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

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

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome to day three of Knowledge18. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. Day three is when ServiceNow brings together its audience and talks about its platform, the creators, the developers, the doers get together in the room. Jeff Frick and I, my co-host, we've seen this show now, Jeff, for many, many years. I joked on Twitter today, it's not often you see a full room and this room was packed on day three. Unless Larry Ellison is speaking. Well, Larry Ellison is not here, but Pat Casey is. He's the Senior Vice President of DevOps at ServiceNow and a Cube alum, Pat, great to see you again. >> Absolutely, just glad to be back. >> So, my head is exploding. With all the innovation that's comin' out. I feel like I'm at a AWS re:Invent with Andy Jassy up on stage with all these features that are coming out. But wow, you guys are on it. And part of that is because of the platform. You're able to put out new features, but how's the week going? >> So far it's been great. But you're sort of right, we are super proud of this year. I think there's more new stuff that's valuable for our customers coming out this year than probably the three years prior to this. I mean you got the chat bot designer, and you got some great application innovation, you got Flow Designer, you've got the entire integration suite coming online, and then in addition to that you've got a whole new mobile experience coming out. Just all stuff that our customers can touch. You can go downstairs and see all that and they can get their hands on it. Super exciting. >> So consistent too with the messaging. We've been coming here, I this is our sixth year, with kind of the low-code and no-code vision that Fred had way at the beginning. To let lots of people build great workflows and then to start taking some of these crazy new applications like chat bots and integration platform, pretty innovative. >> Yeah, I think it's a mindset when you get down to it. I mean we, the weird failure mode of technology is technology tends to get built by by technologists. And I do this for a living. There's a failure mode where you design the tool you want to use. And those tend to be programmer tools 'cause they tend to get designed by programmers. It does take an extra mental shift to say no, my user is not me. My user is a different person. I want to build the tool that they want to use. And that sort of user empathy, you know Fred had that in spades. That was his huge, huge, huge strength. Among other things. One of his huge strengths. It's something that we're really trying to keep foreground in the company. And you see that in some of the new products we released as well. It's really aimed at our customers not at our developers. >> The other thing I think that's been consistent in all the interviews we've done, and John talked on the day one keynote one of his kind of three keys to success was try to stay with out of the box as much as you can as a rule, and we've had all the GMs of the various application stacks that you guys have, they've all talked consistently we really try to drive, even as a group our specific requests back into development on the platform level so we can all leverage it. So even though then the vertical applications you guys are building, it's still this drive towards leverage the common platform. >> Yeah, absolutely. And there is, what's the word I'm looking for? There's a lot of value in using the product the way it was shipped. For easiest thing is when it advances or when we ship you new features you can just turn 'em on, and it doesn't conflict with anything else you got going in there. There's always an element of, you know, this is enterprise software. Every customer's a little bit different. GE does not work the same way as Bank of America. So you probably never get away entirely from configuring, but doing the minimum that you can get away with, the minimum that'll let you put your business-specific needs in there, and being really sure of it, you need to do it, it's the right approach to take. The failure mode of technologists, the other one, is we like writing technology. So give me a platform and I'm going to just write stuff. Applying that only when it makes sense to the business is where you really need to be. Especially in this day and age. >> Well I wanted to ask you about that 'cause you guys talk about many applications one platform. But you used to be one platform one app. >> Pat: Yep. >> So as you have more, and more, and more apps, how are you finding it regarding prioritization of features, and capabilities? I imagine the GMs like any company are saying, hey, this is a priority. >> Sure. >> And because you have a platform there's I'm sure a lot more overlap than if you're a stovepipe development organization. But nonetheless you still got to prioritize. Maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Sure, you end up with two different levels of it though. At one level, you tend to want to pick businesses to go into, which you're aligned with the technology stack you have. I don't think we're going to go into video streaming business. It's a good business, but it's not our business. >> Too bad, we could use some of that actually. >> Well, maybe next year. (laughs) But when you get down to it we mostly write enterprise business apps. So HR is an enterprise business app, CSM, SecOps, ITSM, they're all kind of the same general application area. So we don't tend to have something which is totally out to lunch. But you're right in the sense that A, what's important to CSM might be less important to ITSM. And so we do prioritize. And we prioritize partly based on what the perceived benefit across the product line is. If something that a particular BU wants that five other BUs are going to benefit from that's pretty valuable. If only them, not so much. And part of it too is based on how big the BUs are. You know if you're an emerging product line you probably get few less features than like Feryl Huff. Like she has a very big product line. Or Pabla, he has a very big product line. But there's also an over-investment in the emerging stuff. Because you have to invest to build the product lines out. >> The other thing I think is you guys have been such a great opportunity is I just go back to those early Fred interviews with the copy room and the color paper 'cause nobody knows what that is anymore. >> Pat: Yep. >> But workflow just by its very nature lends itself so much to leveraging, AI, and ML, so you've already kind of approached it while trying to make work easier with these great workflow tools, but what an opportunity now to apply AI and machine learning to those things over time. So I don't even have to write the rules and even a big chunk of that workflow that I built will eventually go away for me actually having to interact with it. >> Yeah, there's a second layer to it too, which I'll call out. The workflows between businesses are different. But we have the advantage that we have the data for each of the businesses. So we can train AI on this is the way this particular workflow works at General Electric and use that bot at GE and train a different bot at maybe at Siemens. You know it's still a big industrial firm. It's a different way of doing it. That gives us a really big advantage over people who commingle the data together. Because of our architecture, we can treat every customer uniquely and we can train the automation for the unique workflows for that particular customer. It gives a much more accurate result. >> So thinking about, staying on the theme of machine intelligence for a moment, you're not a household name in the world of AI, so you've done some acquisitions and-- >> Pat: Yep. >> But it's really becoming a fundamental part of your next wave of innovation. As a technologist, and you look out at the landscape, you obviously you see Google, Apple, Facebook, IBM, with Watson, et cetera, et cetera, as sort of the perceived leaders, do you guys aspire to be at that level? Do you need to be? What's the philosophy and strategy with regard to implementing AI in the road map? >> Well if you cast your eyes forward to where we think the future's going to be, I do think there are going to be certain core AI services that they're going to call their volume plays. You need a lot of engineers, a lot of resources, a lot of time to execute them. Really good voice-to-text is an example. And that's getting pretty good. It's almost solved at this point. A general case conversational agent, not solved yet. Even the stuff you see at Google I/O, it's very specialized. It does one thing really well and it's a great demo, but ask it about Russian history, no idea what to talk about. Whereas, maybe you don't know a lot about Russian history, you as a human would at least have something interesting to say. We expect that we will be leveraging other people's core AI services for a lot of stuff out there. Voice-to-text is a good example. There may well be some language parsing that we can do out there. There may be other things we never even thought of. Maybe stuff that'll read text for you and give you back summaries. Those are the kinds of things that we probably won't implement internally. Where you never know, but that's my guess, where you look at where we think we need to write our own code or own our own IP, it's where the domain is specific to our customers. So when I talked about General Electric having a specific workflow, I need to be able to train something specific for that. And if you look at some other things like language processing, there's a grammar problem. Which is a fancy way of saying that the words that you use describing a Cube show are different than the words that I would use describing a trade show. So if I teach a bot to talk about the Cube, it can't talk about trade shows. If you're Amazon, you train your bot to talk in generic language. When you want to actually speak in domain-specific language, it gets a lot harder. It's not good at talking about your show. We think we're going to have value to provide domain-specific language for our customers' individualized domains. I think that's a big investment. >> But you don't have to do it all as well. We saw two actually interesting use cases talking to some of your customers this week. One was the hospital in Australia, I don't know if you're familiar with this, where they're using Alexa as the interface, and everything goes into the ServiceNow platform for the nurses. >> Yep. >> And so that's not really your AI, it's kind of Amazon's AI, that's fine. And the other was Siemens taking some of your data and then doing some stuff in Azure and Watson, although the Watson piece was, my take away was it was kind of a fail, so there's some work to be done there, but customers are going to use different technologies. >> Pat: Oh, they will. >> You have to pick your spots. >> You know we're, as a vendor, we're pretty customer-centric. We love it when you use our technology and we think it's awesome, otherwise we wouldn't sell it. But fundamentally we don't