(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE live in Miami on the floor of IFS Unleashed. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Had some great conversations. Have more great conversations coming your way. I have two guests joining me. Please welcome Martin Schirmer, the President of Enterprise Service Management, IFS Assyst. And Parminder Khosa, the Senior IT Manager at Parexel. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. >> Lovely to be here. >> It's good to be here. >> Martin, talk to me a little bit... tell the audience a little bit about Assyst so that that get that context before we start asking questions. >> Yeah. Absolutely. So IFS Assyst is a recent acquisition. It's an acquisition we made about a year ago. And fundamentally, it's a platform that takes care of IT service management, enterprise service management and IT operations management. So think of it, of managing sort of the ERP for IT and then broadening that out into the sort of enterprise where you're driving enterprise use cases for all lines of businesses like HR, finance, facilities, so on and so forth. >> Got it. And then Parminder, give the audience just a little bit of a flavor of Parexel, who you guys are, what you do. >> Sure. >> Maybe the impact that you make. >> Yeah, so Parexel is a clinical research organization. And what that means is that we manage drug trials for big pharmaceutical companies. So we're a big company. We're 25,000 people. We have offices in 150 locations all the way from Japan and the east through to the West Coast of the USA. >> Big company. >> Yeah, we are. We are a lot of people. >> And let's start chatting now Martin with some of the questions that you have so we get the understanding of how IFS and Parexel are working together. >> Yeah. Absolutely. I suppose... I mean the first thing is and thank you for traveling here all the way from the UK. (Lisa chuckles) Appreciate it and great energy and vibe. So just what the first question I had really was, you're customer of ours for the last 15 years plus. Maybe just give the audience a bit of context into your journey and how you've evolved from the sort of early years to where you're going into the future. >> Sure. So our history, I was part of a company that Parexel acquired that was already using Assyst. And as Parexel acquired us, they were in the process of also buying Assyst. So it became a kind of natural fit where I carried on with Assyst. And we started relatively small, sort of just the service desktop. And throughout the ongoing 15 years or so, we've just grown and expanded into kind of being a critical tool for Parexel right now. >> Okay, that's fantastic. I mean part of that journey, I know you started in sort of the more they call a ticketing space or IT service management space. Expand a little bit how you've expanded out of that and really moved into the enterprise. >> Sure. So yeah. So when we first rolled Assyst out, it was as I say, purely IT. And eventually we reached out to other business units to say asking questions like, Are you managing your workload through email? Are you managing your workload through Excel spreadsheets? In which case, if you are, we've got a solution for you that will make it a much better experience for your customers. They're all internal. It'll make it much easier for you because you will have official tracking going on through our system. I'll make it better for your management because we can drive metrics from all of the data that we're getting. So if you imagine finance we're getting, kind of 200 miles a day because of the size of our company. And they were just working through them one by one responding, and they becomes just a mess. So we developed forms for them to say, "Okay, Larry raise all your requests here. We will pick it up. We will manage it. We will communicate with you. And once the piece of work that you've asked for is done, we will let you know." And as we go through that process, we'll make it better for us because as I say we're getting those metrics. And we'll make it better for you because we can spot where our gaps are. If a request is taking three days, and of that three days, two days is waiting for someone on our end to respond to you or is waiting for us waiting for a customer to respond, we can iron those out and make it a much better experience for everyone. >> That's fantastic. It's really music to my ears because we always pushing the industry to say move away from just the IT side and really get into the enterprise. And it sounds like you've really gotten a lot of sort of productivity and efficiency gains out of that. >> Definitely, definitely. And it becomes kind of a happy circle. So the finance guys will work with the procurement guys. And they also look... Well, we're doing all of our work through Assyst now. So procurement's a little turnaround. So, well we're using this big spreadsheet to manage all of ours. Can we do the same? And they'll reach out to us and we'll say, "Of course we can. What is your process?" For example, they will say, okay, if someone asks for a new laptop, we need to get the approval from their line manager, from the supplier. We need to do our own internal work and then we will send it out. So imagine if you're doing that in a an email chain. It just becomes chaos. >> Yeah. >> So we will build all of that out for them. And then procurement will talk to HR and it just becomes a snowball. And before you know it, we are doing about 4,000 tickets per day in our Assyst system. And of those, 50% perhaps maybe more than 50% now will be non IT related. >> Oh, that's fantastic. Really music to my ears. And it really breaking down the boundaries or silos within an organization. It's really good. Let the teams work together. Right? >> Definitely. And that's one of the key things that we've learned is that we have to engage completely with our business partners. And our business partners are becoming more and more IT literate as well. So for example, we had a recent big HR solution provided to us. And as part of that, we know there are going to be questions, and queries and perhaps even issues to do with our HR system. So we have to work with us guys, the Assyst front end, the IT HR guys who look after the databases, all of the technology in the background. Then there'll be IT HR who are Workday experts. And then kind of not necessarily at the bottom of the chain will be the HR people themselves who are in their own way, experts in their area, experts in IT in a certain way. So all of those people have to work together. We become the front end, but we have to work with all of those parts of the business. >> That's really great. It's basically what you just said is taking business, IT processes and underpinning solutions. Effectively digital transformation, right? >> Exactly. Yeah. So HR is a great example. They used to have paper flying around with leave request, with sickness requests, with all of those kind of issues. And you said, well if you have an issue with your HR system, you can't raise a leave request, or you can't raise a sickness request, tell us. We will take care of it. We will fix it for you. We will give you the instructions. And we will get rid of all of that paper. >> That's brilliant. Just sort of turning the attention. And all of that, how do you drive the sort of, we'll talk about the autonomous enterprise. How do you drive automation in that process? >> Yeah. Of course, we have to map all of those processes out. Because we're not the experts in HR or procurement or whatever the business area may be. We have to really dig into their work methods, their working areas. What is necessary for them? What is a must have? What is a like to have? What is we don't really need? So we really drive into that processes. Once we've got those, we will automate them. We will build them out in Assyst with the process designer. It's very intuitive now. The latest version is really good to work with. We will do some pretty clever stuff in there. We'll say, okay the manager approval. If the manager is not there, then escalate it to the next person. Then we go to HR and say, okay HR have taken two days to do this. We're not particularly okay with that. So we will escalate it to the next person. And all of that process is completely automated, completely in Assyst. >> Brilliant. I mean obviously, we have a codeless workflow engine with a designer. And if you look at one of the trends from post covid is a war in talent in particular developers. The IDC says there's going to be around 4 million shortage of developers. What is your view on, how easy... Do I need developers? Is it easy, is it difficult to do these workflow extensions and automations? >> Definitely not, no. So the two key areas that you mentioned that with the customizer to develop the forms to make them available to our end users, drag and drop. Really