(upbeat techno music) >> Announcer: Live, from Orlando, Florida. It's The Cube. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. (upbeat techno music) >> We're back at Knowledge17. Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. Josh Gluck is here, he's the deputy CIO of Weill Cornell Medical College in the big apple. Thanks for coming to The Cube. >> Thanks very much for having me. >> Tell us about Weill Cornell, It's a collaboration with Sloan Kettering, originally, and ... >> Yeah, we're a three part, mission-oriented institution. Patient care, being first. Our physician organization delivers patient care in New York City. We're partnered with New York Presbyterian Hospital, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and also the hospital for special surgery. >> So, let's get right into it. CIO, you were probably doing some of the CIO activities here, this week. Love to hear about that. But let's get right into how you're, you know, using automation, how you're using the ServiceNow platform. Let's talk in the context of IT transformation. >> Yeah. So we've been a ServiceNow customer since 2012. We actually went live on 12/12/12. Everybody thought that was a joke, but it turned out to be the real "go live" date. You know, and as the platform's matured, and as our organization's matured, you know, we started focused on ITSM, strictly. Over the last few years though, we've found that, you know, our focus for ServiceNow should be the equivalent of building a 3-1-1 platform for the administrative departments. So we've onboarded folks in HR. We're doing case management now with ServiceNow. Obviously all the ITSM, ITIL-based processes. We've worked with our Department of Environmental Health and Safety. To help them with some of the regulatory compliance, about workflows that they need to have in place. We've also built out Project and Portfolio Management in ServiceNow, and we've been doing it, actually, since the beginning. We worked with ServiceNow pretty intimately to build out those functions. And now, we're actually at the point where, the platform has surpassed what we custom developed back in the early days. And we're really focused on understanding where we can unwrap some of those customizations, and just go to the native portfolio. >> Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that. >> Yeah. >> So, that's not an uncommon story and how complicated is it to unwrap that stuff? 'Cause obviously, you don't want the custom mods there if you don't have to have them. >> Yeah, well you know we spent, what, five, six years now, focused on developing the platform to meet our needs, meet our process. You know, we're academics at heart. Right, being part of Cornell University. So, I think we have a habit of sometimes overthinking solutions. So, our customizations are pretty complex. We also though, understand that it's a heavy lift for us to keep it up. So, we partner with ServiceNow, we've had them come in and help us to an evaluation of what really could be done with a slight change to our process. Or, even just direct support for our process, straight out of the box. We're really excited about the stuff that's coming out of Jakarta. >> Okay, so it's fair to say, I mean, we've all been there. Where you have software development problems, and you go "ah, jeez, I wish I had done it differently." But, when we talk to folks like you, that are unwrapping, unraveling, custom mods, there's no regrets. You got a lot of value >> Josh: Yeah, no. >> out of 'em. And now you're moving forward, right? >> Josh: Yep. Yeah we >> That's interesting. >> Josh: Definitely did the right thing, at the right time. You know, we went through an evolution, in the way that we did Project and Portfolio Management internally at Weill Cornell. And we're focused on some of the high-level problems, high-order problems today, that some organizations may not get to. Right, we're doing resource management, proactive scheduling, and you know, for us to get to the next level, the enhancements that are available in Jakarta are around time-carding and resource management, are really going to help us, I think, not overthink the problem. And come to some standard that the rest of the industry, or other verticals are using, in how they do their resource management. >> And Josh, the 3-1-1 concept is interesting. When did you go from "this is our an ITSM tool, that's going to be pretty cool." >> Yeah. >> To "this is a platform, that we can now take this kind of 3-1-1 approach, and use that as kind of an overarching mission, >> Yeah. >> for that which you're trying to accomplish"? >> I think the concept ... I think when we first went into partnership with ServiceNow, we knew that we wanted it to be more than just a replacement for heat, right? I've actually been with two different organizations. New York Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Cornell, who have come from other ITIL platforms, ITSM platforms, and moved to ServiceNow. I was a BMC Remedy customer for a long time at New York Presbyterian. We were a heat customer at Weill Cornell, prior to going to ServiceNow. So, I think we were all familiar with the fact that it doesn't make sense to buy these point products, to do all of these different workflows. Let's buy a platform. ServiceNow represented that platform. Even in its early stages, we knew that we wanted to do more with it. We had conversations about process users. And I know you guys were talking a little bit before about changes to the license model that are happening. >> Dave: Yep. >> But we really wanted it to be something we could develop further. Our first project just happened to be, in both cases "we have an ITSM platform that isn't working." Remedy at NYP, heat at Weill Cornell. "Let's get off of it, and get onto ServiceNow." But I think, we didn't start calling it the 3-1-1 until maybe a year or two ago. >> Okay. >> And it really started with Case Management. I think that was a big deal. >> It's a good little marketing, CIO selling. >> Josh: Yeah. >> You know, Daniel Pink. How large of an organization ... >> Josh: Is, IT, or Weill Cornell itself? >> Weill Cornell. >> We're between ... We're about five-thousand and change. >> Okay, so not enormous. But, the reason for the question is, at what point does it make sense to bring in a ServiceNow? You know, our little fifty-person company. You know, we're trying ... >> Josh: Yeah. But it's still not there yet. Is it size of company? Is it size of problem? What is your advice there? >> You know, I think it's actually a good idea for most mid-level companies to talk to ServiceNow. And I think there's even a play for some small businesses. It depends on what you want to get out of the tool. Right? I mean, if you're going to use it as just a simple incident-response system, which isn't really the value that ServiceNow provides, it might be a hard sell. But, because it's a hosted system, because there is such a wealth of partners in the community now, and such a following for ServiceNow, I don't know. If you were a ten-person organization and you were customer focused, and you wanted to use it to do ... >> Jeff: Yep, yeah, that makes sense. A couple of different business processes, it could actually make sense for you. >> Josh, really tight schedule today, we'll give you the last word on Knowledge17, some of the things that have excited you, what's the bumper sticker on K17 for you? >> I think the keynotes have been great. I think you guys at The Cube have been doing a great job, of also, >> Dave: Thank you very much, appreciate that. >> you know, getting people up here and asking 'em tough questions and stuff. I appreciate you going easy on me. Than you. But, it's been great. It's been a really good show. >> Well come back again, and we'll really go at it. So, thanks very much Josh, >> Josh: Thank you. appreciate your time. Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest, right after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

>> Narrator: 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. We're live from Orlando ServiceNow Knowledge 17. Our fifth knowledge, Jeff. Abhijit Mitra is here, the general manager of customer service management business unit. ServiceNow. Great to see you. >> Good, you too. >> Loved your keynote this morning. A lot of energy. CJ introduced you as enthusiastic as today as you were 20 years ago when he met you. >> And he said even more enthusiastic, it seems. >> Jumped off the stage, he got a good reason. >> Must be a solution. >> Business is good, you guys are rockin'. You got a hot, new business unit that you're managing. You started off your conversation with essentially saying customer service is broken. I mean, you had us all raise our hands at who's ever had a bad customer service experience. Every hand went up in the audience. Explain that a little bit. What's broken? >> So the thing is that you know, when you think about customer service today companies spend a lot of time and effort on customer service but not necessarily the end customers are seeing the result of that. And you know, when you talk to customers, I talk to a lot of customers asking them like, why is this happening for you. What they're telling us is that all the solutions that are available in the market today. Our solutions are really based on CRM systems and these are very well suited for allowing customers to contact through a multitude of channels we call home channel engagement. And then for support, agents to log their issues as cases. But they don't do anything more and as consumers, as customers, we are looking for solutions. And as customer service departments, customer service agents want to fix customer issues. So that is really where the problem is so the issues don't get fixed and customers keep on calling again and again and again. That's how case volume keeps on growing. >> But they always ask you at the end, are you satisfied with your service and will you hang on for the survey and give me a five please? That's the part that amazes me. That you solved none of the problems that I asked resolving. >> Gave me the NPS. Okay so how are you attacking this problem? >> So the way we're attacking this problem is, this is something that I didn't invent. It's something in which I learned, actually. Again after talking to a lot of customers after joining ServiceNow, what they told us is that they were looking for a service management approach and really the benefit of the service management approach is that it makes customer service a team sport. Because now not just customer service but every other department whether it's engineering or operations or financials, or legal or sales can come together on a common platform and the root cause of the customer issues are then assigned as tasks across enterprise. And once these root causes are fixed, then the issues are permanently resolved. And that reduces case volume. And that also includes customer satisfaction. >> You mentioned CRM based tools, people trying to use CRM based tools for customer service management, which essentially logs something. Logs customer service issues but doesn't give you the whole work flow. What's the difference? Can you give us the, you know CRM, why not CRM, why ServiceNow? >> Yeah like I said, it closes the end to end loop so just give me an example, just giving an example, is that in ServiceNow when customer has issues, these are logged as cases. And now, the customer support agent may be able to give a quick relief to the customer and close the case. And that's what you do with every other CRM system as well. And you do the same thing in ServiceNow. However closing the case is not necessarily the be-all and end-all because the root cause of this customer's issue may still be there. And that's how you assign these as problems to other departments. So that's really the fundamental difference. There is a follow up process that's happening. And follow up process may not just be problem, it may be also require a change of knowledge. It may require technician to go on-site through on-the-ground field service. So basically we close the loop. We allow companies to close the loop so that it's end to end customer service. >> Now I'm just curious, when you're out on the field talking to customers that are doing this, how receptive is kind of that next level of people and departments in terms of now being pulled more directly into a customer's role through you know, taking this service approach. Is it, are they happy? Is this new? Is it just a different way to execute what was inefficiently being done before? Because they don't, you know, I'm not in customer service. I'm in whatever department I'm in. Now you're asking me to help you resolve it because I'm part of the root cause. >> So underlying this is the philosophy that everybody in the company is responsible for customer service. And companies who do well as business actually enforce that philosophy in their different departments. And it is such companies who either have aspirations to transform themselves or who are already along this way that actually have an affinity towards the service management approach. Now in terms of the people who are actually working in the different departments, it's not that they're not working on their own systems anymore. Yeah those systems are there and for example, engineering would work with Gida, and there's nothing stopping them from doing that. But what is interesting here is that the work is getting assigned to them from customer service in the service management system of customer service management. That's really what it is. And that increases visibility. It's all about visibility. And reporting and other things. So that really shows, that okay, here are where the issues are and once you see the benefit of your impact on customer satisfaction, on Netomoto scores, on revenues, then it becomes very, very compelling. >> Abhijit, you guys don't break out the revenues of your customer service management business unit. I understand that. But it's a real business unit. It's growing. You got real customers. You showed some logos today. What can you tell us about the business, the business momentum. Any proof points that you're seeing with customers? >> Well we're been in the market for a little more than a year now. I would say a year because we just launched at this even last year. And in the last year, one year we've seen customers from all over the world at our best solutions. All over the world. We have customers now in 28 countries. Over ten big industrial categories. And many of our customers, early adopters will be live with system for a while. They were here. They are here at this conference. There are eighteen of our customers who are here. They're speaking their own sessions and they're sharing their own experiences with other customers. So it's been a tremendous adoption of the solution so far. >> Okay. And how about the impact that you've seen on their business? Can you share any results? >> Yeah absolutely, some of our customers, without naming names, have had up to 70% production in case volume just because of self service, and case deflection. Another customer had a 40% improvement in their Promoter scores. And these are unbelievable statistics. And a third replaced a 50 different customer service portals. And 15 CRM systems with ServiceNow's customer service management. So these are just unbelievable results that our customers have achieved in the last one year. >> You call them light speed pioneers. >> Abhijit: That's right. >> That's the term you guys are using, light speed. But so you know, your customers don't say hey call you, Abhijit, I need to move at light speed. What are they saying that you guys, of course, translated into that rubric of light speed? >> It's really about business transformations. So most of the, many of our customers, I would say, are looking for a better way to run customer service. They have challenges in either improving customer satisfaction. The customers are telling them that your service is very disconnected. Your SMAs aren't being met. So either it's mostly that or reducing costs because they have too many different systems. Different business units who do, work in different ways. So it's about standardization. It's about increasing efficiency. Do more with less. Automate more. And it's also about the effectivity. So, if you complete the work, you complete it well. It's done. >> Yes, being able to reduce volumes like that is impressive. Especially given the amount of data that we have. The amount of complexity that there is out in the world today. You hear a lot of talk at these conferences about IOT. You know, that's going to create more data, more devices, more problems for customers. What are your thoughts about IOT and the impacts it has on customer service? >> I think IOT is going to force customer service to be proactive. And to some extent, IOT is an opportunity to be proactive because now you have access to data that you've never had before. Now you can analyze the data in real-time. You can find out any anomalies and for which you need to take an action. And if you can predict an outage, then you can essentially take action to avoid that, right? So IOT opens up totally new opportunities for customer service to be proactive now. >> Okay, so we're live. >> They're shutting us down here. >> As always, we shut down the expo hall. It's kind of a CUBE tradition. >> We're going to go way after. The lights will be out but we'll still be going. >> The forklifts will be driving in. >> So hearing a lot today about Jakarta. CJ was explaining sort of, the process that you guys use starts with the customer. You guys try to understand what the needs are and it comes back through the business units into the platform and then you guys take it back and reapply it. What are some of the things in Jakarta that you are going to be applying in your future releases for your customers? >> So one of things that I'm very excited about Jakarta is our communities product. And this is something that were are announced today, we're releasing in Jakarta. Now with communities, it increases the level of engagement that customers have with companies because it allows the companies to provide a totally personalized experience. And think about it. In your own personal lives, when you look for help, you turn to people who you trust the most, right? Your friends and your family. Similarly as customers, they would like to turn to people who they trust which is like, other customers like them, right? So that's why communities is a big step for us. Essentially. And giving that features to our customers to have a better experience for their customers. >> So how would that work? It's a feature within the platform. Your customers will then create communities and cultivate communities? >> Yeah, essentially it's a new product and we just, you just turn it on and then you administer that community. You monitor that community. You rule it out. So our customers would use it to create their own communities for their customers. That's how it would work. >> What are some of the objectives you have for the business unit? What are some of the things we should watching as observers, in terms of indications of success, momentum? >> Really there is only one goal. Which is for our customers to be our most outspoken references. That's really the only goal that I have for this business unit. And 18 of them are here today. They are speaking on our behalf and I hope to see many many more of them in this conference next year. Customer satisfaction as they say is one thing. Customer loyalty is everything. >> Jeff: In public. >> Thanks very much for coming to theCUBE and congratulations on the success you've had. >> Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. >> Alright keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest before the lights go out. ServiceNow Knowledge. It's theCUBE. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's the Cube, covering ServiceNow, Knowledge 17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back to Orlando, everybody, my name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host, Jeff Frick. This is day two of ServiceNow, Knowledge, and this is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. Bart Murphy is here, he's the CTO of York Risk Services, and he's the CIO and CTO of CareWorks, Cube alum. Bart, good to see you again. >> Great to see you guys. So we were talking off camera, Mark came over, we're talking about the CIO Decisions, you participated in that last year as well. What have you been doing at the conference? What are you seeing that's interesting? >> Well I've been attending the sessions and you just mentioned the CIO Decisions, that was my day yesterday. Great opportunity to get you know, great speakers, we mentioned a few of them that spoke yesterday, but also there were some customer round tables that allowed you to collaborate with your peers over a few areas, and sort of discuss what's working for them, what's not. You know, what their road map looks like, how they're selling that to the board, those type of things. It was a very productive day. >> So, since we last talked, what have you been working on? We had a great discussion last year on security, I'm sure things have changed there, they keep evolving. What kind of things you've been working on, what are some of the initiatives that are new? >> Yeah, so last year we did talk about that and my desire, I was somewhat excited when I started to see the new play into SecOps with ServiceNow. So we've now gone live with SecOps. We're continuing to mature our security posture as a company, and I think that's, when you look at a road map or you're looking at things, what we want to see is continual capability maturity in our security space. One, we need to be there, right? As an organization, we're a services organization. We also want to just make sure that we're continuing to get better and automate. So we saw SecOps as a real opportunity for that. So we've now gone live, we've deployed that. We did it and integrated that with certain tools that we have, Tanium, LogRhythm, Symantec, some of our scanning tools. What that's allowing us to do is look at a wide range of log information, parse through that in order to automate certain types of work flows and cases. So whether it be as simple as finding an end point that say has an outdated Symantec update and having that automatically update, or create a case because it can't push the automation, those type of things we're trying to do now to try to raise the level of our security and start weeding through all the noise that's out there, that's provided with all the tools that we have. >> How did you find the integration? >> Well, we did the integration ourselves, and we found the integration, compared to some other products that we've done in the past, to be much smoother. You know, I think this is a later product that they've built into their platform. I think they've taken into account implementation, so some of the integrations were out of the box like the Tanium, others, we built those integrations. So, and we also, I think I may have mentioned this, not sure if I did, when I looked at my incident security response plan and the way I developed that, I developed it very closely to what was coming out of the box with ServiceNow. I wanted to make sure that our policies, procedures, process for that really just met out-of-the-box functionality, so we didn't have to do a lot of customization and configuration there, and we could focus on the technical integrations that really provide some of the power of the automation with the CMBB. >> Speaking of sort of custom work, you talk about M and A, you mention you get a mulligan coming. >> Bart: Yeah. >> Talk about that a little bit, kind of unwinding some of the custom mods. >> Yeah, so we have multiple instances of ServiceNow, and over the last year we've been building our newest instance with York Risk Services Group, that's our total company. And I'm in the process now of taking what we built for CareWorks, you know, we have been a customer since 2010, and really learning what we did well there and what we didn't do well. In addition to the fact that a lot of customization that we did on that platform is no longer really required, that's how much the platform has matured with ServiceNow. >> Which one was it, which release, do you remember? >> Oh gosh, Berlin, probably. >> Berlin, right, right. >> Early, early on if I'm accurate, from the very beginning. And you know GRC was an example where we did a lot of customization because that product just is night and day compared from where it is today. >> Jeff: Right >> So now we get a new opportunity to look at our process to see, say, is this something that we really need to keep the customization, or can we leverage the platform better, and by the way, even if we do have to do customization, can we do it a better way? So it is a little bit of a mulligan, from that standpoint, we get a sort of fresh start on a platform that we understand even better now, and we're doing it at a larger scale, so we're trying to really look at those automation opportunities so we can gain the efficiencies that we need. >> So I wonder if you can talk about the sort of business impact that you've seen over the years. You've been a long-time ServiceNow customer, and it just feels like this whole ecosystem is on the steep part of the s-curve now. Maybe describe the sort of business impact in whatever terms make sense. >> Well, I think partly supporting consolidated shared services, whether it's in IT or other areas of the business, and even finding areas of the business that aren't doing a good job of tracking their work today. And it still exists, in I think every organization. I was mentioning, you know, another area that we're looking at that we'll most likely deploy this year or early next year, I would assume this year, is the HR Case Management. >> Dave: Mmm hmm. >> That's an area very similar to IT, very similar to other areas that we've built use cases within ServiceNow, where things are done primarily through email. It's very inefficient, they don't have very good metrics to understand how much support they're providing the organization. They're pressured just as I am from an SG&A perspective, to do more with less. And the only way we're going to be able to continue to do more with less is to provide some level of automation and stay consistent with it. So when I started looking at ServiceNow, and yes, we're probably on that s-curve too. We've done some really good work on the automation side, but now with the platform, with what they're doing with some of the analytics, what they're, you know, I know what they're going to do with machine learning, what we can do with some of the predictive stuff. How can we take a security instance, for example, have it remediate itself and then inform us on what it did? Those are the type of things that I think's going to bring us way sharp up on that curve. I mean we've done a good job, we're very technical, we've done a good job automating, I'm not, but for what we can do I think over the next three to four years with this platform and the automation, is going to be a game changer for us and we're going to need that. 