expect to be the only person in the universe. And we're also not, like you've seen us with our chat bot, our chat bot, you can use somebody else's chat client. You can use Slack, you can use Teams, you can use our client, we can use Jabber. It's great. If you were a customer and want to use it, use it. Same thing on the AI front. Even if you look at our chat bot right now, there's the ability to plug in third-party AIs for certain things even today. You can plug it in for language processing. I think out of box is configured for Google, but you can use Amazon, you can use Microsoft if you want to. And it'll parse your language for you at certain steps in there. We're pretty open to partnering on that stuff. >> But you're also adding value on top of those platforms, and that's the key point, right? >> The operating model we have is we want it to be transparent to our customers as to what's going on in the back end. We will make their life easy. And if we're going to make their life easy by behind the scenes, integrating somebody else's technology in there, that's what we're going to do. And for things like language processing, our customers never need to know about that. We know. And the customers might care if they asked because we're not hiding it. But we're not going to make them do that integration. We're going to do it for them, and just they click to turn it on. >> Pat, I want to shift gears a little bit in terms of the human factors point of all this. I laugh, I have an Alexa at home, I have a Google at home, and they send me emails suggesting ways that I should interact with these things that I've never thought of. So as you see kind of an increase in chat bots and you see it increase in things like voice-to-text and these kind of automated systems in the background, how are you finding people's adoption of it? Do they get it? Do the younger folks just get it automatically? Are you able to bury it such where it's just served up without much thought in their proc, 'cause it's really the behavior thing I think's probably a bigger challenge than the technology. >> It is and frankly it's varied by domain. If you look at something like Voice that's getting pretty ubiquitous in the home, it's not that common in a business world. And partly there frankly is just you've got a background noise problem. Engineering-wise, crowded office, someone's going to say Alexa and like nobody even knows what they're talking about. >> Jeff: And then 50 of 'em all-- >> Exactly. There's ways to solve that, but this is actual challenge. >> Right. >> If you look at how people like to interact with technologies, I would argue we've already gone through a paradigm shift that's generational. My generation by default is I get out a laptop. If you're a millennial your default is you get out your phone. You will go to a laptop and the same says I will go to a phone, but that's your default. You see the same thing with how you want to interact. Chat is a very natural thing on the phone. It's something you might do on a full screen, but it's a less common. So you're definitely seeing people shifting over to chat as their preferred interaction paradigm especially as they move onto the phones. Nobody wants to fill out a form on a phone. It's miserable. >> Jeff: Right. >> I wonder if we could, so when Jeff and I have Fred on, we always ask him to break out his telescope. So as the resident technologist, we're going to ask you. And I'm going to ask a bunch of open-ended questions and you can pick whatever ones you want to answer, so the questions are, how far can we take machine intelligence and how far should we take machine intelligence? What are the things that machines can do that humans really can't and vice versa? How will humans and machines come together in the future? >> That's a broad question. I'll say right now that AI is probably a little over-marketed. In that you can build really awesome demos that make it seem like it's thinking. But we're a lot further away from an actual thinking machine, which is aware of itself than I think it would seem from the demos. My kids think Alexa's alive, but my son's nine, right? There's no actual Alexa at the end of it. I doubt that one's going to get solved in my lifetime. I think what we're going to get is a lot better at faking it. So there's the classical the Turing test. The Turing test doesn't require that you be self-aware. The Turing test says that my AI passes the Turing test if you can't tell the difference. And you can do that by faking it really well. So I do think there's going to be a big push there. First level you're seeing it is really in the voice-to-text and the voice assistance. And you're seeing it move from the Alexas into the call centers into the customer service into a lot of those rote interactions. When it's positive it's usually replacing one of those horrible telephone mazes that everybody hates. It gets replaced by a voice assist, and as a customer you're like that is better. My life is better. When it's negative, it might replace a human with a not-so-good chat. The good news on that front is our society seems to have a pretty good immune system on that. When companies have tried to roll out less good experiences that are based on less good AI, we tend to rebel, and go no, no, we don't want that. And so I haven't seen that been all that successful. You could imagine a model where people were like, I'm going to roll out something that's worse but cheaper. And I haven't seen that happening. Usually when the AI rolls out it's doing it to be better at something for the consumer perspective. >> That's