okay we're back this is painful on time with Wikibon org and this is the cube silicon angles continuous production we here at knowledge service now's big customer event i'm here with my co-host Jeff Frick this morning we were broadcasting live from sa p sapphire my colleague john furrier jeff kelly and david foyer were down here but we're here in Las Vegas at the aria hotel we're here with dave schneider who's the senior vice president of worldwide sales and services at service now Dave welcome to the cute thank you for having me a lot of good energy here talking to customers said Brian Lily on from from Equinix great case study great story we were Jeff and I were at the you know the customer event last night just cruising around talking to customers talking to prospects everybody's really excited what are they what are they telling you I think what the colonists is that what what we're all about which is making customers successful in their journey both the IT Service Management and allowing IT to be helpful to the entire organization is actually working and that the value they're getting from the investment around our technology is yielding really good results for their country so when you go to meet customers you know describe paint a picture for us of you know new customers new prospects what's the environment like no I think it range is a lot between customer experiences so as people are becoming more and more comfortable to cloud idea service we're seeing people really just rotate naturally to that wanting to get away from fixed fixed offerings and traditional and hosted systems internal there into internal their networks so we're seeing a lot of excitement about that and then there's some disbelief there's some displeased but actually after all these years of trying that they can actually make IT an effective part of an organization and our tools and our solutions really help them do that so when you say all these years of time what have they tried that's not work it seems like they've tried everything they've tried they tried remedy the tribe Peregrine they tried I have a corona motor tool right absolutely so I think what happens in IT is it you know they've been the Forgotten ones they've been the ones that didn't have the opportunity to invest as the other lines of business for a below best to keep themselves competitive in the marketplace now we're giving them best-in-class tools so that they are no longer hindered by the lack of sophistication they want that so you get your getting penalized in a sense by you know the past failures of other initiatives right that's the big barrier that you have to come over it is that inertia the existing disbelief is that right I think there's some disbelief also I think I T is often starved for resources i T is a cost to an organization not necessarily seen as a benefit by the financial parts of the organization however if used correctly they can be turned into an asset class and make the whole organization more competitive this morning we had GE talking on stage and they were able to do a massive transformation using the tool to generate millions of dollars of cost savings and additional revenue streams yeah I mean I've been saying to me this is all about global scale and demonstrating IT value and excellence throughout the organization are you finding that you're so we talked about sort of your prospects when you go in when you go in after customers implemented let's say for a year or so what's different what's changed and particularly i'm interested in that notion of IT value is their heightened awareness of IT value throughout the organization well so i think part of what happens is IT changes the perception of IT and organization gets changed through the transformation with our tool they go from as we we often say the Department of node or the Department of now that's a real thing and that that kind of confidence the swagger that the people have nit for IT kind of gets reestablished and you see people really proud of doing what they're doing and knowing that they're bringing a real value to their their customer is really an important part of what we do so the new confidence that these organizations have on delivering value of their customer the ability to support and integrate hundreds of tools potentially into a single platform record that's transformative to a CIO or to an IT executive who didn't know where things were in when the bad things would happen they couldn't tell what was causing the event and know how to fix it so what questions do you ask prospective customers what's your sort of list of top two or three questions that you start with I think first of all is why would you continue down the path that you are if there is something better what what would keep you from doing it and then we also look for other initiatives that are important to the business where what's driving them so if they've done a lot of integrations through acquisitions that's a huge opportunity for cost savings and aggregation into one one set of tools okay let's talk a little bit about your sort of sales organization you guys I think have these show you let's let me back up a little bit so you start with it I presume incident management problem management maybe even change management is that right is that the starting point so we get brought in to solve a lot of different problems now in an IT organization so it's not uncommon that someone would think about replacing their old help desk or incident management system we always say help desk is sort of like to four letter words you really try to make the desk go away because our customers don't want us sitting behind desks they want us to be out talking to them or they want to self help themselves and so we start maybe with looking at the historical systems very quickly we try to get into a much broader conversation okay and then my understanding is your sales organization has evolved where you will