'Cause you know our SG&A can't grow at the same rate. You want to have that margin improvement, and this is one of the areas that we can use a platform to do that. >> It's interesting, you're, always a lot of talk about automation when we're here. >> Yeah. >> Different automated processes and make them easier. But you mentioned before we went on air, you just mentioned it again, that the desire to get measurement on the process as the primary driving factor, 'cause you just can't measure that which is in email and all these disparate systems, and now you can actually use the motivation of measurement so then you can get improvement as a primary driver to implement it. >> Yeah, I mean one of our core values is to be a data-driven decision making company. And you can't improve what you can't measure. And there's still to this day a lot of these processes that we take for granted. You know, SecOps, HR, operation service center, claim setup. We think we're doing a good job managing it and understanding the productivity of it, but we don't have really good tools in place or they're very disparate. So if we can get that into one CMDB, we can start to leverage automation. Once we start to measure it, we truly can start to see that business value, 'cause we can see those measurements go down. So whether we're using out-of-the-box performance analytics now, you know we started originally, performance analytics was a separate product. On the new York one, again, that's another benefit, we just turn it on, right? And there's already really good, rich data that it's giving us to stay, and we can compare that against our previous performance, whether it's incidents, closing rate, you know all these type of things out of the box. So I can start to show improvement. It's not to say that we don't have areas to improve, we do. There are things outside of ServiceNow that we need to do to improve our overall capability. So whether you're talking leveraging orchestration within ServiceNow but then I need a deployment tool to actually go and do that work. So that's where Tanium comes into play, so there's other strategies we're deploying to say where can we get the full life-cycle of that automation? And that's where engineering discipline and bringing that to your supply chain of activities is key. >> The other thing that you mentioned that kind of flipped it on its head, is you talked about your incidents response plan and trying to make it pretty much as out of the box from ServiceNow as possible. Was that because you just kind of went with the custom, or now are they delivering more best practices in the way that configuration comes out of the box that you don't really have to think about it. >> Yeah, I mean absolutely. >> You can presume best practices, because that's how it's preconfigured out of the box. >> Yeah, and I don't think they tout that, and I understand why, but they're getting feedback from a ton of customers on how to build a process in the most efficient way. I don't think they're doing it in a vanilla way. I think they're doing it in an efficient, robust way. So I think they are at that point where there's a lot of things that come out of the box that people really need to pay attention to. Like I understand that we may have done it this way, but this way is more than sufficient. And if it means that I don't have to customize and I can make my upgrades even easier than they are today, 'cause they aren't that painful at all, on the ServiceNow front, then why not? And then we can benefit from their maturity on the platform, because they're going to continue to add in releases and add in functionality just like we saw over the last two days. >> Back to the sort of s-curve, it sounds like you're getting in the position now to get real operating leverage almost like Metcalf's Law. The first one you get some benefit, but the nth one, boy that's when it really kicks in. >> I hope so. That's what I'm, I think right now we've spent a lot of time and energy getting onto one platform, right? Whether it's from all the acquisitions, whether it's from an older instance to a newer instance. I think once we get critical mass on that platform, yes, the automation stuff will make a marketable difference. We've done some great things for our business but I think once we get everybody on one platform and we get that true understanding of how we want to do our enterprise process and we have some other uplift in our areas and systems. You know, Tanium's a new product that we have. We're looking potentially HRIS, there's other things at play that will play in the ecosystem. And as we mature those and really understand what our end game's going to be, I think that's where we have that power. >> One of the speakers at CIO Decisions this week was author Daniel Pink. We had him on the Cube, talk about selling is human. When you run a business case, you talked about the HR, moving into HR, do you go sell, do you make the business case, are they coming to you, is it push/pull, how does it work? >> A little bit of both. As a CTO and as any executive, I listen to Daniel as well and I'm a firm believer that we're all in sales. All of us are part of some type of revenue-generating company, okay, and if we don't take that to heart, and we just think that we're some cog in a wheel in somebody else's problem, shame on you. No company's going to grow without a full company of great sales people. They're either advocates for their brand, they understand the mission, they understand what they're doing for the mission. So from a sales perspective, certainly I'm going around trying to tell people about the capability of ServiceNow. I saw the CEO speak yesterday too and one thing that struck me that I think a lot of people need to do, is he's spent a lot of time over the last 49 days trying to understand the vernacular of IT. You know, he was the CEO at some large companies, they all had IT, now he's at an IT company. And so he's trying to really understand the speak and some of the capabilities that you have to understand. He's got a better appreciation of it. It's my job, really, to be able to do that type of evangelism within our company to say here are some of the platforms that we have and here are some of the capabilities and at least start the conversation. I will tell you that other times I have people come to me because they've either heard from someone else that they're using it at their company and their HR team loves it, or what's it about? But I need to go around and say I see you guys doing this and we have a platform that's totally made for that. It's why it was built. Let's have a demo or let's start looking at how you think that would improve your guys' productivity. You're stretched for resources, I'm stretched for resources, and just come at it from a common problem statement perspective. Then we build the business case from there. >> I see. So we hear a lot of the announcements this morning, Jacarta, another release. What do you, and so there's a lot of things they did in there, performance improvements, UI improvements and things like that, bringing in intelligent automation, a lot of really good, cool things in there. What's, from your mind, on their to-do list? What kinds of things, I mean, are they doing the types of things that you want them to do, is there something big that could really make a difference to your business? >> Yeah, I wish I was like the ServiceNow product visionary. (laughing) But I'm not, I got to commend 'em. I think they're doing some pretty darn good things. When you start to look at SecOps and its play into GRC and the way that you really start to automate some of your controls, which are a huge component of, I'm not going to say waste within your organization, but they take a lot of time, and they bring value, don't get me wrong, but they aren't bringing...they're not bringing in revenue, they're a lot of compliance and they're good practices, so the more we can automate some of those they're high value but you want your team working on other innovation type of stuff, I think the better. When they start looking at what they're doing with the data now, everybody's becoming a data company, everybody's talking about machine learning. Everybody's talking about AI. I think that is the next place that they got to get to. If they can start to generate, again, some of that low value work, whether it's automating an entire incident end to end. I mean, there's insurance companies out there that are doing that, right, trying to automate a claim end to end. So I think the more they can look at their domain and determine ways to automate an entire workflow, which they are well on their path. They've been doing that from a workflow automation perspective for years. Now take it into AI to do it, I think they're going to be in a good position, a better position than I am in, probably if I was to develop that myself. >> Right. >> So I think that will help me scale from a user support perspective and just workflow in general, service management perspective. >> So you might not be the product guru going forward, but the thing you know probably better than a lot of people under the 15,000 is how to get people to adopt a platform. I wonder if you can share some of your tips and tricks to fellow practitioners to convince the people to don't pick up the phone, you know, put it in the platform? >> Yeah, it's evangelism. You got to get out and educate people on what the platform's about. As a procurer of the platform, you know and ServiceNow is not a cheap solution, and nor should it be. I think you need to go and justify, I'm getting this platform and it's up to me to make sure that we're going to leverage those dollars as much as possible. So anything I buy I want to make sure we're leveraging it as much as we can within the organization. I'm also a firm believer, I understand that reality hits and it's not going to happen overnight. So how do you build a backlog and start really working through that? We do an agile process, we're doing releases every two weeks. We're trying to, I may take an opportunity in IT but then the next one I want to do is going to be in the business. Or it's going to be with security or it's going to be with HR. Trying to get winds across the spectrum instead of trying to take big projects. Big projects take time, you know, there's a lot of little things that I can do to whet their appetite, on boarding, off boarding, transfers, HR started to get familiar with ServiceNow and what it could o just in that space. That whet their appetite, then, to have a more serious discussion about case management, right, which we're still having. So I think trying to figure out how you can handle a backlog of smaller hit items to get winds, will allow you to get a little bit more credibility if you start looking at a more wholesale change to their entire business, which this would be, a wholesale change to their business. >> You have kind of this dual role of CTO and CIO. Over the last several years, so much has changed in information technology, cloud, infrastructures, code and now you're seeing containers explode, the whole sassification of softwares eating the world, obviously service management is playing a big part there. Now AI, the whole big data meme. How has the CIO role evolved and changed and how has that affected you? Particularly the CIO piece, and you know, the CTO piece as well, I guess. Technology's always there, the CTO has got to be following that. But the CIO role seems to be changing quite dramatically. >> I think each organization's a little different. The way I look at it is, and some organizations, and maybe it's just me, some people see a CIO as an operational guy or girl, and some of them see their CTO as going out and looking at new technology. The way I, and why I sort of have the title of the CTO is I never want to have a build and run type of organization. I don't want to have a marginalized CIO that's basically just keeping the lights running, maybe keeping enterprise systems up. We need to be innovative as an entire team and those assets that we build, the same people need to support them, because, man, they build much better assets if they have to support them, let me tell you. (laughing) I think the role is changing whether you use the term CTO, CIO, you know, who is that person that's going to help ensure that you're not only looking at new platforms but not, I don't want to just spend all my time looking at new platforms or looking at new innovations. And certainly want to be aware of the trends. What's the right time to look at that for your organization? Some would say you always need to be on top of all of that, and I don't need to be on top of every AI vendor or data analytics company. What I need to understand is within the context of our organization, our financial structure, where we are as a maturity as an organization, where are the tools right now that can really make a major lift? And sometimes those aren't the most recent platforms. Sometimes they aren't the gold-standard platforms, sometimes they're just grunt and hard work. So I think the role, I hope the role evolves into where somebody takes ownership of all that and it's not carved up. Now, I think there are, even in our organization, there's a place. We have a Chief Innovation Officer, who is staying on top of some of the front-end stuff dealing with our industry. And that's a fine model as well. But I don't like breaking up between operations and development work and innovation. I like to make sure that those are all in sync. I think that's where you don't get a lot of rogue IT, a lot of shadow IT, because ultimately somebody's got to support it, and we want to make sure that that support cost is as lean as possible. >> That's a great answer, steeped in accountability, Bart. It's always great having you on the Cube. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you guys, it's a pleasure to see you. >> All right, good to see you. All right, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest, this is the Cube live from Knowledge 17. Be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering ServiceNOW Knowledge17, brought to you by ServiceNOW. >> Dave: We're back, this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise. I'm Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. Farrell Hough is here she's the general manager of the service management business unit at ServiceNOW, great to see you. >> Farrell: Yes, great to see you, thanks for having me. >> Dave: Awesome, you're welcome. Awesome keynote this morning, you have your baby, which is ITSM, we know, but at the financial analyst meeting and you know, you represent today's keynote, you represented, you know, more than just ITSM, which is, you know, good. But let's start there, so, awesome keynote, lot of energy, so much meat (chuckles). >> Farrell: Yes. >> Dave: In Jakarta. >> Farrell: Absolutely. We have been busy, for sure, in our IT portfolio. In ITSM we really spent a lot of time and energy in giving back to our customer base and making sure that critical capabilities and features in ITSM, have a lot of depth behind them as well. So making sure service level management's solid, service catalog, which is 99% adopted across our customer base, servicing over half a million end users, that making sure that that's solid. And then additionally, making it really easy for new customers to join onto ITSM as well by giving out of the box best practices and a guided set up format like a wizard format that they can within just a couple of hours stand up a brand new incident management process prescribed by ServiceNOW and feel confident in what they're getting. >> Dave: Yeah, so I didn't realize the number was that high in terms of adoption of service catalog. What do you see for CMDB, I mean, when you first started following ServiceNOW it was mixed, 'cause it kind of gets political, but now, today, when you talk to customers it's like, oh yeah that's a big initiative of ours, or we're already there, or what do you see? >> Farrell: Absolutely. I don't have the exact percentage in front of me but I believe that it's upwards of 70% adoption in our customer base. And that is a difference from where we were in the past, for sure. >> Dave: Which is like the mainspring of innovation, 'cause once you get there, with service catalog and CMDB-- >> Farrell: Yep, you get all your assets in there, you get all your services defined, it's go time. >> Dave: Then your operating leverage is huge in terms of when you bring out new function and the impact on the organization, the business impact, can be really enormous. >> Farrell: Absolutely. >> Jeff: And best practice out of the box is a huge, huge coo, everyone we've talked to, you know, they're smart enough now to now customization is bad. Keep it to a minimum, keep it to a minimum, do config but not customizations, so that all those upgrades are easier, easier, easier. So to come out of the box with an integrated best practices workflow, great, great solutions for the customers to get up and running quickly. >> Farrell: It is, and you know, they're asking for prescription, and we're going to give it to them. We've got our own services arm, we have a partner community, we know between all of us in this huge ecosystem what's working and what's not, and we're going to put it in the product and make sure our customers, existing and new, get best practice out of the box. >> Dave: So, kind of three areas you talked about today: service management, we just touched on, we didn't talk about the surveys, but that's cool, that's a nice little feature you guys have added. >> Farrell: Oh yes, that's right. >> Dave: So, you have new and improved surveys. Operations managements, so that's ITOM piece right? >> Farrell: Yep. >> Dave: And then business management. So give us the high level on office management. >> Farrell: I will, yeah, sure. So we announced this year that we're putting out the cloud management platform, and the adoption of cloud is long past it's tipping point. We're seeing cloud being adopted everywhere and cloud resources are extremely easy to procure, stand up, and use, and IT may or may not know about it. And that becomes just a huge problem in terms of cost and even in terms of security and compliance and when we're able to-- we made an acquisition roughly a year ago, the ITOM team, and this is basically the next generation cloud management platform, where now you're able to have a cloud portal where a end user can go and consume and, just like a service catalog, they're going to have a service catalog of cloud services that you've already provisioned very easily with the drag and drop interface, that accounts for all your policy already in those services. And so it makes it very very easy for the business to continue to operate at the pace and the skill that they need to, but for IT to make sure that we have the consistency and the compliance that we need to protect the business overall and manage cost, all with a really great user experience at the same time. So we're thrilled to be able to put out a cloud management platform. And then the second major thing that came out in the IT operations management space was around service mapping. When we went to market with service mapping it was for all on prem services and mapping out what that looked like. This time around we're just bookending it and kind of closing the gap and saying okay, let's look at what's off prem, and let's look what's in the cloud. So you get a holistic view and are able to discover resources in the cloud and on prem as well and you get that holistic view of your services mapped going forward. >> Dave: So I have to ask you, so we're always asking, when ServiceNOW gets into HR, it's like oh does ServiceNOW compete with Workday, no. And when ServiceNOW gets into security, it's like does ServiceNOW compete with FireEyes, et cetera, no no. Now when you talk about this multi-cloud, sort of mapping visibility, there's a lot of talk about, we call it sometimes inter-clouding and inter-cloud management, how far to do you go into that, I mean, can I actually orchestrate across clouds? Is it just giving you visibility, well not just, but, how should I think about the positioning of ServiceNOW in that space of cloud management? >> Farrell: We're out there to create flexibility for customers and we'll start to make it happen that you can orchestrate across different clouds regardless of what they look like. We're not totally there yet, but that's the direction it's going. >> Dave: Well nobody's there. >> Farrell: Yep. >> Dave: This is jump all for the industry. And it's got to be a huge market, I mean, everybody's doing multi-clouds. In fact somebody told me, today David Flora told me in Europe there was a mandate in the banking sector that you have to have a second source for cloud. >> Jeff: Oh really? >> Dave: Yeah, I don't know the context, but good news for the cloud vendors, right? Good news for somebody-- >> Farrell: Exactly. >> Dave: --who manages that. So, okay, and now what about, are we done with ops-- >> Farrell: That was operations management, yep done with that. >> Dave: And then how about business management? >> Farrell: Alright, on the business management side, the big news if the software asset management. We're able to deliver another new product this year, and that's really going to put a lot of power back in the hands of IT. You're no longer caught on your heels with a software audit, realizing you're out of compliance. We struggle with visibility and understanding where are all these software assets, who are they allocated to, are they actually using them, how much is it costing us, and when we're able to have visualization to that because it's on the ServiceNOW platform and we understand where all those items exist, we're able to go in and very easily reclaim licenses, or reallocate them, and to me that's found money. And I just love that. I think that's going to be great, and guess what? You want to find your sourcing for your next IT project it's right there. >> Jeff: Right, right, and you're being humble. I mean that was the thing where the biggest roar came up from the crowd, without a doubt. Super, super well received. >> Dave: We were talking to CJ this morning about how it works and you get the platform, the platform comes out with all these features, and then the business units take advantage of those features. Now of course he described it differently, he said you start with the customer, and then you figure out what to put in the platform knowing that the business units are going to take advantage of it. But when you think about intelligent automation you gave an example of predictive maintenance today, so that's a use case for that so called AI or deep learning, machine learning. So talk about that a little bit. And then I want to get into the DX continuum piece as well. >> Farrell: Yeah, absolutely. When we're sitting on this data set that our customers have and they want us to take advantage of it for them, on their behalf, we're able to go back and apply algorithms to those data sets to say what's the norm? And did it have a good outcome? And all that data is in there, we're able to model it now, you're not having to go do that in some--export that into some other system to try to figure out, with some advanced analytics, what's that looking like, you're able to be able to say very clearly, listen, here's what the normal pattern of behavior is, and establish that for everything else going forward. So it becomes really clear where outliers exist and what suspect events or suspect alerts look like in your environment and then you can fire off a process to say look, this looks like a problem, and with certain signposts associated to it, go ahead and automatically open up that incident. You apply it to change management where you're talking about predictive maintenance. Something has enough failures automatically schedule a change window or decommission it, fail it over, back it out, move it out of the way, so that it's not causing a problem anymore. We put so much on humans to do for so long because the technology wasn't there to allow us to do it, well it's time, it's here now. And so we can take some of the burden away. >> Dave: I just had a thought, we talk in this industry so much about consumerization of IT and trying to mimic consumers, Fred Luddy talks about all the time. What you just described, I thought about an experience of an iPhone user, and anytime you do a migration, my wife just migrated from an android to an iPhone, what question was asked, is it backed up? What you just described is proactive. You're way beyond is it backed up, you're at the point of, we're going to just eliminate any possibility of a disruption. So I guess my question there is, is enterprise IT finally, not only catching up, but in some regards surpassing, this consumerization trend? >> Farrell: Hey, I think there's an opportunity to leapfrog, all the way, and I'm behind a 100%. I do, I think exactly that. And why not get way out ahead and over our skis with that and over-deliver and show that yep, we can see what's coming, we're sitting on all this data. When you choose to go to the cloud, and all that data is accessible, and you're on a single platform, it's all intermingled. You're not having to stitch together, create a data lake that's got all these different integrations pulling data and trying to sort it out from there with some data scientists or some business analysts looking at it, you're now able to lean in way more with your operation and really start to take care of it and truly own it. >> Jeff: I was just going to say my favorite part of your keynote today was kind of teeing off what you said, which is using machine learning and artificial intelligence on relatively simple looking processes that are painful, cumbersome, and horrible, like categorization, prioritization, assignment, to take the first swag, let the machine take the first swag at that stuff, and take that burden off the person because it's tedious, it's cumbersome, and it's painful, so it's this really elegant use of machine learning and AI, which is talked about all the time, on a relatively, again, simple looking activity, that just delivers tremendous value. >> Farrell: Yeah, I'm really really excited about that part because there's a lot of mystic and-- ah, I don't know what the right word is, maybe misunderstanding potentially, which can lead to mistrust of AI and machine learning and what's really going to come of it. And when we're able to say using supervised machine learning, which is the model that we're going after with the auto-classification, you can work with customers to be able to to let them tune the level of accuracy that they are comfortable with. And so you're building trust right away with a really simple example of auto-classification or auto-categorization, that is so frustrating for both parties. The person who is filing the incident, and the for the person who's going to be supporting and fulfilling on that incident as well. And I just love that fact that we can start to dip our toe into this pool and wade in and create trust along the way so we don't leave anyone behind or create mistrust in our user-base that we're just trying to get rid of them in some capacity or pull the wool over their eyes, we're not and we're going to be really transparent about in the way we do it and I think that's phenomenal. >> Jeff: And it's dynamic right, so it continues to learn. You have Spotify, you have a playlist, I like this, I don't like this, the playlist hopefully gets better, so. >> Farrell: That's right, because it took your input. >> Jeff: Correct, right. >> Farrell: And so taking input from the end users is going to then help train that system over time, that's correct. >> Dave: I got so many questions for you. (Jeff laughs) >> Farrell: Okay! Give 'em to me. >> Dave: So the auto-classification piece, that comes from the DX continuum acquisition-- >> Farrell: It does, yes. >> Dave: So explain that, I know you guys re-platformed everything, but what did that give you and let's get into auto-classification a little bit. >> Farrell: Okay, well it gave us some incredibly talented smart engineers and some really great intellectual property in terms of algorithms that we are able to now apply. When we re-platform something we're making sure that it works in the ServiceNOW platform stack and that it is going to be available and pervasive for every application that gets built on top of the platform. >> Dave: Okay so, you had said before, we're not just building a data lake, which, I want to talk to you about that too, 'cause a date lake as we know turns into a data swamp and it's just a mess and then you got to really do a lot of heavy lifting. >> Farrell: Smelly, don't like that. >> Dave: Right? Not good. So-- >> Jeff: Scary critters. >> Dave: You're auto-classifying at the point of creation I presume, or use of that data set. So how does that all work? How is it being applied? Where do you see customers getting value out of this? Explain that a little. >> Farrell: Well really I see in the ITSM side and the IT Space and in the ITSM side specifically, anything that you've got to apply a drop down field to, whether you're an end customer doing it through a service portal, or you're an IT worker, too, like let's help those guys out, why not? Anytime you need to fill out a field through a drop down mechanism, it's one discreet set of values, that's a candidate there. Now you want to have a large data set, which is why incidents, incident category, or assignment, assignment group, or what skill set might be required to work that particular incident, works because there's tons and tons and tons of incidents out there so we have lots of examples around what it could possibly be. And then that's what the data model would be built on. This auto-classification is not meant for the obscure or the random or the infrequent. So when we're talking about high volumes that a service desk sees, this is the perfect setup to apply it. >> Dave: So how will it work? I'll have a corpus of data with a bunch of incidents and I'll just sort of tell the machine go classify this? >> Dave: And it'll do some kind of process? >> Farrell: You're going to have a set of data a portion of the records you're going to use for the training model, the other portion you're going to leave behind, almost as the control group. And you're going to go apply the algorithms to that training set of data and it's going to start to learn and you're going to tell it what fields you want it to learn from and pay attention to and spit a model out on the other side on and it's going to crunch through all that data and it's going to give you a model on the other side, and you'll look at it and see if you agree, and then you're going to take that model and you'll apply it to that control set and you're going to look at what level of accuracy came out on the other side and you'll decide with that data set what accuracy level you want to have. For me, 70% accuracy will work for me on password reset. 