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

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

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

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage and we're here at Knowledge18. This is our sixth CUBE at ServiceNow Knowledge. Jeff Frick is my co-host. Jeff when we started covering ServiceNow Knowledge I think it was under 4,000 people. >> The Aria. >> At The Aria, it was a very hip conference, but now we're talking about 18,000 people at K18. How ironic. Sean Convrey is here. He's the Vice President and General Manager of the ServiceNow Security Business Unit. Welcome back to theCUBE, it's good to see you again, Sean. >> It's great to be back. >> So you know I'm a huge fan of your security initiative because you focused what, in our opinion, is really the real problem which is response. You're going to get hacked, you're going to get penetrated. It takes almost a year to find out when somebody has infiltrated your organization, they're exfiltrating data. You guys are focused on that problem. So, really have a lot of hope for this business in terms of addressing some of those challenges. But, give us the update on the ServiceNow Security Business. >> Sure yeah, so the business is continuing to grow nicely. I think we released at the end of 2017 on our earnings report that security and the other emerging businesses met their aggressive sales targets from 2017. So, we're seeing, you know we're into the hundreds of customers stage now. We've got very mature customers that are deployed in production. I think almost 40% of our customer base is Global 2000 so that's one of the benefits of being on the ServiceNow platform is, we aren't perceived as a 1.0 or a 2.0, even though we've only been around for two years, you know people are thinking of us as an application on top of an already very stable platform. >> One of the things we talk about a lot, you and I have talked about is, what's the right regime for security? All to often it's the sec-ops problem, or it's an I.T. problem. You know, we preach that it's a team sport, it's everybody's problem, but when you extend into an organization from whatever ITSM, or whatever it is, to whom to you sell? Who are your constituents? Are they figuring out that right regime? Or is it really still the sec-ops team? >> Yeah, so there's two major use cases in the security operations product. One is focused on security incident response, and that we're definitely selling primarily to the SOC, to the security operations center. But, we have another growing use case on vulnerability response, which is more the proactive side where we're addressing, really just security good hygiene. How do you reduce the attack surface area in your environment by having less vulnerable software in your environment, and that has a very tight tie to I.T. Actually, they both have very tight ties to I.T. Because in almost all cases, I.T. and I.T. operations are the actual execution arm of whatever changes you need to make to your infrastructure in response to something bad happening. >> Right, it's funny because we were at RSA this year, we've gone for a couple years. 40,000 people, that's a crazy big conference, but a couple of really interesting things that came out this year. One is that, you're going to get penetrated, right, so just a whole change of attitude in terms of not necessarily assuming you won't be, but how are you going to react when you are? How are you going to find out? And the other thing that comes up time and time again when you hear about breaches is this hygiene issue. It's, somebody forgot to hit a switch, forgot to do a correct setting, forgot to do a patch, all these really kind of fundamental things that you need to do at a baseline to at least give you a chance to be able to put up a defense against these people. >> We actually just did a study with Ponemon Institute of nearly 3,000 security professionals focused in on this hygiene problem, on vulnerability response, and some of the stats are just staggering. 70% of respondents said security and I.T. don't have the same visibility into applications and systems. 55% said they spend more time coordinating a response among teams manually than they actually do in the act of patching itself. People are losing 12 days per update in manual coordination, because think about it, you've got not just I.T. and security, but you've got GRC team, you've got the business owner, you've got the application owner, it's not just two folks sitting down at the table, it's a huge team looking at a multi-hundred thousand long spreadsheet of vulnerabilities that they're trying to respond to. >> It's funny, we talk often, it's an often quoted stat, how many days have you been penetrated before you figure it out, but what's less talked about is what you just talked about, is once you find out, then what's the delay where you can start taking proactive action and start taking care of all of these things. That's just as complicated, if not more. >> That's what the study actually bore out. So, one of the things we did was, we broke the data up into those that had been breached and those that had not been breached, and it was about 50/50. But, the biggest difference between the ones that had had a breach in the last two years and the ones that didn't, is the ones that had not been breached self-reported they're vulnerability response program as 40% more effective than those that were breached. So, this hygiene thing this is just fundamental. Actually, my personal theory is, it's not as exciting and undertaking. It's much more fun to talk about how Thor'd the bad guy that was knocking at your front door, trying to find a way in. The sort of proactive, you know execution of a strategy to reduce your attack surface area is much less sexy. >> So, we've always talked about that magic number, or scary number, of the number of days that it takes a company to realize they've been penetrated. Whatever, it ranges from 225, I've seen them higher than 300 and it's a couple years in now, and I'm curious as to what kind of data you have within your customer base. Have you been able to compress that time, and as Jeff points out, even more importantly, have you been able to compress the response time? >> So there's two stats I'll give you. One is, for many organizations they had zero reporting within their own organization. So if they were trying to report out, they were in the land of spreadsheets and emails, so they couldn't tell you how big an impact it had. We actually commissioned a study with Forrester. They did a total economic impact, a TEI study, with our sec-ops customers and found out that the average reduction in their incident response time was 45% improvement, or 45% reduction in their response time, which is just dramatic. That's very meaningful to an organization, especially when there's a prediction of an almost two million cyber-security job shortfall in 2019. So there simply aren't the people to solve this problem, even if you could hire your way out of this. >> So what you would expect is if you could reduce that response time, obviously you're freeing up resource, and then hopefully you could create some kind of flywheel effect, in terms of improving the situation. It's early, but what have you seen there? >> That's exactly what we're seeing. So we're seeing people take the things that are painful and frequent and trying to automate those tasks so that they don't occur as often and require people's time. The analogy that I always use is, if you've watched a medical drama, you always see the doctor racing down the hallway, holding up an X-ray to the fluorescent lights and making a call, telling the nurse five milliliters of this or 10 milliliters of that. >> Stat, stat, stat. >> It's always stat. >> Whatever that means. >> They're saving the day right? They're saving the day. That's what a security person wants to feel like. They want to feel like they're making that insightful call, in the moment, and saving the day, but instead, they're the doctor, they're the nurse, they're the orderly, they're the radiologist, they're the administrative people. They have to play all those roles, and what security automation is really about is, let's take those mundane tasks that you don't like anyway, and get rid of them so you can focus on what truly matters. >> It's such an important piece because like I said, RSA, there's 40,000 people, ton of, ton of vendors, and the CISO cannot buy all those solutions, right? And for you guys, to find a place to fit where you can have nice ROI because you just can't buy it all and to me it's kind of like insurance. At some point you just can't buy more insurance, you can just buy and replace whatever it is that you're insuring, so it's a real interesting kind of dilemma, but you have to be secure. You don't want to be in the Wall Street Journal next week. >> Right. >> Tough challenge. >> It's a very tough challenge and the notion that you can find a product to buy for every problem you have is something that the security community, if you go to RSA, it feels that way, right? Like, "Oh I just need to buy another thing." But, organizations have on average 80 security tools already. So, the challenge is how do you actually reframe and think about prioritization in a different way? So we're actually seeing our customers start to take advantage of the governance risk and compliance capability, that are also part of ServiceNow to use risk as a North Star for their security investments rather than just saying, "Oh this is the latest attack so I need to go buy a thing "that stops that attack." Saying instead, what are my most valuable assets? What is the financial impact of a breach to those services? How do I invest accordingly? >> I was watching a CUBE interview, I think it was from KubeCon, John Furry was doing an interview, and the gentleman he was interviewing said, "The problem with security is for years, organizations "thought they could just buy some piece of technology, "install it, and solve the problem." Couldn't be further from the truth, right? So, describe what you're seeing as to those who are successful and best practice as to solving the problem. >> Sure, well that thinking you can buy your way out of the problem goes all the way back to the early days of firewalls. I mean, I remember earlier in my career trying to convince people that a firewall by itself wasn't enough. So we're seeing in organizations that are adopting best practices around response, is they're taking a much more structured approach to how they respond to the most common attacks. Things like, suspected phishing email, right? Processing a phishing email that's reported by an employee, by a user, takes anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes to check manually to see if it really is phishing or not. You know, with ServiceNow Security Operations we can automate that down to seconds and allow that time for an analyst to go back to focusing on maybe a more advanced attack that does require more human ingenuity to be applied. >> Right, the other thing that keeps coming up time and time again within the ServiceNow application and the platform, is you like having lots of different data sources to pull from. You like being kind of that automated overflow and workflow to leverage those investments for the boxes that they do have in the systems and all those things. You want to use them, but how do you get the most value out of those investments as well? >> Exactly, we're seeing that most organizations don't feel that they're getting the value out of the assets that they've already invested in as well. So, to steal one of our CEO's lines, he talks about this idea of one plus one plus one equals magic. The idea that if you can bring together the right pieces of information you can create this transformational outcome and I think with security technology, if we can bring the data and the insights together on a common platform that allows you to investigate in a more automated way, to draw on the insights that you need from the various systems, and then to respond in the right capacity at the right time, it's a completely different way of solving this problem that I think we are just beginning to explore. >> And a whole nother place to apply A.I. And machine learning down the road as well. So, you can start automating the responses at that tier, and a whole nother level of automation to get the crap that I don't need to pay attention to off my screen, so that I can focus on the stuff that's most important. >> Oh absolutely, I think the headroom in the response category of technology, we're just beginning to see what's going to be possible as we continue to go down this path. >> Can you talk about the ecosystem a little bit? Obviously it's critical. Just to be clear, ServiceNow it not trying to replace Palo Alto Networks, you know, or other security tools. You partner with those guys much in the same way as you're not trying to replace Workday and SAP and HR. Talk about that a little bit, the partner ecosystem, how that's growing and what role they play, where they leave off, and where you pick up. >> Absolutely. So, as you said, we're not in the business of building prevention technology, detection technology, we are all about taking the investments you've already made and bringing them together. So, we consider ourselves a neutral player in this market. We integrate with all sorts of different security technologies because again, the goal is, let's take all these insights that are already in the various pieces of infrastructure. You know, we had one of our customers onstage yesterday during our keynote describing swivel chair. This notion of, I'm swiveling from console to console to console and I'm burning time. If you can give me one place where I can bring that data together, it's really valuable. So, we're quite different than many other ServiceNow products in that, it's often not a human being that initiates the request. You know, a human says, "hey my laptop needs help," right? But, in security it's a third party tool that says, "Hey, go take a look at service X, we're seeing "some weird behavior there." >> So, staying on the ecosystem for a minute. You know, big space; security, crowded space. You were just at RSA. >> It was crazy. >> Crazy, tons of startups. When I talk to startups, in fact I was talking to one the other day, it's a phishing startup, guys out of the NSA doing some really interesting stuff. They got to place bets, small companies, and I'm like, "Have you seen what ServiceNow is doing? "It's kind of an interesting play. "You might be able to participate in "that ecosystem someway, somehow." Is it reasonable to think that startups actually can participate, how can they participate? Can they bring their innovation to you? Or are you really looking for established players with an installed base that you can draft off of? >> Sure, we're actually doing both right now. So, you can think about it, you know, being a new player in the security community, credibility is something we are always seeking to grow and develop over time. So, while we really like to integrate with the large, established security vendors that our customers expect us to integrate with, we also love talking to the innovative startups and integrating with them as well. So, we have a whole technology partner program that allows people to tie into the ecosystem. We have a whole business development team at my organization where we work actively with these companies to help them take best advantage of what integrating with ServiceNow can do. >> I think it's key. If you think about the innovation sandwich we often talk about, for years this industry has marched to the cadence of Moore's Law. It was doubling microprocessor speeds every two years that drove innovation. That was nice, that got us a long way, but seems like innovation today is a combination of data, applying machine intelligence, and cloud, cloud economics. And part of cloud economics you get, scale economies, zero marginal costs at volume, but it's also the ability to attract startups. We see that as critical for innovation. Do you agree? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think that the innovation we are seeing in the security world overall, I think is going to continue to grow, as you saw at RSA, there is always another several hundred vendors it seems like, that are out there. And I think we have, as an industry, toyed with the idea of a suite or consolidation. It's always been, next year is going to be this massive consolidation and it's never seemed to really happen and what I'm thinking is this notion of something like what security operations can do from ServiceNow, where you're sort of making a suite by building an abstractional error that integrates all the technology. So you get the benefits of a suite, while still being able to go best of breed with the individual technologies that you want. >> Yeah, consolidation of technologies and becoming safer every year. Those are two things that haven't happened. Hopefully Sean's ServiceNow can help us with that problem. Put a bow on Knowledge18. What's the takeaway? >> The takeaway for us is that security automation and security orchestration is now here, right? Two years ago, the conversation was "What is ServiceNow doing in security?" Now my conversations with customers are, "I understand, I'm looking at this market overall. "I see the value that it can provide to me." We've got customers on stage, we've got customers leading sessions that are talking about their own transformational experience. So I think the technology is here. Gardner has labeled this category: security orchestration, automation, and response. Which is big for the industry overall. So I think it's here now, and I think we've got a great capability tying into a common platform and of course tightly tying to I.T., where many of our 4,000 customers already are using ServiceNow. >> Who's your favorite superhero? >> Wolverine, no doubt. >> John: Alright, you know why I'm asking. (laughing) >> I don't know why you're asking. >> Oh come on, you're the one that told me that all security guys, when they're little kids, they dreamed about saving the world, so you've got to have a favorite superhero. >> Well, Wolverine's a pretty dark guy, I don't know that that works very well. >> Sells more movies. (laughing) Sean, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks so much. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE live from ServiceNow Knowledge18. (upbeat music)

(techno music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering Service Now Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by Service Now. >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of Service Now Knowledge 18 here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. I'm joined by Pat Wadors. She is the Chief Talent Officer of Service Now, and Pat Tourigney who is the Senior Vice President HR Global Shared Services at Magellan Health. Pat and Pat, thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Pat Wadors: Thank you for having us. We're excited. >> Pat Tigourney: It's so great to be here Rebecca, thank you. >> Rebecca: Well you were both on the main stage this morning talking about Magellan's, Magellan Health Service Now journey. We started talking about a personal health scare that you had Pat, that really changed the way you think about the world of work, and the employers' role in that. Can you tell our viewers a little more about it? >> Pat: I'd be happy to Rebecca. So, obviously I had been working and had taken some time off to start and raise my family. And when I went back to work I started to feel unwell. And it took about two and a half years for me to finally get an answer. I had searched for many doctors, et cetera. But literally one day I was rushed to a hospital emergency room. After a few days I was diagnosed with stage three B colon cancer, and I was told I had probably about a three percent survival chance. So at that time I faced four years of surgery, and hospitalizations, and chemo and radiation. And of course during all this time you're hearing the probably outcomes and the statistics. But what I truly focused on was my purpose. Which was my family. I had two small children and they needed me, and I needed to be there for them. And so I learned a lot of lessons during that time, and I think anyone who goes through that would say that. But the two things that have really stuck with me is knowing my purpose, and leading with empathy. And it's truly changed how I live, how I work, how I interact with other people. And I think its made a huge difference in what I do every day. >> Rebecca: What Pat was just talking about, the leading with empathy, and the finding your purpose, these are two of the things that are central to the culture at Service Now. Can you describe a little bit more for our viewers, how you view this sort of purpose driven life? >> Pat Wadors: For me and for the company, its as essential to our success as our customers. So I know that purpose driven companies outperform those that don't have a purpose. And I know from a talent brand, and how we recruit and retain talent, if their personal purpose is aligned with the company purpose, not only do you get higher engagement and higher productivity, but that impacts our customers. And they have higher engagement and higher sat. So its great business. It's something that I think creates a competitive differentiation, and its something that our employees seek as an employer. So it's just something that I totally believe in and so does our company. >> Rebecca: So talk a little bit about VERN. First of all, what does VERN stand for? >> Pat: Oh I love VERN. (laughing) >> Pat: Everyone loves VERN. VERN stands for the Virtual Employee Resource Network. And a couple things that I would probably want to say about that is number one, you don't see HR in there at all. Because it's about the employee. This is a way that we are helping our employees fundamentally change how they work and how they engage with us. The reason I think VERN works is our employees voted on that name. So we had a whole campaign to launch VERN, and we offered up four different names, and our employees voted. And when VERN won we created a VERN persona, and everything else that goes with that. And he's just become part of our team. >> Rebecca: So what does VERN do? >> Pat: Well VERN is really sort of the, it took the place of our call center. VERN is a way for our employees to learn information, and answer their basic questions, and learn to work in new ways. And it helps, it's basically a consumerized HR product. If an employee can use google or shop online, they can use VERN. Its' very simple, it's easy and fun. And truly VERN has become a part of our team. So we don't have a call center anymore. We don't use email to answer questions. Our employees know that VERN is there for them twenty four seven. >> Rebecca: They have a question and ask VERN. >> Pat: Exactly. Turn to VERN, that's our motto. >> Rebecca: (laughing) I love it. So Pat, thinking about this empathic way of leading, how would you describe what it really means when it comes to HR? You had said before it really is a competitive differentiator, and that if you're happier at work, you're going to do better at work, you're going to be more energized, you're going to then provide better service to your customers. But how can companies, how can they build a culture of empathy? >> Pat: By listening. I think that when Pat and I were talking over dinner and I talked to my peers, companies that win listen. And they listen to their customers, and they reverse engineer back to their products and services. Great cultures listen. And our employees are going to tell us what's working what's not working. And if we capture those data sets, those moments, we give them the information, we give them the tools. They are joyful, they are more productive, there's a stickiness that I can not only survive there I'll thrive. And so by being empathetic, by seeing where the pain points are, by seeing what gets you joyful, and measuring those things and turning my dials accordingly, that to me is a winning situation. >> Rebecca: We're at a point in time where we have five generations in the workforce all at once. Can you describe what that's like, from your company perspective, from talent management and HR, and how catering to these very different segments of people who their comfort with technology is one thing, but also their phase of life. How do you do that? >> Pat: Well I think, honestly, there's this joyfulness, you used that word and I love that word, of how all these different generations really do work together and help one another. In a way we're all learning from each other. And we're not afraid to learn in front of each other. And that really makes a difference I think. And I think there's just this mutual respect of, we're all there to help each other and do the right thing for the company. And I think the empathy piece of it really comes across because, when you truly understand one another in a way that you care and you're showing that, it's not about age anymore or anything else, it's that we're all people working together trying to do our best work and we're there for each other. To me that's what it means. >> Pat: The only thing I would add to that is, when you look at consumerization of the enterprise, when you look at seamless, what they call frictionless solutions, it demystifies the technology. So if you have the older generation