerate their journey for HR, CSM, item? So basically how do we help our organization adopt ServiceNow, be on IT, and take it to the enterprise. >> So that's, so that's the strategy. How do we accelerate customers in their journey. And is the strategy led by customers themselves? Did they say, "Look, Infosys, we have this problem, "we're going too slow," or what would you say, where was sort of the impetus for this? >> I think it's a mix of both. You know, we do get, obviously, inputs from the clients, but the value that Infosys brings in is the diverse experience from multiple engagements, right? And to give you some more views of how we are approaching this space, so on a very high level what we see as the key things or strategies in this space. The first of all, any control system that we have with the client, the first and foremost topic is about user experience. That, you know, as we implement SerivceNow, how do we enhance the user experience for the internalized as for the regular customers? That's one. Second strategy or thing that we see is that, you know, while ServiceNow has been matured and implemented for a larger part of IT organization, but how do we make sure that the similar level of maturity can be achieved for HR managers, right? How program managers, portfolio managers, the security organizations, the facilities team, how they can adopt the platform. So that's the second strategy. The third strategy that we work on is bringing in domain expertise as part of ServiceNow implementation, right? Now, for example, if we are implementing ServiceNow for retail, so how do we bring in experience of store's management, for example? If we are implementing it for a foreign organization, you know how do we bring in that domain expertise, and integrate that with SerivceNow. That's the third strategy. And the fourth thing that we are focusing on is some of the newer things, which possibly, not revenue generating engines for us yet, >> Rebecca: Yet. (laughs) >> But down the line, you're 12 months, 13 months down the line, we expect more revenue to come. So things like, IOT, and, I shouldn't even say AI because AI is something we're already implementing for some of the clients. >> So, that's interesting. You're exploring this area, this area is so hot, what are some of the, how do you see some of the potential use cases? >> So the use cases that we are seeing is so ITSM, I think in our viewpoint, it has matured. A lot of organizations have adopted ITSM, the basic capabilities on incident, problem, team management, asset management, CMDB, is already out there, right? An obvious thing, clients taking those foundational capabilities and taking it to other parts of organization, right? So in case of HR, we are seeing organizations adopting it for case management. Helping onboarding, offboarding all their employees. Managing their payroll systems. That's one set of use cases that we are seeing. The second set of use cases we are seeing are around automating your business processes. So, there are a few clients where they identified a set of business use cases or workflows and they are leveraging the power of ServiceNow to automate those. >> So how are you, how are you and your customers measuring the return on the investment here? What are they seeing? >> So what we do is, when we work on these engagements, so at the beginning of the engagements we do identify certain outcomes that we are going to deliver for our clients, right? And one simple example is if we are implementing ServiceNow for help desk, so one of the key outcomes that we would measure is that by implementing ServiceNow, how many tickets that we have reduced? Or how many calls to service desk have been reduced by implementing SerivceNow? Which, you know, actually has reduced the cost of operations for the client. So that's just one example. What we do is across the organization we identify those use cases and the kind of outcomes that it would deliver, and we also identify the set of metrics, right, which we jointly review during the engagement. At what kind of outcomes that have been delivered with this implementation. >> When you think about all of the, the solutions that you helped customers come to, what are you most excited about? >> Yeah, so I think if you look at the different types of solutions that are out there, right, and how customers are adopting it, I think in my view, or the way we see it, the solutions around the specific domain or industry, right? Because so far what we have seen is that service management or ITSM, it's like a whole giant lair, it is not really tied to a specific domain, right? But more and more we are seeing that clients are asking for solutions which are relevant to their business. Which can help make some difference to their business outcomes. And that's where we are seeing turned around building solutions for retail organizations, building solutions for insurance organization, money factoring, finance, and so on and so forth. So that's one interesting turn that we are seeing in the market right now. >> Last question, how many Knowledges have you been to? >> I have been to, I have been coming right from the beginning. >> So you've seen the conference above, why do you keep coming back? >> I think so first of all, this is a great product. A lot of organizations are adopting it. But interestingly I think it's an equal system. If you look at this conference on 18,000, 20,000 people attending it last year it was only 15,000, and if you look at so many partners and customers out there, I think there's a big big family and bigger ecosystem out there. So yeah, excited to be part of it. >> Gaurav, thanks so much for coming on The Cube, it's been great. >> Thank you. >> I'm Recebba Knight, we will have more tomorrow from ServiceNow Knowledge 18. Until then, good night!

(techy music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18 here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Dave Vellante. We're joined by CJ Desai. He is the Chief Product Officer for ServiceNow. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE again, CJ. >> Thank you, it's great to be here. First time I came was last Knowledge, which was my first Knowledge, so I'm a lot more educated and equipped this time as compared to firing round of questions from Dave last time. >> We will pick your brain, exactly. So you were up on the stage this morning, a great keynote, and you said, "Welcome to the era of great experiences." Unpack that a little bit. What do you mean by that? >> First of all, thank you for remembering that. That was supposed to be the idea. But on a serious note, we feel, if you think about even our company name is ServiceNow, so you provide service, and when you provide service, that's not a technology you provide, you provide an experience, whether it's IT service, customer service, employee, whatever the case might be. And, if you are not delivering experiences, then you are not that relevant. So we are trying to truly, and we are in the beginning of this journey, truly internalize that, that if people are using us, they call themselves service desk, insider organization, IT service desk, customer service desk, whatever the terms you want to use, there is about experiences. Rather than focusing on bits and bytes, we want to focus on experiences, deliver those experiences via our platform. It's not software as a service, it's software as an experience. It's software as an experience, that's the idea, correct. Thank you for-- >> You also talked about the eras. You know, we went back to the industrial era and then went through the ages of computing. Yeah, I was not sure if that was going to work or not, but the point I was trying to make, Dave, was just around the quality of work and how work has evolved. That's it, that was the idea. >> But I think my takeaway was even more than that, because we are entering, in my view, anyway, a new era, and I'd love to get your comments. We're moving from what is real tailwind for you, which is the Cloud era, and obviously, Cloud is an important part of the new era where you have a remote set of services to one where you have this ubiquitous set of digital services that do things like sense, hear, read, act, respond. That's a different world, and it's all about the experience, and I don't know how to define that yet. Digital, I guess, is how we define it. But what are your thoughts? >> The one thing, even simple things, and these are not simple things to understand. When I look at things like even genomic sequencing, that's so different. They are using technology to figure out how to sequence the human genome so that it can help you with your health, live longer, even things like knowing that somebody rings a doorbell at my home and I can see on my phone. Everything is connected, humans are connected, when mobile came and computer came and internet came. But things being connected is pretty exciting for me. That just transforms our lives and how we work, and I really like that it is all about us, and other than us being focusing on the technology itself. So that's the point. It's that we're humans, and let's focus on humans and experience, rather than worry about, oh, this runs two times faster than the other thing, or this thing is smaller than other thing. That's interesting, but not that interesting. >> At this conference, this is really the message that you're getting across. It's the new tag line, we are making the world of work work better for people. How does the Now platform really deliver on that promise? How does it make the employees life easier? I would say we have a bunch of use cases, but as you know, we started out early on with IT service management, and the whole idea was can we provide, as long as computers are there, as long as software is there, password reset is going to be there for a very, very long time. So, my point is that that's when it started. Okay, I need to do password reset, I want to upgrade my laptop. Every year there is a new laptop, every year there is a new phone, and that cycle will continue, and as long as we are using technology for our knowledge workers, IT help desk will be there, right? And where we are evolving is enterprise service management, because you don't, as an employee, you may deal with IT, you may deal with HR, you may have a contractual issue with legal, you may need something related to your payroll from finance. People think payroll is HR, but payroll is finance. And as you try to go across in a day in a life of an employee, you need to make it as easy as possible. So that's what we are focused on, deliver better experiences. You know, artificial intelligence that listen today, I believe, is more about optimization, rather than intelligence. Yeah, we want to use your data to be able to predict, like if you see in Gmail, I don't know if you use Gmail, but if you have Gmail, you get an email, it'll suggest auto-responses. Those auto-responses are almost positive. Have you noticed that? They are never negative. >> Yeah. >> Oh, of course. >> They're like, no, I don't want to come to your meeting. (laughing) It's kind of like trying to predict most likely what you would want to say, and I think if we can use intelligence to make people more productive, that's what we want. >> I mean, I use that function. I actually like it. >> CJ: Yeah, exactly. >> You know, it gives you three choices, and one of 'em is pretty close to what I would normally, and if I'm busy, I'm done. >> Yeah, right, exactly. >> I like that. This is the other thing we've talked about. We've talked about this with Farrel this morning. Try to anticipate my needs, right? So that means you've got to infuse AI into the application and identify specific use cases. You guys have done some M&A there, you talked to the financial analysts meeting, obviously, not disclosing anything, but watch for us to do some more M&A. You got to believe that that machine intelligence space is really ripe for innovation. >> And what we believe is if I look at the big Cloud providers, like Google, are investing a lot in deep learning and many, many other technologies, so whenever they expose it, and some of them do a really good job, we will just leverage their libraries. But there are things specific to enterprise, because there are things specific to enterprise, like if you use the word network at a hardware company, that's always in context of compute network and storage. If you use the word network at a healthcare company, that's a network of physicians, networks of hospitals, networks of whatever. And if you use the word network at a Telco company, that is a whole different network. My point is we want to understand those pieces, and if we can make it easier based on your data, so if all your cases, which are, Oh, part of your network is down. Ah, that's what you mean from the context end point, so we want to use wherever folks like Google are investing, we will leverage that, but if we need to leverage, we'll do that too. >> It's interesting, we were talking to a customer today, it might have been Worldpay, and they took the CMDV language and transformed it into the language of the business. What a rare and powerful concept for somebody from IT to do that, because if the lingua franca is business, then the adoption's going to go through the roof. >> So does that make sense? >> Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Well, I appreciate you talking about the value and the customer experience versus the technology. Certainly, it speeds and feeds you right. Boring. But the platform is important. Many products, one platform, that's unique for an enterprise software company, and you guys aspire to be the next great enterprise software company. Talk about how the platform enables you to get there. >> So I will tell you simple. You know our founder, Fred Luddy, started with the platform in 2004, so that was 14 years ago now, and his idea was you should be able to route work through the enterprise using our platform, and then we started with the IT service management and use case. The biggest advantage we have is that we are a very customer-driven organization. Many companies say that, but you see it here. Dave, you have been coming to Knowledge for a long time, I don't know about you. >> This is my first rodeo, but it's cool. >> It's the first thing you see. >> These are 80-plus person sessions, are customer sessions. They're not our sessions, where they are sharing best practices with them. So we get all these requests, CJ, we have built emergency response system using ServiceNow, CJ, we have built financial close using ServiceNow. Can you productize it? And we say, okay, thank you for the idea, which is great, thank you for the idea. How do I prioritize all of that? And, Dave, where platform comes in, because all the services I talked about today, service intelligence, service experience, user experience, they're all built in the platform, and I'm trying to be cautious, but if I want to create a brand new product on our platform, a brand new product on our platform, 40-use case, a 1.0 product where I feel comfortable the customers can use it, I would say 12 to 18 engineers. That's it. >> Rebecca: Wow. >> If I want to create one product, it's 12 to 18 engineers. So the R&D leverage, and that's the point I was trying to get across, that whether it's my own team creating product or whether our customer building apps on our product, because on platform, because we provide all the common services integration, the incremental cost to create something, now sales marketing, with my close friend, Dave Schneider, is much harder, because he has to scale it, build specialty in it and all that, but to create the product is not an issue for us on the platform. >> But this is where Cloud economics are so important, because at volume, your marginal costs go to practically zero. >> CJ: That's exactly right. >> But people may say, oh, 12 to 18, that sounds like a lot, but we're talking about an enterprise class software product here, and Fred Luddy, in the 2004 time frame, I mean, the state of enterprise software then, frankly, and now, was terrible. The guys at 37signals, I don't know if you know Jason, they made valid attempts, but it wasn't enterprise class software, it wasn't a platform. I've said, a number of times this week, the reference model for enterprise software is painfully mediocre, so you guys have done a great job, and now you've really got to take the next step and stay ahead on innovation. >> Correct on innovation card, that's what I said, innovation should be my top priority. You heard me at the Financial Analysts Day. Customer Service Management, brand new product, we actually launched it at Knowledge 16. Okay, that's when we launched it. It was engineers and teens who created that product, so many teens, the 1.0, now we have evolved quite a bit, 500 customers two weeks ago, 500 enterprise customers. You guys know that we don't go to the small line of the business. 