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

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

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

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering ServiceNow Knowledge17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> We're back in Orlando, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. We're here at Knowledge17. I'm Dave Vellante, with my cohost Jeff Frick. Donna Woodruff is here, she's the service enablement leader at Cox Automotive. Donna, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Hi, thank you for having me. >> Good to see you, you're welcome. Tell us a little bit about Cox Automotive, and specifically your role. Are you an IT practitioner by trade, or business process person? Share with us. >> A little bit of everything, actually. First of all, Cox Automotive is a large, privately-held organization that's part of the Cox Enterprises family. We are changing the way the world buys, sells, and owns vehicles. We are made up of five key solution group areas. Everything from inventory solutions, which includes our auto auctions, and everything to get cars from dealerships to our auctions and back out again for their inventory. We have financial services, which provides floor planning to our dealerships so they can buy cars from our auctions. We have media services, which are all about how do you connect the cars that you're selling to retail customers, so autotrader.com, Kelley Blue Book are some notable brands as part of our organization. We develop software around analytics, and an ERP system for dealerships, to help them move their inventory and do their floor planning, so they can maximize sales in their dealerships. And then of course we have international. We are a global company. We have over 34,000 team members that we support. We're a very heterogeneous organization, and that can drive complexity into the organization. My role is, I am the service enablement leader. I am based out of technology, but I look at my role as much broader than that. It's about solving problems for our business and being able to deliver services internally and externally, and help the organization run more efficient and effectively. >> So you've seen, you know, the narrative in IT, and ServiceNow's described that very well over the years, IT getting beat up, and you only call IT when there's a problem, and obviously the platform and the adoption of that have changed a lot of organizations, presumably you experience something similar. So, take us back to the beginning days, the early days of what it was like, the before and after ServiceNow. What led you to that decision? What were some of the drivers, how'd you get there? >> Absolutely. Well, Kelley Blue Book was an acquisition for Autotrader group of companies about four or five years ago, and they had implemented ServiceNow as a help desk ticketing system. When we acquired them, we saw some great wins with the platform that we thought, hey, this really should be our help desk ticketing system. And so it brought under cross that small group of companies, but it was always viewed as a help desk ticketing system. Over time, just like many other platforms, it starts to get highly customized. Fast-forward to a couple of years ago, we had a need. I was supporting HR and communications from a technology liaison perspective. The problem that they were trying to solve was that they have two employee service centers, one on the East Coast, one on the West Coast, that were staffed by analysts, and they primarily helped our auto auction personnel deal with their benefits and questions around just HR. All the way down to time sheet corrections and things like that. They came to me with this problem, and they said, "You know, we've been using Remedy to some extent." We were in a transitional time in the organization where we were collapsing our help desk tools onto ServiceNow, and they said, "We need some help, here." "We just want to do a few requests." Well, we identified early on as that liaison that I really think that this ticketing platform can do what you need it do. Myself along with a business analyst and an intern sat down with the business, we understood the requirements, and that was the launch of our HR portal. While we were in there-- >> Just you, an analyst, and an intern. >> That's correct. That's correct. And we weren't developers. It was all about configuration. But we understood the tool, we understand that this is really no different than any other business process, and we set out to deliver the first service catalog around HR services. Since then, we haven't looked back. We learned a lot about the platform. We diagrammed out what was wrong with how the service desk had been highly customized, we sat down with our VP and we just showed him the diagram and said, "We think that this platform can do a lot more." He listened to us, and he turned to us, and he said, "Well, do you guys want the platform?" And I turned to my team, and I said, "Do you guys want it?" We took it on, and since then, in the last 18 months, we have expanded the platform very broadly. We've implemented performance analytics to improve our help desk services. Beyond the HR portal, we are now implementing governance risk compliance, a vulnerability management. We're now doing PPM as well. We are re-looking at our CMDB because we want to do more with automation. We've done some orchestration with storage agility and how we can get those engineers more productive by doing zero-touch ticket requests from our developers to expand file shares and to sunset file shares, or to request new file shares