going "I've not used a bot" or "I don't know what machine learning is" I'm like can you type in your question? I can do that. And if I serve you knowledge bites that I can digest that answers my question and move on with my life, that's a gift. And so I think that if you make it more human, if you make it more approachable, then every generation appreciates that. And I also know that from my studies and from working in the valley for a long time in tech, is that every generation wants the same thing. They want to be heard, they want to be appreciated, treated respectfully, and know that they can do their best work. That they matter. >> Rebecca: So Pat you are relatively new to Service Now. You're from LinkedIn. You are so committed to the company you dyed your hair to match the brand identity. What drew you to Service Now? >> Pat: I was a customer of Service Now while at LinkedIn. And my goldilocks is a growth company. I'm a builder. I love creating culture and leading through change. And I also love geeking out with my peeps in HR. And so Service Now has a talent place, they are helping HR solve problems, and I get to geek out with them. I get to meet people like Pat, and have a wonderful dinner and a great conversation. That feeds my soul. I don't think I am unique in the problems I'm facing, and I copy shamelessly. I'm trying to steal VERN from her. (Pat laughing) I think that's awesome, I want a VERN button. >> Pat: I'm going to get you one. >> Pat: And then the added sauce for me where I fell in love, is when John Donahoe became the CEO and wanted my partnership to build an enduring high performing healthy company. And I'm like, sign me up. >> Rebecca: Talking about the culture of Service Now and Magellan Health, culture is so hard. It's just one of those things that, or maybe its not, maybe I'm making it out to be, but when you have large companies dispersed employees, i'ts sort of hard to always stay on message and to have everyone pulling in the same direction. How do you do it? What would you say you do at Magellan? I'm interested in how you do it at Service Now too. >> Pat: Want to go first? >> Pat: I'll take a stab. So, you got to think about where you're going. So what's your purpose? I'm going back to purpose. How do you serve the customer? What are those four key milestones that matter? And repeat, and I say rinse, and then repeat. So everyone hears it. You know the top five goals in the company. And we talk about it all hands, we refer to them in our internal portal, we talk about them, we measure them. We tell the employees this is what we wanted to do, this is what we did or didn't do. This is what we do next. And we're as transparent as we possibly can be. And the magic comes when every employee can look up and say I made that goal happen. And when they start seeing those dots connect, they can't wait to connect more dots. And that's when the journey starts accelerating. That's when you get more flywheel going in the organization where what I do is actually impacting profit, impacting customer success, impacting joy. >> Rebecca: And taking some ownership of it. >> Pat: I agree. I think that when everyone sort of shares in that purpose, and they understand what they do, how it affects that, it makes a huge difference. But I also think as an organization from a leadership perspective, if you model the behavior that you're seeking, and you set your expectations really high for that, and that in a very sort of respectful way when you see things that aren't right you say something about it, the culture does start to shift. And you start to build this feeling of we're there, we're together, we have each other's backs, we treat each other with dignity and respect, and honesty and openness, and you can really start to just shift it almost organically. >> Rebecca: Pat Tourigney, Pat Wadors, thanks so much for coming on the Cube. It was a great conversation. >> Pat: Oh thank you Rebecca. It's been great. >> Pat: Thank you for having us. >> Rebecca: We'll have more with the Cube's live coverage of Service Now just after this. (techno music)

(soft techno music) >> Live from Las Vegas It's The Cube covering Service Now, Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by Service Now. (soft techno music) >> Welcome back to The Cube's live coverage of Service Now, Knowledge '18. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Dave Vellante. We are The Cube, we are the leader in live tech coverage. We are joined now by Alan Marks, he is the Chief Communications Cfficer of Service Now. So thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you, great to be here. >> So the new brand identity of Service Now is we make the world of work, work better for people. >> That's right >> That's your baby, you came up with it so tell us a little bit about your creative process and coming up with that idea and why it works for Service Now. >> Well, it's been a team effort and we think of that identity as our purpose as a company. And as John talked about in his keynote today, purpose is really the center of who you are as a company and what you believe in and what you aspire to do, and I think it's so important in your own life to have a sense of purpose and meaning and I think that's true for companies as well, companies are just collections of people, right? And so as we thought about the next phase of growth for Service Now and how do we build the company awareness and build the brand, we started with, who are we, and why do we exist? And so we did a process where we met with a leadership team we did employee focus groups around the world we met with about a dozen customers to just talk about how do you think about Service Now, what does Service Now mean to you, and that's what lead to our purpose statement of "we make the world of work, work better for people" and really emphasizing people, cause that's something we believe deeply in, that technology should enable people. And what we do is really trying to help people have more meaningful work. Take some of the routine task out of your job so you can focus on things that matter more to you and create more meaningful work for you and create more productivity for your company and your enterprise. >> Dave: I'm always, oh go ahead please. >> Well so, we started with our purpose and then that lead to the brand identity we have a new tagline; Works For You. So, Service Now Works For You, is kind of our version of a Just Do It kind of tagline. >> Dave: (laughs) >> And so we've got our purpose statement we've got a new brand identity, what you see here at Knowledge and we've got a new tagline called, Works For You and you'll see us rolling that out now more. This was the launch of it. We spent the first quarter rolling it out to our employees we did a global tour in eight locations around the world rolling out our purpose to our employees and now this is the first public launch of the new brand. >> I was fascinated by that process. I love that you guys start with wide, big fan of Simon Sinek Google him if you don't know him, his Ted Talk is fantastic and we heard John Donahoe this morning talking about he started with why, so okay, so you do all this research but somehow you have to put that into a creative package the idea of putting the person in the center of the logo and whether it's color scheme or, you know little snippets. How do you come up with that, is that just in your DNA is that really by committee, I mean how does that all work? >> Well we put together a creative team, this is the fun part once you've landed the purpose, this is take out the crayons and let's start decorating something, right? And so when we landed our purpose, and we said well if we're really focused on technology enabling people the former logo of the company was the power button so that was more purely about technology and so we started playing, we had a creative team we put together, we had our in-house creative team we also were using some outside creative support and we started playing with well, how can you change the power button to more reflect people and that's what morphed into the logo today of really using the yellow in the word Now to symbolize people, to symbolize the "you" in "Works For You" instead of the power button as a symbol for the company. >> So you, the last Knowledge, Knowledge '17 you had just started. >> Just started, first week. >> First week on the job, trial by fire here. So tell us a little bit about your first year, reflect on some of the things that might have surprised you during the year, some of your challenges, what would you say? >> Oh it's been wonderful. I say to Pat Waters our Chief Human Resources Officer, every new employee should start the week of Knowledge. It was just such a wonderful way to start, I literally did sign the papers and got on a plane and came to Knowledge '17. And so, to come into the company being able to experience this, and meet our customers and really understand the culture of the company was an extraordinary way to get grounded in the company and understand the, you know, Service Now has just a deep commitment to customers, and listening to our customers, and then responding to their needs. So, given the brand work I've done over the past year that I couldn't think of a better way to start. And then after Knowledge '17, a week or two after that I went down to San Diego and spent an afternoon with Fred Luddy, our founder. And I just said "Fred, tell me your story.", and two hours later Fred was still talking, such a wonderful person, and what struck me in that conversation with Fred is we were spending, really two hours talking about the history of the company and why he founded it, and I realized he was talking mostly about people he wasn't talking about technology and Fred's a product guy. And so it just started to hit me from day one just how focused we are on helping people and helping companies succeed and our customers succeed and that's really what lead to where we are today, and the branding, and so it's an amazing company, amazing culture, and what we're trying to do with this brand the product is well known, we've got deep customer loyalty but the company is not that well known and so as we think about growing the company and reaching other state coders, as we think about expanding our business with existing customers and engaging new customers at the C-suite level, we felt we needed to really elevate the company and that's what this is about. How do we continue to have a strong product brand but elevate the company brand both to drive greater awareness of the company but then also the talent brand piece is important as well and how do we use our brand identity and our purpose to engage the right talent worldwide as we continue to grow and recruit from around the world. >> And that's a big part of why John Donahoe was brought in. I remember I was talking to Frank Slootman, I'm like Frank is so young, he goes look, we found the right guy to take this to the new level. He's been kind of working at it for a while so the timing was perfect. As you do all this research as you talk to customers about their future of work. I mean they're telling you what they need maybe what some of their challenges are, but you guys still have to figure out how to get there. It's almost like Steve Jobs inventing this smart phone, nobody told him no customer told him, this is what we need. >> Alan: Right. >> So you're minds have to put that together, I know it's only a year in, but what are you seeing in terms of your ability to shape the future of work? >> Well I think it starts with the Service Now platform and to me that's the secret sauce. A lot of people have focus, cause people know the ITSM product suite and how the company, the flagship product of the company and a lot of people think of the company in that way but its really the platform itself that can cut across the enterprise and connect different work flows and different work streams particularly work streams are cross-functional areas and the ability to understand that and leverage that with our product suite that really is unlocking the potential of how we can partner with a customer and really drive transformation in the way enterprises operate and drive transformation in how work gets done in a company. >> So with your consumer background, did you like, when you first heard about Service Now say, "really, IT service management?", or did you say "hey, why should the consumer guys have all the fun I want to bring this to the enterprise". >> Exactly, well part of it, this is my first job in the B2B world my background is in consumer, but as John has talked about we really do see the things that we've enjoyed as consumers coming into the workplace. So I really do see a lot of B2C type creative thinking and ideas coming into the workplace to drive this transformation and that's so exciting to take the best of traditional B2B marketing and branding and bring in B2C to help reflect this new wave of technology and how it's changing the way we work and the way we think about work. >> As you're now embarking on this strategy to get Service Now to have wider recognition in the market and you're background in consumer, particularly at Nike, what do you think makes a great brand and what really makes it sort of take hold of customer's imagination. >> That's a great question and I would go back to purpose. I can't say enough about purpose, a company that is clear about who it is and why it exists and what it aspires to achieve in the world, and the impact it aspires to achieve in the world, that's what connects people emotionally, right? You can connect people intellectually but really connect heart and mind, that's the secret sauce. And you said consumer brands, obviously that's what they do right, that's what you have to do. In the B2B world, you see a broader spectrum but that ability to say, how do we take this technology and the more intellectual aspects of our business and really connect it to how you help people and how you enable people and connect it more emotionally. I think that's the (inaudible) NOC, and today, you look at millennial employees today they really do care about what is the purpose, what's the higher value of working for this company vs. that company, and what kind of impact are we going to try to have in the world, and it really does matter. I see it today where you're talking to potential employees and they're asking that question. About if I'm going to join this company, what are the values tell me about the culture of the company. And I think at the end of the day, culture and talent really is what differentiates a company. And strategy is obviously important, but companies that have strong purpose, strong brand, strong identity and that get expressed through strong culture that gets expressed through the kind of people they attract to the company, the kind of talent they have in the company. I think that's what creates great, enduring companies over time. >> So thinking about transparency, I go back to Fred. The self deprecating humor, always, if there's a wart in the software, he talks about it, he's not shy about that. Frank continued that tradition certainly with Wall Street and I'm sure employees, and Mike Scarpelli, very much transparent, John is continuing that tradition. It's obviously worked for Wall Street, you've built trust with investors. How do you take that brand and build trust beyond the investor community, it's a challenge. What are you trying to accomplish there? >> You'll see us marketing more and that's part of what you see here, expressing the brand in a bigger way, you'll start to see us do more marketing at the company level in addition to what we already do at the product level. You'll see us do more marketing directed to talent and being a great place to work. You'll see us expressing this in a variety of ways the kind of culture we create, what we do in the community, the broader impact we have in the world and so I think it's all of those things together and communicating but ultimately you've got to walk the talk, right, it's not just the marketing, you've got to be authentic in what you're doing and have people experience you in an authentic way to really create that sense of trust and engagement over time. And you see we've got that today in our customers. The loyalty we have with our customers the renewal rate the company has with our customers and now we're just trying to continue to build on that and engage other stakeholders as we grow as a company. >> So making work better, okay that's good. The new sort of focus, expanded focus, but what do you want people to say about you, how do you want them to describe you, what are the adjectives you'd like them to use? >> Human, we're "work for people" right, "make work better for people". I think we're a human company, we're an authentic company we're a company that cares, we're a company that really understands technology should help you, it shouldn't be technology for technology's sake, that the end result should be making your life better and we're trying to do that in a work context and I hope that people look at our brand and our identity and how we show up in the world and think that's a copmany I want to be associated with as an employee, as a customer, as an investor, as a partner, as a stakeholder because that's a company that really cares about people and really understand how to apply technology and innovative technology to help people have better lives and in this context, have a better life at work. >> We've been talking a little bit about how you're company is working to attract the best talent, and it's really at a time when the skill sets are changing and we were talking about Fred not being an IT guy, he's a product guy, but you really need the sort of confluence of the two together, you need people who are thinking about the technology but also about the human idea. How hard is it to find the right people or do you just say "we can train them", what's your approach? >> It's always hard to find great talent all over the world it's very competitive, and particularly in technology but I think it gets back again to purpose and culture really being clear about who you are so a potential employee can say "is that a place that I want to work at, when I see the purpose of Service Now, does the resonate for me?". If I'm an engineer, do I want to create product that really is focused on helping people have better work lives and again it really, purpose is the essence of it and I think that really is the center of everything and if you can connect people with your purpose then you will attract the right talent and it'll build on itself through word of mouth and reputation that that's company that I feel attached to and that I want to a part of, and I want to work at.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE covering Service Now Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by Service Now. >> Welcome back to Service Now Knowledge 18 this is the CUBE's live coverage. We are the leader in live technology coverage. We extract the signal from the noise. I'm Rebecca Knight your host along with my cohost Dave Vellante. We've got a great panel right now. We have Andrew Wilson who is the CIO of Accenture and Ellen Shook who is the chief leadership in human resources officer at Accenture. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks for having us. >> Hello great to be back. >> Good to see you again. >> Before the cameras were rolling we were talking about people driven change. But Accenture not but, and Accenture is a huge organization. 400,000 plus individuals working around the world. How do you drive change in such a large and dispersed organization? >> Well I think the most important thing is that change isn't human driven but humans need to be at the center of all change and I think that's why Andrew and I show up in a lot of places together. Because we do use technology to elevate the human experience at Accenture. And the more digital an organization becomes the more important human connection is and that's what we do is create truly compelling experiences for our people. >> Because we don't have separate agendas at Accenture. The relationship that Ellen and I have I think is one of the most important in our enterprise. Where we're driving digital transformation for our clients and within our own business and it's equal parts technology, talent, and change. And so you have to bring those things together and so what we're doing at Knowledge is talking a lot about the outcomes that we drive. Where we're in an experience rich culture our people, our employees, our citizens, our customers. They demand an experience which is very different to how the old IT posture had to deliver. So if we get the partnership right we create a culture and an environment that they'll have fun in and enjoy and not just have to turn up at work for. >> So Ellen what's the outcome that you're trying to achieve? Let's work backwards from there when you think about your human experience? >> Well really what we're trying to do is create an environment where our people can be successful both professionally and personally. Because you, we really require huge diversity at Accenture because in order to bring innovative solutions to our clients we truly need very broad diversity and in order to discover and inspire diverse base of talent. We need to create world class experiences that really unlock their full potential. >> We're all human beings after all. But human beings whether or not we're delivering services or whether we're consuming them. So under Ellen's leadership we talk about truly human and I think that's really important because we must reflect and understand the community we serve. So if we don't have the diversity, if we don't have the gender mix. If we're not looking like the humans who we need to look after then there's going to be a barrier and I think that's at the heart of a lot of modern transformation. >> Now hang on. I heard you say today you have a lot of nn human workers. >> I do, I do. >> So they're not all humans. Who are they, are they robots? >> Well the future of work and the future workforce is a combination of human and machine. Because you need both and you need both working in a way that compliments each other. So we're often asked does the machine replace the human. No it doesn't it changes the content of the work and frees the human to do more interesting work and we need both in a modern agenda. >> And quite simply we do have a very strong belief that technology elevates humans and does not eliminate humans. >> And I'm an optimist too but when I go to the airport I see kiosks, more kiosks than humans. When I drive down the highway out of Heathrow I see all the billboards and they're neon now or electronic so clearly machines have always replaced humans in jobs and clearly as humans we've always overcome. So I'm an optimist too but it seems different this time around because, it cognitive functions and it seems like a whole new set of skills. You guys are experts at this. What are your thoughts? >> I think we are building a set of skills is the new that's absolutely essential for the modern enterprise. So when you drive down the road from Heathrow you don't see the data scientists, you don't see the design thinkers. You don't see the humans that are listening to and talking with their customers and surfacing insights. We think about applying intelligence in the enterprise. Now the humans wouldn't have time to do that if they had to deal with all the old transactions. Free them up from that and then they can do all of this interesting work and that's the future of work. >> One of the things you were talking about on the main stage Andrew was about the changing role of the CIO and you said I actually think of myself as a chief experience officer. Can you refine that a little bit? >> Well I think Ellen and I both care about the experience of all of our employees, all of our humans, all of our citizens and all of our customers and clients as well. So the days of operating in a data center, of buildings systems are long gone. Accenture is now 90% in the cloud and I have to think about services which are really flexible, agile that deliver outcomes. So if my customers are not enjoying the experience and having fun and feeling at home. They're going to walk away so I care much more and that's why I think I lead with experience as the chief experience officer. >> So one just, to bring that down to an example. We hire about a 100,000 people a year and if you think of kind of the old paradigm when someone starts at your company. They have to get assigned a desk, a computer, a security badge you know get onto payroll and all of that historically has been done very siloed function by function. What Andrew and I are trying to create is an exciting experience when you show up for work on the first day where all of that is frictionless. All of that process goes to the backstage and how you feel about showing up as a new employee on your first day is just a glorious experience. >> So we always talk about people process and technology as a CIO you understand. Well the technology will continue to progress it's the people in process that are hard part. But can you actually achieve that vision without a technology platform that is flexible, that enables that type of work environment? >> The technology problem is really what is the enabler of the experiences we're trying to create. But the most important thing that the technology does for us is enables us to create truly world class human experiences. >> Before