 Okay, welcome to a CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. We're here in Palo Alto, California with Todd Basher, director of platform product management for ServiceNow. Welcome to this CUBE Conversation. It's great to be here. You know, ServiceNow is a well-known and emerging, I call him the leader in IT automation, managed service management. It's just a really emerging area. You run the platform product management, which is, you got to, you're the CEO of the platform, basically, you got to watch everything. Platform wars are going on all over the place, whichever vertical you want to talk to. They're a platform where Twitter versus Facebook and LinkedIn. You go on other areas of the market. You can see in the cloud wars, they all have platforms, integrated stacks, horizontally scalable. All this stuff's great, but you know, when you go into an enterprise in your business, you guys have had great success with your platform. So I want to do a drill down on that. So let's talk about this platform for IT, which you guys have. And I also want to talk about the trends of the platform around application development, whereas application development comes so much more turnkey, faster time to value, speed to velocity getting apps built and published. We talked about service catalogs in other interviews. Talk about the platform for IT and how that extends out and enables, on the developer side, pure developers and just business people who want to develop apps. