>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone, we are wrapping up three big days of the CUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Dave Vellante and Jeffrick. It has been such fun co-hosting with you both. It's always a ghast to be with you so three days, what have we learned? We've learned we're making the world of work work better for people. Beyond that what do you think? >> New branding you know there which I think underscores ServiceNow's desire to get into the C-Suite. Become a strategic partner. Some of the things we heard this week, platform of platforms. The next great enterprise software company is what they aspire to, just from a financial standpoint. This company literally wants to be a hundred billion dollar valuation company. I think they got a reasonable shot at doing that. They're well on their way to four billion dollars in revenue. It's hard to be a software company and hit a billion. You know the number of companies who get there ar very limited and they are the latest. We're also seeing many products, one platform and platforms in this day and age beat products. Cloud has been a huge tailwind for ServiceNow. We've seen the SaaSification of industries and now we're seeing significant execution on the original vision at penetration into deeply into these accounts. And I got to say when you come to events like this and talk to customers. There's amazing enthusiasm as much of if not more than any show that we do. I mean I really got, what's your take? >> We go to so many shows and it's not hard to figure out the health of a show. Right you walk around the floor, what's the energy, how many people are there? What's the ecosystem I mean, even now as I look around we're at the very end of the third day and there is action at most of the booths still. So it's a super healthy ecosystem. I think it grew another 4,000 people from this year of the year of year growth. So it's clearly on the rise. SaaS is a big thing, I think it's really interesting play and the kind of simple workflow. Not as much conversation really about the no code and the low code that we've heard in the past. Maybe they're past that but certainly a lot of conversation about the vertical stack applications that they're building and I think at the end of the day. We talked about this before, it's competition for your screen. You know what is it that you work in everyday. Right if you use, I don't care what application. SalesForce or any SaaS application which we all have a lot of on our desktop today. If you use it as a reporting tool it's a pain. It's double entry, it's not good. But what is the tool that you execute your business on everyday? And that's really a smart strategy for them to go after that. The other thing that I just think is ripe and we talked about a little bit. I don't know if they're down playing it because they're not where they want to be at or they're just downplaying it but the opportunity for machine learning and artificial intelligence to more efficiently impact workflows with the data from the workflow is a huge opportunity. So what was a bunch of workflows and approvals and this and that should all get, most of it should just get knocked out via AI over a short period of time. So I think they're in a good spot and then the other thing which we hear over and over. You know Frank Slootman IT our homies I still love that line. But as has been repeated IT is everywhere so what a great way to get into HR. To get into legal, to get into facilities management, to get into these other things. Where like hey this is a really cool efficient little tool can I build a nice app for my business? So seemed to be executing on that strategy. >> Yeah CJ just said IT will always be at our core. Rebecca the keynote was interesting. It got mixed reviews and I think part of that is they're struggling we heard tat from some of our guests. There's a hybrid audience now. You got the IT homies, you got the DevOps crowd and then you got the business leaders and so the keynote on day one was really reaching an audience. Largely outside of the core audience. You know I think day two and day three were much more geared toward that direct hit. Now I guess that's not a bad thing. >> No and I think that I mean as you noted it's a hybrid audience so you're trying to reach and touch and inspire and motivate a lot of different partners, customers, analysts. People who are looking at your business in a critical way. The first day John Donahoe it struck me as very sort of aspirational. Really talking about what is our purpose, what do we do as an organization. What are our values, what problems are we trying to solve here and I think that that laying out there in the way that he did was effective because it really did bring it back to, here's what we're about. >> Yeah the other thing I learned is succession has been very successful. Frank Slootman stepped down last year as CEO. He's maintained his chairman title, he's now stepped down as chairman. Fred kind of you know went away for a little while. Fred's back now as chairman. John Donahoe came in. People don't really put much emphasis on this but Fred Luddy was the chief product officer. Dan McGee was the COO, CJ Desai took over for both of them. He said on the CUBE. You know you texted me, you got big shoes to fill. He said I kept that just to remind me and he seems to have just picked up right where those guys left off. You know Pat Casey I think is understated and vital to the culture of this company. You know Jeff you see that, he's like a mini Fred you know and I think that's critical to maintain that cultural foundation. >> But as we said you know going the way that Pat talked about kind of just bifurcation in the keynote and the audiences in the building and out of the building. Which I've never heard before kind of an interesting way to cut it. The people that are here are their very passionate community and they're all here and they're adding 4,000 every single year. The people that are outside of the building maybe don't know as much about it and really maybe that aspirational kind of messaging touched them a little bit more cause they're not into the nitty gritty. It's really interesting too just cause this week is such a busy week in technology. The competition for attention, eyeballs and time. I was struck this morning going through some of our older stuff where Fred would always say. You know I'm so thankful that people will take the time to spend it with us this week. And when people had choices to go to Google IO, Microsoft build, of course we're at Nutanix next, Red Hat Summit I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of other ones. >> Busy week. >> The fact that people are here for three days of conference again they're still here is a pretty good statement in terms of the commitment of their community. >> Now the other thing I want to mention is four years ago Jeff was I think might have been five years ago. We said on the CUBE this company's on a collision course with SalesForce and you can really start to see it take shape. Of the customer service management piece. We know that SalesForce really isn't designed for CSM. Customer Service Management. But he talked about it so they are on a collision course there. They've hired a bunch of people from SalesForce. SalesForce is not going to rollover you know they're going to fight hard for that hard, Oracle's going to fight hard for that. So software companies believe that they should get their fair share of the spend. As long as that spend is a 100%. That's the mentality of a software company. Especially those run by Marc Benioff and Larry Ellis and so it's going to be really interesting to see how these guys evolve. They're going to start bumping into people. This guy's got pretty sharp elbows though. >> Yeah and I think the customer relation is very different. We were at PagerDuty Summit last right talked to Nick Meta who just got nominated for entrepreneur of the year I think for Ink from GainSight and he really talked about what does a customer management verses opportunity management. Once you have the customer and you've managed that sale and you've made that sale. That's really were SalesForce has strived in and that's we use it for in our own company but once you're in the customer. Like say you're in IBM or you're in Boeing. How do you actually manage your relationship in Boeing cause it's not Boeing and your sales person. There's many many many relationships, there's many many many activities, there's somewhere you're winning, somewhere you're losing. Somewhere you're new, somewhere you're old and so the opportunity there is way beyond simply managing you know a lead to an opportunity to a closed sale. That' just the very beginning of a process and actually having a relationship with the customer. >> The other thing is so you can, one of the measurements of progress in 2013 this company 95% of its business was in IT. Their core ITSM, change management, help desk etc. Today that number's down to about two thirds so a third of the business is outside of IT. We're talking about multi-hundreds of millions of dollars. So ITOM, HR, the security practice. They're taking these applications and they're becoming multi-hundred million dollar businesses. You know some of them aren't there yet but they're you know north of 50, 75 we're taking about hundreds of customers. Higher average price, average contract values. You know they don't broadcast that here but you know you look at peel back the numbers and you can see just tremendous financial story. The renewal rates are really really high. You know in the mid 90s, high 90s which is unheard of and so I think this company is going to be the next great enterprise software company and their focus on the user experience I think is important because if you think about the great enterprise software companies. SalesForce, Oracle, SAP, maybe put IBM in there because they sort of acquired their way to it. But those three, they're not the greatest user experiences in the world. They're working on the UI but they're, you know Oracle, we use Oracle. It's clunky, it's powerful. >> They're solving such different problems. Right when those companies came up they were solving a very different problem. Oracle on their relational database side. Very different problem. You know ARP was so revolutionary when SAP came out and I still just think it's so funny that we get these massive gains of efficiency. We had it in the ARP days and now we're getting it again. So they're coming at it from a very different angle. That they're fortunate that there are more modern architecture, there are more modern UI. You know unfortunately if you're legacy you're kind of stuck in your historical. >> In your old ways right? >> Paradigm. >> So the go to market gets more complicated as they start selling to all these other divisions. You're seeing overlay, sales forces you know it's going to be interesting. IBM just consolidated it's big six shows into one. You wonder what's going to happen with this. Are they going to have to create you know mini Knowledges for all these different lines of business. We'll see how that evolves. You think with the one platform maybe they keep it all together. I hope they don't lose that core. You think of VM world, rigt there's still a core technical audience and I think that brings a lot of the energy and credibility to a show like this. >> They still do have some little regional shows and there's a couple different kind of series that they're getting out because as we know. Once you get, well just different right. AWS reinvents over $40,000 last year. Oracle runs it I don't even know what Oracle runs. A 65,000, 75,000. SalesForce hundred thousand but they kind of cheat. They give away lot of tickets but it is hard to keep that community together. You know we've had a number of people come up to us while we're off air to say hi, that we've had on before. The company's growing, things are changing, new leadership so to maintain that culture I think that's why Pat is so important and the key is that connection to the past and that connection to Fred. That kind of carried forward. >> The other thing we have to mention is the ecosystem when we first started covering ServiceNow Knowledge it was you know fruition partners, cloud Sherpas I mean it. Who are these guys and now you see the acquisitions, it's EY is here, Deloitte is here, Accenture is here. >> Got Fruition. >> PWC you see Unisys is here. I mean big name companies, Capgemini, KPMG with big install bases. Strong relationships it's why you see the sales guys at ServiceNow bellying up to these companies because they know it's going to drive more business for them. So pretty impressive story I mean it's hard to be critical of these guys, your price is too high. Okay I mean alright. But the value's there so people are lining up so. >> Yeah I mean it's a smoking hot company as you said. What do they needed to do next? What do you need to see from them next? >> Well I mean the thing is they laid out the roadmap. You know they announced twice a year at different cities wit each a letter of the alphabet. They got to execute on that. I mean this is one of those companies that's theirs to lose. It really is, they got the energy. They got to retain the talent, attract new talent, the street's certainly buying their story. Their free cash flow is growing faster than their revenue which is really impressive. They're extremely well run company. Their CFO is a rockstar stud behind the scenes. I mean they got studs in development, they got a great CEO they got a great CFO. Really strong chief product officer, really strong general managers who've got incredible depth in expertise. I mean it's theirs to lose, I mean they really just have to keep executing on that roadmap keeping their customer focus and you know hoping that there's not some external factor that blows everything up. >> Yeah good point, good point. What about the messaging? We've heard as you said, it's new branding so it's making the world of work work better, there's this focus on the user experience. The idea that the CIO is no longer just so myopic in his or her portfolio. Really has to think much more broadly about the business. A real business leader, I mean is this. Are you hearing this at other conferences too? Is it jiving with the other? >> You know everyone talks about the new way to work, the new to work, the new way to work and the consumers they sort of IT and you know all the millennials that want to operate everything on their phone. That's all fine and dandy. Again at the end of the day, where do people work? Because again you're competing everyone has, excuse me many many applications unfortunately that we have to run to get our day job done and so if you can be the one that people use as the primary way that they get work done. That's the goal... >> Rebecca: That's where the money is. >> That's the end game right. >> Well I owe that so the messaging to me is interesting because IT practitioners as a community are some of the most under appreciated. You know overworked and they're only here from the business when things go bad. For decades we've seen this the thing that struck me at ServiceNow Knowledge 13 when we first came here was wow. These IT people ar pumped. You know you walk around a show the IT like this, they're kind of dragging their feet, heads down and the ServiceNow customers are excited. They're leading innovation in their companies. They're developing new applications on these platforms. It's a persona that I think is being reborn and it sound exciting to see. >> It's funny you bring up the old chest because before it was a lot about just letting IT excuse me, do their work with a little bit more creativity. Better tools, build their own store, build an IT services Amazon likened store. We're not hearing any of that anymore. >> Do more with less, squeeze, squeeze. >> If we're part of delivering value as we've talked about with the banking application and link from MoonsStar you know now these people are intimately involved with the forward facing edge of the company. So it's not talking about we'll have a cool service store. I remember like 2014 that was like a big theme. We're not hearing that anymore, we've moved way beyond that in terms of being a strategic partner in the business. Which we here over and over but these are you know people that header now the strategic partner for the business. >> Okay customers have to make bets and they're making bets on ServiceNow. They've obviously made a bunch of bets on Oracle. Increasingly they're making bets on Amazon. You know we're seeing that a lot. They've made big bets on VM ware, obviously big bets on SAP so CIOs they go to shows like this to make sure that they made the right bet and they're not missing some blind spots. To talk to their peers but you can see that their laying the chips on the table. I guess pun intended, I mean they're paying off. >> That's great, that's a great note to end on I think. So again a pleasure co-hosting with both of you. It's been a lot of fun, it's been a lot of hard work but a lot of fun too. >> Thank you Rebecca and so the CUBE season Jeff. I got to shout out to you and the team. I mean you guys, it's like so busy right now. >> I thought you were going to ask if we were going next. I was going to say oh my god. >> Next week I know I'm in Chicago at VMON. >> Right we have VMON, DON, we've got a couple of on the grounds. SAP Sapphire is coming up. >> Dave: Pure Accelerate. >> Pure Accelerate, OpenStack, we're going back to Vancouver. Haven't been there for a while. Informatica World, back down here in Las Vegas Pure Storage, San Francisco... >> We got the MIT's CTO conference coming up. We got Google Next. >> Women Transforming Technology. Just keep an eye on the website upcoming. We can't give it all straight but... >> The CUBE.net, SiliconAngle.com, WikiBon.com, bunch of free content.- you heard it here first. >> There you go. >> For Rebecca Knight and Jeffrick and Dave Vellante this has been the CUBE's coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18. We will see you next time. >> Thanks everybody, bye bye.