the cameras were rolling you were talking about how you have five generations of workers at Accenture. How do you cater to them? I mean as you said you want, coming to work everyday whether it's your first day or your, you know you've been there for 20 years to be a glorious experience. How do you make sure you are taking this empathetic people centered approach for each of these different kind of workers? >> I call it with my team sweating the small stuff and that's not worrying about bureaucracy and process. That's worrying about the individual. So we do have five generations working side by side both serving our clients and serving our business and the most important thing is truly understanding what's most important to the human? Not what generation they're coming from or were born during. >> Those five generations have a lot in common before they come to work they typically watch the news. They may have read the Wall Street Journal. They may have consumed content on YouTube. They may have looked at Twitter, they may have subscribed to Netflix. They may have asked Alexa or Cortana for advice and guidance. When they get to work what changes? It has to feel and be exactly like that and Ellen and I will be creating the services that do that so that it feels welcoming and sticky and so I want to stay. Which is really important in the modern enterprise when there's so much opportunity out there for the human. >> And to go back to the question you were asking and talking about driving out of Heathrow and not seeing humans. I think the thing that CEOs really need to understand is that employees are excited about the opportunity that technology is going to bring to their job. In fact we did a piece of research that we launched earlier this year that says over 80% of people are excited about how technology is going to improve their work. Because of the very reason they Google things at home. They use you know Amazon or whatever to go buy their things that they need for themselves. And so they see the opportunity and it's companies and organization's roles to tap into that excitement and really change the future of work. >> Here's a really good example of that. So there is nothing more boring than security training. >> I agree. >> So inside Accenture why don't you subscribe to a TV show that looks like 24. The TV show, the 24 that's episodic. We drop a season that has actors portraying the implications of if you don't get your security rights as a human and as an individual. It gets great ratings, great viewing figures. So it's ratings and viewing figures that tell us we're communicating with our employees. That's what being in the new is about. >> And that's really innovative. I was going to ask you about training and education because the example of Heathrow you don't see the data scientist the person who's putting paper and glue and doesn't have the skill sets of that data scientist. So I know Accenture big on training, education. You guys invest a lot there. My question is as you span five generations is the training regimen... Sort of how do you tailor it to those different needs? >> Well what we're finding frankly is that all of our people really want to stay relevant to their clients and to their people and so what we did was we worked together to democratize our learning platforms. So you no longer have to be tapped on the shoulder and invited to take training. We've enabled our training platform to be available real time and on demand and when you create a culture in which people are hungry to learn. You see some amazing things happen and we can see on our dashboard that Andrew's team has built all of the trending topics on any given day in any day of the week. That our people are doing through self learning. >> And that's shared and open? So there's a little bit of game theory going on here. >> Because transparency builds trust. Absolutely. >> What you want, where you want, when you want it, why you want it and at the rate you want it. Because everybody has different sets of needs. Well they'll stay relevant, they'll stay liquid and they'll be able to keep up with modern technology because we're a technology business in our case. That's wat training is about and they'll be more effective and they'll have fun and they'll have job security and none of that is threatened by other aspects of technology. >> But one point to add to that because I think Andrew's brilliance doesn't always fully come through is that everything that he's built for our people has a social component it. So for example on the learning platform I can recommend different learning experiences that I've gone through to my colleagues, to my peers and when you see the interaction among the people and how you can create real change. With just each other, without driving change top down. That social experience really changes the whole dynamic in an organization. >> I think one of the things that Ellen and I have had a chance to leave our mark on is that we have both democratized training and we socialize training as well and both are really important. >> You talked about, oh sorry. Go ahead please. >> You said you hire a 100,000 people a year and at a time where the skill set is really changing. Because so many of the repetitive automate the task are being automated and so really the skillsets that we need are more empathetic, more creative. How are you finding those people? Particularly at a time we really are in a war for talent? >> We talk about discovering new sources of talent rather than attracting talent to us. So we really try to go digital where the people are. So that's where people are, that's where we go look for them but the most important thing is that we are investing in new skilling our people. So we're not just hiring people in with new skills we're giving all of the 442,000 humans at Accenture the opportunity to continue to keep themselves relevant. >> So rather than coders and testers we now have data scientists and I do think we have new talent sources inside and outside the company. So I'm delighted to say that 54% of my team in China happen to be ladies and there's a really good solid data science gene in them which is helping us with our analytics and surfacing insights in a way that my organization didn't used to do. So we've tapped into new talent, many of them we already had it's just how you free them to do the job that they are very very capable of doing. >> Well Andrew, Ellen thank you so much for coming on the CUBE. It was great to have you here. >> Thanks for having us. >> Great to see you guys. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, we will have more from Service Now Knowledge 18 just after this.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018, brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back to The Cube's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Dave Vellante. We're joined by John Lee he is the managing director, enterprise innovation and product development at TMX Group, so thank you so much for coming on. >> Oh no worries, thanks for having me. >> I want to start out by asking you about digital transformation, that is a technological buzz word. What does it mean for the TMX Group? >> Well it meant a lot of things to a lot of people, for the TMX Group digital transformation really meant how do we pivot from being the traditional exchange to being more non-traditional. If you think about the event of electronic trading as an example, that's just one of the forms of digital transformation that we did in, I think it was the mid to late 90's. But the funny thing is a lot of the infrastructure around it hasn't really moved with that and so when you think about our issuer services and how we onboarded, it's still very paper based. The business work flows are still very much the same as they were, you know, many, many years ago. And so it's really looking at technology as an enablement tool, to see how we can actually go and reimagine those business flows, that's what digital transformation is to us. The other thing is of course, how we reach our clients, and our client base. Be reminiscent to say that in the past our conversations with our clients were in person, or faxes or hand shakes, phones calls, and now they went to emails, now it's really looking at what we're doing in the social media stream, and how we actually interact with them on the digital stage, I guess you could say. >> So you're not an IT guy, you're a product person, innovation is at the center of what you do. If you think about the technology industry, for decades it's marched to the cadence of Moore's law. That's where innovation came from, clearly that's changing. Where do you see innovation coming from? >> Oh yeah so Moore's law is a perfect example, yeah I'm a business guy, but I have a strong technology background, So I have a bit of an identity crisis, I've been in technology and in business back and forth. But the interesting thing is if you think about Moore's law, and just the sheer amount of computing power that's becoming cheaper and cheaper every two years. It's the fuel that's actually going in and developing a lot of this emerging technology. And you know even five years ago I never would have thought that autonomous driving cars, was something that I would see in my lifetime and here it is, like here and now and so, a lot of what we're doing is to reimagine how our digital transformation journey can be powered by the computing power that's available to us. >> And a lot of that has to do with data, presumably. Data and potentially machine intelligence, how do you look at those, you know the sort of the confluence of sure compute power, but data, machine intelligence, cloud, how does that cocktail create new products, new services? >> It's funny you mentioned that but our strategy is really encompassed around several factors, and one of the things was data. As an exchange, we have a lot of market data, and a lot of data that, quite frankly, wasn't something that we could leverage. It wasn't used as an asset, it was used more as a regulatory holding. So things like putting them in big filing cabinets and in boxes going back and you know, you guys all know who you are, you know we still have a lot of that. And so it's really to figure out how do we look at data as an enterprise asset, how do we leverage that information to apply to our AI, and machine learning agenda? And what are the tools like ServiceNow, to actually help empower that and enable that. >> You're talking about the file cabinets and sort of the old antiquated systems, and then because so much of this digital transformation requires a huge cultural change, can you describe some of the challenges that you faced at TMX in terms of making sure that leaders, and then also the rest of the organization, really are committed to change? >> Well you know our CEO, Lou Eccleston, joined the firm a few years ago, and one of the things that was his main mandate was to transform and pivot the exchange. And so if you think about culture and culture change, that's a very, very difficult thing to do, and in a lot of cases, the culture change is actually more difficult than the technology deployment itself. It's that adoption, getting people to really shift and pivot the way they're doing things. Maybe re-evaluating some of the things that they've been doing for the last 10 to 15 years, and then saying to themselves, well maybe this isn't the best way to do it. And we find that that's actually one of the most difficult things to do and so when we actually started on this journey it was a top down approach and we just said, you know, we need to kind of look at a blank piece of paper, yes we've been around for 150 years, yes we have our operational processes that are very, very robust, that kind of give us that integrity that we have today. But how have we leveraged the technology that's available, how have we leveraged the computing power that's available. And you find that there's this massive gap where we've not kept pace. And so when you think about that pivot, the only way to actually do that, is to focus on the people, the leadership, to get the buy in to say yes, we do believe in this, we do believe in the innovation agenda, and just my sheer presence, like my role and function didn't exist two years ago at the exchange. So that's a testament to say yeah, we are really doubling down on this, and we are going to get start with the people as well. >> Where else are you doubling down, I mean what are the big bets you guys are making? >> Well I mean if you think about a lot of the evolving or emerging technologies, blockchain and distributed ledger is one of the big ones, what we're doing with AI and machine learning, and just how we're actually servicing our client base with our analytics offerings for example, these are things that are just, quite frankly, required certain ingredients, so data being one of them, in a digitized format that you can leverage. The cloud and the adoption of cloud, that's something that we've embraced. Quite as recently as two to three years ago, and, you know, if you think about a lot of the disinter mediating elements of what block chain is, we're not shying away from that, we're taking a very, very close look to understand what the real values are to help reimagine what we do. >> So we were talking off camera, you're from Toronto, hot bed of crypto activity, obviously this notion of a virtual value store is taking on but there's so much innovation going on in the protocols, developing out a de-centralized internet, if you will. Are you an optimist about the ability of a de-centralized architecture like that to actually perform and do the type of work that needs to be done, or do you think it's going to be some other you know, replacement maybe for block chain, what are your thoughts on that? >> Yeah so I wouldn't say that I'm a hardcore evangelist saying that block chain and Bitcoin is going to be the silver bullet to solve absolutely everything, I don't think that's 100% valid. But what I do believe in is in the technology and what it can actually do to transform industry. And the one thing that I do know is it's not for one organization to actually go and shepherd that. This is an ecosystem that we're actually looking at, it's a complete revolution, and in order for that to actually happen, there needs to be a massive collaboration between our industry peers, our customers, our competitors, to really go and understand how the technology can be used. And you know, anyone that truly looks at the benefits of what blockchain is, the sure way to fail is to do it all by yourself in a lab, and simulate absolutely everything, because you will not be able to realize the benefits if you do that. >> So what role does ServiceNow play in this sort of innovation engine that you're building out? >> So ServiceNow, you know, again it's a journey, and I think John was just on and he was talking about where ServiceNow is as a tool set. It's funny that we wanted to converge into a consolidation to reduce our costs, simplify our infrastructure footprint, and in order to do that we needed to reduce the amount of fragmented tools in application stacks that we had. And ServiceNow was one of the four service providers that we viewed as a strategic partner to help us on this journey. And, you know, when they started that journey, it didn't dawn on me to look at business work flow, I just said well ITSM, that's clearly something for if I want to go and procure an onboarding experience for a new employee, ServiceNow is the perfect tool to deal with that. But then you started to see how they're dipping their toes into artificial intelligence, looking at predictive analysis, looking at the data sets that they had, and that's when you started to realize, wait a minute this can actually grow much beyond what technology is, you can actually look to see how this can actually go and transform business and business process flows. How can we actually use the tool to actually touch our client base. And these are things that we never even considered, until, quite frankly, Knowledge17 a year ago when I was here. >> Well it is a journey, as you said. >> It is, it is. >> John thanks so much for coming on The Cube, it's been a great conversation. >> Thanks very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, we will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge18, just after this. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> We're back at Dell Technologies World. It's the inaugural Dell Technologies World. You're watchin' The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vallante, and I'm really excited to have Sanjay Poonen on, COO of VMWare, long-time Cube alum. Great to see you, my friend. >> Always great, Dave. >> Thanks again so much for makin' time. I know you're in and out, but things are good. We had Pat on, on Monday. You guys made the call early on. You said to the industry, you know, I think the industry handed us and maybe the forecasts are a little bit conservative. We're seeing great demand. We love our business right now, and it's comin' true. Data centers booming, VMWare's kickin' butt. It's goin' great. >> You know it's been obviously a very good couple of years, since the Dell EMC merger. It's really helped us, and you know, when we think about our partnerships, we put this in a very special place. In the last two years, partnerships like Dell and AWS have been very instrumental, built on top of the partnerships we've had for many years. And our core principles at VMWare have not changed. We're really focused on software defining the data center. Why? Because it makes you more agile, removes costs, reduces complexity, makes the planet more green. We think we've got a long way to go in just building that private cloud, making the data center feel like a cloud. That's priority number one. Priority number two, extending tno the hybrid cloud. Last time we talked was at AWS Reinvent. That's very important. We're doing a bit of work there at AWS and many other clouds. And user computing, making sure that every one of these type of devices are secure and managed, whether it's Apple devices, Google, or Microsoft. Those three priorities have still stayed the same, and now Dell's comin' to give us a lot more of that sort of draft, to help us do that inside the Dell EMC customer base, too. >> Yeah, I mean you guys are doin' it again, the whole, NSX obviously is booming. >> Sanjay: Big launch this week. >> You know, it's funny, the whole software-defined networking thing. Everybody flocked to it. VCs flocked to it. You guys changed the game with that Nycera acquisition. I mean, could you imagine, I guess you did imagine what it was going to become, I mean it's really taken off in a big way. >> Bold move. I got to give credit to the, I mean I wasn't at the company at the time, but I got to tell you, when I saw that I was stunned. Paying 1.2 billion for a company that didn't have much revenue. But here we are. We talked about it in our earnings call being a 1.4 billion one rate business. 4,500 hundred customers. We were zero customers five years ago when we did the acquisition, and what we really defined is that the future of networking is going to be software-defined, clearly, and it's much the same way a Tesla is transforming the automotive industry, right? What's the value of a Tesla? It's not just the hardware, but the software that's changing the way in which you drive, park, all of the mapping, all of that stuff. We believe the same way the networking industry's going to go through mighty revolution. We think the data center gets more efficeint and driven through software. The path into the into the public cloud, and the path to the branch, and that's what we as we launched our virtual cloud networking. It's extremely differentiated in the industry. We're the only ones really pioneering that, and we think it's extremely visionary. And we're excited to take our customers on this journey. It was a big launch for us this week, and we think NSX is just getting started. 4500 customers is about 1% of our roughly 500,000 customers Every single one of them should be looking at NSX. Big opportunity ahead of us. >> Huge. And the cloud play, we talked about this at VM World last summer. The clarity now that your customers have. They can now make bets for a couple of cycles anyway, really having confidence in your cloud strategy. You've seen that, I'm sure, in your customer base. >> We have, and you know, it started off by telling the world that the 4,000 service providers that have built their stack on VMWare, VMWare Cloud Providers, VCPP, are all going to be very special to us as they build out their clouds, often in many specialized country that have country-specific cloud requirements. But the we're going to take the public clouds and systematically start working them. IBM cloud was the first, When they acquired software we had a strong relationship with them, announced two or three years ago. And then I think the world was shocked. It was almost, as I've described on the media, a Berlin Wall moment, when AWS and VMWare came together because it sort of felt like the United States and Soviet German in 1987, okay? And you know, here we have these two companies, really workin'. That's worked out very well for us, and then we've done systematic other things with Azure, Google, and so on and so forth, and we'll see how the public cloud plays out, but we think that that hybrid cloud bridge. We're going to be probably the only company who can really play a very pivotal role in the world moving from private cloud to public cloud and there's going to be balance on both sides of that divide. >> So you really essentially are trying to become the infrastructure for the digital world now, aren't you? Talk about that a little bit. You're seeing new workloads, obviously AI's all the buzz. You guys are doing some work in blockchains. It's going to take a while for all that to pick up, but really it's the ability and containers is the other thing. Everybody thought, oh containers, that's the end of VMs, and Pat at the time said, no no no, you guys don't understand. Let me explain it. He sort of laid it out. You seem to be embracing that, again embracing change. >> I got to tell you, that one for me because I'll tell you when I first joined the company four and a half years ago, I was at SAP. I asked Pat two questions. I said the public cloud's going to, I mean, probably take out VMWare, aren't you concerned with Amazon. Here we are taking that headwind and making a tailwind. The second was like, everyone's talking about Docker. Aren't containers going to just destroy VMs? And that one wasn't as clear to us at the time, but we were patient. And what happened we started to notice in the last few years. We began to notice on GitHub tremendous amount of activity around Kubernetes, and here comes Google almost taking the top off of a lot of you know parts of Docker Two, Docker Swarm, Enterprise, Docker still remains a very good container format, but the orchestration layers become a Google-based project called Kubernetes. And I think our waiting allowed us and pivotal to embrace Google in the partnership that we announced last year. And we plan to become the de facto enterprise container platform. If VMs became the VM in VMWare and we have 500,000 customers, tens of millions of VMs, you'd think we could multiply those VMs by some number to get number of containers. VMWare has its rightful place, a birthright, to become the de facto enterprise container platform. We're just getting started, both between us and Pivotal, the Kubernetes investment, Big deal. And we're going to do it in partnership with companies like Google. >> I want to ask you about Pivotal. When Joe Tucci was the swansong in the MC world, he came out with an analyst meeting and we asked them, if you had a mulligan, you know, what would you do over again. He said, you know, we're going to answer it this way. He said, I wished I had done more to bring together the family, you know, the federation. We laid that vision out, and I probably, he said, personally I probably could've done more. I feel like Michael has taken this on. I almost feel like Joe, when he laughs at Michael. My one piece of advice is do a better job than I did with that integration. And it seems like Michael's takin' that on as an outsider. What can you tell us about the relationship between all the companies, particularly Pivotal. >> Yeah, you know Joe's a very special man, as our chairman, and Joe and Pat are the reasons I joined VMWare, and so I have tremendous respect for them. And he stayed on as an advisor to Mike O'Dell. And I think Mike O'Dell just took a lot of those things and improved on it. I wouldn't say that anything was dramatically bad, but you know he tightened up much of the places where we could work together. One material change was having the Dell EMC reps carry quota, for example VMWare. They're incetivized. That has been a huge difference to allow us to have our sales forces completely align together. Big big huge difference. I mean, sales people care about our product when they're compensated, carry quota on it, and drive it. The second aspect was in many of these places where Dell and VMWare or VMWare and Pivotal were needed to just take obstacles out of the way, and I don't think Pivotal would've been really successful if it had stayed in VMWare four or five years ago. So Paul Mertz leaving, the genius of that whole move, which Joe orchesthrated, and allowing them to flourish. Okay, here they have four or five years, they've