with other applications. >> So what'd you do with all the custom mods, when you talked about the Kelley Blue Book coming over. Did you sort of scrub the hose and start over, or-- >> Well, you know what, we took it back to out of the box, and it wasn't difficult to do. We just rationalized the things that were duplicated across requests and incident, we pulled it back to out of the box, we took an agile approach. My team now is very agile. We do weekly releases on the platform. By bringing it back to out of the box, it allows us to upgrade to the latest major feature releases within a two-week period. Because of that, we're able to adopt and consume the new product enhancements that ServiceNow has to offer very, very quickly. >> So, obviously you had success, or you wouldn't have been able to expand the footprint so radically. How are you measuring success, how did you go from a little bitty thing to a very large thing? >> I think it's about visibility. Visibility and strong leadership support, and showing how we're getting better incrementally over time. I think one of the strategic things that we've done, probably in the last six months, is implement performance analytics, which that started to show the behaviors of how people were working within the platform, how they were addressing incidents, how they were responding to our mean time to response, to our mean time to closure of a ticket, the aging of these tickets. When we first implemented performance analytics, we found a lot of anomalies in the platform. We found orphaned assignment groups, which to the behavior of the organization, they weren't necessarily working the system the way they should be. >> Jeff: Orphaned assignment groups. >> Orphaned assignment groups. Tickets were going in and they were backing up, and nobody was working them. So, allowed us to change the behavior of the organization, to drive consistency in how they were using this, which then made the metrics more meaningful. Now people are running their areas of operation from the platform. >> So the next thing I got to ask you, we talked about it in the open, is behavior. Tech's hard, but it's not that hard compared to people and process. How did you get people at that moment of truth, when I need something, to not send an email like I'm used to, and to actually execute my work through this tool? >> Well, one thing we did that was very unique, and we've continued to do that is as we roll out major feature functionality, we actually create commercials about ServiceNow, about the platform. Internally, we call it Service Station. Everything is associated with a vehicle. We've promoted our brand around the platform as well, and our brand is about doing things more simply, getting things routed to the right people, that's why it's better than email, and demonstrating the power of what it will do to you, and getting those answers more quickly instead of going to your favorite IT person or your favorite HR person. How this platform is helping you get to your answers more quickly, as well as all the self-service capabilities and the knowledge articles around, hey, fix it yourself. You don't have to talk to somebody on the phone. But we still give that personalized touch if they really need help and they want to talk to an individual. >> So really, a lot more carrots than sticks. >> Lot more carrots than sticks, absolutely. It's if you can solve your problem faster, why not? 'Cause at the end of the day, that's ultimately what you want to do. Solve your problem, and get on to the rest of your day. >> How long does it take for a typical employee to go, "Ah, this is fantastic!", and to really shift their behavior and buy in and start selling it, as your advocate? >> I think we're doing a better job now, introducing it to our new hires as soon as they get engaged in the organization, about this is your platform to go to when and if you need help. And here's how easy it is to find the things that you need. It's something that just happens over time, and I think if you address some of those small wins, you create advocates in the organization, and when they have a good experience, they tell others. So some of it's word-of-mouth, some of it is internal promotion. A big part of it is leveraging the platform to get the work done and having a great user experience along the way. >> Donna, you mentioned Service Catalog and CMDB, these are consistently two components that allow customers like you to get more leverage out of the ServiceNow platform. So, specifically as it relates to CMDB, what are you doing there? Do you have a single CMDB across the organization? Is that something you're considering? >> That's probably one of our next big transformational areas. We do have a CMDB within the platform that's been used primarily around the linkages for incident, problem, and change management. But we know that we need to do more with it, and like I said before, we've grown through acquisition, so there's a number of other CMDBs. And we are in the process of bringing that all together onto the ServiceNow platform. Because we're seeing the power of everything else that that connects to. And that's also going to be a key on how we promote more orchestration, more automation, more about the health of our services. >> So, ServiceNow's obviously promoting you guys throughout this event, showcasing some of the things that you've been doing. What've you been talking to other customers about? What are you most proud of? >> Honestly, I'm really proud of my team (laughs), because we are responding to the needs of the organization, and the fact that you can add value through what you do on a day-to-day basis is