>> 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 theCUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone. You are watching theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Tom Yates. He is the Deputy CIO of Howard County. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Sure. It's great to be here. >> Tell our viewers a little bit about your role. >> I'm the Deputy CIO for Howard County, and anything that you receive in terms of services, from a county government from trash pick up, to emergency responder services, police, fire, emergency notification, rec and parks, all of those departments are our clients inside our IT. >> Okay so you've just, that's absolutely, you just painted this version of being a citizen, and all of the things that you go to, all the services that you receive, so now tell me the idea that you had in the CIO department to change that. >> Well it started with pain, so when I started about three years ago, our IT department really didn't know what we didn't know, in terms of what was on our network. I was the new guy, and I started running the change management meeting, which is an internal IT meeting, and I approved a change that ended up causing a four hour outage. That's when we really started looking for a platform that would give us visibility into our network. It really started out internal IT, focus on uptime. I got a demo of Discovery from a vendor in the area, and I was hooked at that point because that's exactly what I was looking for to run these change meetings. I want to know what's connected to what. I want to be able to map business services to our particular configuration items. That was really important to me but then once you start getting into the platform, it's very sticky, and it's very work flow oriented and you see all of these processes across your organization that are siloed, that are paper based, and so we just saw the platform as a great place to aggregate that type of work flow and business process automation and it sort of evolved from there and what we have recently thought about is a way to connect our citizens to a portal using the CSM platform that would allow them to have one place, one sign on where they could go in and have access to the full range of services that our county government provides. >> How will that work? I mean, can you describe what it's like to be a citizen in Howard County? >> Sure Howard County, for those of you who don't know, is located right between Washington DC and Baltimore. We're a fairly affluent county. The citizenry is very connected and involved and they have high expectations of government. We provide services like trash, water bills, you name it. People will come on to our website and they'll want to pay their water bill, or they want to check the status of a permit, or a license request that they have, or they'll want to get information on their property tax bills. Just normal stuff. You have to go to different system and have a different login account for each one of those services. So the feedback that we're getting, and for me as well as a Howard County citizen, is that's not really the best way to present our county. What if there were a way to have a single sign on and provide access with transparency and accountability, where you could go in and see the status of your permit request in real time without having to call anyone, because the younger you are the less desire you have to talk on the telephone. We're looking at different ways to interact with our citizens and to have government be there when they are ready to interact with government, not when government is ready to be interacted with. >> And government has a tough reputation. I mean, you think about any government, any time you have to interact with the government it's tedious, it's time consuming, it's inefficient. What is your, sort of, mission in all of this? What's your over arching objective? >> I would like to treat our citizens like they're human beings. >> That's a worthy goal. >> I have a memory of what it's like to go to the DMV and wait in line and not be treated as customer service oriented as you feel like you should be treated. One of the nice things that we have in our county is our government employees really care and we're looking to build some of these automations so that they don't get distracted by the busy work, and they can really focus on what matters and what matters is taking care of our clients, the citizens of the county. >> Are you hoping that it will drive civic engagement, too? >> Absolutely, so one of the things that we're doing is we're piloting a CSM implementation for one of our council districts. Howard County's broken into five council districts and the council is like the legislative branch. The county executive is like the governor. They all receive questions, issues, complaints from the citizens that are in their particular districts and we're looking at having this platform as a way for the citizens to interact with their legislators as well as report trees down, pot holes, and things like that. Where then the council person interacts back with the administration, so it can get really interesting. Especially if you have state legislators that are involved that are outside of our county. So now we have external resources and finding out, just discovering the work flows of what the process is to most efficiently take care of some of these issues, is the information that we're looking to extract put in a business process, and then automate that work flow. >> Now, how are you going to measure the return on investment? Is it really just shortening the time to value or how else are you thinking about how you're going to measure it's value? >> With government measuring, value is a lot different than it is in the private industry. What I look for inside IT is uptime. If there is a tool that we can have that will prevent us from shooting ourselves in the foot in IT, and accidentally causing an outage, that has value. That's actual value in terms of people's hours of lost productivity that we can not have. In terms of value to the citizens, I think it would be you hear the feedback from people that they're able to interact with the government more smoothly and efficiently and have that level of transparency and accountability that people, during election cycles, talk about. Then after the election, we need to deliver. >> How are you at this this conference? I mean, you hear so much about customers being here, this is a really customer centric event. Are you talking to other customers, learning from them? Are best practices emerging? Are you getting ideas that you're going to take back with you to Howard County? >> Absolutely, and I have a lot of friends in local government and state government that are here, but I get more value really talking from the commercial clients because we are going to be, just by definition of government, a little bit farther back on the adoption curve. For a government I think we're on the cutting edge, but there are things that are being done by private companies. I saw what Comcast is doing and Comcast is another one of the companies that has a reputation. (host laughing) I'll leave it at that. >> Don't get me started. >> But they're taking active measures to improve their customer response, and as a Comcast customer I totally appreciate that because I would have issues sometimes, finding the time to block off, say an hour, to be on a call with Comcast during business hours, right? So, the things that they're doing are really cool. Chatbot, machine learning, AI to help people self-discover what the answers to common problems are. Building knowledge into their platform. I think seeing that and seeing how I, as a customer, interact with that and appreciate that, we just take that and flip it over to the government side. >> What's next for you? >> Well, I would really like to get that 311 system. It's going to be a journey because we do have a lot of systems with a lot of different logins. I think the step that we would like to take first is create that portal where the citizen can register, and then after that we just take the applications that they're using, and we bring them in behind the covers. So, we're basically skinning those applications with one login. It might be a little clunky at the beginning until we get them more integrated. Over time, the idea is we just drive that traffic to that one location, so regardless of what new service we offer or what you're looking for, you'll know that there's one place that you can go to get it and you get it when you want it, not when we want to give it to you. >> Finally, we've heard so much about this transforming role of the of the CIO, and it's a much broader role today than it was even five or ten years ago. What's your personal experience with that? >> I have been with Howard Country government for three years and during those three years, I've seen a big change in the way IT is viewed inside government because we are now business partners with our client departments, as opposed to that shop that you call when something's broken, or I need a computer. Technology is everywhere now and I think it's so permeated, every facet of our organization, that people want to have those conversations now. They want to say, what can we do with technology that could help us. Especially in the age of budget freezes and hiring freezes. Everybody needs to do more with less and the only way to do that consistently is with technology. >> Tom, that's a great final note to close on. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, it's been really fun talking to you. >> Thank you. My pleasure. >> I'm Rebecca Knight. This has been theCUBE's coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18. (energetic music playing)

>> 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 live from Las Vegas. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Raja Renganathan, he is the Vice President of Cloud Services at Cognizant Technology Solutions. I should say welcome back, it's not just welcome, it's welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you Rebecca. >> So tell our viewers a little bit about Cognizant Technology. What does your company do and what do you do there? >> I head the cloud services for Cognizant in the capacity of a vice president. Cognizant is a world-leading professional services company. Our objective is to help our clients to navigate the shift to digital. We have three pillars: go to market, we have Cognizant Digital Business which focuses on the user experience, data related, and we have the Cognizant Digital Operations which is predominantly a middle-office, back-end processing in an enterprise, and the third pillar is Cognizant Digital Systems and Technology which is basically modernizing the platform systems that is required to create the digital foundation. >> And you're also just this week been called a Certified Global Partner of ServiceNow so explain how that works. >> Our relationship with ServiceNow goes back six years. Today I think the ServiceNow line of business, which is under the cloud services, is one of the fastest-growing business unit for us. The key thing in any platform such as ServiceNow is the human intellectual capital. That is where we give a lot of importance. While technology is created by ServiceNow, someone has to go execute and implement the technology. So that's where we spent time and started hiring people, re-skilling the people, and then getting certified across different facets of what ServiceNow recommends as a part of their education system. So today we have about 850 plus certified people across the globe and we also do the delivery across our global operation centers, we also call it as RDCs, Regional Delivery Centers, we have one in Budapest, one in Phoenix, and one in Buenos Aires. So all these three centers caters to different service areas of ServiceNow. As a part of this RDC we're also adding, creating an experience zone, a ServiceNow experience zone, so when client walks in they not only see our associates working on projects, but they also get the panoramic view or the panoramic experience of how ServiceNow orchestration happens, how automation happens, how HR module works, and things like that. Because of the people we have, in terms of re-skilling and certification, we are being measured as the best overall global partner award yesterday in Knowledge18. >> Well congratulations. When you were searching for these people, as you said you had to so a lot of hiring, what were the kind of skills you were looking for when you were trying to find the top talent? >> If you look at Cognizant as a 265,000 plus organization we know the art of hiring people. >> And it is an art, it absolutely is an art. >> So our approach is, one we go to the campus, hire the fresh grads in all of the campus. If you look at of late the kids that are coming out of the campus, they are pretty smart in the sense of they come with the latest digital technologies, artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing understanding, and things like that. So we take them and then we, within 30 days, we completely format them for ServiceNow. This is one approach. The second approach is we go to the lateral market and we hire and we bring them up to speed on the ServiceNow-related technologies. The third option is, with 265,000 people we have, the raw material is inside Cognizant, so we take people from other business units, other domain and then try to format them and to do that. But of late what we have started, especially within the U.S. footprint, is we go to all the community colleges and also we go to all the veteran's associations, those type of organizations and we hire them. So if you look at our Phoenix RDC, I'm proud to say that it is a woman-powered delivery center, when it comes to ServiceNow, with a pretty good mix of veterans. So these are the different approaches we use to hire people towards the ServiceNow practice. >> And they've been successful. >> They have been successful and if you look at how long can they continue in ServiceNow 'til they retire? No, so we do job rotation, every three years we give them opportunity. I have a unique advantage since I run the cloud services. I always rotate my people from ServiceNow to go to Amazon or to Microsoft as you're in different technologies every 24 to 36 months we do the job rotation. In that way I think I'm managing my retention well. >> So we know that the role of IT is really changing in so many organizations around the world. What are you hearing from customers, what are their pain points? What are the challenges that you're trying to solve? >> I think that's a great question now, Rebecca. We are in a very interesting time. The customers have a tremendous problem in their hand because they need to stay relevant in their business because business models are changing and if you look at for a retailer, the competition is not from the same industry. Similar for a pharmaceutical company, the competition is not from the same pharma industry. Everybody wanted to know, a pharma company wanted to know why Google is hiring 100 physicians. So the disruption is going to happen not in your industry, outside your industry. So that is the biggest challenge. The second thing is they need to continue to reinvent their business model. They cannot operate. We are hearing many stories like a lot of regional stores are closing because they didn't stay relevant to the business, to the customers. The third thing if you look at, let's take healthcare industry. Typically patients expect, historically, they were asked to maintain their prescription and medical records, but today in the new age patients are expecting the hospitals to manage everything because keep the data and intelligently apply the data because data is the new fuel or new oxygen, whatever you want to call it. >> Fuel, oxygen, one of those analogies. >> Data is going to play a critical role for any business. So every business is looking for how do I take the data and apply it intelligently? In the process how do I elevate experience? When I say experience it's both customer experience and also employee experience. So that's why if we look at, going back to the purpose of ServiceNow when John Donahoe was presenting in the keynote, he said, "We are in the world to make people's work better." The work is basically the experience. So we know about all the digital, every client is adopting the digital because of the advent of the cloud and the technologies around the AI, machine learning, et cetera, everybody is having a clear chatter of the digital transformation chatter as a part of their enterprises. So that is where we, companies like Cognizant, we go to them and then help them in truly being digital, how do you get there. That is where technologies like ServiceNow plays a critical role. >> And so it is the mission of ServiceNow, and it sounds like also the mission of Cognizant, to make the world of work work better for people. So give me some examples of ways that you are creatively solving employee headaches. How are you making the world of work better? >> I'll give a couple of examples. To start with, for a leading manufacturing company there are a lot of equipment dispersed across the field so we use IOT technology, sensors, and we collect the data, and the data gets analyzed and then we give a dashboard to our customers. When I say customers, the chief customer support officer, he or she can look at the dashboard and send the technician for evaluate it Imagine if the cloud was not there and moreover we use ServiceNow as a platform to do all the orchestration. If the cloud was not there, if products like ServiceNow was not there, this could have been a humongous task, but we are helping the problem for the customer. Today, with one click, the chief customer support officer can know which machine is giving which problem, accordingly dispatch a technician. This is one example. The second example is we are helping some agricultural companies where, in fact this came out during our hackathon, which I'll talk about you a little bit later, all this agricultural farms, the lands are there. When you wanted to grow something, you also need to know everyday what is the moisture of the soil, what is the temperature, et cetera. So we apply IOT technology and then collect the data and use ServiceNow dashboard to give it back to the customer. These are all real-time problems the customers are facing. There are so many examples, but if you look at most of the solutions and the outcomes what we give to the customer, it's all triggered by our innovation. So we are the only company, I can proudly say, conducted three hackathons with ServiceNow. When I say hackathon, all the people are put under one room and ideas were given and end of the day you'll get 100 plus ideas. Recently we did, about a month back, we did a global hackathon. First time we wanted to try India, three continents, seven cities, India, Budapest, Phoenix, 20 hours of continuous time. We generated about 115 ideas. Out of the 115 ideas, I think we are going to come with certain ideas and then put that back into ServiceNow app store. We have close to six plus apps already running on the ServiceNow store, now our plan for the next six months is to add another about 10 plus apps onto the ServiceNow store. >> That is the other questions that that begs. Are hackathons the best way in your mind to spark energy and innovation and creativity? >> Especially with the millennials. The millennials, yes definitely because they don't want to very mundane, routine work. They want a challenge, they are asking for challenge. So this hackathon is one of the ways to keep them happy. Because the future of workforce is changing with millennials coming in. And the jobs, they're also expecting, even in my team people wanted a change every 12 months. While we need to address our customers, we also need to take care of their expectations also. >> Let's think about the future a little bit now. What do you see your customers' future demands and where do you see Cognizant and ServiceNow being able to provide solutions to the problems they don't even know they're having. >> Right, right. So digital is the heartbeat. When I say digital is the heartbeat, the outcome is all about experience because if someone asks me, digital is not technology. Digital is all about experience so in order to give that experience, customers wanted multiple technologies, they wanted to reinvent, rewire, rethink their business models. So that is where we wanted to go as a Cognizant. For example, if you take ServiceNow, if you're taking that platform to them, how can I digitize your enterprise process, digitize your entire workflow and create automation, et cetera and then bring a collaborative work environment within your ecosystem. So this is what they are expecting. Nobody wants non-value add, mundane task, everything they want to get operated in an automation manner. That is where we are helping, basically anything that changes the experience, or pave a new way to the experience, that is where we at Cognizant we are constantly reinvesting on people, process, technology, and then taking that back to our customers. >> That's a great note to end on. Raja, we'll look forward to seeing you again at Knowledge19 next year. >> Thank you, definitely. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18 in just a little bit.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCube's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18 here in Las Vegas. I'm your host Rebacca Knight along with my co-host Dave Vellante, and we are theCube. We are the leader in live tech coverage. We're joined by Sean Caron. He is the principal architect of Linium, at Linium. Thanks so much for coming on theCube again, you're welcome back. >> My second time, and thank you very much for the opportunity. I've really been looking forward to it all week. >> Awesome, Good to have you back. >> We love to hear that. So tell us about Linium and what you do as principal architect. >> Sure, so we are a gold services and sales partner of ServiceNow. Been in the ServiceNow space for about nine years total. And we specialize in helping organizations do digital transformations. So they want to take the platform and really get maximum value from that and that's both a technology discussion, but it's also a organizational change discussion, and you know can be a process discussion. All those kind of things are things that we help our customers with. >> We've been talking a lot about the technology but the organizational change is really what fascinates me. Can you tell, can you just talk about a lot of the organizational change challenges that customers are facing, and they come to you. >> You've got it right. So we've been in this business for 18 years. We started out as a Peregrine partner and also HP, when HP acquired Peregrine, and we noticed that we would get specs from customers and we would nail it. It would be a perfect technical delivery and then six months later when you talk to the customer, they weren't using the product. They didn't get any value from the investment that they made. So we started to engineer a process and we do that around, you know we look at the structure. Where is this project going to land? What's the structure around it? Who supports it? What's your culture? Do you have a culture of dedication to accuracy or customer service? If you don't have those kind of things, we can help build those in your organization. And of course that also gets to helping you find talent, right. So if you need the right people, we can help with that process. Helping you define business best practice process for your organization. Those are all things we work with customers every day and frankly we don't do technology projects. We only do a project where we know when we deliver the technology that that structure will be there to catch it and get value from it. >> So you were recently acquired by Ness Digital Engineering, >> Correct >> Which is really an interesting name for a company. Tell us more about the motivation for that acquisition and how things have changed, and what the future looks like. >> So for the first 17 years of our business we were a privately held company and we grew organically, and we did a great job at that. I mean we became several hundred employees across the U.S. and a couple in AMIA, and a couple in Canada. But to really take the next step right, we saw, we had a vision of what we wanted to do, to take that next step was going to require an equity investment of some type. So we started probably about this time last year, talking to organizations. Ness was one of the first ones that we met and it became immediately apparent that they were a great fit for us. So they have about, well with us about 4,000 people across the world. They're not a billion dollar company right. So their culture is very similar to our culture. They do digital engineering projects, industrial scale, you know hard core grade digital engineering projects, and they tend to focus on platforms that are front of the business, so customer touching. They own the platform under Standard & Poor's right, so they built that. So Standard Poor's ratings, all that information flows in, they do the ratings based on that. That's something they built. PayPal, they do a lot of work in the payments industry. But they didn't really do much on the backend right. The operations that keep all the lights on and obviously that's a great fit for Linium, where we would come in with the ServiceNow platform and help them with that process. So that really worked out well. It was a great fit for us. >> So how do you guys compete? What's your difference relative to, you've been here a while in this ecosystem. It's started to get crowded. How do you, what's your secret sauce? How do you guys compete? >> So our goal is always to try and stay 12 months ahead of where ServiceNow is going. In the past couple of years, that really has been around user experience. Really designing experiences with the platform that are intuitive, that don't require a lot of training, that allow people to approach the platform and get value from it very quickly. Whether that's end users, or our customer's customers. Those kind of things, really, and that's in our DNA. That's a big part of what we do is design these experiences and do them in a way that really help our customers get value. I would say, you know looking forward, so the buzzword that we've heard around here this week is DevOps right, and we see, and one of the things that Ness does very well is DevOps engineering. I think next year will be the knowledge of DevOps. It will be what everybody's talkin' about. ServiceNow will have a lot more throw-weight in that space. So really that's where we're going. We're helping people get that continuous integration, continuous deployment process using ServiceNow as a foundation. >> CJ Desai laid out the roadmap in more detail than I had seen publicly anyway, and we were talking to him and he said, "Look the motivation really came from the ecosystem." You know obviously the customers as well, but the ecosystem as well, wanted better visibility on what was coming, because you guys have to plan for that. You're tryin' to fill white space. You're tryin' to fill a vacuum. So I wondered if you could talk about that. It's a two-edged coin though right? I mean, but having that visibility has to be a godsend. >> Right and we found that when we are some number of months ahead of ServiceNow, we work very well with them. We, you know obviously, like any large ServiceNow partner, we're very plugged in to where they're going. Their roadmap sets our direction and the kind of things that we can do. But it enables conversations, especially DevOps, and user experience too, enabled conversations at new levels within the organization and that's a big differentiator for us. >> But so, what I'm trying to understand is you guys have to make a call on where to put your investments and your resources, and you don't want to, you've said a couple of times, you're ahead of ServiceNow by, let's say N months, six months, 12 months, 9 months, whatever it is. You don't want to develop something and put too much into something that they're just going to replace in a few months. >> Right. >> Dave: So how do you keep that innovation engine going on your end? >> That right, so it takes a lot of research. We have a person whose dedicated job at our organization is Chief Innovation Officer. She spends her entire day talking to customers, hearing what buzzwords are in the industry, looking and talking to ServiceNow, looking at where they're going. So how can we be positioned when ServiceNow gets there 'cause to deliver services, that's not an instant on right. If the technology shows up tomorrow in the next release, to be able to deliver services for that, you have to start well in advance to actually be able to do that, to understand the process, and the structure, and what's required. >> I see, okay so by being ahead of ServiceNow, what you mean is you're going to develop capabilities that plug in to their release when it hits. >> So that we can deliver to what they have, >> Not things that are duplicative, but things that are, add value when it hits. >> Yeah, I mean ServiceNow comes out with, let's say automated testing. That's something they want to really, they want to get into the automated testing market. That's a discipline. You can't be instant on with that and if you want to have credibility with customers, you have to have trained people. You've got to be six months ahead to be able to step into that world and get value from the platform. >> So take the DevOps example that we heard Pat Casey talk about yesterday. So you guys are preparing for that now obviously. >> Yes. >> And how will you go about it? How will that change your customers world? If can take us through an example. >> So obviously DevOps is, you know it's the big accelerator. It's the idea of we're going to do what we've always done and we're going to do it in timeframes that are minutes or hours, as opposed to weeks, or months, or even years right, so it's a big ramp up. So understanding how to put that in play is a big deal. If you're a startup, alright so one of the themes of DevOps is the two pizza team right. You should never have teams bigger than you can feed with a couple of pizzas. If you're a startup and you already got a two pizza team it's easy to do DevOps. You build it into your culture and away you go. But our customers, you know many of our customers, one we were talkin' about here, talking to here at the show, 130 year old firm and they want to do DevOps. So what's that on-ramp? How do you figure that out? One of our new colleagues from Ness, who has been in the DevOps world for a while says, "You know, it's all about unlearning stuff." Because in order to move into this world, you got to unlearn that old world. >> Well right, it is a mindset. >> It is, it's a culture. >> So how, and one that will be very tricky for a 130 year old firm that maybe doesn't order pizzas that often (chuckling) for it's team. So how do you do that? I mean that's a challenge. >> We're working diligently on having a roadmap to onboard DevOps into existing organizations. The secret really tends to be, start with a NET new project and introduce DevOps into those kind of projects. Build one, build two, build three now you've got a culture of DevOps and you can start then to do some of the unlearning and the retrofitting right. But it's very difficult. You can't really take an existing projects and transform how they do their work. Which is what DevOps is all about. >> No, but in a lot of the companies that I've talked to that have, you know hundred plus year old companies that want to do DevOps right. A lot of times, and I wonder if this has been your experience, it's the Ops guys learning Dev, as opposed to the Dev guys learning Ops. I mean the Dev guys like, "Yeah, yeah we can do infrastructure as code, that's fine", but then you've got all these Ops guys runnin' around. So it's a urgency to retrain the Ops guys, who are eager to learn, most of 'em. The ones that aren't probably in trouble. >> Will do something else. >> So I often joke about OpsDev versus DevOps. What's your experience? >> So I think the big difference is Ops guys are trained from the day they take that job to, you know shun failure right. Failure of a system is a big problem. In DevOps it's going to happen. Not only is it going to happen but the best DevOps practitioners create failure. >> Break stuff (laughing) >> Yeah, you know Netflix kind of has this famous program called Chaos Monkey, when it runs running, turn stuff off right, and how do you respond to that. And that's a big leap culturally and structurally for the Ops guys to get over that. You know the idea is we break stuff, but we learn from that, and not only do I learn from that, but I spread that knowledge across the organization. And that's where ServiceNow steps in right, because they know when things are broken, 'cause they're tied to monitoring, and they got this great knowledge capability to hook up the information we learn from how that broke. So what better testing could we have done so that we could have avoided that break? Or if it's a enforced break, what could we have learned about how to respond to that more quickly? You know the classic example is when AWS lost their east availability center and Netflix kept tickin' because they had lost their east availability center through Chaos Monkey a half a dozen times. >> Right >> It was old hat, and everybody else kind of went dark right. So that idea, and enabling that with the ServiceNow platform is a great opportunity. We really see ServiceNow as the context, the engine with all the knowledge about when things happen, how to fix them, and how to record the knowledge that you learn. >> Give us an example of a company, I mean you're talking about simple, streamlined, intuitive tech, no-training required, so give us some examples of some of the most creative uses. >> I'll give you a great example. So, we have a center in Atlanta. We have some folks in Atlanta. And of course if your in Atlanta, you love Chick-fil-a, and maybe if you're anywhere else you love Chick-fil-a. And they had an issue, which was they have franchisees, and their franchises are different from McDonald's, where you might have one franchisee at McDonald's that owns 200 restaurants. They have a lot of power, market power, and they don't share information with any other franchisee, 'cause that's differentiating for them. Chick-fil-a doesn't do that. The maximum number of restaurants you can own as a Chick-fil-a franchisee I believe is three. It's a number like that. So their franchisees are incented to talk to each other and share information. "Hey I found a better way to clean the ice cream machine", or something like that or to fix a problem. So they were looking to build a portal that they could use to both answer questions from the organization to the franchisees, but allow the franchisees to talk to each other. That kind of a thing has to be zero training right, because the people who are on that might be store managers, but it could be, you know the teenager who runs the point of sale terminal and is havin' a problem with that, so it's really got to be intuitive. So we spent a lot of time with them. We actually, it was we brought one of our designers, so we have UI, UX designers, experience designers, and we were in the sales meeting, and we're having a discussion about what they need, and he's kind of heads down typin' on his computer. And they're kind of lookin' at him like, what's up with this guy right, he's not payin' attention. >> He's designing the interface. >> These guys pay attention to everything. He's lookin' at the logo as we're walkin' in, the colors that are on the wall, the way they talk about themselves. So about an hour into the meeting we got a pause and he just kind of picks his head up and goes, "You mean like this?" And turned his computer around and he had a prototype that he built in the meeting of this really easy to use process. >> Very cool. >> Sean: So that was our intro to Chick-fil-a. >> Your sales guy must'a hated that. (hosts laughing) >> No, no, it was, I'll tell you what, so it was competitive, we have multiple competitors, who were going for that business, when he turned that computer around, the sale was done. >> Dave: Boom. >> We were done, right. They looked at that and said, This is, you know it's not perfect clearly, but this is what we need. >> This is the kind of company we want to work with. >> Exactly, well and that, you know part of that is there are partners in the ecosystem who come in and say, "We can do anything. "Tell us what you want." We are much more consultative and we'll come in and be prescriptive and say this is what you should do, and it's a differentiator for us. It's something we do differently. >> Well Sean that's a great note to end on. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE again. >> It's been great, I really enjoyed my time. >> We'll look forward to having you back at Knowledge 19. >> Terrific, I will certainly be here. >> Great, I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18 in just a little bit. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18, here in Las Vegas. I'm your hose, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Josh Kahn. He is the General Manager of Platforms, ServiceNow. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE again. >> Yeah, really excited to be here. Thanks for being here and thanks for being part of our event. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. >> It's been a lot of fun. >> Newly minted. >> Yeah that's right. (laughing) >> Yes, congrats on the recent promotion. So tell us about your new role. >> Yeah, so I run the Platform Business Unit. We use the word platform a lot of different ways at ServiceNow and I think we're trying to get a little bit more clear about that. On the one hand, our platform is the core foundation that all of our applications and all of our customers' applications are built on. It's also a way that independent software vendors and our customers can build their own applications. So what my group is trying to do is really be more thoughtful and structured about how we go about gathering those requirements from our customers and our independent software vendor partners and make sure we're bringing the products to market that meet their needs, and that we're doing all of the things across the board as a company we need to do to make them successful because there's a lot that goes into long-term customer success from the sales teams to the solutions consultants to professional services and the Customer Success Management Team. We're bringing all those things to make sure that, as our customers are building applications, we're helping them be successful. >> I remember we had Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee on and they were making a point. This was years ago when they wrote their, I think, most recent book. They were saying platforms beat products, I'm like, okay, what do you mean? Look, you can make a great living doing products, but we are entering a platform era. It reminds me of the old Scott McNealy, car dealers versus car makers. If you want to be a car maker in this day and age, unfortunately Sun Microsystems never became that car maker, but you've got to have a platform. What's your perspective on all that? >> I totally agree. I think that every customer I talk to is looking for fewer, more strategic vendors and partners, and they're really saying, hey, be a strategic partner to me. Digital transformation is everywhere. Disruption is everywhere, and they're saying, hey, we need a few people we can really count on to help us build a strategy and execute on that strategy to get to the next place. Isolated, independent pieces of software tend to have a hard time becoming one of those strategic vendors, and I think the more you can be thought of as a platform, the more different kinds of workloads run on the same common shared infrastructure that provide shared data services, that can provide simple ways to get work across each other, the more value that you can bring and the more you can be thought of in that strategic partner realm. >> So you guys are a platform of platforms, we use that terminology a lot, and I think there's no question that for a lot of the C-level executives, particularly the CIOs that I talk to, you are becoming, ServiceNow is becoming a strategic platform provider. Who else is in there? Let's throw some... IBM, because of its huge services in certain industries, for sure, SAP because of its massive ERP estate. I mean, I don't know, Oracle, maybe, but it feels different, but maybe in some cases. Who do you see as your peers? >> The category of players that are in this space are really people that are investing big in the Cloud and investing big in intelligence and automation. And, I think, a lot of times automation can have kind of a negative connotation to it, but we really believe that automation can be used to serve people in the workplace and to make the world work better for people, not just make the world of work work without people. So when you look around at the people that are moving into that strategic realm, it's Cloud players, people who are providing either Cloud infrastructure or Cloud functions, a wide set of microservices capabilities, and people providing applications software as a service that start to cover a broader and broader portfolio. Clearly, Workday is thought of oftentimes as a strategic partner to their customers, because they provide a human capital management capability that's broader than just being a data repository. Salesforce is clearly a strategic partner to the sales and marketing organizations. The reality, though, is a lot of work that happens in the Enterprise cuts across these things, and so there's an opportunity for us to work with the Saleforces and the Workdays and the Googles and the Amazon Web Services of the world to help bring all of those things together. I think that what customers want is not only strategic technology providers, but strategic technology providers that will work with each other to solve customers' problems. >> John Donahoe on, I guess it was Tuesday, was saying we're very comfortable being that horizontal layer. We don't have to be the top layer, although I would observe that the more applications you develop, the more interesting the whole landscape becomes. >> Yeah, well, I think that's absolutely true. We're in the early stages of this, right? If you look at the amount of money that's spent in IT in the enterprise sector and then you start adding up all of these areas that I just mentioned, Cloud and SAS, it's still a very small amount of that overall spent. So clearly, big legacy technology vendors are incredibly relevant still today, but the challenge they'll have is making sure they stay relevant as this tide shifts to more Cloud, more intelligence, more automation in the workplace. >> I wonder if you could walk us through the process that you go through when you are working closely with customers, collaborating, trying to figure out what their problems are and solve them and then also solve the problems they don't even know they have, that you can provide solutions for. >> Actually, it's amazing, because in a lot of cases, the innovation, and this has been a phenomenal week, because I've gotten to meet with so many customers and see what they're doing. And what tends to happen with ServiceNow is the IT organization, oftentimes, it starts there. The IT organization brings it in for IT service management, and people start using that to request things that they need from IT, and they very quickly say, man, I have a process that would really benefit from exactly what you just did. Can you build my application on that? And so there starts to become this tidal wave of people asking the IT organization if they can start hosting applications on the platform. I'll give you one example from a company called Cox Automotive. Donna Woodruff, who's an innovation leader there and leads the ServiceNow platform team, found a process where they had a set of safety checks they do at all these remote sites as part of a car auctions, and it was a very spreadsheet-driven process that involved a lot of people doing manual checks, but it also had regulatory implications, insurance implications, and workplace happiness implications. And they were able to take this, put it on ServiceNow, and automate a lot of that process, make it faster, I should say digitize it, 'cause you still need the people going through and doing the checks, but were able to digitize it and make that person's job that much better. These applications are all over the place. They're in shared email inboxes, they're in Excel spreadsheets, they're in legacy applications. We don't actually have to go drive the innovation and the ideas. They end up coming to the ServiceNow platform owners and our customers. >> I'd like you to comment on some of the advantages of the platform and maybe some of the challenges that you face. When I think about enterprise software, I would generally characterize enterprise software as not a great user experience, oftentimes enterprise software products don't play well with other software products. They're highly complex. Oftentimes there's lots of customerization required, which means it's really hard to go from one state to another. Those are things that you generally don't suffer from. Are there others that give you advantages? And what are maybe some of the challenges that you face? >> I think it's true. Enterprise software, you used to have to train yourself to it. It's like, hey, we're going to roll out the new system. How are we going to train all the users? But you don't do that with the software we use in the consumer world. You download it from the app store and you start using it. If you can't figure it out, it's not going to go. >> You aint going to use it. >> Josh: Exactly right. So we put a lot of that thought process from the consumer world into our technology, but not just the technology we provide. We're trying to make it easier for our customers to then provide that onto their internal and external customers as well. Things like the Mobile Application Builder that we showed earlier today, that's coming in Madrid, it's an incredibly simple way to build a beautiful mobile application for almost anything in the workplace. And, again, as I was saying before, a lot of the ideas for applications come from people in the workplace. We've got to make it easy enough for them to not only to identify what the application potential is, but then build something that's amazing. What we're trying to do is put a lot of those design concepts, not just into the end products we sell, but into tools and technology that are part of the platform and the Platform Business Unit so that our customers can build something just like it in terms of experience, usability, simplicity, and power without having to have as many developers as we do. >> You and I have known each other for a number of years now, and just as we observed the other day, off camera, that you've been forced into a lot of challenges. I say forced, but welcomed a lot of challenges. >> I love it, I love it. >> All right, I mean, it's like, hey, I'll take that. No problem. You've had a variety of experiences at large companies. Things you've learned, opportunities ahead, maybe advice you'd give for others, like the hard stuff. >> I think one of the biggest things I've learned here, particularly at ServiceNow, is just the importance of staying focused on customers rather than competitors. I think a lot of times when you're in the business roles or strategy roles, you can really think a lot about who am I competing against, and you can forget that you really just need to solve the customer's problem as well as you possibly can. Be there for them when they need it. Have something that's compelling that addresses their needs, and stay laser-focused on what works for them, and at the end of the day you're got be successful. So that's a strategy we've really tried to take to heart at ServiceNow, is put the customers at the center of everything we do. We don't worry that much about competitors. They're out there and we know they're there and we study them, but it's really the customer that gets us up every morning. >> You know, it's interesting, I've had this, as well as John Furrier has, had this conversation with Andy Jassy a lot, and they're insanely focused on the customer where he says, even though he'll say, we get into a competitive situation, we'll take on anybody, but his point was both methods can work. Your former company, I would put into the very competitive, Oracle, I think, is the same way. Microsoft maybe used to me, maybe that's changing, but to a great extent would rip your face off if you were a competitor. My question is this: Is the efficacy of the head-to-head, competitive drive as effective as it used to be, and are we seeing a change toward a customer-centric success model? >> I think there's two things going on. I think one is once a market really kind of reaches maturity, the competitive dynamic really heats up. >> Dave: 'Cause you got to gain share. >> Yeah, you got to gain share. And today, in the Cloud world, in the intelligence world, there's just so much opportunity that you could just keep going for a long time before you even bump into people. I think in mature markets it's different, so I think a lot of times, partly at EMC, that was one of the dynamics we had is a very, very mature market on on-premise storage, and so you had to go head-to-head every time. But I think there's also the changing tenor of the world. People have a lot less, they don't care for that kind of dialogue as much anymore. They don't like it when you come in and talk bad about anybody else. So I think there's both dynamics at one, and the markets we're in, they're so new, they're growing so fast that it's not as important, but also, people don't care for it. I don't think it helps, if anything, sometimes it makes people wonder if they ought to be, oh, I didn't think about talking to them, maybe we should go call the competitor you just mentioned. (laughing) so, all that said, when you get into a fight, you got to fight hard and you got to come with the best stuff, so I think that's the reality. >> Dave: Great answer. >> That's a good note to end on. Thanks so much, Josh, for coming on theCUBE again. It's been a real pleasure having you here. >> All right. Thank you, I really appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge 18 just after this. (techy music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone, day two of the CUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18. Here at the Venetian in Las Vegas Nevada, I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Dave Vellante. >> Dave: Still have my voice. >> You still have it yes okay well we'll see how you do tomorrow but you're still going strong. But I'm really excited about this panel we have Pharrel Howe she is a GM in IT service management, asset management, business management. Have I forgotten one? >> Nope. >> Rebecca: I got it all at ServiceNow. >> Dave: This week. >> Exactly, at ServiceNow. You run the biggest business for ServiceNow. >> Yes. >> Thanks for joining us Pharrel. >> Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here. >> So I want to talk about employee experience which is really. It's just the cornerstone of this conference but really ServiceNow's purpose. Why has it become so increasingly important in IT today? >> Okay well in IT really you saw it today in CJ's keynote. The era of great experience is here and in IT we've been really really great at managing productivity and managing cost and making sure we were running efficiently and that we still do that and do it really well. But now we have to also make sure not just our customers have a great experience but our employees do too. And companies that do that well have the competitive advantage. It's absolutely required that we're able to do that now and so you know ServiceNow's paving the way for great experiences on our platform. For customers and employees and we're excited to be leading the next era of great experience. >> So I don't want to minimize the accomplishments that ServiceNow has made because they're phenomenal. >> Pharrel: Alright I'm happy for you not to minimize them. >> But I want to say this, you have thrived. I mean when Fred Luddy developed the platform. You thrived in the sea of mediocrity and you drove a ship through that sea and just mopped up a lot of business. Awesome, congratulations and in this world we live in it's like now it's becoming table stakes. If you guys have pointed out our home lives we live with these consumer interfaces we expect that now so as a leader of ServiceNow's a largest business. How do you continue to push the innovation levier? We expect now so much more, how do you continue to differentiate. Because your competition has woken up, the world was waking up. How do you stay ahead? >> Well you saw, you know earlier today CJ talking again and we're going to, you'll continue to see this theme from us. It is all about the platform. We are a platform company and when we build and innovate, acquire and then innovate. It is all within the platform and that I our competitive advantage. So then every application that was in existence today or that we build in the future can take advantage of that innovation natively. It's all integrated and seamless and there's nobody else out there who is able to do that and deliver those experiences. And so that is going to continue to be our strategy moving forward. >> So let's double click on that a little bit. Maybe get some examples. So clearly there's a big emphasis on UX and design. I think you guys have made some investments in design firms. >> Pharrel: Significant. >> There's machine intelligence I'll call it, AI. You're infusing AI throughout the platform and those are just two examples. >> Yeah. >> Maybe talk about those and give us some others if there are them. >> Sure well you know in the IT keynote that I'm going to have this afternoon. It's all about the era of great experiences and taking the roles that are in IT. It will be about the fulfiller, the requester, the planner and the operator in IT and how we've taken to the road and gone and done user research out with our customers and we're building great experiences in the platform for those roles. You no longer is it going to stand for you to just use your best judgment and go and build product and hope everybody will come. You've got to get out there side by side with your customers. Truly understand the work that they're doing and then build that back into the product and iterate again and again and again. And so that's the direction we're going from a design standpoint to build those experiences. >> So let's unpack this era of great experiences something that's simple, easy, intuitive but what are we really talking abut here. How do you define a great experience? >> Yeah well let's take it from something that we can relate to, we're all requesters of services one way or another right? And me as an employee I need services from IT in order to do my job. The thing is the channels that we have today are not enough. Phone and email aren't going to cut it and a lot of times if I'm in the carpool line waiting to pick up my daughter and her friends from school. I and you know I'm trying to check in on the ticket status for a laptop that I need immediately and I happen to think of it right then. I'm not going to call IT, I'm not in front of the laptop. I need more channels on more devices anytime anywhere at my convenience not someone else's. And so that's the kind of stuff that were talking about. We can't, it can't just be good enough anymore it has to be prolific. >> I'm interested in how you're using and applying machine intelligence. It seems like you're trying to anticipate my needs, put things in front of me that I might. You know I might shorten my search time or might be relevant that I hadn't even though of. Is that the right way to be thinking about how you're using machine intelligence and second part of the question is. What ar you finding that machines can do better than humans and how do they compliment each other? Srt of a long question. >> Sure I love this question. That's okay love it. Okay so our initial approach to agent and to machine intelligence, artificial intelligence. All of that is to you heard CJ say it today. You'll here micro-moments are moments that matter and we're looking to inject intelligence right there. Right there, those are very very practical use cases. They're not a panacea. They are not the answer but they are an answer in a moment that critically matters and so a perfect example of how that would play out would be my example previously of checking in on my laptop. The virtual agent that we're bringing to the market in our London release is all conversation based. And so I can very quickly see what topics that agent can handle and I can you know immediately engage on what that looks like and get the confidence that I need back and forth engaging with the virtual agent in m convenience wherever I am. Whether I'm at work or I'm at home and so you know that is a moment that matters for me because it's not, it eliminates the mental overhead for me to keep track of the administration of just trying to do my job everyday. Now take the flip side of that. The person who's on the other side of that virtual agent or would have been had that virtual agent not be there. They are not having to answer those kind of questions. Is my laptop coming please just assure me. They're not answering questions and so you know maybe that's not necessarily deflecting it an incident. It could be, but it's also reducing the administrivia that's happening when, and so it's cutting down the time it takes to resolve incidents and it's reducing friction and frustration. Between fulfillers and requesters of service ad so that's how we're looking at it. In those moments that matter and then as technology evolves and gets stronger. There may be bigger and larger use cases. >> And the machine verses human thing. I hate to say it that way but things the machines are doing. You're seeing categorization obviously is one at scale. Other things, I mean how do you see that evolving. What are the things that increasingly machine are going to do that humans can't do as well. >> Well I would say a use case besides maybe the virtual agent and those conversation based topics which really are just guided flows for conversation. Another thing might be being able to you know if there's just so much data that would take me a while. Or I would need a business analyst to maybe go and look for insights. That's something that machines can do and that's not replacing humans that's scaling our ability to act. And so that I think is the next foray to really move into and we'll start poking in different areas of insights as well and the moments that matter for work getting done in the enterprise as well. >> Because that is really what we're trying to do is help people get their work done. >> Pharrel: Yes. >> Quicker. >> Pharrel: And more easily. And when we talk about employee experience it's simply that. Please just let me get my work done and let me have some choice. I'm going to have a personal tool chain. Don't force me to use you know ServiceNow, please don't force me to use your messaging client. Our connect chat if I want to Microsoft Teams or Slack let me do that and let me keep that UI. So we're really when we talk about employee experiences it's a very broad arena there and its a great partnership between IT and all the other lines of business to deliver what employee experience is going to look like. >> And you know Rebecca, we talked about this yesterday. John Donahoe took on the machine replacing humans and was very transparent. The example I would use is search. When IDC we had a big library. We had like three or four librarians. They're not there anymore but nobody is saying oh wow. Search I mean search is a machine. It made our lives better, it created new opportunities. I think that's a good example, a small one but one where. I'm an optimist even though things are getting complex. >> Pharrel: Me too, absolutely an optimist on that and so for example with our virtual agent. Go do a search on LinkedIn and you will find for conversation designer. There are new jobs being created to be able to support this kind of technology. You know, jobs are evolving not going away. >> So speaking of jobs. You have been a very successful leader in a high growth organization. >> Thanks. >> I think on your Twitter it says I'm on a rocket ship ride of a lifetime. >> Pharrel: I am, I'm here to tell you. >> I'd love to hear what your advice is for other leaders who are trying to affect transformational change in their IT organizations. >> Alright I think whether it's personal change for yourself, you're trying to evolve or you need to evolve your organization. The first thing you need to do is check your assumptions. You know the older we get and the more we're barraged by noise we think we know. Make sure that you're really clear on and have some self reflection but also go and check that with people around you and get some clarity around alright is this really the reality. What's our reality that we're trying to transform? And when you're talking about transformation it doesn't necessarily happen overnight. It can happen overnight and that's called disruption but transformation that you are initiating. Give yourself a little bit of breathing room. You got to know that this is a marathon and you cannot be doing it at a sprint pace. You will burn out so keep your eye on the horizon and what you're trying to accomplish and just get started. Don't sit there and wait and try to have the perfect plan. You're going to attack your way through it, it's going to change anyway. Just get started. >> The rapid iteration we were hearing about that's so important. >> Yeah absolutely DevOps and you know personal digital transformation. You got it. >> I also want to talk to you about women. There is a dearth of women leaders in technology. You are one of them, what are you doing personally to promote diversity and inclusion at ServiceNow and then what is the company doing and finally what should the tech industry be doing to face this challenge head on? >> Yeah you know my take on it is, it's all about belonging and I got that word from Pat Waters. So diversity, inclusion and belonging. That's something that she's championing and we are so fortunate to have her as our chief talent officer. Prior to having that word I was just really focused on connection. You know really engaging just with people and trying to understand where they're coming from and really making sure that you're practicing active listening. That has been like the key for my success I will say throughout my career. Is just being able to constantly reflect back what I'm hearing. One to make sure I didn't put any filters on it obviously and then two people want to feel heard and so you know whenever I get into the conversation around women in tech. Yes there are some very real facts, fact based, data based challenges ahead of us but where I choose to put my focus is a much broader conversation that includes you know everyone. And really just focusing a lot more on connection and belonging over all makes a huge difference. >> What you're saying is really resonating because I mean that's what we keep hearing is happening but perpetuates the old boys club is that oh I know this guy because we went to college together. Or some other kind of biases that you hold that it's just oh he's like me. I want to promote him and bring him along and there are fewer women in positions of power who they can bring up the people that they see are like them. So I think that's another problem too is that you have to... >> Yeah that goes back to a really great HR practice which is you cannot just reach deep into your network every time you get in trouble. Rely on a great HR standard practice that says no you know we need to go out there and there's great talent out there that you just didn't even think of. So you know when you're going back to, we talked about transformation earlier in this conversation. Check your self awareness, be clear about wait a minute. Do I really know right now what I need. I'm not sure let me broaden my perspective here and HR's been a great partner to be able to do that. >> So that's a great point because gender and race and sexual preference are part of that diversity and certainly other factors. But like a financial advisor when the portfolio gets over balanced in one area he or she has to rebalance that portfolio. And again it sounds formulaic but I think Pharrel your point is what you're looking for is to open up that network to a wider audience. >> Absolutely. >> And not just the good old boys network. >> I have a little bit of a bias here, you know my background. I'm an English major and I'm running the large business for ServiceNow. >> We need to open the diversity to English, it's a liberal arts background. >> I don't want kids these days to think that if they pick one path they're stuck in that path and their locked into certain jobs. It's not true, you can you just need, it's the way that you think, it's having critical thinking skills. Now listen, you're not going to go put me on the platform although I probably could. Go in and start coding, you're not going to rely on me to do that right away. I can learn it but allowing us, allowing yourself to start to believe. That hey wait a minute, you know the labels that I've grown up with and put on people. Maybe I can remove a couple and I love it when I'm surprised and are able to bring an employee on my time that I'm like ah it doesn't necessarily make sense on the paper but look at you. You're amazing. >> Well one of the things that supports that is digital. For years if you were in the financial services business or the manufacturing business or the automotive business. You were there for life but if you have digital skills you can traverse now much more easily. >> Yes absolutely. >> Kids today just have phenomenal opportunities. >> I know, I know it's great. I think it's so cool and I love making. I love opening tech a bit more to make it more accessible. More appealing, that there are so many different roads to come in and it's important that we get people who think differently, creative you know people who are good strong communicators. Who can bring clarity to a situation. We need all of that and that to me is the first step for diversity. >> And because that's the stuff that robots aren't very good at. Is the empathy, the creativity, that kind of broad thinking. >> That's right. >> Awesome way to bring it home. >> Found full circle. Pharrel thanks so much for coming on the program. What a fun and enlightening conversation. >> Oh my gosh, super fun. I really appreciate it. >> And you're speaking today at 1:30, good luck with that. >> And by the way we have a diversity and inclusion belonging lunch with Pat Waters and CJ Desai which will be at I think 12:30 as well so. >> Great plug, excellent. Thank you so much again. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante we will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge 18 hashtag know 18 just after this.