500 in two years, eight quarters. >> And I found out last night, I think it was 75, or it might even be higher, reference customers. >> CJ: Yeah, already, using CSM. >> That's the difference. I do, we do, a lot of these shows. >> That's the platform impact. >> And you're talking about the customer focus. You do a lot of these shows. The customers talk about the impact on their business. They don't talk about how they installed some box, or like you say, runs faster. It's the business impact that really makes a difference, and that's why we're excited to be here. >> You saw today when I talked about Flow Designer and Integration Hub. IT wants to provide software so that business analysts can model business processes in a Cloud way with whoever you need to integrate with, so we are really keeping that as the north star for our customers, and how can we make their life easier, whatever they want to automate, some manual processes, all of manual processes. I remember speaking to Fred when I joined initially, and I said, "Fred, how did you think about TAM?" He said, "What do you mean, TAM?" You know, he's a funny guy, and he was serious. His point was there are so many manual workflows, how do you put a TAM around it? Every business is unique, their processes are complex, so don't box yourself and say, Oh, this is a $4 billion TAM and I'm going to get 20% of it. Every enterprise, as long as they exist, they will have manual workflows, you go and give it our platform so they can automate however they want. >> Well, I'm going to make you laugh about TAM. I'm a former industry analyst, so when you guys did the IPO way back when, well before your time-- >> CJ: 2012. >> when Frank was here, there was a research company saying this is small market, maybe it's a billion dollars and it's shrinking, so I, with some of my colleagues, developed a TAM analysis, and it was more than 30 billion. I published 30 billion, you can go on our old Wiki and see that, and the guy said to me, "Dave, you can't publish more than 30 billion. You'll look like a fool." The TAM is much, much bigger than 30 billion. You can't even quantify it, it's so large when you start looking at it. >> And now, because people are recognizing that we automate all the manual workflows in a enterprise on a Cloud platform, last week somebody published a report and I just saw the headlines, I didn't go through the details, 126 billion. So from in 2012 to that small number, and we don't know what the number is. >> Could it be bigger? >> I would have no idea. I would be completely disingenuous if I told you I know what my TAM is, but I don't think that way. I say what customer problems can I solve? >> Well, that's what I wanted to ask you. So you're here with so many different customers. Just on the show, we've had ones in payments, in insurance, in health care. What are you hearing from customers, and what are sort of your favorite applications of what you're doing? What makes you the proudest? >> Yeah, so I would say the proudest moments for me are when I'm like, wow, you do that with ServiceNow? I would have never thought that. So when I didn't expect, when I expect something, Oh, I had this routine email, text collaboration, and I switched it to ServiceNow, get it, like not a big aha moment. I had this one customer who said he has a big distribution network, all these partners, and those guys have ServiceNow, he has ServiceNow, and when they have problem with the product, their product, my customer's product, they all communicate via ServiceNow to each other. So they have created a whole ServiceNow network, truly a B2B kind of exchange, kind of, using ServiceNow. One of our median and entertainment customers who owns a bunch of parks, they refill the popcorn machine using ServiceNow. When the popcorn levels dip, they have those people who carry around the cart, Oh! The popcorn level dip, it marks the sensor, it routines the workflow, goes to the corporate, Ah, we need to fill up popcorn on by this particular ride. For me-- >> And even at my house, I love it. >> Yeah, so that's exciting to me. >> We talked to Siemens today. >> Yes, great customer. >> Awesome, and I want to run a line by you. We talk about AI a lot, machine intelligence. I wrote down during, you know, data is the fuel for AI. Well, you know we love data here at theCUBE, and he was describing that, he said, you know, even though CJ was not prescribing taking the data out, we could leave it in so it learns, right now, we take some of the data out. Well, you described that. Well, we put it to SAP HANA, we throw a little Watson in there, we do some Azure, machine learning, we use Tableau for visualization, he's probably got some Hadoop and Kafka in there, a very complicated, big data pipeline. And I said to him, Okay, in two years, do you want to do that inside of ServiceNow? He goes, "Absolutely. That would be my dream come true." So, I guess I'm laying down the gauntlet. Do you see that as a reality? >> So, we are talk to Siemens, great customer, they keep us honest, so I love that and I did actually meet the team who was in charge of their BI and reporting and they did share the same story a few months ago when I met them. And we are trying to figure out, Dave, if I knew the answer, I would have told you, but you know my style. I don't know the answer. We are seriously trying to figure out, Do we become an analytics hub? We are really good with ServiceNow data, we can build connectors with other data, but do I want to be in the BI and reporting market? Absolutely not. Do I want to help customers as their processes span across and provide them more visual credit tools than others, text-based searches, whatever they need, the answer is yes. Performance analytics, as you know, we have been moving along really at a good pace, and now we have what every single product, but this is something that Eric Miller, who runs that business, we talk about it all the time, because currently our analytics is building the platform, and now you know that data has a Cloud issue, so if you have data here, you have data there, you have data there, we are in our own Cloud. Can we build a connector, potentially, to OnPrem? Don't know the answer, but this is something, it's a fair gauntlet having to solve. >> Humbly, I'd like to give you my input, if I may. >> Yes. >> We see innovation, as I said before, it's data, applying machine learning to that data, and then leveraging Cloud economics. The project with big data projects, as you well know, is the complexity has killed them. Now you see the Cloud guys, whether it's Amazon or Microsoft, and that's where the data pipelines are being simplified and built. Now, I don't know if it's the right business decision for you guys, but wow, wouldn't that be powerful if you guys could do that, certainly, for your customers. >> And, truly, that is, as you heard me on Financial Analysts Day, I'm a huge fan of Geoffrey Moore's work, and he defines system of record, ERP CRM, system of action where we fall in, and then he has System of Intelligence, which is all the things around data and how do you harness the power of data. And that's something that I really, in our product teams, we talk about all the time, if I can solve Siemens problem with everything in ServiceNow, that'd be awesome, but is that something I want to prioritize right now, or is there something, we should give them the flexibility. I don't know. >> Well, you're one of the top product guys in our industry. It's why they found you. No, seriously, I put you up there with the greats. >> You're kind, thank you. >> It's true. You've got an incredible future ahead of you. But as a lead product person, you have to make those decisions, and you have to be very circumspect about where you put your resources. You can't just run to every customer requirement, right? >> And I tell, coincidentally, my wife asks me What's your job, by the way? I said, that's a good question. >> I'm married to a product officer, too, I feel the same way. What do you do all day? You do a lot of meetings. >> Yeah, exactly. So I said that I do a lot of meetings, and she said why do you do a lot of meetings? And I said I'm making a some decision or help my team make a decision because they already analyze a bunch of things. And I said, my hope is, as long as I can make more good decisions than bad decisions, specifically about product strategy, because you never know unless you make the chess pieces move and think of two or three steps ahead, and some things could be right and some things could be wrong. I have a simple framework on my whiteboard for every meeting. No jokes, right? So, my framework is very simple. Question number one, What customer problems we are trying to solve. If you cannot articulate that, for any new product idea you have, I don't go past that question, What customer problem we are trying to solve? Second is Why now? Why do we need to solve this problem now? Like you said, there are many problems, which one are you prioritize? And then, third, Why us? Why should we solve that problem? So, if you can articulate the problem, which always is a challenge because you kind of know what problems you have, but unless you really, really understand the customer pain point, you cannot articulate it. Then you say, why now? Like why is the time right now for us to invest in this, say, analytics, as a service? Why right now? And, third, why you, as in why us? Why is ServiceNow should solve it? That, at least, gives me a guiding compass to say because I have many products, as you know, I am very protective of our platform, and all these use cases come in, every product line wants to go deeper, rightfully so, because they are trying to solve for customers, and the new products want to be built on this platform. Sometimes I say maybe a partner should build it, so we made a decision, facilities product, Should our ISB partner build it? And that's the right place because we feel they are more suited, they have the skill set, all of that. But that's it, what problem, why now, why you? >> Rebecca: Really, I love it. >> Well, the Why you? it's a great framework. The why you is unclear for the Siemens problem, and I can understand that. You take the DemOps announcement that Pat stole from you today-- >> I know, that's not cool, man. >> But that's a problem that you guys solved internally, clear problem. >> He did a nice job of articulating it, very nice job. >> Yeah, definitely. >> But we feel that there always is a process when you need a workflow across, because in planning there are a bunch of companies, as the patch, or in build there are a bunch of companies in develop there are a bunch of companies. That's fine. They could be the system of records for those chevrons and we are the workflow that cuts across. So we feel loved. We showed our value to our customers by doing that. >> Rebecca: That's great. >> I know we've got to go, but lastly, it's roadmap. Last year, you talked about how you guys do releases by alphabet, twice a year. You were really transparent today, laid out the room and talked a lot about Madrid, you laid out well into the future what you guys are doing so, as an analyst, I love that. I'm sure you're customers love it, so-- >> A lot of people to picture, so that's nice. And Twitter, a lot of people posted on social media as well, so clearly there was a customer pain point, as we call it, that they needed a roadmap. In speaking to customers last one year, number one thing, if you tell us what you're building, then we don't have to build it. If you tell us when you're shipping, then we can plan around it, and then we will set aside resources to do testing. Any Cloud software company, whether it's us, CRM software or HR software, people still test, because you cannot mess up your employee experience or customer experience, and they just said give us a predictable schedule, please, so that we know. We did say two times a year, but we were not prescriptive which quarter. It could be four months and eight months, it could be six and six, it could be seven and five. I'm currently going with the quarterly-level fidelity, and eventually, I want to get to a month-level fidelity, where I say March and September, once our internal processes are organized. >> So the other subtlety there, and I know we got to go, is the ecosystem, because you're giving visibility, they have to make bets. They're making a bet on service, but then where's the white space? They're betting on white space. If you're exposing that to them, they can say, Oh, not going to solve that problem. ServiceNow's going to solve it in two quarters. >> I agree. >> Huge difference for them. >> You guys are wonderful. Thank you so much for inviting me. >> Rebecca: Thank you for coming on the show. We appreciate it. >> No, that's awesome, thank you, thank you. >> Dave: Great to have you. >> Rebecca: Great to have you. I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Vellante. We'll have more from ServiceNow Knowledge 18 just after this. (techy music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back, everyone, to the Cube's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge '18. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Dave Vellante. We're joined by Nick White. He is a principal at Deloitte Australia. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube, Nick. >> Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. >> So we've been having great conversations before the cameras were rolling, but tell us a little bit about D.Assist, which is a new technology you're unveiling at this conference. >> Yeah, so it's a solution that we've built, which is essentially a voice-enabled solution to allow patients and nurses to communicate. Essentially we're targeting identifying critical patient needs, critical patient requests, and getting help to them as fast as possible. >> Okay, so tell us a little bit more about the technology behind it. >> Yeah, sure. Well, let me go back and tell you about where it came from. One of my colleagues was in hospital with his father who unfortunately passed away while he was in hospital. And through that experience, he was observing what was going on in the hospital and afterwards he and I sat down and started to go through it and understand where were the challenges that the hospital had in that ward experience and the recovery. And we identified that if you look back at the history of the call bell, it hasn't changed in about 150 years. Florence Nightingale came up with the idea of a bell for patients, but that was in a ward environment where you had 30 or 40 beds in a room and you could look across the room and you could see that patient, okay, I can see what they need. Either I rush to their aid, or I can get to them in a minute. Hospitals today, we've gone and put walls up, curtains, and you've lost that visual cue. But all we've done to support the nurses is we've made that bell electronic. And we put a light above the door. So we looked at that system and we saw at all of the different points where you could have a failure along there, that essentially then would compromise patient care at no fault of the nurses whatsoever, and we thought, how can we better support the nurses to give that care that they work so hard to give? And we came up with the idea of having a voice-based solution that a patient can actually state their request, we could process that request, and we could present it to the nurses and try and give some guidance as to what the next best action for the nurse might be. And allow them to essentially provide accelerated care those people really in need. >> All right, so explain the system. It's fascinating what you guys do. How are you using NLP and ServiceNow. >> Yeah, so the solution is enabled by AWS and ServiceNow. So at the front end of the solution we've got a smart speaker in the room. That essentially passes the speech that the patient has made once they've woken the device through to the AWS platform. From there we pull out the intent. So we convert that speech to text, pull out the intent, and then that intent is passed through to ServiceNow. And once we've got it in ServiceNow, we can do all sorts of things with it. So we can apply a set of business rules, we can smart route it to the most appropriate person to meet the