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

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are theCUBE. We are the leader in live tech coverage. I'm joined by Landon Cook. He is a director of Customer Service for the State of Tennessee. It's your first time on theCUBE. You're going to live it. >> Okay, great, I hope so. Brand new. >> So, you're a director of Customer Service, before the cameras were rolling, we were talking. Does every state have such a department? >> Not exactly, and even in our department, the idea of customer service being a focal point and the creation of an office for us, it's all brand new. So, my office of customer service didn't even exist until five years ago, and I've had one predecessor in that time. And this all came from a new focus and state government on the Customer Service Delivery Model. And usually we had been focused on federal rules and regulations, audit findings, always being good stewards of taxpayers dollars, but service delivery hadn't come from the mouth of the governor, usually itself. So, this is all pretty new for us, and from peers I talk with in other areas, I may have a contact who is maybe the lead of customer service in their area, but the idea of an office that exclusively exists to improve customer service throughout our department, and eventually throughout the state, I believe we're in new territory here. >> So this is really the baby of your governor, Bill Haslam, who has really said he wanted, what was it, Customer Focus Government. So what does that mean? >> So, Customer Focus Government started right after Governor Haslam came to office, in 2011. The idea behind it, he created an initiative, and he stated that our goal was to provide the best possible customer service, at the lowest possible cost. And again, that may not seem that new in many industries, but in state government, state operations, that was kind of ground breaking. And that's what's led to us talking, actually, about the customer experience, the agent experience, and how can we actually redefine customer service in government? And my department, we are one of 47 state agencies. In my department, I talked just briefly about the history, going back there five years, and you see this slowly popping up in all these different departments, and the idea is that we're all going to, at some point, be able to come together and deliver customer service as a state, instead of as each individual department. We're actually going to be able to share the scope of services, and really tailor service delivery to each citizen's need through a log in portal, there's all sorts of stuff we talk about now that's brand new, I'm sorry. >> So it's helping citizens do their citizenship duties. So this is helping them register to vote, registering at the DMV, getting fishing licenses, building permits, that kinds of thing. So, how do you do it? How do you service now? >> So, we're babies, here. So ServiceNow is, the new CSM solution, for the entire enterprise, for the state of Tennessee. My department, the Department of Human Services, we are the pilot agency for all those 47 I described. And we're about seven months in, so it's all been pretty fresh for us. But how this works right now, is we're using it primarily for inquiry management, phone calls, emails, web forms and chat, things people typically think of as customer service. And so, what we're doing with service now, and we started very carefully, very small, we had a very tiny pilot to start with, but once we launched, after October, we very quickly realized that ServiceNow was so collaborative and cooperative with us, and they were just as engaged in our success as we were, that we were building a partnership with CSM. It's kind of new to ServiceNow, too, right? So, it was new to us, new to them, and we're really kind of intertwining and growing together here. Even though we're using it, just now, for inquiry management and typical customer service delivery, once our department has it fully integrated through all of our various, we have 12 divisions just within our department, once we have it integrated there, we're going to take that model, and we're going to go to other state agencies. We've actually already had, there are three other state agencies that are probably going to be joining on board, if they haven't already. This has been a very fast standup for us. And we're going to, eventually it's going to go from, "Well, wow, DHS delivers great customer service," and then instead, DHS is partnering with the Department of Health to deliver customer service to people who need it. And we'll start, slowly, just putting everyone together so in the future citizens of Tennessee can just ask for assistance with something, and the state knows what they need, and the state knows how to deliver it, and can do all that assignment and sharing in the responsibilities behind the scenes, through ServiceNow. >> Anything you can do to improve the DMV experience. So, I mean, that is the thing. You're trying to make people's lives easier, better, simpler, more streamlined, but what was Haslam's goal? What was his impetus for starting this? >> You know, that's actually a hard one for me to say. I've gathered that, you know, he came from a corporate background. I think he had a different perspective on customer service than what is typical of state government. So he brought something new along with all of his prior experience. And I think he was the first who really made it a priority, because I think he understood that the expectation of the customer is different nowadays, and it's different today than it was yesterday and last year, and it's always growing and changing. And people of my generation, and the generation following me, they're always expecting something to be simpler, faster, and more based on their needs, right? And we, state agencies, have been so slow to react, we still use a log of legacy systems, before we launched with ServiceNow, all of our inquiry management was through Excel spreadsheets and Outlook emails. Those are great tools, but their not designed for CSM. And so, we had done a really deep dive within DHS and within state government, to look at okay, where does customer service need to be focused on? Is it the people? It's not the people, we found out very quickly we have passionate people in the state of Tennessee. It's not the processes, because people are doing what they can, but we needed a tool. So, with Governor Haslam's initiative, and our understanding that we had to find a tool to better deliver service, we came on to ServiceNow, just a year ago. So, I've been smiling ever since. I feel it in my face. >> You're a good advertisement. So, what are some of the improvements that you have seen? >> Even when we were doing just our pilot phase, we launched on October 2nd, and I was talking with a lot of people from ServiceNow then, and from the governor's office, and they said, "Try "to get a snapshot of the before, "and be sure to compare it with the snapshot of afterwards." So I figured two months would be actually sufficient, and we were still in our kind of test and pilot stages, but we knew pretty quickly we wanted to continue on with ServiceNow. So, the two months prior, we were averaging inquiry assignment time, so if you filled out an application or you submitted an inquiry to my unit, the Office of Customer Service, the amount of time it would take to get from the time you submitted it, to a person in the field, or in program, who could actually help with it, that was taking about 36 hours average. Some were faster, some were slower, some reached up to three days, and that's not even a resolution. Sometimes that's just for us to even acknowledge that we got it, that someone's working on it. Afterwards, I looked at those two months following, so October and November, and we were at like eight or nine minute average. And it's because, we knew we wanted something enterprise wide, but we didn't quite anticipate the difference that workflow management would provide us. So all the parts that normally were all these handoffs, and I looked at it last Friday, it was 100 seconds. You know, we've entered new measurement criteria, every time I go back and look at it. >> So it's lightening speed, lightening fast changes. >> Yes, and our resolution time on this has come right on board along side that. We've cut it down to about 30% of what it used to be. We're able to just do our jobs faster, so we can get back to what people coming to DHS to do is, they come here to serve, they come here to try to help people, and this has taken away all that administrative responsibility, so we can do what we're actually good at. >> Well, we're going to look forward to hearing what it is, next year at Knowledge19. Thanks so much for joining us, Landon it was great having you on theCUBE >> I appreciate it >> I'm Rebecca Knight. We'll have more from ServiceNow Knowledge18, and theCUBE's live coverage just after this. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone. You are watching theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Tom Yates. He is the Deputy CIO of Howard County. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Sure. It's great to be here. >> Tell our viewers a little bit about your role. >> I'm the Deputy CIO for Howard County, and anything that you receive in terms of services, from a county government from trash pick up, to emergency responder services, police, fire, emergency notification, rec and parks, all of those departments are our clients inside our IT. >> Okay so you've just, that's absolutely, you just painted this version of being a citizen, and all of the things that you go to, all the services that you receive, so now tell me the idea that you had in the CIO department to change that. >> Well it started with pain, so when I started about three years ago, our IT department really didn't know what we didn't know, in terms of what was on our network. I was the new guy, and I started running the change management meeting, which is an internal IT meeting, and I approved a change that ended up causing a four hour outage. That's when we really started looking for a platform that would give us visibility into our network. It really started out internal IT, focus on uptime. I got a demo of Discovery from a vendor in the area, and I was hooked at that point because that's exactly what I was looking for to run these change meetings. I want to know what's connected to what. I want to be able to map business services to our particular configuration items. That was really important to me but then once you start getting into the platform, it's very sticky, and it's very work flow oriented and you see all of these processes across your organization that are siloed, that are paper based, and so we just saw the platform as a great place to aggregate that type of work flow and business process automation and it sort of evolved from there and what we have recently thought about is a way to connect our citizens to a portal using the CSM platform that would allow them to have one place, one sign on where they could go in and have access to the full range of services that our county government provides. >> How will that work? I mean, can you describe what it's like to be a citizen in Howard County? >> Sure Howard County, for those of you who don't know, is located right between Washington DC and Baltimore. We're a fairly affluent county. The citizenry is very connected and involved and they have high expectations of government. We provide services like trash, water bills, you name it. People will come on to our website and they'll want to pay their water bill, or they want to check the status of a permit, or a license request that they have, or they'll want to get information on their property tax bills. Just normal stuff. You have to go to different system and have a different login account for each one of those services. So the feedback that we're getting, and for me as well as a Howard County citizen, is that's not really the best way to present our county. What if there were a way to have a single sign on and provide access with transparency and accountability, where you could go in and see the status of your permit request in real time without having to call anyone, because the younger you are the less desire you have to talk on the telephone. We're looking at different ways to interact with our citizens and to have government be there when they are ready to interact with government, not when government is ready to be interacted with. >> And government has a tough reputation. I mean, you think about any government, any time you have to interact with the government it's tedious, it's time consuming, it's inefficient. What is your, sort of, mission in all of this? What's your over arching objective? >> I would like to treat our citizens like they're human beings. >> That's a worthy goal. >> I have a memory of what it's like to go to the DMV and wait in line and not be treated as customer service oriented as you feel like you should be treated. One of the nice things that we have in our county is our government employees really care and we're looking to build some of these automations so that they don't get distracted by the busy work, and they can really focus on what matters and what matters is taking care of our clients, the citizens of the county. >> Are you hoping that it will drive civic engagement, too? >> Absolutely, so one of the things that we're doing is we're piloting a CSM implementation for one of our council districts. Howard County's broken into five council districts and the council is like the legislative branch. The county executive is like the governor. They all receive questions, issues, complaints from the citizens that are in their particular districts and we're looking at having this platform as a way for the citizens to interact with their legislators as well as report trees down, pot holes, and things like that. Where then the council person interacts back with the administration, so it can get really interesting. Especially if you have state legislators that are involved that are outside of our county. So now we have external resources and finding out, just discovering the work flows of what the process is to most efficiently take care of some of these issues, is the information that we're looking to extract put in a business process, and then automate that work flow. >> Now, how are you going to measure the return on investment? Is it really just shortening the time to value or how else are you thinking about how you're going to measure it's value? >> With government measuring, value is a lot different than it is in the private industry. What I look for inside IT is uptime. If there is a tool that we can have that will prevent us from shooting ourselves in the foot in IT, and accidentally causing an outage, that has value. That's actual value in terms of people's hours of lost productivity that we can not have. In terms of value to the citizens, I think it would be you hear the feedback from people that they're able to interact with the government more smoothly and efficiently and have that level of transparency and accountability that people, during election cycles, talk about. Then after the election, we need to deliver. >> How are you at this this conference? I mean, you hear so much about customers being here, this is a really customer centric event. Are you talking to other customers, learning from them? Are best practices emerging? Are you getting ideas that you're going to take back with you to Howard County? >> Absolutely, and I have a lot of friends in local government and state government that are here, but I get more value really talking from the commercial clients because we are going to be, just by definition of government, a little bit farther back on the adoption curve. For a government I think we're on the cutting edge, but there are things that are being done by private companies. I saw what Comcast is doing and Comcast is another one of the companies that has a reputation. (host laughing) I'll leave it at that. >> Don't get me started. >> But they're taking active measures to improve their customer response, and as a Comcast customer I totally appreciate that because I would have issues sometimes, finding the time to block off, say an hour, to be on a call with Comcast during business hours, right? So, the things that they're doing are really cool. Chatbot, machine learning, AI to help people self-discover what the answers to common problems are. Building knowledge into their platform. I think seeing that and seeing how I, as a customer, interact with that and appreciate that, we just take that and flip it over to the government side. >> What's next for you? >> Well, I would really like to get that 311 system. It's going to be a journey because we do have a lot of systems with a lot of different logins. I think the step that we would like to take first is create that portal where the citizen can register, and then after that we just take the applications that they're using, and we bring them in behind the covers. So, we're basically skinning those applications with one login. It might be a little clunky at the beginning until we get them more integrated. Over time, the idea is we just drive that traffic to that one location, so regardless of what new service we offer or what you're looking for, you'll know that there's one place that you can go to get it and you get it when you want it, not when we want to give it to you. >> Finally, we've heard so much about this transforming role of the of the CIO, and it's a much broader role today than it was even five or ten years ago. What's your personal experience with that? >> I have been with Howard Country government for three years and during those three years, I've seen a big change in the way IT is viewed inside government because we are now business partners with our client departments, as opposed to that shop that you call when something's broken, or I need a computer. Technology is everywhere now and I think it's so permeated, every facet of our organization, that people want to have those conversations now. They want to say, what can we do with technology that could help us. Especially in the age of budget freezes and hiring freezes. Everybody needs to do more with less and the only way to do that consistently is with technology. >> Tom, that's a great final note to close on. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, it's been really fun talking to you. >> Thank you. My pleasure. >> I'm Rebecca Knight. This has been theCUBE's coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18. (energetic music playing)

