we're simulcasting SI piece a fire on SiliconANGLE too so check out that coverage as well My partner John furrier is down there with David floyer and Jeff Frick you could tweet us at d volante he's at Jeff Frick mark to Ludo is here he's the CEO of fruition partners a company that is a systems integrator and service provider that has essentially superglued itself to the ServiceNow platform at precisely the right time mark welcome to the cube thank you so you got to be excited your big sponsor of this event a lot of customers hear about them told about thirty percent of the the end customers are actually not currently service now users so big opportunity there so how's it going yeah it's going great fantastic I think this is our fifth year if your service just tremendous tremendous to see the growth right that we're seeing here I think we are now the size as a company of the entire user conference in 2009 you know we were walking around last night and we were struck by the the number of partners in the exhibit hall you can always judge a company by the strength of its ecosystem it seems to be you know growing so talk a little bit about fruition what you guys do what your specialty is and we'll get into it sure so we actually are a our primary focus is service now so our system integrator with service now we actually started as a process consulting company that when we saw a service now we realize there's a tremendous value of being able to deploy ServiceNow solutions really faster than anything else in the market of time and this is back in two thousand eight so we not only focus on the the system integration side but also that the process definition and I think you know a third element which is what you mentioned this all the other vendors that are here we actually create a lot of the connectors between service now and these other vendors so we're starting to create kind of a broader mash of solutions integrating those other third parties with service now so when you think about you know process right do you think about the big consulting firms their deep industry expertise IBM tuloy pwc Accenture and so what what point did you say I you know but rather than take those guys head on in their wheelhouse we see this trend toward IT Service Management and the cloud and service now how did you make that decision take us through that sure actually and my background was with those larger firms all right so I kind of knew how they operated we kind of found ourselves when I till years ago a decade ago really seeing that that's the discipline that I t really needed to manage itself but we saw the the software is lagging so far behind in the ability to actually deliver what customers needed so we try to do is be very iterative so when we do process definition we don't think about it for a year we actually think about it for a couple months we have some improvement solutions but we really leverage service now to kind of help iterate that organizational change much faster than we could with any other tool so I'm by no means an ITIL expert but I've certainly worked with a lot of clients that passionate about ITIL and what they say is it's a great framework but to actually implement it you know you got to do some right heavy lifting you've got to have you know the right tool sets so how does a service now sort of bring that to life and what role does fruition play in making that real great day by the way fruition how do you bring that all the pressure man yeah sure so there's really two approaches we always go into a customer and saying you know I till it can be complicated but at the same time you're already doing I tell in many different ways you just don't call it that you might not have the rigor of the discipline so what we're able to do is kind of define those processes lightly and kind of use what a customer is already doing to actually translate that into service now and then we do kind of multiple releases on the same process so the customer kind of grows in the maturity of adopting the process with the technology so let's go through an example of that mark you're saying it's cut many customers most are already doing I tell they just don't know it or they don't call it that let's go through a simple example sure so a lot of people would say they change management is a good example where people know that it's good to talk to other people about the changes they're about to make but the level of formality and rigor with in change management varies widely so you may have some customers that you know maybe within five or ten people they might understand what they're about to change and they just kind of talk to each other randomly as that gets larger and more complicated they need more formal approvals when that gets even larger and more complicated they need to know what systems they're about to change what business cycles month end close for payroll they need to understand much more than just the technology side they need to understand the business side but customers can iterate through that maturity and they're not always ready to go and think about it for a year until they get to that that other layer because they're doing this week by week so that's kind of an example of how we mature eventually mature the process then that process gets integrated with another process so that was change integrated with asset and eventually we integrate it with incident so we kind of take what they have today we refine it and then we use service now to automate it and provide some visibility and metrics to it and then integrate it with other process so I'm imagine a customer's uh okay mark I hear you and I'm kind of skeptical we're we're a really complicated organization like you know maybe if we're just talking about our IT infrastructure at headquarters I can believe you but you know we've got a big complex application portfolio and it connects to these business processes and we want to go global with this how are you going to help me scale to that level and actually succeed so that I don't you know fall flat on my face you know two years down the road I think a lot of customers they've actually been trying to solve these problems over the years so you'll find just a good example on one customer global i should say north america they're managing 60,000 desktops and they were doing it on a hundred different spreadsheets so the data existed they already they knew the pain point they were having they just didn't have a way to consolidate the information they weren't even using tabs in this bridge yeah okay okay but so take so take me through that so how do we mature an organization like that so