easy to do. You can put some nice filters in there. You can put some nice variables in there. You can drive intelligent drive the forms from there as well. So if option A is correct, then don't show me option B, show me option C. And all of that is codeless, entirely codeless. I don't need to type any code. And when we move on to a process designer that hooks in nicely with the form customizer because we can say, "Okay, if option B on that form is selected, then runs this process." And all of that process is entirely codeless as well. Drag and drop. Creates some tasks. Create some decisions. >> Fantastic. >> Brilliant. >> Sounds really good. Switching gears a little bit. You spoke about experience, and that's also obviously very topical post, well, Covid becoming a remote workforce. Clearly, we need to be digitally connected to our business and organization because the hybrid workforce, as we all know, is here to stay. And that employee experience is fundamental because it is their sort of channel to the engagement of the organization. Of course, that has retention impacts and productivity impact. So just from your perspective, how was Covid, from your perspective, and how easy or difficult was it to get your employees engaged and productive and working? >> Yeah. And for us, it's a double edged sword Covid was. Because of the nature of our business. We do covid stuff. We do drug stuff. So we may have issues with some trials that are related to that. So we need to escalate those. We need to be aware of them and move them to the top of the chain as soon as possible. And then Assyst becomes a source of truth. Everybody knows that if I've got an issue with the current environment that we're living in, I can raise it in Assyst. And everybody knows that's where that information is. There's no need to have huge conference calls or huge email chains to try and follow those around. So with our Assyst platform, with our employees as well, everybody knew that this is where the source of truth was. We didn't have any dropouts. We didn't have any concerns with our system or performance. We knew it was there. We had to do some work like, as I say, around covid issues just to make sure they get pushed up to the top of the chain. But otherwise, we were fine. And great credit to our IT operations team as well who managed that pretty much seamlessly. >> That's brilliant. That's good news. >> Yeah. >> It really is. Just taking a little bit further and talking a little bit about what next. My team has been, I know, talking to your team about the whole area of asset management. Maybe talk to us a little bit about that journey. >> Sure, sure. So we're an ITOM customer as well. So all of our hardware data is stored within the ITOM platform. So we've pushed out the agents to all of our end user machines, so 25,000 agents. And we're in the process of integrating that into our Assyst platform to make that the single source of truth. And that part of that we're working on the software asset management side as well. So we've got a really good idea of where our software assets are. It comes to all license auditing, we know exactly how much we've got there. And the more complex side of it is of course server. So software management management as well. So we're in the process of getting all of that data as well. So once we've done all that, there is other all as the next step. The next step will be to perhaps do monitoring or pushing out software using the ITOM platform and getting rid of some of the disparate systems that we have right now. >> Well that's good news. And I think I saw a study. I think, every single person as an employee carries around 15 or 20 assets with him at any one time. Be it from a PC, phone, physical software licenses, so on and so forth. In that context, I can imagine the business case around it. >> Definitely. Yeah. And every, again, we map every user to their assets and (indistinct) their assets. And again Assyst as a source of truth for that. So if you want to look at my record, so, all right. Pam's got a laptop. He's got a mobile phone. We're thinking about giving him a tablet, but we'll find out. That he's in the process of getting a tablet as well. So I can have a look at my user record and know exactly what I've got with all of the asset tags and the various links that it has to the software pieces so it becomes a big tree of my assets. >> That's wonderful. Just the question I had was, we spoke about breaking down silos and the enterprise use cases and the effect that has. Do you envisage that Assyst can really get to being enterprisewide as, when I say enterprisewide, everybody in the organization effectively using this tool as their sort of source of experience, and level of automation of process? >> Definitely, definitely. As I say, we're getting... We're really pushing to get to that. As I say, 4,000 tickets a day with a user base of 25,000 kind of means that everybody will interact with the system perhaps every two weeks or so. So we're getting to that point and with the new functionality that's coming out with the Assyst product, with the team's integration, and the bot and everything that will bring to us because we are a big. We use teams. We use bots. We use that kind of technology. It will just fit in seamlessly. And trying to break down the silos, as I say finance, procurement, all of the big beasts within our company already are using the Assyst tool. And we want to bring in more and more of those processes as we mature. >> Brilliant. I think Omnichannel's critical. We want to connect from any device from anywhere. It's just the way we work. So I think that's critical. Teams is of course a a tool that most of us have become too familiar with. >> Yup. (chuckles) >> To be fair. (chuckles) It's better to be here in person finally, right? >> Yeah. >> So I think, that's all exciting news. And it's really fantastic. >> Great. >> So I suppose maybe in the time that we have left, what's next? >> What's next for us is that we're in the process of migrating our solution to the cloud, to the IFS cloud. That will open up a huge new user base for us. If we think all of our customers, all of our people who work on studies will have the ability to connect to Assyst and ask questions. That's a lot of it is just ask a question, or raise an issue or ask for something. So we're talking, it could be expanded by hundreds of thousands of new users that will meet more people on the backend to manage those requests as well. So yeah. It's just going to get bigger and bigger. And as you say, with the CMDB work that we're doing as well, that's another big ongoing stream for us. >> It's great because as you know, with Assyst we have a disruptive licensing model. >> Yeah. >> We have a t-shirt size pricing. All you can need based a number of employees. So there's no barriers to entry for you. >> There really is. And that really helps us because as I said initially, particularly when finance came on board and now they're expanding, there is no cost implication for it. The more that we use it, the better it is for. The more bang for buck that we get. >> Yep. That's our mantra. Enterprise users, right? For the price of a cup of coffee, for the price of a user. That's our mantra. >> I love it. You guys have done such a great job of articulating the synergies in the relationship that IFS Assyst has with Paraxel. You talked about the great outcomes that you're achieving. And it's all about Martin, I know, from IFS Assyst perspective, it's all about helping customers achieve those outcomes and those moments of service that are so critical to your customers on the other end staying with you, doing more business. Whether it's the end user customer, whether it's the actual employee. You talked a lot about the customer experience, the employee experience, and what you guys are doing together to enable that. And I always think that the employee experience and the customer experience are like this. They're inextricably linked. You can't, you shouldn't. Otherwise you're going to have problems. >> Yeah, no, absolutely. And there's actually a study on that saying that, 70% of customers generally don't feel they get what they want from organizations. >> 70. Wow! >> And if you take that one step further to what you said, the interconnectivity between customer employee, employee shops on Amazon, right? It's on those websites. So you can't be rolling out and digitally connect to the employee with something that is clunky and has the wrong experience. Like I said, it really affects that level of engagement the employee has with the company which happens to be largely these days remote. >> It does. Last question Martin, is for you. Talk to us about what's next for IFS Assyst. Obviously, we're back in person. There's a lot of momentum about the company. I was talking with Darren, the growth and first half was great. He kind of gave us some teaser about second half, but what's next from your perspective? >> Yeah. So what's next for us is achieving our goal. We are here to disrupt the industry. It's an industry that's dominated by one player and a fair amount of legacy players. We've disrupted the business model as I've told you. We here to do more because it's a simple thing. And that's the word simple. We want to keep things simple. We're going to keep engineering and driving our product forward, right? We've made sure that our platform is up there with the best. Yeah. We've just been certified by pink. Pink is a verification of ITIL four they call it. So it's a body. And the top level is you can get 20 out of 20. We got 17 out of 20. There's only one other vendor that has more than us and it's only by little. And after it's a big white space, the next one is 14. So we on the right track. We are going to of course drive and capture the market. So watch this space. We here to grow. >> We will watch this space. Congratulations on being that disrupter. >> Thank you. >> Parminder great work with what you guys are doing. You did a great job of articulating, as I said, the customers tour here. We appreciate your insights, your time. >> Thank you very much. >> Pleasure. >> All right, my pleasure. >> Thank you. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube live from Miami on the show floor of IFS Unleashed. We'll be back after a short break.

(dynamic music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another CUBEConversation. This is another very special CUBEConversation in that it's part of a product launch. Today, BMC has come on to theCUBE to launch Helix, a new approach to thinking about cognitive services management. And we're, over the course of the next 20 minutes or so, gonna present some of the salient features of Helix and how it solves critical business problems. And at the end of the segment, at the end of this video segment, we're gonna then go into a CrowdChat and give you, the community, an opportunity to express your thoughts, ask your questions, and get the information that you need from us analysts, from BMC, and also from your peers about what you need to do to exploit cognitive systems management in your business. Now this is a very real problem, this is not something that's being made up. The reality is we're looking at a lot of data-first technologies that are transforming the way business works. Technologies like AI, and machine learning, and deep learning, technologies like big data, having an enormous impact about how businesses behave. These technologies invoke much greater complexity at the application at the systems level and Wikibon strongly believes that we do not understand how businesses can pursue these technologies and these richer applications without finding ways to apply elements of them directly into the IT service management stack. And the reason why is if you don't have high-quality, lower-cost, speedy automation inside how you run your service management overall platform, then it's going to create uncertainty up hiring stack and that's awful for digital business. So to better understand and take us through this launch today, we've got some great guests. And it starts, obviously, with the esteemed Nayaki Nayyar who is the President of the Digital Services Management business unit at BMC, CUBE alum. Nayaki, thanks very much for being here. >> Thank you, Peter, really excited to be here and look forward to our conversation. We are too excited about the launch of BMC Helix and happy to share the details with you. >> So let's start with the why. Obviously, there's a... You know, I've articulated kind of a generalization of some of the challenges that businesses face but it goes deeper than that. Take us through some of the key issues that your customers are facing as they think about this transition to a new way of running their business. >> So, let's put ourselves in the customers' shoes. Then you look at what their journey looks like. Customers are evolving from the online world into the digital world and what we see is, what we call, cognitive world. And the way their journey looks like, especially as customers are entering into the digital world, there are proliferation of clouds. They don't have just one cloud, they have private clouds, hybrid clouds, managed clouds, we call it multi-cloud. So they're entering into a multi-cloud world. In addition, there's also proliferation of devices. It's not just phones that we have to worry about now. As IoT's getting more and more relevant and prevalent, how you help customers manage all the devices and how you provide the service through not just one channel but channel of our customers' or consumers' preference. It could be a Slack as a channel, SMS as a channel, Skype as a channel. So across this multi-cloud, multi-device, and multi-channel, this explosion of technology that is happening in every customer's landscape, and to address this explosion, is where AIML, chatbots, and virtual agents really play a role for them to handle the complexities. So the automation that AIML, chatbots, and virtual agents bring to help customers address these multi-cloud, multi-channel, multi-device world is what we call how we have them evolve from ITSM to cognitive services management. >> Let's talk about that a little bit. We'll get into exactly what you're announcing in a second but historically when we thought about service management we thought about devices. What you're really describing, this transition is, again that notion of how all of these different elements come together in, sometimes, very unique ways and that's what's driving the need for the cognitive. It's not just, you can do multiple clouds, multi-devices, multiple channels, it's your business can put them together in ways that serve your business' needs the best. And now we need a service management capability that can attend to those resources. >> Absolutely. So if you go 10, 15 years back, BMC had a great portfolio. We had Remedy Service Management Suite. We also had Discovery to help customers discover the on-prem assets and provide its service to remedy service management. That's what we had, we were very successful. ITSM, as a category, was created for that whole space. But in this new world of multi-cloud, right, where customers have private clouds, managed clouds, hybrid clouds, multi-devices where IoT is becoming more and more relevant, and multi-channel, customers now have to discover these assets. We call it Discovery as-a-Service but now they can discover the assets across AWS, Azure, OpenStack, and Cloud Foundry and evolve into providing service from reactive to proactive service, and that's what we call Remedy as-a-Service, and then extend that service beyond IT to also lines of business. Now you wanna also provide that service to HR, and procurement, and also various lines of business. And the most important thing is how you provide that experience to your end-users and your end-customers is what we call Digital Workplace-as-a-Service where now customers can consume that service in channel of their preference. They can consume that service through mobile device, of course through web, but also Slack, SMS, chatbots, and virtual agents. So that's what we are combining all of that, that entire suite, we are containerizing that suite using Dockers and Kubernetes so that now customers can run in their choice of cloud. They can run it in AWS cloud, Azure cloud, or in BMC cloud. This whole suite is what we call BMC Helix and helps our customers evolve from ITSM to what we call cognitive services management. >> So that's what BMC's announcing today. >> Yes. >> It's this notion of BMC Helix. >> Yes. >> And it's predicated on the idea, if I can, also of, not only you're going to use these technologies to manage new stuff, we have to bring the old stuff forward. Additionally, we're gonna see a mix of labor, or people, and automation as companies find the right mix for them. >> Right. >> And so we wanna bring and sustain these practices and these approaches forward. Nobody likes a forced migration, especially not in an IT organization. >> Right. >> So that's how we see Helix. if I got this right. >> Yes. >> Helix is gonna help customers bring their existing assets, existing practices, modernize them using some of the new technologies and that's how we get to this new cognitive vision. >> Absolutely. The investments customers have already made in their on-prem assets, in their managing their IT assets, that same concepts come into this new multi-cloud, multi-device, and multi-channel world but now it extends beyond that. It extends beyond just IT to also lines of business and also all these, what we call, omni-channel experiences that you can provide. And this whole suite is, what we call, 3 C's, Helix stands for 3 C's. Everything as a service, Remedy