great. I think one of the most unique things that, in terms of the application, is we actually built an application for our safety auctions. So, as you can imagine, we have a hundred auctions. There's a lot of people working in the auctions. We have everything that a dealership would have, and we have lanes of vehicles running through to be auctioned off with our dealerships. So we have service areas, we have vehicles and people moving about the auction. So safety is a very critical thing for our organization. About a year ago, the safety director came and said, "You know, we have this problem. "We are doing these auctions' safety checklist "around compliance, how can we make "our auctions a safer place?" "You know, we don't have a lot of money, "but we think there's a better way to do it." And they explained the process where they had six area safety managers that were distributed across these hundred auctions, and trying to get the safety message out there through making sure people were wearing their goggles, or that they had all the appropriate OSHA standards in place. So after having a lot of conversations around this, again, we found ServiceNow would be a great solution. We did work with a partner to help us build it, but we took a very manual process and we automated it on the platform. Now we've moved the safety business process to the auctions themselves, where they own it. The general manager's involved, the shop leads are involved in it. And what it's done, it's been a catalyst to reducing our workers' comp claims. We've seen a two basis point improvement over the number of workers' comp claims, which is cost-avoidance, you know. When your average worker comp claim can be around $10,000, that's a significant saving. With a very, very small investment, we saw a 3,000% ROI on this initiative alone. We're bringing visibility to the process, using the platform and the reporting capabilities. It's gotten the general managers and the shop leads engaged and having the conversation about safety. >> This is great, 'cause you got the platform piece of it, and went from basic application delivery to seeing that it is just a workflow tool. >> Donna: Exactly. >> And the benefit of the automation, and now applying it to, I don't think they announced a auto auction safety module this morning. >> No. (laughing) >> Not yet, but we are doing a session... (Donna laughs) >> It's pretty impactful that you were able to see that, execute it with a really small investment, like you said, your initial one with you, an analyst and an intern, and now, really grow and expand the footprint within the organization. >> Yeah, it's really just about business processes in general. You've got everything you need to collect some attributes, or some information, you need to route it or get approvals around it, and then you can measure it. And you can see what's going on with that business process, and then you focus on, how do we improve the business process? The tool helps enable that and facilitate that. >> And how has the conversation around IT value changed, since you started this journey, right? >> Yeah. >> It used to be very cost-focused, I'm sure. Has it evolved to more of a, you mentioned ROI? >> It is, look at it, it's still cost-focused. It's still about savings, but it's also about how do we get things done in an organization more efficiently, with less people pushing paper, and actually focused on solving problems. And being able to measure how we get better in the activities that we're supporting. And then the dollars will follow. >> Dave: Is there a recognition in the business units, that things are changing? >> You know, there really is. One of the areas that we're starting to see real recognition is we're now dipping our toe into customer service management. We brought two platforms together with one of our business units that we acquired in the last year. They were doing some things on Zendesk, they were doing some things on another tool, and they were the same team. So, we've taken that experience, we've brought those agents onto the platform. We didn't change the experience for the customer just yet, because we wanted our agents to be very successful and help them work differently than through email. We pull those channels onto the platform, and now they have a dashboard of these issues in supporting our lenders, who are our customers. Next is really around the portal, in changing the experience for those end customers. Moving it out of the reply to all with email and making it more measurable. We've gotten halfway there, and we see a big growth area there for us, and making a better experience around our customers' support. >> And are you sunsetting some of these other systems as you bring stuff in? >> We absolutely are. I mean, our goal is to eliminate all other ticketing-type systems. In fact, all of the people that are on those ticketing systems, like, "When can we get on the platform?" "We want to be there now." "Help us get there." But bringing things together is going to help us across all of our functional areas, in supporting our customers and our team members much more effectively. It really is becoming our system of action, where you go to get things done. >> Donna, what, from your perspective, is on ServiceNow's to-do list? >> ServiceNow's to-do list. You know, and I've been pretty vocal with ServiceNow, it's like, make it easier for us to use and consume the other capabilities of the platform much more quickly. Allow us to use the great capabilities with some of our external collaborators a little bit more effectively. And I think that's where it is. I think ServiceNow does a fantastic job of