gone public. They have a tremendous amount of traction. Then last year, we began to see that Kubernetes Coming back allowed us to get closer to them, okay? We didn't need to do that necessarily by saying that Pivotal needs to be part of VMWare. We just needed to build a joint engineering effort around Kubernetes And make that enormously successful. So you get the best of both worlds. We're an investor, obviously, in Pivotal. We're proud of their success in the public markets. We benefit some from that sort of idea process, but at the same time we want to make sure this Kubernetes Effort and the broader app platform, our cloud foundry, is enormously successful, and every one of our customers who have VMs starts looking containers. >> Well, I always said Pivotal was formed with a bunch of misfit toys that just didn't seem to fit into VMWare. >> Sanjay: It's come a long way. >> And you took that, but it was smart because you took it and said, here it is. Let's start figuring that out. Who better to do that than Paul? And it's really come together and obviously a very successful. >> Yeah, Rob, Scott, Bill, Yara, many of that team there. They're passionate about developers, okay? We understand the infratstructure role very well, but when you can get dev and ops together, in a way they collaborate, so we're excited about it. And we have a key part for us, we have a very simple mission: to make the container platform just very secure. What's the differenetiation between us and other companies trying to build container platforms? NSX? So our contribution into that is to take Kubernetes Watch for some of the management capabilities, and then add NSX to it, highly differentiate it. And now all of a sudden customers say, this is the reason why I mean, 'cause every container brings a place where the port could be insecure. NSX makes that secture, and we think that that's another key part to what's made NSX the launch this week extremely sepcial is that its story relates to cloud and containers. Those two Cs, I would say, cloud and containers. We've taken what were headwinds to us, VMWare over the last four or five years, and made them tailwinds. And for us that's been a tremendous learnnig lesson, not just I would say in our own technology road map, but in leadership and management. That's important for us as business leaders, too. >> Dave: And I got to give some love to my friends in the Vsin world, Yen Bing and those guys. Obviously Vsin doin' very well. Give us the update there. I mean, you're doin', he's doin' exactly what you said: we're going to do to networking and storage what we did to compute. >> I mean, again you know, when we start things off. If you'll remember, three or four years ago, we were confusing EMC and VMWare, Evo, Rails, some of those things. We just had to clean that up. And as Dell EMC came together and VMWare, we said, listen. We're going to do software-defined storage really well because it has a very close synergy point to the Kubernetes I mean, we know a lot about storage because it's very closely connected to Compute. And if we could do that better than anybody else, and in the meantime all these startups were doing reasonably well, Simplicity, Nutanics, Pivotry, so on and so forth. I mean there's no reason if we don't have our act together we could build the best software-defined storage and then engineer a system together with Dell that has the software, and that's what VX rails has become. So a few false stubs of the toe when we started off, you know three or four years ago, but we've come a long way. Pat talked about over 10,000 customers at the revenue run rate that we announced last year, and a 600 million run rate at the end of Q4. We believe we are, for just the software piece, we are the de facto leader, and we have to continue to make customers happy and to drive, you know, this as the future of hyper converge infrastructure because converged had its place. And now the coming together of Compute Storage, over time networking with a layer of management, that's the future of the data center. >> Yeah, I was watching. THere's some good, interesting maneuvering goin' on in the marketplace. A lot of fun for a company like ours to watch. I want to talk about leadership. There's a great, you got to go to Sanjay's LinkedIn profile. There's an awesome video on there. It's like a mini TED talk that some of your folks mashed up and put out there. It's only about eight minutes. But I want to touch on some of the things that I learned from that video. Your background, I mean I knew you came from India. You came over at 18 years old, right? >> Sanjay: I was very fortunate. I grew up in a poor home in India, and I came here only because I got a scholarship to go to Dartmouth College. And I think I might have been one of the few brown-skinned guys in Hanover, New Hampshire. I mean, you've been there, you know there's not much Indian goin' on here. (laughter) But I'm very forutnate. And this country is a very special country to immigrants, if you work hard and if you're willing to apply yourself. I'm a product of that hard work. And now as an Indian American living in California. So I feel very fortunate for all that both the country and people who invested in me over the last many decades have helped me become who I am. >> So you were on a scholarship to Dartmouth. >> Yes, that's right. >> As a student in India. So obviously an accomplished student in India, and you said, you know, I got bullied a little bit. I had the glasses, right? Somebody once told me, Dave, don't peak in high school. It's good advice, right? So it was funny to hear you tell that story because I see you as such a charismatic, dynamic leader. I can't picture you as, you know, a little kid getting bullied. >> We were always geeks at one point in time, but one of the things my mother and dad always taught me, especially my mom, who had a tremendous influence on my life and is my hero, is, listen, don't worry what people say about you, okay? Your home is always going to feel a safety and a fortress to us, and I appreciate the fact that irrespective of what happened on the playground, if I was bullied, at home I knew it was secure. And I seek to have that same attitude twoards my children and everybody I consider my extended family, people at work, and so on and so forth. But once you've done that, you don't build your identity just to what people say about you. You're going to build your identity over what's done over a long period of time, okay? With, of course, if everybody in the world hates you, that's a tough place. That's happened to a few people in the world. I wasn't in that state at all. And as I came to this country, just got tougher because I was a minority in a place. But many of those lessons I learned as a young boy helped me as an 18 year old, as I came here, and I'm very thankful for that. >> And you came here with no money, alright? >> A scholarship. >> Right. >> Maybe 50 bucks in the pocket. >> You had 50 bucks and an opportunity, and made the most of it. And then obviously you did very well at Dartmouth. You graduated from Harvard, right? >> I did my MBA at Harvard. >> MBA at Harvard, probably met some interesting people there. >> Andy Jackson being one of them. >> I know he's a friend of yours. >> Sam Berg, who's the head of the client business, was also a classmate of mine at HBS. The '97 class of HBS had some accomplished people: Chris Kapensky is running McDonald's. She's President of US. So I'm very fortunate to have some good classmates there. >> So what did you do? Did you go right to Harvard from? >> No, I spent four years working at Apple. And then went back to do my business school. >> And then what'd you do after that? >> I came back to Silicon Valley at a startup. I was one of the founding product managers at AlphaBlocks. Then went to Informatica. And bulk of my time was at SAP, and most of my life was in the analytics, big data business. What we called big data at the time. >> And that's when we first met it. >> Analytics at BI, and then when Joe and Pat called me for this, the end-user computing role at VMWare four and a half years ago. That's when I came to VMWare. >> And that was a huge coup for VMWare. We knew you from SAP, and that business was struggling. You always give credit to your team, of course. Awesome. Which is what a good leader does. The other thing I wanted to touch on before we break is, you talked about leadership and how importatn it is to embrace cahnge. You said you have three choices when change hits you. What are those three choices? >> You either embrace it, okay? You either stand on the sidelines or you leave. And that's typically what happens in any kind of change, whether it's change in work, change in fafmilies, change in other kinds of religious settings, I mean it's a time-old prinicple. And you want to let the people who are not on board with it leave if they want to leave. The people who are staying in the middle and not yet convinced, you'll hope they'll do. But they cannot yet throw the grenades, 'cause then they're just going to be. And you want to take that nucleus of people who are with you in the change to help you get the people who sit on the sidelines in. And to me when I joined VMWare, the end-user computing team had the highest attrition, okay, and the lowest satisfaction. And I found the same thing. There were popel who were leaving in droves. Some people sittin' on the sidelines, but a core group of people I loved that were willing to really work with me, 'cause I didn't really know a lot about it. The smarter people were in the team and some people that we hired in. We had to take that group and become the chagne agents, and when that happens it's a beautiful thing because from within starts to form this thing that's the phoenix rising out of the ashes. And the company, and then these people who are sidelineers start to get involved. New people want to join. Now everybody wants to be part of the end-user computing team at VMWare because we're a winner, but it wasn't that way four and a half years ago. Same thing in cloud. How are we going to transform this cloud business to be one where, VCloudAir. We're being made fun of, like how are you ever going to compete with Amazon. We had to go through our own catharsis. We divested that business, but out of that pain point came a fundamental change. Some people left. Some people stayed, but I'm just grateful through all of this that we learned a tremendous amount. I think change is the most definitive thing that happens to every company, and you have to embrace it. If you embrace chance, it's going to make you a much stronger leader. I'll tell you, the Mandarin word, okay, for crisis is two symbols: one that shows disaster and one that shows opportunity. I choose the opportunity side. >> Dave: You choose? Right? Yeah! >> And eveyrone makes that choice, right? And if you make the right path, it could be a beautiful learning experience. >> Sanjay, words to live by. Definitely check out that video on Sanjay's profile. >> It's on LinkedIn. >> Really fabulous always to sit down and talk to you. >> Always a pleasure, Dave. Congratulations to all your success. >> Dave: Thank you! I really appreaciate your support. >> Thank you. >> Alright, everybody that's it from Dell Technologies World 2018. You can hear the music behind us. Next week, big week. We've got Red Hat Summit. I'll be at Service Now Knowledge. We got a couple of other shows and tons of shows coming up. I don't know, you were at Vmon last year. I don't know if you're going to be there this year, maybe maybe not, we'll see. >> Well we got a big one coming up at VM World. We'll see you there. >> We got big one coming up, VM World, at the end of August through early September, which is back at Mosconi this year? >> It's back at Las Vegas still. One more thing and then it's going back to Mosconi after the construction's over. >> So go to theCUBE.net, check out all the shows. Thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time. (digital music)

(clicking) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at PagerDuty Summit in San Francisco at Pier 27, I got to look at it. I've never been here before. It's a cool facility right on the water, between Pier 39 and the Bay Bridge. We're really excited to have back, I can't believe it's been like three years. To have Sheila Jordan, she's a CIO of Symantec and last we saw you was, I looked it up it was Service Now Knowledge 2014. >> Yes that's correct. >> Sheila, great to see you. >> Sheila: Nice to see you. Thanks for being here. >> Absolutely. So I think when we first talked you were just starting in your role in Symantec and now you're three years into it, you just got off a panel about leading digital transformation, so just give us kind of a general view of what you've been up to and how has that journey been progressing? >> Right, well it's been quite a journey and I would say that it's been really a transformational journey. So the vision for Symantec really is to become the largest cyber security company in the world. And that vision really started two, two and half years ago and I'd say that today it's a reality. When I was hired, I was actually hired to in source IT, so we completed that and then when we went through the Veritas separation, so we separated the company with Veritas which was a pretty significant separation. And then subsequently we've acquired four or five companies, we've recently acquired the Blue Coat company, which with that acquisition, we get our CEO Greg Clark. And then we've also acquired some other companies on the consumer side so the LifeLock business is really tied to our consumer digital safety. So we've been very busy and now we've just announced a small divestiture on our website security business. So lots of acquisitions, lots of change, lots of transformation, that really would been bringing into the organization. >> Jeff: Right and you talked on the panel your job is you got to keep the lights on and keep things moving. Then you've got this acquisition and in your case big, the split the divestiture. But then you still want to innovate and you've talked about looking at new applications, and I thought a really interesting comment you made was about shadow IT. >> Right >> And shadow IT is not all bad. There's a reason that somebody decided to take that action. And really they're trying to understand why? And what was the application requirement? And not just throw it out as unauthorized use. Pretty interesting lesson. >> Sheila: Well a couple things on that. Working in an engineering organization you can't ignore when there's apps being used and come up, because there's a need. Obviously there's a need that the IT organization isn't providing and so what it that need? And what is that capability that the organization is looking for? Now the cool thing is we have technology called CASB which is the Cloud Access Security Broker. That allows us to look at the entire environment of what both cloud applications of who's using what. So for example, we are sanctioned and our standard is box, but I can look across the organization and see what cloud applications we're using and if Drop Box appears, that's a question to say no that doesn't make sense, our standard's box. But the reality is is that all other applications that might be coming out of the engineering organization's using, we should be asking ourselves why? What capability are we not delivering? And how do we bring that into the IT arsenal? >> Jeff: Right, right. And essentially you bring up the box example because another thing you talked about on the stage was your cloud adoption. So kind of you threw out a number, 62%. So I'm not exactly sure what 62% is. But where was it when you got there? What is 62%? What are you measuring? And there's conversations about direct ROI but it's a much more complicated formula than just a simple ROI. >> Yes it really is, and I would say that first of all, from an IT perspective, I think any CIO has the obligation to help the organization run, change, and grow. And forward thinking CEOs really understand that technology can be used to not only run the company, that's kind of old school legacy total cost of ownership costs. Really super important, but it's not only run, but how do you use the technology to change and grow? So when you have opportunities like Saas, that allow the CIOs to have, reduce our total cost of ownership, be more agile, have the Saas providers update their products and solutions and all of that, that's kind of on the Saas providers. It makes our job a little easier or different I'd say. What I mean by that is the role of the CIO hasn't changed. Our job is to protect the company's assets. All of our company's assets and our data whether that's customer data, employee data, partner data. And yet five or seven years ago, it was these monolithic applications it was a private data center. on-prem physical data center. It was massive or monolithic geopcs. All of that has changed. So the role hasn't changed but now we've got to think about Saas applications. Cloud, infrastructure as a service. Public cloud on the infrastructure side. We think about all the applications that are coming in on our mobile devices. We think about IOT, we think about structured and unstructured data. Our role is the same, but how we have to manage that complexity to help our companies and enable our companies run, change, and grow; it's just very different. >> Jeff: And then you get involved in kind of investigating how the second order impacts? Kind of the law of unintended positive consequences by going to a Saas application, for instance. Or going to some of these platforms that doesn't show up in the simple ROI analysis. >> No, I agree with that. But I also think it's total cost of ownership but it's also as important today, as a agility. Everyone wants to get to market faster. Everyone wants to feel to be more productive. So it's really the combination of both total cost of ownership and agility. >> Yeah you said an interesting thing too. "Speed is a habit." Which is a really interesting quote. Because everybody wants speed. >> Absolutely >> And we just had another guest who talked about speed actually does correlate to better software. Because it forces you to do that. But everybody wants speed. You got to have it. So the other, you were all over, I got notes. We could go on all day. I won't go on all day, but somebody talked about what are the limits? What are the limits of applications? As you made a really interesting comment that at the end of the day, it's just about the data flow, and having a horizontal view from your seat. You may find that there's other ways to skin that cat based on what other people are doing. >> Sheila: Right, so I would say one of the reasons I love being in IT, is we see horizontally. There's many functions in the company that see in those silos, but we get to see horizontally which means we see the redundancies in an organization and some of the gaps. And so and as the world changes, that it's less about these monolithic, huge applications, but more about cloud and Saas. It really becomes important about the data flow. Where is the data? Not only is it in that say sales force application, but how does that sales force application move to a box? And how does that content move from box to say some of the collaboration tools in technology and how does that move and flow? Our role has to be about, one: Understanding the data flow and really where that exists. And how do we enable the entire business? Every function to be even more productive. But also how we protect and secure that. So, I think it's so exciting that not only are we doing, our view in IT is to deliver that unified, end to end experience. And it all comes down to the reference architecture approach. But the other part why I'm so excited about Symantec is because we're moving into the notion and the vision of having an integrated cyber defense platform. And I'll explain that for one second. Because historically, the security business has been really fragmented. Point solutions to protect every layer of your architecture. So whether you had a point solution in infrastructure, or end points, or data, or at the web gateway layer. Whatever that was, and what happened is, over time, our recent report would suggest that a large enterprise has anywhere between 65 and 85 security products in there enterprise. Large, large enterprise. >> 65 to 85. >> Security products >> Point solutions. >> In their enterprise. (Jeff chuckles) Yeah and so >> Tough to manage. >> It becomes, yeah it really does. One of the visions that Greg Clark and Mike Fey have for our company, is why can't we be, and deliver this integrated, cyber defense platform? Because it's really connected. We then have products that will live at each layer of the architecture but connected. And so the really super cool thing about that, is that the white spaces between those fragmented products, really are breeding grounds for the bad guys to come in and stay awhile and sit and watch and observe. If you have all that legacy technology and legacy applications, it just becomes a breeding ground. And when you have an integrated cyber trends platform that actually allows it to be much more integrated and really reduce some of the risks and all for our CEOs and customers, a better opportunity to effectively manage their environment. >> Right and you guys are a security company, but also you're a CIO of trying to protect stuff. So you're in a really good spot. Cause the other thing that's happening is this radical increase in the tax services. Especially as we go beyond cloud and APIs to edge economy and IOT devices. As you kind of look at the future of both for protecting your own stuff but also helping to deliver the products for your customers, if the security space is really really rapidly evolving. >> Rapidly evolving and becoming even more important. Because again, the flow of data from your sales force application to your mobile device to IOT back to a content solution. Back to some of the collaboration. The flow of data, is now app to app, or Saas to Saas. Saas to device, device to infrastructure as a service, so it really is the flow of data is so dynamic, and so security becomes just super critical to make sure we're securing that data in motion. >> Right, Right. Yeah it's crazy. And even if you have the most secure systems, you might have lapses in protocol which we hear like some of the CAWS breaches, where somebody didn't configure something right. Alright so, I could keep you here all day (Sheila chuckles) But I won't. But I want to give you that last word. What's next? And there was a little bit of conversation on the panel, so I want to open that up again. As you kind of look forward or, the cloud thing's kind of done, the API thing is kind of done as you look forward, what's kind of the next ... Never say five years in this business. Next couple years, you're excited about the move in the industry forward. >> Sheila: Well I actually think, and I know it might be an overused term, but I really think that we're just scratching the surface on AI artificial intelligence and machine learning. We're using a lot of that in our products today and how we're building our security products. But when I think about corporate IT, and I think about how we deliver statistics and information about our business. So transactional reporting on bookings and revenue and forecast and expenses, there needs to be a better, more predictive way of analyzing that data and understanding it in a much more sophisticated AI. Machine learning that we get our customer insights. And we really start to use those insights into building out that kind of knowledge as we move forward. I look forward to really beginning to really really have some strategies on AI and machine learning in corporate IT. >> Alright, well Sheila Jordan it was great to see you. Hopefully it won't be >> Nice to see you! >> Three years >> Three years till we see you again! CIO of Symantec. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from PagerDuty Summit San Francisco. Thanks for watching. >> Sheila: Thank you so much. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Voiceover: Live from New Orleans, it's The Cube. Covering VeeamOn 2017. Brought to you by Veeam. (funky electronic theme music) >> Welcome back to New Orleans everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract a signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman. Ratmir Timashev is here, he's the co-founder of Veeam and he's joined by Peter McKay who's the co-CEO and president. Gentleman, good to see you. >> Good to see you. >> Welcome to the Cube, congratulations on the great keynote this morning. >> Great to see you, Dave. >> Seemed like you guys were having fun out there. >> Yeah it is, it's a lot of fun, it's a great, great time. >> So Ratmir, I want to start with you. A lot of people in our audience may not be familiar with Veeam. We've been sort of sharing with them, the rapid ascendancy of the company. But come, go back ten years, why did you start, you and your co-founder, start the company? >> Yeah, the company's ten years old. Last year we celebrated ten years, it was started in 2006 by me and my partner who is the technology side. He's my technology genius. I'm on the sales and marketing. So we started the company with the simple idea to build the new version, or new generation data protection for virtualized environments. VMware was getting hot back in 2005, 2006, 2007. It kept more and more penetration within enterprise. Back then the cloud was like, 10 or 20 percent penetrated, but we saw that, it's going to be 90 eventually, so we wanted to ride this big wave, technology revolution wave. And now I think we, looking back ten years I think we're in a very similar spot with the cloud. Cloud is where visualization was 10 years ago so and we want to ride this new wave or the cloud wave the same way exactly that we rode the VM wave, visualization and hyper-V wave. >> You know that's interesting, I was explaining to the audience this morning that your ascendancy coincided with Vmware and what happened was we consolidated resources and the one resource that was so precious was for backup and everybody had to re architect their backup and you guys were the, were an answer and obviously one of the more popular answers. Now we're into this cloud era and you see a similar opportunity, you're messaging sort of focuses on that and there's an emergent strategy that you're >> Yeah. >> putting forth. >> I mean I think everybody is moving into a multi cloud environment, right? Where there's going to be, their data's going to be all over the place, they're going to be on premise or manage service providers or in AWS or Azure and so and for us we need to be able to make it available and always on and so that's our focus is to make it very easy for our customers to store their data and run their applications and always be available no matter what the environment is. On premise, off, no matter what the infrastructure is. >> So we talk about digital transformation a lot on The Cube, every event we go to, it's digital transformation, you guys had a little bit different spin on that, digital life, always on, availability, capabilities. You're having fun with green. (laughs) >> Ratmir: Yeah. >> Peter: Oh yeah. >> Green is, >> We always have fun with green. >> Green is go. >> As you can tell. >> A lot of things you can do with green is go, color of money >> Celtics, right? Boston Celtics. >> Boston Celtics. Number one pick. >> Veeam green team. Veeam green machine. >> Veeam green machine, love it. So give us your perspective on this whole digital life. What is that all about? >> Yeah so our message in the last 10 years has evolved. Originally when we started our message was very simple. We're number one VMware backup. That message really resonated and we did deliver on the purpose of number one VMware backup. I remember first time when we introduce that concept, our competitors look at us like who knows them? But then we did in fact become the number one VMware backup, so And our message has evolved over time so from technical message to, that is focused on our core customer which is IT prone. The person that really understands the modern technologies, responsible for the modern data center. Understands the modern storage cloud technologies and visualization technologies. But that message has evolved as we are growing, becoming bigger, and we're going more into a enterprise so now solution become bigger and broader. That covers cloud. So we had to evolve our message so right now our message is, has become more consumer centric, more emotional, touching our digital life. Because we believe that that's at the end of the day, that's what we do. We enable our customers, our businesses to provide this seamless digital life experience for their users. That's what we do. >> So I love it when a successful company brings in a new leader. Because as opposed to things are bad and they have to make a change, we saw this last week, I mentioned I was at ServiceNow Knowledge, Frank Slootman, incredibly successful CEO, stepped aside, brought in a new, and part of that transition was about reaching a new constituency, so my question to you, Peter, is traditionally the Veeam audience is hardcore operational people. Your messaging is much higher level in the organization so how are you dealing with that sort of bifurcated personas, who are you targeting in this sort of new messaging? >> So as the, in the early days of Veeam it started in kind of that SMB market and kind of expanded into commercial and now very focused on the enterprise and so a lot of the enterprise are kind of working through this transition. The digital life and the new, staying relevant to the new users that are coming online and so we've found that our message needed to evolve as well and it needs to be, lines in business now are getting more involved in some of the decision making so our message wasn't where it needed to be in terms of evolving it for that enterprise customer and one that we think will foster that digital transformation for a lot of our companies customers and so we view this was the right time, especially with version 10, version 9.5 which was very successful and version 10 which really expands our enterprise capability but also we needed to, it broadens a lot of the applications down to things that we could do in an enterprise and we needed that message to also be kind of that enterprise in a broad strategic message. >> Peter, when I talk to customers these days, it's a very fragmented market out there, I think, as Ratmir said you rode that VMware wave, now customers adopting lots of sass, they're doing multiple public clouds, they're trying to figure out how they modernize their private cloud. Before it was VMware, therefore I need backup. Now it's how much does their choice on where they put their data and their application drive to you, how much do you have kind of the brand Veeam out there to kind of pull into those other environments and do customers turn to you for help in sorting out that kind of multi cloud world? >> Yeah actually I was talking to a friend of mine who is a key analyst at ESG, Jason Buffington, you know Jason. >> Yeah he's coming on. >> He had a great point about the industry, that our data industry or storage industry or data protection industry, he said that every new wave you go from mainframe to client server, from client server to visualization, from visualization to cloud. There is always a new backup leader. Because the technology changes so much and the people or the company that doesn't have this old baggage with the old technology, old agent based or supporting all these legacy platforms, that can move much faster and that's what Veeam has demonstrated with visualization. The only exception is the transition from visualization to cloud because cloud is based on visualization. So and based on the concept of the data mobility, and that's, from the mental concept to visualization and so we believe that we are very well set with our leadership position in visualization to also dominate cloud market because our technologies are modern technologies specifically built for visualization and cloud. >> And is the argument then that an Amazon or an Azure won't dominate that, because essentially they are a cloud stovepipe, is that right, can you expand on that a little bit? >> That's the way we look at it, I mean it's choice. People want to put, they should be able to put their data wherever they want or their applications, and we should make it very easy for them to do that. If they want to do an Azure, but it's not only just putting it in Azure, it's being able to get after it, get it and move it and transfer data no matter where wanted to so for us it's about providing the flexibility to move the data or run the apps no matter where you want at any time. >> Peter you ran a company that Vmware acquired that was an Azure service. Veeam has some Azure service solutions, customers often times are trying to switch from there's no more shrink wrap software anymore, models for buying it, where do you see customers in that adoption? Curious of your old role and kind of today what you're seeing. >> It's interesting, so Desktone was very much of a platform for managed service providers and cloud providers and so in coming to Veeam, a big part of our business, which is very different than I think a lot of the other people in the market is focusing on those cloud providers. Not just Amazon, Azure, the public, but also we have 15, over 15,000 managed service providers and cloud providers that run our platform as a business. And so when we rolled out a number of features here that if, unless you were a managed service provider or a cloud provider, you wouldn't get the multi-tenancy and the things that we built on scalability that are really changing the game we believe for the managed service providers. But it's also, what we saw at Desktone that went into Veeam. It's, our customers are also doing it as a service within their organization. Things like multi-tenancy are things that they need and scalability are things that they need as a business, so it's a lot of similarities between the world that I lived in and Desktone and VMware to where we are today. >> One of the impressive stats, you said 2016, 231,000 customers that you have. Are all of those paying customers, you have the free version, can you give us any insight as to how many pay versus free >> It's actually over 245,000, that was at the end of the year, so we're adding 4,000 new customers every month and those are all paid. We don't count the people who downloaded the free version of it. >> That's good to know, you could have millions of >> We have millions so far our other free products, yes. >> Awesome. >> Millions of users. >> That's important. >> And another stat you put out in the keynote was an NPS of 73 which is really, really good. Can we talk about that a little bit? Ratmir you were making the point off camera that it rose from the low 60s. What's going on there? >> Yeah so last year it was 61, the year before it was 62, so we were kind of very high but flat, so and this year it actually jumped to 73 and the reason that I personally contribute that to is because we had extremely powerful release 9.5 and customer are extremely happy with the improvements, and the easy of operate and using all these new capabilities, it was the most, the smoothest upgrade, the smoothest release and with the powerful features. The second reason I think our NPS, net promoter score, rose that much is because Peter came on board. (laughs) So in the last 10 month, Peter really, really strengthen our team. I thought that we are moving very fast but now, so we have the concept of Veeam speed, that means moving really fast but now we, actually with Peter we are moving 10 times faster, all of magnitude faster. >> I don't believe it's me but I think what Veeam has always done is done a really good job of listening to our customers and communicating with our customers on a regular basis. We built at a customer success business, part of our business that we're investing in, but we have a whole, a team of people who just solicit and communicate with our partners, and our customers on a regular basis, so they know what we're doing, it's rare that they don't really get a good sense of where we're going and the vision and strategy of Veeam so I think that goes a long way in driving our NPS score. >> We got to break but last thing we really haven't double clicked on is the ecosystem, maybe a quick word on that and then we'll wrap. >> That's a big, obviously, a partner community, we have 45,000 partners, we have 15, over 15,000 managed service providers in cloud. Probably the area that is impacting our business quite a bit now recently is a lot of the alliance partnerships that have. Today we have Veeamware, we have Cisco, very strong and successful, we announced HPE which not only is a development partnership but also a resell partnership and go to market which is dramatically impacing >> Former competitor. >> Yes yes which has opened up a tremendous amount of opportunities for us so we're going to continue to expand into other companies, we're, because 50% of this market is changing over in 2017 and 18, from legacy solutions to new, in the hardware is a piece of that and we're trying to embed as much of that into one sales motion, one bundle for our customers, making it easy to try and buy Veeam. >> Okay, founder gets the last word, bumper sticker when the buses are pulling away, the trucks are pulling away from New Orleans, what's the bumper sticker on VeeamOn 2017? >> See you in 2018. (laughs) Let's have another great year, and another stick with Veeam. >> We find out I think Thursday where 2018 is going to happen. >> Yes. >> Alright so stay with us alright thanks Gents for coming to The Cube. >> Excellent, thanks for having us. >> You're welcome alright keep it right there buddy we'll be back with our next guest, The Cube are live from VeeamOn in New Orleans, be right back. (funky electronic theme music)

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> We're back. Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick, this is theCUBE. We're live from Orlando ServiceNow Knowledge 17. Our fifth knowledge, Jeff. Abhijit Mitra is here, the general manager of customer service management business unit. ServiceNow. Great to see you. >> Good, you too. >> Loved your keynote this morning. A lot of energy. CJ introduced you as enthusiastic as today as you were 20 years ago when he met you. >> And he said even more enthusiastic, it seems. >> Jumped off the stage, he got a good reason. >> Must be a solution. >> Business is good, you guys are rockin'. You got a hot, new business unit that you're managing. You started off your conversation with essentially saying customer service is broken. I mean, you had us all raise our hands at who's ever had a bad customer service experience. Every hand went up in the audience. Explain that a little bit. What's broken? >> So the thing is that you know, when you think about customer service today companies spend a lot of time and effort on customer service but not necessarily the end customers are seeing the result of that. And you know, when you talk to customers, I talk to a lot of customers asking them like, why is this happening for you. What they're telling us is that all the solutions that are available in the market today. Our solutions are really based on CRM systems and these are very well suited for allowing customers to contact through a multitude of channels we call home channel engagement. And then for support, agents to log their issues as cases. But they don't do anything more and as consumers, as customers, we are looking for solutions. And as customer service departments, customer service agents want to fix customer issues. So that is really where the problem is so the issues don't get fixed and customers keep on calling again and again and again. That's how case volume keeps on growing. >> But they always ask you at the end, are you satisfied with your service and will you hang on for the survey and give me a five please? That's the part that amazes me. That you solved none of the problems that I asked resolving. >> Gave me the NPS. Okay so how are you attacking this problem? >> So the way we're attacking this problem is, this is something that I didn't invent. It's something in which I learned, actually. Again after talking to a lot of customers after joining ServiceNow, what they told us is that they were looking for a service management approach and really the benefit of the service management approach is that it makes customer service a team sport. Because now not just customer service but every other department whether it's engineering or operations or financials, or legal or sales can come together on a common platform and the root cause of the customer issues are then assigned as tasks across enterprise. And once these root causes are fixed, then the issues are permanently resolved. And that reduces case volume. And that also includes customer satisfaction. >> You mentioned CRM based tools, people trying to use CRM based tools for customer service management, which essentially logs something. Logs customer service issues but doesn't give you the whole work flow. What's the difference? Can you give us the, you know CRM, why not CRM, why ServiceNow? >> Yeah like I said, it closes the end to end loop so just give me an example, just giving an example, is that in ServiceNow when customer has issues, these are logged as cases. And now, the customer support agent may be able to give a quick relief to the customer and close the case. And that's what you do with every other CRM system as well. And you do the same thing in ServiceNow. However closing the case is not necessarily the be-all and end-all because the root cause of this customer's issue may still be there. And that's how you assign these as problems to other departments. So that's really the fundamental difference. There is a follow up process that's happening. And follow up process may not just be problem, it may be also require a change of knowledge. It may require technician to go on-site through on-the-ground field service. So basically we close the loop. We allow companies to close the loop so that it's end to end customer service. >> Now I'm just curious, when you're out on the field talking to customers that are doing this, how receptive is kind of that next level of people and departments in terms of now being pulled more directly into a customer's role through you know, taking this service approach. Is it, are they happy? Is this new? Is it just a different way to execute what was inefficiently being done before? Because they don't, you know, I'm not in customer service. I'm in whatever department I'm in. Now you're asking me to help you resolve it because I'm part of the root cause. >> So underlying this is the philosophy that everybody in the company is responsible for customer service. And companies who do well as business actually enforce that philosophy in their different departments. And it is such companies who either have aspirations to transform themselves or who are already along this way that actually have an affinity towards the service management approach. Now in terms of the people who are actually working in the different departments, it's not that they're not working on their own systems anymore. Yeah those systems are there and for example, engineering would work with Gida, and there's nothing stopping them from doing that. But what is interesting here is that the work is getting assigned to them from customer service in the service management system of customer service management. That's really what it is. And that increases visibility. It's all about visibility. And reporting and other things. So that really shows, that okay, here are where the issues are and once you see the benefit of your impact on customer satisfaction, on Netomoto scores, on revenues, then it becomes very, very compelling. >> Abhijit, you guys don't break out the revenues of your customer service management business unit. I understand that. But it's a real business unit. It's growing. You got real customers. You showed some logos today. What can you tell us about the business, the business momentum. Any proof points that you're seeing with customers? >> Well we're been in the market for a little more than a year now. I would say a year because we just launched at this even last year. And in the last year, one year we've seen customers from all over the world at our best solutions. All over the world. We have customers now in 28 countries. Over ten big industrial categories. And many of our customers, early adopters will be live with system for a while. They were here. They are here at this conference. There are eighteen of our customers who are here. They're speaking their own sessions and they're sharing their own experiences with other customers. So it's been a tremendous adoption of the solution so far. >> Okay. And how about the impact that you've seen on their business? Can you share any results? >> Yeah absolutely, some of our customers, without naming names, have had up to 70% production in case volume just because of self service, and case deflection. Another customer had a 40% improvement in their Promoter scores. And these are unbelievable statistics. And a third replaced a 50 different customer service portals. And 15 CRM systems with ServiceNow's customer service management. So these are just unbelievable results that our customers have achieved in the last one year. >> You call them light speed pioneers. >> Abhijit: That's right. >> That's the term you guys are using, light speed. But so you know, your customers don't say hey call you, Abhijit, I need to move at light speed. What are they saying that you guys, of course, translated into that rubric of light speed? >> It's really about business transformations. So most of the, many of our customers, I would say, are looking for a better way to run customer service. They have challenges in either improving customer satisfaction. The customers are telling them that your service is very disconnected. Your SMAs aren't being met. So either it's mostly that or reducing costs because they have too many different systems. Different business units who do, work in different ways. So it's about standardization. It's about increasing efficiency. Do more with less. Automate more. And it's also about the effectivity. So, if you complete the work, you complete it well. It's done. >> Yes, being able to reduce volumes like that is impressive. Especially given the amount of data that we have. The amount of complexity that there is out in the world today. You hear a lot of talk at these conferences about IOT. You know, that's going to create more data, more devices, more problems for customers. What are your thoughts about IOT and the impacts it has on customer service? >> I think IOT is going to force customer service to be proactive. And to some extent, IOT is an opportunity to be proactive because now you have access to data that you've never had before. Now you can analyze the data in real-time. You can find out any anomalies and for which you need to take an action. And if you can predict an outage, then you can essentially take action to avoid that, right? So IOT opens up totally new opportunities for customer service to be proactive now. >> Okay, so we're live. >> They're shutting us down here. >> As always, we shut down the expo hall. It's kind of a CUBE tradition. >> We're going to go way after. The lights will be out but we'll still be going. >> The forklifts will be driving in. >> So hearing a lot today about Jakarta. CJ was explaining sort of, the process that you guys use starts with the customer. You guys try to understand what the needs are and it comes back through the business units into the platform and then you guys take it back and reapply it. What are some of the things in Jakarta that you are going to be applying in your future releases for your customers? >> So one of things that I'm very excited about Jakarta is our communities product. And this is something that were are announced today, we're releasing in Jakarta. Now with communities, it increases the level of engagement that customers have with companies because it allows the companies to provide a totally personalized experience. And think about it. In your own personal lives, when you look for help, you turn to people who you trust the most, right? Your friends and your family. Similarly as customers, they would like to turn to people who they trust which is like, other customers like them, right? So that's why communities is a big step for us. Essentially. And giving that features to our customers to have a better experience for their customers. >> So how would that work? It's a feature within the platform. Your customers will then create communities and cultivate communities? >> Yeah, essentially it's a new product and we just, you just turn it on and then you administer that community. You monitor that community. You rule it out. So our customers would use it to create their own communities for their customers. That's how it would work. >> What are some of the objectives you have for the business unit? What are some of the things we should watching as observers, in terms of indications of success, momentum? >> Really there is only one goal. Which is for our customers to be our most outspoken references. That's really the only goal that I have for this business unit. And 18 of them are here today. They are speaking on our behalf and I hope to see many many more of them in this conference next year. Customer satisfaction as they say is one thing. Customer loyalty is everything. >> Jeff: In public. >> Thanks very much for coming to theCUBE and congratulations on the success you've had. >> Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. >> Alright keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest before the lights go out. ServiceNow Knowledge. It's theCUBE. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering ServiceNow Knowledge17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> We're back in Orlando, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. We're here at Knowledge17. I'm Dave Vellante, with my cohost Jeff Frick. Donna Woodruff is here, she's the service enablement leader at Cox Automotive. Donna, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Hi, thank you for having me. >> Good to see you, you're welcome. Tell us a little bit about Cox Automotive, and specifically your role. Are you an IT practitioner by trade, or business process person? Share with us. >> A little bit of everything, actually. First of all, Cox Automotive is a large, privately-held organization that's part of the Cox Enterprises family. We are changing the way the world buys, sells, and owns vehicles. We are made up of five key solution group areas. Everything from inventory solutions, which includes our auto auctions, and everything to get cars from dealerships to our auctions and back out again for their inventory. We have financial services, which provides floor planning to our dealerships so they can buy cars from our auctions. We have media services, which are all about how do you connect the cars that you're selling to retail customers, so autotrader.com, Kelley Blue Book are some notable brands as part of our organization. We develop software around analytics, and an ERP system for dealerships, to help them move their inventory and do their floor planning, so they can maximize sales in their dealerships. And then of course we have international. We are a global company. We have over 34,000 team members that we support. We're a very heterogeneous organization, and that can drive complexity into the organization. My role is, I am the service enablement leader. I am based out of technology, but I look at my role as much broader than that. It's about solving problems for our business and being able to deliver services internally and externally, and help the organization run more efficient and effectively. >> So you've seen, you know, the narrative in IT, and ServiceNow's described that very well over the years, IT getting beat up, and you only call IT when there's a problem, and obviously the platform and the adoption of that have changed a lot of organizations, presumably you experience something similar. So, take us back to the beginning days, the early days of what it was like, the before and after ServiceNow. What led you to that decision? What were some of the drivers, how'd you get there? >> Absolutely. Well, Kelley Blue Book was an acquisition for Autotrader group of companies about four or five years ago, and they had implemented ServiceNow as a help desk ticketing system. When we acquired them, we saw some great wins with the platform that we thought, hey, this really should be our help desk ticketing system. And so it brought under cross that small group of companies, but it was always viewed as a help desk ticketing system. Over time, just like many other platforms, it starts to get highly customized. Fast-forward to a couple of years ago, we had a need. I was supporting HR and communications from a technology liaison perspective. The problem that they were trying to solve was that they have two employee service centers, one on the East Coast, one on the West Coast, that were staffed by analysts, and they primarily helped our auto auction personnel deal with their benefits and questions around just HR. All the way down to time sheet corrections and things like that. They came to me with this problem, and they said, "You know, we've been using Remedy to some extent." We were in a transitional time in the organization where we were collapsing our help desk tools onto ServiceNow, and they said, "We need some help, here." "We just want to do a few requests." Well, we identified early on as that liaison that I really think that this ticketing platform can do what you need it do. Myself along with a business analyst and an intern sat down with the business, we understood the requirements, and that was the launch of our HR portal. While we were in there-- >> Just you, an analyst, and an intern. >> That's correct. That's correct. And we weren't developers. It was all about configuration. But we understood the tool, we understand that this is really no different than any other business process, and we set out to deliver the first service catalog around HR services. Since then, we haven't looked back. We learned a lot about the platform. We diagrammed out what was wrong with how the service desk had been highly customized, we sat down with our VP and we just showed him the diagram and said, "We think that this platform can do a lot more." He listened to us, and he turned to us, and he said, "Well, do you guys want the platform?" And I turned to my team, and I said, "Do you guys want it?" We took it on, and since then, in the last 18 months, we have expanded the platform very broadly. We've implemented performance analytics to improve our help desk services. Beyond the HR portal, we are now implementing governance risk compliance, a vulnerability management. We're now doing PPM as well. We are re-looking at our CMDB because we want to do more with automation. We've done some orchestration with storage agility and how we can get those engineers more productive by doing zero-touch ticket requests from our developers to expand file shares and to sunset file shares, or to request new file shares with other applications. >> So what'd you do with all the custom mods, when you talked about the Kelley Blue Book coming over. Did you sort of scrub the hose and start over, or-- >> Well, you know what, we took it back to out of the box, and it wasn't difficult to do. We just rationalized the things that were duplicated across requests and incident, we pulled it back to out of the box, we took an agile approach. My team now is very agile. We do weekly releases on the platform. By bringing it back to out of the box, it allows us to upgrade to the latest major feature releases within a two-week period. Because of that, we're able to adopt and consume the new product enhancements that ServiceNow has to offer very, very quickly. >> So, obviously you had success, or you wouldn't have been able to expand the footprint so radically. How are you measuring success, how did you go from a little bitty thing to a very large thing? >> I think it's about visibility. Visibility and strong leadership support, and showing how we're getting better incrementally over time. I think one of the strategic things that we've done, probably in the last six months, is implement performance analytics, which that started to show the behaviors of how people were working within the platform, how they were addressing incidents, how they were responding to our mean time to response, to our mean time to closure of a ticket, the aging of these tickets. When we first implemented performance analytics, we found a lot of anomalies in the platform. We found orphaned assignment groups, which to the behavior of the organization, they weren't necessarily working the system the way they should be. >> Jeff: Orphaned assignment groups. >> Orphaned assignment groups. Tickets were going in and they were backing up, and nobody was working them. So, allowed us to change the behavior of the organization, to drive consistency in how they were using this, which then made the metrics more meaningful. Now people are running their areas of operation from the platform. >> So the next thing I got to ask you, we talked about it in the open, is behavior. Tech's hard, but it's not that hard compared to people and process. How did you get people at that moment of truth, when I need something, to not send an email like I'm used to, and to actually execute my work through this tool? >> Well, one thing we did that was very unique, and we've continued to do that is as we roll out major feature functionality, we actually create commercials about ServiceNow, about the platform. Internally, we call it Service Station. Everything is associated with a vehicle. We've promoted our brand around the platform as well, and our brand is about doing things more simply, getting things routed to the right people, that's why it's better than email, and demonstrating the power of what it will do to you, and getting those answers more quickly instead of going to your favorite IT person or your favorite HR person. How this platform is helping you get to your answers more quickly, as well as all the self-service capabilities and the knowledge articles around, hey, fix it yourself. You don't have to talk to somebody on the phone. But we still give that personalized touch if they really need help and they want to talk to an individual. >> So really, a lot more carrots than sticks. >> Lot more carrots than sticks, absolutely. It's if you can solve your problem faster, why not? 'Cause at the end of the day, that's ultimately what you want to do. Solve your problem, and get on to the rest of your day. >> How long does it take for a typical employee to go, "Ah, this is fantastic!", and to really shift their behavior and buy in and start selling it, as your advocate? >> I think we're doing a better job now, introducing it to our new hires as soon as they get engaged in the organization, about this is your platform to go to when and if you need help. And here's how easy it is to find the things that you need. It's something that just happens over time, and I think if you address some of those small wins, you create advocates in the organization, and when they have a good experience, they tell others. So some of it's word-of-mouth, some of it is internal promotion. A big part of it is leveraging the platform to get the work done and having a great user experience along the way. >> Donna, you mentioned Service Catalog and CMDB, these are consistently two components that allow customers like you to get more leverage out of the ServiceNow platform. So, specifically as it relates to CMDB, what are you doing there? Do you have a single CMDB across the organization? Is that something you're considering? >> That's probably one of our next big transformational areas. We do have a CMDB within the platform that's been used primarily around the linkages for incident, problem, and change management. But we know that we need to do more with it, and like I said before, we've grown through acquisition, so there's a number of other CMDBs. And we are in the process of bringing that all together onto the ServiceNow platform. Because we're seeing the power of everything else that that connects to. And that's also going to be a key on how we promote more orchestration, more automation, more about the health of our services. >> So, ServiceNow's obviously promoting you guys throughout this event, showcasing some of the things that you've been doing. What've you been talking to other customers about? What are you most proud of? >> Honestly, I'm really proud of my team (laughs), because we are responding to the needs of the organization, and the fact that you can add value through what you do on a day-to-day basis is great. I think one of the most unique things that, in terms of the application, is we actually built an application for our safety auctions. So, as you can imagine, we have a hundred auctions. There's a lot of people working in the auctions. We have everything that a dealership would have, and we have lanes of vehicles running through to be auctioned off with our dealerships. So we have service areas, we have vehicles and people moving about the auction. So safety is a very critical thing for our organization. About a year ago, the safety director came and said, "You know, we have this problem. "We are doing these auctions' safety checklist "around compliance, how can we make "our auctions a safer place?" "You know, we don't have a lot of money, "but we think there's a better way to do it." And they explained the process where they had six area safety managers that were distributed across these hundred auctions, and trying to get the safety message out there through making sure people were wearing their goggles, or that they had all the appropriate OSHA standards in place. So after having a lot of conversations around this, again, we found ServiceNow would be a great solution. We did work with a partner to help us build it, but we took a very manual process and we automated it on the platform. Now we've moved the safety business process to the auctions themselves, where they own it. The general manager's involved, the shop leads are involved in it. And what it's done, it's been a catalyst to reducing our workers' comp claims. We've seen a two basis point improvement over the number of workers' comp claims, which is cost-avoidance, you know. When your average worker comp claim can be around $10,000, that's a significant saving. With a very, very small investment, we saw a 3,000% ROI on this initiative alone. We're bringing visibility to the process, using the platform and the reporting capabilities. It's gotten the general managers and the shop leads engaged and having the conversation about safety. >> This is great, 'cause you got the platform piece of it, and went from basic application delivery to seeing that it is just a workflow tool. >> Donna: Exactly. >> And the benefit of the automation, and now applying it to, I don't think they announced a auto auction safety module this morning. >> No. (laughing) >> Not yet, but we are doing a session... (Donna laughs) >> It's pretty impactful that you were able to see that, execute it with a really small investment, like you said, your initial one with you, an analyst and an intern, and now, really grow and expand the footprint within the organization. >> Yeah, it's really just about business processes in general. You've got everything you need to collect some attributes, or some information, you need to route it or get approvals around it, and then you can measure it. And you can see what's going on with that business process, and then you focus on, how do we improve the business process? The tool helps enable that and facilitate that. >> And how has the conversation around IT value changed, since you started this journey, right? >> Yeah. >> It used to be very cost-focused, I'm sure. Has it evolved to more of a, you mentioned ROI? >> It is, look at it, it's still cost-focused. It's still about savings, but it's also about how do we get things done in an organization more efficiently, with less people pushing paper, and actually focused on solving problems. And being able to measure how we get better in the activities that we're supporting. And then the dollars will follow. >> Dave: Is there a recognition in the business units, that things are changing? >> You know, there really is. One of the areas that we're starting to see real recognition is we're now dipping our toe into customer service management. We brought two platforms together with one of our business units that we acquired in the last year. They were doing some things on Zendesk, they were doing some things on another tool, and they were the same team. So, we've taken that experience, we've brought those agents onto the platform. We didn't change the experience for the customer just yet, because we wanted our agents to be very successful and help them work differently than through email. We pull those channels onto the platform, and now they have a dashboard of these issues in supporting our lenders, who are our customers. Next is really around the portal, in changing the experience for those end customers. Moving it out of the reply to all with email and making it more measurable. We've gotten halfway there, and we see a big growth area there for us, and making a better experience around our customers' support. >> And are you sunsetting some of these other systems as you bring stuff in? >> We absolutely are. I mean, our goal is to eliminate all other ticketing-type systems. In fact, all of the people that are on those ticketing systems, like, "When can we get on the platform?" "We want to be there now." "Help us get there." But bringing things together is going to help us across all of our functional areas, in supporting our customers and our team members much more effectively. It really is becoming our system of action, where you go to get things done. >> Donna, what, from your perspective, is on ServiceNow's to-do list? >> ServiceNow's to-do list. You know, and I've been pretty vocal with ServiceNow, it's like, make it easier for us to use and consume the other capabilities of the platform much more quickly. Allow us to use the great capabilities with some of our external collaborators a little bit more effectively. And I think that's where it is. I think ServiceNow does a fantastic job of bringing more capabilities and maturing all of their service areas. I like the fact that they have two major feature releases a year, and we consume them as quickly as they can send them out, probably faster than some other customers do. And continue to listen to your customers. Just, listen to what our problems are, and our needs are, and continue to answer them. They're doing a good job of that. >> Well, Donna, I have to say thanks for all the great products you guys build. The Kelley Blue Book, we've used it for years-- >> Oh, wonderful! >> And Autotrader, it's a great way to shop for vehicles. So thanks for that! >> You're welcome! >> Dave: Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. >> Thanks for sharing your story. >> Keep it right there, everybody. Jeff and I will be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Knowledge17. We'll be right back. (energetic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's The Cube. Covering Service Now Knowledge 17. Brought to you by Service Now. >> we're back, welcome to Orlando, everybody, this is Service Now Knowledge 17, #Know17. I'm Dave Vellante with my cohost, Jeff Frick. Dave Wright is here, he's the chief strategy officer of Service Now and a long time Cube friend. Good to see you again, David. >> Good seeing you again, guys. So off the keynote, we were just talking about intelligent automation and what's new in your world. New way to work is really kind of the broader theme here, people are changing the way they work. So what is intelligent automation and how does it fit in? >> So what we did when we built intelligent automation is we wanted to come at it from a different angle. So we didn't want to build a product and then look for a solution that it'd work with, we wanted to go out and speak to people and see what are the challenges that they faced. So what we did was we came up with kind of four key areas where people wanted to be able to improve or do things differently. We wanted the capability to be able to predict when something was going to happen from an event perspective. We wanted to be able to use machine learning to be able to augment it. So to be able to perhaps order, categorize, or provide severity, or in the case of change, provide risk analysis. We wanted to be able to do that at a machine level rather than use a human triage level. Then people were coming back saying we feel we're doing a good job, but we want to understand if we're doing a good job, so that was the concept of expanding out the benchmarks program to include more and more benchmarks for people to see how they compared against their peers. And the final element was people wanted to set themselves performance targets, but then they wanted to understand when am I going to get to that target. So what we have to do then was augment the whole performance analytics suite to be able to do predictive analytics. So they're kind of the four core areas that sit in the intelligent automation engine. We can go into as much detail as you want around them, but it's pretty interesting. >> So help us understand, 'cause I get a little confused about, you know, when I hear something like a big announcement coming up at Jakarta, platform, but then I see bits and pieces hit the various products. Can you maybe set that up for us and help us understand. >> Yeah, so what'll happen is the benchmarking, the predictive analytics capability, and the ability to do predictive service usage, they will all appear in Jakarta. And then the actual ML side where we can do the auto-categorization, that will appear in the Kingston release. So by the end of the year, everything that's shown will be available. >> And it hits the platform and then the modules take advantage of that, is that correct? >> Yes, so what is happening at the moment is the initial use cases have gone through around IT. So it's IT looking at well how do we process events so that we can get a precursor to a bigger issue and predict the bigger issue. How do we categorize when someone comes in with an IT request or an IT incidence, how do we make sure it goes to the right people and gets the right categorization. And then what'll happen over time is we'll be able to use that for the security module, we'll be able to use it for customer service, for human resources, because it's all, in the same way we said, it's all a different type of service, it's exactly the same process to be able to categorize, to prioritize, to put a severity on something. And then more long term, we can use this technology to look at all kinds of different files on the system. >> And when you say IT first, it's ITSM and ITOM, is that right? >> Yes, ITSM and ITOM. >> Okay, and so good, I like this, this is a very practical example of, generally, AI, as people don't really know what it is. You're going to tell us that something's going to break before it breaks is usually the use case here. >> What we realized is because we can now start to look at time series data and analyze time series data, there's a few things we can do. So the first thing is we can do corelation, so we can start to link events together, so people didn't spend ages just trying to fix the symptoms, they could go right down to the disease and say well, this is what's causing everything else. The other thing we could build in because we could understand what normal looked like is we could build an anomaly detection. So normally, an event says hey, this has got a high CPU, or this switch has gone down. Now we could say this just looks weird. We've got an activity that never normally happens to this level, or it never normally happens at this time of day, or we've never seen this before on a Saturday. And we can actually generate an anomaly alert at that point. Now, the anomaly alert might be a precursor to a traditional alert where you might get. I think the example used in the actual keynote was we get a large number of user threads on a system, that's probably a precursor to high CPU. So once we've started to be able to do that correlation, the more and more examples you get, the more you can start to predict. So you can say as soon as I get that precursor, I have a level of confidence of when we're going to see the next event. So now you get a brand new type of incidence, you'll get an incident for a predicted failure. So the system will say I've seen this, this, and this, I'm 86% confident we've got two hours and we're going to lose this service. So the whole concept of this was how do you work at light speed. And my whole challenge was what happens when you do it before it happens, is that beyond light speed, it was very difficult to try and wrap your mind around it. >> The speed of light is too damn slow. >> Yeah, it's too slow, no one's going to wait for it. >> I did get a tweet back where someone said if you fix everything before it happens, we'll get no budget because everyone will say nothing ever happens. >> If a tree falls and nobody's around. And so there's a risk, sort of risk scoring algorithm in there that helps you say okay, this one is going to fail and you better take advantage of it. >> Yeah, so if you imagine seeing a precursor to something, you look how many times that precursor has caused that event, that allows you to give a degree of probability as to how likely you think it's going to happen. And it might be you decide to set a threshold and say look, if it's below 50%, don't bother doing it. But if it's above 70%, do it. Or if it's a specific type of issue, if it's something around security, and you're above 90% confidence, I want it flagged as a priority one issue. >> Yeah, but if it's my picnic wiki, so can you inject the notion of value in there, I guess the question. >> Dave: Yes, yeah, you can. >> I want to ask you about this categorization piece, even though it's coming down the road with Kingston. That's been a challenge for organizations in so many different use cases. I mean, the one I can think of, you know, is like email archiving and the federal rules of civil procedure, all that stuff when electronic records became admissible. And everybody sort of scrambled to categorize. But it was manual, they were using tags, it just didn't work, it didn't scale. So the answer was always technology to auto-categorize at the point of creation or use. But even then, it was complicated and the math kind of worked but you couldn't apply it. What's changed now and what's the secret sauce behind it? Was that part of the DX Continuum acquisition, maybe you can explain that. >> So we acquired DX Continuum, that gave us eight really bright math Ph.Ds who were data scientists, who could come in, who could look at data in a different way. But I think technology also drove it. So you've got the ability to have the compute power to be able to do the number crunching, but you've got the volume of data as well, I think the more volume of data you get, the more accurate it is. So we found if we're going to train auto-categorization, we need between 50 and 100,000 records to be able to get to a degree of accuracy. And then obviously, we can just keep on doing it again and again and that accuracy gets better and better over time. But even when we ran this out of the box on our system for the very first time before we'd rewritten it on the platform, first time we ran it through, it was 82% accurate straight off. Now, the real interesting thing about when you do something like categorization, it's almost as important what you get right as not guessing when you're going to get it wrong. So we wanted to be be very sure that they system would say I am 100% confident that this is where this is. But if I don't know it, I'm not going to guess. I'm not going to say well, it's 75% confident, so I'm going to say it's this. At that point, you want to say I just don't know. So