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