>> (announcer) Live from Las Vegas: It's the Cube covering service now knowledge 2018 brought to you by Service Now. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is the Cube: the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, and, we extract the signal from the noise. This is day 3 of Service Now Knowledge, k18. The hashtag is #Know18. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Jeff Frick. Chris Anderson is here she's the managing director of Delloit, running the telecommunications, media, and technology practice. Welcome to the cube, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much, glad to be here. >> So, Delloit, awesome company, we had some of your colleagues on earlier. You guys have deep industry expertise. Global scale, leading digital transformations. First of all, what's your role, and let's get into it. >> Sure, so, I work in, as you mentioned, RTMC practice, full of acronyms, right? Mostly focused in the telecom space, and I've been in the telecom space for about 20 years. I'm really driving large scale transformation of the operations: how do we make the business more effective, how do we improve the overall customer experience, right, and how do we make sure that as new technology comes online in tel-cos, that that's seamless to customers, and that they don't fell the disruption, if you will, right, of the large leaps that tel-cos are making. >> Well, so, help us understand the basics of tel-co, um, you've got cost per bit coming down, you got data growing like crazy, you have over the top providers just bogarding the network, tel-co infrastructure is fossilized, um, wow, You must have a lot to do. >> Well we all want to watch the basketball game as we walk from the floor, to our car, into the house right >> 24/7, right, so, major, major challenges, which is great opportunity for you and Delloit. >> Absolutely. >> But give us your perspective on the state of the state in the industry. >> Sure, so I think it's funny you say the basics of tel-co, 'cause I think that's the hard part about tel-co, is it's not really basic, like, everyone expects that communications are there real time, right, and there's always going to be, we'll call it tone, right, but I think now it's at a whole new level, right, I think the challenge now for tel-co is mobility, right, I mean the pace of mobility, right, the massive proliferation of devices right, and sensors that are all connected. And so I think that now, I think the basics of tel-co. the game has changed, right, tel-co used to be it's own vertical, right, and now. it's really its own horizontal, right, enabling smart health, smart cities, right, many other industries, and I think that's the challenge for tel-co, and, it's become the new basic, if you will, it's not just the network for dial tone, right, it's about a true enabler for industry, right, and communications in real time right across the board. >> So, tel-co, that's really interesting, how you positioned that, so, tel-co has a dual agenda. >> Yes. >> The horizontal technology platform, and maintaining the verticle, not getting disrupted, so can it, can tel-co pull off that dual agenda? >> I think it has to, right, because to the point verticle, it used to be that they were the straight line,right, they provided the service and they were directly linked to the end customer, right, and, now, there are lots of other content aggregators and providers in that space, and so it's getting harder and harder for tel-cos to really maintain connectivity to their end customer, right, so they've also got to be an important part of the value chain, right, and other businesses, so I think they have to do both in parallel to stay relevant, but I think that's what makes kind of an, part of our work with servicenow, and how it comes in is the focus on customer service management, right, and really the part about the network, right, is the critical underpinning for tel-co, but if you ask tel-co network people, they say that is the experience, right. That's how I get the experience, right, is the speed of the network, right. I can't have any latency, it's always available, right, for it to enable these mission critical, mission critical things. >> Amazing, and you have these things coming up like, 5G, and industrial internet of things, you know, and we, we did a nice piece with a company that had a remote operation of autonomous vehicle. So, you know, they're driving the car from the office while we're in the car. Business case being take care of the edge cases on autonomous vehicles, so, latency becomes a really important thing with car brakes, and these things, so the opportunity and the challenges are only going to grow with this kind of next big leap that we're going to see built up around the 5G capability. >> Yeah, I think the move to 5G will be transformational, for the industry, right? And, really, 'cause now, you know, you expect your communications to work but you get frustrated, like, if your phone doesn't work, or your internet's not working, you just get frustrated, right, if your autonomous, you know, self driving vehicle is not working, right, or you've got a mission critical device, right, helping your heart beat, right, those are, those are different things, right, in a kind mission criticality that I think 5G introduces the potential for, right, will really change the game, right, but also makes it critical that you understand that full path of the network connectivity, and the services to the customer, right, 'cause if you're not in control of that full path to delivery there's no way to guarantee, right, the mission criticality that 5G` can deliver on. >> Right, so Chris, how does your work, um, what's your focus with the tel-cos? How does it intersect with what you're doing with service now, and how does it ultimately benefit consumers? >> Sure, so my focus, really, in the tel-co space has been in, in what tel-cos call "BSS",right, which are business support systems, or really, the front office. So, from, you know, helping customers from, the time of quoting, right, or ordering services, all the way through to fulfillment and delivery of them, right, I think that's the intersection, really, that is important to us with servicenow, right, our work with servicenow, to date, like many organizations, has been kind of in the IT service management space, HR, more on the enterprise, right, but not truly the heart of the business, right, and where we're really focused is, you know, working with servicenow to bring them into the heart of the business of tel-cos, right, and really change the game, right, I think one of the hot, one of the benefits in what I do, which is large scale transformation, most of these take years, right, two to three years before customers see any benefit of transition from one platform to another, right, and we've already been able to do some work with servicenow right, and our partnership, that you can see the benefit in months, right with a lot less risk, so it's really kind of taking the long term experience that I've had with the traditional industry players, right, and creating agility, right, and transformation from taking that from years to months, right, reducing the risk profile, right, and really creating an amazing experience across the value chain. >> Great benefits Dave: less risk and faster. >> Well, well, so I want to bring that back to sort of what we were talking about earlier: I mentioned the over top, top providers, when I think about my experience with interacting with, Netflix for example, I don't talk to their sales department, or their customer service department or their maintenance. I just interact with Netflix. Is that the vision for where you're trying to take tel-cos? >> I think it's part of it, right? 'Cause to your point, if the service I'm getting, works like it should, I don't want to talk to anybody. Right, like, I think that historically, we think of customer service and customer service management as I call somebody and how do they help me. Right, and I think the next generation of good service is how do I make sure they don't need to call me. >> No calls. >> Right, no calls, right, how does this work, and how do I stay on top of it, and I understand anything that might be degrading the experience and I get my arms around that, and so I think the new generation of customer service management is understanding, right, those things and kind of having a full and immediate view, and being able to take action quickly, and I think the kind of customer service management solution is important. We've been building out what we're calling an end to end service assurance solution ,right, with the servicenow team, and that really lets us look at from the time that an issue is detected, which could be customer degrading, all the way through to resolution. Right, to be able to own that path right to closure right, and really have real time visibility, and the ability to act and the ability to see those metrics and really manage your business real time. >> Well we hear that all the time: going from kind of a historical look at data, and reacting to being a little bit more, um, predictive, but then ultimately being more prescriptive, so you're, you see, you see, the development of the problem before the problem becomes a big problem. >> And I think that that is the future of customer service, and its going to be critical, right, as we pivot to 5G and we've got mission critical services running on that network that we really get this right, so. >> How about the event here, um, what are your takeaways? You're hearing a lot about what I call machine intelligence, AI, um Dev Ops, I mean all kinds of cool tech going around, but what's resonating with you Chris? >> So, probably say the opposite of what everyone's saying so I hear that but like we spent a little bit of time with a client yesterday right and we were talking about machine learning and artificial intelligence, and they say okay that's great so I can, you know, how do I take the emails that come from somebody written in a third language trying to write them in english, and what's the challenge of how do I get artificial intelligence to figure out what that issue is, and go act on it right, and so I think, I think these technologies are exciting, but I think we also have to pay a lot of attention to the basics right and not think that there is a shortcut right to providing the service and the mission criticality so to me I still think in terms of really enabling the front office that they're early days I think its certainly worth the investment but I think part of it is just looking critically at the business remember that the service and the service levels right are really driving right and we keep pushing the technology to catch up but I'm I would not I haven't seen a lot of tel-cos in the front office where experience is concerned be early adopters because that's the least the last risk that you want to take. >> But that's a great example, though, because that's a very specific use case where you would like to see more intelligence applied, and I think that's really the key as well where can we get the value as opposed to a generic dead smart person named thing that kind of exists, right, here is a specific problem, can we use AI and machine learning to help us solve that specific problem. >> Because what we, I think what we know is that if I have a sensor on a device and it picks up an issue I can start acting on that immediately, right, the ones that are much harder to act on are the ones that people report and then have to be translated right to figure out the action that needs to be taken but guess what there's still the same SOA attached to it right so how do I really advance you know artificial intelligence to really be able to move that forward in a much faster and reliable way right to the point where businesses will take a bet on it, so >> Alright we'll give you the last word Chris what should we know about, you know Delloit, kind of a bumper sticker, um, you know, your servicenow practice and tel-co what's your take-aways? >> So, um, I think, I think the magic, right, of the partnership and where we're really trying to take it is the fusion of our truly deep industry experience right and folks that have been in and around for 20 years, and using the servicenow solution in new ways right, and really again bringing it to the core of the value chain right, and, and frankly disrupting a lot of the industry solutions that have been out there that have gotten quite set in their ways like we see so many of our clients that don't have good answers right then they're paralyzed right trying to look at all the solutions that are there, and not finding anything that they like, and I think that's the magic that we're trying to bring to the partnership and really disrupt the game. >> Awesome. Well thanks for coming. Thank you I appreciate it guys. >> Alright keep it right there everybody listen you want to go to a couple of resources I want to give you for some great free content go to theCube.net, you'll see all the videos here, go to youtube.com/siliconangle subscribe to that channel, get notified of all the action we're at all the shows um siliconeangle.com for all the news wikibomb.com is a research site so check those out keep it right there everybody well be back with our next guest right after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, and we extract the signal from the noise. We're here at Knowledge18, ServiceNow's big customer event. 18,000 ServiceNow practitioners and partners and constituents here. As I say, this is day three. This is our sixth year at Knowledge. Jeff Frick and I are co-hosting. When we started in 2013 early on, we saw this ecosystem grow, and one of the first CIOs we had on from the ServiceNow customer base was Link Alander, who is here. He's the Vice Chancellor of College Services at Lone Star College. Link, always a pleasure. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming back on. >> It's always great to get back and talk with you, see what's happening in the industry, and follow you. But, once again, great conference. >> It really is, I mean, wow. Last year was huge. The growth keeps coming. We said that Dan Rogers, the CMO, K18, 18,000. How ironic. >> Yeah, wow, let's see, your first was six years ago, right? >> Dave: Yep, it was 2013. So my first would have been New Orleans, which had been I think 2012, 2011. >> Right, right, the year before we met 'em. >> Three to four thousand in this conference. Actually, that might be the high count. >> Yeah, I mean, it's quite amazing. And the ecosystem has exploded. What's your take on how, not only ServiceNow and the ecosystem have grown, but how it's affected your business? >> Let's start with the, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's start with the ecosystem part because, really, you've got so many more partners out there now. You've got so many more integration points. What was really exciting as we saw this morning with Pat, and some of the enhancements they're doing on the DevOps side, but also what we're going to see with the ability to integrate our cloud linkage, which is really the challenge for everybody as a practitioner today. How do you bring all these cloud services? I've got quite a few of them in my environment. How do I actually integrate those in with my ServiceNow, with my ERP, with all of the other instances? So, seeing what they're doing in that space is great. From the business standpoint, when we came onto ServiceNow, we came on like everybody else, a journey for IT service management. Can we improve our services? Can we help our customers out? In our case, that'd be our faculty and staff. What we didn't realize was the opportunity that came to us with the platform. And one of the first things we did when we brought the platform back to us was we built an app for students. We built a way to help students out with their student financial aid. Now I've got, I think we're roughly at about nine of our areas that are using Enterprise Service Management. I just came back from giving a presentation about legal, and what we've done in the legal space to where that's helped the organization to move forward faster. So that's really cool in what it does, but it also elevates the position of IT in the organization. It really does bring us forward. >> Yeah so, let's talk a little about Lone Star College, 'cause I love your model, you know, and we can both relate. Kids in college, and, you know, the cost of education, the ROI, which I think is a big focus of what you guys provide for your students, so how's that going? How's the model working? >> Well the model's working great. And you know, you hear the pressures out there, 'cause one of the first thing is, how do you help a student complete. So, we're really very focused on student completion, but then now, you've got another focus that, well, it's been there, but it's really getting stronger, on gainful employment. So not only that, how do you get a student in college, how do they complete on time, but then how do they come out and have a livable wage, an earnable wage? And so I'll give a plug on that always because that's what we're focused on. Whether you're just coming to us to transfer to another institution or whether you're coming in the workforce. And we have a very strong workforce development, and one of the things I got out of this conference that I've been working on for quite awhile was for us to become a ServiceNow train, to get that integrated into our curriculum. And I was really excited. We've talked to them before about this, and it's been a discussion, but now what we're looking at is a program that they put in France where they have a six week program that if people are going out of there, coming in, six weeks later, job retrained, 100% placement. A year later, they have 98% retention, and those 2% just went to another company. So I can't think of a better opportunity for us from our standpoints in our workforce development. And I'm really excited we're going to be starting to move that forward now. >> It's interesting to hear John Donahoe on Tuesday talk about their measurement of customer success. And we were asking him on theCUBE, well, your customers measure success in a lot of different ways, so how do you take that input? Your measurement of success is student success, as you just have indicated. >> Absolutely, absolutely. You know, my focus has always been is IT is just a support operation. We're not the mission of the college. And that's important. Because as long as we have that mindset, we realize that it's us helping the faculty to less stress on their life, or the staff, then we've improved their experience, which will improve the student experience. The same goes for the administrative systems. We want administrative systems to have a user interface that's intuitive to today's student. It wasn't designed by a person that was intuitive to today's student. So we have that challenge, and that's what I liked about the change this year and the user interface in ServiceNow and where they're going with UI and UX, and how much of an enhancement that makes for our customers. But it's also, that's the changes that are happening in industry right now. Coach K was at the CIO Decisions, and he was talking about he's headed to go through all this process, and 50 forward years of difference, and he's recruiting 18-year-olds, and he's sending emojis to them, his recruits. But like, yeah, because you have to relate to it. So, we started a process, and this is where coming to a conference like this helps me a lot, because it's like, yeah, I went down the right path. But my team came to me, and I've got a phenomenal team. They came to me and said, you know what, we really need to look at UI, UX, and design thinking. And I'm like, okay. Now let's discuss what we really want to do with this. One group was wanting design thinking to think about analytics. What does the customer need? How do they want to see this data come to them? And how can they make data-informed decisions? Well, we have then rolled that same design thinking into, how do we roll out the fluid technologies in our ERP? How do we become more of a user interface that today's student wants, to what we're trying to do next in mobile? >> That's a really interesting take, because we talk often about millennials entering the workforce, right? And consumerization of IT and expectations. But they're usually a pretty small and growing percentage of the workforce at a particular company. For you, it's like 90% of your customer base, right? And they're on the bleeding edge. They're coming in there 18, 17 years old. So you got to be way out front on this customer experience. So have you really taken that opportunity to redesign that UI, UX, and interface to the applications? That must be a giant priority. >> We've done a lot of incremental items, but really it's been a huge priority for us for the last, we have two really cool items coming down the path. One is the UI UX experience. How do we transform the student experience? The next is a process that our academic success side, the student services side have gone down, with guided pathways. Okay, you and I went to college. What did we do? We saw an advisor every single time we registered. Then we up to the thing, and we filled in a bubble sheet, right? >> Right, right. >> Well right now, the students are registering on a mobile phone while they're sitting down at a Starbucks. They're not seeing an advisor. We want them to see an advisor. So we push them those directions, but this guided pathway says, you know what, I want to do this degree. Then we just line out, here's the classes you're going to take, and whether we use program enrollment, whatever methodology, we can help guide them in their pathway to success and completion, which is a big difference. And that's what needs to happen today. >> Right, well it's interesting, I always like to talk about banking, right? 