>> 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)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. (crowd chattering) >> Hello everybody and welcome to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow. We are here in Las Vegas, Nevada at The Venetian. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Co-hosting with Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. It's great to be here with you-- >> Hey, Rebecca. >> doing the show. >> Busy week. >> Very busy week and we are only-- >> Busy month. (laughs) >> And it's only day one. So we just heard John Donahoe who is the new CEO, he's been CEO for a year, he was at eBay for a decade. He got up on stage and he said, "When I came "to this job I could barely spell IT." But I want to talk to you first, Dave, and say how's John doing, how's the company doing? What's your take on this? >> Well, the company's doing great. It's the fastest growing software company over a billion dollars. It's got consistent growth. 35-40% growth each quarter, year over year. It's growing sequentially, it's throwing off, it's free cash flow is actually growing faster than it's revenue, which is quite impressive. Company's got a 29 billion dollar market cap. Couple years ago ServiceNow, when Frank Slootman was running the company said, we're going to put the stake in the ground and we're going to be a four billion dollar company, I think this company's going to do four billion dollars in its sleep. I think the next milestone is how they get to 10 billion. And beyond that, how they get to 15 billion, how they take their market value from where it is today in the high 20's, low 30's, up to 100 billion. This company wants to be the next great enterprise software company. Basically automating manual tasks you wouldn't think there's that many manual left, but when you think about whether it's scheduling meetings, or scheduling travel or keeping track of medical leave, and all this other stuff that's manual, they want to automate that process. >> Right, exactly, that's what he talked, the tagline this year and really for the brand identity is making more work work better for people. He said that people are at the heart of this brand. Jeff, does this strike you as a new idea? Is this going to work for ServiceNow? >> It's not really a new idea but their kind of changing their shift. It's interesting when we saw Frank Slootman on he was always, the IT guys are my homies, right? He was very specifically focused on going after IT. And Fred's great kind of early intro was, remember the copier room with all the colored pieces of paper. (Rebecca laughs) Vacation requests, new laptop request, etc. How does he make that automated. And more importantly how does he let the people responsible for that be able to code and build a workflow. So I think the vision is consistent, they're obviously expanding beyond just, the IT are my homies, 'cause it's still ultimately workflow. And I think at the end of the day it's competition for how do you work. What screen or what app is on your screen as you go through your day to day workflow. And they're obviously trying to grab more of those processes so that you're doing them inside of ServiceNow versus one of the many other applications that you might be trying to do. >> Just to follow up on that, when Jeff and I first started covering this show it was 2013, less than 5% of ServiceNow's business was outside of the IT department. Today it's about 35% is outside the IT department. So they have their strategy of, they call it, land and expand. Christian Chabot from Tableau I think was the first I heard use that term. These guys are executing on that. Starting with IT and then moving into HR, moving into maybe facilities, moving into marketing, other parts of the organization, customer service management, security, I don't know if they count that as IT, but cohort businesses. So if you look at their financials their up-selling is phenomenal. Huge percentage of their business comes from existing customers. If you look at the anatomy of a typical ServiceNow customer, they might start with a 50 or 75 thousand dollar deal. That quickly jumps to a multi-hundred thousand dollar deal, then up to a multi-million dollar deal. And then up into the high eight figures. So it's really a tremendous story and the reason is, and Jeff you and I have talked about this a lot, is because when Fred Luddy started the company he developed a platform. He took that platform to the venture capital community and they said well what do you do with this? He said you can do anything with it. They said, yeah, get out. So he said all right I'm going to write an app. He worked at Peregrine so he wrote and IT service management app. And when ServiceNow went public, I remember Gartner Group came out and said, eh, it's a tiny little market, help desk is a dying market, flat, billion dollar TAM. Well this company's TAM, it's almost immeasurable. I mean it's, the TAM is literally in the half a trillion dollars in my view. I mean it's enormous. >> It's workflow, right, so again it's just that competition for the screen. And as everyone goes from their specialty and tries to expand, right? Sales force is trying to expand more into marketing. You've got Zendesk and other kinds of help desk platforms that are trying to get into more workflow. What they were smart is they went into IT 'cause IT controls the applications that are in shop. And so to use that as a basis, and IT touches whether it's an HR process where I need to get the person a new laptop. Or it's facilities where I need to open up a new building or etc., IT touches it all. So a really interesting way to try to grab that screen and application space via the IT systems. >> And that's where John Donahoe comes is. As you said Jeff, Frank Slootman, Data Domain, EMC, you know, IT guy. And now John Donahoe, not an IT guy, came from the consumer world, he's trying to take the ServiceNow brand into the C suite. So we have him on a little later, we're going to talk to him about sort of how he's doing that. But this is a company that's transforming, they're constantly transforming. Really trying to become a brand name, the next great enterprise software company. >> I think another thing that really came out in the keynote and also just on the main stage this morning is this idea of change is not just about the technology. In fact, the technology is the easy part. One of the things he kept saying, and he brought up other people and customers and partners to talk about his too, is that it really is a culture