as-a-Service, Discovery as-a-Service, Business Workplace as-a-Service, containerized so that customers can run this in the choice of their cloud, they can run in AWS cloud, Azure cloud, or our cloud with cognitive capabilities, with AIML, and chatbots. And that's how we help them evolve from that existing implementations to this whole new world as they enter into the cognitive world. >> Exciting stuff. >> Absolutely. We are very excited about it. We've been working with a lot of customers already, and we have made really, really good traction. >> So let's do this, Nayaki, let's take a look at a product video that kinda describes how this all comes together in a relatively simple, straightforward way. >> Absolutely. (upbeat music) >> Hi, Peter Burris again, welcome back. We're talking more about BMC's Helix announcement. Great product video. Once again, we're here with Nayaki Nayyar, but we're also being joined by Vidhya Srinivasan who's in Marketing within the Digital Services Management unit at BMC. Thank you very much for joining us in theCUBE. >> Great to be here, thank you. >> So we've heard a lot about the problems, we've heard a lot about BMC Helix as a solution, but obviously it's more than just the technology. There's things that customers have to think about, about how these technologies, how service management, cognitive service management's going to be impacting the business. As businesses become more digital, technology and related services get dragged more deeply into functions. So, Nayaki, tell us a little bit more about how the outcomes within business, the capabilities of businesses are gonna change as a consequence of applying these technologies. >> Absolutely, Peter. So if you look at, traditionally, IT service management was a very reactive process. Every ticket that came in was manually created, assigned, and routed. That was a very reactive process. But as we enter into this cognitive world and you apply intelligence, AIML, you evolve into what we call a proactive and predictive. Before an issue actually happens, you want to resolve that issue. And that's what we call the cognitive services management. And the real business outcomes, you put yourself in a customer's shoes who's providing this service and evolving into this proactive, predictive, and cognitive world, they wanna provide that service at the highest accuracy, at the highest speed, and the lowest cost. That's what is gonna become competitive advantage for every company indifferent of the industry. They could be in a telco, they could be in high-tech, or pharmaceutical. It doesn't matter which industry they are in, how they provide this service at the highest accuracy, highest speed, and lowest cost is gonna be fundamentally a competitive advantage for these customers. >> And when we talk about accuracy, again we're not just talking about accuracy in a technology context. We're talking about accuracy in terms of a brand promise, perhaps. >> Absolutely. >> Or a service promise, or a product promise. >> Yes. >> That's the context. We wanna make sure that the customer is getting what they expect fast, with accuracy, and at low cost. >> Right, every time you tweet or you're SMS-ing your service provider, you expect that response to be at the highest accuracy, at the speed, and the cost. >> So when we start talking about multi-channel, Vidhya, what we're really saying is that this is not just your, you know, this is not just service management for the traditional technology service desk. We're talking about service management for other personas, other individuals, other consumers as well. Take us through that a little bit. >> Yeah, that's right. So we actually take a very holistic approach, right, across the enterprise. So we have end-users who are, at the end of the day, the key subscribers or consumers of our service and we wanna make sure they're very happy with what we provide. We have the agents which kinda goes to the IT persona that people know about in the service desk. But then, as Nayaki said earlier, it's also about extending to a lines of business so you have HR agents, right, people who support HR requests, people who support facilities or procurement request. So making sure that the agent persona is able to do everything that they need to do at the most efficiency level that they can so that they can meet their SLAs to their end consumers is a big part of what Helix, BMC Helix and cognitive service management can provide. And ultimately, when you think about this transformation and where they wanna go, there's a lot of custom applications and custom needs that businesses have. So really thinking about the developer persona and how you actually embed and build intelligent applications through our cognitive microservices that BMC Helix provides is a big part of that value proposition we provide. So as you navigate through this journey and become a cognitive enterprise, how do you make sure that all of these personas throughout your enterprise is able to deliver and get value out of this is what BMC Helix provides for the whole enterprise. >> So the whole concept of incorporating these cognitive capabilities into a service management stack allows us to not only envision, in a traditional way, more complex applications but actually extend this out to new classes of users because we are masking a lot of the complexity and a lot of the uncertainty associated with how this stuff works from that customer. >> That's correct. >> For end-users, for agents, and for developers, and consumers, and customers too. >> Great. >> That's good. >> So you know what... Great conversation. But let's hear what a customer has to say about it, shall we? >> Absolutely, okay. >> My name is Marco Jongen. I work for a company called DSM. And I'm the Director for Service Management within the Global Business Services department. Royal DSM is a global science-based company active in health, nutrition, and materials. And by connecting our unique competencies in life science and in material sciences, DSM is driving economic prosperity, environmental progress, and social advance to create sustainable value for all stakeholders simultaneously. The Global Business Service department is serving the 20,000 employees of DSM spread over 200 locations globally. We are handling, annually, about 600,000 tickets, and we are supporting four business functions: finance, HR, procurement, and IT. We started together with BMC on a shared services transformation across IT, HR, finance, and procurement. And we created a unified ticketing system and a self-service portal using the Remedy system and the Digital Workplace environment. And with this, we are now able to handle all functions in one unified ticketing tool and giving visibility to all our employees with questions related to finance, HR, purchasing, and IT. We were still have and involved with BMC in bringing this product to the next level and we are very excited in the work we have done with BMC so far. >> That was great to hear Royal DSM is transforming its shared services organization with cognitive services management. But, Nayaki, there's no such thing as an easy transformation especially one of this magnitude. We're talking about digital business which is, we're using data assets differently, it's affecting virtually every feature of business today. And now we've got a technology set that's gonna have potentially an enormous impact on IT but everything that IT is being, or everywhere that IT is being employed. That kind of a transformation is not something that people do lightly. They expect their suppliers to help them out. So what is BMC gonna do to ensure that customers are successful as they go through this transformation to cognitive services management? >> Absolutely, Peter. I always say these transformations are not one-month, two-month transformations. These are multi-year transformations and it's a journey that customers go through. We partner very closely with customers in this journey, assessing their requirements, understanding what their future looks like, and helping them every step of the way. Especially in service management, this change, this transformation that is happening, is gonna be very disruptive to their end-to-end processes. Today, all service desks are manned by individuals. Every ticket that comes in gets manually created, assigned, and routed. But if you fast forward into the future world in the next two to three years, that service desk function, which is especially level zero, level one, level two, service desk function, will completely get replaced by bots or virtual agents. It could be 50-50, 70-30, you can pick what the percentage-- >> Whatever the business needs. >> Right? But it is coming. And it is very important for customers to see that change and that transformation that is happening and to be ready for it. And that's where we are working very