 Okay, we're back after that nice break here from knowledge. We're here in Las Vegas at the Aria Hotel. This is ServiceNow's big customer conference. About 4,000 folks here, mostly customers. Most of the content at this event comes from customers. It's practitioners talking to practitioners, which is quite rare actually at these conferences. I'm Dave Vellante, everybody. Thanks for watching with Wikibon.org. I'm here with my co-host Jeff Frick. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE. We go to these events. We extract the signal from the noise. We love to bring you tech athletes. And Fred Lutty is here. He is a tech athlete. He's the founder of ServiceNow. He started this platform around 2003. Fred, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. So we really want to hear the story, you know, but we've been asked to sort of hold that off because we've got another segment with you tomorrow. But I just, I have to ask you, I mean, seeing how this conference and ServiceNow as an organization has grown, you just must be so thrilled in particular with the customer enthusiasm. Well, you know, fundamentally, I've got a personality flaw. And I call it a kindergarten mentality. I want to see my art on their refrigerator. And the only way you can do that is by making somebody happy. And so to see these people here with the excitement, the enthusiasm, and the smiles on their faces, really is satisfying that kindergarten mentality. The cakes. Yeah, well, yes. Oh, good stuff, we were talking about that earlier. Jeff had not seen the cakes before and was quite amazed today. So I think that's an industry first, actually. Good well be. Yeah, so you guys had some announcements today. You know, if you're going to transform an organization, you got to have mobile. I mean, the whole world's going mobile and five billion devices and growing. What did you guys announce today? Well, we announced the ability to run all of our applications on the iPad. And, you know, I think people's reasonable expectations these days are that they should be able to manage anything anywhere, anytime, using the device that they currently have. Now, I like to think of an iPad as something that you use when you're pretending to be attending a meeting or when you're pretending to be watching TV with your family. And when you are pretending to do that, it'd be nice if very efficiently and very effectively you could manage whatever you needed to manage to get your job done. And so today, what we've announced is the ability to run everything that ServiceNow has on that iPad. Yeah, I mean, it seems to mobile is basically a fundamental delivery model and maybe even the main delivery model going forward. Wouldn't it be? I think it will be a main delivery model. And it's a user interface that requires complete rethinking about how you're going to do things. You know, for the longest time, we looked at screens with 24 by 80s, you know, these character screens and then we got big pixel monitors and then we got bigger pixel monitors and we got very accurate mouses and everything got small and you got hovers and you got, you know, this massive amount of data. And now the form factor is completely shrunk and you're looking at this as my major input device. So how am I going to get, you know, everything I used to do with a mouse where I'm hovering over things to see what they do where I'm touching 16 by 16 pixels, which by the way, you can't hit with your fingernail. How am I going to get all of that stuff? How am I going to be able to work with all that stuff using only my thumb or thumbs? So how are you specifically taking advantage of that smaller form factor and the feature sets that you see in things like iPads? Well, I think it's a matter of rethinking. So we're trying to get the user to be able to accomplish their task by doing considerably less work. And one of the things that our system is actually very comprehensive, it's very big. And we create in the browser, in our first user interface, it was really created in 2005, we treat all the elements of the system equally. So now what we've done in the mobile, which I think is very unique. My space, I mean, Facebook doesn't have this, LinkedIn doesn't have this. We know exactly what you do as a user and we remember those things that you do repetitively. And so we're able to create shortcuts or we're able to remember, the system's able to remember what you do and then very quickly present you back with those tasks which are repetitive. So we're trying to simultaneously compress the information and reduce the interactions. Yeah, so that doesn't sound trivial. It sounds like there's some secret sauce behind that. Talk about that a little bit. Well, it's not trivial and there is secret sauce, but it just requires you to rethink. And for me, if you read the Jobs biography, there are a couple of interesting things in there. Number one, when he met Dr. Land, they both agreed that everything that had been invented, it was going to be invented, had already been invented, right? The other thing that they pretty much agreed on or what Jobs said in a quote that I've used for years is that great artists copy, good artists copy and great artists steal. And I've been a thief all my life. I'm just, I'm