>> 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)