closely with them in making sure it's not just a system transformation. It's also the people side and the process that have to change. And companies who can do that, what we call cognitive service management using bots and virtual agents at the highest accuracy, highest speed, and the lowest cost, I keep coming back to that because that is what is gonna give them the highest competitive advantage. >> Lot to think about. >> Absolutely. >> Exciting future, crucial for IT if it's gonna succeed moving forward, but even if the business choose to use cloud, you're going to need to be able to discover and sustain service management at a very, very high level. >> Absolutely. How we discover, how we help them discover, how we help them provide that service proactively, predictively, and provide that experience through omni-channel experiences, what this whole thing brings together for our customers. >> Excellent, this has been a great conversation. Nayaki Nayyar, President of BMC's Digital Services Management business unit. Thank you very much for being here on theCUBE and working with us to help announce Helix. Now don't forget folks, that immediately after this, we'll be running the CrowdChat. And in that CrowdChat, your peers, BMC experts, us analysts will be participating to help answer your questions, share experience, identify simpler ways of doing more complex things. So join us in the CrowdChat. Once again, Nayaki, thank you very much. >> Thank you, Peter, and thank you everyone. Thank you all.

>> 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 AWS re:Invent 2017 presented by AWS, Intel and our ecosystem of partners. >> Hey! Welcome back to theCube's continuing coverage of AWS re:Invent 2017 from beautiful Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with my co host Keith Townsend. We're very excited to welcome back Cube alumni Nayaki Nayyar from BMC. The president of Digital Services Management. Welcome back to theCube! >> Thank you Lisa. Thank you Keith. Really excited to be here. I've been here before and I love this forum and how you are able to scale this and get our word around the world on this forum; thank you. >> Well fantastic. So one of the first things I wanted to ask you, you know, we hear buzz words all the time. Every event that we're at no matter what and I wanna know what is Multi-Cloud? What does it mean to your customers? Or do they say "Nayaki, what is Mutli-Cloud? "Do we need one?" >> Yes. So you know that's a very good question. Every customer I go talk to the number one challenge they have is what we call this Multi-Cloud challenge. Because now customers are evolving their workloads. We heard from Andy how everyone is evolving the workloads into cloud. But it's not one cloud. They have hybrid clouds, managed clouds, private clouds you name it. The privilege of clouds is becoming a norm now. And how you help them manage the complexity of these Multi-Cloud is what is very unique for BMC and all the technology that they are releasing in the market is that's our sweet spot right now. >> So when a customer comes and says "help me navigate this process." Where do you start? >> Yeah, so you know the number one. You'd be surprised. When customers are planning the migration or they're in the journey of migrating their workloads to cloud the first thing is they have to know what they own. Discovering their assets and it'd be interesting for most of the CIOs or heads of technology that I talk to they don't even know what they own across all the data centers. So we have a product called Discovery for Mutli-Cloud. Where it can discover all assets customers have on-prim but also assets across AWS. That is a partnership we announced with AWS. And with Azure or any other clouds that they have. And it actually builds a relationship across all of these assets so you can plan if you move one of those assets what is the impact on the rest of the service. That is the beauty of it. >> So Nayaki, I really love the discovery conversation and it is a big challenge for most enterprises. AWS announcing 1,300 features this year alone. Amazing skill. But those assets don't look like traditional CI, configuration items, that we've seen in the past. There's server-less, there's databases. What does an asset look like in BMC so that we normalize that and look at it across multiple clouds. >> There are like technology assets but most importantly when we took a look at an asset it is a business asset. You're providing a service. End to end service. The service could be listing as a service for an eBay website. And for that service you have databases. You have application service. You have code running on various parts. That is what discovery does. Being able to discover for that service. That business service that you have. Delivering to your customers or to your business what all is mapped to that service. So when you actually asses that impact. If you move any one of them or bring any one of them down. What is the impact to that business service. >> So obviously something like a dependency. If I have a listing service for eBay and it's designed for eBay process but I move it somewhere else what does that mean towards basically the employee that needs to go and list an item on eBay their job is impeded. >> Yeah so it immediately detects what impact any one of those assets are moved or brought down or shut down for whatever reason what is the impact on the rest of the relationships and also the business outcome or business service that you are providing. >> So one of the things that John likes to take on is the concept of Multi-Cloud. Getting more into this definition of Mutli-Cloud. Is that we're not running workloads everywhere, are we? Saying that we can't defeat gravity and the speed of light. That you're not going to have AI running and AWS and across object storage and Google. Multi-cloud. How are customers using Multi-cloud? >> Yeah, so I would not say you would not have like 20 clouds that you are using. Typically companies have, of course on-prim, everyone has on-prim, all large enterprises. But then they also have a private cloud of their own. But then have one or two public clouds that they may have workloads. They may have AWS for sure and Azure. So typically that's what a customer landscape looks like. But even within these four or five clouds that you have to manage it's still a big landscape that technology leaders have to manage and secure. >> Talk to us about what you guys have heard this week from AWS. One of the things that you mentioned this year alone over 1,300 new services and features. Last year I think it was 1,117. So the accelerated pace of innovation at AWS is mind blowing. Do you think they probably need like a neck brace? They're going at such warp speed. But I'm wondering how does their pace of innovation with your strategic partnership. How does that influence BMC and what are some of the things that excite you about what you've heard this week. >> So a couple of things. The very first one is for our customers, BMC has what we call Remedy, one of the largest suite for helping customers manage ITSM or IT Service Management. Most of our customers are moving that workload into public clouds like AWS so for us instead of trying to run it our own cloud or in our data centers it's easier for our customers to just move that workload into clouds. So with the pace of innovation that AWS is releasing with 1,300 new features, we don't have to invest in all that. Or our customers don't have to invest on the infrastructure there. We can just focus on the app side, the Remedy side. That's one. The second one I was so excited about was Arora. The announcement of Arora on Postgres. We were actually working very closely with AWS right now on certifying Remedy with Arora and Postgres. We are like few weeks, few months away from that announcment and that release and once that gets out all of our customers should be able to migrate to their gravity system onto Arora with using Postgres as a database which is a huge cost savings for companies on the database side. So those are the two big announcements we are very excited about. >> So, I know this talks to the pace of change. So you guys cutting edge to move Remedy to Postgres on Arora. Serverless for Arora was just announced yesterday. How does that impact? >> That even makes it our job even more easier right? For it to be able to just scale elastically without being like dependent on any one instance or one server is I think this tremendously futuristic and can help our customers and for us not to manage those server assets in AWS. Absolutely. >> So reducing friction. What does it mean to consume Remedy as a service versus worrying about all of that infrastructure. What does that actually mean to your customer? >> So it's not consuming Remedy as a service. It's service management as a service. Right. So if you look at