>> 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, #Know18 we are theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We are joined by Dan Rogers. He is the CMO of ServiceNow. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE Dan. >> Thanks for inviting me. I always have a great conversation with you guys. >> Yeah, you're, you're back, you're back. So, this conference is amazing. There's so much buzz happening. 18,000 people. It gets bigger and better every year. >> How ironic, 18,000, K18. >> You got it. >> Oh my gosh. >> Well done. >> I didn't even, you did it you must've done it that's marketing genius, genius Dan. >> We might bend the curve next year though. We might bend the curve a little bit more. >> So, so what it, what in your opinion is the most sort of knew exciting things happening? >> Well you know we start the planning process as you can imagine, about six months prior. And we're really super focused this year on customer success. So, one of our principles was it's all about our customers, it's all for our customers. You probably know, unlike any other conference, most of the sessions are delivered by customers. So we have 85% of our breakouts are delivered by customers. So this is really our customers' event. And in the background here, you know we've created this customer success zone, which is where I've taken all the best practices from our customers and we're sharing that and you'll see we've got Genius Lounge, customer success clinics, customer theaters, and the whole vibe is supposed to be helping our customers be more successful. In some ways it's the anti-marketing conference. This isn't buy more stuff, this is we want to help you be successful. And so we wanted to keep the authenticity throughout. The keynotes were celebrating people, celebrating our users how users can use our products. The experiences that they can have. So I think that was the principle. Hopefully we pulled it off. >> So I wonder if you could talk about some of the challenges you have from a marketing standpoint. So let me just set it up. So, in the keynote this morning, if you didn't see it ServiceNow had kind of a fun little play on words where they had cave people in the cave trying to light a fire. We all know that, right? Light a fire under somebody's butt. And then fast forward to today's world and there's this thing called the saber tooth virus coming and so that was kind of really fun. And it explained things, you know, it resonated, I think, with a lot of people. But as you enter this new world beyond IT, I mean 2013, 5% of your business was outside of IT. You know, today it's you know, a third of your business. So you're reaching a new audience now. How do you handle sort of the marketing and messaging of that hybrid approach? That must've been a challenge for you. >> Well, you know I'm a story teller I love kind of starting with the stories. And, talking with our product leaders, the story that we're most deeply connected to really for our product road map is around experiences. So we knew this needed to be a conference about experiences. And we wanted to put a marker down that says this is the era of great experiences. You deserve great experiences at work. It really is the case that certainly when millennials come in to work they have expectations of what the work experience looks like and they arrive and it's like, wah, wah, wah, wah, No you can't, just swipe your finger, No, you have to stand in line. No you, yes, we really use telephones still, you know. And, chat experience isn't really what it ought to be. So we kind of said we're putting a marker down at this conference to say, Welcome to the Era of Great Experiences. You deserve great experiences, and we're going to create that. And if you look at our entire product roadmap, we're trying to create great experiences at work. CJ talked about the Now platform. He said there are three layers to the Now platform. The Now platform has user experiences. That's really how people want to interact with our, our products, how they want to interact with the world. Great service experiences that's all the stuff that's happening in the background. Customers, employees, they just want to touch their phone, the 20 things that happened behind, they need to be obstercated. And then, service intelligence. This idea of prediction. Now these things are not new in the consumer world, but they're very new in the enterprise world. Take the consumer world. You think about Uber, you think about OpenTable, they spend a lot of time on the user experience. Think about the service experience of something like Amazon. Amazon, you touch, you swipe, you click and they're orchestrating hundreds of processes on the, behind the scenes. And then service intelligence. Netflix is a great example. Stuff's predicting for you stuff's being recommended for you. Where are the recommendations at work? Where's the predictions at work? Where's the prioritization that's happening at work? And we've sort of said, that's what our Now platform is all about. It's about delivering those three great things that we think go into making great experiences at work. And that's what the show's about. And therefore, you see the people's centricity of the show. CJ celebrated four personas. He talked about the personas and their life. The IT topic, you know it's happening in a couple hours. We're going to talk about people. Real people and their lives, and how it's making it better. And that all rolls back to the central idea that we believe that technology should be in the service of people. Making work, work better for you. >> So that's the main spring. Love it, go ahead. >> No, I was just going to ask you, you were describing the millennial, or the post-millennial entering the workforce and this, wah, wah, wah, feeling of no it's not like that here, you got to, there's a lot of, onerous administrative tasks that you've got to do. So is that what's driving this, this change, this moment that you're saying that we're at this, this point in time where employees are demanding better and demanding more from their workplace. I mean, is that what's driving the change in your opinion? >> I think we have just this confluence of technologies around AI, around machine learning and a lot of the services being delivered by Cloud platforms. And then we have this contrast between people's work life and their home life. I have a nine-year-old son. I'll share a little experience with him. So he uses things like Khan Academy. Khan Academy, he uses his finger to write the answers and that gets converted into text. Well now when he tries to interact with any application, he's trying to use his finger and he's wondering, why you guys all using keyboards? What is this keyboard thing? And you know, and then when he interacts with any application, TV screen, he's trying to swipe on the TV screen. He can't understand why he can't swipe on the TV screen to get to the next show to the next channel. I look at that, and I'm like, it's so obvious this is where we're going, this is, this next generation, they want to interact with their applications in a very different way. And we need to get to that in the Enterprise. And we want to be first to get there in Enterprise. The acquisitions that we've made five acquisitions that we've made in the last nine months or year. I was actually just walking with some of the guys that, you know from Boas, from SkyGiraffe. SkyGiraffe, DxContinuum, Parlor, Parlo. And these are just kind of adding to our ability to create the experiences that we deserve, opposite all of those technologies, so you can just get your work done, get your work