patient's needs. We can look at the prioritization that the hospital wants to give that sort of query and we can push it up or down in the queue based on that prioritization. Then we present that to the nurses using a dashboard on the nurse station, but we've also got the mobile app deployed. So the nurses have actually got a mobile in their pocket, which buzzes when the patient makes a request, they're able to whip the phone out, have a look at what the patient's need is, and make a decision. >> I'm always fascinated when a company like Deloitte comes up with a solution like this. It's not like you went to the client, and the client said, this is what we want. So how did you go about figuring all this out? What was the process you used? >> That's a really good question. For us it was, it's not about us designing the solution. We saw the problem and we're problem solvers. That's really what we do. We went and engaged with one of the local hospitals in Australia. We said to them, listen, is this right? Have we actually cottoned on to something that is a real problem here? And it really resonated with them. And they gave us access to their top 30 nurses and also their simulation hospital. It's a hospital that's used for training and development. And in that environment, we iterated the design with the nurses and built a solution essentially by nurses for nurses. So the idea was that it was as intuitive to use as your iPhone. Because nurses aren't like IT guys. They're not sitting behind computers all day. It's not native to them to use that sort of interface. So we wanted to make it as simple as I touch, drag, drop, and I let go, and I've done the job that I need to do. And so the nurses' feedback from the implementations that we've done so far have been, this is so easy to use. That's the phrase they've given us. This is just so easy to use. >> And then what's the feedback from the patients? How are they using it specifically? >> Yeah so, I'll give you the example of the spinal ward we've gone into at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney. The Prince of Wales Hospital Foundation heard about what we were doing and they identified the opportunity to fund us to go into the spinal ward. And when you think about spinal patients' traumatic injury and often these patients are in hospital for months if not years. In a very isolating environment trying to recover from a traumatic injury. Not only that though, they may not have full access to their limbs anymore to be able to press a call button. And the hospital foundation saw this opportunity to place our solution in the hands of these patients or in these patients' rooms. And it has been overwhelmingly successful. We've got 26 beds rolled out in the ward. We've been in there for little over a month now. And on the very first day we had a patient who was in the bathroom in a precarious situation, needed help, couldn't reach the call bell, and was able to wake up the device from the bathroom, ask for help, and have two nurses rush to their aid. We've had a patient who was suffering severe pain after their injury and is now able to alert the nurses that the request that they were making is about pain and they were able to come in a much faster time. We've also seen complaints about nurse response time go from a decent level to nothing. And whether those were real complaints or not, is beside the point. The patients were feeling like they were waiting a period of time and that was uncomfortable for them. Now they're not complaining at all. So that patient experience has really shifted. >> That's great. And it's such a miraculous technology. This is really impressive. Best of luck to you, Nick. This is really fun having you on the show. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge '18 just after this. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas. It's the CUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone to the CUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18 in Las Vegas Nevada. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We've got two guests for this panel. We have Katie Benedict who is director advisory people in change at KPMG and Michelle Esposito who is the AVP technology planning for JM Family Enterprises. Welcome Katie and Michelle. >> Thank you for having us. >> So I want to start out with you Michelle, explain to our viewers what JM Family Enterprises is. >> Sure, JM Family's, we're a privately held company located in south Florida. We have about 4,200 associates across the country and I describe us as a diversified automotive company. So we started 50 years ago, it's actually our 50th anniversary. Distributing Toyotas in the U.S. We were the first distributor and we still distribute to the five south eastern states but since then we've grown and expanded into other sectors of the automotive industry. Including auto finance and warranty and insurance products. >> Okay so diversified portfolio of services. >> Yes. >> So recently you had a situation, an implementation situation. Can you tell our viewers a little bit about it and then I want you to chime in Katie with how you worked on it too. >> Sure. So we were an existing ServiceNow customer. We implemented the product back in 2011 and at the time we really just tried to make it look like our old product. We wanted to minimize the disruption to the organization so we said let's just make it look and behave like the old product did. Seemed like a good idea at the time but with that and with the change that happened over time it became very complex to use and it really just wasn't meeting our needs. So, after much consultation with a lot of experts in the field we decided to re-implement ServiceNow. We believed in the platform, we believed in its capabilities and what it could do for us but we needed to start over. So with that comes a lot of change for our organization. People re used to doing things a certain way, they're used to the processes that we already had in place. So trying to get them on board and understand the why to what we were doing was really important. >> And Katie that's where you fit in. So tell us a little bit about KPMG's approach to making this easier, because as Michelle said. We are human nature, we're just resistant to change and sort of we like it the old way. This is hard. So how, what, can you tell us a little bit about your approach. >> Exactly. We were thrilled that JM Family chose KPMG as their implementation partner and really some of things we brought specifically to the table for this re-implementation. Was some of our accelerators. Our process packs to really optimize the new processes that JM Family was using but then also our organizational change management and learning and development capabilities. We specialize in IT transformation from a people perspective and group of a specialized in ServiceNow. We've done, well over 50 implementations of ServiceNow. So we wanted to look from that people perspective, how do we get the right level of buy in. How do we make sure that people understand why we're doing the change. Get that early, quick adoption. A continuous feedback loop we implement a change agent network. Which I've found was one of the most effective things we could have done especially at JM Family given the nature of their organization and given some of the cultural considerations there and it was a tremendous success there I feel. I mean the people there, the associates there were so involved in the initiative and really partnered with our team. As a single team, it wasn't JM Family and KPMG it was one implementation team working together in tandem to make this change happen. >> So what did you learn in the sense of what were people's, what were the sticking points? And then how did you overcome them? >> Yeah. Sure I can take that. As much as people were supportive of the re-implementation and really knew we needed to do it we found that they were still very much embedded with the way we did it today. So even going into this knowing what a huge change management effort it was I was still surprised at how much effort we had to put into it. So it took a lot of communication, a lot of different methods of communication and engagement to get people to really understand what we were doing and why we were doing it. Repetition really explaining it, the change agent network was huge for us and what we did there was. We pulled in some of our bigger supporters and some of our detractors and they were able to kind of permeate the organization in the different departments within IT to really help sell what we were doing. To bring back questions and concerns. So that was really key. >> What was that like bringing in the people who were really butting heads? I mean and how do you navigate between those two factions? >> Honestly I think it was great because I'd rather get that feedback while we're going through the process than hear about it later and hear the implementation not be successful. So in some cases when people brought that feedback that maybe wasn't so positive it was just a matter of more communication, more training but in other times it was you know we really scratched our head and said maybe we really need the rethink about this. Maybe they've got something here and we may need to tweak our approach or do something a little differently. But it was as Katie mentioned, the engagement level was phenomenal. So the positive and the negative we really had a very engaged team. >> So coming out of this Katie, what would you say are sort of the best practices for other leaders that are doing implementation, re-implementations and maybe dealing with some resistance? >> I would say definitely whether it's the implementation or a re-implementation. Don't forget about your people. The technology, especially ServiceNow is fabulous and your processes are generally are standard. You can align to idle processes but getting the adoption is really key and so remembering that this is a transformation. It's not just an implementation of the technology. Paying attention to the people, making sure that they're on board. They know what you're doing, why you're doing it and really what's in it for them is vital to making this a successful project. >> As you're looking at the ServiceNow platform and what you do for JM Family Enterprises what do you see looking ahead as sort of ways you can augment and enhance? >> Oh they have a lot of ideas going forward right now which is very exciting. >> It is, you know we focused in, we're in a second phase implementation. Our first phase really focused on the core ITSM functions and now we're dipping our toe into some other areas. The PPM suite, vendor management, performance analytics. So we're really continuing to mature our use of the product and even looking beyond that. You know we have interest in some of the security operations and even further than that into some of the financial management capabilities. So we definitely plan to continue invest in the platform and see what it can do for us. >> You're evolving just as ServiceNow is evolving too. >> Yes we are. >> Well Michelle and Katie thanks so much for coming on the CUBE. It was great having you. >> Thank you so much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have much more of the CUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18. Hashtag no 18 just after this.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018, brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18. We are theCUBE, we are the leader in live tech coverage. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Dave Vellante. We're joined by Jason Wojahn. He is the managing director global ServiceNow practice lead at Accenture. Thanks so much for your, your returning guest. You're a CUBE veteran. >> Yeah, many times. >> Many time CUBE alum. >> Yes, >> Thanks for noticing. >> Back in the early days. >> But for those who have not had the pleasure of watching your CUBE clips, can you explain what your role is and what you do at Accenture? >> Sure, I'm the global ServiceNow practice lead at Accenture, I'm responsible for our global capabilities in ServiceNow for the company of Accenture. So you know, everything to do with ServiceNow from our consulting capability to our training capability. At Accenture we also have, kind of, what we call three estates of ServiceNow. We have the CIO estate, I know you had Andrew Wilson on theCUBE yesterday, and of course we are a fully deployed ServiceNow customer in our CIO's office. One of the top 10 customers of ServiceNow. We also utilize ServiceNow in our AO, IO, and PBO lines of business. Now in that case that's a go to market relationship where we're selling things like HR outsourcing that is platformed and delivered on ServiceNow and of course last but not least our consulting capabilities. Just over 3000 skilled ServiceNow resources across the world What makes us the largest practice for ServiceNow in the world as well. And those are our three estates of ServiceNow in Accenture. >> So don't hate me for saying this but when we first started following ServiceNow I remember Frank Slootman said to me Dave, this thing is a rocketship. We're going to blow through a billion dollars. We're going to be the next great software company. And one of the things Jeff and I said was well, the ecosystem has to grow. There were companies like Cloud Sherpas which nobody ever heard of which were specialists in the space. Now you fast forward five, six, seven years, Accenture gets into the game, other big SI's have gotten into the game and it is the real deal. It feels like the next ERP of the modern era. >> In my view there are three main big surges going on in the ServiceNow ecosystem and you can kind of tie them back to the CEO's. So you had the early day with Fred Luddy of course, kind of the zero to 150 million stage of ServiceNow. of course when Frank Slootman came in in the 2011 time frame you know you have the next big surge, see them getting IPO ready, you see them really ruggedizing their commercial selling capabilities, their delivery methodology capabilities, etc., and then we move all the way to today and with John Donahoe you see the third surge. And here you see every GSI on the planet wanting to do something with ServiceNow for a lot of the reasons that I just discussed. I mean ServiceNow has been a terribly strategic tool in Accenture across multiple aspects. Of course our go to market aspects, our consulting aspects and of course our internal use of the platform as well. >> It's not easy for software companies to reach escape velocity, certainly many of them can become unicorns and have a billion dollar valuation. It's really hard for them to get to a billion dollars of revenue. ServiceNow has blown through that. They'll probably do three billion or close to it this year. So they really are, in many ways, the next great software company, but you know, VMWare got there, Red Hat obviously doing really well. What are your perspectives on the software ecosystem? I mean, personally I think it's great that we see more competition but there seems to be always this pressure to consolidate. What's your sense of what's happening now? >> Well you see a lot of consolidation that ServiceNow is doing to round out their capabilities as a platform and I think that's terribly important. That's how people want to consume technology right now so we spend a ton of time at this event and you've heard ServiceNow as well, talking about experience management, service management, you know trying to get things away from, you know how do I do this and going to why would I do this versus how. And of course you utilize platforms to really set that tenancy. When you got platform like ServiceNow that has the ability to turn on intelligent automation machine learning capabilities across your platform, the ability to turn on chatbox across your platform, analytics across your platform, knowledge across your platform and of course manage your workflow the way they do with portals, etc. I mean there's no reason to go somewhere else but more importantly, the strategy underneath it you know ServiceNow is an outcome of something that's very important. You can't use AI, you can't use Chatbox, you can't automate if you don't have what we call a lake of data, a data lake. You've got to have that kind of single source of information so that you can do those compounded workflows and get that automation benefit and then when you start laying things like AI, machine learning, intelligent automation, chatbox in there, actually you have to have the data in there to make the suggestions, right, to do the modeling