customers want to provide IT Service Management to their employees. How they consume that with a combined solution from BMC and AWS is the beauty of our partnership coming together. >> Let me ask you on that front, what is some of the feedback that you're getting from customers that helps reinforce the partnership with AWS and improve it? >> Yeah, in fact, after we announced the partnership with AWS I would say the intake. The flood of questions I got from customers around the world is they're so happy to hear the partnership because now they can have BMC and AWS at the table discussing how we move their workload, which they had on-prim into AWS and leverage the strength and the power of what AWS gives along with the power of what Remedy gives. >> So service management a huge. You know I've heard CEOs and CIOs call Service Management the ERP of IT. Meaning this is the central point where I go to consume IT services. How does Mutli-Cloud impact the consumption of IT services through something like Remedy. >> Yes. So think of it right. In the past you were providing service management for all your on-prim assets. Now your assets are all over Mutli-Cloud. So it is like Multi-Cloud service management. So we do have the next iteration of Remedy which we call Mutli-Cloud Service Management. So now customers can use launches to provide service for their on-prim assets but all their cloud assets through one service management tool. That's one. But even more little futuristic that Viore announced with AWS is what we call Cognitive Service Management. Is service management a future is not reactive, it's proactive. You detect an issue before it actually happens and proactively provide that service and that is where our integration with Alexa and the AI services come from Amazon. >> So as customers prepare to get ready for Multi-Cloud and the interface into Service Management, what are some of the things that they should be thinking about today? >> So as customers, first of all discover, making sure you discover all the assets, plan the phase at which those assets will move into cloud but then don't forget that at the end of the day you're providing a service to your end customers or end employees. How that service is provided through a single, I would say technology set or single suite, will take them a long ways. So that's where AWS and BMC's suite really becomes very powerful as customers are planning this journey. >> You mentioned Alexa for business and of course we heard all about that this morning. I see a smile on your face. What is that gonna mean for BMC? >> So in fact we announced a partnership with Amazon on Alexa for Business. Well think of it when you go to work and instead of typing a ticket for requesting a service, you just ask Alexa. Alexa, my laptop's not working or my phone is having an issue and it automatically >> Alexa, my laptop. (laughing) >> So that is where we call Alexa for Business where it's not just for consumer world it's not entering into what I call the enterprise world and being able to provide that experience, that end user experience right, through what we call virtual agents and virtual assistants like Alexa for customers and employees to just ask a question and the entire service will be fulfilled right through Alexa. >> So obviously some of the first thoughts that come to my mind when it comes to that type of service. I had an Alexa at home for a little while and I should probably start calling it Echo cause we're setting off a bunch of echos all across the world here. But I quickly got rid of it because my nine year old would come in the room and would say "Order ten cases of bubble gum." And there's no authentication. So, how are those types of enterprise issues getting addressed? >> So, that's what we call enterprise grade. How do you bring enterprise rigor into the technology that is coming from the consumer world. That's why when you ask Alexa for a certain service or a request. It will validate whether you have the authorization to get that service. And all of that integration inside our core ITSM Suite is already done and that's where the power of Alexa plus Remedy really becomes powerful. >> So how many cases of gum do you actually have? >> I don't even like gum so it's gonna take her a while to chew through all of that. (laughing) >> Oh well if only we had more time to explore that. Nayaki, thank you so much for coming back visiting us on theCube and sharing the excitement at BMC. Your energy and excitement for what you guys are doing is electric so thank you for sharing that. >> Thank you Lisa. Thank you Keith. It was an absolutely pleasure and thank you everyone. Thanks a bunch. >> Awesome. And we want to thank you for sticking around with us for my co-host Keith Townsend I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube live at AWS re:Invent 2017. Don't go anywhere. We have great more segments coming back. (pop tech music)

>> From Las Vegas. It's the cute covering knowledge sixteen Brought to you by service. Now carry your host David, Dante and Jeffrey. We're >> back. This is knowledge. Sixteen. This is the Q. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. This is day one of a three day Walter Wall coverage. The Cube has of knowledge. Sixteen Hashtag No. Sixteen like a lander is here. He's the CEO and vice chancellor of college services at Lone Star College. Longtime Cuba Lem like it's great to see again. >> Good scene again to >> another is >> great to catch up with this >> place, Another knowledge have a bigger and better than ever. You're you're speaking later on this afternoon. You've been over at the CIA event house this year going for you. You know, it's going >> great. The CIA oven, of course, is excellent lot of leadership foundations. Keynote TOC where, you know, service now is heading right now. Kind of. You know, that the shift and I always were still back to one of the themes from eons ago. Let's kill email. But the reality is emails not dead. So as we focus on it, you know, I came into this from the stance of moving the enterprise service management. So as I bring a team here, we really get the opportunity to see where we're at today in that comparison, and then how we can leverage the platform and move yourself forward >> So your role is evolving at Lone Star College, You said off camera, you're not giving up a title. A CIA, your CEO. >> Yes, I am the CEO >> and bread. That's not Teo, but your responsibilities are expanding. Talk about that side of things well, >> so well, last year actually been a year and a half. Now human resource is put underneath me. That's why the title change and all that to fit better and then analytics because, you know, analytics is not it much. People want us to think it should be buried inside of it. It never should, because it's about the business process. About the business service human resource is was just around the concept of aligning that service management what we had completed in it around service excellence. One of my right hand's basically put it as customer delight. Our focus is on customer no light. So it is about that communications piece. How do you talk to your customer? How do you move forward? How do you understand what their challenges are and help them find a solution. It may not be its instead of saying no, I can't do that for you. Sorry. You're out of luck. So in that, in that evolution, we've really moved ourselves forward on the enterprise service management platform side and early days, financial aid. We brought in student call centers. Now you've got human. Resource is were talking earlier about We're moving our legal in there. It's going to accelerate the pace it takes to get a contract illegal down TTO one day, maybe two days or some way didn't catch their approvals fast enough. So that's the big transformation from an organization >> of automated. That whole process over I actually, before going, I want to ask you questions about analytics. So you have. Ah, datas are that's working for you outside of it. Is that right or you? The days are >> well, you know, I actually have a team, >> have a data >> team s o. We're talking two different sets. Analytics too, because we're actually using service now. Analytics when it comes to the Service management analytics. Right. But for the organizational analytics, we actually have a large team that that does our analytics everything from dash boarding through, You know, in our case, core institutional reporting that's required. >> And is there a chief data officer as part of that team? >> I have a personal leading that group. >> De facto even >> factor. Yes. >> So there's a lot of discussion to about whether the CDO should report to the c. E. O. In this case, it does. But you had you had said things questions as to whether or not that Data Analytics function should be in it. It's not a night function. We kind of agree on