both look at existing customers helping them utilize the platform further beyond maybe just the core helpdesk an incident management problem management and utilize service now as a platform for other areas can you talk about that a little bit so went once when we get involved with a customer the customer is a customer for life so we kind of have a mantra inside of service now which is love that customer and if you love the customer and you do things for and on behalf of them teaching them about the technology and how they can benefit from it we get additional businesses they're more and more successful so every time we interface with the customer it's an opportunity to throw them an opportunity to make them more successful every time they do something to add technology around us they're saving money and probably growing their license business with us but having a pretty good at bit so it's interesting when we were at the event last night for the people who weren't here there were pictures of cakes all over the place there was there was cakes on the table and there was a slideshow with cakes and I said so what is the story with the cake what's in it and I kind of know the stories but it's good to follow till you said about what's really cared about a lot of us like sugar so there is that there's this common desire to celebrate so actually it was solving not not coming tonight well it's not common IT but it actually started with one customer or a couple different customers well when we went go lives the customer actually themselves they didn't go buy a store-bought cake they baked their own cake and they would decorate the cake in various ways and most of them had service now or Thank You service now it's part of it they really viewed this as a setting free element and so they were celebrating like a birth or a wedding like anything else that we celebrate in life they were celebrating with a kick and so it became a tradition I can't tell you how many hundreds of cakes I've now eaten but it's really a fun thing to do and it kind of keeps on a life about life of its own and sometimes I'll do interim cakes when they do go live with a new module or other aspects and call those cupcakes it's it's interesting as they said we were down at the event last night talking to a lot of customers and potential customers and the vibe is very good and the other vibe that's that that picked up this morning I mean the Kino started at 8am right this is not a sleep and group of people these are people that are up and ready to go everyone was waiting to eat at six thirty they were on the ground and so these are people that are working you know they're they're getting stuff done this is not kind of a hangout tech crowd well I mean there was some hanging out last night there was all hang out last night however I will say this event is all about the customer more than eighty percent of the content is taught by customers to customers they come up with the content they're here because they want to learn and so they don't want to miss a thing they're going to bring the ideas back to their companies and implement change and so they view themselves through service now is an opportunity to make a massive the organization it's obviously a pretty darn good career move for a lot of the customers as well who gets successful with us but most importantly they want to be here and we're thrilled to have them because you know quite honestly I get energy i sat in that keynote presentation and I got so much energy listening to the panel I was fired up and ready to go David you guys have a ninety-six percent renewal rate which is that's the same how is it that you've been able to achieve that what what's the secret sauce behind that what a customer's tell you so it fluctuates a little bit but it's been a 95 plus 4 13 quarters in a row I think really the issue is if you do right by the customers where why would they go somewhere else the alternatives just aren't that good but most importantly if you're delivering value every day through an engagement if you're bringing technology to bear to solve a problem once you solve the problem you don't need to Joe try something else you look two ways to leverage what you've already built and moved forward so the four or five percent of customers that disappear many of those are through acquisitions right companies got acquired and went out of business very rarely is that they made a choice to go with a different technology you guys don't and maybe used to in the early days but you don't sort of overwhelm your messaging with with cloud you know some of these some of the SAS companies do can you talk about sort of how you sell to organizations and a little bit more more depth it's not a it's almost night not a hard core technology sell its really around business process and value can you talk more so we sell to multiple levels in a company so there there are folks that are functionally responsible for different aspects of what we do let it be incident management or help desk let it be people that are trying to build knowledge management systems or trying to do employee self-service those are different constituents that will talk to in a sales campaign and then we often will try to reach the CIO or an executive NIT you give them the message of what we can really provide because you know people don't start off thinking you know I want to replace my helpdesk them and end up with the RP for IT we've got to convince them or give them the possibility that that's or sorry paint the picture that the possibilities are real so to customers do they do I mean a lot so many projects today are not not IT projects their business driven yes and there's a business case around them and the whole ir r and r roi etc and pv whatever it is how do people conduct a business case for service now it ranges dramatically depending on what problem they're trying to solve but you know some of what we do is sort of