>> 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 along with my cohost Dave Vellante. We're joined by Chris Bedi, he is the CIO of ServiceNow. Thanks so much for coming on the show Chris. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, we're hearing so much about improving employee experience and this is the goal, your goal, and also the collective goal of CIO, so can you tell us a little bit about why this, and how do you see your role in this? >> Yeah for sure, I mean if I rewind three or four years I don't think experience was really on anybody's agenda, or not high on the list. I think, you know, what we've come to realize or I've come to realize is that experience is critical to actually getting the right behavioral and economic outcomes. It is not optional anymore because with the amount of transformation that we're driving through technology it's changing processes, changing the way customers interact with us, suppliers interact with us, and that change needs to be easy. And not just easy for easy sake, but otherwise we don't get the business outcomes we are looking for. So, for me it's very purpose driven to say that for us to get those economic outcomes we have to focus on experience. >> I feel like the CIO role is evolving, and we've talked about this before, I'd love your thoughts on it. You know, it kind of used to be, alright we're going to keep the lights on, granted that's still part of the role but it's table stakes. >> It doesn't go away. (Rebecca laughs) But yes, still part of the role. >> You know, we can outsource our email, you know, what are we going to do with the cloud, okay. That's shifting, you know, with the digital economy, machine intelligence, the economy booming, this war on talent especially in Silicone Valley. Things are changing, how do you see the role changing and where do you see it evolving to? >> Well, I think the CIO role is changing. It's driven really by what's going on in every industry. If you think about it, everything, how fast your company operates, how efficient your processes are, how engaged your employees are via employee experiences, the mode in which you're able to interact with your customers, how digital your supply chain is, everything is powered by technology platforms and CIO's are the ones governing and managing and those technology platforms to deliver those outcomes, and I think it's only going to increase where technology has a bigger and bigger impact and I think that is really driving a shift in the CIO role where CIO's need to be front and center. There is no more, here's the business strategy, here's the technology strategy. They are one and the same thing and I think in our consumer lives we talk about the digital divides or the have's and have nots. I think the same thing is going to play out in enterprises where those enterprises that can figure out how to harness these newer technologies to drive meaningful business outcomes are going to start to separate themselves from the competition and that separation's only going to get bigger with time. So I think there's a tremendous amount of urgency on this topic as well. I was reading a recent article which talked about CEO's priorities for IT and saying favoring speed over cost, and I don't think that's because all of a sudden we're going to become frivolous with our spending. But I think again it just speaks to the urgency and the need for businesses to transform and it's now. >> It's not just harnessing the technologies, it's also harnessing the employee behaviors that need to change in order to create these cultural shifts that you're talking about, right, or? >> Yeah, for sure, and I would say and we had our CIO Decisions yesterday, one of the key topics was, you know, driving cultural transformation and I find that's a lot of what I'm doing and that involves a lot of selling, quite frankly. I mean, I don't have sales in my title, but by the very definition of it we're saying this technology has the promise to unlock a new business model, unlock a new process. Get to that next level of efficiency or productivity. But, you're selling a vision, right, and that means change, and people don't like change. As long as someone else is changing they're fine with it, once it's themselves, so we have to focus a lot and really double down on transformation efforts and play a key role in that, and to link it back to your first question, that transformation gets so much easier if we can deliver compelling experiences, right? So, it's all kind of tied together. >> Four years ago at K15, Frank Slootman sort of threw down the gauntlet to CIO's in the audience and said, you must become business leaders, if you don't become business leaders you'll be a dinosaur. How are you a business leader, and how are you becoming a business leader? >> I think it's really shaping IT's agenda based upon what's important to the organization. And, that's going to be different for different organizations but largely it's going to be things tied to customers, how productive and engaged are the employees, what can we do to drive margin, which is top and bottom line improvement in the economic model, and making sure that IT's goals and objectives are one and the same with the business goals and objectives. So, for example we do at ServiceNow in IT, we have a shared contract with every function. Marketing, sales, you know, professional services, that here's the business outcomes. On my dashboard, you'll seldom see a whole bunch of IT metrics, it's all about did we get to the business metric or not. Cuz if you're not measuring that then I'm not sure what you're measuring. >> Okay, so you, and I'm sure you have a lot of IT metrics, too, but you're able to then tie those IT metrics to business metrics >> Sure. >> And show how a change in one flows through the value to affect another. >> Yeah, I mean, where the role was, that doesn't go away and it's a critical part of the role and I don't want to undermine it which is, all the invisible things that just happen in corporations, you know, the utilities of, is the networking, and phones and all that, that has to be rock solid. That's table stakes, but yeah, for the next part of that, it's really driving those transformational business outcomes. >> So you're a big proponent and advocate of machine learning, how do you see machine learning transforming the modern work experience, the modern workplace and then the employee experience of the modern workplace? >> I think at a very high level, it's around speed and effectiveness of decision making. And, machine learning, I think has the promise or the opportunity for all of us to unlock that next wave of productivity. Just like in the late '90s we had ERP's and they drove a lot of automation, and supply chain and finance organizations around the world got better. They got faster, more efficient. I think machine learning can do that for the entire enterprise by leveraging platforms to help people make faster and better decisions. I know there's a lot written about replacing humans and things like that. I don't buy into that, I think it's just helping us be better and I think there's used cases all over the enterprise. The biggest barriers to machine learning in my mind typically come with talent. How do you do it, and the good news is here, I mean what we embedded with machine learning in the ServiceNow platform, you don't need an army of data scientists that are super hard to find, almost democratizing the ability to leverage machine learning. Second biggest one that when I talk to CIOs, it's lack of the right data, and they don't have the right data perhaps because they haven't yet digitized their processes, so that's a critical precursor. You got to digitize your processes to generate the right data to then feed the algorithms to get the outcome, but yeah machine learning I think is going to materially transform how we operate dramatically over the next three to five years. >> And, I mean, IT systems continue to get more complex. They in many cases becoming more of a black box. I wonder if I could get your thoughts on this. I mean, I remember reading Michael Lewis's book, Flash Boys, and he talked a lot about the flash crash, and nobody could explain it. They chalk it up to a computer glitch, and his premise was a computer glitch is computers are so complex we can't explain them anymore. >> Yeah. >> AI, machine learning, machine intelligence, going to make that even more complex and more of a black box. Is that a problem for us mortals? >> I think it's a problem, (laughs) for us mortals, but I think it's a problem and I'll tie it back to the transformation in human behavior. We're, I'll call it prototyping and rolling out and leveraging machine learning in our own enterprise, and one of the things we've observed is that us humans, us mortals as you call us, we need to know why, so if a machiner is making an algorithmic based recommendation or a decision we need to know why. And, our employees had a hard time accepting the ML based recommendation without knowing the why. So, we had to go back and rework that, and say how do we surface the why in the context of the recommendation and that got people over the hump. So I think it is a super important point where, as these algorithms get more and more sophisticated, our human brains, the way we interpret it, is we still need the why. >> Yeah, so you're trying to white box that, is what you're saying, which again is not easy. I often use the example of, a computer can tell me if I'm looking at a dog, or I joke Silicone Valley if you watch Silicone Valley >> Yeah yeah yeah, >> Hot dog or not hot dog. >> Hot dog, exactly. >> But, try to explain how you know it's a dog, it's hard >> It is challenging. >> To do that. >> Right. >> Especially if you think about data scientists, they are incredibly cerebral and way smarter than me and, they often have a hard time simplifying it enough where its consumable if you will. So, it is a challenge and I think, you know, it's something that'll evolve as we start to use more of it cause we'll just have to figure it out as an industry. >> I want to ask you about, one of the things that we're hearing so much about this conference is the neat things that you're doing around eradicating employee pain points and taking care of all those onerous, annoying, tedious tasks that we have to do, the filling out of paperwork and all of that sort of thing. What are sort of the next things you're thinking about, the other parts of the work day that are annoying for all of us when you sort of think ahead to the product lineup? >> I think, one of the things we do is figure out where you are and you know, digital transformation, right, is great, but it has so many different meanings depending on your company or your industry. So what we did internally is we actually gave definition and an answer to the question of how digital are you? So we take every process and a collection of processes to a department and bubble it up and so on forth, and we rate every process on how fast it is, how intelligent is, which is a measure of machine learning, and what's the experience we're delivering. And taking those three measures, we're able to come up with a score and more than anything it gave us a common language around the enterprise to say, how do we move this from a score of 50 to 70, how do we move this from a 60 to a 90, and which processes are most important to move first, second and third, right, and without that it gets really hard because digital transformation can just feel like this abstract concept and as business leaders, we do better when we have measurement. And once we have a number and a target and a goal, it's easier to get people aligned to that. So, that's been helpful for us as well on a change management aspect. >> So true. Coach K, you guys always have great outside guests come in and speak at your CIO Decisions Conference, I mean Robert Gates is one that, you know, I mean as much as you've accomplished in your life you haven't accomplished nearly as much as that guy. >> Yeah. >> Very humbling. Coach K was your, one of your guests this week, you host that event. >> I do. >> Share with us some of the, some of the learnings from Coach K. >> We had Coach K, Duke's basketball coach, I would argue best coach, best basketball coach >> I'm a Tarheel. >> Sorry, Tarheel here. >> Yeah exactly, Dean Smith. >> We had a couple in the audience- >> He said he's no Dean Smith the other day, (Rebecca laughs) well you know I don't know. >> And I am a college hoops junkie so for me, it was a massive treat. I just wanted to talk to him about so many games and things like that. But he, he really gave a great talk about just how to be a better leader, how to constantly be learning and applying yourself. I mean he's 71 years old and how he needs, he talked about how he had to reinvent himself at least ten times, he's been coaching for 42 years. To meet the players where they are, and changing himself. And every season, the day after the season ends, having a meeting with his managers saying, what do we need to change? And it could be they just won the national championship. So, never resting on his laurels, constantly learning, and he had really interesting anecdotes about when he coached the U.S. Olympic team, and the difference of 18-year-olds right out of high school versus these are the superstars of the NBA, massive egos, and one of the interesting things, he said so many interesting things I could keep going on but just, you know, he said don't leave your ego at the door. Bring your ego, cause that what makes you great. I need you to have that ego Kobe when you're taking that last second shot cause that's what makes you, you. But, also what he spent a lot of time is getting them aligned on values. Here's the core values that which we are going to operate as a team and that are going to allow us to be successful. And I think that leadership lesson applies to any team. He applied it in a very difficult environment while millions of people are watching but, and he talked about how he took that collection of individuals and made them a unit, and that was super powerful. >> Yeah, he coached the first dream team which was Magic, >> Yeah I think he's coached four or five, and >> and I think Byrd might have been hurt but he played, >> yeah. And how he would just >> and Jordan I mean that, try and bring that eclectic mix together. >> And then to hear, have someone be so, you know, I've done all these things, and then be articulate enough to be able to say, and this is what I did >> Yeah and just super humble >> this is how I brought out the best in people. >> Super humble and just, again, constant learning right, I mean John our CEO talks about be a learning animal. I think Coach K embodied that in spades. >> West Point grad too, right, with a lot of discipline >> Yeah. >> That's right, yeah, yeah. >> in his background and >> for sure, >> and it's really inspirational. >> And then he talked about that, that's where he learned a lot of his leadership lessons. >> Really, yeah? >> At West Point. >> Well, Chris it's been so fun talking to you we could, maybe we should get Coach K on with you. A little like, Mike Krzyzewski, yeah >> That would be a treat for me, you and me could talk about Duke Tarheels. >> Yeah, well okay, alright, if you insist. >> We could bring John Wooden into the greatest coaches ever conversation in fairness >> We could, we could. >> to the wizard of Westwood I mean. >> Cool, well thank you. >> Chris, thanks again for coming on. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge '18 coming up just after this. (techno music)

>> Narrator: 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 here in Las Vegas. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Dave Vellante. We're joined by Dave Wright. He is the chief innovation officer at ServiceNow. Thanks so much for coming on the program. >> It's a pleasure, always a pleasure. >> Good to see you again Dave. >> Good to see you as well. >> Yeah, you've been around the block. You've been around theCube a few times. >> Around the block, a bad way of putting it but yeah. (laughing) >> So chief innovation officer, we've had a lot of great new product launches at this show. What are you most excited about, and what are you already thinking about when you go back to your office? >> So I think what's been interesting to me is the different way of engaging now, we've got the concept of virtual agent technology and I don't just mean the fact that we've got virtual agents. The fact that it starts to give people alternatives and it gives people alternative ways to come into the system, whether it be through our interface or whether it be through someone else's interface, I start to wonder, what'll happen going forward as we get more and more bot type technologies out. How will you have that one interface that works with all those to get that information back of the chain? How will you almost have a single interface that allows you to connect to all these bots and solve your problems? Because the benefits kind of two fold. One is the bot technology you get from being a customer to coming in and actually doing a request. But the other is you'll eventually be able to take that same technology and apply it to the fulfilled user so the power user because if I'm doing something and I can have an agent that's helping me do it, almost like the agent assist concept, you saw this morning. If I can take that to a next level and have AI running on top of that, then I can make work easier for the people coming in but I can actually improve the people that are in the system and make them more effective. >> Go ahead. >> Go ahead, follow up please. >> No, I was just going to ask about, how you get your ideas? So you're here, you're interacting with customers, you're seeing how they're using your product. So is it interviewing customers to find out their pain points? Is it really just watching, I mean you're the chief innovation officer. How do you spark your own creativity? >> It's a really weird answer. I get most of it off kids, most of it off my kids. So I can tell you a story. We were in Barnes and Noble the other week and they had albums in the, plastic twelve inch albums. >> Rebecca: They're coming back. >> And they cost more than they use to. >> Dave Vellante: Yeah really. >> So I called the kids over, I said look, let's get educated. This is what I use to play music on. And now we moved to CD's and you guys miss CD's and this is why you guys buy music. Now I've got a 12 year old and seven year old. And the 12 year old was saying, well, we don't buy music. And I said yeah, and I thought, no you don't, you rent music. And then my youngest daughter said, why would you want to own a song forever? And I was like, this is interesting. We started having a discussion, >> These are deep, these are deep questions. >> It was while other kids we're over having a sleepover and they're all eating pizza and they were talking about the concept of having a job. They said, how do you decide what you want to do for the rest of your life and how do you do that? And we we're talking about how you do something, you get better. You go to another company, you get better at doing it. You go to another company. And one of them said, it sounds really boring just like doing the same thing. And then one of them had the best answer. She said, don't you think it's a waste of your time? And I said, why is it a waste? And she said, because if you're really good at something, why should you just do it for one company? And I was like, oh so, you're going to be a contactor. (laughing) But what I realize was because this whole generation don't need to own things, they just need to use things, so they don't need to know how to do something, they just know they want to do it. And they don't need to own something, they just need temporary access to it. Then it got me thinking when you talk about where could work go to. Do you get a whole concept of the gig economy becoming a gig enterprise. Because we've got a lot of people in work who've got all these different skills but we force them to do one job. And it might be that someone's doing a job but they've got skills that would be applicable outside of that job but they never get to use them. So have we seen the first generation arrive now where they expect everything to be tass based? And then it gives you control over your own career. Because then you say, well, actually I'm not good at this but I can start a bid for work. I can say to people, hey I'm only a three on a skills racing but if you don't need any complex, I'll take it cause I get to learn. So it's a whole new dynamic and I think when you ask whereabout ideas come from, some of the first stage ideas or the first horizon, I think they come form customers. Some of the second horizon, they come from people who aren't working. It's just trying to imagine how they all develop and whereabout that all goes. >> So you surround yourself with millennials? >> Not even millennials. >> Dave Vellante: They're kind of pre post millennials. >> Almost like the linksters, almost the people who've been born connected. It's definitely a Gen Z thing but it's beyond millennials. I think the millennials had a certain expectation around well it's kind of a negative connotation but before they were called millennials, people use to refer to it as the entitlement generation. And it wasn't because they were entitled, it was because they felt they just got access to everything. So it's like with my kids, they're kind of Gen Z and one of them is a linkster, but you never go to them and say, they never come to you and say, hey, I want to watch a movie and you go, great, let's go to Blockbuster's, let's rent it. They expect it to be just available on demand, available all the time. And that was what I think the kind of millennial generation started being entitled to access to data, then I think you went to the generation where it was everything always connected, no concept of banword. But now I think it's the, the real thing that's changing is the concept of ownership and I think that's where you start to see things like, will the car industry ever be the same because if you don't need to own a car because you're not driven by the same passions that people who own cars are driven by, it's just a way of communicating you don't need a garage on your house, you may as well park the car somewhere else. It comes when you need it. It can change the way cities are laid out. I mean there's so many different routes you can go down with this. >> SO how does that innovation, how does that knowledge that you gain get into ServiceNow products and services? >> That all comes back then to how you, how people are going to face new management dynamics or how people are going to manage things like IOT devices? How are people going to deal with managing work if it is a task based economy? How are people going to start to think about not just working in a system of record, or not just working in a system of engagements, but how are they going to start to build that mesh or that web that links all these different things together? And I think that's where our strand comes. Our strand comes in the ability to be able to link systems of records together. To link users with those backend systems, to be able to manage those complex work processes. That's kind of the core elements. Also I think when you look at what Fred Crasick when he built the platform and he had the whole work flow engine and it is that engine that's kind of the key pallet to the whole company. >> I think the metaphor of mesh, sometimes we talk about a matrix of digital services that becomes ubiquitous beyond a cloud of remote services, is really transforming to this mesh of digital capabilities that are everywhere that do things that Clouds don't do. They sense, they react, they respond, they read, they hear. It's an amazing time that we're entering in innovation. Andy McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson when they wrote the book Second Machine Age talked about Moore's Law, power innovation but they also talked about the innovation curve reshaping from going from Linears Moore's Law which we've marched to the cadence of Moore's Law for decades in this industry to reshaping, to an expediential curve. And I wonder if we could get your thoughts. We've paused that it's accommodation of sort of data applying machine intelligence to that data and then leveraging Cloud economics at scale is really where the innovation is going to come from in the future. What are your thoughts on that? >> So let me try to understand the question. So you're talking about not actually the way that you've seen the growth from a process prospective but the way you actually see the growth from a machine learning capability being able to analyze that data? >> Applying that layer of machine learning. Maybe use that mesh metaphor, that top level. You know you've got horizontal technology services but then there's this new AI layer on top. The data is the fuel for that