shift. And it really is about a different way of leading. It's a different way of bringing in the right kind of talent who are not just these IT guys, let's be honest. >> Right. >> But they are data scientists, they are creative people, they integrate design thinking into the way they do their jobs, with this over-arching goal of how do I make the employee experience better and how do I make the candidate experience better too. Because that's another part of this. It's not just the people who are already working for you. In the period where there is a war for talent-- >> Jeff: Right, right. >> you also have to be thinking about okay, how do the people that we want to get-- >> Jeff: Right. >> What's their experience like when we're trying to attract them. >> So question for you, Rebecca, 'cause you cover this space-- >> Rebecca: I do, yes. >> a lot, right, and you write for MIT and-- >> Rebecca: HBR. >> HBR and the new way to work and the good, I'm trying to remember-- >> Rebecca: It's called Best Practices, yeah. >> book that you did, that interview. So as it is competition for talent, how did it strike you? 'Cause at the end of the day that's really what it's all about. How do you get and retain the best people when there just aren't enough people for all the jobs that are out there. >> It's interesting because I do feel as though, obviously, you want to be able to enjoy your workday and that's what Andrew Wilson at Accenture was talking about, really it's about having fun. And it's about having it be a great experience. At the same time I do think the human part of work is so essential. As we've talked about before, you don't quit jobs you quit bosses. And it really is about who is your manager and who is the person who is leading this change. >> Jeff: Right. And how are they interacting with employees and with you personally. >> But should it be fun, I mean, they're still paying you to show up. (Rebecca laughs) >> And I think sometimes we get confused. Clearly the mundane still takes-- >> Yes. >> a ridiculously too high percentage-- >> Rebecca: True. >> of time to do the routine, where there's this automation opportunity. But the other piece is the purpose piece and they brought up purpose early on in the keynote, right? >> Rebecca: Yes. >> People want to work for purpose driven organizations and the millennial workers have said they want to be involved in that. It's not just about shareholders and stakeholders and customers. So there is a bigger calling that they need to deliver on to attract and maintain the best people. >> A couple words about the show. So we do a lot of shows. This is a legit 18,000 person show, we're at the Sands Convention Center. It's crowded, the line at the Starbucks coffee the morning-- >> Rebecca: (laughs) Around the block. >> was about 60 to 65 deep, I mean that's a lot of people waiting for coffee. The other thing I want to stress is the ecosystem. When Jeff and I first started this show the ecosystem was very thin, Jeff, as you recall, and that's one of the things we said is watch the ecosystem as an indicator of progress. Well the ecosystem's exploding. You've seen acquisitions where companies like CXC and Accenture have got into the business big time. You see E&Y, Deloitte coming in as big partners now of ServiceNow and as we've often joked, the system integrators like to eat at the trough. So there's a lot of business going on in this ecosystem. >> Right, and that was part of the keynote too. The software's the easy part. It's are you investing in the change management for your people, are you investing in best practices. And if you're not then you're probably wasting some of your money. >> Great. Well it's going to be a great show, this is just segment one, we've got a lot of great guests so I'm excited to get going with both of you. >> Jeff: All right. >> Dave: All-righty. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Allante and Jeff Frick, we will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge18 coming up just after this. (electronic music)

okay we're back this is painful on time with Wikibon org and this is the cube silicon angles continuous production we here at knowledge service now's big customer event i'm here with my co-host Jeff Frick this morning we were broadcasting live from sa p sapphire my colleague john furrier jeff kelly and david foyer were down here but we're here in Las Vegas at the aria hotel we're here with dave schneider who's the senior vice president of worldwide sales and services at service now Dave welcome to the cute thank you for having me a lot of good energy here talking to customers said Brian Lily on from from Equinix great case study great story we were Jeff and I were at the you know the customer event last night just cruising around talking to customers talking to prospects everybody's really excited what are they what are they telling you I think what the colonists is that what what we're all about which is making customers successful in their journey both the IT Service Management and allowing IT to be helpful to the entire organization is actually working and that the value they're getting from the investment around our technology is yielding really good results for their country so when you go to meet customers you know describe paint a picture for us of you know new customers new prospects what's the environment like no I think it range is a lot between customer experiences so as people are becoming more and more comfortable to cloud idea service we're seeing people really just rotate naturally to that wanting to get away from fixed fixed offerings and traditional and hosted systems internal there into internal their networks so we're seeing a lot of excitement about that and then there's some disbelief there's some displeased but actually after all these years of trying that they can actually make IT an effective part of an organization and our tools and our solutions really help them do that so when you say all these years of time what have they tried that's not work it seems like they've tried everything they've tried they tried remedy the tribe Peregrine they tried I have a corona motor tool right absolutely so I think what happens in IT is it you know they've been the Forgotten ones they've been the ones that didn't have the opportunity to invest as the other lines of business for a below best to keep themselves competitive in the marketplace now we're giving them best-in-class tools so that they are no longer hindered by the lack of sophistication they want that so you get your getting