that, but yes, but what kind of reports in to the head of, Well, >> you know, But see, when I when I sit down at that table, I sit down as the vice chancellor college services. So I have to sit down with three separate hats in front of me. Andi, I can't favor one over the other. Otherwise I wouldn't be doing my job currently. So when I look at the analytic side from a perspective, I will get on my team that provides the data, my database services and, you know, why are you not getting this done or what's happening here? So I've gotta look at it from all areas >> like Bill Belichick, GM coach way Tom Brady. You got to figure out who >> you are. At that point, I'm >> well. So is this how the role of the CEO is evolving? I mean, we've heard of this event previously. Frank's Lupin one year a couple years ago, said CEO should be a business person. Absolutely certainly seen examples of that. Now you're sort of given responsibility for you. No other services beyond just services. How was that role evolving? >> Well, rolls about for years. The question is, Is the CIA evolving? So? And that's where the challenges in the organization. So a lot of CEOs they're going through this process now where they're understanding that, Yes, I need to understand what are the business goals and objectives howto achieve those goals howto I had value to the organization. How did not become a cost center that has a target on my back? How you become an enabler enabler for the business And that's really where we came into that part of the process because we're recognized that Alcide nightie was here trying to help find solutions and provide better customer service. I myself come from a background in higher it for a long time through different institutions. And so when somebody talk to me about student services or student success, these air topics, I understand. I came to Lone Star originally because I didn't feel I had the strength in the academic side. And so when I first arrived there, I was really focused on academic understanding how the academic side operates and what they need in it. So I've had the opportunity to get well rounded in education, but it doesn't. It really is just about anybody that comes into this role. You must understand the business you're in, and then the next part is you need to be able to talk. I have an intelligent conversation around a topic area, bring value to the organization and come back with ideas. Well, you know, if we did this so the legal one was rather interesting because we had a new general counsel. Come on, and we're trying to help him, and he's like, Well, there has to be something better. You ask me. It's a better way to approach this. And we were able to dig through. Is that you know, What service? Now we've been doing this in HR. We're doing this here. So finally, we've got them into service now. And they see an opportunity the same way we see it. Which is we're improving. We're getting rid of the little stuff, the mundane work, You know that the task orientated work and we're focusing on the things that are really a challenge. And it has been there for a while because self service and all the other opportunities we've given the customer. Now we can shift that back and say, Okay, I cannot focus on what does the hard thing to get completed. How Doe I really put in effort in and a lot of a lot of staff hours into this one piece. >> So you started service management You mentioned hr Legal >> Financial Aid General Student Carlson are We're looking at scholarships right now. We tell a little bit ideas around our foundation in scholarships and what we could do for them. Grants. Grants are very big challenge because you have to really track and trend your grants. When you look at it, sm the areas that we've matured there are phenomenal, and then we're getting ready now to move and I Tom, which we didn't do because we already built a complete structure around that we were feeding that to service now. So now I'm looking at from opportunity that if I can eliminate a lot of the tools, I put in a play and get into one single tool and maximize the value of that tool. So I think you heard me many times when we talked in this. It's never about the tool. It's always about people in a process first. And then how does the tool come in? Well, this platform, we can actually adjust that because we're not We're not bound by the tool. Like the legal module. They have a great legal module. Well, it didn't fit what we needed. So it's been adjusted accordingly. T meet our needs from the platform side by keeping the core components so we haven't customized. We haven't taken it to a path where we can never upgrade. But at the same time as we looked at the process they had and how do we take that process and then actually put it into play with service now? >> And they were all inward service now do you worry about locking? >> Always. I think >> that Do you manage that risk? >> Well, the very first thing, to be honest with you is any time you enter in any cloud situation or any product situation, you want an exit strategy of some kind In case something goes wrong, something happens. You have to be at that point. So the only way to manage it really is to one. Keep a good, strong partnership. I believe that I have a strong partnership was service now. I don't believe it's a vendor relationship and I think that's critical because as we look at what we're doing each time as a partner, were were engaged with things like Where you heading? What's happening next? You know what? And then the same thing with the user group community were engaged with that group. So from a partner standpoint, we look at that first. But if the worst case scenario came, I've got to be able to get out of the solution. I've gotta have an exit strategy which we actually had designed before we went into it. Now the question becomes is we get further and further entrenched. What do we do and I'm comfortable. I'm comfortable that the company and the operations are going the right direction for me at the same time. If I'm gonna protect my organization to make sure we're safe. >> And that's a big, big part of transparency on the part of service now and your ability to communicate, you know your road map and your needs, I mean, a scale of one to ten ten being, you know, really transparent. How Where would you put service now as an organization >> who? That's a tough one, Especially when I'm sitting here. >> Uh, Frank's not around is a freaking God. He's breathing guy. Let's see. You know, >> a CZ forest transparency. I would give him good, strong seven. >> Yeah, >> I think I would. No company can be completely transparent. They've got a lot of things working in the back room or ideas that they're moving forward >> because they don't know. They don't know what they don't know. Going. Yeah, >> but there's there's ideas that they have that they're moving forward. It's gonna like today with the watch demo. I'm like, Oh, yeah, I love wearables. I you know, I live off. I could very easily now just say Oh, yeah, I just >> got an e mail. Sorry. Yeah, but, >> uh, at the same time is, you know, for them to bring that forward at this point. So they're creative and looking at these items, but they don't want to get out there too soon. >> I'm curious on the partner vendor, you know, mentioned a couple aspects of what defines that relationship of all the vendors you have. How many do you consider to be? You know, close business partners where your, you know, really sitting at the table and building a long term relationship, You gotta have an exit, but its life so much easier. If >> you're working with a partner verse a vendor right now, I would stay out of our partner strategy. We've got four. That's it. But those are four core providers for the organisation. Their leaders in the market space. That's the other key. Most my partnerships or with leaders, of course service. Now, at the time when we first engaged with them and actually I would say, from a partnership standpoint, a strong partner was service. Now, probably since about two thousand ten, we've been on the platform since two thousand eight. So we built that partnership over that first couple of years. You got past that vendor relationship and then moved on from there. But right now, just our core technology stack would be sitting in that partnership room, and I've got others than in that court Technologies. Technically, I'm not a partner there. A vendor there there were by cell. They have a great product, but they don't really want to bring us into that point. And we really haven't approached that point. >> We had a great discussion off camera about you had mentioned. You're looking at potentially expanding into this security realm with service now. And you were sharing with me like your philosophy on security. So I want to document that The premise that I'm going to put forth summarizing our