great. I mean we were talking earlier, it's very hard to predict. >> Pat: Of course. >> I mean who would have predicted that Alexa would have emerged as a leader in NLP or that, and we said this yesterday, that the images of cats on the internet would lead to facial recognition. >> I think Alexa is one example though. The thing I think's even more amazing is the Comcast Voice Remote. Because I used to be in that business. I'm like, how could you ever have a voice remote while you're watching a TV and watching a movie with the sound interaction? And the fact that now they've got the integration as a real nice consumer experience with YouTube and Netflix, if I want to watch a show, and I don't know where it is, HBO, Netflix, Comcast, YouTube, I just tell that Comcast remote find me Chris Rock the Tamborine man was his latest one, and boom there it comes. >> There's a school of thought out there, which is actually pretty widespread that feels like the voice technologies have actually been a bit of a fail from a pure technologies standpoint. In that for all the energy that we've spent on them, they're sort of stuck as a niche application. There's like Alexa, my kids talk to Alexa at home, you can talk to Siri, but when these technologies were coming online, I think we thought that they would replace hard keyboard interactions to a greater degree than they have. I think there's actually a bit of a learning in there that people are not as, we don't mandatorily, I'm not sure if that's a real word, but we don't need to go oral. There's actually a need for non-oral interfaces. And I do think that's a big learning for a lot of the technology is that there's a variety of interface paradigms that actual humans want to use, and forcing people into any one of them is just not the right approach. You have to, right now I want to talk, tomorrow I want to text, I might want to make hand gestures another time. You're mostly a visual media, obviously there's talking too, but it's not radio, right? >> You're absolutely right. That's a great point because when you're on a plane, you don't want to be interacting in a voice. And other times that there's background noise that will screw up the voice reactions, but clearly there's been a lot of work in Silicon Valley and other places on a different interface and it needs to be there. I don't know if neural will happen in our lifetime. I wanted to give you some props on the DevOps announcement that you sort of pre-announced. >> We did. >> It's, you know CJ looked like he was a little upset there. Was that supposed to be his announcement? >> In my version of the script, I announced it and he commented on my announcement. >> It's your baby, come on. So I love the way you kind of laid out the DevOps and kind of DevOps 101 for the audience. Bringing together the plan, dev, test, deploy, and operate. And explaining the DevOps problem. You really didn't go into the dev versus the ops, throwing it over the wall, but people I think generally understand that. But you announced solving a different problem. 500 DevOps tools out there and it gets confusing. We've talked to a bunch of customers about that. They're super excited to get that capability. >> Well, we're super, it's one of those cases where you have an epiphany, 'cause we solved it internally. >> Dave: Right. >> And we just ran it for like three years, and we kept hearing customers say, hey, what are you guys going to do about DevOps? And we're never like quite sure what they mean, 'cause you're like, well what do you mean? Do you want like a planning tool? And then probably about a year ago we sort of had this epiphany of, oh, our customers have exactly the same problem we do. Duh. And so from that it kind of led us to go down the product road of how can we build this kind of management layer? But if you look across our customer base and the industry, DevOps is almost a rebellion. It's a rebellion against the waterfall development model which has dominated things. It's a rebellion against that centralized control. And in a sense it's good because there's a lot of silliness that comes out of those formal development methodologies. Slow everybody down, stupid bureaucracy in there. But when you apply it in an enterprise, okay some of the stuff in there, you actually did need that. And you kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater. So adding that kind of enterprise DevOps layer back in, you still do get that speed. Your developers get to iterate, you get the automated tests, you get the operating model, but you still don't lose those kind of key things you need at the top enterprise levels. >> And most of the customers we've talked to this week have straight up said, look, we do waterfall for certain things, and we're not going to stop doing waterfall, but some of the new cool stuff, you know. (laughs) >> Well if you look at us, it's at the, if you take the microscope far enough away from ServiceNow, we're waterfall in that every six months we release. >> Dave: Yeah, right. >> But if you're an engineer, we're iterating in 24-hour cycles for you. 24-hour cycles, two-week sprints. It's a very different model when you're in the trenches than from the customer perspective. >> And then I think that's the more important part of the DevOps story. Again, there's the technology and the execution detail which you outlined, but it's really more the attitudinal way that you approach problems. We don't try to solve the big problems. We try to keep moving down the road, moving down the road. We have a vision of where we want to get, but let's just keep moving down the road, moving down the road. So it's a very, like you said, cumbersome MRD and PRD and all those kind of classic things that were just too slow for 2018. >> Nobody goes into technology to do paperwork. You go into technology to build things to create, it's a creative outlet. So the more time you can spend doing that, and the less time you're spending on overhead, the happier you're going to be. And if you fundamentally like doing administration, you should move into management. That's great. That's the right job for you. But if you're a hands on the keyboard engineer, you probably want to have your hands on the keyboard, engineering. That's what you do. >> Let's leave on a last thought around the platform. I mentioned Andy Jassy before and AWS. He talks about the flywheel effect. Clearly we're seeing the power of the platform and it feels like there's the developer analog to operating leverage. And that flywheel effect going from your perspective. What can we expect going forward? >> Well, I mean for us there's two parallel big investment vectors. One is clearly we want to make the platform better for our apps. And you asked earlier about how do we prioritize from our various BUs, and that is driving platform enhancements. But the second layer is, this is the platform our customers are using to automate their entire workflow across their whole organization. So there's a series of stuff we're doing there to make that easier for them. In a lot of cases, less about new capabilities. You look at a lot of our investments, it's more about taking something that previously was hard, but possible, and making it easier and still possible. And in doing that, that's been my experience, is Fred Luddy's experience, the easier you can make something, the more successful people will be with it. And Fred had an insight that you could almost over-simplify it sometimes. You could take something which had 10 features and was hard to use, and replace with something that had seven features and was easy to use, everyone would be super happy. At some level, that's the iPhone story, right? I could do more on my Blackberry, it just took me an hour of reading the documentation to figure out how. >> Both: Right, right. >> But I still miss the little side wheel. (laughs) >> Love that side wheel. All right, Pat, listen thanks very much for coming. We are humbled by your humility. You are like a rock star in this community, and congratulations on all this success and really thanks for coming back on the Cube. >> Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure meeting you guys again. >> All right, great. Okay, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching the Cube live from ServiceNow Knowledge K18, #know18. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas It's theCUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018 brought to you by ServiceNow >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. What we do is we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. This is our sixth year at ServiceNow Knowledge. Jeff and I, Jeff Frick, my co-host, we started in 2013 I believe, Jeff. >> Yes. >> At the Aria, right? >> At the Aria, third floor. >> Small conference. 3,800 people, we were kind of tucked in the corner Now we're in the center, the ecosystem is burgeoning. As is ServiceNow, the company started with core IT service management and has been extending its applications on its platform into new areas and Abhijit Mitra is here, he's the general manager of the customer service management unit at ServiceNow. It's great to see you again my friend, welcome back to-- >> Great to see you Dave and Jeff. >> Great to see you, welcome back. >> So we met several times at headquarters, at shows like this, you've been educating me and us on your business, but let's start with customer service management, what is it to you guys? >> Interesting you ask the question because two years ago I remember explaining to you that it's not customer-service management. It's customer service-management. So, I want to go back to that once more and start off explaining what that was about. You know, I have been building CRM applications for a long time, in my career and especially in the customer service domain, I always felt there's something missing and I didn't quite really know what it was until I came to ServiceNow. And I discovered service management and what I realized, and after talking to so many customers what I realized is that traditional CRM solutions are meant for, they're very well architected for customer engagement which is about allowing customers to contact you by different channels, by phone or email and logging their issues as cases. And that's important, we need that in customer service. But what is also very important is, how do you streamline your underlying operational processes? So that it can close the loop and fix those issues or deliver to your customers request and that's what service management is fundamentally designed to do. So what we have done here is we've combined customer engagement with service management into customer service management to give you a solution that can cater to the end to end process, that's what it is. >> Okay, so we had your boss on earlier and he said, "I have three things on my whiteboard "when people walk in with a new idea. "First one is, what's the problem? "Second one is, why now? "And the third one is, why us?" So when you guys had that conversation, (laughs) what was the answer? >> So, the problem, it really has been that customer service has been fundamentally broken and we all experience customer