AI. >> Absolutely, I think it's the I think people can't even imagine what they can do with that data, people can't even contemplate some of the decisions they can make and it's when people start to look at things in completely different ways, it's when people start to say, well, if we apply machine learning to a user interface for example, could we come up with a better user interface because now if we understand how people interact with the system, could we actually build a better system? Or you see people starting to have this whole butterfly effect around the way that artificial intelligence works. So the best example I heard was from, I was actually at a convention with a girl called Louis Chang and she was talking to me about it. But they were speaking to hospitals. They we're talking about self drive cars and the application machine learning of being able to help cars drive. And they were saying the interest in knock on effect of this was a hospital saying it was going to be a real problem for them having self drive cars. And she said, why's it going to be a problem? And the problem was, if you look across the whole America you have about 20 people a day die because they can't get replacement organs. But 37 percent of the organs come from car crashes. So if you take car crashes out of the equation. So what they were investing in was actually looking at how they do cloning technology for organs. So no one would ever imagine (mumbled speaking) and this is going to improve cloning technology so much. And I think AI's in the same place. Everyone's using it in such a small area that they don't even see the potential of what they could do with it, they don't have any concept of what they could be starting to look at and how they could start to spot transvaterian people. Even on a base level, I was speaking to one of our customers the other night, and they managed to put an AI system in place that when they got a call in off the description of the call they could work out what the customer satisfaction was going to be and if it was going to be a bad satisfaction figure, they could preemp that and put different agents that were more skilled on that particular issue. And they said a few years ago all they were interested in was maybe one day we'll be able to categorize something asymmetrically. But now they can predict how well something's going to be resolved. >> It's very hard to predict isn't it? I mean who would of thought that Alexa would of emerged as one of the best if not the best natural language processing systems or that images of cats on the internet would lead to facial recognition in technology. >> That one especially. >> Could of never predicted that. So, but because you're such a clear thinker and a strategic thinker, I want to ask you to make some predictions. I'm going to run some things by you. You talked about autonomous vehicles for awhile. Do you believe that owning in the future, pick whatever time frame you want, that owning and driving your own car will become the exception? >> Yeah I think it will probably be the people who, well okay, so I definitely think driving your own car will become the exception. I think some people will always want that sense of ownership until we get to a generation that doesn't. I think they'll always be a hard core of people who do want to own and do want to drive and do want that experience, but I think you've already got the issue where congestion's such a level in most areas. Is there any enjoyment out of driving? So I love driving, I love sports cars, I collect them. But if someone said, hey you've got two options, you can sit in a high performance sports car to go to LA or you can sit in a Tesla and it will drive itself and you can read a book. I'm getting in the Tesla. (laughing) >> How about retail? Right for disruption, do you think that large retail stores will essentially, not essentially, it's never complete, but will largely go away? >> I think it depends on the nature of the experience. So I think for a lot of goods that are consumable goods, I can kind of see that going away. I don't think it will go away for luxury goods. I don't think it will go away fully for fashion. I think people always like to look at things and understand things and check fits but for some things that are high consumables maybe even for electronics, I can see those going or I can see it going for things where it's worn product. So something like a shop that just sells sneakers. I can see someone could easily offer a range and say, well look, here's what we sell. When you order something, we'll automatically ship you one size up, one size down, or two variations of color and it will be a free system return the ones you don't want. I think the whole experience of ordering one thing and hoping it works out, I think that will go away. It will be concept of ordering a group of things or maybe it will be applying to artificial intelligence to say, hey you've asked for this color, but we know that people who also ask for that color like this color as well. We're going to ship you them both. You can see how it goes and send us the one back you don't like. >> Okay, let's see. Will machines make better diagnosis than doctors? I've got to say I think you will get to a point where that will happen. Especially if it's things where it's image processing, where it's x-ray processing, MRI processing. Where it's something like process of mental health, then I don't know. Maybe, I'd probably rather have my mental health treated by a person than a questionnaire. But yeah I think the things we're using, image recognition, or things where you're looking at patent distribution or you're looking at even like virus distribution or virus structure, then I think those areas I think you will get to a point where diagnostic issue is better. But you look at where artificial intelligence is from diagnostics now and you go on doctor google and search for something, you know, everything finished with the bottom line, or it could be cancer. >> Dave Vennari: Yeah, you're dead. >> What about will there ever be a revolt, you know in the sense of, technology is so pervasive, and people just say forget it, I'm sick of just being tracked, I just kind of want to have a human to human connection and, >> Dave Vellante: Dream on. >> So are we done for? >> I was speaking to a girl who works for me, Menesha, and she was saying, we were talking on Friday and she said, hey, I was having a coffee with nother girl Cass, and Menesha's in Seattle and Cass in is San Francisco, and I said, oh was she in Seattle or were you in San Francisco and Menesha's a lot younger than me, and she went, no we weren't in the same room. We were just like doing it over video like a virtual coffee. And I was like what, so you both get coffee and sit and have a conversation? And she was like, oh yeah. >> Dave Vellante: Alright, I've got one more, I've got one more. >> Okay, let's hear it, let's hear it. >> Alright last one, it's great, thanks for playing along. >> I know this is fun. >> Financial services is an industry that really hasn't been disrupted. DO you feel like the banks will lose control, the major banks will lose control of payment systems? >> I think there's a lot of conversations now around how much those payment systems open up. Because if you, let's say you do a transaction with Amazon, you do a transaction with Google, how hard would it be for every transaction to be done that way? So rather than, if your setting off a payment for I don't know, gas bills or a car loan payments, rather than giving your bank details, why not give your PayPal details or your Amazon account details or your Google details? That could be, reduce all the banking transactions down to one interface. I think that could happen. I think you could get, well obviously you're already seeing the rise of Blockchain and I'm not a Blockchain expert. I'm itching to find a used case for us with Blockchain but I can't find it yet. But for direct transactions, if both sources can trust each other than yeah, that direct transaction between those two sources, I think that's completely possible. I think there's also areas where, you've seen happen in the past where a banking faces issues from retail coming into banking, so sometimes you'll get the big supermarket chains, especially in Europe they say, okay you're going to get (foreign name) or you're going to get Tesco's Bank, because they've got all our customer loyalty, they've got people waiting to give discounts to if they bank with them, so they can instantly bring, if you said to your shopping account base, hey, if you bank with me we'll give you 20 dollars a week off your grocery shopping, you could probably ring 10 million customers straight away. So I think banking's challenged from other industries that want to get into it, from places where you'll actually go and do each transactions now and from where places where you'll just go and order stuff online and you could filter all that through one place, I think they'll still always be the commercial side of banking. There's always going to be the stocks and bonds, there's still going to be the wealth management, but props for transactional banking, you could start to see a decline. >> Fantastic, thank you. >> I love this futurist talk, it's been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for coming on theCube Dave. >> Alright, thanks for having me, always a pleasure. >> Dave Vellante: Great to see you. >> We will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge18 theCube's live coverage just after this. (upbeat music)

(techy music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18 here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Dave Vellante. We're joined by CJ Desai. He is the Chief Product Officer for ServiceNow. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE again, CJ. >> Thank you, it's great to be here. First time I came was last Knowledge, which was my first Knowledge, so I'm a lot more educated and equipped this time as compared to firing round of questions from Dave last time. >> We will pick your brain, exactly. So you were up on the stage this morning, a great keynote, and you said, "Welcome to the era of great experiences." Unpack that a little bit. What do you mean by that? >> First of all, thank you for remembering that. That was supposed to be the idea. But on a serious note, we feel, if you think about even our company name is ServiceNow, so you provide service, and when you provide service, that's not a technology you provide, you provide an experience, whether it's IT service, customer service, employee, whatever the case might be. And, if you are not delivering experiences, then you are not that relevant. So we are trying to truly, and we are in the beginning of this journey, truly internalize that, that if people are using us, they call themselves service desk, insider organization, IT service desk, customer service desk, whatever the terms you want to use, there is about experiences. Rather than focusing on bits and bytes, we want to focus on experiences, deliver those experiences via our platform. It's not software as a service, it's software as an experience. It's software as an experience, that's the idea, correct. Thank you for-- >> You also talked about the eras. You know, we went back to the industrial era and then went through the ages of computing. Yeah, I was not sure if that was going to work or not, but the point I was trying to make, Dave, was just around the quality of work and how work has evolved. That's it, that was the idea. >> But I think my takeaway was even more than that, because we are entering, in my view, anyway, a new era, and I'd love to get your comments. We're moving from what is real tailwind for you, which is the Cloud era, and obviously, Cloud is an important part of the new era where you have a remote set of services to one where you have this ubiquitous set of digital services that do things like sense, hear, read, act, respond. That's a different world, and it's all about the experience, and I don't know how to define that yet. Digital, I guess, is how we define it. But what are your thoughts? >> The one thing, even simple things, and these are not simple things to understand. When I look at things like even genomic sequencing, that's so different. They are using technology to figure out how to sequence the human genome so that it can help you with your health, live longer, even things like knowing that somebody rings a doorbell at my home and I can see on my phone. Everything is connected, humans are connected, when mobile came and computer came and internet came. But things being connected is pretty exciting for me. That just transforms our lives and how we work, and I really like that it is all about us, and other than us being focusing on the technology itself. So that's the point. It's that we're humans, and let's focus on humans and experience, rather than worry about, oh, this runs two times faster than the other thing, or this thing is smaller than other thing. That's interesting, but not that interesting. >> At this conference, this is really the message that you're getting across. It's the new tag line, we are making the world of work work better for people. How does the Now platform really deliver on that promise? How does it make the employees life easier? I would say we have a bunch of use cases, but as you know, we started out early on with IT service management, and the whole idea was can we provide, as long as computers are there, as long as software is there, password reset is going to be there for a very, very long time. So, my point is that that's when it started. Okay, I need to do password reset, I want to upgrade my laptop. Every year there is a new laptop, every year there is a new phone, and that cycle will continue, and as long as we are using technology for our knowledge workers, IT help desk will be there, right? And where we are evolving is enterprise service management, because you don't, as an employee, you may deal with IT, you may deal with HR, you may have a contractual issue with legal, you may need something related to your payroll from finance. People think payroll is HR, but payroll is finance. And as you try to go across in a day in a life of an employee, you need to make it as easy as possible. So that's what we are focused on, deliver better experiences. You know, artificial intelligence that listen today, I believe, is more about optimization, rather than intelligence. Yeah, we want to use your data to be able to predict, like if you see in Gmail, I don't know if you use Gmail, but if you have Gmail, you get an email, it'll suggest auto-responses. Those auto-responses are almost positive. Have you noticed that? They are never negative. >> Yeah. >> Oh, of course. >> They're like, no, I don't want to come to your meeting. (laughing) It's kind of like trying to predict most likely what you would want to say, and I think if we can use intelligence to make people more productive, that's what we want. >> I mean, I use that function. I actually like it. >> CJ: Yeah, exactly. >> You know, it gives you three choices, and one of 'em is pretty close to what I would normally, and if I'm busy, I'm done. >> Yeah, right, exactly. >> I like that. This is the other thing we've talked about. We've talked about this with Farrel this morning. Try to anticipate my needs, right? So that means you've got to infuse AI into the application and identify specific use cases. You guys have done some M&A there, you talked to the financial analysts meeting, obviously, not disclosing anything, but watch for us to do some more M&A. You got to believe that that machine intelligence space is really ripe for innovation. >> And what we believe is if I look at the big Cloud providers, like Google, are investing a lot in deep learning and many, many other technologies, so whenever they expose it, and some of them do a really good job, we will just leverage their libraries. But there are things specific to enterprise, because there are things specific to enterprise, like if you use the word network at a hardware company, that's always in context of compute network and storage. If you use the word network at a healthcare company, that's a network of physicians, networks of hospitals, networks of whatever. And if you use the word network at a Telco company, that is a whole different network. My point is we want to understand those pieces, and if we can make it easier based on your data, so if all your cases, which are, Oh, part of your network is down. Ah, that's what you mean from the context end point, so we want to use wherever folks like Google are investing, we will leverage that, but if we need to leverage, we'll do that too. >> It's interesting, we were talking to a customer today, it might have been Worldpay, and they took the CMDV language and transformed it into the language of the business. What a rare and powerful concept for somebody from IT to do that, because if the lingua franca is business, then the adoption's going to go through the roof. >> So does that make sense? >> Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Well, I appreciate you talking about the value and the customer experience versus the technology. Certainly, it speeds and feeds you right. Boring. But the platform is important. Many products, one platform, that's unique for an enterprise software company, and you guys aspire to be the next great enterprise software company. Talk about how the platform enables you to get there. >> So I will tell you simple. You know our founder, Fred Luddy, started with the platform in 2004, so that was 14 years ago now, and his idea was you should be able to route work through the enterprise using our platform, and then we started with the IT service management and use case. The biggest advantage we have is that we are a very customer-driven organization. Many companies say that, but you see it here. Dave, you have been coming to Knowledge for a long time, I don't know about you. >> This is my first rodeo, but it's cool. >> It's the first thing you see. >> These are 80-plus person sessions, are customer sessions. They're not our sessions, where they are sharing best practices with them. So we get all these requests, CJ, we have built emergency response system using ServiceNow, CJ, we have built financial close using ServiceNow. Can you productize it? And we say, okay, thank you for the idea, which is great, thank you for the idea. How do I prioritize all of that? And, Dave, where platform comes in, because all the services I talked about today, service intelligence, service experience, user experience, they're all built in the platform, and I'm trying to be cautious, but if I want to create a brand new product on our platform, a brand new product on our platform, 40-use case, a 1.0 product where I feel comfortable the customers can use it, I would say 12 to 18 engineers. That's it. >> Rebecca: Wow. >> If I want to create one product, it's 12 to 18 engineers. So the R&D leverage, and that's the point I was trying to get across, that whether it's my own team creating product or whether our customer building apps on our product, because on platform, because we provide all the common services integration, the incremental cost to create something, now sales marketing, with my close friend, Dave Schneider, is much harder, because he has to scale it, build specialty in it and all that, but to create the product is not an issue for us on the platform. >> But this is where Cloud economics are so important, because at volume, your marginal costs go to practically zero. >> CJ: That's exactly right. >> But people may say, oh, 12 to 18, that sounds like a lot, but we're talking about an enterprise class software product here, and Fred Luddy, in the 2004 time frame, I mean, the state of enterprise software then, frankly, and now, was terrible. The guys at 37signals, I don't know if you know Jason, they made valid attempts, but it wasn't enterprise class software, it wasn't a platform. I've said, a number of times this week, the reference model for enterprise software is painfully mediocre, so you guys have done a great job, and now you've really got to take the next step and stay ahead on innovation. >> Correct on innovation card, that's what I said, innovation should be my top priority. You heard me at the Financial Analysts Day. Customer Service Management, brand new product, we actually launched it at Knowledge 16. Okay, that's when we launched it. It was engineers and teens who created that product, so many teens, the 1.0, now we have evolved quite a bit, 500 customers two weeks ago, 500 enterprise customers. You guys know that we don't go to the small line of the business. 500 in two years, eight quarters. >> And I found out last night, I think it was 75, or it might even be higher, reference customers. >> CJ: Yeah, already, using CSM. >> That's the difference. I do, we do, a lot of these shows. >> That's the platform impact. >> And you're talking about the customer focus. You do a lot of these shows. The customers talk about the impact on their business. They don't talk about how they installed some box, or like you say, runs faster. It's the business impact that really makes a difference, and that's why we're excited to be here. >> You saw today when I talked about Flow Designer and Integration Hub. IT wants to provide software so that business analysts can model business processes in a Cloud way with whoever you need to integrate with, so we are really keeping that as the north star for our customers, and how can we make their life easier, whatever they want to automate, some manual processes, all of manual processes. I remember speaking to Fred when I joined initially, and I said, "Fred, how did you think about TAM?" He said, "What do you mean, TAM?" You know, he's a funny guy, and he was serious. His point was there are so many manual workflows, how do you put a TAM around it? Every business is unique, their processes are complex, so don't box yourself and say, Oh, this is a $4 billion TAM and I'm going to get 20% of it. Every enterprise, as long as they exist, they will have manual workflows, you go and give it our platform so they can automate however they want. >> Well, I'm going to make you laugh about TAM. I'm a former industry analyst, so when you guys did the IPO way back when, well before your time-- >> CJ: 2012. >> when Frank was here, there was a research company saying this is small market, maybe it's a billion dollars and it's shrinking, so I, with some of my colleagues, developed a TAM analysis, and it was more than 30 billion. I published 30 billion, you can go on our old Wiki and see that, and the guy said to me, "Dave, you can't publish more than 30 billion. You'll look like a fool." The TAM is much, much bigger than 30 billion. You can't even quantify it, it's so large when you start looking at it. >> And now, because people are recognizing that we automate all the manual workflows in a enterprise on a Cloud platform, last week somebody published a report and I just saw the headlines, I didn't go through the details, 126 billion. So from in 2012 to that small number, and we don't know what the number is. >> Could it be bigger? >> I would have no idea. I would be completely disingenuous if I told you I know what my TAM is, but I don't think that way. I say what customer problems can I solve? >> Well, that's what I wanted to ask you. So you're here with so many different customers. Just on the show, we've had ones in payments, in insurance, in health care. What are you hearing from customers, and what are sort of your favorite applications of what you're doing? What makes you the proudest? >> Yeah, so I would say the proudest moments for me are when I'm like, wow, you do that with ServiceNow? I would have never thought that. So when I didn't expect, when I expect something, Oh, I had this routine email, text collaboration, and I switched it to ServiceNow, get it, like not a big aha moment. I had this one customer who said he has a big distribution network, all these partners, and those guys have ServiceNow, he has ServiceNow, and when they have problem with the product, their product, my customer's product, they all communicate via ServiceNow to each other. So they have created a whole ServiceNow network, truly a B2B kind of exchange, kind of, using ServiceNow. One of our median and entertainment customers who owns a bunch of parks, they refill the popcorn machine using ServiceNow. When the popcorn levels dip, they have those people who carry around the cart, Oh! The popcorn level dip, it marks the sensor, it routines the workflow, goes to the corporate, Ah, we need to fill up popcorn on by this particular ride. For me-- >> And even at my house, I love it. >> Yeah, so that's exciting to me. >> We talked to Siemens today. >> Yes, great customer. >> Awesome, and I want to run a line by you. We talk about AI a lot, machine intelligence. I wrote down during, you know, data is the fuel for AI. Well, you know we love data here at theCUBE, and he was describing that, he