like an oxygen water problem right you can't live today without breathing or drinking some water you can't live in IT without solving some of these problems so it's an oxygen issue the nice to have things are quickly becoming oxygen issues employee self-service are you kidding me you're not gonna have a system that lets employees help themselves why wouldn't you do that why wouldn't you have an automated password reset process to save money why wouldn't you do cloud provisioning to save money these are these are oxygen issues can't live without them type of problems for IT organizations and the reality is they're not getting the job done today so being able to show them a way to make it transformed is great we do intercede a lot of times during an upgrade process or during that consolidation phase where they realize we've got hundreds of tools and they're all in little islands they're not talking to each other and they don't have any data that they can trust so you strive for this consumer like experience we're hearing that a lot what are your customers telling you about oh how well you're doing that I think the exciting things we're going to see tomorrow with Fred's keynote presentation on the handheld on tablet device interfaces are really all about continuing that push towards consumerization nobody wants to use a green screen interface that was designed in the 80s anymore our customers are wanting the same kind of tools they had or they have when they go home when they use google or they use amazon they want the same kind of experience when they're at work and so we provide them the ability to make that happen and that's really transformative to how people perceive IT it is it is it more the IT staff that wants that type of experience or their their customers their clients and their own company are telling them this is our expectation if she said only use Google is only amazon is no I mean I go as far to say is if I'm going to an old guard custom or the old tools and I'm trying to recruit the generation that's coming into the workforce today and I'm showing user interfaces that looking at acquitted and old that employee base isn't going to stay there very long so if you want to be able to grow your business with today's talent on a global scale you need tools that look familiar and that people want to use I'm looking at your screen over there it looks pretty sexy it doesn't look anything like it did 10 years ago Yeah right so did your workforce like Frank's Lupin you're hiring by Mars what are you hiring what are you looking for we're hiring athletes we're hiring people to care we love that Natalie yeah absolutely i'll check out i mean if i could say it one way is if you want to love your customer and sell transformative technology and you want to be part of something that's bigger than you because that's what i'm looking for i'm looking for people that want to join us create something special make a difference not just in our lives which is nice and fun we're really focused on the customer is when you change your customers experience in their perception it has gifts beyond cakes it has gifts beyond making a great company these are lifelong relationships you'll have and even opportunity to that at service now well the enthusiasm here at knowledge is palpable you talk to the customers and they all smiles on their faces they want to be here they want as you said David share their stories most of the content coming from customers and then of course the cube so keep it right there I'll be back with Jeff brick David thank you very much for coming in the cube and sharing your story this is the cube this is knowledge we're here live in Vegas we'll be right back with our next guest right after this great thanks good

okay we're back this is Dave Volante I'm back I was just meeting with Joe Tucci and Mike cappellas and in an analyst breakout and got some good information I'll share with you a moment this is Silicon angle TVs continuous coverage of EMC world and we're live here in Las Vegas and we have a good friend Dave Cahill from SolidFire on we met SolidFire a year ago at EMC world the CEO Dave Wright popped out of Rackspace conceived and founded SolidFire to be exclusively focused on the cloud service provider market flash all flash array focused on the cloud service provider market like no other company most companies sell flash arrays all flash array sort of broad set of use cases SolidFire is uniquely focusing on the cloud service provider space and we're going to get into that with with David Cahill David welcome to the cube it would be back so you moved to Colorado a lot of interesting personal stuff going on and it's it's it's great to see you you know doing so well personally and it seems like SolidFire is really making some progress you guys are as I said before are uniquely positioned in the cloud service provider space but so why don't we get into it maybe give us the bumper sticker because you could maybe maybe add some color to what I just said yeah and then give us an update on where we're at yeah sure so so guys that are building large-scale multi tenant clouds it's a unique customer set in the last year has done nothing but validate that for us we've been in early access with a handful of partners and our cloud service providers in that regard and continue to expand out that program now and it's it's as evident now as it was then that this customer set has unique challenges around scale around automation around performance and around efficiency that you don't traditionally see in the prize and so we continue to be laser focused on that customer set large-scale multi-tenant clouds and there's plenty of them being built yeah so um so where are you at you guys go through your beta program and yeah so we're heading the crap out of the kick in the beating the crap out of the system we are heads down charging towards full GA later in the year but the purpose of the early