and the analyses to find those opportunities. So I think what you're going to see and what you're actually seeing right now is consolidations on platforms. And those platforms are kind of being used as a ubiquitous glue code for everything else behind the infrastructure and really looking at you know, this is the employee first experience. This is where the last yard of the field is being delivered to the individual. >> The red zone. >> Yeah. >> So the timing of the Accenture acquistion was actually fortuitous because it coincided with ServiceNow's push into the rest of the enterprise. Accenture obviously deep into lines of business, board levels, C-Suite, etc. Talk about how that's changed the whole relationship motion with your customers, how you've gone deeper and describe, sort of, that dynamic. >> Yeah, so, obviously within Accenture our diamond clients are paramount to the way we run our business and who we are as a business and what's great is we're seeing more and more of those clients where they have comprehensive relationships with Accenture, bringing ServiceNow to bear in that conversation and actually, again, using it as an overarching capability to help get things done better. You know it can be very austere to sit at a Cebol console or an Oracle console or those types of things. We're actually using ServiceNow to kind of keep that from having to happen but you're doing the same transaction on the back end. And again, like I said, you know, once you get some of those data points in there it tends to kind of start to gain some momentum because you get a little bit of automation here or a little bit of automation there and then suddenly that connects you to other aspects of the enterprise and other consolidation points. >> What makes Accenture different, you got all the SI's are now in, elbowing their way in. We want a piece of the action. Why Accenture? >> Well the ego in me says it's because we're number one. We have the largest single certified pool of resources across the globe. There's nobody bigger than us. There's nobody that does more influence revenue than ServiceNow, than us and there's no one with higher customer satisfaction than us We actually got that award two days ago from ServiceNow. So if you value those things, that's why you should work with Accenture. But more importantly than that we've really spent a lot of time making sure that we're doubling down on our methodologies, we're doubling down on our thought leadership, we're leveraging our capabilities that we're you know, trialing and piloting in our CIO's office across the 450,000 person company called Accenture. We're obviously leveraging the things we learn in our AO, IO, BPO practices where we have embedded ServiceNow into those go to market services. But we're bringing that all back to our consulting practice and it's a creed of to not only the way we handle CIO, AO, IO, BPO, but a way we handle our customers from a consulting perspective as well. >> It's the customercentric approach. >> Jason: It is, it is. >> Well Jason thanks so much for coming on the program. It's always fun to have you on theCUBE. >> Thanks a lot. >> Dave: Great to see you. >> Thanks. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18 in just a little bit.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18, #know18. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with Dave Vellante. We're joined by Gemma Kyle. She's the head of management assurance at MLC. She's straight from Sydney. So welcome Gemma. >> Thank you. Thank you very much. >> Let's start off by having you tell our viewers a little bit about MLC. >> Sure. MLC is a life insurance company. It's interestingly Australia's oldest and newest life insurance company. We were recently sold by National Australia Bank to Nipon Life, a Japanese life insurance company. And we are now, thanks to the investment of capital from Nipon into MLC Life Insurance, Australia's newest stand-alone life insurance company. So we come as a 130 year old company with 1.4 million customers. But also we're investing in new technology, new infrastructure, new processes, new business operations. >> So, insurance is one of those industries that hasn't been radically disrupted. And I wonder what the conversation is like internally. Is there a complacency? "Not in our industry," "Not in my lifetime," "I'll be retired by then." Or is there paranoia? >> It's a great question. Look, it hasn't been disrupted, but it will be. I can't talk for the American market, but certainly in the Australian market we have 17 players right now and we know that they are going to consolidate down to eight or nine and we want to be one of those eight or nine. The disruption is going to come from the fact that previously there had been complacency. Customers had not been communicated with, invariably because their life insurance sits within a broader wealth management product called superannuation. Now, what's happening is customers are becoming more informed, more demanding and want more access to more flexible and innovative products that can follow them through their life cycles of marriage and children and mortgage. We really need to be on the front foot to offer the right kind of products and life insurance products to meet our customers' need. >> So, superannuation was not a term that I was familiar with. And I don't want to go too deep into it, but it's basically Australia's version of Social Security, except you can see your money. You can invest, you have control over where it goes and it's yours. >> Gemma: That's correct. >> It's not just some black hole. >> Yeah, that's correct. >> Okay, nice. >> I was just thinking about when you were talking about how customers are starting to demand more. So, when you think about digital transformation, is that what's leading the charge, would you say? >> Absolutely, absolutely. When we talk about digital transformation, it's really about breaking down the silos that previously existed within companies. And it's not just life insurance companies, it's all types of financial services. So previously, we would have the actuaries who do the pricing of our products and the advisors who sell our products, were the gods of the insurance industry. Now, when we look towards digital transformation, it becomes technology, it becomes process and it becomes risk management and control that are in the ascendancy. This is really critical because customers are looking to self-serve. They want to make their own choices. So that's where we need to meet them. We need to break down the traditional barriers between the silos and have a single platform that we can use a data analytics to better serve our customers. >> So, the advisors are getting disrupted by the whole self service trend. The actuaries. Are we getting robo-actuaries now with machines? >> Well, I don't see why not. >> Right, the data's there. >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, we are actually required under regulation to have a chief actuary, and that absolutely makes sense. But what we're starting to have now is automatic underwriting engines. So, previously you would apply for an insurance policy and the underwriter would come in, who has an actuarial background, and they'd price the risk you present to the business. These days we have sufficient data, that as soon as you put your information into the system, we can automatically approve a policy for you. That automated underwriting is an example of the type of disruption we're starting to see. >> But humans are still the last mile, if necessary. Is that right? >> Gemma: Absolutely, absolutely. Advisors are important because they help our customers understand their financial need. And advisors are very strongly regulated within the Australian market. They're required to have a qualification. And we've recently seen changes to our legislation around the requirement to, evidence that they are treating customers honestly, efficiently and fairly. And selling them products that they need, not that they have been encouraged to sell by another supplier. >> What's your biggest challenge? (laughs) Top three. >> Yeah, yeah, top three. Look, without a doubt, it's cultural change. Cultural change. By cultural change, I mean the behaviors and the beliefs that surround not just internally how we manage risk and compliance, but also externally around how customers perceive the insurance industry. We definitely suffer from a lack of trust. Now, the disruption that we're facing is that customers are saying "We don't trust you," and it's not well founded. It actually doesn't bear out in the data in terms of how we pay our claims and how we service our customers. But there's certainly an image problem there. So, we think we need to service, we think we need to address this cultural issue from the inside out. We need to fix ourselves and make sure that we, can with integrity, defend the decisions we make around how we service our customers and then in turn have customers really trust us. See what we do. Trust us by how we behave, not just what we say. >> When you're talking about the behaviors, changing the behaviors, how is security, risk, compliance, how is that all perceived within your company? >> Yeah, yeah. Well, like I said, the actuaries are king. They have sophisticated data models through which they can price policies. And, where we've traditionally been with risk and compliance is very much in a qualitative space around actions that are undertaken, or senses that things aren't working as well as they should do. What we've started to do, and this service now has been absolutely critical to this journey, we're starting to shift the conversation away from risk and compliance and towards business process and control. We're simply shifting the conversation away from a focus on risk exposures, or the things you must do and onto the cost benefit analysis of control investment options. That allows our executive and our board to start to use data and analytics to drive decision making around where we need to focus our efforts. >> So you're turning all of this kind of back office risk oriented stuff into a value proposition for the organization. >> Gemma: Exactly right. >> Can you talk a little bit more on how ServiceNow participates in that process? >> Sure. Ultimately, the value proposition. It is about behaviors, but the value proposition is all around being able to defend the decisions that you make. Being able to demonstrate with data and analytics. And being able to put a quantified amount of money on the bottom line around what's the value to actually changing our behaviors, or changing the way we manage your process. ServiceNow is obviously critical to that, because they have this amazing performance analytics engine that enables us to draw data out of the system as it relates to business process. As it relates to operational loss events. As it relates to customer complaints. As it relates to asset management. And integrate it to tell a story of where we're most exposed. To loss today and potential loss tomorrow. It's a very powerful tool that even our, surprisingly, our CEO, not only does he now use his app that we've created for him, but he personally calls people in the office to say "Hey, I see you've got "an overdue action here, what are you doing about it?" Now, I know, nobody wants that call. (laughs) Nobody wants that call. So consequently, we've got this incredible tone from the top that reinforces how important it is to pay attention to your controls, to your obligations, to genuinely own them. That's when you start to see the cultural change. >> You don't do business in Europe, do you? >> Gemma: No. >> Is there a GDPR equivalent in Australia, if you're familiar with GDPR? >> Gemma: No, sorry. >> Okay, so, it's all about privacy. So, the GDPR? >> Gemma: Oh, oh. Yes, yes. >> The fines go into effect this month and that doesn't affect you because you're not doing business in Europe. But is there something similar in Australia where if a customer says "I want to know "what data you have on me." Or, "I want you to delete that data." You have to prove that. It's quite onerous. But, is there anything similar for you guys? >> Gemma: Absolutely, absolutely. So, we've actually got two things. First of all, we do have the privacy act. And under the privacy act that's been in place for quite some time, all individuals, whether you're an employee or a customer, you have access to your data. And, you also have the right to be taken off lists and call trees and the like. The government's just recently introduced CPS147, which is a prudential standard around data breaches. Now previously, if there was a breach of data. Say for example, we accidentally send a letter to the wrong customer, and in that letter it has personal details about somebody's medical history. Now previously that was not okay from a privacy perspective, but it wasn't notifiable to the regulator. With CPS147, we now have a notifiable data breach system. It's just come in place. And we have to notify the regulator when we breach somebody's privacy, somebody's data. And we could be subject to fines. >> And does the ServiceNow platform play a role in that, in terms of just tracking the notification, or compliance, or? >> Absolutely, absolutely. So, when the change in legislation was introduced, we simply added literally another little tick box into our operational loss event module to say, "Is this a data breach?" And just simply by doing that, now when you log a loss event, and you tick that little box, we can see from across the company where are our data breaches happening? And if they're a cluster. Is there something here that's telling us that we've got a systemic problem that we need to fix? As soon as it came in, we were automatically reporting on it. >> One of the things we're hearing is that there's so much great customer-on-customer learning that takes place at Knowledge. Are you finding that? Are you talking with a lot of customers, and about how you use the platform? And success? >> Absolutely. This is a really exciting conference. I'm really having such a good time and sort of overcoming my jet lag, to tell the truth. It is very exciting. In Australia, we've already started some groups. So, we work with other, myself and my systems manager, Greg Dominich, the two of us tend to go to a lot of companies to talk about our experiences with the implementation of ServiceNow. What worked well, what didn't work well and what we would do better. Because we want to create a community of practice. We want to lift the practice of risk management above where it currently sits. And so, walking around here there's so many networking events, and this hall in particular, is wonderful. So yes, talking to lots of other customers. Just sharing innovations. It's very exciting. >> How long have you, when did you go live with ServiceNow? >> Okay, so, we went live, let's see, probably in, the first GIC module went live in June, 2017. We then had another iteration in September, 2017. So, we've basically spread it out to make sure. The next modules we're looking to introduce are business continuity management. Each time, we follow the same, we use the PPM tool, that ServiceNow provides to actually implement the modules. But then we have a process that we follow ourselves in terms of putting in the data, cleaning it, categorizing it, making sure we've got the analytics right and then we step to the next module. Interestingly enough, cultural change doesn't happen once you've implemented the system. Cultural change starts at the very point where you recognize there's an opportunity to do better. So, as we implement each module, we're also maturing our practices. And we're also changing the culture of how the business approaches risk and compliance. >> What's your relationship with IT in all of this? How does that all work? >> Look, it's very close. It's part of the transformation journey that those silos still exist. And they exist because we all create our own languages for understanding our world and how we engage with a business. Now, it's about breaking down those barriers. So, we work very closely with them on security management, on business continuity management and on incident management. And we're going through the process now of aligning our language so that once we have that shared language, we have the shared data and we can really become quite powerful. >> Rebecca: Great. Well Gemma, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It's been a really fun conversation. >> Thank you very much. It's been nice to hear. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from.