service every day of our lives and as consumers, I can tell you, I expect that experience to be much better today. I don't know about you, but I expect that experience to be much better. >> I was going to say expectations are pretty low unfortunately. I'm going to have to tell you for the 18th time, my name, account number, and social security number, my mom's maiden name, but I just told the other four people that I got to before I got to you. (laughs) >> So, feel the pain. >> We feel the pain. >> Let's rest that argument, OK? Now let's go about, sort of a why now, right? So, what we are seeing in the industry is massive digital transformation. Now digital transformation is a heavily overused buzzword. When I talk about digital transformation, I am talking about products becoming services, services becoming connected services where you're offering solutions to consumers and customers digitally meaning they are powered by technology. In that kind of a world, when we are customers we expect our requests and our issues to be resolved and delivered instantaneously and we expect those digital services to be always on. Now this kind of a challenge was not there like you know five, 10 years ago, this is something new. And this is where, when you combine service management which is all about how do you deliver that end to end service in a technologically technically connected world to the customer through the different channels of their choice becomes truly differentiating. So that's why now, now is the right time for doing something like this. >> Well, why ServiceNow? >> Well, ServiceNow is a market leader in service management. We are the market leaders in IT service management. And so what we are doing is we are essentially taking the core capability of the service management and just to explain a little bit for people who are not so familiar with service management, service management is about automating repetitive requests through workflows, we apply that to what we say an effortless customer experience. So customers now through self-service for example, they don't need to call anybody, they can go to your website and they can sort of request services which get automatically delivered to them, right? So that's essentially something ServiceNow does very well because of our automation capabilities. Service management is about driving down root cause of customer issues through a structured process. Problem management, change management and we do that. Service management is about monitoring connected services and being proactive and taking actions to prevent business disruptions and we do that. So that's why service management is extremely applicable to the problem of offering services in our digitally connected world. >> So you said you've been doing it for a long time in your career, before was it just really thinking about the ticket as an individual transaction in customer service management versus trying to build really more robust processes that are integrated in service management that now you're applying to the customer problems? Is that kind of why this is a fundamentally different approach? What makes it so different? >> Yes, so service management is essentially the underlying operational process, you're right. And one part of that is the ticket. Customer engagement on the other hand is being aware of who your customer is. Who that person is, what's the customers 360, what is his purchase history, what's the service history of this customer? What service contracts do they have? What entitlement do they have? All the information. So, combining it together on one common platform is what's unique. >> OK, talk a little bit about how you're innovating in that platform. You guys announced virtual agent technology, you're infusing artificial intelligence into the platform. Discuss that a little bit. >> Yeah, so, let's talk about virtual agent. I said one of the things that we focused on is making that experience for customers as effortless, as simple and easy as possible, right? So, we know that, you know companies around the world like 75% of all organizations, they want the self-service to be the primary channel of help and mass consumers, we also want self-service, right? But self-service today is primarily very static because you get, what do you get? You go, look at a knowledge base article, some self-help article, right? >> Right, right. >> And OK, maybe you lock some cases, that's all you can do. With virtual agents, what's happening is self-service is becoming actionable. Because when you are in the self-service experience, a virtual agent can anticipate your needs and start helping you, you interact with the virtual agent and it's not just a human-like interaction with you, but it can also perform actions. Automated actions using workflow capabilities of ServiceNow. And this is very unique. Now it's an extension of the service process, it becomes a living, breathing entity. The website becomes a living, breathing entity. Not only does it reduce a lot of, on the organization side for example, the customer service organization side. Not only does it reduce a lot of repetitive work for customer agents, but it makes the experience for customers very simple and effortless. >> The thing I think is so interesting on the AI side of it is that, the system learns from every transaction and can apply that learning to the next transaction versus an individual interaction between myself and say a customer service agent where they might learn a little bit on how to solve that particular problem. But it's not shared system-wide. It's not necessarily