these, 18%, for example, in this case, I don't know. And then over time, you get to reprocess the things that you don't know, and that percentage gradually goes up. So now, I think in-house, we're running into the 90% region. >> So the math, though, has been around forever. I mean, things like support vector machines and there are other techniques. What is it about this day and age that has allowed us to effectively apply that math and solve this problem? >> So I think what you get now, if you look at the DX Continuum technology used, I think it was five different methodologies for being able to interrogate. And it was neural nets, it was using base, but I think what gives you the big advantage is people have always taken live data and then tried to do this prediction. That's probably the wrong way to do it. If you take historical data and then run it, you just find out which one works. And if this algorithm is working the best for you based on the way you structure your data, then that's the algorithm you focus on. And that's exactly the way predictive analytics works. What we do is we were initially looking, saying okay, well we've got these three different models we can use. We can use projection, we can use seasonal trend lows, we can use AREMA with the auto-regressive moving average type solution. Which one are we going to use? And then we realized we didn't need to guess. What we could do is we could give the system historical data and say which one of these most accurately maps and then use that algorithm for that data set. Because every data set is different, so you might look at one data set where it's really spiky, so you don't want to use projection because if you choose the wrong points, your projection of them is effectively out. So it might be, in that case, you want to use STL and be able to smooth out some of the curves. So you have to, every time you want to do predictive analytics around a specific data set, you need to work out what mathematical model you need to use. >> So the data is then training the models and the models are your models, correct? >> Yes, yeah. >> And now you tell the customer, and I'm sure you do, that this is your data and your data is not going to be shared with anybody outside of your instance. But the model, the gray area between the model and the data, they start to blend together. Is there concern in your customer base about oh, I don't want the model that you train going to my competitors, or is this a different world where they feel as though hey, I want to learn, like, security. What are you seeing there? >> So this is the uniqueness that we, you don't get a generic ML where we look at everyone's instance and train across that. We can only train for your instance. And that's because everyone does things differently. You go to some companies where their highest priority issue is a sev-9, whereas another customer would have sev-1, so you've got people doing different implementations like that. But let's say I tried to do everyone's, and I went through and I said look at this description, this is a networking issue, so I'm going to categorize it as networking. And you haven't got a networking category, you've got networking infrastructure or networking hardware, then it fails. So I have to build a model that's very specific to your instance. So every time we do this, we'll build it for each customer. So it's kind of customized artificial intelligence machine learning models that sit within your instance. >> So my data, your model that you're basically applying for me and only me. Period, the end. >> Yeah, so we do the training on your data and we inject that model, which is your model, back into your instance. >> And now, the benchmarks, you guys have been talking about benchmarks for a while, this is sort of taken it to a new level. So how do you roll that out, how do you charge for it, what's the strategy there? >> So what people do is they effectively subscribe to it. So they're willing to share their data, we're at that point, allowing them, so it's almost a community issue, at this point, everyone is sharing data across the systems. Now, we added another nine benchmarks in the Jakarta release and now I think there's 16 benchmarks. Ive been mainly focused around IT and ITOM, but as we get more and more customers coming on in CSM and more on HR and more on security, we'll be able to start to introduce the whole concept of benchmarking those as well. But the thing you can do now is you don't just see the benchmark and how you perform, we can also use analytics to show how you're trending as well. So you might be better than people of a similar size or people in the same industry, but it might be that you're trending down and you're actually going to start to get close to being worse than them. So the concept here is you can take corrective measures. But also, it gives a lot of power to customers, not just to be able to say I think I'm doing a good job, but to be able to go to senior management and say this is how customers that look like us are currently performing. This is how customers in the finance sector perform. This is how customers with 100,000 people or more perform. And they can see look, we're leading in this, this, and this area, and they can see where they're not leading, and they can actually start to see how they'd address that. Or it might even be that you start to build relationships where they could say to their account manager who are the people who have got this best in performance type thing, could we meet with them, could we exchange with them? The evolution of this will be on the performance analytics side when we start to get to Kingston and beyond will be to be able to do not just the predictive analytics, but to be able to do modeling and to be able to do what-if. And the end goal is we've gotten to the point where we've got predictive, you want to get to the point where you get to prescriptive. Where the system says this is where you are, if you do this, this is where you'll get. >> That's what I was going to ask you, is it intuitive to the client, what they should do, and what role does Service Now play in advising them. And you're saying in the future, the machine is actually going to-- >> Yeah, could be able to say hey, well, if you want to, let's say you want to improve your problem closure rates, you could say well, when you look at other customers, an indicator of this is people have gotten much better first call incident closure. So what you need to do is you need to focus on closing first call incidents because that's going to then have the knock on effect to driving down the way you resolve problems. So we'll be able to get to that, but we'll also be able to allow people to actually model different things. So they could say what happens if I increase this by 10%? What happens if I put another 10 people working on this particular assignment group, what's the effect going to be, and actually start to do those what-if models, and then decide what you're going to do. >> To prioritize the investment to get the numbers down. It's interesting too, 'cause it's a continuous process, as you mentioned, it's this whole do the review once a year, do your KPIs. That's just not the way it works anymore, you don't have time. And to use the integration of the real time streaming data, which is interesting that you said not necessarily always what you want to use first compared to the historical data that's driving the actual business models and the algorithms. >> I think the thing about the whole benchmark concept is it's constantly being updated. So it's not like you take a snapshot and you say okay, we can improve and move here, you see if everyone else is improving at the same time. So there might just be a generic industry trend that everyone is moving in a certain direction. It might be that as we start to see more things coming online from an IOT perspective, I'll be interested to see whether people's CMDBs start to expand. Because I don't know if people have yet established whether IT is going to be responsible for IOT. Because it's using the same protocol for its messaging, how are you going to process those events, how are you going to deal with all that. >> So I guess it's the man versus machine, machines have always replaced humans. But for the first time, it really is happening quickly with cognitive functions. And one of your speakers at the CIO event, Andrew McCafee and his colleague Erik Brynjolfsson have written a book. And in that book, they talked about the middle class getting kind of hollowed out and they theorize that a big part of that is machines replacing them. One of the stats is the median income for U.S. workers has dropped from $55,000 to $50,000 over the last decade. And they posited that cognitive functions are replacing humans, and you see it everywhere. Billboards, the kiosks at airports, et cetera. Should we be alarmed by that? What is your personal opinion here? And I know it's a scary topic for a lot of IT vendors, but it's reality and you're a realist and you're a futurist. What are your thoughts, share them with us. >> People have different views on this. If you look at the view of executives, they see this see this as potentially creating more jobs. If you look at the workforce, I completely agree with you, there's a massive fear that yeah, this is going to take my job away. I think what happens over time is jobs will shift, people will start doing different things. You can go back 150 years and find that 90% of America is working farmland. And you can come now and you can find out they're like 2%. >> Not too many software engineers either back then. >> Not too many. Hard to get that mainframe in the field. What I think you can do is you can not just use AI or machine learning to be able to replace the mundane jobs or the very repetitive jobs, you can actually start to reverse that process. So one of the things we see is initially, when people were talking about concepts like chat bots, it was all about how do you externalize it, how do you have people coming in and being able to interface to a machine. But you can flip that and you can actually have a bot become a virtual assistant. Then what you're doing is you're enabling the person who's dealing with the issue to actually be better than they were. An interesting example is if you look at something like the way people analyze sales prospects. So in the past, people would have a lot of different opportunities they were working on. And the good sales guys would be able to isolate what's going to happen, what's not going to happen. What I can do is can run something like a machine learning algorithm across that and predict which deals are most likely to come in. I then can have a sales guy focusing on those, I've actually improved the skills of that sales guy by using ML and AI to actually get in there. I think a lot of times, you'll be able to move people from a job that was kind of repetitive and dull and be able to augment their skills and perhaps allow them to do a job that they couldn't have done before. So I'm pretty confident just based on the impact that this is going to have from a productivity perspective, where this is going to go from a job perspective. There's a really cool McKinsey report and it talks about the impact of the steam engine on what that drove on productivity and that was a .3% increase in productivity year and year over 50 years. But the prediction around artificial intelligence is it'll produce a productivity increase of 1.4% for the next 50 years. So you're looking at something that people are predicting could be five times as impactful as the industrial revolution. That's pretty significant. >> Next machine age, this is a huge topic. We're out of time, but I would love for you, Dave, to come back to our Silicon Valley studio and maybe talk about this in more depth because it's a really important discussion. >> I'm always around, happy to do it. >> Thanks very much for coming on The Cube it's great to see you again. >> All right, thanks, guys. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody, we're back with our next guest right after this short break. Be right back.

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE covering Service Now Knowledge 17 brought to you by Service Now. >> Welcome back to Orlando everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage and this is Knowledge 17 #know17. Daniel Pink is here, best selling author, speaker at the CIO forum here. Daniel, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> It's great to be here. >> So, you were tellin' us about an audience of a hundred CIOs hanging out, kicking back, listening to you. Give him the love on the Persuasion, the Art of Persuasion and Selling. He wrote a book to sell us humans. So, share with us the premise and what you were talking to the CIOs about. >> Well, I mean the premise was that a lot of persuasion influenced in selling is more science than art. There's this rich body of social science that gives us some clues about how to be more persuasive, whether we're persuading up, whether we're persuading down in an organization, whether we're persuading side to side. And, these CIOs are persuading in multiple, multiple directions. They're talking to their CEO. They're talking to their Board. They're talking to their team. They're talking to other business units. They're talking to vendors and so, I want to look at what does the science tell us about how to persuade effectively. >> Well, I mean typically you don't think of, now maybe this is different, a little bit different for CIOs, but IT people generally are not great salespeople. >> That's what we think, right. Yeah, exactly. And yet, it you look at some of the data we have, we find that in general, this is the whole swath of the U.S. work force, people in a variety of functions are spending about 40 percent of their time persuading, influencing and selling, in general. They might not necessarily be, not necessarily selling a product or service in a cash exchange, but they are doing things. They are at a meeting and they are trying to persuade someone to do something different or do something in a different way. They're a boss trying to get their employee to do something. They're an employee trying to get their boss to stop doing something. They're dealing with people they need to get, enlist help from someone in another department. You need to recruit someone to come and work for you rather than for a competitor. And so, if you look at the content of a lot of white collar work, a huge portion of it is this thing that's kind of, sort of, like selling. It's not denominated in dollars, but the transaction is the denomination is time, effort, attention, energy, zeal, belief, whatever and it's a big part of what we do. And, as I said, you don't have to go with your intuitions about what's effective and what's not, you can actually look to this rich body of social science for some clues about how to do it more effectively. >> So, why does selling have the black eye when it's really persuasion and, as you said, we're all persuading all the time? Not only at work, but also at home with our kids, our spouse, everybody. >> I would say it's a black eye and a bloody nose. I mean, it's looked at, people really really look at sales in a negative way. It's quite remarkable. I think that that's. I'll give you the reason and I'll tell you why the reason is outdated. The reason is that most selling and buying for most of our lifetimes, for most of human civilization has been in a world of information assymetry where the seller always had more information than the buyer. When the seller had more information than the buyer the seller can rip you off. Alright, when the seller has more information than the buyer, the buyer doesn't have any choices. The buyer doesn't have a way to talk back. The seller can really rip you off. Information assymetry is why we have the principle of buyer beware. Buyers have to beware 'cause they're at a disadvantage because of information. Alright, this is basically the history of commerce until like ten years ago when all of a sudden, we went from a world of information assymetry to a world of information parity. And so, and this is true in every domain. It's true for selling a product, you know, selling a car, selling b to b services. It's true in the dating market. It's true in the hiring market. It's true at a meeting where, it drives baby boom managers crazy, they'll be in a meeting and they'll say something and some 28 year old sitting in the back will say, excuse me, and hold up her phone and say, no, what you said isn't right. Alright, and so the reason it has this black eye and bloody nose is because we're used to this world of information assymetry. One of my points was, okay we're in a totally different era now of information parity and that's a different terrain. And so, again you can use the science to navigate this terrain. >> So, people ask me what's this digital transformation all about. I say, well it's attempt by brands to achieve assymetry again. >> I mean listen, if you are a seller assymetry is awesome, alright. I mean, you want to do everything you can to preserve it. What I'm saying is that the tide is so ferocious here that it's a very difficult thing to hold back. So, it's possible in certain kinds of industries and certain kinds of products and services, you can do some things to kind of hold back that tide. My view is like holding back tides is difficult work. And, usually in the long run it doesn't work very well. So, my view is like, okay what do you in this world of information parity and this world, you know the old world was buyer beware, I think this new world is seller beware. And, I think that today what sellers have to do is they have to take the high road. I mean, you want to take the high road because it's the right thing to do, but now there's a very pragmatic reason to take the high road. It's 'cause the low road doesn't lead anywhere. >> Right. Well, the other thing that you're touching on which is again, within the last ten years it's instinct versus data base decision making and processing. So as you said, you don't have to make this up. There's plenty of science to support this effort and the instinctual guy in the corner is no longer necessarily the authority. >> Absolutely right, and what's interesting is a lot of this, some of this research confirms our instincts. Some of this research doesn't. For instance, we tend to believe that strong extroverts make the best sales people. Not true, it's an absolute abject myth. Strong extroverts, in general, are terrible sales people. Now, it doesn't mean that strong introverts are better. People who are the best, and I was talking to these somewhat more introverted CIOs, the people who are the best, and there's some good research on this, are what are called ambiverts, which are people who are in the middle, not heavily extroverted, not heavily introverted. And, the great thing about the ambiverts is that they are ambidextrous, so they know when to speak up, they know when to shut up. They know when to push, they know when to hold back. So, even though the mythology or instincts, to use your word, is that, oh strong extroverts make better sales people. If I want to sell more I got to be more extroverted. The evidence doesn't say that. The evidence says, in fact, to the contrary. The evidence points to ambiverts as having an edge in selling. >> So, what's the formula for the high road? Is it transparency a part of that? >> Well, on a personal level, yeah, I think transparency is getting to be not even a choice. It's basically like, transparency is no more a choice than say, oxygen is a choice. >> Yeah, okay, stable stakes. So, yeah, exactly. So, if you look at the research there are three personal qualities that seem to be important. Attunement, which is, can you get out of your own head into someone else's head, understand their perspective? Okay, so you don't have any coercive power today. Buoyancy, they're a b c, attunement, buoyancy, total luck, attunement, buoyancy and clarity. Buoyancy is in any kind of persuasive effort there's a huge amount of rejection and human beings don't like rejection. I don't like rejection, nobody likes rejection. So, one sales person who I interviewed described his job as looking out into an ocean of rejection. So, buoyancy is, how do you stay afloat in that ocean of rejection. How do you deal with rejection? And, there's some good science behind that. And then, clarity has two dimensions. Clarity is, it used to be that if you had access to information, you had an edge. But, now everybody has access to information. >> Right, right. >> So, the edge comes from being able to curate information, being able to make sense of information. Separate out the signal from the noise and information. The other thing is that you were talking again, this goes directly to your point about instinct versus data and machine. You know, a lot of sales people like to say, old fashioned sales people say, oh, I'm a problem solver, and that's cool. It's just that problem solving is becoming less important. Because if your customer or your prospect knows exactly what their problem is they can find a solution without you. They don't need you. You know, and so the premium has shifted to the skill of problem finding. Can you service latent problems? Can you look down the road and anticipate problems? Can you see around corners? And, that's going to be incredibly important in this world of machine learning and AI, where simply expressed problems will be solved that way. And, what we human beings have to do is figure out the right problems to solve, anticipate problems, you know really, see around corners and do that kind of thing. >> So, you basically advised the COs to tune in, deal with rejection and make things more clear and curate. >> Absolutely, absolutely, right, right, right. And, the information thing is big because, you know, in anything, not only the CIOs but in any realm. It used to be that expertise came from having access to information. Think about in the world of finance, at a certain point only stock brokers could find out what the stock price was. Only stock brokers had certain kinds of information about how a company was performing. So, I'm an expert. Why? 'Cause I have the key where the information is locked up. Now, everybody does, so what do you do if you want to be a financial professional? Well, you'd better be really good at synthesizing information, making sense of it, separating the signal and the noise from the information. >> What were some of the more interesting question that you got from the CIOs audience? >> There was a couple of interesting questions about well, there was a couple of questions about introversion, extroversion and how much you can change your personality, which is minimally. I mean, you can make a small move to, you can make a small move to the middle. There was a question about, a very good question for these CIOs in particular 'cause most of them are dealing with multi-national firms and employees and customers all around the world, is how much national differences make a, how much national differences are important. And, there is some, there's some very interesting stuff on that. For instance, if you look at, it's not a shocker, but if you look at like if you're selling or persuading say in a Japanese, East Asian culture, very much more hierarchical than it would be here. Like you guys would not be Jeff and Dave from the get go, you know. >> Right, right. >> It would be like, oh wait a second, wait a second. These guys have ear pieces and ties. Whoa, wait a second, I better you know, be much more hierarchical in how I deal with them. Or, in certain Latin cultures, Brazil is a good example, if you and I were to do business together we wouldn't even talk business at our first meeting. We would go out to dinner. We would have a meal. So, there's that kind of cultural nuance stuff. There's one thing that I tried to explain to them that Americans stink at. It's one of the biggest cognitive errors that Americans make and it's this. When we Americans try to explain people's behavior or predict people's behavior we almost always overstate the importance of someone's personality and understate the importance of the context that they're in. So, we look at, oh, Jeff did that 'cause he's a jerk. Dave did that 'cause he's a nice guy. Freida did that because she's mean, you know. And, we don't and we disregard what context they're in and when we look at our own behavior we behave very differently in different contexts. If you were to drive with me you would think I was the worst person on the planet. I mean, truly, like in that context I'm just miserable, I'm mean spirited 'cause I can't stand doing it. Otherwise, I'm okay, you know. And so, again if you go to East Asian cultures, East Asian cultures will look at the entire fish tank rather than the fish that's in the foreground. And so, as a consequence, they say, oh well, Pink Sun was you know, maybe he was having a bad day or maybe Pink Sun doesn't like to drive or when Pink Sun's with his family he's a nicer guy and that kind of stuff. Americans, they say, that guy's a jerk. >> Alright, we got to wrap up. What Jeff really and I want to know is, does this work on our kids? >> The short answer, absolutely. >> Alright, Terry. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Alright, thanks you guys. >> Alright, keep it right there. We're going to be back with our next guest right after this. This is Knowledge17. Be right back.