bringing more capabilities and maturing all of their service areas. I like the fact that they have two major feature releases a year, and we consume them as quickly as they can send them out, probably faster than some other customers do. And continue to listen to your customers. Just, listen to what our problems are, and our needs are, and continue to answer them. They're doing a good job of that. >> Well, Donna, I have to say thanks for all the great products you guys build. The Kelley Blue Book, we've used it for years-- >> Oh, wonderful! >> And Autotrader, it's a great way to shop for vehicles. So thanks for that! >> You're welcome! >> Dave: Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. >> Thanks for sharing your story. >> Keep it right there, everybody. Jeff and I will be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Knowledge17. We'll be right back. (energetic music)

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

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

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

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

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 17, brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back to Knowledge17 everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my cohost Jeff Frick. This is our fifth Knowledge, we're doing wall to wall coverage. This is day one, we'll be here for three days giving you all the keynotes, the announcements, talking to practitioners. We're going to talk to one of the leading partners now of ServiceNow. Michael Kollar, is the Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer of Vision, Strategy, and Engineering for Atos. Michael, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. >> Dave: You got a lot on your plate. >> I do. >> Dave: Talk about that role, I love that title. >> So, essentially what I do for Atos, I own, one, the vision and strategy of how we deliver, develop and deploy our services. And then second, I'm also accountable for how we engineer and build those services and bring 'em to market. >> Dave: Okay, so talk about your relationship with ServiceNow, how did it start, how'd you get into this space? >> So about two, three years ago we started a need to transform our service delivery platforms within Atos from the 196 different tool sets that we had across the global services that we provide to really find a better way to do it. We we're spending a lot of our time picking tools, integrating tools, trying to figure out what's the right tool for every little corner case. And we said to ourselves, "There's got to be a better way to do this." So we started to think about what were the key things we wanted in a ITSM service management platform going forward. And we thought about workflow, integration, orchestration, some of the key things that today are cornerstone to ServiceNow. And it led us down the path to find ServiceNow as our vendor partner of choice for service management and beyond. >> Okay, so how's that business going, what's the reaction been from your customers? And talk a little bit about the strategy. >> So from a business perspective I tell ya the customers love what we're doing. For the first time we're able to adapt at their rate of change and differentiate, or transform our services aligned to how they want to consume it and to align to their business. Typically in the past that was a very difficult process for us since everything was bespoke, we wrote code to do it. Now it's a configuration or an orchestration that we do with ServiceNow. So that part's been great. From an overall journey, I will tell you it's been hard. Given that we have a global customer base that we support in 72 different countries around the world, it's pretty hard to get to a standard platform, so it's taken us a considerable amount of time to get there. But the results have been, I think, extraordinary in the way that we can deliver the service, the revenue that we've created with it, and just the ability we're able to respond to customer needs with. >> So, can you talk, unpack the value flow for our audience? Just help us understand sort of, where ServiceNow adds value, where you guys add value, and then where the customers pick up, and what impact it's having on their business? >> Sure, so first question, where do we provide value? A couple of different areas, so, besides the service management discipline that we provide, we're a managed service provider, so all the platforms that go into running their private cloud and public cloud get built, designed, and deployed by Atos. So that's one of the areas. Second, as it relates to deploying ServiceNow in support of their needs, we have a set of accelerators, technologies, methodologies, and capabilities that we're able to deploy to allow them to consume our services with ServiceNow faster. Nice part about that is we have our own instance that we provide a shared service out of but we've adapted that so that if customers want their own instance of ServiceNow and want to grow and leverage that capability we're able to deploy it in their instance and let them take advantage of it, and then build with it as they want to adapt it or extend it for their enterprise. >> How about the technology integration challenges? You integrated your business and ServiceNow sort of into your business, I guess, what were the technology integration challenges that you faced and others that you're facing? >> So the first challenges we went through was just the complexity of the model that we wanted to support. So for us it wasn't just a single set of services it really is our entire global portfolio. So that is