learned by the machine to help the next person get that answer a little bit faster. So it seems like the application of AI, and machine learning to these workflows really opens up an efficiency gate that's like nothing that you've been able to do before. >> Absolutely, you know one of the features that we offer is something called agent intelligence I have not seen if you talked about that, but what agent intelligence is about is that when you do need an agent, right? And you need to find the right agent, you can essentially convert or route these cases essentially which is just descriptions of words or descriptions, right? You can categorize them, you can prioritize them, and you can route them to the right cues. So that the right people can actually now help you out to solve these issues. This is something that we are using machine learning for. To be able to learn from like past history and then be able to do that without writing any rules or thing like that. The machine simply learns and figures out the best way to categorize, prioritize, and route the cases to the right people. >> Based on real behavior, as opposed to trying to figure out the rules in advance. >> The thing is that you, every time you figure out a rule, it becomes outdated very quickly. So, it's very difficult to keep rules up to date. I know and I've been building rules engine for a very long time. I know exactly how it works, It's very difficult. If AI can actually solve this problem, there is a tremendous productivity gain. >> Talk about why I wouldn't use a CRM system to do this, I have all my customer information in there, everybody's using it, I got my sales guys involved and why not just use CRM? >> Yet again, goes back to the core value proposition of CRM. CRM was essentially invented as a methodology to enforce the sales process. So you track your leads, the opportunities, codes, convert MTRs, and that's what most companies use CRM for. Now, since we had your prospect data in there used, you know some customers would start thinking that okay, you know what? My customer database is in CRM, but actually if you think about it for most companies, the customer data is not in CRM. It's in their ERP system. >> It's in Oracle SAP. >> SAP that's where the data is so, in a service process, you're actually interacting with your customers. The customers are interacting with your system through self-service. In CRM, and in traditional lead opportunity management, there's no customer interaction. It's your company's internal process. So here, you are talking with a customer interacting with the system and you servicing that customer in an end-to-end process. So, I don't think for customer service, CRM was ever well suited actually. So specifically in the customer service domain, I think a service management approach is a much better approach. >> Abhijit, what are some of the KPIs? What are people using as yardsticks of success when they're doing these types of implementations? >> Yeah, so one of the key KPIs for our customers is, you know from a business stand point, it's Net Promoter Score and we have had, customers like Epicor, for example, who've implemented customer service management, actually retiring 15 CRM systems including everything you can imagine. And within 10 months of going live, they're seeing 10 percentage point improvement in Net Promoter Score, just by switching to CSM. These are unbelievable numbers, then we have had nice systems, by the way both these companies have won awards for innovating customer service. And they've seen more than a 70% reduction in cases because of self-service. 'Cause they are going to the self-service channel. So these are sort of the obvious, let's say customer satisfaction improvement or cost savings that some of our customers have seen from using our solution. >> That's great. >> Okay, takeaways from K18, what should we, what's the bumper sticker say in the back of the car as they're pulling away as it relates to customer service management. (laughs) >> You know, to summarize for customer service management, we essentially combine customer engagement with service management to offer and to help you offer an effortless connected and proactive customer service so this is really our key value propositions that we offer to companies. Effortless is all about simplifying the customer experience. Connected is about breaking down the silos in your organization. Getting everybody on a common platform to drive down root cause of customer issues and the customer service team support, and proactive is about monitoring the data and reacting to issues before customers are affected. And this is what makes customer service experience, a superior customer service experience. >> Jeff: Three word bumper sticker, it works perfectly. (laughs) >> Abhijit, it was great to meet, however briefly your team last night, we saw you guys, you took your team out to dinner, they seem motivated, really charged up, a lot of smiling faces, so congratulations on the progress that you've made. You're super excited, I can tell and it's really great having you back on theCUBE, thank you. >> Yeah, yeah, and if you wanted even the shortest bumper sticker, I would say customer service is a team sport. >> Beautiful that's a good one. >> The other won't fit. (laughter) >> That'll work, all right. >> Okay keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. We're live, you're watching theCUBE from ServiceNow Knowledge18, we'll be right back. (upbeat music)

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

>> 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)