(techno music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering Service Now Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by Service Now. >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of Service Now Knowledge 18 here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. I'm joined by Pat Wadors. She is the Chief Talent Officer of Service Now, and Pat Tourigney who is the Senior Vice President HR Global Shared Services at Magellan Health. Pat and Pat, thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Pat Wadors: Thank you for having us. We're excited. >> Pat Tigourney: It's so great to be here Rebecca, thank you. >> Rebecca: Well you were both on the main stage this morning talking about Magellan's, Magellan Health Service Now journey. We started talking about a personal health scare that you had Pat, that really changed the way you think about the world of work, and the employers' role in that. Can you tell our viewers a little more about it? >> Pat: I'd be happy to Rebecca. So, obviously I had been working and had taken some time off to start and raise my family. And when I went back to work I started to feel unwell. And it took about two and a half years for me to finally get an answer. I had searched for many doctors, et cetera. But literally one day I was rushed to a hospital emergency room. After a few days I was diagnosed with stage three B colon cancer, and I was told I had probably about a three percent survival chance. So at that time I faced four years of surgery, and hospitalizations, and chemo and radiation. And of course during all this time you're hearing the probably outcomes and the statistics. But what I truly focused on was my purpose. Which was my family. I had two small children and they needed me, and I needed to be there for them. And so I learned a lot of lessons during that time, and I think anyone who goes through that would say that. But the two things that have really stuck with me is knowing my purpose, and leading with empathy. And it's truly changed how I live, how I work, how I interact with other people. And I think its made a huge difference in what I do every day. >> Rebecca: What Pat was just talking about, the leading with empathy, and the finding your purpose, these are two of the things that are central to the culture at Service Now. Can you describe a little bit more for our viewers, how you view this sort of purpose driven life? >> Pat Wadors: For me and for the company, its as essential to our success as our customers. So I know that purpose driven companies outperform those that don't have a purpose. And I know from a talent brand, and how we recruit and retain talent, if their personal purpose is aligned with the company purpose, not only do you get higher engagement and higher productivity, but that impacts our customers. And they have higher engagement and higher sat. So its great business. It's something that I think creates a competitive differentiation, and its something that our employees seek as an employer. So it's just something that I totally believe in and so does our company. >> Rebecca: So talk a little bit about VERN. First of all, what does VERN stand for? >> Pat: Oh I love VERN. (laughing) >> Pat: Everyone loves VERN. VERN stands for the Virtual Employee Resource Network. And a couple things that I would probably want to say about that is number one, you don't see HR in there at all. Because it's about the employee. This is a way that we are helping our employees fundamentally change how they work and how they engage with us. The reason I think VERN works is our employees voted on that name. So we had a whole campaign to launch VERN, and we offered up four different names, and our employees voted. And when VERN won we created a VERN persona, and everything else that goes with that. And he's just become part of our team. >> Rebecca: So what does VERN do? >> Pat: Well VERN is really sort of the, it took the place of our call center. VERN is a way for our employees to learn information, and answer their basic questions, and learn to work in new ways. And it helps, it's basically a consumerized HR product. If an employee can use google or shop online, they can use VERN. Its' very simple, it's easy and fun. And truly VERN has become a part of our team. So we don't have a call center anymore. We don't use email to answer questions. Our employees know that VERN is there for them twenty four seven. >> Rebecca: They have a question and ask VERN. >> Pat: Exactly. Turn to VERN, that's our motto. >> Rebecca: (laughing) I love it. So Pat, thinking about this empathic way of leading, how would you describe what it really means when it comes to HR? You had said before it really is a competitive differentiator, and that if you're happier at work, you're going to do better at work, you're going to be more energized, you're going to then provide better service to your customers. But how can companies, how can they build a culture of empathy? >> Pat: By listening. I think that when Pat and I were talking over dinner and I talked to my peers, companies that win listen. And they listen to their customers, and they reverse engineer back to their products and services. Great cultures listen. And our employees are going to tell us what's working what's not working. And if we capture those data sets, those moments, we give them the information, we give them the tools. They are joyful, they are more productive, there's a stickiness that I can not only survive there I'll thrive. And so by being empathetic, by seeing where the pain points are, by seeing what gets you joyful, and measuring those things and turning my dials accordingly, that to me is a winning situation. >> Rebecca: We're at a point in time where we have five generations in the workforce all at once. Can you describe what that's like, from your company perspective, from talent management and HR, and how catering to these very different segments of people who their comfort with technology is one thing, but also their phase of life. How do you do that? >> Pat: Well I think, honestly, there's this joyfulness, you used that word and I love that word, of how all these different generations really do work together and help one another. In a way we're all learning from each other. And we're not afraid to learn in front of each other. And that really makes a difference I think. And I think there's just this mutual respect of, we're all there to help each other and do the right thing for the company. And I think the empathy piece of it really comes across because, when you truly understand one another in a way that you care and you're showing that, it's not about age anymore or anything else, it's that we're all people working together trying to do our best work and we're there for each other. To me that's what it means. >> Pat: The only thing I would add to that is, when you look at consumerization of the enterprise, when you look at seamless, what they call frictionless solutions, it demystifies the technology. So if you have the older generation going "I've not used a bot" or "I don't know what machine learning is" I'm like can you type in your question? I can do that. And if I serve you knowledge bites that I can digest that answers my question and move on with my life, that's a gift. And so I think that if you make it more human, if you make it more approachable, then every generation appreciates that. And I also know that from my studies and from working in the valley for a long time in tech, is that every generation wants the same thing. They want to be heard, they want to be appreciated, treated respectfully, and know that they can do their best work. That they matter. >> Rebecca: So Pat you are relatively new to Service Now. You're from LinkedIn. You are so committed to the company you dyed your hair to match the brand identity. What drew you to Service Now? >> Pat: I was a customer of Service Now while at LinkedIn. And my goldilocks is a growth company. I'm a builder. I love creating culture and leading through change. And I also love geeking out with my peeps in HR. And so Service Now has a talent place, they are helping HR solve problems, and I get to geek out with them. I get to meet people like Pat, and have a wonderful dinner and a great conversation. That feeds my soul. I don't think I am unique in the problems I'm facing, and I copy shamelessly. I'm trying to steal VERN from her. (Pat laughing) I think that's awesome, I want a VERN button. >> Pat: I'm going to get you one. >> Pat: And then the added sauce for me where I fell in love, is when John Donahoe became the CEO and wanted my partnership to build an enduring high performing healthy company. And I'm like, sign me up. >> Rebecca: Talking about the culture of Service Now and Magellan Health, culture is so hard. It's just one of those things that, or maybe its not, maybe I'm making it out to be, but when you have large companies dispersed employees, i'ts sort of hard to always stay on message and to have everyone pulling in the same direction. How do you do it? What would you say you do at Magellan? I'm interested in how you do it at Service Now too. >> Pat: Want to go first? >> Pat: I'll take a stab. So, you got to think about where you're going. So what's your purpose? I'm going back to purpose. How do you serve the customer? What are those four key milestones that matter? And repeat, and I say rinse, and then repeat. So everyone hears it. You know the top five goals in the company. And we talk about it all hands, we refer to them in our internal portal, we talk about them, we measure them. We tell the employees this is what we wanted to do, this is what we did or didn't do. This is what we do next. And we're as transparent as we possibly can be. And the magic comes when every employee can look up and say I made that goal happen. And when they start seeing those dots connect, they can't wait to connect more dots. And that's when the journey starts accelerating. That's when you get more flywheel going in the organization where what I do is actually impacting profit, impacting customer success, impacting joy. >> Rebecca: And taking some ownership of it. >> Pat: I agree. I think that when everyone sort of shares in that purpose, and they understand what they do, how it affects that, it makes a huge difference. But I also think as an organization from a leadership perspective, if you model the behavior that you're seeking, and you set your expectations really high for that, and that in a very sort of respectful way when you see things that aren't right you say something about it, the culture does start to shift. And you start to build this feeling of we're there, we're together, we have each other's backs, we treat each other with dignity and respect, and honesty and openness, and you can really start to just shift it almost organically. >> Rebecca: Pat Tourigney, Pat Wadors, thanks so much for coming on the Cube. It was a great conversation. >> Pat: Oh thank you Rebecca. It's been great. >> Pat: Thank you for having us. >> Rebecca: We'll have more with the Cube's live coverage of Service Now just after this. (techno music)

(soft techno music) >> Live from Las Vegas It's The Cube covering Service Now, Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by Service Now. (soft techno music) >> Welcome back to The Cube's live coverage of Service Now, Knowledge '18. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Dave Vellante. We are The Cube, we are the leader in live tech coverage. We are joined now by Alan Marks, he is the Chief Communications Cfficer of Service Now. So thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you, great to be here. >> So the new brand identity of Service Now is we make the world of work, work better for people. >> That's right >> That's your baby, you came up with it so tell us a little bit about your creative process and coming up with that idea and why it works for Service Now. >> Well, it's been a team effort and we think of that identity as our purpose as a company. And as John talked about in his keynote today, purpose is really the center of who you are as a company and what you believe in and what you aspire to do, and I think it's so important in your own life to have a sense of purpose and meaning and I think that's true for companies as well, companies are just collections of people, right? And so as we thought about the next phase of growth for Service Now and how do we build the company awareness and build the brand, we started with, who are we, and why do we exist? And so we did a process where we met with a leadership team we did employee focus groups around the world we met with about a dozen customers to just talk about how do you think about Service Now, what does Service Now mean to you, and that's what lead to our purpose statement of "we make the world of work, work better for people" and really emphasizing people, cause that's something we believe deeply in, that technology should enable people. And what we do is really trying to help people have more meaningful work. Take some of the routine task out of your job so you can focus on things that matter more to you and create more meaningful work for you and create more productivity for your company and your enterprise. >> Dave: I'm always, oh go ahead please. >> Well so, we started with our purpose and then that lead to the brand identity we have a new tagline; Works For You. So, Service Now Works For You, is kind of our version of a Just Do It kind of tagline. >> Dave: (laughs) >> And so we've got our purpose statement we've got a new brand identity, what you see here at Knowledge and we've got a new tagline called, Works For You and you'll see us rolling that out now more. This was the launch of it. We spent the first quarter rolling it out to our employees we did a global tour in eight locations around the world rolling out our purpose to our employees and now this is the first public launch of the new brand. >> I was fascinated by that process. I love that you guys start with wide, big fan of Simon Sinek Google him if you don't know him, his Ted Talk is fantastic and we heard John Donahoe this morning talking about he started with why, so okay, so you do all this research but somehow you have to put that into a creative package the idea of putting the person in the center of the logo and whether it's color scheme or, you know little snippets. How do you come up with that, is that just in your DNA is that really by committee, I mean how does that all work? >> Well we put together a creative team, this is the fun part once you've landed the purpose, this is take out the crayons and let's start decorating something, right? And so when we landed our purpose, and we said well if we're really focused on technology enabling people the former logo of the company was the power button so that was more purely about technology and so we started playing, we had a creative team we put together, we had our in-house creative team we also were using some outside creative support and we started playing with well, how can you change the power button to more reflect people and that's what morphed into the logo today of really using the yellow in the word Now to symbolize people, to symbolize the "you" in "Works For You" instead of the power button as a symbol for the company. >> So you, the last Knowledge, Knowledge '17 you had just started. >> Just started, first week. >> First week on the job, trial by fire here. So tell us a little bit about your first year, reflect on some of the things that might have surprised you during the year, some of your challenges, what would you say? >> Oh it's been wonderful. I say to Pat Waters our Chief Human Resources Officer, every new employee should start the week of Knowledge. It was just such a wonderful way to start, I literally did sign the papers and got on a plane and came to Knowledge '17. And so, to come into the company being able to experience this, and meet our customers and really understand the culture of the company was an extraordinary way to get grounded in the company and understand the, you know, Service Now has just a deep commitment to customers, and listening to our customers, and then responding to their needs. So, given the brand work I've done over the past year that I couldn't think of a better way to start. And then after Knowledge '17, a week or two after that I went down to San Diego and spent an afternoon with Fred Luddy, our founder. And I just said "Fred, tell me your story.", and two hours later Fred was still talking, such a wonderful person, and what struck me in that conversation with Fred is we were spending, really two hours talking about the history of the company and why he founded it, and I realized he was talking mostly about people he wasn't talking about technology and Fred's a product guy. And so it just started to hit me from day one just how focused we are on helping people and helping companies succeed and our customers succeed and that's really what lead to where we are today, and the branding, and so it's an amazing company, amazing culture, and what we're trying to do with this brand the product is well known, we've got deep customer loyalty but the company is not that well known and so as we think about growing the company and reaching other state coders, as we think about expanding our business with existing customers and engaging new customers at the C-suite level, we felt we needed to really elevate the company and that's what this is about. How do we continue to have a strong product brand but elevate the company brand both to drive greater awareness of the company but then also the talent brand piece is important as well and how do we use our brand identity and our purpose to engage the right talent worldwide as we continue to grow and recruit from around the world. >> And that's a big part of why John Donahoe was brought in. I remember I was talking to Frank Slootman, I'm like Frank is so young, he goes look, we found the right guy to take this to the new level. He's been kind of working at it for a while so the timing was perfect. As you do all this research as you talk to customers about their future of work. I mean they're telling you what they need maybe what some of their challenges are, but you guys still have to figure out how to get there. It's almost like Steve Jobs inventing this smart phone, nobody told him no customer told him, this is what we need. >> Alan: Right. >> So you're minds have to put that together, I know it's only a year in, but what are you seeing in terms of your ability to shape the future of work? >> Well I think it starts with the Service Now platform and to me that's the secret sauce. A lot of people have focus, cause people know the ITSM product suite and how the company, the flagship product of the company and a lot of people think of the company in that way but its really the platform itself that can cut across the enterprise and connect different work flows and different work streams particularly work streams are cross-functional areas and the ability to understand that and leverage that with our product suite that really is unlocking the potential of how we can partner with a customer and really