'Cause banking, you used to go see the banker, go into the teller, and, you know, deposit your check and get your cash. And now most people's experience with their bank is via electronic, whether it's online, on their phone, or their app. You have kind of the dichotomy, 'cause they still have their interaction with the teachers. So there's still a very people element, but I would imagine more and more and more of that administrative execution, as you just described, is now moving to the mobile platform. That's the way they interact with the administration of the school. >> Well, that's their expectation. So, that's what we have to deliver, and it's a challenge because we have resources, we have limitations in resources or capabilities, but it's really keeping that focus going to where you look at it. So as we're doing this UI UX right now, one of our major goals is going to be to bring students in the engagement as we go through the design process, and get their feedback. Not computer science people, not IT people. We want the normal student that's going to go register for a class. And since what you have is such a large transient population, you know, two years, they're in, they're done. 100,000 per semester. 160,000 unique each year. You've got to create that rich experience, but the engagement, the bonding to the institution. And I like the bank for an example because not too long ago I switched banks because I didn't like their app. >> Dave: Absolutely. >> And it's easy to do, it's real easy to do. >> Airlines, you appreciate the good apps. >> Link: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. >> How does ServiceNow contribute to that user experience, that, your customer experience? >> Well right now from the student side, they don't see much of ServiceNow. They can submit requests, and we can handle their incidents, and those types of items. They have certain things. We have the student financial aid. But it really is about the Enterprise Service Management philosophy. I think if you go back to one of theCUBEs, maybe two or three years ago, I said, "Who would have ever thought they would come to IT to talk about service delivery?" Okay? Now, everybody at Enterprise is like, okay, how do you do this? How do you not let things fall through the crack? So that the legal app was a great one, because that was a challenge that our general council or our COO had when he came in. Everything was falling through the crack. So they worked through their workflows. They built a process. And then they built, we built an app for them in ServiceNow that handles everything. Now when I'm in a cabinet meeting, I get to hear about how legal's doing so great. I'm like, what about me? I think we're still doing a good job. (laughing) >> Well, Link, I'm curious too on, kind of the big theme has always been at this show kind of low code, no code developing, right? Enable people that aren't native coders to build apps, to build workflows. How has that evolved over time within your organization? >> Well, we still want to make sure when we're putting out code. What it's enabled for us is, of course, our developers, it makes it easier to get to time to completion of a project. But we still want to make sure that whatever's built is production ready. You know, so we're not opening up the tool case to everybody. (laughing) But, sad to say, I actually still go in, and I'll build my dashboards, and I'll build my interaction, and I use my performance analytics, which does enable people. And we're seeing that in some of our heavier Enterprise Service Management side, but as far as letting them dive into the no code environment, I still have to put some protection on us. And like any organization, we always have to think of IT security. That's the other piece of it. What are they putting out there? What could be a violation of privacy? How do we handle that? >> Jeff: Right. >> So, we stay completely engaged, but the speed to deliver is what the change is. Our legal app was a three month development project. Three months to go from a, they had a separate system. And to go through the process, redesign it, build it, and put it in production. Three months. >> Three months? >> How many people, roughly? How many people did it take to get there? >> Well, we use a development partner that used three, and then I had two at the time on my own. I still have only three individuals that actually handle our, that are primary to ServiceNow in my organization, as large as our installation base is. >> Really? And that includes the permeation of ServiceNow into the rest of the organization, or? >> Link: Yes. >> Dave: Really? >> 'Cause I added, and before that, if it has been last year, it was one and a half. >> Dave: Wow. >> That's what I had then. And technically, I probably have only two and a half because one person has another job, which is running our call center. >> So what are you using now? You got obviously ITSM, what else is in there? >> ITSM, ITBM, we got a great presentation we gave earlier on project portfolio management, and what we've done with that. And where we're going next. Business operations. We're actually launching this summer, if everything goes right. This is more of an internal, us doing it, but what I've been doing is I've been taking our contract management piece, utilization, incidents request change, and project. Now I'm going to roll it in and then do analytics against it to come back with what is the total cost per service per month per individual. On every license contract I hold. >> It's funny, the contract management software licensing management piece is a huge untapped area that we hear over and over and over again. >> So, two years ago we talked a lot about security. I think ServiceNow just at that point had announced its intentions to get into that business. What do you make of their whole SecOps modules, and is it something you've looked at? State of security, any comments? >> Well this is one of those situations I think we're just a little bit too far ahead of them again. 'Cause we actually had built a modular ourself that handled what we needed. In my environment, I've got an ISO, but I also have the partners that support us. My SOC is operated by a third party. So they feed in the alerts. We ingest the alerts into the security module, and then we take action from there. So basically, they were about, a little bit behind us. And we had just looked at the model saying we need a better way to manage that event. >> So you got that covered. Yeah, I want to ask you, you know, a couple years ago we, when the big data meme was hitting, we were, of course, asking you all these data questions. Now the big theme is AI, and in some regards it's like, same wine, new bottle. But it's different. What's your thoughts on machine intelligence? Obviously ServiceNow talking about it a lot. How applicable is it to you? >> Okay, so. (laughing) >> You know why, that's good. I had to ask. >> Augmented intelligence. Let's just not make it artificial, okay? 'Cause I, when Fred had that conversation during the fireside and he said, you know, a computer takes 10,000 images to know what a cat is. And of course, the computer's a mundane object that can look at 10,000 images to determine that's a cat. You showed me the other ones earlier today, I about rolled over laughing. >> It's allowed on the blueberry, check it out. >> You know, augmented intelligence is going to be a driver. There's no question about it. What we saw on the interface about it abled to, as the machine learning goes through the process, it's picking up the information, and it's helping the agent to get to the resolution faster, that's great. Knowledge bases that are integrated in with that. Can you think about how much quicker it would be for somebody like myself who's going to go to a chatbot, and I'm going to run through a chatbot in automated intelligence and do that type of work. So that's going to make a significant difference. One of the areas we think they will be dramatic, for especially this generation, the millennials coming into the school, will be to put that augmented intelligence in, in that process. Because, trying to explain to a student, you know, yeah, you go to the registrar's office to take care of this, and you go to the bursar's office to take, they have no clue what those mean. Well, if we can take it to their language, but then also add in augmented intelligence to guide them through those navigation points. So augmented intelligence over the next years, it's taking that big data now, it's actually put into use, all that machine learning, and making something happen out of it. >> You know, digital is one of those things where I actually think the customers led the vendor community. So often in the IT business, and the technology business in general, a lot of vendor hype, whether it's hyper converged or software to fund, they kind of jam it down our throats, and then sort of get it adopted. I almost feel like, you've been doing digital for awhile now because your student force has sent you in that direction. And I feel like the vendor community is now catching up, but is that a right perception? I mean that, the digital is certainly real, and then you guys are leaning in in a big way. >> I think between the three of us we could probably come up with all the different hype words that have been used, and probably fill this room with every one of those words, right? But the reality is, as practitioners, you're looking at what is your customer base, what do you need to be able to deal with. So, we've been into digital transformation, absolutely. Is it a good definition? Was cloud a good definition? I mean, what am I really? It's either I'm going to use software as a surface, a platform as a sur, I have a gigantic private cloud. Okay, that's great. We're talking about high availability and scalability. But when you put all those in, we've been in a digital transformation everywhere. Your banks did it, that's why you have a bank app. Airplanes did it because, you know, what was that ticketing system they used to use? >> Dave: Yeah, Sabre. >> Sabre, that's what it was, oh yeah. It's probably still out there somewhere. But the reality is, is that, if you're not transforming digitally, you're going to get left behind. And even some big IT companies, and I'm sure we got a list of those bit IT companies also, that have fallen off the face of the earth, or are struggling to stay on because they didn't go through that digital transformation. They tried to do the same thing the same way and move forward. You can't do that. >> You know, you just reminded me. I just got a, hey, it's been awhile since I goofed on Nick Carr, but you remember, as a CIO, Does IT Matter? Right, in the early 2000s, that book. I mean, IT matters more than ever, right? I mean, Nick Carr obviously very accomplished, but missed it by a mile. >> Well, it's funny 'cause then IT was a support organization. Now that IT is an integrated piece in the way that everything just happens, right? It's not keeping the lights on and support so much anymore. >> I can't remember who brought that up in the keynote. Talking about the fact that, basically, we permeate the organization, okay? 'Cause there's not a function that they're doing that doesn't have some type of IT. And the question is are you sewing it together correctly. Because in the end, what are they going to want? Well, you want a seamless student experience. You want a seamless employee experience. Nobody's perfect, everything needs improvement. I'll always say that. But then at the same time is, you want that data to be all tied together so you can take advantage of big data. You can take advantage of machine learning. And then you can come back and report on it. You know, what we've done, so I guess three years ago is when I took over. I was put in charge of our analytics team. And our focus was unlocking the data so that people could have access and make decisions that are informed. You know, it's not data driven. We need to see the data, look at it, and come forward from there. So things like what ServiceNow did in performance analytics. Our general council highlighted the performance analytics as soon as we, we missed it, as he said. We put it in the first app, we didn't do it. We needed to add it. So we added it in. And he's like, wow, what I always thought was one thing. But now that I'm seeing the data, and I'm seeing the patterns, it's totally different. Because we have assumptions just 'cause we think we're busy. Performance analytics is letting him see exactly what's happening in his organization. >> Let me ask you a question. If somebody on your staff, let's say somebody that you mentored, came up to you and said, "Listen, Link, I really want to be a CIO. I mean, it's my aspiration. What advice would you give me?" >> Well, it's kind of hard when you ask this one, because I've mentored and then partnered, I wouldn't even call it mentored anymore, a great friend of mine, and he's now a CIO at Spellman in Georgia, yeah. In fact I was just chatting with him earlier because I saw something, I was like, hey, you need to check this out. It'll solve your problem. You know, it's a simple key fact. If you want to be in IT, you've got to be agile. You really have to be agile. You can't be rigid. You can't close those doors and keep your focus, and you have to constantly learn. If you don't just constantly learn, then you fall off. And that's something, when we talk about digital transformation and these companies that haven't made the transformation, that aren't here anymore, they stopped learning. They thought they had it. It's the companies that have actually continued to learn, or the CIOs or people coming up the ranks that look at it. And they look at things differently. It really is. The digital transformation is about keeping the CIO transformed, and every one of the staff. Had a discussion not too long ago with one CIO about how does he energize his staff. He's trying to do a transformation, but his staff is entrenched in the old way we did things. And, you know, sometimes you just have to shake things and get 'em excited about this piece of it. And a lot of times, if you're especially in a college, I have the luck of bringing a student in. What was your experience with that application? What did you think about it? They think it's the greatest thing they've ever created. But when you get it in front of a student, it can be something totally different. So, the biggest one right there, you got to have agility, you got to constantly learn, and you really, you know I might have a laser focus about things, I have a very agile planning model I use, but at the same time is I try to keep the door open to any possibilities. >> Well, Link, you're a great leader, and a friend of theCUBE. Can't thank you enough for making some time out of your busy schedule to come back on. Great to see you again. >> Jeff: Good seeing ya. >> It was great seeing you again, as always. As always. >> Alright, keep it right here, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. We're live from Las Vegas, ServiceNow Knowledge18. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18 live from Las Vegas. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Raja Renganathan, he is the Vice President of Cloud Services at Cognizant Technology Solutions. I should say welcome back, it's not just welcome, it's welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you Rebecca. >> So tell our viewers a little bit about Cognizant Technology. What does your company do and what do you do there? >> I head the cloud services for Cognizant in the capacity of a vice president. Cognizant is a world-leading professional services company. Our objective is to help our clients to navigate the shift to digital. We have three pillars: go to market, we have Cognizant Digital Business which focuses on the user experience, data related, and we have the Cognizant Digital Operations which is predominantly a middle-office, back-end processing in an enterprise, and the third pillar is Cognizant Digital Systems and Technology which is basically modernizing the platform systems that is required to create the digital foundation. >> And you're also just this week been called a Certified Global Partner of ServiceNow so explain how that works. >> Our relationship with ServiceNow goes back six years. Today I think the ServiceNow line of business, which is under the cloud services, is one of the fastest-growing business unit for us. The key thing in any platform such as ServiceNow is the human intellectual capital. That is where we give a lot of importance. While technology is created by ServiceNow, someone has to go execute and implement the technology. So that's where we spent time and started hiring people, re-skilling the people, and then getting certified across different facets of what ServiceNow recommends as a part of their education system. So today we have about 850 plus certified people across the globe and we also do the delivery across our global operation centers, we also call it as RDCs, Regional Delivery Centers, we have one in Budapest, one in Phoenix, and one in Buenos Aires. So all these three centers caters to different service areas of ServiceNow. As a part of this RDC we're also adding, creating an experience zone, a ServiceNow experience zone, so when client walks in they not only see our associates working on projects, but they also get the panoramic view or the panoramic experience of how ServiceNow orchestration happens, how automation happens, how HR module works, and things like that. Because of the people we have, in terms of re-skilling and certification, we are being measured as the best overall global partner award yesterday in Knowledge18. >> Well congratulations. When you were searching for these people, as you said you had to so a lot of hiring, what were the kind of skills you were looking for when you were trying to find the top talent? >> If you look at Cognizant as a 265,000 plus organization we know the art of hiring people. >> And it is an art, it absolutely is an art. >> So our approach is, one we go to the campus, hire the fresh grads in all of the campus. If you look at of late the kids that are coming out of the campus, they are pretty smart in the sense of they come with the latest digital technologies, artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing understanding, and things like that. So we take them and then we, within 30 days, we completely format them for ServiceNow. This is one approach. The second approach is we go to the lateral market and we hire and we bring them up to speed on the ServiceNow-related technologies. The third option is, with 265,000 people we have, the raw material is inside Cognizant, so we take people from other business units, other domain and then try to format them and to do that. But of late what we have started, especially within the U.S. footprint, is we go to all the community colleges and also we go to all the veteran's associations, those type of organizations and we hire them. So if you look at our Phoenix RDC, I'm proud to say that it is a woman-powered delivery center, when it comes to ServiceNow, with a pretty good mix of veterans. So these are the different approaches we use to hire people towards the ServiceNow practice. >> And they've been successful. >> They have been successful and if you look at how long can they continue in ServiceNow 'til they retire? No, so we do job rotation, every three years we give them opportunity. I have a unique advantage since I run the cloud services. I always rotate my people from ServiceNow to go to Amazon or to Microsoft as you're in different technologies every 24 to 36 months we do the job rotation. In that way I think I'm managing my retention well. >> So we know that the role of IT is really changing in so many organizations around the world. What are you hearing from customers, what are their pain points? What are the challenges that you're trying to solve? >> I think that's a great question now, Rebecca. We are in a very interesting time. The customers have a tremendous problem in their hand because they need to stay relevant in their business because business models are changing and if you look at for a retailer, the competition is not from the same industry. Similar for a pharmaceutical company, the competition is not from the same pharma industry. Everybody wanted to know, a pharma company wanted to know why Google is hiring 100 physicians. So the disruption is going to happen not in your industry, outside your industry. So that is the biggest challenge. The second thing is they need to continue to reinvent their business model. They cannot operate. We are hearing many stories like a lot of regional stores are closing because they didn't stay relevant to the business, to the customers. The third thing if you look at, let's take healthcare industry. Typically patients expect, historically, they were asked to maintain their prescription and medical records, but today in the new age patients are expecting the hospitals to manage everything because keep the data and intelligently apply the data because data is the new fuel or new oxygen, whatever you want to call it. >> Fuel, oxygen, one of those analogies. >> Data is going to play a critical role for any business. So every business is looking for how do I take the data and apply it intelligently? In the process how do I elevate experience? When I say experience it's both customer experience and also employee experience. So that's why if we look at, going back to the purpose of ServiceNow when John Donahoe was presenting in the keynote, he said, "We are in the world to make people's work better." The work is basically the experience. So we know about all the digital, every client is adopting the digital because of the advent of the cloud and the technologies around the AI, machine learning, et cetera, everybody is having a clear chatter of the digital transformation chatter as a part of their enterprises. So that is where we, companies like Cognizant, we go to them and then help them in truly being digital, how do you get there. That is where technologies like ServiceNow plays a critical role. >> And so it is the mission of ServiceNow, and it sounds like also the mission of Cognizant, to make the world of work work better for people. So give me some examples of ways that you are creatively solving employee headaches. How are you making the world of work better? >> I'll give a couple of examples. To start with, for a leading manufacturing company there are a lot of equipment dispersed across the field so we use IOT technology, sensors, and we collect the data, and the data gets analyzed and then we give a dashboard to our customers. When I say customers, the chief customer support officer, he or she can look at the dashboard and send the technician for evaluate it Imagine if the cloud was not there and moreover we use ServiceNow as a platform to do all the orchestration. If the cloud was not there, if products like ServiceNow was not there, this could have been a humongous task, but we are helping the problem for the customer. Today, with one click, the chief customer support officer can know which machine is giving which problem, accordingly dispatch a technician. This is one example. The second example is we are helping some agricultural companies where, in fact this came out during our hackathon, which I'll talk about you a little bit later, all this agricultural farms, the lands are there. When you wanted to grow something, you also need to know everyday what is the moisture of the soil, what is the temperature, et cetera. So we apply IOT technology and then collect the data and use ServiceNow dashboard to give it back to the customer. These are all real-time problems the customers are facing. There are so many examples, but if you look at most of the solutions and the outcomes what we give to the customer, it's all triggered by our innovation. So we are the only company, I can proudly say, conducted three hackathons with ServiceNow. When I say hackathon, all the people are put under one room and ideas were given and end of the day you'll get 100 plus ideas. Recently we did, about a month back, we did a global hackathon. First time we wanted to try India, three continents, seven cities, India, Budapest, Phoenix, 20 hours of continuous time. We generated about 115 ideas. Out of the 115 ideas, I think we are going to come with certain ideas and then put that back into ServiceNow app store. We have close to six plus apps already running on the ServiceNow store, now our plan for the next six months is to add another about 10 plus apps onto the ServiceNow store. >> That is the other questions that that begs. Are hackathons the best way in your mind to spark energy and innovation and creativity? >> Especially with the millennials. The millennials, yes definitely because they don't want to very mundane, routine work. They want a challenge, they are asking for challenge. So this hackathon is one of the ways to keep them happy. Because the future of workforce is changing with millennials coming in. And the jobs, they're also expecting, even in my team people wanted a change every 12 months. While we need to address our customers, we also need to take care of their expectations also. >> Let's think about the future a little bit now. What do you see your customers' future demands and where do you see Cognizant and ServiceNow being able to provide solutions to the problems they don't even know they're having. >> Right, right. So digital is the heartbeat. When I say digital is the heartbeat, the outcome is all about experience because if someone asks me, digital is not technology. Digital is all about experience so in order to give that experience, customers wanted multiple technologies, they wanted to reinvent, rewire, rethink their business models. So that is where we wanted to go as a Cognizant. For example, if you take ServiceNow, if you're taking that platform to them, how can I digitize your enterprise process, digitize your entire workflow and create automation, et cetera and then bring a collaborative work environment within your ecosystem. So this is what they are expecting. Nobody wants non-value add, mundane task, everything they want to get operated in an automation manner. That is where we are helping, basically anything that changes the experience, or pave a new way to the experience, that is where we at Cognizant we are constantly reinvesting on people, process, technology, and then taking that back to our customers. >> That's a great note to end on. Raja, we'll look forward to seeing you again at Knowledge19 next year. >> Thank you, definitely. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18 in just a little bit.

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

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

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18. We're coming at you from Las Vegas, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost Dave Vellante, we are theCUBE, we are the leader in live tech coverage. We are joined by Sebastiaan Laurijsse, he is the global senior director, IT, cyber security, digital transformations at NXP, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE Sebastiaan. >> Thank you for having me. >> Good to see you. >> Thank you. >> So I want to start out by asking you a little bit about NXP, what you do and then what your company does and then also what you do there. >> NXP is the leading semiconductors in providing products for automotive and our company vision is providing a sure connections and infrastructures for a smart world. And that's what we are trying to achieve by implementing new ways of working with making the world more autonomous, like autonomous driving et cetera, so that's really what we're trying to do. >> Dave: Cool company. >> We are really building the future of tomorrow. >> Yeah. >> Big, large company too right? >> Yeah. Roughly about 36 thousand employees currently. >> Wow, okay, yeah. >> So you said you're really building the future of tomorrow, unpack that a bit, tell our viewers exactly what you're doing there. >> So today what you have experienced also on this event is a lot about artificial intelligence and machine learning. NXP has been elected as the number three in the world as the provider of solutions for artificial intelligence. So if you really think what we are developing today, it's already started and will become available in five or three years from now. So it's, you only can imagine what the future brings us and what we will shape. >> When do you think owning your own car and driving your own car will become and exception? >> Driving your own car, you won't own a car anymore. It will be some kind of help that comes to your home on demand when you need it and it even predicts when you like to travel and then it comes by automatically. >> How far away is that, you think it's two decades? >> Nah I think here it's not about technology, I think we have the technology to even enable it today. >> Dave: It's policy. >> It's policy, regulation, compliancy that doesn't allow to lets go harvest all data to make the right decisions there. >> We had the insurance company on the other day and they were like, no we're going to figure this out. >> Out of necessity. >> We always figure this stuff out. >> Yeah it's really not about technology anymore, it's really about legal, what prevents us access the data to make the right decisions, right. >> It's amazing though just to watch the progression of automotive, I mean they're basically software defined vehicles now I mean how many semiconductors are in a car now? >> Yeah but also you can clearly see within that experience, we are transforming our business to more software because developing a product as hardware that needs to stay in for 15 years or longer if you look to a car. Then you would like to have the ability to be dynamic more on top of the product by using software so also our products are becoming software defined. >> So you're a very R and D centric culture. >> Sebastiaan: Yes. >> Maybe talk about that ethos and the cultural aspects, and maybe what the process looks like, share with our viewers. >> I think it's the most awesome part of the company. Of course we also manufacture our products but mainly R and D is so dynamic, we have so, tech savvy people and we have so much issues as IT and you think what are they consuming so much bandwidth on Netflix and then they tell me hey we are developing a product for 4K entertainment into the car. So I have an issue on my wider network, you're providing all kinds of services but you're building for entertainment into the car for the future. >> That car better be autonomous. >> Exactly. >> Yes. >> That's for the kids in the back seat I think. >> Yes. >> You once described ServiceNow as the platform of platforms can you talk a little bit about that from your R and D process? >> So what you clearly see and also I think that all companies will eventually become an IT company, yeah? Also the banking companies tell us now today they are an IT company with a banking license. What I truly believe in is that we need to close the gap between IT and the business so I think the future model is that IT will dissolve for a certain part into the business. But you don't want to have, of course you still have you shared services, you still have a hybrid model where you have the countries where you're providing support from, so you're not always as close to the business. You have 24 seven economy and you need to provide those services and what you don't want to build is human interfaces. So what you try to achieve by building the platform of platforms, the fabric is that you try to connect the business acumen, the business dynamics, the project management tools that requires management into the IT systems and since you can detect the phase where they are in if they are facing issues with their products the projects are slipping or delaying, you would like to increase automatically the severity of the incidents. So that they can automatically solve and you have a better understanding of the business priorities. >> NXP is really interesting because you're at the intersection of a lot of big trends. I'm mean you're a hardware-- >> Sebastiaan: IOT. >> You're hardware manufacturers, you're a software developer, security, AI, IOT and underlying all this is data. >> Yeah, the new money. >> Yeah, right so I'm just envisioning this pretty complicated matrix, I'm wondering if you could describe that in your terms. >> If you look from an IT infrastructure perspective the growth on data is enormous. To cope with that growth because the data allows us to make better products. Data could be a requirement but could be also the affect of the results. What we tried to prevent, the project in bringing to the real life that you feel your requirement of quality is increasing. We had consumer great, automotive great, and we had for the flying industry, also the same great. But however your norm is increasing, so what you clearly see by increasing the norm, we call that the total quality culture, you also would like to have a total quality product, you don't want to replace your phone one year from now and I think if you look four years back, a phone, one and a half years, two years and then you had a new one. But as products become more expensive, they become more part of your daily life, part of your personal brand even and it generates that data, we need, if you try to work on proper quality that will generate an enormous amount of data. But a data can use, you optimize your processes upfront in the future as such it becomes more cost efficient to develop new products. So it's really about the conditioning for more data is also conditionally need to optimize your processes. >> Where does ServiceNow fit in to all this? How do you use ServiceNow? >> So for me what you really see in ServiceNow today is the best work flow engine you can imagine. It really orchestrates all IT and connecting business processes. And I think the potential and I think if you look into the portfolio where they have HR, it's going beyond IT and now they often, as already said by John Donahue, they come in via the IT angle, ITSM but as the process become more and more part of your culture rather than inhabit a forced way of working then the platform starts supporting the culture of your organization because by machine learning a proper UI, visualization capabilities it becomes really part about metering, showing what you're doing and really helps you to orchestrate your daily work and that's also I think of the new company, it's a little too difficult to pronounce, have you ever, it's about orchestrating the future way of working. >> So we're hearing so much about this, making the world of work work better for people, you describe it as a work flow engine, really helping employees organize their work days, orchestrate their work days, improve them, can you describe the culture at NXP and sort of how ServiceNow is improving employees everyday lives. >> What we really try to do and it's also what we see it's easy to show the cost efficiency savings you have from a platform as ServiceNow. If you improve your onboarding by optimizing the process by three days, because that's your first point of engagement when you bring some people on board and if it goes fluently, work integration with ServiceNow providing the services, everything is ready at day one. Day one you're there, your laptop is ready, your provisions, your desk is ready, and you have orchestrated a process that's a flawless end user experience. And that's what we would like to provide with ServiceNow, orchestrate with ServiceNow, because that's what the uses