access program really is was to get some select cloud service providers to beat the crap out of the system and let them continue to you know evolve the services that they're gonna offer based on the SolidFire system and and make it a better offering GA both from a infrastructure standpoint but also from a services standpoint because you know these guys are advancing the way that we think about the cloud cloud 100 was let's move your data to the cloud cloud 2.0 is let's move your apps to the cloud and so that's a mindset shift which requires evangelism on the part of the cloud service provider to the end customer in addition to the infrastructure right if you if you if you crack the code on the economics of high performance in the cloud you open it up to a much broader application set that's so um so actually Dave I want to see if it call inaudible here so you are you hanging out here you got it something to do after this so we are I'm around okay so Sanjay merchandani was the CIO of EMC we're gonna lose them if we don't bring him on I realized now look at the schedule yeah I take off for 20 minutes everything gets behind so if you wouldn't mind I want to bring take a quick break when I bring Sanjay in interview him and then bring you back and then pick this up with me okay all right so listen keep it right there we're going to come right back with Sanjay merchandani CIO of EMC we're right back you the cube is this conceptual box if you will we bring people inside of the cube and then we share ideas the cube is a comfortable place it's a place where people feel happy and are happy to share their knowledge with the world and we're happy to be ambassadors of that knowledge transfer yeah can I get okay we're back and this is the segment with Sanjay Mirchandani CIO of EMC now Santi has been on the cube a couple of times and really has been leading emcs transformation efforts internally so the company's not just talking about transformation actually transforming I was at the CIO event in October EMC CIO event Sanjay really he noted that event and was the sort of highlight at that show working with a number of EMC CIOs to help them understand how EMC was transforming Sanjay was a really first of all welcome to the cube thank you good to be here and so that was a great event it was the MCS first real effort to bring together CIOs and and they used you EMC usually was a showcase which is smart you guys are doing some internal transformations but there was a lot of interest around what you were doing obviously a lot of talk about infrastructure transformation but also new metrics and things like that what did you take away from that event well you know the whole thing is that people want proof points the whole thing today is about proof points and we've been on this journey first in virtualization then we move that to cloud and we've now incorporated obviously big data into that but nobody builds infrastructure for the sake of infrastructure you want to drive value out of it and we translated value for the business for EMC is a customer internally around agility speed time to market and there's been a shift in the way our internal customers think about things because it's all about hey give it was faster doesn't have to be perfect out of the gate but give it us quicker so we could work together and get it right so we've been we've been we've built out our cloud and now we're working through the layers of in layers on top of that of that cloud of you words are things like platform-as-a-service true business intelligence as a service connectivity between our infrastructure and our legacy applications or if I have the liberty of building our new applications how do you do that and then on top of all of that these devices we're having thousands of these devices a month into the network how do you bring a true user experience and give our users productivity outside of email mm-hmm on this device so that's what we took away that customers were interested in these layers so so when I hear something like VI as a service I think I get excited as a business person I said can I get access to a self-service bi portal right and actually begin to interact with data you know without having to call up you know an army of IT people is that the vision is that you're actually doing that right right and right so talk about the hello yes we should go it's actually very exciting because it's the first layer of value that we're adding directly on top of our cloud infrastructure right so the number one area where you have rogue IT or shadow IT whatever you like to call it is some form of business reporting so users will say IT can't provide me my reports fast enough or IT can't provide me the reports the way I want them or in the format that I want them or as frequently as I want so it's usually shadow IT usually the big percentage of it is there on some kind of reporting system so what we decided to do was we built a cloud infrastructure we've got the capabilities we've got green plumbing plays so what we're doing is we're creating as much of this data that the custom that our internal customers want access to give them one version of the truth so you take away the noise about where is the data and instead spend time on two things helping our internal customers build the skills to do the analytics the way they wanted and give them data scientists as a service as a human service to really enable them because we see the data left to right nobody else does all elements of data within the company mm-hmm so so we give them data scientists as a service and we'll give them the ability will give them skills around tool sets that they want to use a Microsoft reporting tool or SAS or something else on top of the green flap we're enabling the platform we're enabling some competency around the tools when we're enabling data scientists with subject matter expertise in the data and then the and then our internal customers can go