drive transformation in the way enterprises operate and drive transformation in how work gets done in a company. >> So with your consumer background, did you like, when you first heard about Service Now say, "really, IT service management?", or did you say "hey, why should the consumer guys have all the fun I want to bring this to the enterprise". >> Exactly, well part of it, this is my first job in the B2B world my background is in consumer, but as John has talked about we really do see the things that we've enjoyed as consumers coming into the workplace. So I really do see a lot of B2C type creative thinking and ideas coming into the workplace to drive this transformation and that's so exciting to take the best of traditional B2B marketing and branding and bring in B2C to help reflect this new wave of technology and how it's changing the way we work and the way we think about work. >> As you're now embarking on this strategy to get Service Now to have wider recognition in the market and you're background in consumer, particularly at Nike, what do you think makes a great brand and what really makes it sort of take hold of customer's imagination. >> That's a great question and I would go back to purpose. I can't say enough about purpose, a company that is clear about who it is and why it exists and what it aspires to achieve in the world, and the impact it aspires to achieve in the world, that's what connects people emotionally, right? You can connect people intellectually but really connect heart and mind, that's the secret sauce. And you said consumer brands, obviously that's what they do right, that's what you have to do. In the B2B world, you see a broader spectrum but that ability to say, how do we take this technology and the more intellectual aspects of our business and really connect it to how you help people and how you enable people and connect it more emotionally. I think that's the (inaudible) NOC, and today, you look at millennial employees today they really do care about what is the purpose, what's the higher value of working for this company vs. that company, and what kind of impact are we going to try to have in the world, and it really does matter. I see it today where you're talking to potential employees and they're asking that question. About if I'm going to join this company, what are the values tell me about the culture of the company. And I think at the end of the day, culture and talent really is what differentiates a company. And strategy is obviously important, but companies that have strong purpose, strong brand, strong identity and that get expressed through strong culture that gets expressed through the kind of people they attract to the company, the kind of talent they have in the company. I think that's what creates great, enduring companies over time. >> So thinking about transparency, I go back to Fred. The self deprecating humor, always, if there's a wart in the software, he talks about it, he's not shy about that. Frank continued that tradition certainly with Wall Street and I'm sure employees, and Mike Scarpelli, very much transparent, John is continuing that tradition. It's obviously worked for Wall Street, you've built trust with investors. How do you take that brand and build trust beyond the investor community, it's a challenge. What are you trying to accomplish there? >> You'll see us marketing more and that's part of what you see here, expressing the brand in a bigger way, you'll start to see us do more marketing at the company level in addition to what we already do at the product level. You'll see us do more marketing directed to talent and being a great place to work. You'll see us expressing this in a variety of ways the kind of culture we create, what we do in the community, the broader impact we have in the world and so I think it's all of those things together and communicating but ultimately you've got to walk the talk, right, it's not just the marketing, you've got to be authentic in what you're doing and have people experience you in an authentic way to really create that sense of trust and engagement over time. And you see we've got that today in our customers. The loyalty we have with our customers the renewal rate the company has with our customers and now we're just trying to continue to build on that and engage other stakeholders as we grow as a company. >> So making work better, okay that's good. The new sort of focus, expanded focus, but what do you want people to say about you, how do you want them to describe you, what are the adjectives you'd like them to use? >> Human, we're "work for people" right, "make work better for people". I think we're a human company, we're an authentic company we're a company that cares, we're a company that really understands technology should help you, it shouldn't be technology for technology's sake, that the end result should be making your life better and we're trying to do that in a work context and I hope that people look at our brand and our identity and how we show up in the world and think that's a copmany I want to be associated with as an employee, as a customer, as an investor, as a partner, as a stakeholder because that's a company that really cares about people and really understand how to apply technology and innovative technology to help people have better lives and in this context, have a better life at work. >> We've been talking a little bit about how you're company is working to attract the best talent, and it's really at a time when the skill sets are changing and we were talking about Fred not being an IT guy, he's a product guy, but you really need the sort of confluence of the two together, you need people who are thinking about the technology but also about the human idea. How hard is it to find the right people or do you just say "we can train them", what's your approach? >> It's always hard to find great talent all over the world it's very competitive, and particularly in technology but I think it gets back again to purpose and culture really being clear about who you are so a potential employee can say "is that a place that I want to work at, when I see the purpose of Service Now, does the resonate for me?". If I'm an engineer, do I want to create product that really is focused on helping people have better work lives and again it really, purpose is the essence of it and I think that really is the center of everything and if you can connect people with your purpose then you will attract the right talent and it'll build on itself through word of mouth and reputation that that's company that I feel attached to and that I want to a part of, and I want to work at.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE covering Service Now Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by Service Now. >> Welcome back to Service Now Knowledge 18 this is the CUBE's live coverage. We are the leader in live technology coverage. We extract the signal from the noise. I'm Rebecca Knight your host along with my cohost Dave Vellante. We've got a great panel right now. We have Andrew Wilson who is the CIO of Accenture and Ellen Shook who is the chief leadership in human resources officer at Accenture. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks for having us. >> Hello great to be back. >> Good to see you again. >> Before the cameras were rolling we were talking about people driven change. But Accenture not but, and Accenture is a huge organization. 400,000 plus individuals working around the world. How do you drive change in such a large and dispersed organization? >> Well I think the most important thing is that change isn't human driven but humans need to be at the center of all change and I think that's why Andrew and I show up in a lot of places together. Because we do use technology to elevate the human experience at Accenture. And the more digital an organization becomes the more important human connection is and that's what we do is create truly compelling experiences for our people. >> Because we don't have separate agendas at Accenture. The relationship that Ellen and I have I think is one of the most important in our enterprise. Where we're driving digital transformation for our clients and within our own business and it's equal parts technology, talent, and change. And so you have to bring those things together and so what we're doing at Knowledge is talking a lot about the outcomes that we drive. Where we're in an experience rich culture our people, our employees, our citizens, our customers. They demand an experience which is very different to how the old IT posture had to deliver. So if we get the partnership right we create a culture and an environment that they'll have fun in and enjoy and not just have to turn up at work for. >> So Ellen what's the outcome that you're trying to achieve? Let's work backwards from there when you think about your human experience? >> Well really what we're trying to do is create an environment where our people can be successful both professionally and personally. Because you, we really require huge diversity at Accenture because in order to bring innovative solutions to our clients we truly need very broad diversity and in order to discover and inspire diverse base of talent. We need to create world class experiences that really unlock their full potential. >> We're all human beings after all. But human beings whether or not we're delivering services or whether we're consuming them. So under Ellen's leadership we talk about truly human and I think that's really important because we must reflect and understand the community we serve. So if we don't have the diversity, if we don't have the gender mix. If we're not looking like the humans who we need to look after then there's going to be a barrier and I think that's at the heart of a lot of modern transformation. >> Now hang on. I heard you say today you have a lot of nn human workers. >> I do, I do. >> So they're not all humans. Who are they, are they robots? >> Well the future of work and the future workforce is a combination of human and machine. Because you need both and you need both working in a way that compliments each other. So we're often asked does the machine replace the human. No it doesn't it changes the content of the work and frees the human to do more interesting work and we need both in a modern agenda. >> And quite simply we do have a very strong belief that technology elevates humans and does not eliminate humans. >> And I'm an optimist too but when I go to the airport I see kiosks, more kiosks than humans. When I drive down the highway out of Heathrow I see all the billboards and they're neon now or electronic so clearly machines have always replaced humans in jobs and clearly as humans we've always overcome. So I'm an optimist too but it seems different this time around because, it cognitive functions and it seems like a whole new set of skills. You guys are experts at this. What are your thoughts? >> I think we are building a set of skills is the new that's absolutely essential for the modern enterprise. So when you drive down the road from Heathrow you don't see the data scientists, you don't see the design thinkers. You don't see the humans that are listening to and talking with their customers and surfacing insights. We think about applying intelligence in the enterprise. Now the humans wouldn't have time to do that if they had to deal with all the old transactions. Free them up from that and then they can do all of this interesting work and that's the future of work. >> One of the things you were talking about on the main stage Andrew was about the changing role of the CIO and you said I actually think of myself as a chief experience officer. Can you refine that a little bit? >> Well I think Ellen and I both care about the experience of all of our employees, all of our humans, all of our citizens and all of our customers and clients as well. So the days of operating in a data center, of buildings systems are long gone. Accenture is now 90% in the cloud and I have to think about services which are really flexible, agile that deliver outcomes. So if my customers are not enjoying the experience and having fun and feeling at home. They're going to walk away so I care much more and that's why I think I lead with experience as the chief experience officer. >> So one just, to bring that down to an example. We hire about a 100,000 people a year and if you think of kind of the old paradigm when someone starts at your company. They have to get assigned a desk, a computer, a security badge you know get onto payroll and all of that historically has been done very siloed function by function. What Andrew and I are trying to create is an exciting experience when you show up for work on the first day where all of that is frictionless. All of that process goes to the backstage and how you feel about showing up as a new employee on your first day is just a glorious experience. >> So we always talk about people process and technology as a CIO you understand. Well the technology will continue to progress it's the people in process that are hard part. But can you actually achieve that vision without a technology platform that is flexible, that enables that type of work environment? >> The technology problem is really what is the enabler of the experiences we're trying to create. But the most important thing that the technology does for us is enables us to create truly world class human experiences. >> Before the cameras were rolling you were talking about how you have five generations of workers at Accenture. How do you cater to them? I mean as you said you want, coming to work everyday whether it's your first day or your, you know you've been there for 20 years to be a glorious experience. How do you make sure you are taking this empathetic people centered approach for each of these different kind of workers? >> I call it with my team sweating the small stuff and that's not worrying about bureaucracy and process. That's worrying about the individual. So we do have five generations working side by side both serving our clients and serving our business and the most important thing is truly understanding what's most important to the human? Not what generation they're coming from or were born during. >> Those five generations have a lot in common before they come to work they typically watch the news. They may have read the Wall Street Journal. They may have consumed content on YouTube. They may have looked at Twitter, they may have subscribed to Netflix. They may have asked Alexa or Cortana for advice and guidance. When they get to work what changes? It has to feel and be exactly like that and Ellen and I will be creating the services that do that so that it feels welcoming and sticky and so I want to stay. Which is really important in the modern enterprise when there's so much opportunity out there for the human. >> And to go back to the question you were asking and talking about driving out of Heathrow and not seeing humans. I think the thing that CEOs really need to understand is that employees are excited about the opportunity that technology is going to bring to their job. In fact we did a piece of research that we launched earlier this year that says over 80% of people are excited about how technology is going to improve their work. Because of the very reason they Google things at home. They use you know Amazon or whatever to go buy their things that they need for themselves. And so they see the opportunity and it's companies and organization's roles to tap into that excitement and really change the future of work. >> Here's a really good example of that. So there is nothing more boring than security training. >> I agree. >> So inside Accenture why don't you subscribe to a TV show that looks like 24. The TV show, the 24 that's episodic. We drop a season that has actors portraying the implications of if you don't get your security rights as a human and as an individual. It gets great ratings, great viewing figures. So it's ratings and viewing figures that tell us we're communicating with our employees. That's what being in the new is about. >> And that's really innovative. I was going to ask you about training and education because the example of Heathrow you don't see the data scientist the person who's putting paper and glue and doesn't have the skill sets of that data scientist. So I know Accenture big on training, education. You guys invest a lot there. My question is as you span five generations is the training regimen... Sort of how do you tailor it to those different needs? >> Well what we're finding frankly is that all of our people really want to stay relevant to their clients and to their people and so what we did was we worked together to democratize our learning platforms. So you no longer have to be tapped on the shoulder and invited to take training. We've enabled our training platform to be available real time and on demand and when you create a culture in which people are hungry to learn. You see some amazing things happen and we can see on our dashboard that Andrew's team has built all of the trending topics on any given day in any day of the week. That our people are doing through self learning. >> And that's shared and open? So there's a little bit of game theory going on here. >> Because transparency builds trust. Absolutely. >> What you want, where you want, when you want it, why you want it and at the rate you want it. Because everybody has different sets of needs. Well they'll stay relevant, they'll stay liquid and they'll be able to keep up with modern technology because we're a technology business in our case. That's wat training is about and they'll be more effective and they'll have fun and they'll have job security and none of that is threatened by other aspects of technology. >> But one point to add to that because I think Andrew's brilliance doesn't always fully come through is that everything that he's built for our people has a social component it. So for example on the learning platform I can recommend different learning experiences that I've gone through to my colleagues, to my peers and when you see the interaction among the people and how you can create real change. With just each other, without driving change top down. That social experience really changes the whole dynamic in an organization. >> I think one of the things that Ellen and I have had a chance to leave our mark on is that we have both democratized training and we socialize training as well and both are really important. >> You talked about, oh sorry. Go ahead please. >> You said you hire a 100,000 people a year and at a time where the skill set is really changing. Because so many of the repetitive automate the task are being automated and so really the skillsets that we need are more empathetic, more creative. How are you finding those people? Particularly at a time we really are in a war for talent? >> We talk about discovering new sources of talent rather than attracting talent to us. So we really try to go digital where the people are. So that's where people are, that's where we go look for them but the most important thing is that we are investing in new skilling our people. So we're not just hiring people in with new skills we're giving all of the 442,000 humans at Accenture the opportunity to continue to keep themselves relevant. >> So rather than coders and testers we now have data scientists and I do think we have new talent sources inside and outside the company. So I'm delighted to say that 54% of my team in China happen to be ladies and there's a really good solid data science gene in them which is helping us with our analytics and surfacing insights in a way that my organization didn't used to do. So we've tapped into new talent, many of them we already had it's just how you free them to do the job that they are very very capable of doing. >> Well Andrew, Ellen thank you so much for coming on the CUBE. It was great to have you here. >> Thanks for having us. >> Great to see you guys. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, we will have more from Service Now Knowledge 18 just after this.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube! Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Rebecca: Welcome back to theCube's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge '18. We are here in Las Vegas at the Venetian I'm Rebecca Knight, your host along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We are joined by Thomas Squeo. He is the Senior Vice President for Digital Transformation & Enterprise Architecture at West Corp. Thanks so much for coming on the show! >> Good morning, thank you for having me. >> So Digital Transformation, you're the SVP it's a buzzword of the technology industry and also at this conference. Tell us a little bit about how you describe it what it means and then also about West's journey. >> Sure, so in my own role within West Digital Transformation gives me an opportunity to have higher amounts of contact with the business side of the organization. Whether it be customer success, product management, looking at our strategic accounts team and basically working across all aspects of the business. While I am running Enterprise Architecture I also run product engineering for the organization and those combined rolls give me the opportunity to take things from strategy to tactic inside the organization but the Digital Transformation component gives me the context for what the organization needs to move towards. >> Dave: Essentially, you guys are a digital company, right? >> We are. >> So, I mean, you're digital evolving maybe. What is Digital Transformation mean to a company like yours that's born digital if you will? >> Right, so we came out of a traditional Teleco background so everything about our business was driven by software and up until about 2015 it was very human capital intensive. So what we've done is we've kind of re-tooled ourself to be a more forward looking technology organization that's driven by software delivering solutions on behalf of our customers. And that includes much more of a service and solution portfolio then it does in a human capital portfolio. >> So as you transition from a business to a digital business what was the roll of data? How did the data model evolve? >> Well I think that one of the things that we look at in our data model is that because of the scope and scale of our business, they have different data model requirements for different aspects of our business. Our safety business operates under DHS critical infrastructure rules whereas our unified communications is particularly dictated by regulatory and compliance environments and healthcare, education, commercial and utility markets and other aspects depending on what kind of notifications are going out. It might be under HIPA, high trust and those kinds of things Those are really kind of the drivers for us to be able to prioritize how it effects our data model and our INFOSEC profile. >> So you have to have sort of semi-siloed data model, right? >> Correct. So we don't see a lot of customer movement across the organization only about 30% of our customers buy from multiple West businesses and they're typically very compartmentalized around the use and consumption model that we actually have been approached for. >> So as the digital leader, does that present challenges for you or it is what it is and you just deal with it? >> Thomas: It actually presents more opportunities than anything else and the reason why is because we can take learning from very forward looking, leaning cloud native platforms and be able to apply that into some of our legacy business or we could also look at something like the regulatory environment than how certain businesses actually satisfy that and be able to mature some other aspects of our business that might be a little bit more loose or came in through an acquisition that wasn't governed by kind of an organization of the scale of ours. >> Rebecca: So you're a very progressive leader and before the cameras were rolling we were talking a little bit about how there is this mentality particularly in IT this sort of break it, fix it mentality and keeping going that way. What's your best advice for people in rolls in IT and elsewhere in the organization to get out of that mindset? >> Well the most important thing I think is that you have to move out of an order taker roll and your really have to kind of move into a either a strategic advisor kind of an internal consultancy model where in which your IT leadership team is not necessarily seeking a seat at the table, that's kind of a cliche in that regard but much more of how do you partner with the General Managers, Segment Presidents and so on and so forth as an advisor on the side working with them on how they consume the technology services across the organization. That's really how we focused our architecture team as opposed to necessarily looking at bringing in an external consultancy to kind of lead and broker that conversation inside the organization. >> Dave: What are you doing with ServiceNow? >> So we are actually, we've just released in April our first phase with ServiceNow. It was a significant transition over multiple service management platforms. We've rolled out service management and knowledge already. We're underway with operations management next. And we're talking about all the aspects of it. So we're taking very much an out of the box approach. We're not doing an customizations, we're doing a lot more configuration around workflow and so on. We've been able to establish a really strong leadership presence around the organization from a governing perspective, how we're going to float those changes into the organization and then ultimately how are we going to deliver. We kind of take it as kind of the base fractal as the first phase and first implementation. And then how do you expand upon that to ultimately make sure it's woven into the fabric in the organization as a tool for not only employee experience but customer experience as well. >> So no custom mods. Check. >> Thomas: No custom mods. >> Smart. How about a single CMDB with a siloed or a fractured data model. >> Thomas: That's very much a part of our strategy. >> So okay, you bought into that. >> We look at asset management as kind of the bridge between logical Enterprise Architecture models and how it actually translates into physical infrastructure the CMDB is that source of truth for that and we're looking to ServiceNow to be able to provide that for our organization and that includes not only in our on prem instances, our virtualized environments our hybrid cloud environments ultimately looking at them as kind of a cloud management provider as we scale up and take advantage of that. And that includes charge back, show back being able to show what consumption is, being able to have our capacity teams be able to do forecasts based on, you know, cyclical environments where or storms or things like that move across and effect where our compute resources are ultimately deployed. >> But you don't get there overnight. I mean you got organizational barriers you got politics involved. What's the timeline look like to effect that? >> We started our transformation journey in late 2015. We reorganized the initial aspects of our IT organization everything but product development in 2016 and really spent the next 18 months kind of driving towards table setting on a platform level, not only in how we were dealing with service management but how our cloud native platform was being built out, our CICD tools data center consolidation all those activities. And then ultimately when in 2017 we reorganized the last elements of our product engineering and our development organization and now really kind of lit a fuse if you will on that transformation journey. So rather than necessarily have it start at on point and look at the distance between strategic kind of alignment we've actually gone and put definite milestones and breakpoints for us to be able to kind of reenergize that part of the organization. >> Thomas, thanks so much for coming on theCube it's been really fun talking to you. >> Thank you for the opportunity. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vallante we will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge '18 in a little bit. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge '18, #Know18. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Walid Saleh. He is the Senior Director, Enterprise Service Management and Automation at CIBC, based in Toronto. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Walid. >> It's great to be here. >> So I wanted to talk about the digital transformation, the enterprise service transformation journey that you are on at CIBC. Can you give our viewers a little bit of a sense of that? >> Yeah, I would say, we're actually focused on three different pillars. Obviously we're a financial institution, so security, and visibility, and compliance, that's paramount. You want to make sure that your financial institution is taking care, and has stable stakes. But we also are focused on user experience. It's very important for us. And we're focused, also, on delivery and agility of the delivery. Enabling our businesses to have their products out for our customers as fast as possible. And in the same time, making sure that our internal employees do have a great experience that can actually mirror the experience they give our customers as well. So those are the three, I would say, pillars that we're focused on. And this is where ServiceNow helps us with the transformation, for sure. >> Can you follow up on that? Elaborate a little bit. >> Yeah, I would say, you know I've been in technology for over 20 years, and I think it's really exciting times, you know? They always talk about the Jevons Paradox, which says, with computers, you get this efficiency, but that efficiency is really eaten up by the rate of consumption. So eventually, you're not getting really, the benefits that everybody talks about, but that we have been predicting for years and years. I actually believe that this is the time where we're going to see some of this efficiency. In the keynotes this morning, they were talking about the automation, were talking about the customer experience, and I think in it was the automation, the artificial intelligent. I think John, was here talking about the artificial intelligence and how it solves problems. I think this is where we're going to start seeing some of those efficiencies really manifest itself. And finally, maybe that paradox will be resolved, right? So that's really, I would say, a very important part of what you do in automation. Making sure we take all of those repetitive tasks that maybe are low value, not only that, but connecting the different areas, these are the ones we need to take out of the system, and focus on the higher function values, I would say. >> So the keynote resonated with you today. You're not running away from automation, you're embracing it. >> Absolutely. And would you say your organization is, as well? >> Yes, for sure. I've been around through multiple transformations, that's how the technology is. And I would say, throughout many of those transformations, we actually see that, our staff, it's about how do you prepare them with the skills that are required for that next wave. And in many cases, we see people, they're moving around to different jobs, doing different things that actually adds more value. Where those pieces that maybe they were complaining about because, it's just repetitive, maybe it's late at night, I don't want to be up, you know? I don't want to be doing the same things over and over. Those are the pieces that really can leave automation. Machine and machine learning actually do, execute and have your staff. So in my mind, absolutely not shying away from it. We're continuously looking at how do we have our staff ready? What's the next skill required for our transformation? And how do we actually have the teams do those higher functions? >> I was just thinking when you were describing how the kind of, grunt work, that employees are happy about, we tend to hear about this great anxiety about automation, and that people are worried that the robots are coming for their jobs, but what you're describing is the opposite, and that employees are actually grateful and really excited to have that stuff done for them. >> I would say as part of that transformation, I think there is no such thing as over-communicating. I think you have to communicate once, and twice, and thrice, and keep communicating, right? Especially in a large, classical organization, where there's a long chain of command. Actually, you have to do a lot of communication. Explain to people what the end view is. And I think what's really important is to focus on the purpose. That's really, really important. It's not the task, it's what the purpose is behind it, right? And how do we actually, maybe, take some of that task that again, are low value, and have a better experience for our employee, and subsequently for our customers as well. >> Could you talk a little bit more about the ServiceNow journey? How did it start? Where is it going? Maybe give us some detail on the timeline. >> I would say it's an interesting subject because I think when we started, it was all about, again, itel, the problem management, incident management, the usual, managing IT, IT managing. Making sure that everything is up and running and recovery is solid. I think we absolutely are seeing now that the platform, and it is really a platform, I think there will be never an argument, now, saying "Well, it is a platform." It has grown from just that area, which is just focused on being really internalized and looking internally into IT to how do we look outward to our clients, and how do we look outward to the business. And I think the business absolutely sees the value as well, and sees how we can help them automate some, again, of those workflows that enables them to be agile and faster, for sure. >> When did you first install ServiceNow? >> We actually started in 2012. >> Wow, okay. >> So one of the really early in the Canadian space, I would say. >> And what was your first move, beyond IT? >> Yes, I would say roughly, maybe two years later, 2013, 2014, that's when, once we put a catalog of services together, with a portal for people to request what they need, that's when we actually started really realizing that you know what, this is not just technology for technology. There's now all these business people. And we've done the job as technologists trying to do this, and then we realized, you know what, user experience is really, really, really important, right? And it really mirrors what John was saying in the keynotes. Again, that experience, how do you focus on experience, and make it easy for our consumers, which internally, to help our customers. >> So that was, what, '14 time frame? >> Roughly '14. >> Start bringing it to the business, as what, customer service management, or HR, or? >> As a place, a central place, a single portal for them to actually request services from IT. And it has grown to maybe beyond that as well. So over the years, you find other areas to say, "You've got a really good thing going down in here, "and everybody knows it, can you add this? "Can you add that?" >> And have you avoided custom modifications, pretty much or? >> I would say, because we were really early on the platform, I'd be lying if we say we avoid it. But I think after a couple of years, we really, I would say around 2014, this is when we actually realized the rate of innovation and how we need to make sure that the customization aren't a minimum. And it's something that, again, we had to communicate and drive in the organization. Obviously everyone feels that their business is special. But a lot of communication about what is the impact of customization, and how do you, if you customize, you will build it, we call it Tech-Debt, that you'll carry over, year over year. And that's when the business actually really listens around efficiency and the cost of that Tech-Debt. >> And what version are you at now? >> We are on Jakarta. >> You're on Jakarta, okay. So you're pretty current. >> Absolutely. And the custom mods make it a little bit harder for you to keep up, but it sounds like you're working through that. >> Absolutely. Every year, when we upgrade, we actually remove pieces of the customizations. Try to be, as much as possible, out of the box. >> Dave: And single CMDB? >> Absolutely, it's the single CMDB on all our environments, for sure. >> And have you written apps, are you taking advantage of the platform? >> We have, we have. And we found, we started, again, being technology, we started with some of the apps that actually helps technology. Things like our runbook being moved internally into ServiceNow. Moving our disaster recovery tools into ServiceNow. And again, John was talking about this this morning about how Fred said it's one data model. And it is, really. It's the heart and core of ServiceNow. Anything we move in really makes use of that data model. Is the data better together, if you like, right? I mean, it's really, I would say it's interesting because as we move things inside ServiceNow, you start seeing more and more potential. Why can't we do this? Why can't we automate this? Why can't we, just by the virtue of having the data reside together. So we've done a good number of that. What this led to is we also figured out well, we can do some of this to the business as well. So we actually start using ServiceNow for some of our business applications as well, for our back-office. >> Last word on the show, you had 18,000 peers here. How's the show going for you? What are you learning? What are your takeaways? >> It's excellent, I think it's great. I'm really happy to see that we're focused on the end user experience. Again, I keep saying the customer experience will never exceed the employee experience. So it's really important that we get this great experience for our own internal staff. And I'm really happy to see that this is the focus for John, so it's great. >> Rebecca: Great, well Walid, thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vallante, we will have more from Las Vegas at ServiceNow Knowledge '18 just after this.