'Cause, in all likelihood, what's it going to be? But maybe for a VPN issue I want 90%. You'll be able to start applying accuracy by category to then tune in exactly how you want things to work to make sure you get that good user experience. >> Dave: And then you'll continue to train that model and iterate. >> Farrell: Yes, absolutely. And you'll be able to train it and often as you like. I mean on demand, like yep, I want to train it again. And when you have a service desk worker who goes back in and re-categorizes, because yeah, that wasn't quite right, that's just the same thing as clicking the like button, thumbs up, thumbs down, on Spotify. You're right that you've just given it feedback. When you train it again, it takes that feedback into account. >> Dave: And then the subsequent incidents get auto-classified. >> Farrell: They get the learning. They get the learning. There's not magical learning that happens in this particular case, the technology's not evolved to that state, there's no unicorn back there that's doing all the learning for you. It takes feedback and it'll take some tuning, but hopefully in being able to make the feedback mechanism very easy, the tuning happens naturally, therefore the model gets better over time. >> Dave: Well it's a great use case because it's relatively narrow, and you have tons of data, and it can be implemented right away. >> Jeff: And like you said, even if it just helps you partially down the road, it's better than zero down the road, especially these repeatable processes that have to happen over and over and over, it's like oh please shoot me, this is the work that machines are supposed to do because it's mundane and repeatable and-- >> Farrell: Mind-numbing. >> Jeff: Mind-numbing, thank you. Let me get to solving the customer problem. >> Farrell: That's right. >> Dave: Okay so when we first encountered ServiceNOW we did our first Knowledge, it was from 2013, and it was at the height of the big data sort of hype-cycle. And so we would ask, of course we asked, well what about data, what about big data? The response was always well we got a lot of data and we're looking at that. But now we're here. And you mentioned earlier, it's not some data lake that you're processing as offloading your data warehouse, so what are you doing in that space? So it's not a data lake, it's a corpus of data and you're basically applying these AI and intelligent automation models to, can you explain a little bit about how that works? >> Farrell: Sure, well first off we won't do anything, we have to have our customer's permission to be able to use their data, they showed interest in machine learning services then they will give us permission to leverage their data and all customer data is separated too, within their own instance, within their own database, there's no co-mingling of data, so there will be no data lake whatsoever. But what we are able to do, and it's on a personal level, which I just love, because that's who we are as a company, that we're offering personalized supervised machine learning, personalized auto-classification, we're not taking all the data of all of our customers, kind of aggregating it up and then building models against that, and then saying oh I think this model would pertain to you and then it's only 25% accurate or even relevant. We're building a model very specific to you. And working with your data set and we have access to it, with your permission, and we'll go build that model, using the training set as we described, and then go test it out, and then help you go re-deploy it. So we'll pull that data into a central instance, help retrain it, and then move it back into your instance so that model is always constantly tuned and then you get to decide when you retrain it. >> Dave: So who's we in that example? You have a team of data scientists that do this? >> Farrell: This will be in our platform team. It's a platform service. You don't need data scientists to, I would say on the customer side, maybe if they were wanting to interpret some of that data or do something with it maybe they'd have a data scientist. This is just tried and true engineering and having a good service model behind it, it's just a central instance. >> Jeff: Do--I'm sorry, I interrupted. >> Farrell: No, I was just going to say through our acquisition DX Continuum, those engineers are building those training models and will keep them up to date, but they're not literally turning a crank when that data comes in and it'll be-- >> Dave: So it's a model that they apply, it scales, it's part of the service. Now you iterate that over time-- >> Farrell: That's right. >> Dave: But it's the-- >> Farrell: And you can build out other training models. So we just talked about auto-classification for instant, but this can extend in other areas as well. >> Jeff: Well I was going to say, do you think it's an opportunity for the ecosystem that has specialty expertise around, pick your favorite topic area, we're talking to someone about oil and gas earlier today, that they know what the model is way beyond just simple correlation to take in this and it flow and predict that, I think the example was that the well cap's going to break, or whatever. So do you see that potentially as an ecosystem contribution as well around more specific use cases? >> Farrell: Well I think that would be super cool. If we had customers of similar ilk, whatever that looked like, wanting to collaborate and share and crowdsource something for a greater good that wasn't competitive, I think that that would be amazing to be able to do that. And we would be able to facilitate it. We don't have any current plans to do that right now but I could absolutely see it. >> Dave: Well we've talked about the ecosystem through for years, to see it just burgeoning and awesome story. Thank you for coming on theCUBE and doing a brain dump on us and educating us. >> Farrell: Yeah, thank you so much-- >> Jeff: You really had a great opening line, "exciting time to be in IT," that was your opening line, the key night, I know you've got the excitement >> Farrell: It is! This is the best time to be in IT. I mean oh my gosh, it's fabulous. >> Dave: You're exploding. Alright Farrell, thanks very much. >> Farrell: Alright, thank you. >> Dave: Alright, keep it right there buddy, we'll be back with our next guest, theCUBE, we're live from Orlando, be right back. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering ServiceNow, Knowledge17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Hi everybody, we're back. This is theCUBE and we're live from Knowledge17, I'm Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. Michael Dippolito, did I say that right? >> D'Ippolito, close enough. >> D'Ippolito, sorry about that. A fellow Italian, I should get that right. D'Ippolito is assistant Vice President of Run Services Delivery, infrastructure and operations for Nationwide Insurance. Nationwide is on your side. >> You got it. It's in our heads right? >> I remember that. >> What a great marketing campaign. Michael, great to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> So how's Knowledge going for ya? >> Very good, very good. I'm really excited about some of the new things coming out with the newest release that was just announced this morning. And as a matter of fact I'm ready to go back and say let's jump to that version right? Because it sounds really exciting. >> So where are you right now? Which version are you on? Are you on the Helsinki? >> We are on the Helsinki release now. We usually like to jump a couple and stay as current as we can, usually you know one release behind maybe but if we find there's good functionality in jumping one we'll do it. >> I want to come back and talk about that, because we like to pick your brains about what's the best practice there, but before we do maybe set up your role at Nationwide. >> Yeah, RunService is a pretty large organization for Nationwide, through acquisitions and through our legacy environments, we have lots of application systems, you know, keeping all those running is a monumental task. So, our group is kind of sitting mainly in the middle of the applications, the infrastructure, the process, and trying to help everything stay running smoothly. >> Okay and you started with IT service management change management, like most customers, is that right? And then, you've been evolving that. Can you talk about that a little bit? >> Yeah we just implemented, about a year ago actually, we installed a year ago. >> Okay. >> We went with the Fuji release that we implemented then we've already jumped to Helsinki, and we pretty much went all processes all at once and kind of a big bang. We actually did ask that management at first does a little bit of a pilot, but then we actually went through all the other ITSM functionality, big bang after that. >> Jeff: So you're all in. >> Michael: Yeah. >> So what was life like, you know, give us a before and after, and maybe take us through the business case and how that all came about. >> I'll give you a perfect example, I just kind of did an after action review for our senior management, on our previous platform, which was an on prem heavily customized platform, to take a release would require a year and a half with a lot of planning and about a million dollars. >> Jeff: To do an upgrade. >> To do an upgrade. (Jeff Laughing) This last release to Helsinki went about six weeks, and about $100,000. So, that's a huge business case right there. Being able to be in the cloud, not having to worry about the infrastructure ourselves, and really we drove a model of zero customization so we wanted to stay out of box as much as possible, just for that reason so we could take releases fast and stay current. >> Wow, I'm sure that benefits. >> In the, you know, was situtation, the cost was predominantly people cost, programming cost, license cost, maintenance, consultants? >> It was mostly hours of effort. >> Yeah. >> The amount of customization we had and then to retrofit and test all those changes back into the release from the vendor was a monumental task and we never want to get into that situation again. >> And so with the ServiceNow upgrade, it's not out of pocket cost as much, you're quantifying time, is that correct? >> Correct. >> Yeah okay. >> It's mostly our internal cost. >> You said the time it took was a year and a half and then, like a typical upgrade in ServiceNow is, >> Michael: Less than two months. >> Okay. >> For us to bring it in test it, exercise it, making sure all our customizations, or configurations actually I should say, are working well. And a lot of it is more just the change management around it, you know, putting out the word, the communications, doing a little bit of training, or whatever it takes to get ready for a smooth launch. >> And some of the upfront planning of that as well. Now, when we talk to customers, there seems to be, we heard today that 90% of customers are adopting service catalog, CMDB, I don't know. It's mixed, right? We hear some yes, some no. Maybe tell us your experiences. >> We have a huge focus on CMDB right now. We think that CMDB is basically the foundation to all your other processes to run more smoothly right? So good trustworthy data enables faster incident resolution, better problem solving, more rigorous change management so you asses your risk of change better. So really when we sold our CMDB project, we didn't sell it based on the CMDB, we sold it based on all those other things, >> All the benefits. >> That get a ramp off of it. You know, from doing that effort. So, we're putting a lot of effort on CMDB maturity. >> So you were talking before about some of the things you saw today in Jakarta that were of interest before we go there, you had mentioned you started with Fuji, and now you're on Helsinki. What was the, you didn't double leapfrog did you? Or did you? What's your upgrade strategy? You said you might be an N minus one, but you like to stay pretty current. What's your strategy in regards to upgrades? >> Right now, we're looking at trying to be N minus one >> Uh huh. >> and taking two per year. So looking at two releases a year. We're trying to plan our schedules around maybe spring and fall. So we organize our work and our patterns around that. But something like that. We haven't really solidified that yet. A lot of it depends on what we see coming up, and what we can take advantage of. Like for example, we're getting ready to implement Work Day. And we want to make sure we have great integration between Work Day and ServiceNow. Some of the things that Jakarta is going to offer us is going to integrate nicely into Work Day. So, we may jump to that version because of that. >> So we heard this morning that the big things, well CJ set up the big things in Jakarta were going to be performance, obviously everybody better performance, maybe some UX stuff in there too, vendor risk management, and then the software asset management, which got the big cheers and the whoohoo! >> Yeah. (Jeff chuckling) >> Yeah, so, what in Jakarta is appealing to you? >> This software as a management I'd say, is very interesting because we're looking at that very closely right now in terms of our strategy around that. The other one I really like is the performance analytics and the predictive analytics that are coming out. I'd really love to be able to benchmark ourselves against other companies in terms of how we're doing. I feel we beat ourselves up a lot internally around things like availability or performance. But then, when I look and talk to others, we're not so bad. (Jeff chuckling) We're actually doing pretty good. So it'd be nice to get that benchmarking. >> Right, right. >> And some of that trend analysis that's offered. And then, finally, how do we get into a more predictive analytics mode where we can prevent incidents from happening before they do? So that's key. >> It was interesting, listening to Farrell Hough this morning talk about sort of the evolution of automation. How do you look at automation? Some shops are afraid of automation, but it seems like the ServiceNow customers we talk to really can't go fast enough. What is your thought, and how are you evolving automation? >> Well, one of our key drivers right now is how do we increase the speed of delivery to the marketplace? But, we also have to stay safe and reliable, right? And the key to speed is through automation. You can't really get that speed if you're not highly automated. And, to be highly automated, you need really high trustworthy data. So that enables fast decision making, and accuracy. >> Jeff: And that ties back to your CMDB commitment. >> Exactly, so, that all entailed enables speed, which we really want because in today's world speed is everything in terms of how you're constantly adapting your systems of engagement out there with your customers. Constantly learning from their patterns and adjusting on the fly. And that requires new mindsets. >> So you start with IT service management, you've got HR as well, is that right? >> We don't have the HR model. Right now we're only IT service management. >> Okay, straight IT services. >> We're looking at other modules, as we speak. >> Okay, so you want to make sure you get the value out of the initial ITSM, and then, how do you see that, you know, evolving? What is the conversation like internally? Do the business lines say, wow, all of a sudden we're getting improved service, and how are you doing that? Or is it more of a push where you go out to the business and say hey, here are some ideas. How does that all work? >> I'll tell you what we're really starting to see is a really change in what's driving innovation. And it's more coming from IT versus, the former models where IT was kind of like the order taker, and the business came up with everything they needed. Now, with the pace of change with technology, new business models are coming from IT to the business. And we're actually almost seeing ourselves more of an IT company than we are an insurance company. And, you starting to see those patterns especially with things like, now we're talking about metered insurance for auto, right? So basically, pay by the mile insurance, versus paying the same rate for six months. With the data we're getting out of vehicles today we can adjust your rates on the fly as you drive. Why should you pay the same rate if your car sits in the garage all weekend, versus you take it out and drive it 200 miles, right? So with the kind of data, big data and analytics that are coming from the vehicles we can do that now. >> So how is that conversation taking place? Is it being initiated by somebody in the IT staff that says hey, did you know that we have this data and we can do this? Let's take it to the business unit. Or does the business unit saying, I just saw Flo, the competitor, sticking the little thing in the dashboard? (Michael chuckling) Can we do that too? You know, there's a lot of talk about IT taking a seat at the business table >> Right. >> But how have you seen it actually been executed inside of Nationwide? >> Actually what we're seeing is, the lines are very blurry now between IT and the business. Almost to where, we're just a team working together versus the silos you used to have, and throwing the ideas over the fence. So we actually have a team that their goal is strategy and innovation. They report up through our CIO, and then business line teams have similar organizations, and they all work in a matrix fashion together. So anybody can bring any type of idea to the table, regardless of who you report up through. And we take those into consideration and we look for partners, we've got partners coming to us all the time that want to join us in innovation. And so it doesn't have to be our own solution. It could just be us on the back end of somebody else's front end, right? So, there's a lot of interesting ideas coming at us. >> What's happening in the business Mike? I mean you've got, obviously you're supporting the big systems or claims, you've got your agents systems, but mobile has exploded onto the scene. >> Yes. >> How has that affected you? What are some of the drivers in the insurance business these days? >> Well, definitely we're in this digital world now so, mobile first is critical. Everything has to be mobile enabled. We have to think of our strategy in a digital way constantly so we have a whole digital strategy that we work on. The traditional models of agency sold insurance won't ever really go away, per se, but they are shrinking. You see the demands and needs of the millennials coming up, very differently and changing. You have to compete on price to get in the door. That's important, so again we're trying to find all those interaction or intercept points with our customers as they need us. People don't really like to think of insurance, it's not on top of mind in their day to day life. But, when certain events happen like oh, I'm going to get married, or I'm going to take a trip, or you know, those kinds of things. >> Jeff: Right, kid turns sixteen. >> Yeah, we have different ways to interact with our customers, and offer some solutions that meet their need at the time. >> Well it seems like you're right, to be competitive, you've got to have the right price for those that say okay, I've got to get insurance, I need to start somewhere, great, but are you able to, as an industry, sell value? I mean, increasingly you're seeing some companies I would say Nationwide is one, where you're selling value. >> Yeah. >> Is that a trend in the business? >> Absolutely, I'll give you an example. One of the things that, normally the insurance model used to be I buy insurance and I'm protected when something bad happens. then when something bad happens, you compensate me. You pay my claim. But what about, if we can help you prevent the bad thing from even happening? So with products like our Smart Home package that you can buy now with internet of things, we can put sensors on those hot water tanks or on those pipes, or connected to your alarm system so that maybe we could alert you when we see your pipe is about to break. >> Right so, we cover, as you know our audience, we cover big data a lot. And the data business, and the insurance business have come mashing together, right? You had mentioned before, Mike, in many regards you're becoming an IT company and digitization is all about data. And the data allows you guys to build new products, to offer new services, to be more competitive and at the end of the day it's all about speed. >> Correct, speed and then that helps drive that value equation, right? So it's not so much being the lowest price, although you have to have a good price to be in the game, but then after that how can you provide that value? >> I'm curious Mike, from an insurance point of view, where before the business was based on, you know you didn't have so much data, right? So you had some big swaths, Age, sex, smoker, not smoker, but now as you're able to get data to the individual level, how that changes the way you look at it? Because it's very different than just kind of aggregating to the bulk, and then the poor unfortunate soul who has a car wreck, you pay the claim. But now, like you said, you know if I'm driving on the weekends, or if I'm parking my car. How is that really shaping the way that you guys look at the marketplace and the opportunities? >> Well you know, in the old days, you used to be able to take basically a subset of data from the past, and make your decisions based on that. >> A subset of data from the past, I love that. >> Now we're taking all the data in real time. >> In real time. >> So that puts more demands on the need for the technologies to provide that. It's critical, like especially if we're going to change your rates daily on how we insure your car, we have to have all the data, all the time. >> I remember Abhi Mehta, one of our early big data CUBE interviews, he made the statement in 2010 he said, "Sampling is dead." And, now, some people will debate that but the point he was making is just the same one you just made Michael is that you've got that data coming in, streaming it in real time. Some consumers, you know, have an issue with sticking that little meter in their car, but ultimately, that's the trend. It's going to happen. >> And you know we're seeing, and you're probably seeing it in other businesses as well, if you can provide that value, customers will give you the access and the data, because they see a value in return. So, it's that value equation. If it's good enough, they'll give you the value, and they'll give you the data. >> Dave: Yeah, you see it every day in mobile apps, right? >> Correct. >> You know, you're in New York City trying to get somewhere and it's like, turn on location services and I can help you. >> When you download any app, there's a big screen that comes up and you say I accept at the bottom, and then it has access to your pictures, access to your location and you're free to hit that accept because you see the value in that application. >> It's a quid pro quo, you know it's interesting we had the author on yesterday, Pink, Daniel Pink? >> Jeff: Pink, Mr. Pink, yes. >> And he was pointing out, he said look there used to be that the brand used to have all the information, and now there's parody in information, but in many regards, this whole digitization is an attempt by the brand to provide, to use more data and to give the consumers more value, and to create differentiation in the marketplace, and that's kind of what you're describing in your business. Last question, what's on ServiceNow's to-do list? What do you want to see a year, year and a half in? >> Well, after we implemented, we partnered with ServiceNow in a project they call Inspire, and basically it's to, what are we going to do next? You know, that very question, how do we leverage now what we've implemented, and take advantage of what the platform has to offer? We see lots of opportunities, as a matter of fact our list is so long we just don't have the bandwidth to do it all (Jeff chuckling) and we have to prioritize, but we see a lot of integration points, we see a lot of APIs coming in, we are in a kind of a really big phase in automation right now, we're trying to automate as much as possible, so for our on prem technology, we really want to go into automated provisioning of our assets, which means being able to connect those into the CMDB as they're provisioned, all automatically, and we want to really shorten those cycle times for when we have to provision infrastructure and support our applications. So ServiceNow is setting us up to do just that. >> Inspire is a great program, it's one of the best freebies in the business, and it leads, it's a win win. The customer gets the best experts, they come in and obviously, the hope is they're going to buy more stuff from ServiceNow, and if the value's there you will. Why not? It's going to drive to the bottom line. >> Using cloud to provision on prem resources, I like that. (all laughing) >> Mike thanks very much for coming to theCUBE, it was really a pleasure having you. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> Jeff: Thanks for sharing the insight. >> Alright keep it right there buddy we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break, there's a CUBEr live from Knowledge, be right back. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's the Cube. Covering ServiceNow, Knowledge17, brought to you by ServiceNow. >> We're back. Hi, everybody, I'm Dave Vallente with Jeff Frick, and we're here live at Knowledge17. This is our fifth year. Ian Proctor is here. He is the Director of Consulting at Deloitte. Ian, great to see you. >> Great to see you guys too. >> So we were talking off-camera and Jeff and I, we did our first knowledge. We basically said, look, for this to really explode you need the big consultancies to support this. They're the ones who have the relationship, the deep domain knowledge, the industry expertise. Ian, you've been at this for longer than most. Certainly longer than most that's in new senior management. So tell us a little bit about your background, a little bit on Deloitte, of course, well-known firm, but specifically your ServiceNow practice. >> Yeah, absolutely. So I have a bit of a unique trajectory in terms of working with ServiceNow. Now, I started off as a customer. I was working at an airline in Canada by the name of West Jet Airlines. It's Canada's second largest airline. And we were growing very quickly, and we had internal challenges with legacy platforms. And I was actually speaking at a conference, and somebody approached me about a new platform that maybe could really help. And, so over the course of about 10 months, I grew to understand ServiceNow as a technology. Had the chance to meet Fred Luddy, and really get an appreciation for the underlining platform. >> Jeff: What year was that? >> That was 2011, I'd say. >> Okay. >> And so that was a big move back then, and when I took the ServiceNow opportunity to my executive at that time, no one had ever heard of it. And you know, moving outside of your own data center was a bit scary back then. And we did a very successful transition in the early stages. So, ServiceNow deployed in a major airline in Canada in that time frame was kind of a unique story. And I became a reference client, and I had a background in consulting. I'd been at Delolitte previously, and I saw the opportunity to take the technology platform of ServiceNow and go back to my consulting roots, and the uniqueness of our deep relationships, of our focus on business transformation, and bring those two together. And so myself and one other key leader in Deloitte, by the name of Dan Slowkar, him and I essentially began building that practice in 2012. And here we are today, 2017, and it's been a fantastic journey. As a globally networked firm, we get to interface with a lot of C-level executives of major corporations across the globe. And they have a unique set of needs. Their global operating models need to be integrated, and so ServiceNow is a platform, looking at that as a realization of integration. And so when you look at like the Deloitte expertise in operating models and in really driving true business transformation to generate business value, that's where this synergy has become so strong. And we see a lot more opportunity, as does ServiceNow, to move into what might be, not classically viewed as IT areas, and getting into industry vertical specific solutions where Deloitte has a very deep and rich background in understanding what it takes to make that business work. >> So one of the unique advantages that Deloitte has, obviously, as you pointed out, Ian, is their relationships. You can count on one hand the number of companies who have that type of presence in the board room, at the C Suite. So my question is, what are you hearing from those customers? I know you're in a lot of different industries, but broadly, everybody talks about digital transformation, but what are some of the big themes that they're asking you for help with these days? >> Yeah, that's a great question, because today's challenges are a lot different than yesterday's challenges. But where Deloitte is uniquely positioned is that we've been on a journey with a lot of these clients for a long time. And they expect us to bring them the best across all many number of domains. While I focus on technology transformation to drive business value, we have a risk practice, we have a financial advisory practice, and so getting tighter integration inside these global organizations to drive out some of that transformative change, like you mentioned it, about the digital transformations. Our view is around re-imagining the digital experience, and how that extends into multiple different business units and how, very similar to the messaging that we were seeing over the last couple of days from John and the executive was these organizations can't be viewed as a whole bunch of separate organizations. And this kind of business transformation is something Deloitte has been helping clients with for a number of years. To drive out process sufficiencies, to drive out different ways of delivering, and I think now that we've got the technology platform that enables that, the opportunity to take what we've experienced over the the last couple of years, and apply it in industries you may not think of, like oil and gas, or in the financial services industry, they're desperate for innovation, but they also exist within regulatory frameworks that necessitate a lot of visibility, transparency, audit ability, and when you take that knowledge of like the financial service sector, and you pair that with what you can do with ServiceNow, that's what our clients are expecting from us. >> I'm curious, everyone knows, right, financial services is usually on kind of cutting edge of new technology, right? That's their business, they have to stay fast and furious and out on the edge, but are there some industries that people probably don't think of that you've seen as aggressive adopters with huge ROI in this type of technology? >> Absolutely. I mean, I'm based in Western Canada, and so there's a large oil and gas footprint in Western Canada. Some of the largest martin nationals are head-quartered there. So in the oil and gas segment, there are unique challenges with operating the remote areas. And so having to always rely on the classic technologies which bound you to your desk just don't work. When you're in a remote operating site, working on an oil well, for example, and you need to notify somebody that the well head has a crack in it, well, how are you going to do that, right? Are you going to call somebody? Well, you may not have SAT reception. Or if the guy is miles away, so when you think about the unique business challenges in there, an interesting story about that is, we were helping a client in that regard, as an IT advisor. So, we had ServiceNow on an iPad, and we were sitting there using it, and the rig manager looked over and said, Ian, what's that? And I was, "Oh, this is ServiceNow. "We use this to kind of route work to each other, and get work done, and there's some reporting," "and here's some dashboards," and he said, "Can I have that?" And I said, "Well, absolutely, absolutely." And so, this is one example where these business use cases show up naturally, and then since we've been at this at this a while, like you mentioned I've been doing this since 2012, we see these trends, and so we can take innovations from one segment, re-imagine them, and then apply them to a different segment. >> Alright, we got to go, so I'll give you the last word. Sort of fast-forward to Knowledge17 here, using your experience, what do you see as the big opportunities for you guys going forward? You mentioned going beyond IT. Maybe you can sort of summarize where you see you want to take your clients. >> You know two key messages that I'll close on. It's really re-imagining the digital experience, and that means different things to different people. It's an important conversation to be had, to say, What are you trying to drive from a business-value standpoint? And then secondly, looking at segments that can benefit from all the lessons learned that we've had delivering technology, and a big one there is in the financial services industry, in the core business. So those two areas are really going to be a game-changer for all of us. >> Dave: Ian, great stuff from somebody who really knows this community. Thanks for coming on the Cube. >> Thanks guys, good seeing you. >> Appreciate it. >> Take care. Have a good rest of the show. >> All right, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is the Cube, we're live, from Knowledge17. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Orlando, Florida. It's The Cube. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. (upbeat techno music) >> Welcome back to Orlando, everybody. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage, and we're here in Orlando at the Knowledge conference. Knowledge 17, ServiceNow's big customer show, and that's one of the things Jeff and I, Jeff Frick my co-host and I'm Dave Vellante like about Knowledge is we get to talk to the practitioners, the customers, the doers Naresh Samlal is here, he's the director of mobility and process automation at VITAS Healthcare. Thanks for coming on The Cube. >> Ah, I am glad to be here thank you for having me. >> You're welcome. Tell us about VITAS. What's the organization about >> So VITAS is the largest hospice and palliative care provider in the country. What's unique about our business is that our patient care staff is really in the field. They're not bounded by four walls as compared to a typical healthcare provider. So our nurses, our chaplains, physicians and so forth go to the homes of our patients and being in hospice that, you know, our... We truly believe that Your best care is delivered in your own home, and so that's VITAS's directive is to really deliver that care in their home. Which really creates for a unique setting in managing you know, logistics and the staffing around that whole solution. But we've done it really well for 30 years and, you know we're looking forward to a great future with that. >> Well it's a really important service. Obviously, you know, families and loved ones can be together, and gather in very difficult times. Now in the past 30 years technology has changed quite a bit. How has that affected your business? >> Yes, that's a great question. In many ways, technology at VITAS has not changed. And so a lot of things that we have done historically have been... And still today there's many things that are still the same because that's what works and at the end of the day this fight, leveraging technology, the sensitive time in someone's life really needs that personal interaction and technology can't substitute that. However, we always are challenging ourselves to make that interaction more efficient with technology. So most recently, actually last year, we completed a deployment of 8,000 mobile devices to our patient care staff. So our nurses prior to this rollout walked around with 25 pounds of paper. They were traveling from their homes to our patients' homes, to our offices back and forth with paper, they didn't have access, real time access, to patient records like they do today. We replaced an entire binder with a mobile device. >> Dave: I was going to say these things change the world right? >> With an iPhone. Absolutely. >> So how many how many stops did it, you know, just a little bit of that kind of, their workflow how many stops a day do they make, kind of, what's kind of the scope of that? >> So that's a great question Um, they may, they'll have a starting point in a day, they know where their first patient they don't know where their last patient or how many they're going to see that day. So it could vary. It could be, you know five, it could be up to ten. And it varies based on the need, based on what that visit calls for. So it really varies and being able to have realtime information now and be more flexible and more efficient with these devices we're really able to allow them to give better care and more care quite frankly. >> Jeff: Right. >> So take us through the sort of case example of how you brought in ServiceNow Where's the driver and how did it change your organization. >> So there's quite a bit of efficiency and I talked about how the business has not changed very much over the course of time. But mobile devices as it relates to mobility and VITAS we really saw an opportunity to leverage the staff that we have to do more with them and give them the ability to give better care and not have to worry about the administrative aspects that come with that. For example, today they're able to access our EMR so they patient data right on their mobile device they can order drugs for our patients right on their mobile device. They can enter their time, their traveling, all these logistics that they weren't able to do they had to literally leave their home, go to a patient, go back to our main office or program office in that location, scan any documents they need to scan, enter any time, do some administrative stuff, go back out, that's kind of what the day looked like and so now with these devices we're able to free them up from having that extra travel. There's obviously a lot of cost saving opportunities around that, but it really allowed for, it allows for a nurse and a patient caregiver to maybe be able to see a patient, one patient more, two patients more in a day so that really transforms our business and really at the end of the day it's really going to allow VITAS to provide care because we believe we provide the best care in hospice and palliative care. You know, we feel that if you're not with VITAS you're not getting the best care and this really allows us to really see that through and position ourselves to deliver more. >> So where did you start with ServiceNow? >> So ServiceNow was actually introduced on the ITSM side so we brought it in to really fix our ticketing system get it up to, you know where it needed to be at the very least and out of that there was a parallel opportunity for us at management. So mobility was in its very infancy at the time. We knew we wanted to do it, we knew it could happen, we knew the benefits of it, but the reality of it was a little bit farfetched. Right? And so ServiceNow combined with a few other partners that we work with, really bringing that together and finding that secret sauce, and finding the right recipe for making that work allowed us to do this. One of the biggest things with managing so many devices and them being mobile, you know, physically off our premises is not knowing where they are, right? You know they don't actually hold patient data but there's some risk around security and exposing that so losing these devices, them getting in the wrong hands, was really important for us. So we really needed to first and foremost know where all our devices are at any given moment. Coupled with a few other pieces that work well with ServiceNow we now have that single pane of glass that we can really know exactly where the devices are, manage them in real time, we are able to tie our financial data right back to them so we're able to really get the full visibility of what mobility looks like and ServiceNow is at the core of that. They're at the center, we bring everything back into ServiceNow so we have one place to go manage our data, share and really, you know, be effective with it. >> So the data, the patient data, lives in the cloud? Is that right? >> So, essentially yes. So no data actually lives on the device, it's all a matter of the device being able to access the cloud. So through wifi, if they're at a hospital or if they're at a patient's home, or LTE coverage. >> And it used to live in paper that somehow got scanned, right? Which... >> I can't imagine, 'cause they don't know what the route is so now I assume they go to their first stop, it's got all that patient ABC, they finish, check in, I'm done, and then, where am I going next, get the data. >> I'm glad you brought that up, and so today they're able to access that information and I think part of the next step as to where VITAS is going is to really systematically tell them okay this is probably your next stop and not with a phone call to find out if they're available to do that but systematically know that they're available, when they're going to be available, and set them up with that information. And so that's really where we're looking to next. For mobility and technology at VITAS. >> What about all the, the compliance, the Affordable Care Act, EM, you had mentioned EMR, meaningful use, I mean all these things that you have to worry, HIPAA, maybe the potential unwinding of the Affordable Care Act, or maybe the evolution of it, I mean all these things you got to keep track of, where does that fit? >> So another great point, you know, one of the things, one of the things is, hospice is or end of life care really consumes about 30% of one's cost throughout their life. Most people don't realize that. That's your most expensive time in your life, in your cycle, that's going to go to what's healthcare. And that's where VITAS is very sensitive. And the other thing to note is that the average patient with VITAS is with us for two weeks. So timing is everything. >> Jeff: Two weeks. >> Yes. >> Dave: Yeah, short time. >> Right, so it gives... >> Jeff: And how many visits? What's the average number of visits in that two weeks? >> So we have 16,000 patients on our uh... >> No I mean for that particular, I mean what's kind of your average visits per patient over that two weeks? >> That may vary, depends on the patient, and this is average, right? So that may vary, sometimes it's 24/7 care other times it may be a couple times a day other times maybe once a day. And it really depends >> Dave: Okay, and so it's typically at least once a day, right? >> At least once a day, right. So that's not uncommon. So going back to your question, these things all come into play where as an organization, we feel the effects of regulation changes, right and that impacts our financials as well, so mobility, bringing mobility to the table with the help of ServiceNow and these other players that we make this work really helps us realize these efficiencies. Which at the end of the day, this is how we're able to really stay afloat in those areas and really not feel the impacts quite frankly. And if you look at our last quarter, we thrive. >> Yeah I mean and get paid on time, and not have to go back and forth, back and forth >> Well even like audit I would imagine I mean does the GPS data that demonstrates that your people were there, you know figure back into audits and all kinds of stuff I would imagine >> Right, and we are heavily audited with our devices as well. I mean they're very sensitive You got to think about it too, mobility and such a paradigm shift for a company like VITAS was and is very scrutinized, right? We spend a considerable amount of money in this program. We also see a lot of returns on it. But, it's a very different approach for folks that have done things a certain way for a really long time, right, so you talk about audits, going back to financials ServiceNow really allows us to stay really close to that. Be really tight, and speak with confidence when we provide our data, right, so our CFO is very sensitive to that and in a moment's notice we are able to respond to his request for last week's financials, last month's, what is our loss rate? You know, things like that just wasn't, we didn't have access to that type of date before. And quite frankly it's not something that's very common So most organizations see mobility I would have to say more as a luxury compared to how VITAS uses it today Today, this device is the clinical workstation at VITAS This is how our patient care staff works. This allows them to be productive. It's not a luxury. >> And how often do they come back to the barn, just to come back to the barn so they can get, they're you know, in the field most of the time actually working. >> So at the very least they may come back, they'll come back once a week now for a team meeting versus much more frequent for administrative work. Right? So that's had a tremendous impact on them. >> And how long ago again did you kind of roll out the solution? >> So we completed the rollout to the full audience at the end of last year so Q4 of last year so we've been at full feet for two quarters now and we're, and that really was setting the stage for what's to come next, right, so we're in the middle of rolling out an application right now which is going to allow our patient care staff to order drugs so our physicians and nurses can submit the request for drugs, and like items to treat our patients where as before, what that looked like was them having to leave the patient's house, run to the store, come back, or do a mail order request for drugs. So today... >> And will that be in the ServiceNow app or are you using ServiceNow to kind of manage everything and that's a separate kind of an app? >> Did you guys develop that app on top of ServiceNow or... >> We, so that is isolated from ServiceNow today, but we're standing it up as is, however that's something that we're actually considering looking at ServiceNow to see how we can play in that space as well because ServiceNow has done a lot for us, right we know it's a fantastic tool. We've used it in ways that are unconventional and we continue to do that. So part of, a lot of why we're here this week is to really capitalize on how they help us too. And so we're embarking on the journey program with ServiceNow to really look at how we can transform our business even further and opportunities like this really play a role into that. >> And so are you developing apps on ServiceNow or >> So we do have custom apps on ServiceNow, today they're very, you know, they're quick wins internally they really don't extend towards business they're more internal to IT, but that's really what the next phase of what we're looking at is how does ServiceNow really impact our business and our business processes, right, that's really our next step. >> And we can, can we differentiate just for my own edification, custom apps versus custom modifications, right? Those are two different things right? >> Configurations, right? >> Custom apps, you're building an app on top of the platform, what about custom mods, are you avoiding those at all costs? >> So, I can't say we're avoiding them at all costs and you really can't. You have to have some customization. We try to limit those so we can take on upgrades and take on, and be swift with all the new features that they bring on. So we're one version behind by, you know by design, and so, we're able to consume that as fast as they are able to release it because of our light customization. We try to stay out of the box. >> When you upgrade, do you test... So you're what in -1? >> Right. >> Okay, do you always upgrade to the next version, do you sometimes leapfrog? >> I have not had to leapfrog yet, so we've been pretty good about that and I plan to stick hard into that. >> So help us understand some maybe advice for other customers is you don't really want to leapfrog if you don't have to but sometimes you have to because you're too late in the upgrade cycle, is that right? >> Yeah. >> Okay, so. >> I mean, it's not ideal because you introduce a lot of unknowns if you have to leapfrog, right and ServiceNow, let me say this to your service, the upgrade process with ServiceNow has been unlike anything, any other upgrade process I've been through of any software. >> Dave: In what sense? >> It's been smooth, we've had very little issues coming out of it, we do full regression testing, but our findings are always very minimal, but the actual upgrade process is short, it's effective, it works, it's very informative, and they're getting even better at that, so for, you know that gives us a lot of peace of mind that we have a stable platform that we can really build and thrive on. >> How many upgrades have you gone through? >> We've done three so far? >> Okay >> What is short, Naresh with how long... >> I'm, you know I've done, I've seen inside of an hour at times, so our instance, we're two years into ServiceNow so we don't have you know, massive amount of data like maybe other companies do. We have substantial data there, but they're pretty quick I've seen an hour to do an upgrade. >> And how disruptive is an upgrade? >> Not at all. Here's one of my favorite parts about the upgrade is I don't have to announce that we're doing an upgrade to the general population. >> (laughs) >> Okay, they don't even know. >> That's a good indicator. >> They don't know. They're actually working in it while it's being upgraded. They log off, log back on, new version. Right? So I've been able to consume these upgrades as fast and as easily as I'm talking about. So I did one thing that was probably different than most people are doing. I'm suppressing the UI upgrade, and taking the platform upgrade, so the look and feel stays the same, and so we're in the middle of a program right now to relaunch ServiceNow with a new look and feel, new branding, just give it a whole new facelift, that's when I'm going to release the new UI. That's when we're going to give it... >> Jeff: But you really separate the skinning and the UI from the underlying platform. >> Yeah and you're allowed to do that, right? That's one of the points about it. >> And the UI changes, not on every cycle, is that correct? I mean it just changes periodically right? >> It's periodically. There's been subtle changes, and then there's been you know, full revamp for the better, but for the most part we're able to consume it and stay current with it because, you know, we can contain it that much. >> Yeah but it's different and then the user says oh, you know even like you know, crappy Gmail when they changed the, like oh it's new. >> You got to learn it all over again, you don't like it, it grows on you, well, you know we can control that now. We don't have to like, react to it every time. >> And the strategy to be in -1 is, can you explain that? What's the logic behind that? >> Yeah absolutely, so there's constantly a ton of new features. ServiceNow is learning from us and from many customers and really being reactive to that. And so I want that whatever we have and we're trying to do we're getting, we have access to the latest and greatest, and we don't have to go build something if I know it's there It also helps us identify and plug gaps in our system, so, in our processes. So, for example, we may know we have a host of different things that we need to regularly work on. Consuming an upgrade and it being so simple as just turning something on or just start using it means I can get to be more efficient quicker rather than having to put that on a priority list and get focused, and get a project going, and get a team behind it, it's just more consumable that way and we're able to be more agile, and improve quicker as well. So that's one of the reasons I like doing upgrades and staying current with it. >> Alright Naresh, thanks very much for coming onto The Cube, I appreciate you sharing >> I appreciate it, thank you so much for having me. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Alright keep it right there buddy, we'll be back with our next guest... (applause) Thank you! Right after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge17, brought to you by ServiceNow. >> And we're back in Orlando, everybody, this is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick, CJ Desai is here, he's the Chief Product Officer of ServiceNow, the newly-minted, 150 days in, CJ, great to see you off the keynote, fantastic job. >> Thank you, thank you, thank you. >> Very crisp, I was struck by your story about last October, when you were contacted by ServiceNow, you fired up the platform and started playing around and built an app. >> Yeah! (chuckling) >> And you found it was a good experience. >> It was a great experience, I'll tell you, Dave, from my standpoint, when you join a company that is built on a platform like ServiceNow, you want to make sure that you feel great about the foundational elements, because as always, you can build floors on top of a foundation, only when the foundation is strong. So ServiceNow always, I don't know if you know, but it started out as a platform company, and then they used the service management use case, and went deep in that use case, and then went to Operations Management and other products, as you know, and I just wanted to make sure that, hey, how easy it is, if I'm a customer, or if I'm in the product development organization, to create an app, and having that strong foundational layer, even simple things like, it's the cloud offering, first of all, you have a integrated development environment, you can start creating workflows, UI, all of that is so easy, and there's no headache of figuring out how to deploy the app, because it's right there, so you just publish it and you're done. >> Yeah, it's interesting, one of the first CUBE interviews we did at Knowledge was with Doug Leone, the famous VC, and he told the story of, he saw this, "What am I going to do with this?" And sent Fred away and said, "Build something on top of it," and that's what happened, but. But help our audience understand, CJ, because you talked about Jakarta today. >> Yeah. >> Now, Jakarta is a platform capability, and if we understand it correctly, we were talking about it earlier, the business units have to figure out, "Okay, how do we apply that capability "to our particular needs, and our customer needs," so explain that. >> Yeah, so ultimately, there are two things that happens in the products organization, right? First is, we do release this every six months, twice a year, so every six months, twice a year, and we go by alphabets, and we pick cities, just a fun factoid, we pick cities that go from North America or South America, to Europe, to Asia. So, H released last year, around this time, was Helsinki, after Helsinki was Istanbul, and then we have Jakarta, so are now in Asia, and then next will be Kingston, and the one after that is London, so you go alphabetically, and the reason we pick this city names in alphabets, we support our customers, because it's a multi-instance paradigm, n minus one and n minus two releases, so when you make, name of the cities, customers will have a conversation with me and say, "CJ, we went on Helsinki, we're upgrading to Istanbul, "or we're going to skip Istanbul, "and go straight to Jakarta," for example, so, first of all, that's our naming system that we use, every six months, you will see us talk about a specific release, and you heard from John yesterday, he was very clear in saying, "Listen, "our customers want to hear our roadmap, "they want to know what we are up to," and so we took that customer feedback to heart, and decided, why don't we just tell them what's coming in Jakarta? So Jakarta will be released this summer, and from a planning standpoint, Dave, to answer your question, we figure out first, what do our customers want, and is it in the applications that we talked about, like ITSM or CSM or security or HR, and for those applications to deliver the functionality, what do we need to do in the platform so that the functionality can be delivered? So the requirement process is a complex requirement process, the applications team will give requirements to the platform, customers also sometimes have requirements for the platform on scale, platform will build a functionality, applications team will build the features on top of it, so in Jakarta, which is coming out this summer, we have six new products, you saw some of them, software asset management and others, 30 major features, and that's close, so after Jakarta, we're already in planning for Kingston. After Kingston, I think I'm going to announce it for the first time, will be London, so it's Jakarta, Kingston, London, are the