said, you know, even though CJ was not prescribing taking the data out, we could leave it in so it learns, right now, we take some of the data out. Well, you described that. Well, we put it to SAP HANA, we throw a little Watson in there, we do some Azure, machine learning, we use Tableau for visualization, he's probably got some Hadoop and Kafka in there, a very complicated, big data pipeline. And I said to him, Okay, in two years, do you want to do that inside of ServiceNow? He goes, "Absolutely. That would be my dream come true." So, I guess I'm laying down the gauntlet. Do you see that as a reality? >> So, we are talk to Siemens, great customer, they keep us honest, so I love that and I did actually meet the team who was in charge of their BI and reporting and they did share the same story a few months ago when I met them. And we are trying to figure out, Dave, if I knew the answer, I would have told you, but you know my style. I don't know the answer. We are seriously trying to figure out, Do we become an analytics hub? We are really good with ServiceNow data, we can build connectors with other data, but do I want to be in the BI and reporting market? Absolutely not. Do I want to help customers as their processes span across and provide them more visual credit tools than others, text-based searches, whatever they need, the answer is yes. Performance analytics, as you know, we have been moving along really at a good pace, and now we have what every single product, but this is something that Eric Miller, who runs that business, we talk about it all the time, because currently our analytics is building the platform, and now you know that data has a Cloud issue, so if you have data here, you have data there, you have data there, we are in our own Cloud. Can we build a connector, potentially, to OnPrem? Don't know the answer, but this is something, it's a fair gauntlet having to solve. >> Humbly, I'd like to give you my input, if I may. >> Yes. >> We see innovation, as I said before, it's data, applying machine learning to that data, and then leveraging Cloud economics. The project with big data projects, as you well know, is the complexity has killed them. Now you see the Cloud guys, whether it's Amazon or Microsoft, and that's where the data pipelines are being simplified and built. Now, I don't know if it's the right business decision for you guys, but wow, wouldn't that be powerful if you guys could do that, certainly, for your customers. >> And, truly, that is, as you heard me on Financial Analysts Day, I'm a huge fan of Geoffrey Moore's work, and he defines system of record, ERP CRM, system of action where we fall in, and then he has System of Intelligence, which is all the things around data and how do you harness the power of data. And that's something that I really, in our product teams, we talk about all the time, if I can solve Siemens problem with everything in ServiceNow, that'd be awesome, but is that something I want to prioritize right now, or is there something, we should give them the flexibility. I don't know. >> Well, you're one of the top product guys in our industry. It's why they found you. No, seriously, I put you up there with the greats. >> You're kind, thank you. >> It's true. You've got an incredible future ahead of you. But as a lead product person, you have to make those decisions, and you have to be very circumspect about where you put your resources. You can't just run to every customer requirement, right? >> And I tell, coincidentally, my wife asks me What's your job, by the way? I said, that's a good question. >> I'm married to a product officer, too, I feel the same way. What do you do all day? You do a lot of meetings. >> Yeah, exactly. So I said that I do a lot of meetings, and she said why do you do a lot of meetings? And I said I'm making a some decision or help my team make a decision because they already analyze a bunch of things. And I said, my hope is, as long as I can make more good decisions than bad decisions, specifically about product strategy, because you never know unless you make the chess pieces move and think of two or three steps ahead, and some things could be right and some things could be wrong. I have a simple framework on my whiteboard for every meeting. No jokes, right? So, my framework is very simple. Question number one, What customer problems we are trying to solve. If you cannot articulate that, for any new product idea you have, I don't go past that question, What customer problem we are trying to solve? Second is Why now? Why do we need to solve this problem now? Like you said, there are many problems, which one are you prioritize? And then, third, Why us? Why should we solve that problem? So, if you can articulate the problem, which always is a challenge because you kind of know what problems you have, but unless you really, really understand the customer pain point, you cannot articulate it. Then you say, why now? Like why is the time right now for us to invest in this, say, analytics, as a service? Why right now? And, third, why you, as in why us? Why is ServiceNow should solve it? That, at least, gives me a guiding compass to say because I have many products, as you know, I am very protective of our platform, and all these use cases come in, every product line wants to go deeper, rightfully so, because they are trying to solve for customers, and the new products want to be built on this platform. Sometimes I say maybe a partner should build it, so we made a decision, facilities product, Should our ISB partner build it? And that's the right place because we feel they are more suited, they have the skill set, all of that. But that's it, what problem, why now, why you? >> Rebecca: Really, I love it. >> Well, the Why you? it's a great framework. The why you is unclear for the Siemens problem, and I can understand that. You take the DemOps announcement that Pat stole from you today-- >> I know, that's not cool, man. >> But that's a problem that you guys solved internally, clear problem. >> He did a nice job of articulating it, very nice job. >> Yeah, definitely. >> But we feel that there always is a process when you need a workflow across, because in planning there are a bunch of companies, as the patch, or in build there are a bunch of companies in develop there are a bunch of companies. That's fine. They could be the system of records for those chevrons and we are the workflow that cuts across. So we feel loved. We showed our value to our customers by doing that. >> Rebecca: That's great. >> I know we've got to go, but lastly, it's roadmap. Last year, you talked about how you guys do releases by alphabet, twice a year. You were really transparent today, laid out the room and talked a lot about Madrid, you laid out well into the future what you guys are doing so, as an analyst, I love that. I'm sure you're customers love it, so-- >> A lot of people to picture, so that's nice. And Twitter, a lot of people posted on social media as well, so clearly there was a customer pain point, as we call it, that they needed a roadmap. In speaking to customers last one year, number one thing, if you tell us what you're building, then we don't have to build it. If you tell us when you're shipping, then we can plan around it, and then we will set aside resources to do testing. Any Cloud software company, whether it's us, CRM software or HR software, people still test, because you cannot mess up your employee experience or customer experience, and they just said give us a predictable schedule, please, so that we know. We did say two times a year, but we were not prescriptive which quarter. It could be four months and eight months, it could be six and six, it could be seven and five. I'm currently going with the quarterly-level fidelity, and eventually, I want to get to a month-level fidelity, where I say March and September, once our internal processes are organized. >> So the other subtlety there, and I know we got to go, is the ecosystem, because you're giving visibility, they have to make bets. They're making a bet on service, but then where's the white space? They're betting on white space. If you're exposing that to them, they can say, Oh, not going to solve that problem. ServiceNow's going to solve it in two quarters. >> I agree. >> Huge difference for them. >> You guys are wonderful. Thank you so much for inviting me. >> Rebecca: Thank you for coming on the show. We appreciate it. >> No, that's awesome, thank you, thank you. >> Dave: Great to have you. >> Rebecca: Great to have you. I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Vellante. We'll have more from ServiceNow Knowledge 18 just after this. (techy music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back, everyone, to the Cube's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge '18. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Dave Vellante. We're joined by Nick White. He is a principal at Deloitte Australia. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube, Nick. >> Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. >> So we've been having great conversations before the cameras were rolling, but tell us a little bit about D.Assist, which is a new technology you're unveiling at this conference. >> Yeah, so it's a solution that we've built, which is essentially a voice-enabled solution to allow patients and nurses to communicate. Essentially we're targeting identifying critical patient needs, critical patient requests, and getting help to them as fast as possible. >> Okay, so tell us a little bit more about the technology behind it. >> Yeah, sure. Well, let me go back and tell you about where it came from. One of my colleagues was in hospital with his father who unfortunately passed away while he was in hospital. And through that experience, he was observing what was going on in the hospital and afterwards he and I sat down and started to go through it and understand where were the challenges that the hospital had in that ward experience and the recovery. And we identified that if you look back at the history of the call bell, it hasn't changed in about 150 years. Florence Nightingale came up with the idea of a bell for patients, but that was in a ward environment where you had 30 or 40 beds in a room and you could look across the room and you could see that patient, okay, I can see what they need. Either I rush to their aid, or I can get to them in a minute. Hospitals today, we've gone and put walls up, curtains, and you've lost that visual cue. But all we've done to support the nurses is we've made that bell electronic. And we put a light above the door. So we looked at that system and we saw at all of the different points where you could have a failure along there, that essentially then would compromise patient care at no fault of the nurses whatsoever, and we thought, how can we better support the nurses to give that care that they work so hard to give? And we came up with the idea of having a voice-based solution that a patient can actually state their request, we could process that request, and we could present it to the nurses and try and give some guidance as to what the next best action for the nurse might be. And allow them to essentially provide accelerated care those people really in need. >> All right, so explain the system. It's fascinating what you guys do. How are you using NLP and ServiceNow. >> Yeah, so the solution is enabled by AWS and ServiceNow. So at the front end of the solution we've got a smart speaker in the room. That essentially passes the speech that the patient has made once they've woken the device through to the AWS platform. From there we pull out the intent. So we convert that speech to text, pull out the intent, and then that intent is passed through to ServiceNow. And once we've got it in ServiceNow, we can do all sorts of things with it. So we can apply a set of business rules, we can smart route it to the most appropriate person to meet the patient's needs. We can look at the prioritization that the hospital wants to give that sort of query and we can push it up or down in the queue based on that prioritization. Then we present that to the nurses using a dashboard on the nurse station, but we've also got the mobile app deployed. So the nurses have actually got a mobile in their pocket, which buzzes when the patient makes a request, they're able to whip the phone out, have a look at what the patient's need is, and make a decision. >> I'm always fascinated when a company like Deloitte comes up with a solution like this. It's not like you went to the client, and the client said, this is what we want. So how did you go about figuring all this out? What was the process you used? >> That's a really good question. For us it was, it's not about us designing the solution. We saw the problem and we're problem solvers. That's really what we do. We went and engaged with one of the local hospitals in Australia. We said to them, listen, is this right? Have we actually cottoned on to something that is a real problem here? And it really resonated with them. And they gave us access to their top 30 nurses and also their simulation hospital. It's a hospital that's used for training and development. And in that environment, we iterated the design with the nurses and built a solution essentially by nurses for nurses. So the idea was that it was as intuitive to use as your iPhone. Because nurses aren't like IT guys. They're not sitting behind computers all day. It's not native to them to use that sort of interface. So we wanted to make it as simple as I touch, drag, drop, and I let go, and I've done the job that I need to do. And so the nurses' feedback from the implementations that we've done so far have been, this is so easy to use. That's the phrase they've given us. This is just so easy to use. >> And then what's the feedback from the patients? How are they using it specifically? >> Yeah so, I'll give you the example of the spinal ward we've gone into at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney. The Prince of Wales Hospital Foundation heard about what we were doing and they identified the opportunity to fund us to go into the spinal ward. And when you think about spinal patients' traumatic injury and often these patients are in hospital for months if not years. In a very isolating environment trying to recover from a traumatic injury. Not only that though, they may not have full access to their limbs anymore to be able to press a call button. And the hospital foundation saw this opportunity to place our solution in the hands of these patients or in these patients' rooms. And it has been overwhelmingly successful. We've got 26 beds rolled out in the ward. We've been in there for little over a month now. And on the very first day we had a patient who was in the bathroom in a precarious situation, needed help, couldn't reach the call bell, and was able to wake up the device from the bathroom, ask for help, and have two nurses rush to their aid. We've had a patient who was suffering severe pain after their injury and is now able to alert the nurses that the request that they were making is about pain and they were able to come in a much faster time. We've also seen complaints about nurse response time go from a decent level to nothing. And whether those were real complaints or not, is beside the point. The patients were feeling like they were waiting a period of time and that was uncomfortable for them. Now they're not complaining at all. So that patient experience has really shifted. >> That's great. And it's such a miraculous technology. This is really impressive. Best of luck to you, Nick. This is really fun having you on the show. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge '18 just after this. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas. It's the CUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone to the CUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18 in Las Vegas Nevada. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We've got two guests for this panel. We have Katie Benedict who is director advisory people in change at KPMG and Michelle Esposito who is the AVP technology planning for JM Family Enterprises. Welcome Katie and Michelle. >> Thank you for having us. >> So I want to start out with you Michelle, explain to our viewers what JM Family Enterprises is. >> Sure, JM Family's, we're a privately held company located in south Florida. We have about 4,200 associates across the country and I describe us as a diversified automotive company. So we started 50 years ago, it's actually our 50th anniversary. Distributing Toyotas in the U.S. We were the first distributor and we still distribute to the five south eastern states but since then we've grown and expanded into other sectors of the automotive industry. Including auto finance and warranty and insurance products. >> Okay so diversified portfolio of services. >> Yes. >> So recently you had a situation, an implementation situation. Can you tell our viewers a little bit about it and then I want you to chime in Katie with how you worked on it too. >> Sure. So we were an existing ServiceNow customer. We implemented the product back in 2011 and at the time we really just tried to make it look like our old product. We wanted to minimize the disruption to the organization so we said let's just make it look and behave like the old product did. Seemed like a good idea at the time but with that and with the change that happened over time it became very complex to use and it really just wasn't meeting our needs. So, after much consultation with a lot of experts in the field we decided to re-implement ServiceNow. We believed in the platform, we believed in its capabilities and what it could do for us but we needed to start over. So with that comes a lot of change for our organization. People re used to doing things a certain way, they're used to the processes that we already had in place. So trying to get them on board and understand the why to what we were doing was really important. >> And Katie that's where you fit in. So tell us a little bit about KPMG's approach to making this easier, because as Michelle said. We are human nature, we're just resistant to change and sort of we like it the old way. This is hard. So how, what, can you tell us a little bit about your approach. >> Exactly. We were thrilled that JM Family chose KPMG as their implementation partner and really some of things we brought specifically to the table for this re-implementation. Was some of our accelerators. Our process packs to really optimize the new processes that JM Family was using but then also our organizational change management and learning and development capabilities. We specialize in IT transformation from a people perspective and group of a specialized in ServiceNow. We've done, well over 50 implementations of ServiceNow. So we wanted to look from that people perspective, how do we get the right level of buy in. How do we make sure that people understand why we're doing the change. Get that early, quick adoption. A continuous feedback loop we implement a change agent network. Which I've found was one of the most effective things we could have done especially at JM Family given the nature of their organization and given some of the cultural considerations there and it was a tremendous success there I feel. I mean the people there, the associates there were so involved in the initiative and really partnered with our team. As a single team, it wasn't JM Family and KPMG it was one implementation team working together in tandem to make this change happen. >> So what did you learn in the sense of what were people's, what were the sticking points? And then how did you overcome them? >> Yeah. Sure I can take that. As much as people were supportive of the re-implementation and really knew we needed to do it we found that they were still very much embedded with the way we did it today. So even going into this knowing what a huge change management effort it was I was still surprised at how much effort we had to put into it. So it took a lot of communication, a lot of different methods of communication and engagement to get people to really understand what we were doing and why we were doing it. Repetition really explaining it, the change agent network was huge for us and what we did there was. We pulled in some of our bigger supporters and some of our detractors and they were able to kind of permeate the organization in the different departments within IT to really help sell what we were doing. To bring back questions and concerns. So that was really key. >> What was that like bringing in the people who were really butting heads? I mean and how do you navigate between those two factions? >> Honestly I think it was great because I'd rather get that feedback while we're going through the process than hear about it later and hear the implementation not be successful. So in some cases when people brought that feedback that maybe wasn't so positive it was just a matter of more communication, more training but in other times it was you know we really scratched our head and said maybe we really need the rethink about this. Maybe they've got something here and we may need to tweak our approach or do something a little differently. But it was as Katie mentioned, the engagement level was phenomenal. So the positive and the negative we really had a very engaged team. >> So coming out of this Katie, what would you say are sort of the best practices for other leaders that are doing implementation, re-implementations and maybe dealing with some resistance? >> I would say definitely whether it's the implementation or a re-implementation. Don't forget about your people. The technology, especially ServiceNow is fabulous and your processes are generally are standard. You can align to idle processes but getting the adoption is really key and so remembering that this is a transformation. It's not just an implementation of the technology. Paying attention to the people, making sure that they're on board. They know what you're doing, why you're doing it and really what's in it for them is vital to making this a successful project. >> As you're looking at the ServiceNow platform and what you do for JM Family Enterprises what do you see looking ahead as sort of ways you can augment and enhance? >> Oh they have a lot of ideas going forward right now which is very exciting. >> It is, you know we focused in, we're in a second phase implementation. Our first phase really focused on the core ITSM functions and now we're dipping our toe into some other areas. The PPM suite, vendor management, performance analytics. So we're really continuing to mature our use of the product and even looking beyond that. You know we have interest in some of the security operations and even further than that into some of the financial management capabilities. So we definitely plan to continue invest in the platform and see what it can do for us. >> You're evolving just as ServiceNow is evolving too. >> Yes we are. >> Well Michelle and Katie thanks so much for coming on the CUBE. It was great having you. >> Thank you so much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have much more of the CUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18. Hashtag no 18 just after this.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018, brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18. We are theCUBE, we are the leader in live tech coverage. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Dave Vellante. We're joined by Jason Wojahn. He is the managing director global ServiceNow practice lead at Accenture. Thanks so much for your, your returning guest. You're a CUBE veteran. >> Yeah, many times. >> Many time CUBE alum. >> Yes, >> Thanks for noticing. >> Back in the early days. >> But for those who have not had the pleasure of watching your CUBE clips, can you explain what your role is and what you do at Accenture? >> Sure, I'm the global ServiceNow practice lead at Accenture, I'm responsible for our global capabilities in ServiceNow for the company of Accenture. So you know, everything to do with ServiceNow from our consulting capability to our training capability. At Accenture we also have, kind of, what we call three estates of ServiceNow. We have the CIO estate, I know you had Andrew Wilson on theCUBE yesterday, and of course we are a fully deployed ServiceNow customer in our CIO's office. One of the top 10 customers of ServiceNow. We also utilize ServiceNow in our AO, IO, and PBO lines of business. Now in that case that's a go to market relationship where we're selling things like HR outsourcing that is platformed and delivered on ServiceNow and of course last but not least our consulting capabilities. Just over 3000 skilled ServiceNow resources across the world What makes us the largest practice for ServiceNow in the world as well. And those are our three estates of ServiceNow in Accenture. >> So don't hate me for saying this but when we first started following ServiceNow I remember Frank Slootman said to me Dave, this thing is a rocketship. We're going to blow through a billion dollars. We're going to be the next great software company. And one of the things Jeff and I said was well, the ecosystem has to grow. There were companies like Cloud Sherpas which nobody ever heard of which were specialists in the space. Now you fast forward five, six, seven years, Accenture gets into the game, other big SI's have gotten into the game and it is the real deal. It feels like the next ERP of the modern era. >> In my view there are three main big surges going on in the ServiceNow ecosystem and you can kind of tie them back to the CEO's. So you had the early day with Fred Luddy of course, kind of the zero to 150 million stage of ServiceNow. of course when Frank Slootman came in in the 2011 time frame you know you have the next big surge, see them getting IPO ready, you see them really ruggedizing their commercial selling capabilities, their delivery methodology capabilities, etc., and then we move all the way to today and with John Donahoe you see the third surge. And here you see every GSI on the planet wanting to do something with ServiceNow for a lot of the reasons that I just discussed. I mean ServiceNow has been a terribly strategic tool in Accenture across multiple aspects. Of course our go to market aspects, our consulting aspects and of course our internal use of the platform as well. >> It's not easy for software companies to reach escape velocity, certainly many of them can become unicorns and have a billion dollar valuation. It's really hard for them to get to a billion dollars of revenue. ServiceNow has blown through that. They'll probably do three billion or close to it this year. So they really are, in many ways, the next great software company, but you know, VMWare got there, Red Hat obviously doing really well. What are your perspectives on the software ecosystem? I mean, personally I think it's great that we see more competition but there seems to be always this pressure to consolidate. What's your sense of what's happening now? >> Well you see a lot of consolidation that ServiceNow is doing to round out their capabilities as a platform and I think that's terribly important. That's how people want to consume technology right now so we spend a ton of time at this event and you've heard ServiceNow as well, talking about experience management, service management, you know trying to get things away from, you know how do I do this and going to why would I do this versus how. And of course you utilize platforms to really set that tenancy. When you got platform like ServiceNow that has the ability to turn on intelligent automation machine learning capabilities across your platform, the ability to turn on chatbox across your platform, analytics across your platform, knowledge across your platform and of course manage your workflow the way they do with portals, etc. I mean there's no reason to go somewhere else but more importantly, the strategy underneath it you know ServiceNow is an outcome of something that's very important. You can't use AI, you can't use Chatbox, you can't automate if you don't have what we call a lake of data, a data lake. You've got to have that kind of single source of information so that you can do those compounded workflows and get that automation benefit and then when you start laying things like AI, machine learning, intelligent automation, chatbox in there, actually you have to have the data in there to make the suggestions, right, to do the modeling and the analyses to find those opportunities. So I think what you're going to see and what you're actually seeing right now is consolidations on platforms. And those platforms are kind of being used as a ubiquitous glue code for everything else behind the infrastructure and really looking at you know, this is the employee first experience. This is where the last yard of the field is being delivered to the individual. >> The red zone. >> Yeah. >> So the timing of the Accenture acquistion was actually fortuitous because it coincided with ServiceNow's push into the rest of the enterprise. Accenture obviously deep into lines of business, board levels, C-Suite, etc. Talk about how that's changed the whole relationship motion with your customers, how you've gone deeper and describe, sort of, that dynamic. >> Yeah, so, obviously within Accenture our diamond clients are paramount to the way we run our business and who we are as a business and what's great is we're seeing more and more of those clients where they have comprehensive relationships with Accenture, bringing ServiceNow to bear in that conversation and actually, again, using it as an overarching capability to help get things done better. You know it can be very austere to sit at a Cebol console or an Oracle console or those types of things. We're actually using ServiceNow to kind of keep that from having to happen but you're doing the same transaction on the back end. And again, like I said, you know, once you get some of those data points in there it tends to kind of start to gain some momentum because you get a little bit of automation here or a little bit of automation there and then suddenly that connects you to other aspects of the enterprise and other consolidation points. >> What makes Accenture different, you got all the SI's are now in, elbowing their way in. We want a piece of the action. Why Accenture? >> Well the ego in me says it's because we're number one. We have the largest single certified pool of resources across the globe. There's nobody bigger than us. There's nobody that does more influence revenue than ServiceNow, than us and there's no one with higher customer satisfaction than us We actually got that award two days ago from ServiceNow. So if you value those things, that's why you should work with Accenture. But more importantly than that we've really spent a lot of time making sure that we're doubling down on our methodologies, we're doubling down on our thought leadership, we're leveraging our capabilities that we're you know, trialing and piloting in our CIO's office across the 450,000 person company called Accenture. We're obviously leveraging the things we learn in our AO, IO, BPO practices where we have embedded ServiceNow into those go to market services. But we're bringing that all back to our consulting practice and it's a creed of to not only the way we handle CIO, AO, IO, BPO, but a way we handle our customers from a consulting perspective as well. >> It's the customercentric approach. >> Jason: It is, it is. >> Well Jason thanks so much for coming on the program. It's always fun to have you on theCUBE. >> Thanks a lot. >> Dave: Great to see you. >> Thanks. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18 in just a little bit.

>> 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. We are wrapping up day one of coverage. I'm Rebecca Knight, your host, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Bipin Paracha. He is the co-founder and principal consultant of IntegRhythm. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Bipin. >> Thank you for having us. >> So let's just lay the scene for our viewers. Tell our viewers a little bit about what IntegRhythm does. >> So IntegRhythm started as a management advisory firm. We were teaching clients how to transform, fell in love with ServiceNow platform back in 2012, and since then, we love leaving behind working systems that drive outcomes for our clients. So we do a lot of transformative process organization, shared service transformations, things that leave behind business value for our clients. >> So a combination of tip of the spear consulting, and also implementation, is that correct or? >> So we change the tip of the spear, we kind of have tip of the spear in the implementation phase. So it is kind of baked into our methodology on how we drive outcomes for our clients. >> Dave: Oh, okay. >> So we don't charge our clients extra for consulting because we believe we get paid when we drive outcomes. >> Outcome-based incentives. >> Bipin: Yep, exactly. >> So your growth has been phenomenal, really, in recent years. So what's the magic? What are you doing? How has it been achievable? >> So one of the fundamental things that you've heard all along here, but what we also believe, is customer success. If you drive value for your customers, if you drive great value, they come back. Lot of people say that. Lot of people believe that. But we were fortunate enough to latch on to the comet's tail with ServiceNow early on. We were one of the few early partners. We saw the platform is amazing. It can do terrific things. And we've been able to drive the platform to do things for our customers, and that's helped propel our growth. As long as we stay true to that mission, we are keeping to grow. >> I want to ask you a question as a practitioner, somebody who really knows this space. ServiceNow obviously great for mid to large-size companies, trying to do anything related to a service request, customer service management, obviously ITSM, change management, problem management, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What's it not good at? It's not for small business. It's not CRM. It's not an HR app. So what's the profile of a company that you typically work with? >> So it is great for small businesses. We are a small business. We own ServiceNow. >> Dave: Really? We run our business on ServiceNow. >> Dave: Get out of here. >> For the right profile of a customer, it is beautiful. >> How many employees are you? >> We have 70 today. >> Dave: 70? >> 70. >> Dave: Oh, you really are a small business. >> And we are pretty small, but we still run our business on ServiceNow. It does more things than any other project management tool. It does more things than any other content management tool. We use CSM, we use PPM, we use everything. It drives value. >> Dave: Do you run your CRM at ServiceNow? >> We integrate with CRM. >> Dave: Okay. >> So we use the same CRM that ServiceNow uses, Hubspot. Our marketing, our website. >> Which is really marketing, I mean, ServiceNow is your backend CRM platform essentially. >> Yep. So our single view of our customer is ServiceNow. Anytime anybody touches us across a project, across an incident, across, we see them in ServiceNow. >> Wow, that's, I didn't realize that. I mean, is that common that a company of your size? >> It's actually not, so one of the big leg-ups we have is we are an implementation company, we are passionate, so we kind of get the free implementation. So our team goes gangbusters. >> Yeah, you're ServiceNow alpha geeks. You guys are really deep into this stuff. >> Yeah, they love what they're doing. We have to kind of slow them down sometimes. We got customers to deal with, go focus on customers. >> You are a passionate evangelist for ServiceNow. >> Oh yeah. >> What are you learning here at Knowledge? And this is not your first Knowledge, not your first rodeo. But are you talking with other customers and learning how they're using it, the platform? And then also being able to come back and take those best practices home? >> So we are a business, right, end of the day. So we get our clients here to ServiceNow, and when clients talk to the product company, product team, they learn a lot. When the product team talks with the clients, they learn a lot. But when clients talk to clients, magic happens. We've been a partner for other technologies, I won't name them, but ServiceNow is truly a customer-driven organization. I have never in my 20 plus years of experience run into a passionate customer base. Sometimes customers know how to sell ServiceNow better than ServiceNow themselves. So get a bunch of customers together, we win. >> In the early days when we started covering ServiceNow you would hear stories about making custom mods, making modifications, how that slowed people down, going into subsequent releases. I hear more often now, no custom mods, we avoid custom mods. What are you seeing? What are you preaching in the marketplace? >> So ServiceNow today is different from ServiceNow five years ago. >> Yeah, for sure. >> So we strongly believe you can go live out of the box. We actually had two presentations, a 2.5 billion dollar company, top 20 exporter in the U.S. Took them live in ServiceNow with zero customizations. Straight out of the box. Schooler, American Greetings, CSM out of the box. Our story is you're buying a Ferrari. Drive it around the block. Use what you use, and then figure out how you transform the organization. When you're buying ServiceNow, you get best practices. ServiceNow's already baked in industry best practices. If you are doing something, figure out where you're special, and pay attention to where you're special. >> When you think back to those customers five years ago that did a lot of custom modifications, how do you help them get off that technical debt? >> So we have a couple of programs that we run. So we've done back in the box for a couple of our accounts. Stand up a new ServiceNow instance, build up from scratch, migrate. Sounds easy, but we've done it a few times, so we know we can, we do. The other thing is, you can move in a phased approach. So HR has come up with a scoped app. It was two years. Move off the custom HR into scoped app. GRC, move into the scoped app. So you can migrate in phases. We've had like six major conversations today around how you roll back the stuff. So what customers built six years ago, ServiceNow delivers out of the box. >> Rebecca: Bipin, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It's been a pleasure having you. >> So thanks for having me here. It was fun hanging out. >> Dave: You're welcome. Good to meet you. >> The party is getting started, so, I think we've got to join them. It's our time now, exactly. >> Bipin: Alright, thank you. >> Yes, thank you, thank you. We will come back tomorrow with more from ServiceNow Knowledge18. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We'll see you back here tomorrow. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Dave Vellante. We have Deepak Bharadwaj joining us. He is the General Manager of HR Business Unit at ServiceNow. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Deepak. >> My pleasure, glad to be here. >> Good to see you again. >> Likewise. >> So we know that ServiceNow is expanding beyond IT, and HR is a huge business opportunity. Describe for our viewers how you view your role, and how you see HR in the modern organization. >> Yeah, that's a great question, so what we are trying to do, really, is help our customers' HR organizations provide their employees with what I call the Google Maps for their employee journey. So if you think about Google Maps, and what it has done in terms of the transformation of the travel journey, it provides you proactively with the guidance that you need as you make your way. And so if you think about the employee journey, it could be long in an organization, it could be short, but they all have these moments that matter, whether they are personal, whether they are professional. So when you think about personal moments, that could be birth of a baby, I changed my address, I got married, things like that. It could be professional. If I'm a manager, I want to promote someone. If I'm a new hire, I'm being onboarded. So how do we help guide these employees through each of these moments that matter in that journey? And why that's important is because that's when employees need their organization's support the most, and so, if you don't get that right, then it starts to have an impact on everything from productivity and engagement, and eventually that starts to impact customer satisfactions, right? So if you really think about happy employees equals happy customers, you can really bring it back to things like employment brand, productivity, engagement, and really where the rubber meets the road and where things could fall apart is during these moments that matter. So what we do is we help HR departments manage that, provide the proactive guidance to these employees, provide high touch help when they need it because not everything can be automated, right? You might order a Starbucks on your app, but sometimes you just want to go and walk up and talk to the barista. And so we want to make sure that we can provide flexibility to our customers in being able to manage how they interact, how employees interact with these HR departments and make them feel like they've got the peace of mind, get the emotion and the stress out of these moments that matter, and get them back into what they are doing best, which is their day-to-day job. >> You said that companies are investing in, you were talking about investing in employee, in customer success, but that's really about investing in employee success because happier employees lead to happier customers. >> Deepak: Absolutely. >> They're happier to come to work. >> Deepak: Yep. >> Do companies get it? Do companies get that? >> I think they do. They get it at a philosophical level, it makes sense. I think where companies struggle with is they are trying to figure out how do they make that linkage happen. And the reality is there's no silver bullet. It's not a, you fix this one thing over here, and that's going to make an impact. And so our approach is, while there may be many other things that you need to address, right? What we focus on really is making sure that we give this employee that guidance, that help, when they need it the most because we believe that that's where things could fall apart very easily. But, on the other hand, if you actually take care of them during those moments that matter, that represents a great opportunity to differentiate themselves and create what we call competitive differentiation, right? In fact, the topic of my keynote this morning was how employee experience creates competitive differentiation. And that's what we are here to enable. >> You guys talk a lot about the HR onboarding experience. You got to get a desk. You got to get a badge. You got to sign up on this portal, that portal, and it's just a slow and somewhat painful, not really productive period in an employee's life. When I think, and you and I talked about this at headquarters. When I think about how I interact with Netflix, and Fred Levy talks about this all the time, bringing that consumer experience to the enterprise. I don't talk to Netflix's sales department or marketing department or customer service department. I just interact with Netflix. I'd like to interact with HR the same way. I believe that's what you're trying to do. Is that a reality, can that happen in our lifetimes? Is it happening today? >> Absolutely, why not, right? We've got the technology, for sure. It is a very well-known pain point. Everybody knows this pain exists. I think where we are in terms of maturity of the market for these types of solutions is trying to figure out, well, who owns this problem. So this is a very distributed problem. It's across the enterprise. And anything across the enterprise, we at ServiceNow do very well. But a lot of times, it also means that we have to go and make the case, or help our champions make the case, with many departments. So, in this case, you need to get IT on board, and facilities on board. Obviously, HR has to be on board. And there's a number of departments that have to come together. And so we still have to figure out who owns this problem, who owns the budget, how are we planning to roll this out, can we do this in a phased manner. And that's where we are today in terms of its maturity, but at this point, we launched the product last year, right? We had customers that were creating bespoke solutions before that. We productized it, we launched Enterprise Onboarding and Transitions last year at Knowledge, in fact. And we've seen, we're starting to see, the early customers starting to implement, based again on the foundation of case and knowledge management. You know, start there, get your unstructured interactions more structured. And then eventually start to automate the things that are going to make that difference, especially when they start to cut across these multiple departments. >> I know we ask you this all the time, but for our viewers who aren't as familiar with what you guys are doing in HR, if I just brought in a Workday or a SuccessFactors, or I'm a PeopleSoft customer, why do I need ServiceNow? What do you guys do? We talked to John Donahoe about, you guys are a platform of platforms, but explain that, please. >> Sure, we absolutely, and maybe I'll go back to the Google Maps metaphor. The way I think about this is, you know in my mind, Workday, you can think about them as a highway system. You have to drive on them. Yes, it's got signage, and you need to know what exits to take, right? So, to me, Workday has a good user interface, if you will. But a lot of times what employees are looking for is, where do I go? Where do I begin? What's the policy? What's the process? And so that's where the Google Maps equivalent comes in. And these two go hand in hand. And they're extremely complementary. And you just cannot imagine going out there without a maps application these days. And in fact, my, where I feel that things have truly transformed is this is not just when I don't know the way to get somewhere. You're using this for every trip now. When I go home every day after work, I'm using Google Maps. Whether I know it or not, it turns on and it tells me, oh, you're headed home, and it's going to take you 35 minutes to get home. And I didn't ask it anything. But I'm using Google Maps every day for a route that is well-traveled because I know that if there is a traffic backup, it's going to let me know. >> Dave: Police ahead. (laughing) Or whatever. >> Yeah, and so I think that's where we are different from systems that are extremely important for, you know, managing our core data, core business processes, talent management, workforce management. I mean, there are systems that do that, do that very effectively, but we are really trying to provide that guidance, especially when what you're trying to get done involves multiple departments, and a number of times, multiple systems, even within HR. >> So when you're thinking about, when you're talking to customers, what are their, what are they telling you about their biggest pain points? And then what is your, if you have any sort of overarching advice for these HR practitioners, what is it? >> That's a good question. So, we engage with customers typically three different ways. They're all related, but typically our engagement starts off either because we are talking to someone that runs shared services, and what they're trying to do is bring order to how employees are interacting with HR. And typically they will go through some sort of organizational change. They'll setup a shared services organization, which basically means that becomes a single entry point for employees to go to, and, in that case, really, the pain point is too many unstructured interactions, and they may have no technology or they may have technology that is inadequate. And we bring a method to that madness, if you will. We help them structure those interactions and help them provide the right type of support to these employees. The other way we engage with customers is they're going through a full-blown HR transformation, and they've decided that technology is going to be a big piece of their transformation. And as they are looking to move everything to the cloud, for example, we start to talk about how the interaction aspect of employees still needs to be managed. And you cannot ignore that. You cannot just move your systems to the cloud and then just hope that employees will figure this out themselves, right? Because, again, it's not about the user interface, it's about the entire end-to-end experience. So that's the other pain point that we help solve for them, in the context of a cloud-based application or set of applications, how do you make sure that they know what they need to do. And then the third piece is, it's usually a CHRO type conversation, where they are really starting to make this association between happy customers means happy employees, and so they are trying to, they have several strategic initiatives then that are on a C Suite level, trying to find out, okay, what does that really mean, and they're trying to drive great employee experiences. And so they're working top down. As part of that, they may end up with a shared services set up to manage that. They may end up with moving systems to the cloud. But it's a different angle, and they are really thinking about the holistic end-to-end experience for that employee, and what they're going to feel, how does that impact employment brand, so kind of higher order benefits that they're trying to accomplish. But ultimately, we make the HR department much more effective and efficient, and we make it very, very easy for the employee. That's what we end up doing. >> You guys completed some research with chief human resource officers. >> Deepak: Yeah, the CHRO Point of View Study. >> 500, I think, in the study? >> Deepak: Yeah, absolutely. >> Tell us about the study, the findings, what'd you learn? >> Yeah, so this was a study that was done recently. 