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018, brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18, live from Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Michael Hubbard, who is the VP Inspire program at ServiceNow. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Happy to be back here, and for another year of this session. >> Always a pleasure to have you on. So, I want you to just refresh for our viewers, what the Inspire program is, who are you, what do you do? >> Perfect. So, as the name connotates, our job is to inspire the future of work. So as you are all learning about ServiceNow's new vision and purpose, to really make the world of work work better for people. We're finding that subset of 1% of folks that have a bold idea, a vision and a passion, for massive digital transformation, and a leader with both the power and the vision and span of control to say: if you'll partner with me, let's go get something done, in a 90-day sort of sprint, that has measurable business outcomes, mapped to a tactical approach, mapped to an inspirational sort of experience where digitization, digital transformation, it becomes real, because by the end of this process, you've got an example of it on your phone, in your environment, exciting your stakeholders and your employees. >> I wonder if we could talk about the past of work. There was a major, y'know, swing in the last 10-15 years of remote workers, the world flattening, and the emphasis was on giving people the tools, whether it was video, or good conferencing calling, etc, so that they could collaborate. And then you kind of saw the pendulum swing, there were a couple of companies, very high profile, certainly Yahoo, IBM, where they try to create the bee-hive effect, to really foster more collaboration. What are your thoughts on that pendulum swing, y'know, centralization, de-centralization, and what does the future of work look like, to your customers? >> So the pleasure of my job is that I live in this conversation, all week, every week, with some of the most transformative business and IT leaders in the global 2000. Your examples, Dave, they hit upon sort of tools that tried to catalyze a different way of working. We gave somebody chat, or we gave somebody the ability to work from home because they had internet connected to their house, and they had a phone line, and what else do you need, maybe a webcam. But these tools didn't fundamentally change the flow of work through the enterprise, right, and so I think the future of work, in terms of comparing it to the attempts of the past, it's a more fundamental shift that says, people process technology, governance, culture, purpose, all have to evolve, and I think there's finally enough hunger to do the hard work, not of throwing a new tool at an employee, or throwing a new policy at a user group, but changing all those other elements, those systemic elements, because overall productivity per employee has not changed. Overall satisfaction with your experience, and the pleasure of being at work, is not getting better fast enough, and you compare it to what we've enjoyed as consumers, in our personal life, and the contrast has gotten so stark that there's finally that passion among business leaders to say: enough's enough, it's time to stop buying point solutions, and start looking at the holistic change that's going to improve revenue per employee, improve my retention rates of my top talent, attract millennial and post-millennial talent, and are looking for partners that will take that holistic view of a platform, that'll work with those tools, but will knit it all together for a big outcome. >> So it sounds great, can you tell us, give us some examples of some success stories? >> Absolutely, so we work, we're very selective, we're an investment in some of our most ambitious customers, we work with about 1% of those. So, for example, Accenture has been a great partner for us, and go to market-serving customers, but I'm speaking about their CIO organization, folks like Tom Breezy and Andrew Wilson, who lead experience transformation, lead employee centricity, and lead the IT work, working with them on making leave of absence easier, because women in the workforce, and getting them back into the workforce after a pregnancy or a troubled pregnancy, that immediately yields benefits to their most tangible source of revenue, which is billable credible resources to serve their clients. So if we can help them with the generational women issues, that will really help their customers, their investors, and their top-line. So that's the type of work we do with Accenture, Virgin Trains is another great example. Virgin Trains were doing work, of course in good old ITSM, good old make IT better, but outside of IT, how can we make your experience on the platform better, in terms of empowering the people for Virgin Trains working the platform, working the train car, to have the right answer for you when you have a problem, to empower them with better knowledge, better workflow, so that they're able to ask the enterprise for help, and then action the answer for you as the employee. Allianz Life is another example, huge insurance company, and they're facing what many financial services firms are facing, which is that balance between agile business and the need for governance and compliance. So we worked with Steve, their chief compliance officer, to change the way that they manage the underwriting and approval of new policies, so it both allows them to make the business move faster and reduce the costs to underwrite and manage and comply to federal regulations. Doesn't have that much to do with IT, but the foundation of a platform that changes how work flows through enterprise across different stakeholders, and across many tools, and Dave, as you said, "mediums," that's what it's all about. >> So many companies that we talk to really dance around the automation issue, and you heard John Donahoe this morning saying look, we're all about automating workflows, so we have to take this head on. What are the conversations like amongst the Inspire customers, with regards to automation, machines replacing humans, etc, could we explore that a little bit? >> Yes, so as you'll hear more and more from ServiceNow, and as we're seeing within our Inspire customer base, there's two sort of threads that we tend to pull on. One thread is we try to find those opportunities for technology and automation to be in service of people, versus the inverse of suddenly now we're all just supporting the tech, and we're trying to just eke out a little piece of value to still add as people inside of a tech revolution, we're turning that around, and we think we can get the noise out the way of the people, by having the technology to serve them, workflow's a great example, alert's a great example, machine learning to solve the easy, repeatable problems is a great example, and that will free up the humans to do the things that make us human, that are more evolved, that are more advanced, that require empathy, etc. So that's one thread we pull on a lot within Inspire, is finding those human moments, cause moments really matter, and then empowering and transforming the ability for that person to serve their fellow employees or their customers. The second thread we pull on is we really push back on the idea, whether it's automation or any other sort technology buzz word trend, push back on the idea of incremental improvement. So if you have a process that's five days, we're not going to talk about how we can get it to four and a half, we're going to talk about why we can't get it to zero, And for regulatory reasons, that human element of needing empathy and interaction and building rapport, there might be reasons it creeps back up to a day, but let's start with that zero-based budgeting approach that says "five days, start with what if we "tried to get it to zero?" And that changes the frame of the conversation on automation from being about maybe attacking a certain percentage of people or time and trying to take a little cost out, to resetting the purpose of how that process supports an outcome in an enterprise. >> I want to ask you about that tension between the human-centered, the empathetic approach, versus the business, the business processes, the business that needs to get done. What are some of the challenges that your customers have faced, that you sort of see as the biggest pain points to implementing some of the changes that you want to see changed? >> So the hardest the thing to create for us, as an advisory team with the customer, is urgency. So what we have to find first is urgency, that today is not good enough. Change is a mandate, it's a requirement, there's no if, there's just a how, right, and that's why we focus on just 1%, because not everyone's ready for that type of a commitment to change. Once you have the urgency, you have to have vision, so we work with a lot of great customers, but we will never know your business the way you do, we'll never know your customers the way you do, so you have to bring your half of that vision. We'll spark ideas about what other people are doing and what's possible, and you've got to bring that back to a relevant outcome for your business. And different companies have different cultures, with different purpose statements, and some will resonate with taking out costs, some will resonate with empowering their employees, some will be all about, let's say in the healthcare space, we've done work with VITAS hospice care. If you think about hospice, of course it's not about just the nurse, of course it's not about just the patient, it's actually about coordinating the family, because it's the family that often needs the most support and interaction in that process, and so you really have to understand, you can push through the tension if you get to a meaningful purpose statement around what makes that company's existence necessary, and why people choose to work there, and that's really the start of every Inspire engagement, is getting that alignment. >> Michael, one of the drivers of digital transformation is fear, fear of missing out, "FOMA", but also fear of getting disrupted. Ginni Rometty at a conference, at the Think conference recently, used the term "incumbent disruptors." I would think that resonates with a lot of your customers, we want to be the disruptors, not get disrupted, some defense, yes, but we also want to go on offense. What are your thoughts on your customers' ability to be incumbent disruptors, and what role does ServiceNow play in that? >> Great question, and two thoughts to the answer. One is: ServiceNow lives in that intersection too, because we're getting big enough now that we start to worry about the upstarts, perhaps, in our own market space, as we look at customers who have been with us for years, have rolled us out broadly, suddenly we're the incumbent. So we are, in our own world, are thinking about making sure we are a disruptive incumbent, and continue to drive that value for our customers, but to take it back to our customers instead of ourselves. The key there is that tension, to use the word you used earlier, of those- let's take FinTech in financial services. FinTech startups, they're all trying to race to create a market disruption, create a wedge in a marketplace, of a consistent use case with a group of consistent business problems they're solving, while all the incumbents have all the capital, access to markets, access to cultures, brand credibility in the world, and they just don't know if they're going to have enough time to move their giant battleship before this little swift boat sweeps around them and takes a flanking position. So it's a very real challenge, and where we tend to focus is with those big companies, as a catalyst, bringing our whatever's in the water of Silicon Valley out to New York, or to London, or wherever, and helping them get a little of that swift boat style into what is really a big aircraft carrier group that they're trying to turn. >> Financial services is a really interesting case study, because it really, that industry has not yet been disrupted in a big way, even though like you said, there's a lot of FinTech swift boats trying to go after 'em. Do you think traditional incumbent financial services firms will lose control of payment systems, or do you think they will respond? >> Well we have an interesting member of our company, our CEO who, of course, has some history with PayPal, so that'd be great question for Mr Donahoe. I think it's too early to tell, but I also don't think it'll be a binary answer. What we're seeing when we work with some of these large companies is a very different fear or challenge around disruption in emerging markets versus established markets. So in established markets, they probably are going to get the time to reinvent themselves, because of the amount of momentum they have with customers, the amount of stickiness they have with customers. I mean the simplest truth that I've found in whether you win or lose a disruption battle with a customer is how hard it is for that customer to give up their relationship with you. It's the same in divorce, it's the same in changing airlines it's the same in changing credit cards. You've got all your points in one place. So in these established markets I think they're going to have the time to really succeed, but in emerging markets, that's where the battleground is really sitting. >> Yeah and financial service firms have always done a pretty good job of getting on to that next wave. >> We'll have to ask John Donahoe. >> We will, we will, and he's coming up soon, so... But thank you so much for coming on theCUBE again, it's always a pleasure to talk to you Michael. >> Yeah, fantastic to see you both, and it's just exciting to see this show continue to grow, and to have new customers, not just CIOs, but chief people officers, heads of talent, joining the conversation around the future of work. >> Dave: Awesome, thanks Michael! >> Thank you. >> Well thanks to you for joining our conversation. >> Michael: You bet. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Vellante, we will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge 18, coming up just after this. (light techno music)