is. If it's a need of any of the help of services, we would like them to go, shift left to ServiceNow and with help of knowledge help themselves. We are all doctor Google and we would like to have access to that information ourselves and not be dependent by the expert, we all become that expert. >> Are employees happier? I mean I think that's a question too. Because we know that from research that happier employees make more productive >> Are more productive. Workplaces. They're more likely to stay, recommend it to their friends and the network gets bigger, I mean what's your-- >> If you have a company that shapes the future, we have very happy employees. (laughing) >> Self fulfilling prophecy there. >> Yes. >> When did you go live with? >> So we are one of the first adopters in 2007 in Europe. So we really started then, I don't know the name because they talk about days, months and now they talk about locations. (laughing) But I think we did a big overhaul during some of our big integrations that we have done so we are really one of the first customers in Europe providing the product. >> And how far, where, what version you in now? >> We are ready to upgrade, we will skip one release if we go to-- >> It's coming to London. >> Yep, London. >> Oh okay. And you started with ITSM like most? >> ITSM, ITOM, so IT operation management and now we have the IT business management app like demand management, IT financial management, really orchestrating from demand to fulfilling. >> A lot of our guys have written that they feel like machine intelligence and ITOM go together very well. >> Yes. >> You agree with that and how do you see that affecting your business? >> So what we clearly see is that the mean time to detect, the mean time to repair, we would like to detect algae before they hit the end user. So you really would like to make sure that before they notice it's already been solved. Or when it goes wrong, they already say we're on top of it, we know, we know the impact, we know that the whole chain of events, a single network port or power outage somewhere in a room could cause a big effect on the whole IT service and therefore research now helps us to make sure that we are on top of the things. >> Sebastiaan you mentioned off camera that you are very intimately involved with ServiceNow and helping them with their roadmap, providing feedback so can you share with us some of the things that you talk about with them and what would you like to see, where's their white space, what's on their to do list from your perspective? >> So what, but of course, if you look to our portfolio, what we are doing as NXP. So a member of the product advisory council for IT operation management and I'm closely working also on the Lighthouse program with ServiceNow and all kind of new releases, what I really think if you see what you are investing, of course they are now coming forward with the chatbots, awesome but if I see how my children consume information, using YouTube and I think also John touched upon it, what we are building as NXP is in the flawless end user experience and everything as being you don't have a UI. If you look to your car, today you have a speedometer, an RPM meter, why do you have RPM on your dashboard, why? What's the value of you know? In the past you needed it to shift gears and why is it still there? Does it really add value? >> Cause it's cool. (laughing) We love dials, come on. >> So it's about the end user experience, it's about your lifestyle, your brand identity it's not as more about requirements so, of course UI is important, I believe it, what's more important I think to invest in that engine behind it machine learning, artificial intelligence and how to ingest data. So because what is really required to make smart decisions is a lot of data and still I think the platform has potential, but there's some room for improvement to get proper integration by onboarding more data making the right decisions and orchestrate the actions out of it and I think the learn think act, we have the same strategy as sense, think, act at NXP I think that's how robotics and AI will work in the future. >> Data is the fuel for your innovation. >> Yes. >> So it's a great point you're making. >> I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the feelings in Europe, you're based in the Netherlands, about automation and the future of jobs because in the United States there is a significant anxiety about the machines coming for our jobs and at least the media portray it that way and I'm curious from your perspective, what is the feeling in Europe? >> Of course I think I see the opportunity but automation will change of course, automation, machine learning, it will essentially change the whole way of working. Because what we say it's about helping the business by decision automation, making decisions so we try to reduce the human effort, we have a total equality culture but we still need more and more people to help them that ask the right questions. Because the innovation of course come from a lot of data But still have people who connect the dots of never existing connections before. If you have a lot of data and you don't know which questions to ask, would you build a new solution? So it's still about smart people and creativity and of course we know patterns, we know what people are doing. But still the real breakthroughs is being done by people and therefore we need those people still in the future. So the anxiety is there yes, automation is there but I think it's about building a joint incentive between your outsource provider, your source provider between your workforce is what's the incentive for them on automation because otherwise you get a culture of fear and anxiety and a lot of doubt and that will be counterproductive for your company value. >> What do you think as a journalist. I mean you're right, the mainstream media talks about this a lot and they're actually accurate, the data is there to suggest that machines are replacing humans and cognitive functions and that's a concern but there's not a lot written in the media about the opportunity, there is some about the opportunities but more importantly what to do about it, in other words, public policy, education, I mean maybe I'm just missing it but. >> No, I agree with you, I completely agree and also this idea that Sebastiaan is bringing up is showing, proving that this can work for you, I mean this is actually going to improve your work life by taking Carol out of the drudge work or show opportunities for humans and robots to work alongside of each other. >> Yes. >> Rebecca: So there you go. >> Well in tech you better be an optimist you know. >> It's true. >> Although it seems like Musk and Stephen Hawking weren't optimists but maybe they're thinking you know hundreds of years-- >> Light years ahead. >> Right, right, right, right. You report directly to the CIO, at this conference, we're hearing so much about the changing role of the CIO and how the CIO has to be thinking so much more broadly about the business than ever before I mean how do you see it? >> So that's an interesting question because that's exactly where we are in today so we have had the classic way of the CIO, financial risk control et cetera then we have the transforminal CIO, then we have the CDO, or we have the future COO who takes care of operations because today IT is often being seen in the enterprise companies as a shared service center, something you do with the lights off but clearly bank accounts, what I already told you before was we are now IT companies with a banking license as IT becomes more dominant, it becomes part of operations and yes, we need a transformational CIO, CDO or a new type of COO that sees IT as part of the operations and the way of working. And of course you can give the new title, but at the end it's just a smart guy who helps the company succeed and brings IT as one together to make success. It's not about the role or responsibility, I think there's still the name of a chief information, chief data officer it's still the right title because he makes sure he gets the right data towards the business to make the right decisions faster. >> Right, great. >> It's not about running only the lights on. When the lights doesn't go on, it's IT's fault, right? >> Rebecca: Always, always. >> Always. >> Yeah that need doesn't go away but it's table stakes now. >> Exactly, Sebastiaan, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, it was a pleasure having you here. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Vallante we will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18 coming up just after this. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome to day three of Knowledge18. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. Day three is when ServiceNow brings together its audience and talks about its platform, the creators, the developers, the doers get together in the room. Jeff Frick and I, my co-host, we've seen this show now, Jeff, for many, many years. I joked on Twitter today, it's not often you see a full room and this room was packed on day three. Unless Larry Ellison is speaking. Well, Larry Ellison is not here, but Pat Casey is. He's the Senior Vice President of DevOps at ServiceNow and a Cube alum, Pat, great to see you again. >> Absolutely, just glad to be back. >> So, my head is exploding. With all the innovation that's comin' out. I feel like I'm at a AWS re:Invent with Andy Jassy up on stage with all these features that are coming out. But wow, you guys are on it. And part of that is because of the platform. You're able to put out new features, but how's the week going? >> So far it's been great. But you're sort of right, we are super proud of this year. I think there's more new stuff that's valuable for our customers coming out this year than probably the three years prior to this. I mean you got the chat bot designer, and you got some great application innovation, you got Flow Designer, you've got the entire integration suite coming online, and then in addition to that you've got a whole new mobile experience coming out. Just all stuff that our customers can touch. You can go downstairs and see all that and they can get their hands on it. Super exciting. >> So consistent too with the messaging. We've been coming here, I this is our sixth year, with kind of the low-code and no-code vision that Fred had way at the beginning. To let lots of people build great workflows and then to start taking some of these crazy new applications like chat bots and integration platform, pretty innovative. >> Yeah, I think it's a mindset when you get down to it. I mean we, the weird failure mode of technology is technology tends to get built by by technologists. And I do this for a living. There's a failure mode where you design the tool you want to use. And those tend to be programmer tools 'cause they tend to get designed by programmers. It does take an extra mental shift to say no, my user is not me. My user is a different person. I want to build the tool that they want to use. And that sort of user empathy, you know Fred had that in spades. That was his huge, huge, huge strength. Among other things. One of his huge strengths. It's something that we're really trying to keep foreground in the company. And you see that in some of the new products we released as well. It's really aimed at our customers not at our developers. >> The other thing I think that's been consistent in all the interviews we've done, and John talked on the day one keynote one of his kind of three keys to success was try to stay with out of the box as much as you can as a rule, and we've had all the GMs of the various application stacks that you guys have, they've all talked consistently we really try to drive, even as a group our specific requests back into development on the platform level so we can all leverage it. So even though then the vertical applications you guys are building, it's still this drive towards leverage the common platform. >> Yeah, absolutely. And there is, what's the word I'm looking for? There's a lot of value in using the product the way it was shipped. For easiest thing is when it advances or when we ship you new features you can just turn 'em on, and it doesn't conflict with anything else you got going in there. There's always an element of, you know, this is enterprise software. Every customer's a little bit different. GE does not work the same way as Bank of America. So you probably never get away entirely from configuring, but doing the minimum that you can get away with, the minimum that'll let you put your business-specific needs in there, and being really sure of it, you need to do it, it's the right approach to take. The failure mode of technologists, the other one, is we like writing technology. So give me a platform and I'm going to just write stuff. Applying that only when it makes sense to the business is where you really need to be. Especially in this day and age. >> Well I wanted to ask you about that 'cause you guys talk about many applications one platform. But you used to be one platform one app. >> Pat: Yep. >> So as you have more, and more, and more apps, how are you finding it regarding prioritization of features, and capabilities? I imagine the GMs like any company are saying, hey, this is a priority. >> Sure. >> And because you have a platform there's I'm sure a lot more overlap than if you're a stovepipe development organization. But nonetheless you still got to prioritize. Maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Sure, you end up with two different levels of it though. At one level, you tend to want to pick businesses to go into, which you're aligned with the technology stack you have. I don't think we're going to go into video streaming business. It's a good business, but it's not our business. >> Too bad, we could use some of that actually. >> Well, maybe next year. (laughs) But when you get down to it we mostly write enterprise business apps. So HR is an enterprise business app, CSM, SecOps, ITSM, they're all kind of the same general application area. So we don't tend to have something which is totally out to lunch. But you're right in the sense that A, what's important to CSM might be less important to ITSM. And so we do prioritize. And we prioritize partly based on what the perceived benefit across the product line is. If something that a particular BU wants that five other BUs are going to benefit from that's pretty valuable. If only them, not so much. And part of it too is based on how big the BUs are. You know if you're an emerging product line you probably get few less features than like Feryl Huff. Like she has a very big product line. Or Pabla, he has a very big product line. But there's also an over-investment in the emerging stuff. Because you have to invest to build the product lines out. >> The other thing I think is you guys have been such a great opportunity is I just go back to those early Fred interviews with the copy room and the color paper 'cause nobody knows what that is anymore. >> Pat: Yep. >> But workflow just by its very nature lends itself so much to leveraging, AI, and ML, so you've already kind of approached it while trying to make work easier with these great workflow tools, but what an opportunity now to apply AI and machine learning to those things over time. So I don't even have to write the rules and even a big chunk of that workflow that I built will eventually go away for me actually having to interact with it. >> Yeah, there's a second layer to it too, which I'll call out. The workflows between businesses are different. But we have the advantage that we have the data for each of the businesses. So we can train AI on this is the way this particular workflow works at General Electric and use that bot at GE and train a different bot at maybe at Siemens. You know it's still a big industrial firm. It's a different way of doing it. That gives us a really big advantage over people who commingle the data together. Because of our architecture, we can treat every customer uniquely and we can train the automation for the unique workflows for that particular customer. It gives a much more accurate result. >> So thinking about, staying on the theme of machine intelligence for a moment, you're not a household name in the world of AI, so you've done some acquisitions and-- >> Pat: Yep. >> But it's really becoming a fundamental part of your next wave of innovation. As a technologist, and you look out at the landscape, you obviously you see Google, Apple, Facebook, IBM, with Watson, et cetera, et cetera, as sort of the perceived leaders, do you guys aspire to be at that level? Do you need to be? What's the philosophy and strategy with regard to implementing AI in the road map? >> Well if you cast your eyes forward to where we think the future's going to be, I do think there are going to be certain core AI services that they're going to call their volume plays. You need a lot of engineers, a lot of resources, a lot of time to execute them. Really good voice-to-text is an example. And that's getting pretty good. It's almost solved at this point. A general case conversational agent, not solved yet. Even the stuff you see at Google I/O, it's very specialized. It does one thing really well and it's a great demo, but ask it about Russian history, no idea what to talk about. Whereas, maybe you don't know a lot about Russian history, you as a human would at least have something interesting to say. We expect that we will be leveraging other people's core AI services for a lot of stuff out there. Voice-to-text is a good example. There may well be some language parsing that we can do out there. There may be other things we never even thought of. Maybe stuff that'll read text for you and give you back summaries. Those are the kinds of things that we probably won't implement internally. Where you never know, but that's my guess, where you look at where we think we need to write our own code or own our own IP, it's where the domain is specific to our customers. So when I talked about General Electric having a specific workflow, I need to be able to train something specific for that. And if you look at some other things like language processing, there's a grammar problem. Which is a fancy way of saying that the words that you use describing a Cube show are different than the words that I would use describing a trade show. So if I teach a bot to talk about the Cube, it can't talk about trade shows. If you're Amazon, you train your bot to talk in generic language. When you want to actually speak in domain-specific language, it gets a lot harder. It's not good at talking about your show. We think we're going to have value to provide domain-specific language for our customers' individualized domains. I think that's a big investment. >> But you don't have to do it all as well. We saw two actually interesting use cases talking to some of your customers this week. One was the hospital in Australia, I don't know if you're familiar with this, where they're using Alexa as the interface, and everything goes into the ServiceNow platform for