three-- >> Yeah, so when we go to these events, a lot of times, at the keynotes, somebody will make a product announcement and you get a little golf clap, it always happens at ServiceNow Knowledge that you get somebody hooting in the audience, today, the hoot came for software asset management, they were the three high level things you talked about today, performance with UX, and performance, and then the vendor risk management, which is very interesting, we'll talk about that a little bit, and then the software asset management, the guy must've been an Oracle customer hooting and hollering. But so, give us the high level overview. >> Alright, so, here is the thing, right? Our buyer is IT organization, we started with IT. We love our buyer, and CIO, to all the organizations that support CIO, head of infrastructure, the portfolio management team, the business management within IT. And one of the things that we saw, and this is the requirement that we got is, when we talk to CIOs about how to make the IT organization productive, because IT, it's a tough job, man, it's a tough job, things go down, you're like, "Okay, of course, IT," and technology's such an integral part of our life that people are always looking at IT to make sure they deliver great technologies. So, IT budget, and every, debated this all the time, everybody talks about IT budgets, what's happening to IT budgets, how the IT budget is going up or down, are you asked to do more with less, there are so many examples I can use, but as per Gartner, 25% of the IT budget is on software licensing. Then there is hardware and all the other infrastructure and people-related cost. 25%, so if, and as you know, some of the vendors put you through a pretty complex audit process, so why can't we, our chief buyer is IT, why can't we give them a platform, or a product, that allows them to discover how many products you are using by vendor, Microsoft, Oracle, some of you examples you used, for desktop, it's Adobe and others, you use these products, are you really utilizing all the licenses you have, or are you potentially in overage so that you actually have a sense of where you stand with every vendor that you're using that makes up your 25% budget. We talk to financial customers, manufacturing industrial customers, these are billions of dollars of budget, 25% is still a big number, any improvement in that 25% could go a long way, and what CFOs do not like is when CIOs go and tell the CFO, "Hey, we didn't clear this audit, "or potentially these guys may sue us "for a contract violation," so we decided we are going to create a product that helps you get a good posture on what your licensing is, does that make sense? And that's why, you know, I also saw on Twitter, a lot of people love this idea that, hey, can we automate this software as a management process, discover what's being deployed, allow you to reclaim, and at the end, help you save the cost. >> And the other one was the cloud management platform, which again, similar type of situation, especially with all the freemium services, and test dev, and card swiping, that they can get unruly pretty quickly. >> In my last job, as you are aware, I was in infrastructure space, and one of the things in speaking to customers, always realized that hey, IT was not agile enough, we decided, for some customers, we decided to go and use some of the public cloud services, re-enter infrastructure, because IT could not keep up with our demands, and you go and speak to IT, they say there is so much going on that sometimes it's not easy for devops communities, in particular, that you pointed out, so much going on. So, IT felt like they were losing control, developers, whether they're application developers in IT organization or in business units, just wanted agility, and IT felt like if they cannot deliver that level of service, you had the share-to-IT functions going on in the departments, and with cloud, we acquired a company called iTapp about a year ago in April. The first year was all focused on re-platforming, like I said today, I think many times, I'm sure people got sick of listening to me, is, we are going to re-platform every acquisition that we make, and we usually buy technologies in our business so far. And we re-platform it, and now, IT gets the control back, once for, you know, you help the developers, devops people, sure, go and use public cloud, but IT will still have a single pane of glass that allows you to look at your resource mapping, utilization, understanding the cost and the usage, whether you are on public cloud service, or in private cloud service. >> Well, it's huge, because it's very unpredictable, and people often complain, "Oh, I get the cloud bill at the end of the month," but a lot of times, there's not just one cloud bill, it's many, many cloud bills, and what happens, you know, you remember this, in the downturn, a lot of CFOs said, "Go to the public cloud, "eliminate Capax" and then, when we came out of the downturn, lines of business said, "I got to move fast, "and this cloud thing seems to be working for me." IT seems to have really, you know, in previous big picture trends like this, mega trends, IT oftentimes has been sort of pushing back, you saw that with client server. >> Yeah, their security concerns, compliances-- >> And today, they're announcing, okay, we have to embrace cloud, or we're toast. >> And Dave, I'll tell you, there are customers, I mean, some very large customers in regulated industries who tell me that, "CJ, we are now cloud first, "before we decide to do something," I mean, that's a pretty big statement, cloud first, I mean, if you remember 2008, '09, '10, '11, '12, '13, that journey, and how customers were reluctant, and they're like, "I don't know, my data losing from here," and this and that-- >> Well, I got to bring this up, so, I was reading an article on SiliconANGLE, EMC World is going on, Dell EMC World this week, and Michael Dell basically made this statement in his keynote, "If you're a cloud first, "you could be in trouble because of the expanse," and so forth. I don't buy it. I think the other, I love you, Michael, but the value that customers are getting out of going cloud-first, maybe, yeah, maybe the bill at the end of the month is high, but the other residual effects on your business, the speed, the agility, the processes, you're seeing it, aren't you? >> I mean, I'll tell you straight up, there are customers that are asking us, because, you know, again, IT's our key buyer, and key customer, and we appeal to the IT department, and the CIOs, even at the CIO dinner the night before, people are embracing cloud. Now, they are on a journey, some of them have maybe mode few percent of their workload, some of them may have mode a little higher, but they're on some journey, and they're trying to balance when the cost pros out with the cons, or the cons out with the pros, but, can you give us some kind of control plane to manage our cloud resources, understand the usage, understand the billing, which we do for financial management, and tie-in with IT processes, because that resource life cycle, that VMU provision, right, that VMU provision in the cloud, what happens to the life cycle of VM, can you create an incident, can you close it out, that's equally important besides just saying, "Yeah, I'm going to move this particular workload to cloud." So I feel that customers are on this journey of some kind of combination of public and private cloud, and it doesn't have to be zero-sum game, infrastructure continues to grow, I don't feel like, okay, if you do this, that means you do not do private, or if you do private, that doesn't mean-- >> Certainly both, and containers are going to just exacerbate the problem. >> Right, and the demand for compute, store, and networking is not going down any time soon. >> I'll tell you, my role environment, so my team lends cloud infrastructure, so our platforms runs on cloud infrastructure, and you saw some of the elevated numbers, I mean, our growth, we are trying to invest in compute network storage ahead of our growth, so it's not, and we are a cloud service, so I always look at it as, this doesn't have to be zero-sum game, customers are expanding, they want the agility, like you said, the agility, the business is asking, "Can you develop this app faster, "can you give me what I need," is what's driving-- >> It's a topline game for businesses, Jeff, I just want to inject some of those numbers on your cloud, 50,000 instances, 150 million active users, and 10 billion transactions per month. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, but I want to get, it's funny you're talking about Jakarta and London, I remember when we were doing interviews around Dublin, which I guess was a while ago, but I'm curious, 'cause there's this other trade-off, and get your perspective, is in a devops world, in kind of a continuous integration and development world, people want to push code frequently. On the other hand, in an enterprise world, and we've talked to a couple of customers, they can only take it so much, and so you've kind of got this yin and yang, and you want to get stuff out, and there's patches, and this and that, and you're on a relatively aggressive for current enterprise release schedule, on the other hand, the trend is clearly, just keep pumping it out, pumping it out, pumping it out, how do you see that kind of sorting itself out over time with these big enterprise customers? >> I will tell you, from a technology standpoint, there is nothing that prevents us from doing more frequent releases, yes, we have to mature our product release processes, we have to mature our cloud operations and how fast we can churn the code. There is nothing that prevents us, technically, from instead of two releases a year, maybe do four releases, it doesn't! But our customers, and we talk about customers first, listening to customers, you saw John today, I mean, we want to listen to them, and they will tell us, that I was at a large financial institution in Boston two weeks ago, and, your hometown, and they told me that, "I cannot do every six months, "I cannot do every six months, CJ, "we usually skip a release," right? And so we are just listening for specific use cases around service management, the processes, customer-run, same thing with operations management, right now, six months about feels right, every six months, release, we do quarterly patches, where we do not release features in those quarterly patches, and for emerging products, like you saw customer service, they challenge security, the team did a great job, when I look at those releases, is it potentially can we push things fast? Maybe, but right now, I'm okay, based on customer feedback. If customers come and say, "I want every three months," I hope to see what does that mean-- >> Let me run something by you, I told Jeff I've been sharing cabs with practitioners all week, it's great to just have wonderful conversations, and one said to me, "I've asked ServiceNow "if they can give me more granularity in the releases," I said, that doesn't sound trivial, in other words, if I can selectively choose features, is that even technically feasible? >> I mean, this is the isolating the feature, micro-feature development, making sure your schema is abstracted enough, I mean, there are companies in consumer world who do that, and push code out really fast. I would say, right now, one of the requirements I do get is, we're on IT service management, we have been a customer of ServiceNow for a while, but on this other thing, say, customer service, or HR, I want to take the new features, so my IT service management is at, say, Helsinki, but I want to take the HR, like the onboarding you saw, the onboarding, which is in Jakarta. So does that mean I need to upgrade this thing to leverage the HR feature? The answer is yes, because it's all built on single platform. Now, I do not want to do where customers, we give them two instances, and then we do a back-end pipe integration, a connector, so you can be on Helsinki for ITSM, and Jakarta, that-- >> Architecturally-- >> That breaks our model, and I do not want to do that. There are companies who, say, reside in different tenant, and will give you one for, I do not want to do that. >> I wanted to ask you about this too, CJ, because, you have a dogma, you have your own cloud, you see a lot of SaaS companies now saying, okay, you see Workday, a little bit of Salesforce, certainly Infor, putting their applications on AWS, for example. You guys, very proud of your cloud, you have availability, and I think when you show availability numbers, you downplay it, actually, people don't understand this, you're talking about application availability, you're not talking about the server light-- >> No. >> Okay, so you're very dogmatic about your cloud, and this issue here, you won't do something that maybe is going to help one customer but is going to ruin the experience down the road for all, and that dogma, is that a valid, it's not a criticism, it's an observation, and is that a good thing? >> So I would say there are some design principles, or operational principles that we live with, and we are going to stick to them, like we talk about acquisitions and re-platforming, think about, Dave, you have somebody coming in, you acquire a machine learning company, really smart kids, really smart people, machine learning or data sciences, an art more than a science, and looking at prediction accuracies and things like that. Now you tell them, "Welcome to ServiceNow, "here's your badge, you just got onboarded, "it's great what you've built, "we are not going to sell that standalone, "you need to re-platform," which typically takes one year, "Before we can launch your product." That's a tough message. That's a tough message for an engineering team to hear, that now I have to figure out how does this platform work, I mean, if I had a magic bullet, I would tell you, if I can wave the magic wand, I'll say, acquire this technology in machine learning AI, combine that with our organic development, it's a re-platform and I have a toolkit that does this thing, and it is a re-platform, but that's not easy. So on these kind of principles, whether it's re-platforming, how we do the releases, how we look at the cloud, and I want to answer your public cloud question. Right now, as you know, we're active, active, I've seen your interviews in the past here, we're active, active, we have eight pair of data centers, 16 around the world, and we make sure with our multi-instance architecture, the availability of the uptimes are very high for our customers, and when they upgrade, we know, they can pull the upgrade, "I'm going, CJ, "from Helsinki to Istanbul, or Helsinki to Jakarta," and that's available, but, can we potentially look at moving our footprint, and renting infrastructure in a public cloud? I'll never say never, but right now, there is no need for it. >> No, you see it, and there are advantages to having your own cloud. I want to ask about your role as Chief Product Officer. Fred Luddy had that title, we were sort of joking earlier, Fred was a coder, the company brought Frank in for adult supervision, and so you're inheriting that title, but I sense that you're a different type of manager, what do you bring to ServiceNow? >> I'll tell you, first of all, Fred, Frank, and even Dan McGee, who had this role last year, he was here, I saw his interview, he's here today, phenomenal people, I mean, I have interacted with all three of them, Dan McGee helped me transition into my role, Frank hired me, and just great, great guy, and even with Fred, going through this user experience, how do I think about the user experience based on the persona, he's always there to provide input with lots and lots energy and feedback. So let me just tell you for, in less than 30 seconds, what my role is, right? My role is, I help platform team, and the cloud infrastructure team, that's lead by Pat Casey, who is doing CreativeCon tomorrow, I have individual application general managers that you saw some of them today, and I also have the customer support organization, and the user experience teams. So that's my overall responsibility, so it's the responsibility that Fred Luddy had til last October, and Dan McGee had til last December, combined into one. So, it's a big job, and it comes with a lot of responsibilities on behalf of our customers, you talk about high availability number, we help to make sure that we keep our cloud service up and running secure, but at the same time, bringing this innovation in platform and the applications is my job. So, I'd done, fortunately, when I started out of college, makes me sound old, I know, but when I came out of college, I worked for a company that was doing business applications for a long time, eight years there, and I worked in that applications technology team, I worked in the CRM applications, did things for financial applications, and I went on security software, understanding how you protect the applications you write, all the way from OS up to the application stack, and then I worked for a infrastructure company, as you know. So that gave me a really good feel on the entire stack, how do you scale that stack, and be maniacally focused on, what do customers want? I mean, I am very fortunate to have great customer relationships, many companies around the globe, I reach out to them, ask them, tell me what you think, tell me what we are doing well, so customer focus, having done product development for 20-plus years now, and understanding all the way from application stack to the underlying infrastructure, is where I can help-- >> Yeah, it's like a triple threat that you have, the product innovation, the enterprise class, security, and scaling, as you mentioned, very, very important. Alright, CJ, I love having you on theCUBE, you're a great guest, we could continue, but we got to leave it right there. Great to see you again-- >> Thank you, thank you so much, I really appreciate it. >> Alright, keep it right there, everybody, we'll be back with our next guest, this is theCUBE, we're live from Knowledge17, we'll be right back.

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

(electronic music) >> Narrator: 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. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Jeff Frick, Link Alander is here as the Chief Information Officer at Lone Star College. Cubealom, Link, great to see you again. >> Good seeing you again too. >> Another ServiceNOW Knowledge, although, not like the other ones, I mean, things changing, we're in a different venue, we got a new leader, new topics, is it old wine, same wine new bottle, or is it all sort of new stuff? What's going on in your world? >> Well you know, it's early on in the conference to see what the changes are, and it was kind of interesting as the change transformed, I didn't make his 100 day visits, 100 customers, he had an event in Houston, I was actually out of town at the time, so I was really looking forward to going to that event. But when you think about it, you know, Frank took it to a certain level, and now, we're looking at a total different change and transformation again, to where, what is next? And when you start talking about the A.I., the predictive analytics, proactive vs. reactive, and those types of shifts, that's really what we have to have. So, yeah, it is a change. It's a significant change, and you know I liked earlier in the segment, I was listening to him and talking about the fact that, you know, where are your trusted partners at, where do you invest and where will you align your strategy to, and that makes a big difference for us. >> So from a customer standpoint, it's sounds like you're embracing that change, I mean, you know, Wall Street's been a little reticent, I mean obviously they're happy with ServiceNOW and the stock's up, but I thought Jim Cramer was going to cry when Frank Slootman told him he was leaving. And some of the analysts yesterday said, "Oh, the stock will be at 102 if Frank were still here." and so, that's fine, you know, whatever. The stock market's going to do what it does. But from a customer perspective, you seem pretty comfortable with the changes. >> You know, it's really interesting, 'cause Frank and I had a relationship that went back to Data Domain. So I'd worked with Frank in different roles and different times, so when I first heard it, I was kind of like, what's going to happen? Immediately I started looking at what happened with Pat, and I talked to a bunch of my friends at ServiceNOW, and they're like, "Oh, no, "this was probably the smoothest transition ever." You know, it's like, "Yeah I'm leaving, "and guess what, here's my successor." So it was a different approach that you don't see often in technology companies. And you think about technology right now, how disruptive everything is. I mean, what do you take the split of HP, you take EMC and Dell, and all these other shifts that are happening in the technology, everything's shaking up. This is not really shaking up, this is just a new direction, and where ServiceNOW wants to head in the future. >> You know, that's interesting. You're right, I mean, transitions in big tech are not really ever this, apparently it was pretty smooth. I mean look at EMC, for example. I mean they couldn't find a successor. I mean it was, "Well, it's not Gelsinger, "well, it's not Gould, I don't really know." So Michael Dell had to come in, a pretty good successor, I guess. So that's maybe, I dunno, maybe a testament to Frank, maybe it's the culture of ServiceNOW, but from a customer standpoint again, you're seeing huge opportunities, you mentioned machine learning. What are you doing with those types of things, and how are you applying them? >> Well, we see these are the newer opportunities. So, from the IT service management and the enterprise service management has taken us to a new direction. And when you look at the customer service platform and what can we do differently and how can we help our customers out, and I have a 100,000 students out there that are expecting good support and need to navigate educational systems, which, it doesn't matter, we're just not easy to navigate. It's not like going out shopping. We have our own challenges that are out there. So, you know as we look at the next generation we're looking at how much more automation can I put into play so that the technicians and the practitioners can actually focus on the real challenges that are out there. Because a lot of times they are dealing with small issues that, they bog them down, and they don't get to focus on the bigger direction. So that's what we see on that side. You know, predictive analytics and A.I. in education have been a big item. We've been doing predictive analytics with students trying to figure out, you know, what's their likelihood of success, and how can we intervene to help a student out. And so when you look at things in that different direction, now all of a sudden you apply it in the IT space, which machine learning, it's a lot easier than understanding human behavior. >> So talk a little more about that. I mean, I remember when we were in college, you know, the professors that would look around and bunch of you aren't going to make it. >> Now we have a dashboard that shows that, by the way. (chuckles) >> Now you've got the data. >> Red. >> So, okay, so you've had years of data you've been collecting, what kind of things can you do proactively to help students? >> Well some of the interesting things for us, so you know, in our industry, from the community college perspective we're very dynamic. We can address change in the industry, needs of the community, so we're able to introduce programs and activities very quickly. Now when it comes down to students, you're sitting here looking at them going, okay, why are we losing these students? Why are students leaving us early? Why are they not completing? And, it was really interesting when we ran the data out, and we started seeing that it was our high achievers that were leaving us early. So actually our chancellor at the time really thought about this a lot, and looked at some different pieces of the data, and boosted our honors college, which then improved our retention of these 3.3, 3.4 GPA students. On the other spectrum we were all thinking, okay, well we need to focus on, where's that other student at, how do we save that student? And they've always had those interventions. So now they're enhanced. Now you have the opportunity for a dean or a chair to say, okay if I reach this one little group of students, maybe I can make a difference in their lives and their careers. So they're able to look at the data, look at the data sets, and then actually just reach out and touch 'em. And see what they can make a difference of. >> I wonder if we can talk a little bit about some of the practical things about ServiceNOW generally and IT service management, when we first, our first Knowledge was in 2013 and Jeff and I were talking in our open, when we talked to customers about, well, did you adopt a single CMDB? Have you adopted aggressively a service catalog? A lot of times the answer was, "Well, kind of." But it kind of gets political, we have our own little silo, but not across the organization. That seems to have changed. What was your experience in that regard, and how about, can you share with us what you're seeing with your peers with regard to those two items and then we can talk a little bit further. >> Okay, sure, you know, from the start we actually went all in. We're long term customer, late 2009, 2010, we adopted ServiceNOW, and we immediately looked at it as IT service management. How do we transform the way we do business and what do we do? So the service catalog was very basic at first, now our service catalog is pretty amazing. Our knowledge bases were primitive, now customer service, they can address their items. So that made a significant enhancement but really what it brought forward is our enterprise service management. So for example, while I was waiting here, I was actually approving a legal certification for a contract I have going across in ServiceNOW. So it's really handy, I'm sitting in a conference, and I have a legal matter to deal with, and a couple clicks and I'm taken care of. The same goes now for our HR side. So HR adopted in two years ago now, and you're seeing that workflow, all the power of the workflow coming in to help employees out. We've got a long way to go to get to that, whatever you want to consider utopia of service management is, but we're far along that journey. And we're just constantly looking for new ways to improve that. From the peers' perspective it's also very interesting, so I talk to, I deal with a lot of our peers, especially in the state of Texas, but then also nationally in different groups, and their movements are a little slower in the process because of that decentralization where from our perspective we're 100% centralized, so it's a lot easier to implement and not have those verticals to knock down. And they're knocking IT verticals down, they're not knocking other verticals down. So, it's a little more challenging, but I've seen some pretty impressive successes. Even in those areas where they have different verticals of IT across their organization, they've done a phenomenal job about bringing them into the fold and trying to consolidate those services and show those services better to the customer. The consumerization part is the harder part. It's trying to deliver services now like consumer IT but still maintaining that enterprise level. And that's probably the biggest challenges we're facing right now, is trying to create that consumer look and feel. >> Is that a UX challenge that ServiceNOW needs to address, or is that something that you guys have control over? >> Well, actually they've done a great job, as far as changing the dynamics of how things are working, so they've done a great job there, it's more on our perspective of using a customer-centric approach and looking at how does our customer view these services, what happens, how do they engage those services? It's very similar when we're dealing with students and we're trying to understand how they use our systems. Well they have their own way, we know how they're supposed to be used, but they have their own way they use the system. And so it's looking for that customer-centric approach, it's trying to understand their behaviors and work from those directions. >> And how much of that do you do with good old-fashioned sitting down and watching people interact with the application? I mean, that was a great thing that LinkedIn, or excuse me, Intuit used to always do with their early QuickBook days, right, a lot of just sit down and watch people interact with the application versus using machine learning and using kind of more