going to admit it right here. Right on camera, live. And so what we do is we go out and take a look at who's doing this great. Amazon's doing it great. Zappos is doing it great. Asana's doing it great, you know? And we capture those ideas. And then what they meant by great artists steal is that you take them and you reformulate them for the tasks that you're trying to solve for the problem that you're trying to solve and the artist won't, they probably, the original artist probably won't even recognize that as their work, but yet they're deeply inspirational to us. So do you fancy yourself as a bit of an artist? Well, I think it's interesting, I was watching the Bellagio Fountains down the road and to create something like that, if you think about the physics and the art that had to go into that to create that beautiful masterpiece, it's not just a painting, right? Think about the physics that goes on to shoot something, water 700 feet in the air and then cut it off instantly and have that all choreographed. I mean, it's phenomenal amount of engineering, but it took also a phenomenal amount of art just to make that interesting so that we actually stood there and wrapped amazement of, look how all this is choreographed, so yes, I do. In fact, I don't think, I take exception to the term engineering, software engineering. I don't think, we haven't progressed to the point where this is an engineering, this is an art, this is a craft, it's something that people practice and we try to get better at it and better at it and better at it, but I don't think it's anywhere near an engineering discipline. Yeah, that's going to follow up. The other interesting from the Jobs book that I never really got until I read the book was like the iPod Shuffle, because when I first saw the iPod Shuffle, I was like, you can't do anything, you can't manage your playlists on it, all you can do is change songs, I don't get it. And then in reading the book, as you just said, what is it you're trying to accomplish with that form factor, and don't just automatically try to replicate what you can do in one form factor to another form factor, but really rethink what's that application and it sounds like you're kind of taking advantage of that opportunity as you take the app to the mobile space and to the iPad specifically to rethink what is the best use case for that platform. That's right, and as you'll see tomorrow, the iPad was really the inspirational first step that we're taking toward a totally mobile app. And just like the Apple evolution of building all of this wonderful new capabilities into iOS and then bringing them back into OSX, we're going to be doing the same thing. So you'll see tomorrow on stage not only an iPad app, but you will see a native iOS app running. And you'll see that it does even more things than the iPad app does, and much faster. So it's a wonderful user experience. And those notions will be also coming back into the browser, et cetera. The same way that Apple's been bringing a lot of the capabilities of iOS back onto OSX. I was talking to an IT practitioner last month at a large grocer, and I asked him, what's your biggest challenge? What excites you the most? And he said the same thing. He said both, what's my biggest challenge is embracing all this pressure from my users for mobile. And that's what excites me the most, because I'm a mobile addict. He pulls out all his devices. So how do you see this announcement within your user base changing the lives of IT pros? Well, technology, since the dawn of time, has been used really for two things. It's been used to streamline, make tasks more efficient and more streamlined, and it's been used to create business differentiators. And so our product really is about process and moving process through an organization. And so we want to streamline that as much as possible. So if I can, we do things like change management. Change management has multiple levels of approval. If I can get it to the point where a manager can pull his phone out of his pocket and do five approvals between meetings, he's become significantly more efficient. The changes are going to be done in a more timely fashion, and the bottom line improves. It's as simple as that. It's interesting, those of you watching know, we were earlier today broadcasting from SAP Sapphire event. And if you go to Sapphire, you hear huge doses of two things, one is HANA, of course, which is their in-memory database, but the other is mobile. It's all you hear, and it's interesting to hear you guys talk about the ERP of IT, and you hear SAP, the poster child for ERP, and all their customers are going to mobile, whether it's retail, manufacturing, across the supply chain. And so it sounds like you've got a sort of similar mentality, more focused, obviously, within IT, but of course now you're also branching beyond IT. Do you see your mobile app push going beyond the IT community? Yeah, absolutely. Underlying all of our applications, we have a platform that's a, it's a forms-based workflow platform that's really purpose-built for something that we would characterize as a service relationship management. So pretty much any request, response, fulfillment type workflow can be handled by our platform. And what our customers