everything from cloud, our digital workplace solution, our large scale analytics, including our security offerings. So we had to integrate a global set of offerings into ServiceNow and the platforms that we use, so Amazon, Azure, Google, and other bespoke technologies, and writing the code to make that happen. >> So one of the big challenges when we talk to IT practitioners is migration from A to B. "We got to get from A to B and we don't want to "spend a billion dollars doing it and we got to do it fast." How did you deal with the migration from the legacy systems to where you are today? >> So we took an approach that we refer to as big box and little box. So the little box allowed us to take our green field services that had been built with ServiceNow and our net new customers that were consuming those services were deployed straight out onto those platforms, the new capability we built with ServiceNow. And what we've done with the legacy customers and our legacy services, as we work through either renewal strategies with our customers or they start to consume new services we migrate them onto the new platform to be able to leverage those services going forward. So it's an evolutionary process it's not a big bang. We have to do it in a very systematic way so we don't compromise the services that they consume from us that they in turn deliver to their internal IT departments or their customers from Atos. >> What are the big asks you're getting from customers and how are you advising them? >> So a big ask we get from customers is, "Can we leverage the IP that you've built "and help us extend that further, faster, with us?" And what we've done there is originally the frameworks we built at Atos we refer to as the Atos technology framework, it was a very proprietary home grown type product that we used to transform our services. What we've done over the last several years is turned that into a product, essentially a application that we can sell to our customers and they can get it from us as a license and support model to help them on their journey. The ask then is that if they aren't happy or say they want to engage other providers from Atos is to allow them to leverage the IP that we've built with them and have those other providers be part of the ecosystem. So aligned to that we've now created the ability for third parties to interact with our customers and leverage the ecosystem and products and services we built on ServiceNow in support of our common customer. >> Nice, now when you were talking off camera you obviously, hybrid cloud's a big topic, a hot topic. Dell EMC World's going on this week, you guys get a, you've won an award at that show. You're here obviously but, so what's going on in hybrid cloud, you know, what are you being recognized for? >> So from a hybrid cloud perspective we're going to announce a private Azure stack appliance in partnership with VC around VxRack and VxRail. One of the other things, when we think about hybrid cloud, what we've done specifically with ServiceNow is integrate our offerings that come from Atos, our private cloud platforms, we refer to as our digital private cloud, that was built in concert with Dell EMC around the Vmware suite of technologies, VCE, and other components of the Dell EMC family. And we stitch all of that together with public cloud providers AWS, Azure, and Google, in a seamless framework with ServiceNow. And that's I think, from us, one of our key value props that we take to customers, is the integration of the private cloud on-prem solutions and what we do in the public space, with ServiceNow as the engine to do that. >> So you see all this stuff coming together don't you? So you're saying ServiceNow is the platform glue to allow you to manage all these disparate systems? >> Oh without a doubt. We look at ServiceNow as the platform of the future for us and our customers. And we look at it, and we really refer to them as being platform businesses going forward. And you need an integrated platform end to end to drive that to, one, the transformation, but two, to be able to manage that end to end service perspective as you think about private public and the SAS model that's out there that our customers want to consume. >> I'll give you the last word on Knowledge17 what's the sort of bumper sticker for you guys? >> So I think the bumper sticker for us is, at least from an Atos perspective, it's the year of the platform. And as we look at what ServiceNow is rolling out being a platform provider, and the partnership that we have with them specifically in the cloud space, to enable a successful outcome of hybrid cloud consumption for our customers. >> Platform trumps products every time so Michael thanks very much for coming to theCUBE and sharing your knowledge, and best of luck. >> Thanks for your time and I appreciate it. >> You're very welcome. And keep it right there everybody we'll be back with out next guest, theCUBE, we're live from Knowledge17. We'll be right back. (bright electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge '17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back to Orlando, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and we are covering three days wall to wall coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 2017. I'm Dave Volante with my co-host Jeff Frick. When we first started doing Knowledge in 2013, you'd walk around the show floor, and the names that you'd see weren't the brand names. Well, Infosys is here and Gaurav Uniyal, who's the industry principal of North America for the practice lead at ITSM for the ServiceNow practice with Infosys, you're seeing the big SIs join the community and really start to add value. Gaurav, welcome to theCUBE, thanks so much. >> Thank you. >> How'd you guys get into this? Like you say, four or five years ago, you guys might have been kicking the can, and now, you're all in. What's the journey been like? >> Sure, sure. We have been a partner with ServiceNow for almost last eight years, and as I look back to the journey, I can categorize the journey into four parts. Initially we saw 2010 to 2012 is basically about ITSM, how do you get the foundation capabilities in? Once that was there, we saw for the next couple of years it was all about how do you integrate services together, the service integration management as a concept. The third wave we saw is where concepts like ITOM, mobility, there's a lot of focus on user experience. And now, here we are in 2017, and as we look at the trends, what we are anticipating for the next two to three years, on a very high level, there are three trends which we believe are going to shape the journey of ServiceNow. First one is AI, obviously, how do you bring in concepts of machine learning, chat bars, predictive analytics, and how would that help organization do things faster, more efficiently, and in a cost-optimizing manner? AI is definitely one. Second trend that we are seeing is now organizations are looking for solutions that are relevant to their business. Solutions which are specific to retail industry, to CBGs, to finance, to healthcare, and so on, so forth. We are seeing a lot of traction there. And third is the natural expansion of ServiceNow into newer areas like obviously CSM, HR and so on, so forth. These are the three trends on the high level that we see, AI, going vertical, and on going horizontal by expanding these capabilities. >> Big factor when you talk to customers is sometimes it's not simple to implement ServiceNow. They need a partner like yours, so where do you start? I mean, when we first started following ServiceNow, a lot of folks weren't adopting CMDB and going too hard on the service catalog. To take advantage of these trends, the AI and other things that you talked about, do they need to be there on the majority curve? I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. >> Sure, sure. What we see is that obviously there are a set of foundational capabilities that are required. There's definitely a push required from the management to be able to drive the initiator. But more and more we are seeing our clients implementing the solution in a standardized manner. If I look back four or five years back, a lot of customization, everybody have their own processes. But when I talk with clients now, they're looking for something which is ready-made, which can be deployed in a very, very faster manner. >> Gaurav, why Infosys? Talk about what you bring to the table versus maybe some of the other suppliers out there, and what do you consider your sweet spot? >> I think I would, a couple of things. One is Infosys we do a lot of work outside of ServiceNow. We have our practices for cloud, we have practices for HR, and so on, so forth. One thing that have been to our table is the domain expertise. If you're implementing HR, it requires not only ServiceNow skills, but as well as domain skills to be able to configure the processes. That's one differentiator that we have. The second differentiator we have is delivering ServiceNow as a service, so clients are also looking for turnkey projects where one render can bring in the platform, bring in consulting, implementation services, and also be able to manage the platform end-to-end, so that's the second thing. And third thing is basically being ahead of the curve. What we have done, we have invested last, I would say, last eight to 10 months in building a product that we brand as ESM Cafe, Enterprise Service Management Cafe, and it's what we call as a gold image of ServiceNow, and that helps you deploy ServiceNow faster and in efficient manner. >> So, Gaurav, what did you see eight years ago, 'cause clearly ServiceNow isn't where it is today, that gave you guys the confidence to make the investment? >> And before ServiceNow, we used to work with other products as well. What we saw new with ServiceNow was a huge focus on user experience. How do you make it easy for the users, how do you deploy an intuitive solution? And in our view, that has been the key, a focus on user experience, bring simplistic workflows, and be able to drive user behavior. >> Maybe some of those other domains, you mentioned HR, where else do you see Infosys as really strong? >> What we are seeing is ITOM is definitely one area that we are focusing on. HR, CSM, these are two big stack we have. And then, we are also focusing a lot on building vertical solutions. As I said, having specific solutions for retail industry, for our healthcare clients, or manufacturing clients. That has been a focus for us. >> We're out of time, Gaurav, but I'd like to leave you with the last word. Knowledge 2017, what does it mean to you, your customers, and Infosys and your presence here? Give us the bumper sticker. >> So I think, if I have to summarize everything in one word, I will say it's all about diversity. We see so many partners, so many clients, everybody they have their own perspective. But how do you bring in all that diverse experience and gel it together to be able to deliver the experience for the users? >> Great, well, Gaurav, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, we appreciate it. >> Yep, it has been pleasure. >> Okay, well, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is theCUBE, we're live from ServiceNow Knowledge '17. Be right back. (electronic keyboard music)