aggregated data with your, like you said your huge client set to start to figure out how they're actually engaging with the application. >> It's really a combination of both, it really is. I mean, one of the things is, doesn't matter what the machine can tell us, they can give us a pattern and a history, but we don't understand the why sometimes. Why, what did we do? We saw that recently as we were reviewing some of our registration processes. And we were watching it because we use another product that monitors customer experience on the registration cycle. And we were watching something strange and we couldn't figure out why they were going in a certain direction. We looked at it, we didn't see it, but the students did, and there was actually a navigation on that page that sent them in a different direction, it was never meant to be there to do. It was for certain situations, not all situations. So you have to take a combination. You need the data from the machine, the machines can tell you all kinds of patterns on what's happening, but you do need that human part. That's also where IT, when you start talking about the C-Suite and having those discussions, that's where IT always failed, you know, we always talk ones and zeroes, everybody else is trying to have a conversation. So now all of a sudden it's about having that conversation. How can we talk about, here are the challenges, here's what you see, here's what you'd like to do, and how do we address that and move forward with it? So that makes a difference. >> It's just funny, the impact of again, a registration, what feels from the outside like a very mundane process, and yet, it impacts every single person that you guys do business with. It's their direct connection into your much bigger process, and education and professors, and the resources of the school. >> It's everything. >> It's everything. And that, from the outside looking in, someone might think, "Oh, registration, you know, "it's simple, we've got that defined. "We've been doing that for years." But it's not at all. >> And it has to change and it has to adapt quickly. So we're going through a process now where we're really re-evaluating the entire cycle because higher education, we already throw all these other things out at you, you know, what's a bursar, do you know what a bursar is? (Dave and Jeff laugh) How do you understand that? One of you take care of this problem. And then you deal with federal government changes, the state, you throw all those complexities in there, and now we're going through a process where we're, we've already started through some of the initial prospecting parts, but how do we simplify it even further? How do we knock down those barriers, or at least make it easier transitioning. We've done a lot of great stuff in the past. And we use a combination of things to get there, it's not just one set of tools that solves a problem. It's a bit of everything. >> And then the, sort of, post, coming out of Y2K, there was a lot of discussion, and then when the market crashed, there was a lot of discussion about IT value. You know, Nick Carr wrote the thing, Does IT Matter, et cetera, et cetera. What's the value discussion like today? I'm particularly interested as somebody who's implemented ServiceNOW, with the single CMDB, and the service catalog that's evolved. What is the value discussion that you have with your so-called line of business folks at the college? >> Well, the key to it is that we always act as an enabler. You know, we're there to support them and help them walk through the business process changes, look at things from different directions. They don't come to us and say, we want this tool, they come to say, this is my business problem. Now help us figure out how to solve that. That's where the IT value comes in. Yes, I have a bunch of very experienced practitioners. We're constantly understanding what trends and changes are happening. But what's the right tool for that problem? And by doing it this way, one, we're understanding the business problems we're trying to solve, but it also gives us a, it improves our agility, which you've heard me talk about probably a dozen times about this agility because that's what it is. Old IT was locked step stuck, and you were always there. Now when you start talking about agility and the ability to address business needs quickly, but yet still keep that same trajectory. I have legacy systems, I have to have those. But what can I put on the top of that, items like platforms as a service, what can I address things differently on? Probably one of the better ones recently we had a faculty recruiting team going out and they wanted, all of a sudden they were like doing Excel spreadsheet, okay, I'm interested in teaching for you in the future, I'm taking this and they're doing an Excel spreadsheet, and we sat down with them and I was in one of their big meetings and I'm like, okay, would you like to do that on an iPad? >> Dave: There's a better way. >> There's an easier way to skin this cat. So we actually turned around, we built a nice app, and ServiceNOW just to collect, hey, I'm taking classes at this university, I'm interested in teaching for Lone Star in the future, I'm in Mathematics, now that same group can turn around and send out a notification every time we're hiring that says, oh hey, we're hiring right now, we're hiring Math professors, so if you're interested, come on and join us. >> So you're observing how the business is approaching solving problems and identifying areas where you can use, for example, in this case, ServiceNOW, to dramatically improve their experience, is that fair? >> I mean, that's the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is, what is the problem, let us work on the tool, and then make sure we align things directly. 'Cause that's the harder part. I feel I failed my job if they come into me and say, "You know what, I want you to buy this, "because this is going to solve my problem." Well what's your problem? >> Well, what's interesting is, you know, you've been in IT a long time, and I've observed a lot of interactions between business and IT, when the business people try to tell IT people how to do it, it never works. But what you're saying is, you have enough visibility on the business and understanding of how technology can able, you can actually tell the business people, "Hey, there's a better way." >> That's the perfect way to approach it is, what is the best way we can do this for you. Whether that is in our legacy ERP, and I mean ours is not really a legacy, but in our ERP, or do I put this in the ServiceNOW platform, or do I put it in another platform? And how do we address that problem quickly and easily? >> How about another question, I always like to pick your brain, 'cause you know this stuff so well. How about custom mods? We've probably talked about this before a little bit, but you sort of have a philosophy of trying to avoid them at all costs? >> Absolutely. >> And you've succeeded at that? >> Ah yes, yeah. On the ERP side, we're still less than 10% customized on that platform, and you know, we've held that line. Because we can address the business problems, there's ways to address it without doing all these massive customizations. Sometimes it's just about really understanding the true business process. It's walking back to the old days of understanding what the process is, and then how does the technology adapt to that process. There's things that you can switch on and switch off that is not a custom mod, so your upgrades will process faster. Then there's other times when, like you said, we come in and we could have gone with that recruiting team, we could have gone and put it in our ERP, but we're like, well why? We're just picking up context, we're looking for these things. We need something quick and agile. So ServiceNOW was the perfect jump for it. A quick app. >> And are they coming to you earlier and earlier in the process? Do they get it, that you are an enabler of problem-solving, not necessarily and implementer of what I think I need? >> Absolutely. I mean, and the team we have is phenomenal, so, you know every once in a while, they're like, "Hey, we need this." Well, do you really need that or what do you need? And then we start that conversation. But it comes down to, it's not just myself. And I think that's really the key for any IT leader, is it's about the whole team's perspective. It's not going in with a technology solution as much as it is trying to understand the business problem first. Work through the technology solution. Find out what adapts and what will meet their needs. >> So single CMDB, adopt service catalog, avoid custom mods, anything else you'd tell folks that are just getting started with ServiceNOW? >> I mean, always be proactive. You're always out there trying to have that discussion with people to understand that you're there to help them and there to move it forward, it's just engage in that conversation. And that's the hard part, sometimes IT people don't want to jump into that conversation. What about that business side? I'm lucky, I have a passion for higher ed. This is why I've stayed in higher ed. To me, I get the reward this week when I get back from Orlando, it's graduation time, and you get to see your success walk across the stage. And each one of those students, whether they're moving on to another degree, whether they're moving into the workforce, I mean, that's something that you get out of this that is so impressive when in my field. So the same goes for how you treat your customers. Your employees, or your students, it's about how they feel at the end of the day. Did I do my best to help them out? >> That's got to be really gratifying. You know, in this day of man versus machine, the answer is education, so Link congratulations, and thanks very much for coming back on theCUBE. I love the conversations, we always ask you anything we want, but it's good to see you again. >> Good seeing you. >> Good seeing you Link. >> Alright, keep right there everybody, we'll be right back with our next guest, this is theCUBE, we're live from Knowledge17, #Know17. We'll be right back. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow, Knowledge17, brought to you by ServiceNow. (upbeat music) >> In 2004, Fred Luddy had a vision. He was the founder of ServiceNow, and his vision was to create software that was really simple to use, to automate workflows within organizations. Two years later in 2006, was the first ServiceNow Knowledge. He rented out a room at a hotel that could support 50 people. 30 minutes before that event, nobody was in that room. By the time, the time came to start the first ServiceNow Knowledge, 85 people were in the room, talking to each other about this transformation that was occurring in their business. And as they started talking to each other Fred Luddy stepped back and said, you know what, to have a successful conference I just need to let people talk to each other. And here we are today, in 2017. 15,000 people at the ServiceNow Knowledge. Welcome to Orlando, everybody. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host Jeff Frick. This is, I believe, our fifth Knowledge, Jeff. >> Just look at that. 14, 15, 16, 17. Fourth or fifth. (laughing) >> Fourth or, no. We started at the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas, with about 4,000 people and now we're up to 15,000. This is a story of a company that did an IPO right around 100 million, brought in an excellent CEO, Frank Slootman. In six years his company has exploded to 1.4 billion dollars. They're on a path to do 4 billion dollars of revenue by 2020. They've got a 17 billion dollar market cap. If you look at software companies over a billion dollars, there is no software company that's growing as fast as ServiceNow, 30 plus percent a year, and throwing off as much free cash flow as ServiceNow, growing at about 45%. So they are incomparable in terms of comparing to other software companies. They're on a tear, the stock prices are up. Lo and behold Frank Slootman, the CEO, is getting out at the top. Bringing in a new CEO, John Donahoe. I feel like it's you know, an NFL quarterback, It's Bill Walsh handing the reins over to George Seifert. Maybe, and as I say, getting out at the top. John Donahoe, totally different style. We're going to be talking to him on theCUBE, just finishing up his keynote now. But, Jeff, here we are. Our fourth year, I guess, at Knowledge. And, pretty amazing transformation in this company. >> It is a pretty amazing transformation. We talk a lot about big data, and we talk a lot about cloud in many of the shows we go to but what we probably don't talk about enough, and we are going to for the next three days, is the success of SASS apps. And, as I always like to joke, there's a 60 storey building going up in San Francisco that Salesforce is completing to show you the power of SASS apps. And I think, with the ServiceNow story, is, more of that same story, you know. They started out with a relatively simple idea, Fred wanted to make work easier. And he started with the ITSM because that was an easy place to get going. But really, it's about simplifying workflow in a SASS application, letting people get work done easier. And it's pretty interesting, Because now, as you look around, day of the conference, they've got five bubbles, or five balls, or five posters, to really symbolize how they've moved beyond just ITSM into HR, customer service, biz apps and security. And applying the same foundation, the same method, the same software, to get after more and more of the workloads that are happening inside the enterprise. >> From a company perspective, this story here is about execution. The company, as I said, I gave you, shared with you the financials, they've penetrated the Global 2000, over 50% of their average contract value comes from the Global 2000. And there's significant upside there, as well. In addition, their average contract value is growing very dramatically. I was speaking to some customers and asking them, what was your deal size when you first started with ServiceNow? They were like, it was small, it was like 60,000 contracts. Now they have many, many customers, well over a million dollars, several customers over five million dollars, so this is a company that is largely focused on large organizations, but also governments and mid-sized companies. Not small businesses, yet, Jeff. You and I have been dying to get a hold of ServiceNow for small business. They announced Express a couple years ago, but what Express really was, was a way for larger companies to try, you know, get their feet wet before they really jump all in. So, we are still waiting for that day, but in the meantime, ServiceNow has a lot to do. As they say, their goal now is to be four billion by 2020. It feels like, when we first covered ServiceNow Knowledge, we said wow, this company reminds us of the early days of Salesforce, they've got this platform you can develop on this platform, you know, call it paths, or whatever you want to call it. But, we at the time said they were on a collision course with Salesforce. Now, there's plenty of room for both of those companies in the marketplace. Salesforce obviously focused predominantly on Salesforce automation, ServiceNow really on workflow automation. But you can see, though, two markets coming together. >> Right, right. >> People really, you know SalesForce, we try to use it for a lot of different things. And so giant markets built on the cloud built with flexibility to add volumes we started at problem change management help desk type of things within IT service management, and we're seeing that expand dramatically. And one of the things that you've always emphasized, Jeff, is the ecosystem. Take us back to the early days, of when we walked the floor of the original Knowledge that we did, that was four or five years ago. The companies that you saw there are much different than what you see today. >> But the passion is still the same, and that's why we've loved coming to this thing for so many years. It's because it's one of the companies that has a real passion. There was a shout-out to Fred, which is where it all started you know, I think Frank did a great job continuing that, and now clearly John is a really polished guy. Did his time at Bane, eBay, which he talked about as a community based environment, and that was built on the strength of it. But the other part in terms of their expansion, their TAM expansion, which is always a popular topic is, John talked about IT living at the intersection of interconnectedness across departments. And they've really done a good job of leveraging that. And he talked about a simple HR on-boarding process, to highlight all the departments that are taught. Securities, facilities, you need to get your badge, you need to get your laptop, you need to get checked in. So, they're leveraging this and coming up from the bottom, and we talk about IT being an agent of transformation and not a cost center, well what better way to do that than to continue to simplify all these basically mundane processes. But, again, just start eating them up, and pulling more and more processes into the ServiceNow platform. >> The key to success from a customer standpoint is to adopt a single CMDB, and to adopt a service catalog. Jeff, when we first started following ServiceNow, and we talked to the customers, not everybody was adopting a single CMDB. That was a very political, sort of football. When I talk to customers today, many more, just anecdotally, have adopted the CMDB. What that gives the customer and ServiceNow, is tons of leverage. Because you essentially have that single source of truth, and then you can use that as a ripple effect across all the other innovations that you drive with ServiceNow. So, for example, you start with help desk and change management and problem management, and then you move onto, maybe, IT operations management. And you're automating those tasks. Then might you move onto HR. You might move onto logistics, or marketing. You're now dealing with security. The perfect example they often give is on-boarding. When you on-board a new employee, there's six or seven or eight departments that you have to talk to. There's at least eight, nine, 10 processes. You got to order your laptop, you got to get a phone, you've got to get your office, you've got to get on-boarded to HR. All of these things that have to occur, that are generally separate phone calls, or you're walking down the hall. ServiceNow when you on-board, they give you the example, they're eating their own dog food. You go into the portal and you do all these things. And it has a ripple effect because of that single CMDB, throughout the organization. And so that's given ServiceNow a lot of leverage within these companies. What you hear from customers is: one, it's complicated to install this stuff. And in the early days especially when there weren't as many experts in ServiceNow. So it used to take a couple years to implement this. Second is your price is too high. You know, you hear that a lot. If that's your biggest hurdle, you're in good shape. What ServiceNow has to do in my view, Jeff, is two things. One, is got to tap the ecosystem. And you've seen companies like CSX now, DX Technology, and Accenture, KPMG, EY, join the fray. I always joke that SIs love to eat at the trough. Well, ServiceNow is becoming a big, robust ecosystem, with a giant TAM. So, ServiceNow has to lean on those partners very heavily to go in and accelerate implementation, convey best practices. ServiceNow has a program called Inspire. Which is a lost leader. It's one of the best freebies in the industry. Where they will go in and share best practice with their largest customers. And in doing that in conjunction with the SIs, to accelerate adoption on the price side, this company and I think John Donahoe is perfect for this, really has to increasingly emphasize the value. I think to date Jeff, it's been a comparison. Well, I can get this from BMC for this much, or HPE for this much, or IBM's got versions of that. Or, other competitors in this space. ServiceNow has essentially, their pricing has been compared to them. What they have to do is shift the conversation from cost, and price, to the value of the delivery. >> Biggest surprise. You got to spend a little day, kind of, behind the curtain in the analyst day. Biggest surprise that came out of that, for you? >> I don't know if it's a shocker, but it was certainly underscored, is the actual amount of upside that this company has, because they have, you know, penetrated the Global 2000 pretty substantially. But what struck me was their ability to add new capabilities, and add, expand their TAM. You know, I think I wrote a piece in 2013 basically sizing the TAM. When ServiceNow first IPOed, Gartner came out and said this is a dead market, help desk is an 8 billion dollar market, where are they going? I followed that up with a piece that said you know, this TAM is quite large, it's probably about 30 million. And I shared with the Wikibon audience how it could get there. I think I underestimated that. I think the TAM is 60 to 100 billion dollars. And the reason is that ServiceNow is able, Fred Luddy said when we first interviewed him, it's a platform. I took it out there and said here it is. >> Right. >> And the VC said what can you do with it? And he said anything! >> Revolutionized platforms. >> And they said, well, we're not going to fund it. Right, and so what they've been doing now is adding modules, and one of the ones I'm most excited about is security. And it's not competing with the FireEyes, and the Palo Alto Networks and the McAfees. It's actually automating a lot of the response to security. Automating the run book, automating the incident response. And doing so in a way that actually builds that ecosystem up, and is the glue that hangs it together. So, I guess the biggest eye-opener for me, Jeff, I talked earlier about the revenue growth, and the free cash flow growth, for a billion dollar plus company. What was surprising, the biggest eye opener or surprise to me, was the sustainability, in my opinion, of that upside. >> Right. But if it works, right, no one's going to give it up. And if the efficiencies are so much better, no one's going to give it up. I just, like, it does other huge categories of software, right? There's CRM which they're playing a little bit into not coming at it from kind of a sales perspective, but kind of coming at it from a customer management perspective. There's HR, which they're clearly going after. There's ERP, which they're probably not in a position to do in the immediate term. But there's still a lot of work getting done in large enterprises that can use a significant amount of customization, automation, with a little big data twist in the back. And, a real eye to the customer experiences, as the millennials more and more in the workforce, and the expected behavior of enterprise apps needs to mirror more, what we get on our phones. So I think they're in a pretty good position. >> TSM is the core. Everything stems from that. That's sort of the main-spring. And really, IT are their peeps, as Frank Slootman used to say. (laughing) ITOM, IT operations management, is another large and substantive business. Not as big as ITSM, but bigger than the others. Customer service management is a new and growing area. Security is a huge upside in my opinion. HR they've been at it for a while, we've talked to Jen Straud many times. And that's a big growth area. So these line-of-business entries are what's going to power the growth of ServiceNow going forward. There's also MNA, we haven't talked about MNA. When we first walked around the ecosystem on the exhibit floor at the Aria, four or five years ago, what we saw were a number of companies that could fit right into the ServiceNow platform, so one of the more prominent companies that ServiceNow acquired was DX Continuum. It's sort of an intelligent AI, machine-learning system. They're deploying that to help predict outages, part of their IT operations management service. And they'll use that elsewhere. So it's a very specific AI, we cover AI, we cover autonomous vehicles, and so forth. That's actually a great use case. So much of AI is fuzzy. So much of deep learning and machine learning is like how is that applied? Well, predictive analytics, to say OK this component is going to fail, replace it. Or, move the work off of that server. That's a real tangible use of AI. So we've seen ServiceNow use MNA. So what it does when it acquires a company, it has to go through cycles of re-platforming. ServiceNow doesn't just bolt on third-party products. We basically rebuild them from scratch on the platform. >> Right, right, ease into the platform. Which is what you have to do. Which is, kind of partner what SASS is all about, and in the early days of SASS there was a lot of push-back, because everybody thought they needed customization. Well, you didn't really need customization because you can't have 47 versions of the platform out there. What you need is the ability to configure. And have great configurability, and that's what good platforms do. And that's what Fred tried to build. And oh by the way I got to get started, so I went with the ITSM. So I think they're in a great position, Dave, and, as we know, cloud economics of which this is a big, giant application, get good, as the thing gets bigger and bigger and absorbs more and more functionality. Again, interesting change of management. We're going to talk to John, really look forward to it, fresh new energy. I think they're off to, off to the races, they've been racing for a while. (laughing) >> Some of the other things, let's talk about customers for a minute. So, some of the other things I get from customers when I talk to them is, and again, CMDB, and service catalog, those are two critical. If you want to get the value out of ServiceNow, you got to implement those two things, and others. But as well, this idea of multi-instance, allows you to upgrade at your own pace. What a lot of SASS companies will do, and we know this, as a customer of a lot of SASS companies, they say new upgrade coming, beware. And boom, the function hits, or often times hits, with a price increase. What ServiceNow claims is that because you're in a multi-instance, as opposed to a multi-tenet environment, you can plan your upgrades. Now, having said that, what a lot of customers will do, is they will try to avoid custom-mods, custom modifications, and they will try to take ServiceNow function out of the box. The desirability of that is when a new upgrade comes, you don't have to worry about the modifications you've made. However, it's not always that simple. I talked to a customer this morning on the way over here, they're a big SAP user, and they're doing a lot of custom-mods with their implementation. And I said aren't you worried about that? Yes, we're very worried about that, because that's going to be problematic for us when we upgrade. But they're wed to SAP. So, my advice to customers is always try where possible to avoid custom modifications. You hear that a lot from, for instance, IN4 customers. You frankly hear it a lot from Oracle customers, trying to avoid the modifications. Mods can drive value for your business, but in the cloud world, the cloud era, they can really create problems for you. >> And everyone thinks that they're special, but the reality is that a lot of processes are repeatable across businesses. And actually if you're sitting as a SASS offer provider, you see it across a lot of customers, try to go with what's the standard out of the box, with basic configuration changes, and try to keep away from the customization, or like you said, you can get yourself in serious trouble. And not really take full advantage. 'Cause you want to take advantage of the upgrades, you want the security upgrades, you want the functionality upgrades, you want the latest plug-ins from the ecosystem, so stick with the core and try to really avoid. And you've got stuff that needs to be kept up, and it's old and it's legacy, try to shield it as much as you can from this new-age application. >> So we're here for three days, theCUBE, Knowledge17, #know17, and so we will be covering all the innovations it's an interesting conference because the roles here are IT practitioners, CIOs, line-of-business professionals like those within HR, and other lines of business. So really a diverse crowd. There's a developer conference, a lot of events within the event. There's a women in tech luncheon hosted by John Donahoe, so a lot of stuff going on that we're going to be covering, Jeff Frick and myself. We are going to be right back with John Donahoe, the new CEO of ServiceNow coming fresh off the keynotes. Keep right there everybody. This is theCUBE, we're at Knowledge17, be right back.

