[Music] [Music] okay we're back after that nice break here from knowledge we're here in Las Vegas at the Aria hotel this is service now's big customer conference about 4,000 folks here mostly customers most of the content at this event comes from customers its practitioners talking to practitioners which is quite rare actually at these conferences I'm Dave Volante everybody thanks for watching with wiki Bond org I'm here with my co-host Jeff Frick this is Silicon angles the cube we go to these events we extract the signal from the noise we love to bring you tech athletes and Fred ludie is here he is a tech athlete he's the founder of ServiceNow he started this platform around 2003 Fred welcome to the cube thank you very much so we really want to hear the story you know but we've been asked to sort of hold that off because we got another segment with you tomorrow but I just I have to ask you I mean seeing how this conference and ServiceNow as an organization has grown you just must be so thrilled in particular with the customer enthusiasm <Fred>  you know fundamentally I've got a personality flaw and I call it a kindergarten mentality I want to see my art on their refrigerator and the only way you can do that is by making somebody happy and so to see these people here with the excitement the enthusiasm and the smiles on their faces really is satisfying that kindergarten mentality cakes oh good stuff we were talking about that earlier Jeff had not seen the cakes before and was was quite amazed today no I think that's an industry-first actually good well be yeah announcements today you know that's if so you guys had some you're gonna transform an organization you got to have mobile I mean the whole world to go on mobile five billion devices and and growing what you guys announced today <Fred> well we announced the ability to run all of our applications on the iPad and you know I think people's reasonable expectations these days are that they should be able to manage anything anywhere anytime using the device that they currently have now I I like to think of an iPad as something that you use when you're pretending to be attending a meeting or when you're pretending to be watching TV with your family and when you are pretending to do that it'd be nice if very efficiently and very effectively you could manage whatever you needed to manage to get your job done and so today what we've announced is the ability to run everything that ServiceNow has on that iPad  <Dave> yeah I mean it seems to mobile is basically a fundamental delivery model and maybe even the main delivery model going forward wouldn't it be I <Fred> I think it will be a main delivery model and it's a it's a user interface that that requires complete rethinking about how you're going to do things you know for the longest time we we looked at screens with 24 by 80s you know these character screens and then we got big pixel monitors and then we got bigger pixeled monitors and we got very accurate Mouse's and everything got small and got hovers you've got you know this massive amount of data and now the form factor is completely shrunk and you're looking at this as my major input device so how am I going to get you know everything I used to do with a mouse where I'm hovering over things to see what they do or I'm touching you know 16 by 16 pixels which you by the way you can't hit with your fingernail how am I going to get all of that stuff how am I gonna be able to work with all that stuff using only my thumb or thumbs so how are you specifically taking advantage of that smaller form factor and you know the feature sets that you see in things like iPad <Fred> well I think it's a matter of rethinking so we're trying to get the user to be to be able to accomplish their task by doing considerably less work and one of the things that our system is actually very comprehensive it's very big and we create in the browser and our first user interface it was really created in 2005 we treat all the elements of the system equally so now what we've done in the in the mobile which I think is very unique it does MySpace I mean Facebook doesn't have this Lincoln doesn't have this we know exactly what you do as a user and we remember those things that you do edit of Li and so we're able to create shortcuts or we're able to remember the system is able to remember what you do and then very quickly present you back with those tasks which are repetitive so we're trying to simultaneously compress the information and reduce the interactions yeah so that doesn't sound trivial it sounds like there's some secret sauce behind that talk about that a little bit <Fred> well it's not trivial and it's a there there is secret sauce but it does it just requires you to rethink and for me you know if you if you read the jobs biography there were a couple of interesting things in their number one when he met dr. land they had both agreed that everything that had been invented was going to be invented had already been invented right the other thing that they that they pretty much agreed on are what job said and a quote that I've used for years is that great artists copy good artists copy and great artists steal and I've been a thief all my life I just I'm gonna admit it right here it's not on camera live and so what we do is we go ahead and take a look at who's doing this great Amazon is doing it great Zappos is doing it great asan is doing it great you know we and we capture those ideas and then what they meant by great artists steal is that you take them and you reformulate them for the task that you're trying to solve for the problem that you're trying to solve and the rich the artist won't they probably the original artist probably won't even recognize that as their work but yet they're they're deeply inspirational to us an artist so do you fancy yourself as a bit of  <Fred> well I think it's interesting  down down the road and you know to I was watching the Bellagio fountains create something like that if you think about the physics and the art that had to go into that to create that beautiful masterpiece you know it's not just a painting right think about the physics that goes on to shoot something seven its water seven hundred feet in the air and then cut it off instantly and have that all choreographed I mean it's phenomenal amount of engineering but it took also a phenomenal amount of art just to make that interesting so that we were we actually stood there in rapt amazement of you know look how all this is choreographed so yes I do in fact I don't think I take exception to the term engineering software engineering I don't think we haven't progressed to the point where this is an engineering this is this is an art this is a craft you know it's something that people practice and we try to get better at it and better at it and better at it but I don't think it's anywhere near an engineering discipline <Jeff> yeah the other interesting from the jobs book that I never really got until I read the book was like the iPod shuffle because when I first saw the iPod shuffle and you can't do anything you can't manage your playlists on it you all you can do is change songs I don't get it and then in reading the book as you just said you know what is what is it you're trying to accomplish with that form factor right and don't just automatically try to replicate what you can do a one form factor to another form factor but really rethink what's that application and it sounds like you're kind of taking advantage of that opportunity as you take the app to the mobile space into the iPad specifically to rethink what is the best use case for that platform you'll see tomorrow the iPad was really  <Fred> that's right and as as the inspirational first step that we're taking toward a totally mobile app and just like the Apple evolution of building all of this note wonderful new capabilities into iOS and then bringing them back into OS X we're going to be doing the same thing so you'll see tomorrow on stage not only in an iPad app but you will see a native iOS app running and you'll see that it does even more things than the iPad app does and much faster it's a wonderful user experience and those those notions will be also coming back into the browser etc the same way that apples been bringing a lot of the capabilities of iOS back onto OS X <Dave> I was talking to an IT practitioner last month at a large grocer and I asked him what's your what's your biggest challenge what excites you the most and he said the same thing he said both of X what's my biggest challenge is embracing all this pressure from my users for mobile and that's what excites me the most because I have a mobile addict I got in it pulls out all those devices so how do you see this announcement within your user base changing you know the lives of IT  prose.    <Fred> well it'll you know technology since the dawn of time has been used really for two things it's been it's been used to streamline make make tasks more efficient and more streamlined and it's been used to create business differentiators and so our our product really is about process and moving process through an organization and so we want to streamline that as much as possible so if I can we do things like change management change management has multiple levels of approval if I can get it to the point where a manager can pull his phone out of his pocket and do five approvals between meetings he's become significantly more efficient right the changes are going to be done in a more timely fashion and the bottom line improves it's as simple as that <Dave> yeah it's interesting we were those of you watching no we were earlier the today broadcasting from sa P sapphire event and if you go to sapphire are you here to to get huge doses of two things one is Hana of course which is there in memory database but the other is mobile he's all you hear and it's interesting to hear you guys talk about the ERP of IT and your si PE they know the poster child for ERP and all their customers are going to mobile whether it's retail manufacturing you know across the supply chain and so it sounds like you've got sort of similar mentality but more focused obviously with it within IT but of course now you're also reaching beyond IT do you see you're a mobile app a push going beyond the IT community <Fred> yeah absolutely you know our underlying all of our applications we have a platform that say it's a forms based workflow platform that's really purpose-built for something that we would characterize as a service service relationship management so pretty much any request response fulfillment type workflow can be handled by our platform and what our customers have done over the years is create different applications that help them streamline that workflow typically that workflow is handled by by people creating a spreadsheet emailing it to somebody else having a TA back perhaps they built a Lotus Notes app but yes everything that that that or I will say that our platform usage has been expanded by our customers sometimes beyond our wildest dreams and and we love it so you talked about you know some of the greatest artists we stole rights of and so now you guys put up this platform I've said a number of times today it's not trivial to it to actually get a CMDB working in the way that you wanted to get it to work so now you've had this platform out for quite some time your successes started to you know you get a lot of press people are starting to see it do you worry sometimes that people gonna say okay I can do that too I'm gonna I'm gonna you know rip it off what gives you confidence that you can stay ahead of those those thieves out there <Fred> well I have great confidence in that you know we have a very broad base of applications that are very deep in functionality but if that's really something that you want to happen yeah because you want some young people with fresh new ideas to try to unseat you because they will come at the come at this from a completely different perspective and a completely different angle and they will do things that you never thought of and so the race is then on are they going to become more relevant than me or am I going to be inspired by their ideas incorporate them into our platform and stay ahead of them see welcome that all right absolutely welcome back yeah we we wouldn't be where we are today if Edison and Bell weren't weren't the jobs and gates of their time I mean they had just and I think jobs and gates as well right they had this great rivalry that really caused technology to move ahead a lot faster than when it was just I be am selling mainframes and so you need those rivalries you need that you need that competition you know I'm I'm watching these young guys from asana it's a great little platform for for tasking and you know they came out of Facebook they have a very Facebook mentality and they have phenomenal ideas and believe me guys from asana I'm watching you those are just that's where great ideas come from >> <Dave> Wow we always like to say we love sports analogies here in the cube and Jeff your kids are into sports well as our mind you always want to see and play that more competitive you know environment it sounds like Fred you have the same philosophy yes very much so yeah excellent all right Fred well listen we really appreciate you coming by now you come back Fred's gonna be back again tomorrow we're gonna go through the story of service now that's why we really didn't touch up on it and in any kind of detail today but to it but but but Fred actually started the company we give him a little preview Fred so you started the company really not to go solve an IT service management problem right you came up with this sort of idea this platform and and then you you that was really the first application that you developed right up a step in for that oh great you see give us a little tidbit we're gonna back >> every day I wake up that's all I really >><Fred> I've been a programmer now for 40 years want to do why do I program because I want somebody to take a look at the technology that I build and say hey that's pretty helpful I like that I can use they're gonna put that in my fridge fridge so the real strategy behind the company was to build some software that somebody wanted that hopefully they would pay me so I could build more software that was the entire strategy and so you know on one hand I love technology and on the other hand it really irritates me when it makes me feel stupid or it makes other people feel stupid so what I wanted to do was to create an enterprise platform that people could use and they would feel empowered they could walk up and use it like they'd walk up and use an ATM like they'd walk up and buy something from Amazon etc so a completely you know consumer eyes thought process and then that was the thought process really in O 3 and no 4 and then what we do really figured out was that a platform is a very hard sale you know it's tough to convince somebody that they should take this it'd be like selling you an Intel processor and telling you can do anything you want right I want to solve a business problem and so we decided to go after the ITSM space first it was a space that was very underserved very lucrative and and growing significantly <Dave> amazing so so join us tomorrow we're gonna Fred back on and we're going to here this story the founding story of ServiceNow and how we got to where we are today so Fred thanks very much for coming on and sharing the news and I'm gonna change it all by tomorrow good all right so so keep it right there I will be up next we've got Douglas Leone coming on which is a partner at Sequoia Capital and and and one of the better-known DC's out in the valley so so keep it right there will be back with Doug just in a minute this is ServiceNow this is the cube this is knowledge right back