conversation is, you should organizations increasingly should treat security as an ongoing part of their business continuity plans, not necessarily as a sort of separate stovepipe managed by a few security practitioners. Is that a fair summary? >> Yeah, Service continuity is what I use. I don't have >> service continuity, service continuity, that your business. Yeah, it always comes >> out to service continuity. How do you How do you continue that process and provide the same level of service in the in the event. It's very simple to me as I look at all those events as like problem management incident management, you have a response that you have to take, so it has to be inherit. It has to be natural. You just do it way we're talking about that. That response, specially for security, is what's more important is that you have everything planned out and you're ready to deal with that incident in that rock response because it's gonna happen. So how you handle that response can actually dictate your future, right? Wei had that little bit of that discussion there, too. So it does come down to that service continuity. How do you continue to move forward as and get through that threat and then afterwards make sure that you prevent that from happening again. >> Unlike many CEOs that I talked to, your discussions with the overseers at the college are not entrenched largely in the security discussion. You've earned some level of trust with regard to your capabilities. Is a business your ability to respond. Can you talk about that a little bit? How you actually achieve that, what expectations you were able to set and how you're able to execute on that? >> Well, the biggest, biggest part, especially when you look at it at that event, it's how. How is it performed overall over the history? You've gotta have some history. You've gotta have some credentials. How do you deal with these responses in these emergencies? That gives you a little bit more slack in that process, but it is about constant communications. So what the board received for me is communications. It's very straightforward. Typically, in an annual report type format, Short updates clear, concise updates. But then, when event happens, we're talking about the flood that happened in Houston, and very quickly I had an email out and my service test team was already on it. They already implemented their service continuity because while we may be shut down, we have students online taking classes. We have students that need to know what's going on, what's happening so they're calling in, and our service desk continued on through that entire process without issue. So they see that as an example on a regular basis. If we have a system down, everybody gets to see exactly. We did X, Y and Z or if we even have a like today, I should say today Monday we had a blip. We did, Nam. We have. We saw performance degradation. We immediately had a team on. We had a WebEx open with everything running. So we're preparing for a service continuity event that didn't happen. And they see those two because the business units are getting these notifications. Hey, we've gotta WebEx open. We have this issue coming up, and when they see that, they realize how fast we are to respond to what could be a potential issue that we built that trusting relations. >> So that's a good example. If I understand it correctly, the regime that you've put in place puts a heavy emphasis on the response. I mean, obviously you're trying to stop the bad guys who wouldn't go innovated on the response as well. Is that a fair assessment? >> Yes. I mean, the threats, goingto threats gonna happen. The threat happens all the time. So it is about that response. It is being quick to respond to communicate and take care of the problem. >> Do you think that's changed amongst the CEO community in the last ten years that that the shift in mindset toward that response versus so to keep him out big dig a bigger mode, Wider moat. >> Well, you can dig a big, wide moat. Doesn't matter. >> I think I've >> got these big, robust to hot data centers. Amazing firewalls. They're redundant. You tried overload him. They're going to take over. I've got next gen firewalls behind that. I've got you. Just you, layer layer. This tax of protection I have put in you still have to prepare that we're talking about it is Okay, so that's the perimeter. Well, inside my perimeter is one hundred thousand students, those hundred thousand students around my network. So how do I protect against that? So now I have inside perimeter protection. You can build all this entrenchment that you want to build. But the reality is you need we prepared Just gonna happen that you are. Somebody is going to get to that point. Or at least then the alarms up that you have to respond to >> service now is talking yesterday at the financial analyst meeting about you know, the statistic. And I've heard a range here, but it's large that that after an intrusion it takes, on average two hundred five days for the average organization toe. Realize that there's been an intrusion. I've seen numbers as high as three, three, three, fifty, etcetera. Um, first of all, does that sound consistent with what you see in there in the real world and conservative now help compress that time. >> So the interest was service. Now, of course, is tracking and trending those responses. I, tom and Service watch. There's a lot opportunities with those tools and course we have a perimeter we have a pile of tools were using. In our case, our threats are a bit different because, of course, we're not a big financial institutions. So we were not right with all those other pieces. But you're from the days to recover from a major event and my peers and what that have actually experienced a data loss event? Yeah, it easily is that it is easy. That >> and you think, feel is, though that service now could help you attack that compress that >> yes, mainly through the data collection and then the reporting and then as the events going on all of this information that's happening in the problem management side. What you're seeing from outside information coming in and technicians on the inside updating information as they go through it. You have a comprehensive log of the event from start to finish. >> Now you're speaking just right after this. I think you're just what? You're what you're talking about. >> The shift for my tea service management. Teo Enterprise Service Management. It's actually Enterprise. Wow. But I'm actually walking through the journey. But the best part about that is it's the pitfalls we learned along the way because Wei didn't know we went to Enterprise Service Management. It's kind of I think we had a discussion when we went to the cloud. I didn't know we went to cloud. Exactly. I just knew we went to this heavy virtualization, these two out data centers and I kind of realized, Wow, we really pushed into this new this new wage, this new change. >> We've got a new operating model on on, >> you know. But now yeah, it really is about how we are journey to enterprise service management and the fact that we actually started in a price servicemen before I've even heard of it. It just was around The fundamentals of Hungary. Better service provider. How can we help our customers, uh, achieve their objectives and the business units make it simpler? >> My last question is, what's exciting you these days? A CEO practitioner. What? Float your boat? True. >> What's exciting? You see, I asked if you're gonna give me any hard >> questions for you. That's exciting. >> You know, What excites me is that you're seeing the maturity level of a cloud. The platform side. It is so flexible that you can respond to a customer need quickly that you, khun dynamically spin up the capacity Your When I first started this process, trying to build this high availability was difficult. Now hie availability is really not difficult. It's just around. The process is so that the maturity of the technology and the maturity the service piece that excites me. But it also excites me when I start seeing new team, people come into the market space and they understand that already they're coming in with an idol understanding there they're coming down, understand that business mentality. So original Lighty practitioners didn't have that business background. They didn't have that communication skill you're seeing a lot more of it. The organization now. >> Well, you're a real leader in this space. You've got a lot of experience. Appreciate you sharing your knowledge. And I'm sure the service now community does as well. So good luck with your talk this afternoon. And thanks again for coming. >> Thank you. It's great being here. >> All right, Link a lender. Always a pleasure. Keep right, everybody. This is the cue. We'LL be back Live from Mandalay Bay. This is knowledge sixteen. Right back. >> Service. Now is the time.