off and have a nice day with that information any way they want it so how do you deal with the issue of credentials like who gets to see you which data well obviously we put business rules behind all that so our security officers involved you know and we we are now tearing the data based on access based on you know profiles etc so all of that has to come together so it's not an all-or-nothing formula you know we're bringing best practices into play and and making sure those those are things that you understand how to do in a traditional world right and and if it's rogue IT or shadow IT as you you know that now comes into picture so you have better control over that stuff yeah so um we actually just did you mentioned shadow IT we just did a survey on IT transformation we had one of the questions we asked is you know what percent of your your IT budget or organization's IT budget is managed by a centralized organization and only about when I say only about 38% said 100% yeah so if more than half had some kind of shadow IT and about 20% had a 25% of the spend or more going to shadow I mean and let's be honest it was cloud computing stuff that was in the arsenal of IT for years is out in the open you can get access to the credit card for the same amount of infrastructure and in a drop of a hat that my IT guys need so it's just shadow IT has gone out of the dark corners of the organization right into the open into the plow yeah it's okay you know and so it's a whack-a-mole syndrome yeah so we're saying you got to either embrace it or get out of the way yeah and so you know the pitch that my my leadership team and I are making to our organization is we have to be the brokers of value it's not about authorship it's not about where it was built or where it was written it's about how soon can we add value to the business and we have to be the brokers of value all right and not it's not all about hey if it wasn't written here it isn't good enough for this for this company so yeah you've always been very forward-thinking about that I mean you know shadow IT freaks out some people oh we got to pull it in but you're like okay fine so now I want to tie it into the messaging that you were hearing at EMC world so it's it's IT transformation transform IT or sorry its transformation transform IT business and in yourself yeah we've said okay IT transformation that's about the cloud the new new cloud infrastructure Bob as well the business transformation is about data unlocking data value data value and then self obviously will you make cloud architect maybe that's a piece of what I'm gonna talk about to are so-so is that a reasonable way to look at what the messaging is and how that maps from a practitioners perspective and I'm trying to squint through okay how much of that is marketing and how much is actually implementable so you've talked about the the cloud transformation internally at EMC IT as a service um how about the data piece you talked about bi self-service bi but how about even going beyond that you're actually getting into that point where you're leveraging that yeah are you able to monetize yes great question by the way and there's lots of new answers to that to that question because when you chunk something down to saying you know IT is about you know transforming I tease about infrastructure well transforming IT is about infrastructure self service automation cataloging and creating the capability to present IT as a service did that make sense yeah my goal is to break down the big black box of IT into little box black boxes of IT so customers internally can pick and choose what they want at the price points they want and at the service level they want and I present that up and as much of an automated Service Catalog as I can now that is transforming IT there's a lot of process transformation alongside technology transformation and the you as human transformation which I'll get to in a minute once I built that what do our internal customers want they want big data we talk about big data they want Anytime Anywhere computing capabilities so if you've got that sleek little MacBook Air in front of you or the latest Android device that has showed up at your door or an iOS device they want to be able to compute any way they like on any form factor any screen anywhere we have to render that so for us today Mobile is an opt-out strategy so you ever tell me explicitly that you don't want mobile when I give you a solution it's automatically opt-in yeah two years ago it was the other way round hello I mean okay now how do you do that you do that based on the fact that I've got a cloud infrastructure and I'm building mobile capabilities on top of that bad infrastructure to expose elements of that data manage those devices create that user experience on top of that infrastructure security apps the hole in your login monitoring authentication you know so on and so forth and so how do you do that so that's that's to be transforming you know the business how they use it how they consume it what they want to do with it etc said differently in the first so transformed IT transformed the business is transformed IT was building the factory floor building the production line it was all about IT transform the business is all about the business it's where you're building the widgets you want off that factory floor transform you is what gets the lease attention but it's probably the most pivotal thing in all of this is the bits are gonna be just really cool bits on the on the data center floor unless somebody knows what to do with them and really drive value with it and so for me the focus of my leadership team and myself is not so much just about the architectural roadmap but it's bringing the thousands of people that are involved with IT whether it be our own people or partners that helped us along with us in this journey in a way that they're showing us the way I mean I could come up with s best roadmaps