we're actually going to go in and basically find what data they're actually capturing we're going to find all the one-off tools and the tools are abundant IT people are great at just making up their own solutions right access database SharePoint side note spreadsheet whatever it is a fool with the tool as they say exactly so we keep finding all of these but in the end they're all trying to solve the same problem so what we're able to do is come in kind of do that discovery and see how big this problem is but in the end we then consolidated into one framework really consolidating it back into service now so some of the challenges really just letting people that they'll let go of that spreadsheet right or that access database that they had built over time when they finally let go of it we can finally consolidate the data then they see why it's much more relevant to have it in a single place than in 60 separate spreadsheet so an eye area i mean i think you're right you get this collection of tools and i've always felt like the the value that the software delivers is a function of its usage and also the productivity of the individual as they're using it so you sometimes get a tool that's not very good people have to use it and it's hard to use but so talk about the the usage profile and how you know it permeates your organization and that's one thing we've seen is with service now because the user interface is so simple and lightweight and is built on essentially web technologies and people are you never got trained on the internet right I mean you just kind of its intuitive from how you look at it and therefore the adoption is much simpler it's the the right clicking the views the reports because it's easier to use they then want to use it more rather than the resistance of using a tool that they don't quite understand they don't know how to navigate so then they create 60 spreadsheets but if it's easy to use and they enjoy using it the adoption really grows much faster so kind of we go back you know 10 or 10 years or so there was a big discussion and big name in the industry around business value CIOs were sort of struggling to sort of describe and quantify the value that I t brought to the business budgets were getting cut and so in many ways I think you're in the value business can you talk about I T value how it flows to the organization how you're helping customers realize the value that they bring to the shirts and there's a lot of reasons why people do an IT service management initiative some of it and that value it's not always the hard dollars you can't always naturally equate because we did this we save this much money you can sometimes if you were saving out hardware if you're saving on software but there's other other elements of efficiency with nit the customer interface between the business buyer and IT itself what that relationship is like so a lot of different things drive it it could be cost it could be internal efficiency it could be the relationship that the IT has with the business units all of these are actually you know very valuable for the relationship that I t has with the business it doesn't always necessarily equate to a hard or soft dollar yeah so I think I can I kind of look at it as I agree a value definitely can come from hard dollars and that that's kind of the easy one okay I'm going to do this and the save some money the the harder pieces to articulate and quantify are actually the much more valuable ones that particularly you know we heard Frank talk about the degree to which I t is embedded within the IT ness of the business so if you think about things like agility the speed do what you can deploy new applications or or fix problems and and the other is the stuffs got to be up if it goes down I lose productivity and I guess there's a risk element of that of that to talk about metrics how are metrics evolving and what do you see when you actually put you know have a successful implementation of service now within an organization what happens to the metric side how do they get shared what are the metrics how do they could share what are the KPIs people are focusing on I think the first thing that we see is that once we start to consolidate these different systems they can actually see in aggregate what's happening so 60 different spreadsheets it's hard to create a metric or dashboard from 60 disparate spreadsheets right so once it's finally within one system they can actually see what what sometimes the metrics are what do we actually own we've surprised we've surprised CIOs by saying you have 12,000 employees but you have 16,000 desktops and they just they just never knew before so that that's one element the other element so operational efficiency once in tracking changes for example now that there's this transparency we call it the fog of IT when everyone's kind of working their own silos in their own workflow without any real SLA is you don't really know what's working well or not but now when you're in a platform like service now and everyone's entering the work that they're doing well now we can see well how long did it take me to do that how much lead time did a particular Department give me to make that change how many changes actually caused system outages they didn't have that information before it maybe they had it in 10 different systems we've been at clients that actually hired people full time just to consolidate data from eight different systems to try to make something of it but now that it's actually in one system we can see you mentioned SLA for service level agreements we can see how many people are working on particular issues how many changes how many assets well how they all relate to each other so I think there's the massive benefit really as being in one system and being able to see in aggregate what is everyone's doing so I feel like we're still in the early days of realizing the potential for this type of platform because I mean to me this is basic blocking and tackling that we're talking about so let's say we get that down what gets more exciting to me is ok now as a business person how can i leverage this information to make decisions about where I should prioritize my investments I want to look at my my investments as a portfolio I got limited resources and I can look at these metrics and say ok if i invest over here I can drive some other metric and it's going to add business value are you starting to have those conversations with customers lonely started a little bit the evolution of even with service now kind of beyond the help desk as you start to talk about the services that I t is actually providing the