penalized in a sense by you know the past failures of other initiatives right that's the big barrier that you have to come over it is that inertia the existing disbelief is that right I think there's some disbelief also I think I T is often starved for resources i T is a cost to an organization not necessarily seen as a benefit by the financial parts of the organization however if used correctly they can be turned into an asset class and make the whole organization more competitive this morning we had GE talking on stage and they were able to do a massive transformation using the tool to generate millions of dollars of cost savings and additional revenue streams yeah I mean I've been saying to me this is all about global scale and demonstrating IT value and excellence throughout the organization are you finding that you're so we talked about sort of your prospects when you go in when you go in after customers implemented let's say for a year or so what's different what's changed and particularly i'm interested in that notion of IT value is their heightened awareness of IT value throughout the organization well so i think part of what happens is IT changes the perception of IT and organization gets changed through the transformation with our tool they go from as we we often say the Department of node or the Department of now that's a real thing and that that kind of confidence the swagger that the people have nit for IT kind of gets reestablished and you see people really proud of doing what they're doing and knowing that they're bringing a real value to their their customer is really an important part of what we do so the new confidence that these organizations have on delivering value of their customer the ability to support and integrate hundreds of tools potentially into a single platform record that's transformative to a CIO or to an IT executive who didn't know where things were in when the bad things would happen they couldn't tell what was causing the event and know how to fix it so what questions do you ask prospective customers what's your sort of list of top two or three questions that you start with I think first of all is why would you continue down the path that you are if there is something better what what would keep you from doing it and then we also look for other initiatives that are important to the business where what's driving them so if they've done a lot of integrations through acquisitions that's a huge opportunity for cost savings and aggregation into one one set of tools okay let's talk a little bit about your sort of sales organization you guys I think have these show you let's let me back up a little bit so you start with it I presume incident management problem management maybe even change management is that right is that the starting point so we get brought in to solve a lot of different problems now in an IT organization so it's not uncommon that someone would think about replacing their old help desk or incident management system we always say help desk is sort of like to four letter words you really try to make the desk go away because our customers don't want us sitting behind desks they want us to be out talking to them or they want to self help themselves and so we start maybe with looking at the historical systems very quickly we try to get into a much broader conversation okay and then my understanding is your sales organization has evolved where you will both look at existing customers helping them utilize the platform further beyond maybe just the core helpdesk an incident management problem management and utilize service now as a platform for other areas can you talk about that a little bit so went once when we get involved with a customer the customer is a customer for life so we kind of have a mantra inside of service now which is love that customer and if you love the customer and you do things for and on behalf of them teaching them about the technology and how they can benefit from it we get additional businesses they're more and more successful so every time we interface with the customer it's an opportunity to throw them an opportunity to make them more successful every time they do something to add technology around us they're saving money and probably growing their license business with us but having a pretty good at bit so it's interesting when we were at the event last night for the people who weren't here there were pictures of cakes all over the place there was there was cakes on the table and there was a slideshow with cakes and I said so what is the story with the cake what's in it and I kind of know the stories but it's good to follow till you said about what's really cared about a lot of us like sugar so there is that there's this common desire to celebrate so actually it was solving not not coming tonight well it's not common IT but it actually started with one customer or a couple different customers well when we went go lives the customer actually themselves they didn't go buy a store-bought cake they baked their own cake and they would decorate the cake in various ways and most of them had service now or Thank You service now it's part of it they really viewed this as a setting free element and so they were celebrating like a birth or a wedding like anything else that we celebrate in life they were celebrating with a kick and so it became a tradition I can't tell you how many hundreds of cakes I've now eaten but it's really a fun thing to do and it kind of keeps on a life about life of its own and sometimes I'll do interim cakes when they do go live with a new module or other aspects and call those cupcakes it's it's interesting as they said we were down at the event last night talking to a lot of customers and potential customers and the vibe is very good and the other vibe that's that that picked up this morning I mean the Kino started at 8am right this is not a sleep and group of people these are people that are up and ready to go everyone was waiting to eat at six thirty they were on the ground and so these are people that are working you know they're they're getting stuff done this is not kind of a hangout tech crowd well I mean there was some hanging out last night there was all hang out last night however I will say this event is all about the customer more than eighty percent of the content is taught by customers to customers they come up with the content they're here because they want to learn and so they don't want to miss a thing they're going to bring the ideas back to their companies and implement change and so they