have done over the years is create different applications that help them streamline that workflow. Typically that workflow is handled by people creating a spreadsheet, emailing it to somebody else, having it emailed back. Perhaps they built a Lotus Notes app, but yes, everything that, or I will say that our platform usage has been expanded by our customers, sometimes beyond our wildest dreams, and we love it. So you talked about some of the greatest artists were stole, right, and so, now you guys put up this platform. I've said it a number of times today, it's not trivial to actually get a CMDB working in the way that you wanted to get it to work. So now you've had this platform out for quite some time, your success has started to, you get a lot of press, people are starting to see it, do you worry sometimes that people are going to say, okay, I can do that too, I'm going to rip it off. What gives you confidence that you can stay ahead of those thieves out there? Well, I have great confidence in that, we have a very broad base of applications that are very deep in functionality, but that's really something that you want to happen. Because you want some young people with fresh new ideas to try to unseat you, because they will come at this from a completely different perspective and a completely different angle, and they will do things that you never thought of. And so the race is then on, are they going to become more relevant than me, or am I going to be inspired by their ideas, incorporate them into our platform, and stay ahead of them. So you welcome that. Absolutely welcome that. We wouldn't be where we are today if Edison and Bell weren't the jobs and gates of their time. They had just, and I think jobs and gates as well, they had this great rivalry that really caused technology to move ahead a lot faster than when it was just IBM selling mainframes. And so you need those rivalries, you need that competition. You know, I'm watching these young guys from Asana. It's a great little platform for tasking, and they came out of Facebook, they have a very Facebook mentality, and they have phenomenal ideas. And believe me, guys from Asana, I'm watching you. Those are just, that's where great ideas come from. Well, we always, like I say, we love sports analogies here in theCUBE, and Jeff, your kids are into sports, as are mine, and you always want to see and play that more competitive environment. It sounds like Fred, you have the same philosophy. Very much so. Excellent, all right Fred, well listen, we really appreciate you coming by. Now you come back, Fred's going to be back again tomorrow. We're going to go through the story of service now, that's why we really didn't touch upon it in any kind of detail today, but Fred actually started the company, well give me a little preview Fred, so you started the company, really not to go solve an IT service management problem, right, you came up with this sort of idea, this platform, and then you, that was really the first application that you developed, right? Give us a little tidbit of what we're going to hear tomorrow. Well we can even back up a step before that. Oh, great. You see, I've been a programmer now for 40 years. Every day I wake up, that's all I really want to do. Why do I program? Because I want somebody to take a look at the technology that I build and say, hey, that's pretty helpful. I like that, I can use that. I'm going to put that in my fridge. It's one of the fridge. One of my friends. So, the real strategy behind the company was to build some software that somebody wanted, that hopefully they would pay me, so I could build more software. That was the entire strategy. And so, you know, on one hand I love technology, and on the other hand, it really irritates me when it makes me feel stupid, or it makes other people feel stupid. So what I wanted to do was to create an enterprise platform that people could use and they would feel empowered. They could walk up and use it, like they walk up and use an ATM, like they walk up and buy something from Amazon, et cetera. So a completely, you know, consumerized thought process. And then, that was the thought process really in O3 and O4. And then what we really figured out was that a platform is a very hard sale. You know, it's tough to convince somebody that they should take this. It'd be like selling you an Intel processor and telling you you can do anything you want with it. Right? Exactly, they want to solve a business problem. And so we decided to go after the ITSM space first. It was a space that was very underserved, very lucrative, and growing significantly. Yeah, amazing. So join us tomorrow. We're going to fred back on and we're going to really hear the story, the founding story of ServiceNow and how we got to where we are today. So Fred, thanks very much for coming on and sharing the news. And I'm going to change it all by tomorrow. I guess. Whatever you heard today. Fantastic. That's called a tease. All right, so keep it right there. Up next, we've got Douglas Leone coming on. He's the partner at Sequoia Capital and one of the better known VCs out in the Valley. So keep it right there. We'll be back with Doug just in a minute. This is ServiceNow. This is theCUBE. This is Knowledge. Right back.