the nurses. >> Yep. >> And so that's not really your AI, it's kind of Amazon's AI, that's fine. And the other was Siemens taking some of your data and then doing some stuff in Azure and Watson, although the Watson piece was, my take away was it was kind of a fail, so there's some work to be done there, but customers are going to use different technologies. >> Pat: Oh, they will. >> You have to pick your spots. >> You know we're, as a vendor, we're pretty customer-centric. We love it when you use our technology and we think it's awesome, otherwise we wouldn't sell it. But fundamentally we don't expect to be the only person in the universe. And we're also not, like you've seen us with our chat bot, our chat bot, you can use somebody else's chat client. You can use Slack, you can use Teams, you can use our client, we can use Jabber. It's great. If you were a customer and want to use it, use it. Same thing on the AI front. Even if you look at our chat bot right now, there's the ability to plug in third-party AIs for certain things even today. You can plug it in for language processing. I think out of box is configured for Google, but you can use Amazon, you can use Microsoft if you want to. And it'll parse your language for you at certain steps in there. We're pretty open to partnering on that stuff. >> But you're also adding value on top of those platforms, and that's the key point, right? >> The operating model we have is we want it to be transparent to our customers as to what's going on in the back end. We will make their life easy. And if we're going to make their life easy by behind the scenes, integrating somebody else's technology in there, that's what we're going to do. And for things like language processing, our customers never need to know about that. We know. And the customers might care if they asked because we're not hiding it. But we're not going to make them do that integration. We're going to do it for them, and just they click to turn it on. >> Pat, I want to shift gears a little bit in terms of the human factors point of all this. I laugh, I have an Alexa at home, I have a Google at home, and they send me emails suggesting ways that I should interact with these things that I've never thought of. So as you see kind of an increase in chat bots and you see it increase in things like voice-to-text and these kind of automated systems in the background, how are you finding people's adoption of it? Do they get it? Do the younger folks just get it automatically? Are you able to bury it such where it's just served up without much thought in their proc, 'cause it's really the behavior thing I think's probably a bigger challenge than the technology. >> It is and frankly it's varied by domain. If you look at something like Voice that's getting pretty ubiquitous in the home, it's not that common in a business world. And partly there frankly is just you've got a background noise problem. Engineering-wise, crowded office, someone's going to say Alexa and like nobody even knows what they're talking about. >> Jeff: And then 50 of 'em all-- >> Exactly. There's ways to solve that, but this is actual challenge. >> Right. >> If you look at how people like to interact with technologies, I would argue we've already gone through a paradigm shift that's generational. My generation by default is I get out a laptop. If you're a millennial your default is you get out your phone. You will go to a laptop and the same says I will go to a phone, but that's your default. You see the same thing with how you want to interact. Chat is a very natural thing on the phone. It's something you might do on a full screen, but it's a less common. So you're definitely seeing people shifting over to chat as their preferred interaction paradigm especially as they move onto the phones. Nobody wants to fill out a form on a phone. It's miserable. >> Jeff: Right. >> I wonder if we could, so when Jeff and I have Fred on, we always ask him to break out his telescope. So as the resident technologist, we're going to ask you. And I'm going to ask a bunch of open-ended questions and you can pick whatever ones you want to answer, so the questions are, how far can we take machine intelligence and how far should we take machine intelligence? What are the things that machines can do that humans really can't and vice versa? How will humans and machines come together in the future? >> That's a broad question. I'll say right now that AI is probably a little over-marketed. In that you can build really awesome demos that make it seem like it's thinking. But we're a lot further away from an actual thinking machine, which is aware of itself than I think it would seem from the demos. My kids think Alexa's alive, but my son's nine, right? There's no actual Alexa at the end of it. I doubt that one's going to get solved in my lifetime. I think what we're going to get is a lot better at faking it. So there's the classical the Turing test. The Turing test doesn't require that you be self-aware. The Turing test says that my AI passes the Turing test if you can't tell the difference. And you can do that by faking it really well. So I do think there's going to be a big push there. First level you're seeing it is really in the voice-to-text and the voice assistance. And you're seeing it move from the Alexas into the call centers into the customer service into a lot of those rote interactions. When it's positive it's usually replacing one of those horrible telephone mazes that everybody hates. It gets replaced by a voice assist, and as a customer you're like that is better. My life is better. When it's negative, it might replace a human with a not-so-good chat. The good news on that front is our society seems to have a pretty good immune system on that. When companies have tried to roll out less good experiences that are based on less good AI, we tend to rebel, and go no, no, we don't want that. And so I haven't seen that been all that successful. You could imagine a model where people were like, I'm going to roll out something that's worse but cheaper. And I haven't seen that happening. Usually when the AI rolls out it's doing it to be better at something for the consumer perspective. >> That's great. I mean we were talking earlier, it's very hard to predict. >> Pat: Of course. >> I mean who would have predicted that Alexa would have emerged as a leader in NLP or that, and we said this yesterday, that the images of cats on the internet would lead to facial recognition. >> I think Alexa is one example though. The thing I think's even more amazing is the Comcast Voice Remote. Because I used to be in that business. I'm like, how could you ever have a voice remote while you're watching a TV and watching a movie with the sound interaction? And the fact that now they've got the integration as a real nice consumer experience with YouTube and Netflix, if I want to watch a show, and I don't know where it is, HBO, Netflix, Comcast, YouTube, I just tell that Comcast remote find me Chris Rock the Tamborine man was his latest one, and boom there it comes. >> There's a school of thought out there, which is actually pretty widespread that feels like the voice technologies have actually been a bit of a fail from a pure technologies standpoint. In that for all the energy that we've spent on them, they're sort of stuck as a niche application. There's like Alexa, my kids talk to Alexa at home, you can talk to Siri, but when these technologies were coming online, I think we thought that they would replace hard keyboard interactions to a greater degree than they have. I think there's actually a bit of a learning in there that people are not as, we don't mandatorily, I'm not sure if that's a real word, but we don't need to go oral. There's actually a need for non-oral interfaces. And I do think that's a big learning for a lot of the technology is that there's a variety of interface paradigms that actual humans want to use, and forcing people into any one of them is just not the right approach. You have to, right now I want to talk, tomorrow I want to text, I might want to make hand gestures another time. You're mostly a visual media, obviously there's talking too, but it's not radio, right? >> You're absolutely right. That's a great point because when you're on a plane, you don't want to be interacting in a voice. And other times that there's background noise that will screw up the voice reactions, but clearly there's been a lot of work in Silicon Valley and other places on a different interface and it needs to be there. I don't know if neural will happen in our lifetime. I wanted to give you some props on the DevOps announcement that you sort of pre-announced. >> We did. >> It's, you know CJ looked like he was a little upset there. Was that supposed to be his announcement? >> In my version of the script, I announced it and he commented on my announcement. >> It's your baby, come on. So I love the way you kind of laid out the DevOps and kind of DevOps 101 for the audience. Bringing together the plan, dev, test, deploy, and operate. And explaining the DevOps problem. You really didn't go into the dev versus the ops, throwing it over the wall, but people I think generally understand that. But you announced solving a different problem. 500 DevOps tools out there and it gets confusing. We've talked to a bunch of customers about that. They're super excited to get that capability. >> Well, we're super, it's one of those cases where you have an epiphany, 'cause we solved it internally. >> Dave: Right. >> And we just ran it for like three years, and we kept hearing customers say, hey, what are you guys going to do about DevOps? And we're never like quite sure what they mean, 'cause you're like, well what do you mean? Do you want like a planning tool? And then probably about a year ago we sort of had this epiphany of, oh, our customers have exactly the same problem we do. Duh. And so from that it kind of led us to go down the product road of how can we build this kind of management layer? But if you look across our customer base and the industry, DevOps is almost a rebellion. It's a rebellion against the waterfall development model which has dominated things. It's a rebellion against that centralized control. And in a sense it's good because there's a lot of silliness that comes out of those formal development methodologies. Slow everybody down, stupid bureaucracy in there. But when you apply it in an enterprise, okay some of the stuff in there, you actually did need that. And you kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater. So adding that kind of enterprise DevOps layer back in, you still do get that speed. Your developers get to iterate, you get the automated tests, you get the operating model, but you still don't lose those kind of key things you need at the top enterprise levels. >> And most of the customers we've talked to this week have straight up said, look, we do waterfall for certain things, and we're not going to stop doing waterfall, but some of the new cool stuff, you know. (laughs) >> Well if you look at us, it's at the, if you take the microscope far enough away from ServiceNow, we're waterfall in that every six months we release. >> Dave: Yeah, right. >> But if you're an engineer, we're iterating in 24-hour cycles for you. 24-hour cycles, two-week sprints. It's a very different model when you're in the trenches than from the customer perspective. >> And then I think that's the more important part of the DevOps story. Again, there's the technology and the execution detail which you outlined, but it's really more the attitudinal way that you approach problems. We don't try to solve the big problems. We try to keep moving down the road, moving down the road. We have a vision of where we want to get, but let's just keep moving down the road, moving down the road. So it's a very, like you said, cumbersome MRD and PRD and all those kind of classic things that were just too slow for 2018. >> Nobody goes into technology to do paperwork. You go into technology to build things to create, it's a creative outlet. So the more time you can spend doing that, and the less time you're spending on overhead, the happier you're going to be. And if you fundamentally like doing administration, you should move into management. That's great. That's the right job for you. But if you're a hands on the keyboard engineer, you probably want to have your hands on the keyboard, engineering. That's what you do. >> Let's leave on a last thought around the platform. I mentioned Andy Jassy before and AWS. He talks about the flywheel effect. Clearly we're seeing the power of the platform and it feels like there's the developer analog to operating leverage. And that flywheel effect going from your perspective. What can we expect going forward? >> Well, I mean for us there's two parallel big investment vectors. One is clearly we want to make the platform better for our apps. And you asked earlier about how do we prioritize from our various BUs, and that is driving platform enhancements. But the second layer is, this is the platform our customers are using to automate their entire workflow across their whole organization. So there's a series of stuff we're doing there to make that easier for them. In a lot of cases, less about new capabilities. You look at a lot of our investments, it's more about taking something that previously was hard, but possible, and making it easier and still possible. And in doing that, that's been my experience, is Fred Luddy's experience, the easier you can make something, the more successful people will be with it. And Fred had an insight that you could almost over-simplify it sometimes. You could take something which had 10 features and was hard to use, and replace with something that had seven features and was easy to use, everyone would be super happy. At some level, that's the iPhone story, right? I could do more on my Blackberry, it just took me an hour of reading the documentation to figure out how. >> Both: Right, right. >> But I still miss the little side wheel. (laughs) >> Love that side wheel. All right, Pat, listen thanks very much for coming. We are humbled by your humility. You are like a rock star in this community, and congratulations on all this success and really thanks for coming back on the Cube. >> Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure meeting you guys again. >> All right, great. Okay, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching the Cube live from ServiceNow Knowledge K18, #know18. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

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

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

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

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge18. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18. We're coming at you from The Venetian in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. I have with me Paul Webb; he is the ServiceNow Practice Lead for EY. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Paul. >> Thanks for having me, Rebecca. >> So, before the cameras were rolling, we were talking about how, what EY's focus is, and it's not traditional IT, you're really focused on bringing ServiceNow into the business; can you talk a little bit about this? >> Yeah, that's right. >> Paul: So, traditionally ServiceNow's been seen inside the IT organization, transforming the way in which the service desk is run. But what we're finding is more and more of customers see the power of the platform and how it can be taken out into HR, customer service, and automate a lot of business process that have traditionally been manual or used by a bunch of disparate systems. So, that's been our focus and it's been very compelling to our customers and it's been very good to us. >> So, give me some examples of how, of what you're doing. What are some innovative solutions? >> Yeah, so we've got a couple of really cool ones. One is fleet car management, so we've taken a device that we've put in vehicles that then transmits back to a ServiceNow hub to give us the vehicle telemetry. So then when the vehicle comes back in from being used, someone like Hertz or Avis, anyone like that, they can then use a device to see whether the car needs a repair or a service, new tires, and then automatically trigger a work order to get that taken care of. So that's a really different use case than a traditional IT. >> Right, right, and so... How are clients, are they ready for this? Are they, you feel at this conference that there's been this pent-up exhaustion with the workplace and the way it's been structured because our consumer lives are so easy and intuitive. >> We're seeing this need for disruption sort of kicking in this year. It's like last year it was a lot of ideas, a lot of thought around the art of the possible, but now we're starting to see companies ready to embrace it, and so that change, that transformation is happening right now in 2018. >> And how are you helping them, because it's not easy, this stuff is hard, change management. >> Yeah, it's kind of great that we're such a diverse and broad company, so the fact that I can bring our customer service teams, our supply chain teams, our human resources teams, all of that consulting breadth that we have, and deep subject matter experience. We can bring that to the ServiceNow platform and then take it to a client to really transform the way in which they think about a problem. >> And what would you say are some of the best practices that have emerged, because as we've said, this is a really disruptive time for so many companies. You just talked about car industry. What would you say are the insights you've gleaned in working with clients? >> It's time to value, I think more than anything else it's getting something in the hands of the customer or the user very, very quickly. So, our typical cycle is 12 weeks from an ideation, an idea of what they want to achieve, to something they can actually touch and feel and experience. >> Rebecca: 12 weeks! >> 12 weeks, yeah. And we typically work in these 12-week delivery cycles, so that you don't end up with fatigue and design fatigue. You just get your hands on something you can touch, you can feel, you can experience, and then you can mature it from there. >> So, walk us through the process. I mean, at 12 weeks, that is stupendous. >> Yeah, first of all it's containing the scope, it's not trying to do too much all at once. We then really help the client to whiteboard what problem they want to solve, we may do something as simple as a proof of concept, or we call them hackathons, it's common here. Do that to get the ideas into an environment that they can touch, then we come up with a series of requirements that need to be in the first release, and then once we've done that, it's send it to our developers, get them to turn the crank, turn it into something that we can get in the hands, even if it's not in production, if it's not production-ready it's got to be close enough where they can say, "Yeah, we need x changed, we need y changed, we need something different." Or this is good to go, let's now evolve. >> When you're in this design process, which is messy and complicated, how are you sparking good ideas and creativity and innovation on your team? >> We find the client brings that themselves. We've got smart people, they do good things, they're young, they're innovative. But we find when we start to produce some ideas to the conversation, it rapidly sparks the same back from the client. So this collaborative approach works really well to bring everybody up to a whole new level of thinking. >> So, the tag line, the new branding for ServiceNow is making the world of work work better for people, and that is where you're focusing EY's business, too. So, what would you say should be next? What are the next employee pain points that you want to focus on with the ServiceNow platform? >> It's interesting that, it's a little less exciting, but it's this concept of the system of protection. One of the guys that works with me, Lawrence, came up with the concept of using ServiceNow as this system of protection, where we can look at things like compliance and security and risk, and use ServiceNow to help manage that, facilitate that risk. The second side is obviously the more creative, improve productivity, improve efficiency, drive more of this disruptive digital agenda into the equation. And so those two ends of the spectrum, protect the business and then innovate the business, are two prime agenda items right now. >> Finally, why would a client choose EY? What do you bring to the table? >> I think it's the breadth and depth. You know, we are a very large global company. We have a lot of really bright minds, I think 70 percent of our business is now millennials, so we've got a lot of brilliant minds that are really trying to bring new ideas, new disruptive thinking, and yet we still have that maturity and that experience across that spectrum. So, bring all that to bear on a problem for a client enables us to do some really unique things. >> Rebecca: Great, well thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Paul. >> Thanks very much for having me, Rebecca. >> We will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge18 and theCUBE's live coverage just after this. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow, Knowledge2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at ServiceNow Knowledge18, 2018. Been here for six years. It's amazing. It's like 18,000 people all over the Sands Convention Center. Huge ecosystem and we're excited to be back, as usual. Our next guest, Greg Deitrich. He's a VP of operations in engineering at DXC. Joined by Tim Henderson, director of automation engineering at DXC. Gentlemen, welcome. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, first off, just kind of impressions of the show. It's amazing. This thing grows like four or five thousand people, I think, every single year. >> Yeah, it's amazing to see 18,000 people here at a ServiceNow conference. I actually attended back in October of 2007 before they had Knowledge. I attended a first user group session in New York where there's about 70 people around... >> You and Fred and a couple other people, right? >> Fred, his brother who ran operations at the time, and a few more. >> That's right. And then, obviously, you guys... We interviewed traditional partners way back into the day. You got mopped by CSC and you guys have rebranded into DXC. So you guys have a long history in really making a bet on the ServiceNow value proposition. >> Yeah, that's right. CSC and now DXC has had a long history of partnership with ServiceNow and, as you said, as evidenced by some of these acquisitions that we did with Fruition and Logicalis, the guys with the green suits around here. >> Jeff: That's right. >> And that continues to be a very strong part of our business. >> Good bet. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> And what's interesting, and I'm sure back in the day, we used to talk to Fred. He had this great platform but nobody's got a line item budget for a new platform, right? So you have to build the application. Obviously, the story's well-known. He build the service-management application. But he still has that great platform underneath. And now we're seeing all these different kind of applications built on this platform beyond what the original application-- >> I think that what you see is the pivot to more focus on business and less about IT, right? And that's what we're doing with Bionics And Platform DXC. It's taking a completely different angle that we're trying to orchestrate business within an ecosystem which ServiceNow is a key construct of. And it resonates with clients. We've showed what we've done to several major clients and it's really trying to achieve, like John said, business outcomes and less about the IT. But how can you quickly bundle sequence workflows and capability to get efficiency and automation into the workplace. >> Right. So let's dig down a little deeper on that application. What problem did you approach? Why was this the right tool to go after this problem? >> Sure. So the big thing that Tim and I are driving across DXC is our DXC Bionics approach which is really centered on how can we digitally transform our delivery engine, right? So we're applying data and analytics and leaning out people on processes and applying technology automation tools to really drive intelligent automation across everything we do. To get better, faster, cheaper, more automated, scalable, repeatable. In doing that, it was really important that we took a platform approach and ServiceNow's been a cornerstone in that platform. And we call that platform Platform DXC. >> Why are you called Bionics? >> So, Bionics, for us, is that combination of data, people, and technology. It's not just automation as the silver bullet and just the technology. It has to be that combination of the data with the people and the technology and automation coming together to make people work smarter, work more intelligently. >> Jeff: Right. >> And I think some of that, too, is the muscle part of it, right? You think Bionics but, as Greg said, you've really got to understand the business problem or what's occurring. And a lot of people we've seen in the industry are applying just automation without really understanding the underlying problem. And a lot of companies have had IT implemented in a diversified portfolio for 20 years and these disparate systems are very siloed. And there's a lot of waste in the value stream of their company. If you really don't break that apart and look at that, you're really not helping them lead in their marketplace. >> Right. It's just fascinating how we continue to find these big giant buckets of inefficiency. All the way back to the original ERP days and you just keep finding so many giant buckets where things are just not working as smoothly as they could. >> You know, people will look at this somewhat and they'll say, "Well, automation is to get heads out." Well, actually, it's to free up heads, right, Greg? To where you can actually empower these people to go do other value-added things for that company and not sit here in this toil or managing technical data or inefficient waste. It's really liberating but it does take a good champion within a company to go pull that off. >> And clearly the people part's probably the hardest part, right? In the keynote yesterday, John touched on, kind of, best practices and one of them, I think number three, was a commitment to change process. And that's, obviously, a big part of you guys' business, helping people to get through that piece of it. I laugh. I have Alexa and I have a Google Home, and they send me emails on how I should interact with this thing to try to help me change my behavior to take advantage of this new technology. I'm like, "Oh, okay." So it's hard to change people's behavior. >> Yeah, see the people component comes down to a couple of things. One, it comes down to skills, right. And there's been a lot of discussion here this week around getting the right skills, the digital types of skill that are needed in this new economy. But the other piece that's more important, I think, around people is this cultural picot, right? So a big piece of our digital transformation has not been about technology, but is has been about a cultural change. Thinking differently, challenging the status quo. Working differently, right? That agile DevOps. Eliminating that fear of failure. Let's fail fast, let's learn from it in that continual incremental way of driving improvement. >> Right. And something we did when Greg and I experimented with this. We actually didn't know how it was going to work out. To put the platform itself together, we created this concept called a Buildathon. >> Jeff: A Buildathon? >> A Buildathon. >> Jeff: Not a hackathon. >> So we have our team. We have ServiceNow. We have AWS. Microsoft, Dell, other partners in there. And we write code together. It's no Powerpoint. You're doing scrum sessions. And we basically created the platform in 230 days which is phenomenal when you think about it. From inception to briefing Greg and the CTO of our company, Dan Hushon, to saying it's open for business. >> Right. >> And, as Greg said, empowering people, getting them to work. But one thing we're doing is getting our partners to build with us. We call it co-creation. I know it's a little dicey term if you take that the wrong way. But they're having fun with it because, instead of getting all caught up in contractuals and, "What am I going to make on this?", it's like, "Let's go try some things and build together "and then go, oh, well, I made that water glass "and I can go price this in here and everybody "understands what they're going to make in it "as a business." And it's huge. It transforms the workforce. Our partner network loves it. They're lined up to get into the framework. And, like Greg says, it's re-energized our workforce. It's been huge. >> It's interesting, the whole DevOps conversation. So all these terms, Moore's Law, et cetera, have a very specific application. But I think it's much more interesting in the more general application of that method. Whether it's Moore's Law and this presumption that we're just going to keep getting better, faster, cheaper, and driving forward. Or we really do have switches. No, we're not going to do a big old MRD, and we're not going to do a big giant PRD, and spread this thing out, and start our build, and someday down the road, hope to deliver something. It's like, "Let's start delivering now." >> Right. Gone are the days of those big requirements, and then go way, and then the big reveal. And, oh no, we missed all this. Right? It's got to be that more interactive, collaborative module way. >> Right. And the thing about the people... You know, we go to a ton of shows, right? Everyone's automation's going to take. But I've never heard anyone say, "We're overstaffed." That we have more people qualified in these new areas than we need. I mean, there's still such a demand for people across the board. Whether it's truck-driving or it's... >> It's unlocking the power of those people. Just to kind of share an example, when we went through the pilot for this to go get the funding, we took basically a womb-to-tomb situation where we would go do infrastructure to service a platform and have it in a client's hand for business. In the past, that would take us 2100 hours and eight teams and 53 hand-offs. In seven weeks, we've proved we could orchestrate that all the way through the last mile, getting to the client's network in two hours and 14 minutes to where the client could log in. >> Wow, that's a game-changer. >> It is a game-changer. But you free up those resources then to help that customer understand how to leverage that application and change their business versus all this toil of trying to figure out, "Well, did I get the network connected? "Well, who knows how to do the firewalls?" Everything is code. >> Right. >> And that's really, I said it earlier, we're really going towards business code, right? Because that's what John's talking about, is getting business processes code, and then empowering people to have that situational awareness. >> And then, hopefully, opening up their minds to, "Oh, my goodness. "If I can do this that easily, "what else can I do? "What else can I do." So, Tim, you've got an interesting background. Not that ServiceNow is not exciting. But you were involved in a very exciting business for years and years at Cape Canaveral. So what did you do there and what lessons did you learn there that you can apply right now? >> That's a great question. So it was actually an honor to support our country in that way. I was the IT director at Cape Canaveral for 12 years and supported Atlas, Titan, and Delta rocket launches for commercial and military purposes. But what I learned there a lot was two key things: systems engineering... That's almost like DevOps for aerospace and defense. It is people really building a system together and understanding what they have to achieve. The other thing is command and control. And that sounds a little rigid in today's world of agile. But when Greg and I talked about Platform DXC, what we felt is, we need and control system for business. Right? That has a complete loop. And we're going to talk about this Thursday at 1:30? >> 1:30. >> Right. So we took a lot of those constructs and we didn't even select ServiceNow when we put the platform together. We'd been a good partner with them. But then we said, "You know what? "They have a market-leading solution. "They're going to fit into the orchestration "of business." And then, there's an intelligence pillar, and an automation pillar. But we're seeing huge gains. Every client we get in front of is like, "Wow, we didn't think about that." And we also have, our partners are actually wanting to put their IP into our platform so people can just consume it and we could wrap another service wrapper around it. So it kind of turns into an IT marketplace in a way. So we're pretty excited about it. >> I'd love to just kind of drill down on the command and controls. Interesting. I talked to a company a couple of weeks ago and they were in aviation. And the guy's like, "You know, in aviation, "if they want to innovate around ticketing "or AV systems in the planes, "they can innovate all day long. "It doesn't really matter if somebody "can't print their ticket if it doesn't come up "on their phone." But in terms of the safety, it's not to say, in terms of the regs, and the maintenance, of the aircraft. It's super-rigid. You can't take risks. I would imagine at Cape Canaveral, although, some missions have people, some don't, it's still big, expensive missions and you really aren't failing fast... >> We actually move pretty quick, believe it or not. You can build a rocket in six months. They'll fly it in and you can erect it and test it in thirty days and launch, which is pretty crazy when you think about it. And a rocket's a lot of hardware and software, right? What they have is that value stream, through systems engineering and situational awareness. So, for example, they know every time a torque wrench is used, who used it. So if it went out of calibration, they can immediately go back and say it was used on this guidance system, on that rocket. We need to go back and check it before it launches. And it's really a pedigree. You know, who was the tech? Were they assigned? Did they have the right skills? Did they capture the data for the test? And you really have a pedigree. And we've actually built some of that into the Platform DXC. We call it the Digital Thread, which is something we'd worked on with the Air Force. So if you take compliance, right, and you have this thread of everything that's occurred, whether it's the people, an asset, an application, you have a thread. So you look at compliance radically different. So we capture a lot of telemetry, whether it's technical, business, or security. And that's where the intelligence pillar has this whole AI engine and machine learning and things to just start pivoting radically. So it's really a closed-loop system which is what a rocket has. The airplane that probably everybody in this room flew here in, right? It's always sensing itself and adjusting. And if it has a failure potentially coming up, it notifies Boeing before that plane lands that they need something to go look at. That's what we're trying to do here for business. >> It's funny. Another interview, this gal came. She was a lawyer. She was a homicide detective. And we talked to her about chain of possession. What an important concept chain of possession is. And I'm just curious about how cumbersome was that before when you started versus with the tools that we have now in terms of sensors and networks, and basically unlimited networking and unlimited storage? What percentage of it really was chain of command versus actually doing things, and that kind of followed along? >> I think you asked a question, how cumbersome was it? I think it was so difficult that, in many cases, it was not there. Right? So you had these big gaps. And you didn't know what happened and you didn't have the integration of the data. And now, in today's world, with these more real-time cloud-based, integrated systems, you're able to get that at, more and more, a commoditized price. It's no longer as expensive and difficult to get that. It's being commoditized where, in the past, in some cases, you didn't have it because it was too hard or too expensive. >> Right. So you didn't have that closed-loop kind of feedback mechanism to make sure that things go well. >> Tim: You needed people and paper. >> Yeah. >> Alright, so I can't believe we're, like, May 9th. The year's halfway gone. So what's next up in the balance of 2018 on this journey? If we talk a year from now, what are we going to be talking about? >> Yeah, so our strategy for this year ahead of us is really to continue driving Bionics, or intelligent automation across our whole business unit. So DXC, the world's leading largest independent services company across infrastructure, apps, and BPS. So we're transforming how we deliver and deploying that at scale. So intelligent automation at scale across your business. The second key piece for us this year is to work across all of our offerings and our industry solutions to ensure that they're built for operations and built on Platform DXC so all that efficiency, effectiveness, automation is built into the offerings. So that what we have ahead of us for this year. Alright. Should be fun. And it has been so far. We'll watch Elon Musk's car keep going through space because that's very entertaining. >> Tim: It is pretty cool. >> Well, what's cool, too, is that everyone's excited to watch the launches. They're going to get up at six in the morning and count it down and it is very cool. Alright, Tim, Greg, thanks again for taking a few minutes and stopping by. >> Thank, Jeff. >> Alright, Tim and Greg. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from ServiceNow Knowledge2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada. We'll be right back after this short break. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone to theCube's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18 here in Las Vegas. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Dave Vellante. We're joined by Dave Wright. He is the chief innovation officer at ServiceNow. Thanks so much for coming on the program. >> It's a pleasure, always a pleasure. >> Good to see you again Dave. >> Good to see you as well. >> Yeah, you've been around the block. You've been around theCube a few times. >> Around the block, a bad way of putting it but yeah. (laughing) >> So chief innovation officer, we've had a lot of great new product launches at this show. What are you most excited about, and what are you already thinking about when you go back to your office? >> So I think what's been interesting to me is the different way of engaging now, we've got the concept of virtual agent technology and I don't just mean the fact that we've got virtual agents. The fact that it starts to give people alternatives and it gives people alternative ways to come into the system, whether it be through our interface or whether it be through someone else's interface, I start to wonder, what'll happen going forward as we get more and more bot type technologies out. How will you have that one interface that works with all those to get that information back of the chain? How will you almost have a single interface that allows you to connect to all these bots and solve your problems? Because the benefits kind of two fold. One is the bot technology you get from being a customer to coming in and actually doing a request. But the other is you'll eventually be able to take that same technology and apply it to the fulfilled user so the power user because if I'm doing something and I can have an agent that's helping me do it, almost like the agent assist concept, you saw this morning. If I can take that to a next level and have AI running on top of that, then I can make work easier for the people coming in but I can actually improve the people that are in the system and make them more effective. >> Go ahead. >> Go ahead, follow up please. >> No, I was just going to ask about, how you get your ideas? So you're here, you're interacting with customers, you're seeing how they're using your product. So is it interviewing customers to find out their pain points? Is it really just watching, I mean you're the chief innovation officer. How do you spark your own creativity? >> It's a really weird answer. I get most of it off kids, most of it off my kids. So I can tell you a story. We were in Barnes and Noble the other week and they had albums in the, plastic twelve inch albums. >> Rebecca: They're coming back. >> And they cost more than they use to. >> Dave Vellante: Yeah really. >> So I called the kids over, I said look, let's get educated. This is what I use to play music on. And now we moved to CD's and you guys miss CD's and this is why you guys buy music. Now I've got a 12 year old and seven year old. And the 12 year old was saying, well, we don't buy music. And I said yeah, and I thought, no you don't, you rent music. And then my youngest daughter said, why would you want to own a song forever? And I was like, this is interesting. We started having a discussion, >> These are deep, these are deep questions. >> It was while other kids we're over having a sleepover and they're all eating pizza and they were talking about the concept of having a job. They said, how do you decide what you want to do for the rest of your life and how do you do that? And we we're talking about how you do something, you get better. You go to another company, you get better at doing it. You go to another company. And one of them said, it sounds really boring just like doing the same thing. And then one of them had the best answer. She said, don't you think it's a waste of your time? And I said, why is it a waste? And she said, because if you're really good at something, why should you just do it for one company? And I was like, oh so, you're going to be a contactor. (laughing) But what I realize was because this whole generation don't need to own things, they just need to use things, so they don't need to know how to do something, they just know they want to do it. And they don't need to own something, they just need temporary access to it. Then it got me thinking when you talk about where could work go to. Do you get a whole concept of the gig economy becoming a gig enterprise. Because we've got a lot of people in work who've got all these different skills but we force them to do one job. And it might be that someone's doing a job but they've got skills that would be applicable outside of that job but they never get to use them. So have we seen the first generation arrive now where they expect everything to be tass based? And then it gives you control over your own career. Because then you say, well, actually I'm not good at this but I can start a bid for work. I can say to people, hey I'm only a three on a skills racing but if you don't need any complex, I'll take it cause I get to learn. So it's a whole new dynamic and I think when you ask whereabout ideas come from, some of the first stage ideas or the first horizon, I think they come form customers. Some of the second horizon, they come from people who aren't working. It's just trying to imagine how they all develop and whereabout that all goes. >> So you surround yourself with millennials? >> Not even millennials. >> Dave Vellante: They're kind of pre post millennials. >> Almost like the linksters, almost the people who've been born connected. It's definitely a Gen Z thing but it's beyond millennials. I think the millennials had a certain expectation around well it's kind of a negative connotation but before they were called millennials, people use to refer to it as the entitlement generation. And it wasn't because they were entitled, it was because they felt they just got access to everything. So it's like with my kids, they're kind of Gen Z and one of them is a linkster, but you never go to them and say, they never come to you and say, hey, I want to watch a movie and you go, great, let's go to Blockbuster's, let's rent it. They expect it to be just available on demand, available all the time. And that was what I think the kind of millennial generation started being entitled to access to data, then I think you went to the generation where it was everything always connected, no concept of banword. But now I think it's the, the real thing that's changing is the concept of ownership and I think that's where you start to see things like, will the car industry ever be the same because if you don't need to own a car because you're not driven by the same passions that people who own cars are driven by, it's just a way of communicating you don't need a garage on your house, you may as well park the car somewhere else. It comes when you need it. It can change the way cities are laid out. I mean there's so many different routes you can go down with this. >> SO how does that innovation, how does that knowledge that you gain get into ServiceNow products and services? >> That all comes back then to how you, how people are going to face new management dynamics or how people are going to manage things like IOT devices? How are people going to deal with managing work if it is a task based economy? How are people going to start to think about not just working in a system of record, or not just working in a system of engagements, but how are they going to start to build that mesh or that web that links all these different things together? And I think that's where our strand comes. Our strand comes in the ability to be able to link systems of records together. To link users with those backend systems, to be able to manage those complex work processes. That's kind of the core elements. Also I think when you look at what Fred Crasick when he built the platform and he had the whole work flow engine and it is that engine that's kind of the key pallet to the whole company. >> I think the metaphor of mesh, sometimes we talk about a matrix of digital services that becomes ubiquitous beyond a cloud of remote services, is really transforming to this mesh of digital capabilities that are everywhere that do things that Clouds don't do. They sense, they react, they respond, they read, they hear. It's an amazing time that we're entering in innovation. Andy McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson when they wrote the book Second Machine Age talked about Moore's Law, power innovation but they also talked about the innovation curve reshaping from going from Linears Moore's Law which we've marched to the cadence of Moore's Law for decades in this industry to reshaping, to an expediential curve. And I wonder if we could get your thoughts. We've paused that it's accommodation of sort of data applying machine intelligence to that data and then leveraging Cloud economics at scale is really where the innovation is going to come from in the future. What are your thoughts on that? >> So let me try to understand the question. So you're talking about not actually the way that you've seen the growth from a process prospective but the way you actually see the growth from a machine learning capability being able to analyze that data? >> Applying that layer of machine learning. Maybe use that mesh metaphor, that top level. You know you've got horizontal technology services but then there's this new AI layer on top. The data is the fuel for that AI. >> Absolutely, I think it's the I think people can't even imagine what they can do with that data, people can't even contemplate some of the decisions they can make and it's when people start to look at things in completely different ways, it's when people start to say, well, if we apply machine learning to a user interface for example, could we come up with a better user interface because now if we understand how people interact with the system, could we actually build a better system? Or you see people starting to have this whole butterfly effect around the way that artificial intelligence works. So the best example I heard was from, I was actually at a convention with a girl called Louis Chang and she was talking to me about it. But they were speaking to hospitals. They we're talking about self drive cars and the application machine learning of being able to help cars drive. And they were saying the interest in knock on effect of this was a hospital saying it was going to be a real problem for them having self drive cars. And she said, why's it going to be a problem? And the problem was, if you look across the whole America you have about 20 people a day die because they can't get replacement organs. But 37 percent of the organs come from car crashes. So if you take car crashes out of the equation. So what they were investing in was actually looking at how they do cloning technology for organs. So no one would ever imagine (mumbled speaking) and this is going to improve cloning technology so much. And I think AI's in the same place. Everyone's using it in such a small area that they don't even see the potential of what they could do with it, they don't have any concept of what they could be starting to look at and how they could start to spot transvaterian people. Even on a base level, I was speaking to one of our customers the other night, and they managed to put an AI system in place that when they got a call in off the description of the call they could work out what the customer satisfaction was going to be and if it was going to be a bad satisfaction figure, they could preemp that and put different agents that were more skilled on that particular issue. And they said a few years ago all they were interested in was maybe one day we'll be able to categorize something asymmetrically. But now they can predict how well something's going to be resolved. >> It's very hard to predict isn't it? I mean who would of thought that Alexa would of emerged as one of the best if not the best natural language processing systems or that images of cats on the internet would lead to facial recognition in technology. >> That one especially. >> Could of never predicted that. So, but because you're such a clear thinker and a strategic thinker, I want to ask you to make some predictions. I'm going to run some things by you. You talked about autonomous vehicles for awhile. Do you believe that owning in the future, pick whatever time frame you want, that owning and driving your own car will become the exception? >> Yeah I think it will probably be the people who, well okay, so I definitely think driving your own car will become the exception. I think some people will always want that sense of ownership until we get to a generation that doesn't. I think they'll always be a hard core of people who do want to own and do want to drive and do want that experience, but I think you've already got the issue where congestion's such a level in most areas. Is there any enjoyment out of driving? So I love driving, I love sports cars, I collect them. But if someone said, hey you've got two options, you can sit in a high performance sports car to go to LA or you can sit in a Tesla and it will drive itself and you can read a book. I'm getting in the Tesla. (laughing) >> How about retail? Right for disruption, do you think that large retail stores will essentially, not essentially, it's never complete, but will largely go away? >> I think it depends on the nature of the experience. So I think for a lot of goods that are consumable goods, I can kind of see that going away. I don't think it will go away for luxury goods. I don't think it will go away fully for fashion. I think people always like to look at things and understand things and check fits but for some things that are high consumables maybe even for electronics, I can see those going or I can see it going for things where it's worn product. So something like a shop that just sells sneakers. I can see someone could easily offer a range and say, well look, here's what we sell. When you order something, we'll automatically ship you one size up, one size down, or two variations of color and it will be a free system return the ones you don't want. I think the whole experience of ordering one thing and hoping it works out, I think that will go away. It will be concept of ordering a group of things or maybe it will be applying to artificial intelligence to say, hey you've asked for this color, but we know that people who also ask for that color like this color as well. We're going to ship you them both. You can see how it goes and send us the one back you don't like. >> Okay, let's see. Will machines make better diagnosis than doctors? I've got to say I think you will get to a point where that will happen. Especially if it's things where it's image processing, where it's x-ray processing, MRI processing. Where it's something like process of mental health, then I don't know. Maybe, I'd probably rather have my mental health treated by a person than a questionnaire. But yeah I think the things we're using, image recognition, or things where you're looking at patent distribution or you're looking at even like virus distribution or virus structure, then I think those areas I think you will get to a point where diagnostic issue is better. But you look at where artificial intelligence is from diagnostics now and you go on doctor google and search for something, you know, everything finished with the bottom line, or it could be cancer. >> Dave Vennari: Yeah, you're dead. >> What about will there ever be a revolt, you know in the sense of, technology is so pervasive, and people just say forget it, I'm sick of just being tracked, I just kind of want to have a human to human connection and, >> Dave Vellante: Dream on. >> So are we done for? >> I was speaking to a girl who works for me, Menesha, and she was saying, we were talking on Friday and she said, hey, I was having a coffee with nother girl Cass, and Menesha's in Seattle and Cass in is San Francisco, and I said, oh was she in Seattle or were you in San Francisco and Menesha's a lot younger than me, and she went, no we weren't in the same room. We were just like doing it over video like a virtual coffee. And I was like what, so you both get coffee and sit and have a conversation? And she was like, oh yeah. >> Dave Vellante: Alright, I've got one more, I've got one more. >> Okay, let's hear it, let's hear it. >> Alright last one, it's great, thanks for playing along. >> I know this is fun. >> Financial services is an industry that really hasn't been disrupted. DO you feel like the banks will lose control, the major banks will lose control of payment systems? >> I think there's a lot of conversations now around how much those payment systems open up. Because if you, let's say you do a transaction with Amazon, you do a transaction with Google, how hard would it be for every transaction to be done that way? So rather than, if your setting off a payment for I don't know, gas bills or a car loan payments, rather than giving your bank details, why not give your PayPal details or your Amazon account details or your Google details? That could be, reduce all the banking transactions down to one interface. I think that could happen. I think you could get, well obviously you're already seeing the rise of Blockchain and I'm not a Blockchain expert. I'm itching to find a used case for us with Blockchain but I can't find it yet. But for direct transactions, if both sources can trust each other than yeah, that direct transaction between those two sources, I think that's completely possible. I think there's also areas where, you've seen happen in the past where a banking faces issues from retail coming into banking, so sometimes you'll get the big supermarket chains, especially in Europe they say, okay you're going to get (foreign name) or you're going to get Tesco's Bank, because they've got all our customer loyalty, they've got people waiting to give discounts to if they bank with them, so they can instantly bring, if you said to your shopping account base, hey, if you bank with me we'll give you 20 dollars a week off your grocery shopping, you could probably ring 10 million customers straight away. So I think banking's challenged from other industries that want to get into it, from places where you'll actually go and do each transactions now and from where places where you'll just go and order stuff online and you could filter all that through one place, I think they'll still always be the commercial side of banking. There's always going to be the stocks and bonds, there's still going to be the wealth management, but props for transactional banking, you could start to see a decline. >> Fantastic, thank you. >> I love this futurist talk, it's been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for coming on theCube Dave. >> Alright, thanks for having me, always a pleasure. >> Dave Vellante: Great to see you. >> We will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge18 theCube's live coverage just after this. (upbeat music)