500 CHROs and HR leaders that we studied. I think the number one thing that popped out for me was that the CHROs are thinking of their role as not someone that is managing talent, management processes, and people data and things like that. That's obviously very important and that's been the focus. But as those disciplines mature, the technologies that manage that mature, what's happening is that they're focusing towards how to create these great experiences. How to leverage digital technologies and create what we call consumerized experiences, especially during these moments that matter. So when they are thinking about their employee population, they are looking at where do these breakdowns happen? This is where, you know, things are likely to snap, quite literally, right? Employees can get angry, frustrated, overwhelmed, stressed out. This is very, you know, intrinsic, you know, it's from the gut. And so, that's where your employment brand starts to take a dip, and that ends up on Glassdoor. That will end up with those employees speaking with a friend, and that starts to directly impact employment brand. So they're starting to focus on these moments that matter. And then I think what they're trying to do is also develop digital proficiency. One of the things that came out of the study is how can CHROs be the change agent when it comes to digital transformation so that this just doesn't have to come from IT. Doesn't have to come from a different line of business. HR can manage and guide their own destiny. Obviously, IT is going to be involved. But how can HR be more and more in the driver's seat, become more digitally proficient? And we see that in our customer base. We've got a number of customers where HR deployed ServiceNow first, and really set the bar for the other departments to follow. But ultimately, we absolutely believe that every department should be on the same platform because that's where you get the economies of scope, if you will, in terms of solutions to these problems. >> What can you tell us about your business? How are you guys doing? Couple years now since you've launched this product. How's it going? >> Well, it couldn't be better. As John mentioned in our earnings column last quarter, it was last month actually, we had six million dollar plus ACV deals, just for HR, right? And that's just in one quarter, so. That starts to show you how the business is really picking up. We have hundreds of customers now using us for HR. 80% of them are off our customer bases live. In fact, we had a customer in my keynote, they did a global rollout, and they took 14 weeks to complete that global rollout. So the time to value is extremely fast, and that's one of the things that really makes it, you know, a solution that our buyers are attracted to. But, you know, the business is doing very well. Lot of interest from organizations that are all sizes, really. You know, you look at thousand person organizations. We are selling to hundreds of thousand person organizations. We're selling globally, in all geographies. We are selling to all verticals. And, you know, it's just great to see the business take off. >> Rebecca: Great, well, Deepak, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much, and love being here. And thank you for having me. >> Dave: Awesome seeing you again, thanks. >> Rebecca: We can't wait to see you again next year. >> Likewise, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more just after this. (upbeat music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone to The Cube's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 2018, #Know18. I'm Rebecca Knight your host, along with my co-host Dave Vellante. We have two guests joining us, we have Mitch Kenfield who is an Advisory Principal CIO advisory at KPMG, And Adrian Hubbard, Service and Process Manager at Linklaters, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Adrian, I want to start with you. Can you describe for our viewers what was sort of happening, what was going on at Linklaters, sort of the inflection point when you realized you needed to step up your game in this arena, and just lay that our for our viewers. >> Yeah, I think, from Linklaters' point of view, we're very much, kind of, use the telephone more than anything else, it's very much a contact organization through voice. And we wanted to implement a platform that would engage the users in a different way, more to be self-serving, more chats, more routes to service, if you like. And we saw ServiceNow as the right tool for that. We did some due diligence, an RFP process, but that wasn't enough, we had to build a strong business case to make sure we were doing the right things. And that's where we kind of reached out to KPMG to see what they could offer us in this space. >> Talk more about your business, and-- >> So we're a global firm, we're kind of part of the magical circle, so there's four or five in that arena we call our strong peers. And yeah, as I say, fairness can be very challenging, their day themselves needs to be very efficient and very effective, and they don't always want to have to tell Serve. So one of our challenges is the more time they spend with us the less time they're billing their clients, which is obviously the revenue of the firm. But then when you've got 450 plus partners they all feel they want to run the firm in a way that perhaps is regional, office-based. So some of those challenges play into delivering service also. >> You talked about doing your due diligence, how did you go about that? What was the, what was your process? >> So we engaged with a consultancy firm to help us through the process. Through that, we worked out where do we want to get to, our vision. We short-listed some top-set firms, there was about three or four on the list that we knew met the requirement. So we then went through the process of the next layer down and series of workshops with each provider. Obviously, there was a cost model, we got supplier guys involved from a contract perspective, tried to get the best price. But I think deep down we always felt ServiceNow was the right fit for us. And I've been at Linklaters six years, when I first joined Linklaters that time ago, we went through the same process. We chose the different tool then, but ServiceNow was in the list and we really would have liked to have gone there six years ago. But I think ServiceNow have improved a lot during that time, and now was the right time for us to choose them. >> It was the one that got away, and now you've brought it back. >> Absolutely, yeah, yeah. >> So, Linklaters reached out to you, so then describe about, describe how you sort of shepherded them through the process? >> Yeah, so they had reached out in our London office, and I guess I had happened to be there and jumped on the phone with them, and first of all, when Adrian mentions about the culture of a law firm, so we are a consulting firm you know, consultants and tax and audit and finance folks, so we kind of understand that, it's kind of like the industry where everybody's the boss and nobody's the boss. So we jumped on the phone, and one thing that I mentioned as Adrian was describing, is that we see this space as an opportunity to truly change the way the technology business is running, and therefore change the ultimate business. >> Adrian: Yeah. >> And so, we tell our clients a lot, if you're just going to kind of implement, it might not be the right thing for you. But if you're ready to transform the way you run technology, and the way that supports the business, we think we can help, and we brought something to them that we call Powered IT, which I can give some details on, but just at the highest levels it's our view of an accelerated transformation that includes some technology components, but more than that includes operating models and process to say let's not reinvent things, let's bring to you what's good, and that way we can spend our time focusing on the specifics for you, to get you to the business result you're looking for, and that was kind of that first conversation we had. >> Sure. >> The word "agile transformation" is popping into my head. It's such a common theme today, but is it relevant to what we're talking about? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I'll start, Adrian, and maybe you can give your perspective on it. When we bring our view, and again, we call it Powered just as a tag, but really what it is, it's an acceleration. It's the components from an organizational aspect's process, metrics, supporting ServiceNow with some kind of near-the-box configurations to add in to that. And then, to your question, it's how do we deliver that in an agile way, where you see it constantly. We don't take six months before we show something, you're seeing it regularly and we can course correct and tweak to say we have a limited amount of effort we can spend, let's spend that in that agile methodology for things that transform you sooner and get it done. Would you, what was y'all's reaction? >> Yeah, to add to that, so what's really important for me is that we hadn't worked with KPMG before although, we were talking early doors, we didn't know what this Powered IT was, what it would bring us. So we made sure we had a number of kind of pre-sales workshops, where I could see the product and they've got a very strong environment where I could see exactly was I was going to get at the end, which is important for me because there's always a risky element, going in with a new incumbent, it was going to be success of this, or not, and I had to be sure that we did the right risk assessment. So actually, to be able to be provided with that kind of out-of-the-box experience, because often you go into sales call, or into the RFP process, and then you come out the back end of it and actually you see, actually getting what you saw in that sales demo. So it's important that we did that extra look. So I think we're able to see the end product, if you like, and then through talking with Mitch and the team and the UK guys, we then knew what the approach would be, very agile and quite aggressive as well. We delivered end-to-end in 14 weeks, which, considering that it took us from the old tool to ServiceNow, it took us from the old way of working to a new way of working on day one. We switched the old tool off on day one. There was a lot going on, it was... you know, we had to really stick to scope, as well, to manage mistake holders. >> I'm interested in how you managed risk, because that's the one thing that popped into my head. When you transform and your business processes are affected you know, you want to move fast, but there are dependencies. So how did you identify those, how did you guys manage the risks? >> I think, in terms of... We were quite strong on what our service improvement plans were looking like, we knew that we needed a new tool, we knew the tool would unlock it, but we didn't know is the extras that KPMG would bring through the Powered IT. So it's more than just the tool set itself, it's actually the processes and the policies. So because we're able to look at those day one, we knew what the end product was going to be. And plus we went with the preferred Powered IT platform. What we didn't try to do was to impose our current way of thinking. We took the KPMG way of thinking, which was the less risky approach, it meant that we weren't customizing, which was a big danger for us, potentially. So we also knew it was fully supported, because KPMG have put this Powered IT module together, built with other clients as well, so we knew we were adopting best practices from other clients. But actually it was fitting, the way we needed to get to from our vision. I think the thing that made me a little bit nervous was we'd been through a number of maturity assessments over the years that said our processes were quite mature. Where we were weak, really, was some of the reporting, the visibility of performance. So again, but they were kind of the key things from risk assessment, let's make sure the key things we could see working. And then we knew the risk was less. But, you know, as always, when you engage with a new incumbent for the first time, we had to make sure that we met the team as well, that was also a key part for us, to make sure the people we'd be working with, from day one, we met them at the beginning. And they stayed throughout. So that was also very good for us. >> So, Adrian, I'm curious about your particular experience, and then Mitch, I wonder if you could chime in on other clients that you might see. You always hear, "You got to have buy-in from the C-suite, top down." But when you go change the operating model, I often hear, the senior management goes, and then the rest of the company's like, "Well, we got to run the business," and they're trying to catch up. >> Yep. >> Is that a common problem? How do you guys deal with that? >> I think our senior team have been in place, they've been very supportive. There hasn't really been an issue there. And a lot of the senior team also supported the decision to go ServiceNow, which is important for me. I have to say, not all parts of the IT organization thought it was the right decision, but we had to demonstrate that as we went through, and the series of workshops was important, early doors. So we made sure we engaged the right stakeholders, they felt part of the whole solution end-to-end. And yes, people tried to push the scope at times, tried to scope creep, but actually senior management were very good and supportive of me to stick to scope. Stick to what we've agreed to do, help me push back certain people when they became challenging. And because we stuck to that scope, we delivered on-time. The fear would've been, as you know, you customize, you go off track-- >> I think what we see, to your analogy and I think your degree, you have to have that senior commitment. There can't be a question of why. But what breaks down often is that kind of next layer of key managers and stakeholders that maybe didn't show up to that meeting, and you know, didn't, you know... And those are the little things that can kind of take it off rail. And to your question earlier about agile, the great thing about a well-executed agile methodology is not about doing agile configuration it's about doing agile business transformation. It's about having regular interaction points where those stakeholders are involved in the process. And every day they're in those sessions and they're seeing something, and they get the chance, and we connect together. And that's what gets you to the end of it, to where instead of just in 14 weeks, we deployed a technology that kind of feels the same way we used to work. You deploy a technology and people are doing things different, and that's a key aspect. >> Dave: Lot of repetition. >> A lot of repetition. >> A lot of overcommunicating-- >> And we tell our clients a lot, it's going to be a rough 14 weeks, because you're going to be involved. This isn't the old-- >> Adrian: You didn't tell me that. >> Well (laughs). It's not where you're going to give me requirements we're going to go away and build something and hope we got it right and you're going to say, like you said, "That's not, wait, I thought I was going to get..." We're going to be in it and the teams are working collaboratively, stand up meetings, and all those kind of things. And it can be interesting, and for many of our clients, it changes the way they think about programs, right? >> So how's it going? I mean, what's the business impact been? >> It's been really positive. Of course, it talks for itself, it's really good. The fact that you've got 20 thousand people here kind of demonstrates that, but it is the industry platform, and there isn't anything that comes close to it, if we're being honest. But in terms of where we are now, we are gaining a lot of benefit from the dashboards, the reporting. We've still got to make sure the quality of data is good, of course, but actually visualizing our performance is really powerful. But we've also introduced new ways of interacting with our user base, so chat is a big thing for us. We now have a user pool to what we want to market out to the firm. So we're trying to get away from the telephone as the first point of contact, and move into other contact areas, like the portal. So that's the kind of areas that we need to kind of market outwards. But we're about three months in from go live. So we're now kind of looking back on some of the improvements already that we want to make, so looking at how we're using it, working with teams on using it better. So the improvement cycle is kicking in. And we've already made some minor improvements, and there will be more to come. >> So you avoided custom mods-- >> Yes. - Which is very important because the allure of custom modifications, it's so attractive, and then you know, you get technical debt and stuck with it. What have you learned, if you had a mulligan, would you choose anything differently? >> Yeah, it's an interesting point, because I think one of the things we could've done better already was the training. Because what was really powerful about Powered IT, there was training material, we had to kind of adapt that for our own change process, of course. Understanding our culture and how training with Linklaters, isn't necessarily the same as perhaps other technology firms, where they're expected to sell flurn. Very much the model at Linklaters is kind of classroom-led training, that tends to be our culture. And we perhaps didn't do enough of that before go live. So yes, everyone went live day one, they could log a ticket, but they couldn't unlock all the other benefits that we were really trying to deliver. So I guess that training's one of those areas that you could always overdo, but I think I would go back and arrange training earlier, make sure people know the training's coming, make sure their diaries are free as well, because we're all busy people. But I think, yeah, I think for now, I think we did a good job in the 14 weeks, but I'd come back and look at training again. >> And when was your go live? >> We went live on the 12th of February, this year. >> Oh okay, and single CMDB is the vision, or goal, or? >> Yeah, so we went live with the CMDB, we're now able to populate that out, and everyone knows that can be a pain point. So that's one of the kind of evolutions we're going through now, but as I said, we switched off the old tool on the day one, so we had to make sure the customer-facing processes were working, that we could may control changes, problem management could deal with issues that reoccur. So all of that was in place, but actually we've unlocked the power of the tool for visibility, managing the tasks across teams is quite big for us, as well. But that whole transparency of data has really improved the way we work. >> Rebecca: Great. >> I think one aspect, to play on your question, there are certain aspects of the platform in that transformation that you may not do all, but you need to design an architecture right the first time. So on the CMDB, you might not have it all the way populated, but if it's not architected with a good CMDB data model, it'll catch up later on, to your point. And so, a lot of, I think, that effort is a certain amount of time you have to show value, and then you lay that groundwork, you start improving, and then you make the decision of if and when do we expand into new things. When do we move into new areas, outside of the core, and those kind of things. >> For you know this, Mitch, too, and one of... I'm going to comment, maybe you could... You could give me your observations, early on in the ServiceNow, before the big ascendancy, a lot of mistakes were made, in terms of companies not standardizing, getting the CMDB architecture right, for a lot reasons, you had politics, people were trying to slide it in. And now you see a much more consistent vision around CMDB, how to architect it, single CMDB, one throat to choke, essentially. >> Yeah, I agree totally, and I think if you look at the ecosystem of what this all is, you have to level set on it, it was drastically different from a platform perspective, and three or four years ago to now. And to your point, I think there were a lot of relatively quick implementations, if you will. And again, quick implementation is okay, as long as it's architected and thought through for the long term, and I think we're seeing in the market some implementations that maybe made some short cuts, if you will, but to your point, the things that you got to get right, you got to get the CMDB and the data model, that layer, right. You got to get the employee experience right. You only get one chance to set an employee experience. If you underwhelm, then you've lost that audience, right? Then they're like, "Eh, well, yeah," you know? And you only get one chance to have some transformation, and it doesn't have to be going from crawling to, you know, sprinting, but if you go from crawling and it feels kind of the same way, you lose interest in expanding the capabilities. So I think that's, we've all, you know, the ecosystem has learned from that, and there are some things that you've got to get correct, and what we try to do with our clients is try to say, "Hey, let's not argue about those things, right, let's not start with a whiteboard and argue about the things that should be the same for Linklaters, that should be the same for anybody." Let's get that 80% where it's, let's focus on the things that are specific to you and not deal with that common stuff. >> Right, capture their attention right away. >> Absolutely. And we use a term internally, and sometimes with our clients too, everybody knows the 80/20 rule, right? You do 80% of it, you just should stop, it's not worth the effort. We switch that, we say 20% is what makes it work for you. We should just power through the 80% that should be the same for everybody else, and the 20% that makes it work for you. How do you deal with employee experience in a law firm, right, where everybody are knowledge workers, that have all, that's very different than employee experience in a, you know, industrial manufacturing firm, right? So that's what matters and what makes it transformational to a specific organization. >> And you're in Jakarta, or Kingston? >> We're on Jakarta-- >> Yeah, okay. - Yeah. >> Great. >> And again, because it's delivered through Powered IT, KPMG do a lot of the testing, once the new version's available, it's their offer to us in terms of making sure it's fit for purpose for their Powered IT platform. And as been said, it's the 20% that we've configured for Linklaters is what we need to test. >> So we're big believers, and John mentioned it this morning of only stay one behind at most. We're big believers in we should help our clients learn what's in the new upgrade, and how it applies to them. So we've heard this week, there's some great things coming out with London, some new things in the experience, and some automations, and so on. So our job is to bring that to our clients with Powered, and say, "Yep, we're ready, here's what's in it, and by the way, here's what they've advanced, and here's what you should look to add, and let's have that ready for you." >> So, you keep people, at worst, in minus one-- >> Correct. - Is really your objective-- >> And our general advice to clients, is if you need to go to N, if there's functional new capabilities that change your business, go to N right away. If it's more just add-ons, stay at N-1, learn from the others, and keep advancing, but never go later than that, absolutely. >> And but, ServiceNow will allow you to be N-2, right? >> They will. Going forward, they're going to keep you more to N-1-- >> Dave: Pushing you along, right? >> Exactly. So you want to save just one release back and you want to make sure, and again, to use that term I used earlier, as long as you stay near-to-the-box, you know, and out-of-the-box, if you turn it on, you need to add it, get it into your environment, you need tailor it, right? But there's a fine line between staying close to that and doing way too much, and over-configuring, not even customization, just making it to where it's really complex, and that's where we try to keep our clients away from. >> Do they still do cakes, you get a cake? >> Yes. >> Had a good one. >> Yeah, we had a really good one on go live. Yeah, it's actually on LinkedIn so yeah, go and have a look. >> A bunch of law books, it looks really smart. >> It looks really good. >> Yeah, it looked very good. >> And it tasted great, too. (laughing) >> That's important. Adrian, Mitch, thanks so much for coming on The Cube, we had a great time. >> Thank you both. >> You're welcome, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Vellante, we will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge18, coming up just after this. (music)