>> Announcer: Live, from Orlando, Florida, it's theCube. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back to Orlando everybody, this is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Jeff Frick, our cohost. This is Knowledge17, #Know17. Jim Hebb is here, the Advisory Director for People in Change at KPMG. And he's here with Nate Channel, the Enabling Technology Lead at JM Smucker and Company. Systems integrator, customer, gents, welcome to theCube. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> So let's hear the story, JM Smucker, you told me off camera that you just started in November. Right? >> Nate: Right, we went live in November. >> Take us back to that decision point, where you said, "hey we need to do something here." What was that like? >> Well, I guess we were asked by the CHRO of Smucker to look into a current state assessment of their HR Organization. And from that, one of the things we discovered was that, the company is a family owned company, had grown organically over the years, had a very family type os environment, and while that is a big selling point for the company, it also resulted in a more relaxed approach to delivering HR services. >> Love the vocabulary. (group laughing) Relaxed approach. >> Relaxed approach, so essentially, if you were an employer manager and needed help from HR, you had to know who to go to. So you had to have a name, you had to go find them, if they weren't the right person, then you got passed to the next person. Certainly there was no way to record, track, have a collaborative, sort of tool to use for HR service requests. There was no way to report on information related to where things stand. Employees couldn't see where their service requests are it was email, phone call, stop by the desk. That was a gap that we thought, if you really wanted to transform the organization and really ratchet up the level of service, we needed to do something. >> A lot of tribal knowledge. But, now you're in IT, is that correct? >> I'm actually in HR. >> You are in HR. >> Is that where you guys started? You started in HR or? >> I actually joined the company a little less than a year ago. So the project was was already under way, when I came in. Yes, I did start in HR, and I think that, just coming into the organization, kind of seeing it where it was when I came in, and how everything was kind of fractured because we had gone through a lot of acquisitions and that's how we grew, and we grew very quickly. Nothing was really consolidated, so seeing this transformation has really been fantastic. >> But did you guys have ITSM installed or no? >> No, no. >> Okay, so the company started at .. >> Which is unusual right. >> Yeah, I was going to say. >> It started with HR and from there they have now decided to adopt the IDSM platform, >> Right. >> And are going live in a month or so I think. >> Yes. >> It's really interesting that they started with HR. >> So tell us about the implementation, how did it go, I mean a lot of people will share with us, it's sometimes very complex to implement, you chose a partner, to obviously reduce the complexity, share the risk. >> Yeah, so it felt very fast for us. From an IT perspective, we're not prone to doing anything agile. I think having that agile development life cycle come in was a shock to the system. It put us into the position where we had to really focus on what wanted and needed, very quickly. And we were able to do that, and I think we were able to put something in place that will benefit us in the future. And I think, it's benefiting us now. We've transformed our organization. >> And how did you get it in? Were things just breaking or how did you get the opportunity to provide the initiative to bring in this agile new tool? >> So it was really part of a broader HR transformation that we were doing with the company. We were looking at everything top to bottom, their entire HR operating model, their HR org structure, all of their HR processes, all of the HR technologies that we were conturently doing, a Workday implementation with them. Building a new shared services center, looking at their entire North American models. As part of that, this was just a natural piece of the puzzle that needed to be added. >> So a lot of people are confused and ServiceNow's trying to constantly explain to people, we don't compete with Workday. Talk to the practitioner, where does Workday leave off and ServiceNow pick up, if I'm an employee of Smucker, what do I interface with, am I talking to ServiceNow, am I talking to Workday, both? >> Actually our design, we have the portal in place. We have the HR service portal and that's really our gateway for our employees. So it's part of ServiceNow, but it leads them into Workday, and a lot of our employees associate those two as one. They think that if they're having a problem, or anything like that they need to access something, they go through HR Home, but they're thinking they're going right into our deck. >> Dave: It's an HR portal to them. >> Right, exactly. >> Dave: They don't really know or care what's at the back end. >> Exactly. >> Nor should they really. >> Nor should they. And that was presumably the design point? >> Nate: Right, right. >> Again, not always common, right, you hear different stories of different stovepipes, but you seem to have some success with this approach. >> We have, we always try to take it from the perspective of what does the employee manager need, and how do they want to interact with HR. So it's not about, HR often has more of an insular approach to, well, we're thinking compensation or benefits, or providing this type of function. Employees and mangers come and say, I have an issue and I need help with it. They don't really need to know, if this is comp or benefits, they can say, I have an issue with my paycheck, it might be a benefit deduction, it might be an incorrect calculation from payroll, it might be something related to retirement plan, so they don't need to figure that out and have to find where they need to go, they should be able to come to HR and get help, right from the start. >> So onboarding is the classic example. How has that, as a relatively new employee, how has it affected the onboarding process? >> We are still kind of hashing through onboarding right now. We're really focusing on the Workday side to get everything kind of ironed out perfectly before we truly bring ServiceNow as a part of that into it. But from any perspective where there's any kind of problem, we're directing our future employees to utilize the tool, as possible. >> Take us through the project, when did it start and how long did it take? >> It actually started with an RFP process. So we facilitated that, so we had five different providers that we were helping Smucker evaluate. Methodology approach, functionality, technical alignment, business and cultural alignment, cost. And from that RFP process ServiceNow came out on top. That was the selection point that was earlier in 2016, first quarter 2016. Because we were doing an entire transformation, we staged everything in sequential order in terms of what we were doing with Workday, Shared Services, redesign of operating model, all of that good stuff, and we ended up, as Nate said, launching, doing a soft launch, right after Thanksgiving for the ServiceNow platform, full launch with Workday, ServiceNow, Service Center, everything on the December 14th. >> And the business impact, so far is early days, but so far, and what's expected? >> It was completely different than anything we're used to, >> Dave: In a good way. (laughing) >> Yeah, absolutely, it was fantastic. I think our employee population really jumped on board very quickly. Instead of following that traditional HR, you know, pick up the phone or send an email, they're calling a Service Center, and they're following up on cases, instead of following up on emails. >> Jeff: Total relief. >> Yeah, I think we've definitely consolidated all of that into the ServiceNow platform. >> Alright gents, we got to leave it there. Yet another happy customer. It actually doesn't get boring after a while, I love to hear the stories, because things change so much, it used to be ITSM, and now we're talking lines of businesses et cetera, so gents, thanks very much for coming on theCube, appreciate it. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> Thank you, thank you. >> You're welcome. Keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. It's theCube, we're live from ServiceNow Knowledge17. Be right back.

(upbeat music) >> Commentator: Live, from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge17, brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Hi everybody, welcome back to Knowledge17. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm with my co-host Jeff Frick at our fifth Knowledge. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. Seneca Louck is here, he's the Business Process Lead at Dow Chemical. A relatively new ServiceNow customer. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you guys. >> Thanks for having me. >> So you said this is your second Knowledge. >> Seneca: It is. >> And, well how do you like Orlando? >> I like it, I like it. I'm here, in Venetian, >> Sunny? >> for next year, and so I'm a Vegas guy, so I'll be happy to get back there, but Orlando's nice. >> Dave: Where's home for you? >> Originally from New Jersey. Worked in Philadelphia for 15 years and relocated to Midland, Michigan, where Dow Chemical's headquartered. >> Dave: Fantastic, ah it's great, great country, Michigan. >> Absolutely. >> So, take us through your role, start there. What do you do, >> Sure. >> at Dow Chemical? >> So, I'm a Business Process Lead for Enterprise Service Management. We could go down the ITSM route, or we can go down the BSM route and we said, "Why pick one?" Enterprise Systems Management used to be the name. We actually elevated it up, Enterprise Service Management. We're the IT Operability focus on the end. >> Okay, and you said you went live, with ServiceNow, June last year? >> June 11th last year, we started with Incident Problem Change Config. We did Change Management, sorry, a month later. And then we did Service Request catalog, rolled out for the whole rest of the year. >> How long did it take you from sort of, when you said, "All right, we're doing this. "Start the project." To actually get, you know, MVP out? >> The cake. >> Yeah, the cake. (laughs) >> To get to the cake. >> And MVP's a really important thing. Minimum Viable Product. It was a hard lesson for us to learn. Quickly we realized that we're not going to be able to do everything we want to do in a first shot. So, we did focus very heavily on MVP. ServiceNow was good enough to make sure that they bred that into us, the importance of that. And so, we started in October, with workshops. We spent probably the first four or five months before we wrote one single line of code or configured one thing in ServiceNow. You know, a lot of that work was As-Is Process. Document it, understand it, uplift it, figure out what we want that To-Be Process to look like, and then figure out how the tool's going to deliver against that. >> Did you do some of that, I mean much of that came as part of the business case, and then you just refined it, is that right? >> The business case was really more on the value side. We didn't get into the specifics around process. We had a high level idea what we wanted to do strategically. Right? >> Yeah. >> Our guiding principles were really, Industry Best Practice, we like to think we're special. But really, the industry should know. Out of the box, ServiceNow, whenever possible. And to be honest, the out-of-the-box ServiceNow should reflect Industry Best Practice fairly well. And so that was kind of the coming in position for us. We deviated only when absolutely necessary and we really tried to stick to vanilla. >> So you minimized custom mods? >> Seneca: We really tried to do that, yes. There's times where we had to deviate of course. But we really wanted to look to see if ServiceNow had an answer, and if we could tweak what was already there, then great. There's only a handful of opportunities where we had to build something net new. >> And was that related to your ERP, or when did you have to build those custom mods? >> So, in places where we might have a concept that was to bring Legacy capability from a previous system. We knew we weren't going to cut and run from the old to the new. We had to kind of pull on some of the capabilities of that platform. So, the way you guys do category, sub-category, we did through classification. And so we had to customize a couple of tables to bring classifications over to bridge that gap. >> I see, okay, and then, so then you go live. Now was it a CMDB, a single CMDB across the organization? >> So, we have HP technology, where we had large investment. We wanted to keep that for discovery purposes and it enabled us to build one big tunnel between our CMDB and ServiceNow, so it made the integration go very easily. So, we really did two key integrations, a CMDB integration and an LDAP one to get our people data. Once that was done, we were on our feet, we were stood up and we were ready to start delivering processes. >> And the Service Catalog? >> Service Catalog was an interesting one because we had it spread out in a bunch of places. We had web forums, where somebody had customized a small, little web forum that that was actually making calls into our ticketing system to create service requests. We also had Request Center, which was brought in to try and solve that world of Service Request Management, but it only did it for Service Request. And we realize ServiceNow is going to do it end-to-end. >> Seneca, when you're thinking about your investments. I like to look at 'em as you get investments to run the business, some to grow the business and some to transform the business. And you're really sort of an IT-transform expert. How do you allocate that? Are those mutually exclusive? Do they sort of blend into each other and how much of your investment is transformation, and what does that all mean? >> Yeah, so it's tough because you've got guys that are on the run side, and I actually spent the large majority of my career on the run side. So, I know what if feels like to be accountable for everything in production, regardless of how it got there. And so, I kind of oscillate back and forth. Right? If the hair's on fire and these guys are going to be dead by the time the project transforms next year's capability, there's no point in us waiting. We can't wait. So, we're bouncing in and out of transformation and dealing with, making sure operability can happen effectively, efficiently, and that these guys are around next year, and alive and well, so that we can deliver that transformational capability. >> You talked about MVP being kind of a new concept. I wonder if you could dig into that a little bit further. >> Sure, sure. >> Is that not kind of a process or methodology that you guys have done in the past, or was it a learning curve? >> So, it was a little bit of a learning curve. So, typically you know, we delivered the biggest SAP implementation in the history of the world. A billion dollars, 800 SAP systems. And it took us seven years. So, we didn't think a lot about MVP, we wanted perfection. And so we made sure that we got it. And it cost us dearly. But in the end, the results were good. In this case, we had to move fast. Right? We weren't going to be able to do it all. We knew the capabilities that you see, throughout this room, are incredible. We want to get to them. But we've got to get on to the platform first. And so, we really did hone in on trying to find, what is the minimum product that we need to get people moved over to the platform, and we'll increment from there. So, it was a little bit of a learning for us. It was a little bit of a culture change. And we kind of found that sweet spot between Agile and Waterfall, which I think we called it Wagile, or (laughs). Yeah, Wagile I think, >> Well, right. >> is the name. >> I mean your implementation >> coincided with the sort of DevOps craze, and Agile, but there's >> That's right, that's right. >> a place for Waterfall, right? >> There is, there is. >> Sometimes, you need >> that perfection. Other times, you need to break stuff and iterate. >> Absolutely. >> But so, that's interesting. You said you came up with sort of a hybrid. Sometimes, hybrids are scary. So, how did you sort of come to that point and how's it workin' for you? >> Yeah, so what we did is we front-ended a lot of the requirements. We spent, like I said, several months, just sitting and doing requirements. And then, we transitioned into two-week sprints. And we pulled out of the backlog, the requirements that we had captured in those months previous. So, that was kind of how we blended the two together. We're more a Waterfall shop but we were delivering a system of record. And so, in systems of record, we strongly believe that Agile can be dangerous. It's not necessarily the place to start. And so, we started with Waterfall, and we kind of ended with Agile. >> All right, okay, and so, what so far have been the sort of business impacts? Can you share that with us? >> Yeah absolutely, so first thing's first, we're getting consistency throughout our processes. So, many times, geographical differences or even within a geography, at a sub-activity level, people were doing things differently. So, first thing we had to do was Standardize Process. That gives us the ability to measure across the world, how that process is being executed. Whereas before, we couldn't do that one-for-one, we couldn't compare these things one-for-one. And so, now we have that vision, now we have that visibility, and we were a performance analytics customer from day one, so we started capturing data to baseline, to benchmark, from Go Live, until today, and we've got incredible data to go back then and do the continuous service improvement. >> And how much of the consistency and process was forced in your pre-deployment activities, where you kind of find, all right, we got to sit down and actually document this to put it into the system. Versus, now that you've got this tool in place, that you see the opportunity to continue to go after new processes. >> It varied, dependent upon area, so Change Management was actually not a bad process from a global perspective. On the flip side is, we actually implemented some case management capability for our Business Functions. Their processes were extremely deviated across geographies, across activities. And so it depends, but the bottom line is that before we talk about implementing on this platform, we got to talk standardization. Good news is the incident problem changed. It wasn't as much work. On the Business Process side, it was a lot more. >> How are you predominantly measured? Is it getting stuff done? Are there other sort of KPI's that you focus on? Is there one that you try to optimize? >> So, these days, we're actually operating in a little bit of a dangerous place because we're going through so much mergers and acquisition activity, that our success is, can we integrate a company in less than a year while we go on to do the biggest chemical merger in the history of the world? So, typically, we would be kind of looking at metrics, and KPI's, down at the process level. Right now, we're looking at, can I actually bring these companies together? So it's integrated. >> And not kill each other. >> And not kill each other. (laughs) That's right. That's not to say we're not doing the latter as well but I think we have to start with, can we get the big activities done so that we can figure out how to do the process improvement. >> Dave: Right. How about the show for you here? What's it been like? What are you learning? >> Yeah, so. >> Are you sharing? >> Dx Continuum I think is going to be the theme that I'm going to leave here thinking, wow, these guys did the right thing with that purchase. So, you know the artificial intelligence, the machine learning, the data lakes, that we're going to be able to take all this data that we have and pump it out to you guys. And you're going to turn around and tell us an interesting story. You're going to tell me the questions that I would never even think to ask because you're going to be able to see into that data in ways that we never even dreamed possible. So, that's the big one for me. I've heard some rumors of some other things coming, but I shouldn't know about those and so I'm not going to say anything at this point. But right now, it's about the machine learning, the artificial intelligence. >> So, what other, I mean 'cause a company the size of Dow must be doing some interesting things with Big Data and Hadoop and AI. How does what you're doing or does what you're doing with ServiceNow relate to those sort of other activities? Is there sort of a data platform strategy? >> It's an interesting question. It's something that we're actually struggling with a little bit to figure out what that strategy is going to be. I don't think the larger organization expected so many opportunities to use analytics and to use machine learning against data sets that otherwise were, this is operation stuff, for the most part, right? We're starting to get into the business side a little bit but really, we were focused on running the business from an operations perspective. And so, all of a sudden, now, we're getting attention that we wouldn't have had otherwise, from the big players, you know. The SAP Business Warehouse, Business Intelligence guys. They've got 120 people delivering their reporting service. I got a guy half-time, that's helping me with my PA reports and we've got to figure out a way to either join our strategies together or at least meet in the middle because there's data that we probably want to share from each other. >> Do you have a Chief Data Officer on staff? >> We do not, that I'm aware of, actually. But I think it is , it's a very powerful role, but in our SAP world, they kind of act as that defacto person within our organization. But they're not very interested in what we're doing yet but they are starting to get the attention of us. >> It's interesting 'cause we talk a lot about IoT Now will bridge, you know, kind of the IT and the Ops folks. And it sounds like you're having that experience really specifically built around some of the processes that you're delivering in ServiceNow. To bring those two world together. >> Yeah, so while I mentioned machine learning and Artificial Intellience, that's actually right there, second on my list. The thing I came here last year and raised my hands and said I need the most is I need the ability to bring massive amounts of data onto this platform. Raw performance data, network data, server data, utilization data, end-user data. I want to be able to bring it into this platform so that I can use it to correlate events and incidents and problems. And so, the things that you guys are doing for IoT, to bring massive data sets in, are actually going to solve my problem, but I don't think it was necessarily what you were trying to solve. But I'm very happy for that. >> So, by the way, we're independent media, so we're (laughs) like third-party guys. >> Understood, understood >> It's these guys, ServiceNow. So, we just sort of unpack, analyze. What about if you had to do it again. What would you do differently? Obviously you would have, and you did, you embraced the MVP, other things? >> So, we took a very dangerous route in that we didn't have a team built. We didn't have a competency built. We took a system integrator and we went off and we went hog wild and we implemented it quickly, while we built the team, while we built the governance, while we built the competency center. If I could do it again, I'd have that team ready, staffed, you know, well-trained up front, so that we could learn as we went, a little bit more, be a little more autonomous and self-sufficient. >> Were you one of the 100 customers that John Donahoe met with in 45 days? >> I was not actually. >> And if you weren't, then what would you tell him in terms of the piece that he said, "What can we do better?" What would you? >> Yeah. >> So, the question came up yesterday, around releases. You know, should we do more, should we do less. I mean, we're actually struggling a little bit to keep up with the two releases per year. So, the biggest thing that I see is not making it a wholesale upgrade. If I could take parts and pieces from the new capabilities that are coming without having to go through the full upgrade cycle, you know, I think that would be huge for me. So that we don't have to spend a couple of months or we're hoping to get that down to one month. But this is our first one in production. So, we're going to spend three months getting this upgrade right. We're hoping to get it down to, you know, a couple of weeks to a month. But if I can take pieces and parts of the capability that's being delivered, and not have to take it wholesale, that would be the thing. >> Yeah, so that's interesting because Multi-instance is nice. You don't have to go on the SaaS player's schedule. But you want to keep current, you know, for a lot of reasons, with maybe, with certain parts of the upgrade. Yeah, okay, that doesn't sound trivial. (laughs) >> Yeah, it's not. >> Although I know they're thinking about it so it's come up, I've heard a couple of people at least mention that it's something that they have to think about. They may not actually go that direction. But at least that they're thinking about it, that tells me that they're exploring other avenues to deliver capability. >> Dave: What's in the future for you guys? Where do you want to take this thing? >> Yeah, so our next big thing's going to be Event Management. So, we've got 45 different tools that are doing monitoring from purchase tools to somebody's script that's sitting on the mainframe that sends us an event, when some exception happens. And so we've built, you know, with a custom IT process automation tool, our Event Management framework. And it's integrated with ServiceNow. But at the heart of it is, there's some old technology, decade-old technology, that was my first entry into IT process automation. And so, as the person who built it, I'm going to be the one that ultimately unplugs it and hands it over to ServiceNow. So, for us, that's the next step for what we're going to do. >> Awesome, well listen, Seneca, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It's great to have you. Loved the knowledge. >> Thanks for having us. >> Dave: Rapid fire, you know, perfect for theCUBE, so thank you. >> Great, wonderful. >> Thank you, guys. >> Thanks for coming on. >> I appreciate it. >> All right, pleasure. >> All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Knowledge17 in Orlando. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)