business well those services are actually a combination of there's of course the hardware layer right what's my total cost of assets there's a software layer in the licensing that goes on top of it but let's not forget the operational layer that surrounds it so how many people did it take to implement that change how many people does it take to support that how many end users are there that are actually working on this so with a platform like service now you can actually see the total cost because it's actually all wrapped around a service ok so you see the total cost what about the value piece I want to I want to keep coming down that just because I really do think you're in the value business and and being able to realize that value is a function of our getting the cost right making sure that that's efficient but but actually placing my bets in a way that's going to drive the objectives of my organization now that's not necessarily it's not really the main focus of IT but it is the main focus of business and you're talking about forging a partnership with the business so so how are those conversations how do you see those evolving over time sure well now we can actually go to the business owner so once we've defined those services and we define the hardware the software the operational costs and this is something I t never had so we're now able to do is go to the business service owners because that that service isn't something that I t just thought up it was actually for a business unit for a particular business owner so we see those conversations where we find go to the business service owner and they'd never seen any data from IT before about this they because they really didn't know the cost right oh that's what you do I didn't know that constant this project that I'm suggesting is going to cost this much more so finally there is a conversation around metrics to be able to say well this is the cost this is the operational efficiency this is your impact on our IT department those conversations never happen before it was kind of gut reaction and they kind of felt like something was working or not working but now we're actually going with those operational metrics well to it must arm the the IT organization to basically say okay look yeah there's the capex but then there's this ongoing cost we're going to eat over the next five to seven years what's the value of that that that's bringing to the business versus maybe putting that resource elsewhere a lot of times i t just ends up owning that right that's part of the reason why we're in the set was talked about the seventy thirty you know seventy percent is keeping the lights on thirty percent his new innovation and that's why that's why you get all this sort of complaints about it2 sucking all the resources out so how has that dynamic changed in successful implementations of service now are you seeing that 7030 flip are you seeing sort of a different mindset with injuries you know what what I've seen is that as organizations mature as we go through those layers as I was mentioning once they can see the data now they're actually working on the right problems I think before they were just working on maybe the biggest the biggest outage maybe a department or division that seem to complain a lot you will exactly so they'll just management by squeaky wheel and a little gut reaction and now that they see the metrics they can see where the issue actually is so now they're targeting their effort well it's interesting it's still for some customers we've been with we've been with some customers for nine ten years it still feels like a state of chaos but they're fixing the right problems whereas before they were kind of fixing squeaky wheels without realizing the engine was completely broke so they're using those metrics to really target their efforts versus just kind of manage complaints now do you guys actually develop apps on top of service now if you talk about that a little bitter extensively so we we have an entire platform as a service group that actually a lot of customers are understanding that service now that's a platform if it already has the database it already has the workflow in jit has a reporting engine has security but more importantly it has all the data about your business I have all my business services potentially I know all my buildings and all my users I know my organizational structure so when that date is there and the tool sets there and I T is very familiar with how to use this platform as the business says hey I'd like to have another HR case management tool I'd like you to maybe we'll get a different field services tool IT SEZ wait a second let's not get another tool we already have all this data and we can already manage it with a team we already have the beauty of service now be on one platform is to add another application your system administrators don't have to learn anything new because it's the same that's the same rules it's the same scripting it's the same platform so we we've built HR case management tools we've built actually this morning coca-cola went through there a third-party access vendor management we built that globally for them we've built logistics applications for armored truck management it's kind of all over the board it's the creativity with nit finally being unleashed with an actual platform that they're familiar with and not just a series of spreadsheets so I'll give you the last word we got it we got to go but just on fruition what's your vision for the company where do you want to take it sure so really our vision is around cloud service management I think we've seen with IT Service Management helping an IT department mature to a steadier state but the disciplines around ITIL how a manage workflow planned workflow unplanned workflow on assets the disciplines of service management are broadly applicable to on HR department to a call center there are a lot of other areas within the business that actually need those that process discipline so we're actually taking cloud service management the disciplines we learned with an IT on service now taking them to the rest of the business units and actually automating within the service now planning well I think you guys got a lot of runway how do you mark to Ludo CEO of fruition partners and gradual ations on your success to date and good choice hitching your wagon to service now and good luck in the future thank you very much all right keep it right there buddy this is the cube this is Dave vellante we'll be right back with our next guest we're live at knowledge here in Las Vegas the ServiceNow user conference right back after this word