view themselves through service now is an opportunity to make a massive the organization it's obviously a pretty darn good career move for a lot of the customers as well who gets successful with us but most importantly they want to be here and we're thrilled to have them because you know quite honestly I get energy i sat in that keynote presentation and I got so much energy listening to the panel I was fired up and ready to go David you guys have a ninety-six percent renewal rate which is that's the same how is it that you've been able to achieve that what what's the secret sauce behind that what a customer's tell you so it fluctuates a little bit but it's been a 95 plus 4 13 quarters in a row I think really the issue is if you do right by the customers where why would they go somewhere else the alternatives just aren't that good but most importantly if you're delivering value every day through an engagement if you're bringing technology to bear to solve a problem once you solve the problem you don't need to Joe try something else you look two ways to leverage what you've already built and moved forward so the four or five percent of customers that disappear many of those are through acquisitions right companies got acquired and went out of business very rarely is that they made a choice to go with a different technology you guys don't and maybe used to in the early days but you don't sort of overwhelm your messaging with with cloud you know some of these some of the SAS companies do can you talk about sort of how you sell to organizations and a little bit more more depth it's not a it's almost night not a hard core technology sell its really around business process and value can you talk more so we sell to multiple levels in a company so there there are folks that are functionally responsible for different aspects of what we do let it be incident management or help desk let it be people that are trying to build knowledge management systems or trying to do employee self-service those are different constituents that will talk to in a sales campaign and then we often will try to reach the CIO or an executive NIT you give them the message of what we can really provide because you know people don't start off thinking you know I want to replace my helpdesk them and end up with the RP for IT we've got to convince them or give them the possibility that that's or sorry paint the picture that the possibilities are real so to customers do they do I mean a lot so many projects today are not not IT projects their business driven yes and there's a business case around them and the whole ir r and r roi etc and pv whatever it is how do people conduct a business case for service now it ranges dramatically depending on what problem they're trying to solve but you know some of what we do is sort of like an oxygen water problem right you can't live today without breathing or drinking some water you can't live in IT without solving some of these problems so it's an oxygen issue the nice to have things are quickly becoming oxygen issues employee self-service are you kidding me you're not gonna have a system that lets employees help themselves why wouldn't you do that why wouldn't you have an automated password reset process to save money why wouldn't you do cloud provisioning to save money these are these are oxygen issues can't live without them type of problems for IT organizations and the reality is they're not getting the job done today so being able to show them a way to make it transformed is great we do intercede a lot of times during an upgrade process or during that consolidation phase where they realize we've got hundreds of tools and they're all in little islands they're not talking to each other and they don't have any data that they can trust so you strive for this consumer like experience we're hearing that a lot what are your customers telling you about oh how well you're doing that I think the exciting things we're going to see tomorrow with Fred's keynote presentation on the handheld on tablet device interfaces are really all about continuing that push towards consumerization nobody wants to use a green screen interface that was designed in the 80s anymore our customers are wanting the same kind of tools they had or they have when they go home when they use google or they use amazon they want the same kind of experience when they're at work and so we provide them the ability to make that happen and that's really transformative to how people perceive IT it is it is it more the IT staff that wants that type of experience or their their customers their clients and their own company are telling them this is our expectation if she said only use Google is only amazon is no I mean I go as far to say is if I'm going to an old guard custom or the old tools and I'm trying to recruit the generation that's coming into the workforce today and I'm showing user interfaces that looking at acquitted and old that employee base isn't going to stay there very long so if you want to be able to grow your business with today's talent on a global scale you need tools that look familiar and that people want to use I'm looking at your screen over there it looks pretty sexy it doesn't look anything like it did 10 years ago Yeah right so did your workforce like Frank's Lupin you're hiring by Mars what are you hiring what are you looking for we're hiring athletes we're hiring people to care we love that Natalie yeah absolutely i'll check out i mean if i could say it one way is if you want to love your customer and sell transformative technology and you want to be part of something that's bigger than you because that's what i'm looking for i'm looking for people that want to join us create something special make a difference not just in our lives which is nice and fun we're really focused on the customer is when you change your customers experience in their perception it has gifts beyond cakes it has gifts beyond making a great company these are lifelong relationships you'll have and even opportunity to that at service now well the enthusiasm here at knowledge is palpable you talk to the customers and they all smiles on their faces they want to be here they want as you said David share their stories most of the content coming from customers and then of course the cube so keep it right there I'll be back with Jeff brick David thank you very much for coming in the cube and sharing your story this is the cube this is knowledge we're here live in Vegas we'll be right back with our next guest right after this great thanks good