>> 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)

>> Voiceover: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. (upbeat electronic music) >> Welcome back to sunny Orlando, everybody. This is ServiceNow Knowledge17 #Know17. I'm Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. John Donahoe is here as the newly-minted CEO and President of ServiceNow, fresh off the keynote, fresh off 49 days in. John, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you very much, it's great to be here. >> John: So how'd you feel up there? You had the theater in the round, you were working the audience, I loved how you walked on the stage and really got into it. How's it feel? >> Well, what I love about ServiceNow, is it's a community-based business and a community-based company. And so, we had 15,000 members of our community out there, and that community feeling is, I think, one of the real powers of the movement that's called ServiceNow and of the ethos of this company. So, I loved that, I fed off that energy. >> So, at the risk of some repetition, a little bit of background about yourself, a former Bain, former eBay CEO, you shared that with the audience. What is relevant about your background to the ServiceNow experience that you expect to have? >> Well, you know it's funny Dave, I spent the first 20 years of my career at Bain doing business transformation. And a lot of what I talked about today was digital transformation, that is, every company is trying to transform. And I spent the first 20 years of my career focused on that. And then we talked a lot about great customer experiences. Well, the consumer world and consumer-based applications like eBay, or PayPal, or many other consumer applications, are defining the new standards of what kind of easy, simple, intuitive experiences are possible. And employees are consumers at home and they're increasingly expecting the same kind of great experiences they have at home at work, and as customers of enterprises. And so I think you're going to see the world of consumer and enterprise converging. And so that's why I'm very excited about being a part of ServiceNow. >> So, you talked to the audience, as I say, about your background. You're a family man, you've got Four children. >> John: Yeah >> Jeff: Pictures on stage; which I love. You know, it really kind of goes with the folksy, you know, history of this company and the community base. Not too many people put their family photo up on the keynote. I thought it was great. >> John: Yeah, well, they're my bosses, so... (all laughing) >> Dave: Well, like you said, they make you humble >> John: Yeah. >> Dave: and you learn a lot from them, so... So I appreciated you starting that. I've got Four kids, Jeff's got kids, and so... >> John: That's great. >> Dave: And you're hosting a women in tech breakfast tomorrow, a real passion of ours, so, maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Well, I just think it's really, really important. And, people ask me: "Why do you think that way?" I think it's good business, right? At the end of the day, the ultimate thing we do to succeed in business is we need to attract, develop, and retain the very best people, >> Dave: Right. >> John: and by definition, 50% of the workforce is female. And so, to not be aggressively trying to cultivate that part of our team is to miss an opportunity. And doing it well is hard, but if you do it well, it could be a source of competitive advantage. So, I care deeply about it professionally, and then also personally as a father of a daughter, the question I ask men that have daughters and say: "Do you want your daughter to grow up and be part of a work environment that's even better than the one they would have been if they'd come at your time?" And almost all of us say, "Yes!" >> Jeff: Of course >> John: So, it's a responsibility we all share. >> So, I want to ask about your management philosophy. You know, I've heard the term, of course you have too, "benevolent dictator". You use the term, >> "servant leadership". >> "servant leadership". >> John: Yeah. >> Dave: Which starts at the customer on top. Explain your philosophy there. >> Well, it's a way I learned to lead early in my career; which is: that it's the opposite of a classic pyramid. Right, where the CEO's on top and everything's underneath. No, this is an upside-down triangle, where the reason we're here is to serve our customers, to serve our employees as they serve our customers, to serve the purpose and to the extent you can, to serve the communities in which we are part of. And my experience is that: building that deeply into the culture of a company breeds a level of commitment and a level of long-term orientation that's really important. And ServiceNow's had that from the beginning. Think about Fred Luddy embodied that. He was a brilliant technologist, and he said, "You know what, I'm going to recruit a CEO" "before the company goes public who has those skills." So, he recruited Frank, right? And Fred stayed involved. Frank embodied servant leadership. Frank could've stayed forever. Frank said I was the right CEO to serve this purpose from 75 million to a Billion Four. And then he started to looking for someone that's the right person to serve for the next generation; which is me. So this notion of stewardship, we're all here to serve our customers and try to make our purpose come alive over a long period of time. And I think it's the most enduring motivation and inspiration we can have. And it keeps the customer front and center. >> Well, so one of the first things you did in your first 100 days, you said you wanted to see 100 customers, you actually accomplished that in 45 days. So, first of all congratulations, first of all how'd you do that? (all laughing) >> Well, I went at a roadshow to 10 cities across the U.S. and just packed my days full of meetings with customers. And they were individual meetings, and we had some group meetings, some lunches and dinners. And those are some of the best because you get a conversation going. I had Four or Five, Six customers around a breakfast table or dinner table and we start talking about their issues. And, the dynamic in every situation was they would start sharing with each other. They would say, "Well, how are you addressing this?" And they'd starting saying they have similar issues, similar challenges, similar ideas of how they're going to address it. So, the power, that community power, I was seeing firsthand in smaller settings. And for me, it was just so energizing because our limitation of how quickly we can get better is well we understand our customer's needs, and also understand their feedback about where we can get better. >> Well it's interesting, you said you were a customer when you ran eBay... >> John: Yes. >> Jeff: of ServiceNow, so that's kind of some of your background knowledge of the company. When you went out on your tour, what were some of the things that surprised you that you didn't know even though you had been kind of a ServiceNow customer in the past? >> Well, I think what I hadn't fully understood was the power of the ServiceNow platform, and how it's getting pulled into new areas across the company. So, it's getting pulled to customer-facing applications, customer-facing processes like Ashley at GE is talking about. >> Jeff: Right. >> John: And it makes sense, right? I know at eBay and PayPal, we really worried a lot about how do we handle inbound contacts from our users. And password reset was the #1 inbound contact. (dave laughing) Well, password reset is a perfect process that can be handled in an automated in a self-help way; which is ultimately what the customer wants. >> Jeff: Right. >> John: And ServiceNow can help enable that. And so, as I was sort of surprised and delighted by how this platform is getting pulled into new use cases, that in many ways are back to what Fred Luddy imagined when he founded the company. The interesting thing is, Fred founded the company as a platform to serve all services, businesses, business processes across the enterprise. And then, but platforms don't generate revenue, They don't sell. So, he found an application: ITSM; which was the first application, and it took off. And so ServiceNow began to be known as the IT company. But that was never what Fred envisioned. It was a company that enabled and empowered IT to simplify and automate and transform the entire company. >> It's interesting, password reset. Because it seems like such a simple process. And it doesn't necessarily seem like a high-value process. But in fact, it's hugely high-value for the customer. It's hugely cumbersome in terms of the time it takes. So, to automate something that seems so simple as password reset, has huge implications in terms of efficiency inside and customer satisfaction on the outside. What a great example. >> Well, and here's what's so interesting about that example: Is, it touches multiple parts of the company. Because, people actually, your password is your security. And you could automate changing it in a way that was insecure. But, you've got to do it in a way that it's the convenience that we want to reset our passwords, but we want to know we're safe. And so, that password reset flow has to touch security, it has to touch engineering, it has to touch operations and customer support, it has to touch the customer's record, and so it's a classic multi-function, multi-discipline flow, but you want to make that easy and simple for a user, and yet also have them feel safe. Simple and safe is hard to do. >> John, you mentioned Ashley from GE, I want to talk about digital transformation. It's one of those terms you hear a lot at these conferences, sometimes it's amorphous, it's kind of like A.I. We'll talk about that if we have time. But Jeff, I love your quote. We follow GE quite closely, and Jeffrey Immelt said: "I went to bed an industrial giant," "and I woke up a software company one day." >> John: Yep. >> Dave: And you see this everywhere. So what is digital transformation to you and the customer's that you've been talking to? >> Well, here's, technology and software in particular on one hand is disrupting every company in every industry. I view that as a motivation. I view that as a wake-up call for all of us, including a software company. And, software is an opportunity. An opportunity to make changes and advancements at a pace and a magnitude that's been unparallelled in business history. So every company needs to define how they're going to use technology, how they're going to use software, how they're going to use digital capability to their advantage. To their advantage with their own consumers, their own customers, either industrial customer or a consumer in a consumer business, and how to use it to change the employee's experience and improve it. So, employees are spending time not on manual tasks; which now can be done by technology, but on higher value-added activities, and then how you can operate a global enterprise in an effective and efficient manner. And so, technology is an offensive weapon if you will, an offensive tool, is something that's on the mind of every CEO, and every company. And that's where they're looking for how do they have a few trusted partners. A few trusted technology partners that help them navigate their way through that, help them drive their way through, and that's ultimately what ServiceNow is. >> So these are big ideas, and they involve a lot of different constituencies within your customer base. Obviously, your IT peeps, as we like to say, but the CIO, who's role is changing, and also the line of business folks. So these are big, heavy lifts that you can't do alone. You've got to have an ecosystem to do that. When we did our first Knowledge in 2013, the SIs were a lot of companies frankly that we never even heard of. And now, you're seeing all the big SIs. I don't even want to name them because I'll forget some. But, your partner strategy is critical to achieving that vision that you just laid out, isn't it? >> Absolutely, Absolutely. Because it takes both of us. It takes our software and then their capabilities to help our shared customers, shared clients, implement the software, and do it increasingly in a way that is as configurable as possible; which means as minimum customization as possible, and also as quickly as possible. And our partner ecosystem's an essential partner in doing that. And there's the big SIs, and then also some of the smaller ones. I spent some time with customers in some smaller cities where they're saying having local capabilities, local teams, that were trained and certified on ServiceNow was really important to them. Often they end up being acquired by or joining the bigger SIs over time, but that sort of grass roots opportunity. Because that's also job creation. That's job creation in communities. I got to see how talented, computer-literate, software-literate people in different cities around the world are seeing an opportunity to create a livelihood by helping customers integrate ServiceNow in the most effective way. >> So two years ago, Frank Slootman in his keynote said that the CIO's role is changing and they're becoming business people. >> John: Yes. >> Dave: And kind of challenged CIOs, if you don't speak wallet you better start learning that language, the "lingua franca" of the business. So, you obviously agree with that. But, how is the CIO role changing, and how does it support other roles within the organization, that you're trying to apply ServiceNow to? >> Well, I have a really, Jeff, a really outside-in... Or, Dave, really outside-in...sorry about that. >> Dave: It's alright. >> John: I've had a lot of names this morning. >> Jeff: I'm sure you have. >> Dave: That's pretty good. >> John: Outside-In view of this. Which is through the eyes of the customer, alright? The CEO is thinking about: "Alright, I've got to serve our customers better," "I've got to retain our customers" "and serve our customers better." "And then I've got to tract and retain employees" as we've been talking about. "And I need the digital capability," "I need technology to help us do that." Their going to turn to the most technically-literate person in the C-suite to help do that. That's the CIO, right? And so the CIO by very definition has to play a broader role of partnering with the business unit leaders, with the functional leaders, to drive that end-to-end business transformation or digital transformation. And the CIOs that I met are ready to take on that challenge. They couldn't have done that before the cloud technologies that give them the ability to play offense. But these cloud technologies now cut across, they don't just sit in IT, they cut across all of the enterprise. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> John: And so, I would say there's almost this gigantic sucking sound, if you will, to use an old Ross Perot-ism, that IT and the CIO are being asked to play this role, be change agents, strategic change agents, across the enterprise. And they're ready to do that, but they do need to speak business in business terms, and business value, and business value means: Are we serving our customers better? What's our customer NPS? What's our customer response time? What's our customer retention? They need to speak employee value terms: What's our ability to retain our best employees? What's their satisfaction? And then of course they have to speak the business terms of efficiency, right? Are we being more productive and more efficient as we're serving our customers and as we're serving our employees? And so, the CIOs I met and the IT professionals I met, are asking for help to translate what they do into that business language. And the very best ones are doing it. And I think you'll see that trend continue more and more. >> And they've got to have automation, and they've got to have efficiency because their budgets aren't going up commiserately with their increased responsibility to drive this digital transformation. So they've got to wring that extra value out of the tools and processes and people that they have, and that's where you really help them quite a bit. I think I saw a quote the other day that someone went from 60 days to Two days in a business process, amazing. >> Well, and it's interesting because companies are investing more in technology than they ever have. If you take the broad technology spend, they're investing more in technology. But, they expect to get productivity and efficiency, not just out of IT, but across the entire enterprise. >> Jeff: Across the board. >> John: And that's the opportunity: More investment, greater productivity, greater value for customers and employees. >> You talked yesterday to the financial analyst about the sort of execution machine that you inherited. Personally, I think you have a great CFO, one of the best if not the best in the business. So I presume you're not going to be spending a lot of your time trying to restructure reporting and counting beans, no pejorative intended there. So, what do you bring to the organization? Where are you going to spend your time? And what are your main goals over the next mid-term and long-term? >> Well, as you said, I'm blessed. Mike Scarpelli, I think, is a world-class CFO and the best in the industry and I'm honored and thrilled to work with him. Same with Dave Schneider and Kevin Haverty who run our sales force. And now CJ Desai, our Chief Product Officer, Dan Rogers, we've got a really strong team. My focus is to have us continue our current momentum, continue the current execution that we're focusing on. But then, to begin to sort of chart a course for 2018, 2019, 2020, and beyond as we go from being a billion-dollar company, to a four, to five-billion dollar company, to beyond to a 10-billion dollar company. And the nice news is that it's building on top of this very solid foundation. As we evolve from being what has been an IT-focused platform company to be more of a digital transformation platform and company. And helping our clients, helping our customers, achieve their aims and their goals, and being one of the few trusted technology partners. Every company has a few trusted technology partners and we want ServiceNow to be one of those. And, to do that, you've got to be viewed as mission-critical and adding real value, both of which I think we are. >> Dave: So you could joke, you know, don't mess it up. >> John: Yes. >> Dave: Okay, and take it to another level; which really is kind of what seems to be your expertise. Bringing it into the line of business is talking to the CEO and other C-level executives. And actually, marrying the expertise of the CIO has cross-organizational purview, leveraging that capability and super-powering that. >> Exactly. Exactly. You know, it's interesting. If I were to look back on the last 15 years, the C-suite role that has changed the most in the last 15 years has been that of the CFO. 15 years ago CFOs were being counters. >> Dave: Yeah. >> John: Right? Today, as you said, as Mike Scarpelli and Bob Swan, my previous CFO at eBay and the best CFOs, they drive value across the enterprise. Right? They're almost COOs in their mindset. They work with business units, and they add enormous value. So that job has become significantly more important and powerful. I see the same thing happening with the CIO over the next Five to 10 years where the CIOs role with grow, and expand, and broaden. And that's exciting. >> Well, you know, one of the things, actually, you know, we come to these conferences, and there's obviously a lot of messaging, but we try to understand how that messaging actually fits with what customers are doing. One of the things that you guys are messaging this year is light speed. And so, when you talk about the CFO and the changing role, it brings up, to my mind anyway, light speed requires a new set of metrics, and listening to, like Scarpelli, talk yesterday, he's all over the metrics. And these aren't, you know, your typical, you know, EBITDA metrics, they are just a new set. Do you see that happening within, not only ServiceNow, but within your customer base, where the so-called, I'll call them, "light speed" metrics are emerging? >> Absolutely. I mean, you saw the example of Dave Wright going through the machine learning, and how the machine learning capability, when applied to the ServiceNow platform, applied to specific problems, helps you fix problems before they happen in an automated fashion. Imagine that, right? That's light speed. Dave said it so well on stage. (all laughing) That's even faster than light speed. And so, you begin to see, alright, how do you measure, in delivering a great customer experience, how do you measure the reductions of problems? How do you measure the prevention of problems that provides greater availability, greater reliability, greater consistency, of a customer's experience? Now, ultimately that measure will be in customer NPS or some other customer metrics. But, some of the subordinate metrics I think you will see a growing number of what I would call L2, L3 metrics, that is, a dashboard of how to run a great company around customers, employees, and financials. >> Alright John, I know you're super busy, we've got to leave it there. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE and congratulations on the role, great keynote, and best of luck. We'll be watching. >> John: Thanks very much Dave, thanks >> You're welcome, alright. >> From me, congratulations. Keep it right there, buddy, we'll be right back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from ServiceNow, Knowledge17. Be right back. (upbeat electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live, from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow, Knowledge17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> We're back. I'm Dave Vellante, this is Jeff Frick. Raja Renganathan is here. He's the Vice President of Cloud Services at Cognizant Technology Solutions. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave. >> So, tell us about Cognizant and what you're doing to sort of support your client's digital transformations. Let's start there. >> Yeah. So Cognizant is, you know, a leading digital technology outsourcing, you know, provider. We help our clients to lead the digital. Okay, so basically customers are going through disruption, that digital disruption, and everybody is going through the digital transformation. So, we help our clients to navigate the digital shift. So, how we do that is via three-pillar, right. We have, you know, imagine a front office, a middle office and a back office. The front office is digital business. Our digital business unit helps our customers to innovate new products and solutions, you know, using data as a new oil, new ad, whatever you want to call it as. Then, the middle office, that is where, getting into the enterprise, we're touching the business processes. How do we create platforms to simplify and modernize those processes. And how do we create business process as a service? That's what we call it, as a middle office. That's our digital operations, you know, pillar. The third one is, how do I modernize the legacy technologies, you know, into the latest turning-towards-digital, thereby providing agile and you know, extensible, you know, things like that. So, that's our digital systems and technology. So, we introduce these three core pillars, and the underlying platform for everything is Cloud. That's where we see, you know, products like, such as ServiceNow. It plays a very critical role towards, you know, fulfilling our customers' value. >> So, what's your strategy with respect to ServiceNow and the partnership? >> If you look at our partnership, you know, back in 2008, this is a small history to that. See, we introduced the Fortune, you know, 1000 enterprises. At the time, you know, The BMC and the HP, you know, those are all providing, it was pervasive those days. >> Sure. >> Then we started hearing from the customers, "Hey, do you guys know a company called ServiceNow?" You know, that is where I think, hey, everybody's talking ServiceNow. So, what is it all about? That is where we started our journey, back in 2008. At the time, we put together, we took some, you know, the BMC and the HP guys, we reskilled them, trained them on ServiceNow. Right? Started with about a 10-people practice. Today we are 700-plus people practice, spread across four delivery centers. And the beauty is all of the 700, 675-plus, are certified in ServiceNow. So, that is what the value people see. That the certification skillset, the implementation, you know, the knowledge that we take to the customer, they see that as a value. >> Then, how are you seeing the implementations evolve inside the customers, once you go in and do an initial project? How is it evolving? We keep hearing about all these different application stacks and kind of service areas. What are you seeing in the field? >> If you look at our customers, I think, you know, we also, the place is valued, we have ServiceNow. Most of them are, you know, they are Cognizant customers. You know, because we know that application. Because we bring the domain knowledge and the application. Everyone starts with the basic thing, ITSM. IT Service Management Model. But, because of the digital shift, they are going beyond ITSM. So, they want to move from systems of records to systems of intelligence. Now, we are going one level above. How do we create a system of action with ServiceNow, workflows and automation and things like that. So, today, if you look at ITSM, yes, it's becoming a commodity. That is where, I think, ServiceNow has really helped us. But, customers want to use the power of the platform. How do I add customer service on top of it? How do I create, you know, HR module and Finance module and Legal and facilities, and use the power of the platform. So, this is how we see the implementation approach. They start with ITSM and then go through, you know, module by module. But there are some customers where they say, "Hey, you know what? "I have so many tools in the ecosystem, "but I want ServiceNow to be the fulcrum "or manager of managers." So that is where we use the ServiceNow platform to integrate. ServiceNow has got a lot of API integretation, you know, mechanics. We use the integration, API integration methodology and then integrate various tools into it. Provide a common, single-pane window. >> Is this allowing your customers to gain a competitive advantage? Or is it cutting costs for them? I mean, what is there, what is your customers' sort of, business case, and the business value? Is there differentiation that's inherent? >> So, traditional ideas sim, they, if you take the legacy, the tools that used to exist, compared to a ServiceNow-based idea sim. We have seen customers who are already reducing call volumes by 30 per cent. Okay? Just an average, incident, call-incident reduction, call reduction, et cetera. However, we are in the AI era, artificial intelligence, you know. We have moved from mobile firsts to artificial intelligence first. Artificial intelligence is no longer in the labs. It is on the street. Customers are looking for, how do we, you know, use artificial intelligence and mission learning to increase the service levels? So, that is why we call it as, modernizing ideas sim. That's what even ServiceNow says, that one of the customer conversations. In the modernization ideas sim, how do we bring the artificial intelligence and mission learning? Your 30 per cent can go up to 40 to 50 per cent. Right, and in the process, with conversational analytics, it makes, you know, again a superior end-user experience. >> And how does Cognizant differentiate in the marketplace? >> That's a great question. The key thing is the people. I would say, I would start with the people because any new technology, okay, whatever, the robots are there. You need the human intellectual capital to implement that. So that is where we realize this problem earlier and we started investing on the people. So we have something called a ServiceNow Academy where we constantly recruit people and reskill our own people to meet the needs of the ServiceNow. So, the ServiceNow Academy, that is where, constantly produces, you know, people, number one. Number two, we have ServiceNow Labs. This is an investment from Cognizant. We call it a center of excellence, whatever the name you want to call. The ServiceNow Labs is the biggest differentiator for our customers, where we constantly, you know, produce you know, the best practices and we take those best practices, you know, to the customer. The third one is, we constantly innovate. Innovation is very critical. So, we used to do something called Hackathon. For the past three years, we have been doing Hackathon. A team from ServiceNow, they go all the way to our delivery centers, in offshore. 4000 people will be part of the Hackathon, across different locations, while we're video conferencing, webex and things like that. Recently we did, about three months back, For 4000 people participating, 80-plus innovation ideas came out. All these 80-plus innovation ideas, we go back to our customer. "Hey, you're in healthcare. "This is something, you know, to track your ambulance. "You know, for 911, et cetera. "These are the things, ideas, you can do that." So, I would say, constantly reskilling the people via our ServiceNow Academy. The second thing is constantly producing best practices via our ServiceNow Labs. And the third one is, you know, powering the innovation by our Hackathon. These three things really help us to, you know, take the value of ServiceNow to our customers. >> Excellent, all right, we've got to wrap before the music starts. Raja, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. >> And thank you, and it's a pleasure in talking to you, guys, thank you. >> Ah, you're welcome. >> Thanks. >> All right, >> keep right there, everybody. We'll be back to wrap, right after this short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Commentator: Live, from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge17, brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Hi everybody, welcome back to Knowledge17. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm with my co-host Jeff Frick at our fifth Knowledge. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. Seneca Louck is here, he's the Business Process Lead at Dow Chemical. A relatively new ServiceNow customer. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you guys. >> Thanks for having me. >> So you said this is your second Knowledge. >> Seneca: It is. >> And, well how do you like Orlando? >> I like it, I like it. I'm here, in Venetian, >> Sunny? >> for next year, and so I'm a Vegas guy, so I'll be happy to get back there, but Orlando's nice. >> Dave: Where's home for you? >> Originally from New Jersey. Worked in Philadelphia for 15 years and relocated to Midland, Michigan, where Dow Chemical's headquartered. >> Dave: Fantastic, ah it's great, great country, Michigan. >> Absolutely. >> So, take us through your role, start there. What do you do, >> Sure. >> at Dow Chemical? >> So, I'm a Business Process Lead for Enterprise Service Management. We could go down the ITSM route, or we can go down the BSM route and we said, "Why pick one?" Enterprise Systems Management used to be the name. We actually elevated it up, Enterprise Service Management. We're the IT Operability focus on the end. >> Okay, and you said you went live, with ServiceNow, June last year? >> June 11th last year, we started with Incident Problem Change Config. We did Change Management, sorry, a month later. And then we did Service Request catalog, rolled out for the whole rest of the year. >> How long did it take you from sort of, when you said, "All right, we're doing this. "Start the project." To actually get, you know, MVP out? >> The cake. >> Yeah, the cake. (laughs) >> To get to the cake. >> And MVP's a really important thing. Minimum Viable Product. It was a hard lesson for us to learn. Quickly we realized that we're not going to be able to do everything we want to do in a first shot. So, we did focus very heavily on MVP. ServiceNow was good enough to make sure that they bred that into us, the importance of that. And so, we started in October, with workshops. We spent probably the first four or five months before we wrote one single line of code or configured one thing in ServiceNow. You know, a lot of that work was As-Is Process. Document it, understand it, uplift it, figure out what we want that To-Be Process to look like, and then figure out how the tool's going to deliver against that. >> Did you do some of that, I mean much of that came as part of the business case, and then you just refined it, is that right? >> The business case was really more on the value side. We didn't get into the specifics around process. We had a high level idea what we wanted to do strategically. Right? >> Yeah. >> Our guiding principles were really, Industry Best Practice, we like to think we're special. But really, the industry should know. Out of the box, ServiceNow, whenever possible. And to be honest, the out-of-the-box ServiceNow should reflect Industry Best Practice fairly well. And so that was kind of the coming in position for us. We deviated only when absolutely necessary and we really tried to stick to vanilla. >> So you minimized custom mods? >> Seneca: We really tried to do that, yes. There's times where we had to deviate of course. But we really wanted to look to see if ServiceNow had an answer, and if we could tweak what was already there, then great. There's only a handful of opportunities where we had to build something net new. >> And was that related to your ERP, or when did you have to build those custom mods? >> So, in places where we might have a concept that was to bring Legacy capability from a previous system. We knew we weren't going to cut and run from the old to the new. We had to kind of pull on some of the capabilities of that platform. So, the way you guys do category, sub-category, we did through classification. And so we had to customize a couple of tables to bring classifications over to bridge that gap. >> I see, okay, and then, so then you go live. Now was it a CMDB, a single CMDB across the organization? >> So, we have HP technology, where we had large investment. We wanted to keep that for discovery purposes and it enabled us to build one big tunnel between our CMDB and ServiceNow, so it made the integration go very easily. So, we really did two key integrations, a CMDB integration and an LDAP one to get our people data. Once that was done, we were on our feet, we were stood up and we were ready to start delivering processes. >> And the Service Catalog? >> Service Catalog was an interesting one because we had it spread out in a bunch of places. We had web forums, where somebody had customized a small, little web forum that that was actually making calls into our ticketing system to create service requests. We also had Request Center, which was brought in to try and solve that world of Service Request Management, but it only did it for Service Request. And we realize ServiceNow is going to do it end-to-end. >> Seneca, when you're thinking about your investments. I like to look at 'em as you get investments to run the business, some to grow the business and some to transform the business. And you're really sort of an IT-transform expert. How do you allocate that? Are those mutually exclusive? Do they sort of blend into each other and how much of your investment is transformation, and what does that all mean? >> Yeah, so it's tough because you've got guys that are on the run side, and I actually spent the large majority of my career on the run side. So, I know what if feels like to be accountable for everything in production, regardless of how it got there. And so, I kind of oscillate back and forth. Right? If the hair's on fire and these guys are going to be dead by the time the project transforms next year's capability, there's no point in us waiting. We can't wait. So, we're bouncing in and out of transformation and dealing with, making sure operability can happen effectively, efficiently, and that these guys are around next year, and alive and well, so that we can deliver that transformational capability. >> You talked about MVP being kind of a new concept. I wonder if you could dig into that a little bit further. >> Sure, sure. >> Is that not kind of a process or methodology that you guys have done in the past, or was it a learning curve? >> So, it was a little bit of a learning curve. So, typically you know, we delivered the biggest SAP implementation in the history of the world. A billion dollars, 800 SAP systems. And it took us seven years. So, we didn't think a lot about MVP, we wanted perfection. And so we made sure that we got it. And it cost us dearly. But in the end, the results were good. In this case, we had to move fast. Right? We weren't going to be able to do it all. We knew the capabilities that you see, throughout this room, are incredible. We want to get to them. But we've got to get on to the platform first. And so, we really did hone in on trying to find, what is the minimum product that we need to get people moved over to the platform, and we'll increment from there. So, it was a little bit of a learning for us. It was a little bit of a culture change. And we kind of found that sweet spot between Agile and Waterfall, which I think we called it Wagile, or (laughs). Yeah, Wagile I think, >> Well, right. >> is the name. >> I mean your implementation >> coincided with the sort of DevOps craze, and Agile, but there's >> That's right, that's right. >> a place for Waterfall, right? >> There is, there is. >> Sometimes, you need >> that perfection. Other times, you need to break stuff and iterate. >> Absolutely. >> But so, that's interesting. You said you came up with sort of a hybrid. Sometimes, hybrids are scary. So, how did you sort of come to that point and how's it workin' for you? >> Yeah, so what we did is we front-ended a lot of the requirements. We spent, like I said, several months, just sitting and doing requirements. And then, we transitioned into two-week sprints. And we pulled out of the backlog, the requirements that we had captured in those months previous. So, that was kind of how we blended the two together. We're more a Waterfall shop but we were delivering a system of record. And so, in systems of record, we strongly believe that Agile can be dangerous. It's not necessarily the place to start. And so, we started with Waterfall, and we kind of ended with Agile. >> All right, okay, and so, what so far have been the sort of business impacts? Can you share that with us? >> Yeah absolutely, so first thing's first, we're getting consistency throughout our processes. So, many times, geographical differences or even within a geography, at a sub-activity level, people were doing things differently. So, first thing we had to do was Standardize Process. That gives us the ability to measure across the world, how that process is being executed. Whereas before, we couldn't do that one-for-one, we couldn't compare these things one-for-one. And so, now we have that vision, now we have that visibility, and we were a performance analytics customer from day one, so we started capturing data to baseline, to benchmark, from Go Live, until today, and we've got incredible data to go back then and do the continuous service improvement. >> And how much of the consistency and process was forced in your pre-deployment activities, where you kind of find, all right, we got to sit down and actually document this to put it into the system. Versus, now that you've got this tool in place, that you see the opportunity to continue to go after new processes. >> It varied, dependent upon area, so Change Management was actually not a bad process from a global perspective. On the flip side is, we actually implemented some case management capability for our Business Functions. Their processes were extremely deviated across geographies, across activities. And so it depends, but the bottom line is that before we talk about implementing on this platform, we got to talk standardization. Good news is the incident problem changed. It wasn't as much work. On the Business Process side, it was a lot more. >> How are you predominantly measured? Is it getting stuff done? Are there other sort of KPI's that you focus on? Is there one that you try to optimize? >> So, these days, we're actually operating in a little bit of a dangerous place because we're going through so much mergers and acquisition activity, that our success is, can we integrate a company in less than a year while we go on to do the biggest chemical merger in the history of the world? So, typically, we would be kind of looking at metrics, and KPI's, down at the process level. Right now, we're looking at, can I actually bring these companies together? So it's integrated. >> And not kill each other. >> And not kill each other. (laughs) That's right. That's not to say we're not doing the latter as well but I think we have to start with, can we get the big activities done so that we can figure out how to do the process improvement. >> Dave: Right. How about the show for you here? What's it been like? What are you learning? >> Yeah, so. >> Are you sharing? >> Dx Continuum I think is going to be the theme that I'm going to leave here thinking, wow, these guys did the right thing with that purchase. So, you know the artificial intelligence, the machine learning, the data lakes, that we're going to be able to take all this data that we have and pump it out to you guys. And you're going to turn around and tell us an interesting story. You're going to tell me the questions that I would never even think to ask because you're going to be able to see into that data in ways that we never even dreamed possible. So, that's the big one for me. I've heard some rumors of some other things coming, but I shouldn't know about those and so I'm not going to say anything at this point. But right now, it's about the machine learning, the artificial intelligence. >> So, what other, I mean 'cause a company the size of Dow must be doing some interesting things with Big Data and Hadoop and AI. How does what you're doing or does what you're doing with ServiceNow relate to those sort of other activities? Is there sort of a data platform strategy? >> It's an interesting question. It's something that we're actually struggling with a little bit to figure out what that strategy is going to be. I don't think the larger organization expected so many opportunities to use analytics and to use machine learning against data sets that otherwise were, this is operation stuff, for the most part, right? We're starting to get into the business side a little bit but really, we were focused on running the business from an operations perspective. And so, all of a sudden, now, we're getting attention that we wouldn't have had otherwise, from the big players, you know. The SAP Business Warehouse, Business Intelligence guys. They've got 120 people delivering their reporting service. I got a guy half-time, that's helping me with my PA reports and we've got to figure out a way to either join our strategies together or at least meet in the middle because there's data that we probably want to share from each other. >> Do you have a Chief Data Officer on staff? >> We do not, that I'm aware of, actually. But I think it is , it's a very powerful role, but in our SAP world, they kind of act as that defacto person within our organization. But they're not very interested in what we're doing yet but they are starting to get the attention of us. >> It's interesting 'cause we talk a lot about IoT Now will bridge, you know, kind of the IT and the Ops folks. And it sounds like you're having that experience really specifically built around some of the processes that you're delivering in ServiceNow. To bring those two world together. >> Yeah, so while I mentioned machine learning and Artificial Intellience, that's actually right there, second on my list. The thing I came here last year and raised my hands and said I need the most is I need the ability to bring massive amounts of data onto this platform. Raw performance data, network data, server data, utilization data, end-user data. I want to be able to bring it into this platform so that I can use it to correlate events and incidents and problems. And so, the things that you guys are doing for IoT, to bring massive data sets in, are actually going to solve my problem, but I don't think it was necessarily what you were trying to solve. But I'm very happy for that. >> So, by the way, we're independent media, so we're (laughs) like third-party guys. >> Understood, understood >> It's these guys, ServiceNow. So, we just sort of unpack, analyze. What about if you had to do it again. What would you do differently? Obviously you would have, and you did, you embraced the MVP, other things? >> So, we took a very dangerous route in that we didn't have a team built. We didn't have a competency built. We took a system integrator and we went off and we went hog wild and we implemented it quickly, while we built the team, while we built the governance, while we built the competency center. If I could do it again, I'd have that team ready, staffed, you know, well-trained up front, so that we could learn as we went, a little bit more, be a little more autonomous and self-sufficient. >> Were you one of the 100 customers that John Donahoe met with in 45 days? >> I was not actually. >> And if you weren't, then what would you tell him in terms of the piece that he said, "What can we do better?" What would you? >> Yeah. >> So, the question came up yesterday, around releases. You know, should we do more, should we do less. I mean, we're actually struggling a little bit to keep up with the two releases per year. So, the biggest thing that I see is not making it a wholesale upgrade. If I could take parts and pieces from the new capabilities that are coming without having to go through the full upgrade cycle, you know, I think that would be huge for me. So that we don't have to spend a couple of months or we're hoping to get that down to one month. But this is our first one in production. So, we're going to spend three months getting this upgrade right. We're hoping to get it down to, you know, a couple of weeks to a month. But if I can take pieces and parts of the capability that's being delivered, and not have to take it wholesale, that would be the thing. >> Yeah, so that's interesting because Multi-instance is nice. You don't have to go on the SaaS player's schedule. But you want to keep current, you know, for a lot of reasons, with maybe, with certain parts of the upgrade. Yeah, okay, that doesn't sound trivial. (laughs) >> Yeah, it's not. >> Although I know they're thinking about it so it's come up, I've heard a couple of people at least mention that it's something that they have to think about. They may not actually go that direction. But at least that they're thinking about it, that tells me that they're exploring other avenues to deliver capability. >> Dave: What's in the future for you guys? Where do you want to take this thing? >> Yeah, so our next big thing's going to be Event Management. So, we've got 45 different tools that are doing monitoring from purchase tools to somebody's script that's sitting on the mainframe that sends us an event, when some exception happens. And so we've built, you know, with a custom IT process automation tool, our Event Management framework. And it's integrated with ServiceNow. But at the heart of it is, there's some old technology, decade-old technology, that was my first entry into IT process automation. And so, as the person who built it, I'm going to be the one that ultimately unplugs it and hands it over to ServiceNow. So, for us, that's the next step for what we're going to do. >> Awesome, well listen, Seneca, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It's great to have you. Loved the knowledge. >> Thanks for having us. >> Dave: Rapid fire, you know, perfect for theCUBE, so thank you. >> Great, wonderful. >> Thank you, guys. >> Thanks for coming on. >> I appreciate it. >> All right, pleasure. >> All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Knowledge17 in Orlando. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida It's the que covering service now. Knowledge seventeen Brought to you by service now. >> Welcome back to Sunny Orlando. Everybody, This is the Cube, the leader Live tech coverage. My name is Dave Volonte, and I'm here with my co host, Jeffrey Walter Wall coverage of service now. Knowledge seventeen. Jason, Johannes. Here he is. A long time cube along Lamis, a managing director at Accenture. Jason, great to see you again. >> Thanks so much. Appreciate it. >> So when Jeff and I did our for our first service now knowledge in twenty thirteen, we walked around the floor. We saw a company called Cloud Share pose. Uh, we said, you know, for this company to become a billion dollar company, they really have tto evolve the ecosystem, and that's exactly what's happened. But But before we get into that, take us through how you got to Accenture. >> Yeah. So let's see, I had an eleven year career Att. IBM decided tto leave that for no good reason other than to go try something new and way were responsible for a small company called Navigant. Nah, Vegas was one of the first service now partners in the ecosystem. We thought maybe if we had a few good years there, we might pick up some VC funding or something like that. Things moved a lot faster than we had expected. And one one twenty, thirteen We're required by Cloud Sherpas. I became president of service now, Business Unit was a new line of business in Cloud Sherpas, which was really aspiring and was a cloud services brokerage across sales force, Google and service. Now and then, of course, the good news here at the twenty fifteen, we move on to extension er and then I get the opportunity to lead the global platform team for service >> now at Accenture. So before we get into that, when you were a navigates, did you ever do a raise or did you not have two? >> Didn't have to be police tracked it all the way through. So >> what sort of people in our audience are always interested in fascinated the entrepreneur get started? That was with sort of customer funding and sort of getting getting projects, >> you know, it started like a lot of partners did at that point in time. I mean, really, the ecosystem was served by partners nobody ever heard of. Right, And, uh and so they all started kind of one deployment at a time and you see some companies that might have been doing implementations for other it some tools or something of that nature started to gravitate to this thing called service hyphen now dot com at the time, right? And, uh, couple logo changes elimination of Iife in later. Here we are over a billion dollars in the service now ecosystem and on their way to four billion by twenty twenty. >> And you guys were there early. So what advantages that did that give you? >> So I think what it taught us early on is kind of how to build, uh, and create service now, consultants, which was, you know, something that the very little of the ecosystem had at that point in time. Um, it wasn't is quite a straightforward. It's just saying, Let's take somebody who did Platform X or or, you know, application Why? And go, you know, go work on service now The first people that were rolling through while they had big company logos, they they did tend to be early adopters and those types of folks that would be kind of earlier in line. So, you know, there's kind of a whole different requirement. Hold this a different necessity. At the time, I would say two thousand, two thousand. It was really kind of the anti other platforms or other tools kind of crowd. And then we move into where we are today, which is, you know, market leading Sim tool moving rapidly into other spaces. HRC sm etcetera. So >> do you find they're still on expertise? Shortage in the marketplace? And >> there is >> How are you feeling? Not >> so. I consider US Foundation Lee a learning organization. We were back then, and we are now with over a hundred certified trainers on service. Now we had fifty of them here at the event, training on behalf of service, now largest of any partner, and we've turned that internally. So while we've very publicly recently made several acquisitions, one in Europe one in Germany are UK, Germany and, of course, Canada. We also organically, in the last fourteen months, crew Accenture's sort of Haitians more than one hundred thirty percent. So we have that training capability, and we can use that to incubate our next consultants that our next certified resource is on the platform. Did you guys know platforms are so broad? You really have to, you know, be broad and deep to be successful, like kind of scale we're at right now. And so it's important that we're kind of climbing down as deep as we can the platform as quickly as possible since Agent and did a century by Cloud services an accelerator or really, Was that there their first kind of big play with service? Now there's quite a big business case around it, because at the time he was a sales force company of with company and a service down company. So I think the answer is a little different for each of the platforms. But I'LL give you the service now platform. So what we did is we took a practice in Cloud Sherpas that was about the same size of centuries practice, and we brought them together, right. We unified the organization, which is kind of a different model for X ensure having a global platform lead on a global platform team where there's a direct line management relationship versus managing across the axes, but what that gives us an ability to kind of globally incubate skills globally moved to, You know where the center of gravity needs to be now versus where it needed to be then and so it came together quite nicely. On top of that, you see us making these few acquisitions. We'd just be three in the last six months. And it's, you know, kind of round out our global presence and capability. So we saw as we brought the organisations together, there were few. Geography is where we needed toe accelerate, Right? I mentioned we were accelerating our certifications one hundred thirty thirty percent more than doubled their staff in that time. We now have more than fifteen hundred certified Resource is in two thousand service now, resource is an extension. And, uh and that was largely through organic efforts Post cloud Sherpas acquisition. Now we layer in these additional acquisitions on top really gives it that full global capability. >> And obviously extent you had a sales force business yet folding that didn't have ah, Google businesses. Well, >> yeah, So platforms and of course, you know, absent in e mail, etcetera. So you know, they're on their way and kind of kind of re adjusting or kind of Swiss Ling for that practices. Well, but obviously my my interest in my >> phone is the service now, Okay. And then you said two thousand a trained now, professionals, >> just over two thousand service. Now, resource is in our platform team over fifteen hundred service now. Certifications. >> Uh, okay. And that's obviously global. Yeah, And then the other thing, the other big team we're hearing is that service now starting to penetrate, you know, different industries. And that's where you guys come in. I mean, you have deep, deep industry knowledge and expertise when if you could talk about how the adoption of service now is moving beyond sort of horizontal, I t into specific industries. >> So that's our big pivot. And that's the future of service. Now is a platform, not an I t. Sm tool, in my opinion. And I think the one of the foundational tenets behind the acquisitions, you see, with, like, dxy and of course, uh, of course, you know, cloud Sherpas to Accenture. Um, one of the things service that has to do to reach their market capitalization has become more than just a ninety seven, too will become a platform. Um, when you start have this platform conversations, you start having conversations that air well outside of it, they'd become business conversations. I'm sure you made the keynote this morning and heard about going horizontal across that full very often. Silas size departments in business. That's the way work gets done. And that's where the opportunity is. We find that most commonly when we're talking to prospects and customers, they want to talk about others in their sector, in their domain. What have you done with customers like me somewhere else and you end up having a conversation. So we did this here. We did that there. We did this over here, right across that whole platform. We're going deep into service now. Catalyst Model, which they just released here at acknowledged seventeen. And the reason for that is because that's where we're moving. We're creating an entire conversation across the platform, so we're certainly gonna have an industry lends to the same conversation. But we're going to bring more to that. We're gonna bring the integration stacked that we're gonna be in the custom ap Stop to that. We're gonna be the configured abstract to that. Of course you're gonna bring those outside of T APS to that. >> And the catalyst is what the gold standard of partners. >> Yeah, it really is. I mean, the service now just release the program to the partners just a few days ago. There are three partners that have catalyst today. There'LL be more of a course in time. Ours is focused on the financial sector, which we have really found to be a high growth area for us in the platform. And we also had a significant amount of domain and intellectual property in that space. That was easy for us to aggregate and really hit the market running with that one. But we'LL have more intime retail and a few others coming very quickly. And so that's where you're building a solution on top of service. Now you got exactly right cell as a solution across the platform. So just it's important not to think of it as just a new individual app or just a individual integration. But it's important to think of something much bigger >> than that. And then, you know, we're obviously it feels like we're on the steep part of the S curve. You predicted this a couple years ago that the future of service now is beyond me. But you were there doing the heavy lifting with getting people to buy into a single c M d b. Adopt the service catalog, you know, do a host things that were necessary to really take leverage. And in the early days, there was some friction in order to get people to do that. It was political, didn't really see, you know, the long term benefits, that they would maybe do it in a little pocket of opportunity. Has that changed as it changed dramatically? And how has that affected your ability to get leverage with customers, specifically the customers themselves getting leverage in other areas? >> You know, customers they're all trying to digitize, right? Everyone's trying to digitize, and it's a digitize, er die moment. It really has been digitized by moments for the last several years. Um, there's only so many places going to be able to do that. And what's so important about service now is the ability to actually bring that across work flows across organisations to relate to people in a user interface and a design that they're familiar with. You know, service now does a fantastic job. That's why we've been here in this sector. So order this software so long. But, you know, it's it's, uh, it's it's imperative anymore. It's not something that are seeing our clients have an option, too, except a reject. It's a demand. >> Yes, I want to I want to stay on this, uh, point for just a minute. I've said several times today and Jeff, you and I have talked about this that in the early days, the names that you saw in the ecosystem, you know, no offense, but like cloud Sherpas, you know, it was not a widely known brand. And now you've got the big I mean, except yours. You know, not number one, number one or number two. And what what you do on. So that lends an air of credibility. Two customers, they feel the comfort level. You've got global capabilities, got the ability to go deeper. So where do you see >> stay? Tune? It's also validation. I mean, when you're a start up company, that is a tremendous validation that a company like a century, they don't make small bets, you know, they're not going to They're not going to come and try to build a practice around your solution unless they feel like they could make some serious >> coin. So it feels Jason like we're on the cusp of Ah, you know, decade, Plus, you know, opportunity Here. You feel that way? >> I think there are other platforms that kind of paved the way of what you should expect to see out of the service now. But in my opinion service now does it better? Um, you know, I'm envisioning a place where, as service now is moving towards, you know, there's four billion mark that we're moving. We're having comments to our stack to write in that process and and the type of industrialization and rugged ization that you'd expect to see in a digital kind of movement in a digital world, you know, the least single a platform of records, a single place of record. It becomes so important for so many reasons, people adopted service down because the best of what it did, and it's extremely capable platform. But just start layering things like a I and chat bots and some of these things as well, especially a I. It needs a single source of record to make its best decisions. And if you don't have that someplace, you're not going to get the value out of a I. So not only the service now happy automate now very tactically kind of down your Peredo chart, but it's set you up for the future because it gives you that contacts that place where you can warehouse the information and let your automated solutions get in there and kind of ripped and release the best of of the solutions that they have a party available. >> I wonder if we get a riff on the sort of structure of the software business for a minute. I mean, you know, it's much different today. Like you said, everybody's going, going digital. You've got this whole big data trend going on, and a eyes now seems to be really. But if you look at some previous examples, I mean, Salesforce's an obvious example. You got used to have a sales force practice. I still do. I was in your company in your smaller company, and and I guess Oracle is the other one I look at. They had the system of record with the database ago. Probably go back to IBM Devi, too, but it was sort of that database was the main spring, uh, and then you know, Salesforce's sort of came from from C R M. But sales force It seems like there it's not the greatest workflow engine in the world. It seems like there's a lot of called the sex where service now seems to have the potential to really permeate throughout the organization. I wonder if you could give us your perspectives from you know, your your experience and in these businesses, how do you compare service now? Other software companies? >> Well, you know, a lot of software companies. Um, there's a lot of room, right? So it's It's very regular that we see successfactors workday or sales force and service now in office and azure. All kind of kind of sitting in the same place is a W s et cetera. Um, you know, those are just going to be natural. There's gonna be those that grow and scale and those that do not. But one of the things that I think it's most powerful about a service now, is it my opinion? It's got the best workflow capability to span across those different stacks, and that gives you your Swiss army knife, right? That gives you your ability too almost integrate with anything you want to in a meaningful way by directionally uniter, actually etcetera to bring that data in an enriched away into a single repository and then the layer these other things like Aye, aye and chat bots. On top of that, you get that console experience. A lot of the executives I'm talking to you right now are wrestling things with things like universal cues or a single approval Q. Or things of that nature search now does that really easy. That's an easy thing to do. What isn't easy right is making sure you aggregate all those things up in a meaningful way to a single source and then putting in somebody's hand that they can actually do something with contacts. But it's in St John. Donnie in the Kino talked about what? What's cool about centric? Uh, entry is you cross all those different silos where, if you're coming in, is the CIA right amount for your coming in as a marketing automation after you're coming in as a pick, your favorite silo SAS app. You don't have the benefit of being involved in so many kind of cross silo processes where service now came in, uh, check. They said it is our homies, uh, Frankie, So to say so you're already kind of touching, which gives you a better footprint from which to now go up into those. There are many organisations in a business that understand their underlying technology. But tonight, T Wright brothers, they kind of understand the blueprint. But, you know, I've seen a lot of articles about the rise of the chief digital officer. Anything like that. Reality is the CEO is a digital officer. Now, if they're not, they're not gonna be that CEO very long. And they need to be able to work within the context of digitizing everything. >> Well, this gives him a platform to actually deliver that value across the enterprise. So Alright, Jason, Hey, it's great to see you again. Thanks so much for coming on. Sharing your perspectives and congratulations on all the great success and continue. >> Appreciate it. Thank you very much. And >> I keep it right there, buddy. Jeff and I'll be back with our next guest right after this. We're live from service now. Knowledge seventeen. This is cute