done. Get to the actions that you need. John I thought did an amazing job of explaining what it takes to create great experiences. And he had this, what I call the UX iceberg. This idea that, appearances are on the top, Anyone can make an app, mobile app that has great appearances. Just put nice skin on there, nice colors on it. But the hard work happens below the water line, which is where you think about the behaviors. How do people actually want to work? And we've filmed people, we've watched people, in their daily lives how they want to work. Go down a layer, the relationships who do they need to work with? Who do they interact with? And then, the work flows, what are the systems they need to interact with. And when we think about their entire paradigm of UX experience and then design from that paradigm, we end up not just with a pretty skin, we end up with actually something that fundamentally changes the way you get your work done, and that's what we're going after. >> So I've kind of resigned myself to the fact that I'm not going to be a ServiceNow customer anytime soon. When Jeff and I first saw it in like 2013, we were like, we want this. It's not designed for 50 person companies like ours. Okay, I can live with that. You guys aspire to be the next great Enterprise software company. As a marketing executive, you got to kind of be in Heaven, right now, because now, you and I have talked about this, I don't have the marketing gene, I find marketing very challenging, but for someone who has that marketing gene, if I compare you to, the great software companies in the Enterprise, it's Oracle, it's SAP, it's Sales Force. Our HR system, our provider, it's Oracle, it's clunky. We use Sales Force, it's Oracle, right? I don't use SAP. I don't want to use SAP. Okay, so laying down the gauntlet on experience is I think brilliant because you're living in a sea of mediocrity when it comes to experience. Now, you have to stay ahead of the game. Acquisitions are one way to do that. But how does that all play in to your marketing. >> You know, it actually starts with purpose. So we, about nine months ago began a journey to, I'd say get to the essence of our purpose. We talked to all of our employees, went on road shows around the world, Talked to our customers around the world. And we kind of said, both what do we actually do for you, what do you want us to do for you, and we grounded ourself in this central idea we make the world of work work better for people. It turns out, that is a rallying cry a firing signal for everything we do as a company. So when I think of marketing, marketing is about bringing that promise through our brand expression to life. We make the world of work, work better for people. That's a bar, a standard. This conference needs to feel like it's making work, work better for people. This conference needs to exude humanity and their experiences. This isn't a technology conference. You see the thing behind you, very deliberately. We're celebrating people, people's lives, people's work lives, so I think of the connection between our purpose and marketing. It's the standard, it's the bar for us. My website, which we refreshed in time for Knowledge, is no longer a taxonomy of products. It's talking about people, their lives, how we make their experiences better. So I think of it as this show, our keynotes, very deliberately focusing on those personas. I think of it as a watermark that kind of says make everything true to your purpose. It's also a watermark for our products. It's a litmus test for our products. Is this product ready to ship yet? Does it make the world of work work better for people? Yes, no? Yes, let's ship it. No, let's not. It's the litmus test for our sales engagements. Are you talking about how you're making experiences better for people? Or are you talking about some other abstract concept? You talking just about cost savings, you're talking about, if you're not talking about experiences, you're not living our purpose. So, it's going to exude through everything that we do. I think it's a really foundational idea for us. >> It's powerful when a brand can align its sales, its marketing, and its product and its delivery, you know to the customer. >> And the timing too just because we were really at low unemployment, we have this war for talent, particularly in technology but in other industries as well where employees are saying what can I do to attract and retain the best people. Make, make their work lives easier, more fun, more intuitive, simpler. >> I always joke that, you know, there's something that's written on a job description. And if you read the job description, You're like, yeah, I want to do that. I get to lead this thing, drive this thing, duh de tuh. The job description doesn't say, oh and by the way, you're going to spend 2.4% of your time filling in forms and you're going to spend 1.8% of your time handling manual IT requests. 4.2% of your time, you're going to, if it did, you wouldn't take the job. So we actually deserve the jobs just on our job description. And that's kind of what I think is that, you know, where we need to get to with work. >> Right, right, exactly. >> So what have we got goin' the rest of, of K18 here? You got a big show, I think Thursday night, you got the customer appreciation. What else is going on here that we should know about? >> Well the way we structure the event is we have these general session keynotes. And you can kind of think of it as John is explaining a lot about why we're doing what we're doing. CJ's explaining a lot about what are we doing. What have we been doing? What's our innovation road map look like? And then Pat Casey's going to pick up on how. How can you build those experiences that CJ's previewed, that fell into the reason why we're doing the things that CJ previewed. So there's kind of a method to the madness to the, to the three days as it were. And then below that, we have these things called topic keynotes, and as you remember we have these five Cloud services now. Of course HR, customer service, security operations, IT, and then really intelligent apps allowing me to build those up. So you have topic keynotes across each of those five Cloud services. And then beyond that, it's really the customer, customer breakouts. Interspersed amongst that is your ability to go along and have a session or success clinic in this customer success area. Or go into the Genius Lounge. Drop by the pavilion, have demos of our products. So those are some of the really, kind of exciting structural things we have around the conference. And then on Thursday night, you know, we wanted to go bigger and better than ever before, and we call it Vegas Nights. So Thursday night, instead of having, you know, the band, you know, of yesteryear, which many conferences, kind of love to do, we decided to have this kind of experiential thing. You can go and see Cirque De Soleil. You can go to the Tower Night Club. You can go to Topgolf. So there's a little menu you can choose from. We've actually reserved the Cirque De Soleil for the whole night so they're running multiple performances just for ServiceNow customers, which is pretty fun. >> So tailored to the individual. Whatever you want to do. Whatever will make your life better. >> That's the idea. Just drop it in, put it in your agenda and you're good to go. >> I love it. Well Dan, thanks so much for coming on the show. It was great to have you. >> Thank you, I enjoyed the discussion. >> Good to see ya again. >> Good to see you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18 coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat music)