somebody's got to make them happen yeah and I think you're hitting on a really important point you know the people piece we always sort of ignore that we talk about the technology but you know well when you look at the spending that goes on in this industry the vast majority of his own people which you know on the one hand says okay that's important we're investing in our people but we're in a labor-intensive IT economy and and that's stifling innovation you've talked frequently as have your colleagues about the 70/30 mix 70% goes to running the business 30% goes to the innovation but decades of infrastructure investment in silos have really stifled yes innovation and so yes you got attack the processing and the people problem right or else that's not gonna change which slaves to that yeah trust me that's that's what it is yeah and so so that in order for us to move the industry forward Palmer talks about getting deeper into the business integration you can't get there you know if you're you know stuck in all this infrastructure right you sort of bring the first five minutes of my presentation you know and and but that's exactly true you know we've we've you know we say 70% is lights on 30 percent 25 30 percent is innovation it's not even innovation it's just new stuff compared to old stuff yeah it's not me I mean yeah yeah that's that's the binary call you need to get beyond that into true innovation and and you know that that takes a lot of effort and people are so stuck in I gotta get this done I gotta get this out you know I gotta work do this work around I got a triage this problem that the technology and the processes are so institutionally complex the business has gone this way I teeka's continue to run this way because we haven't had time to move this way I think today and I say today I mean the period of the technology that were in is the technology lends itself to agility the business is open to how it needs it and open and and welcoming to how it wants it consumed the technology good enough iterate agile and it's up to IT to adapt at this point to say I'm willing to bring those two things together and really change how I do things for the business that makes sense yeah and well it does especially when the context of the IT services discussion we had earlier and we talked about you said binary you know it's either you're you're maintaining or you're doing something else right I think when organizations if you can present IT as a service can start to really align with their their their objectives of their entry to like a portfolio right run the business grow the business transform the business right and maybe align it to business unit and really start to make IT a much more fundamental part of the strategic plan and the operating plan and that's what excites me listen I had one more question for you I've been hearing a lot about propel I heard first heard a couple months ago we heard more about it last week at sa P sapphire you did yeah okay yep that Jo was just talking about Jo Tucci so you know I know talk about propel yeah I didn't use that word but he talked about OSAP and he said hey it's going live soon I heard it's going live this summer but my fifth great so what's that all about okay so you know as as here's how I like I like to think about it for a few years we were building on infrastructure and it was a drive for efficiency in the business so you it's what I call you know when you start trimming the fat but you got to build back some muscle and the muscle we were trying to build back was a cloud infrastructure and applications that took us into the future right the business wasn't slowing down their plans because I couldn't keep up with them they were going just as fast as they had to go driving shareholder value creating new markets new products getting and doing the things they had to do we were working with 10 12 year-old legacy systems like every other company in our class it grow fast grow globally acquire companies you're just trying to tread water sometimes and just stay afloat we made a conscious call up two and a half years ago to revamp our core systems align a business systems no different than a retail bank pulling out their core retail banking systems and back-end systems and putting in new ones once they've used on a main route for many years very trivial but we just we didn't just stop at the a player we're completely building out this this new line of business solutions on and on what is essentially an EMC VMware RSA and partner friendly technology so it's s ap on the top and the a player Vblock architecture we've used in the spring frameworks gem fire all of the other products you know the middleware products that that allow us to move into the cloud from VMware all built on a V you know running on everything V yeah right so the only thing that we're bringing over over 12 years is data that we're spending a lot of time transforming so they're ready for big data and the database physically everything else is brand-spanking-new so at every layer of that stack we are transforming IT the business and ourselves I mean if you know what I encapsulate the the the the theme for this event we're living it July 5th my team's been working for the last couple of years the last couple of months have been torture as you would imagine anything of the scale you know we closed the quarter we turn on the lights the next morning and we're in a new system and we got to take our users through it so you know the teams in the next you know stellar job but we still have a little bit ahead of us so I said you'll be in the beach but Sanjay's team as the IT I always pulls the shorts we don't get we don't get a long weekend we don't get a very long month actually Dante merchandani one of the best CIOs in the business we had Oliver Bushman on last week and other real innovators I really appreciate names good to be here as always I keep it right there and we'll be right back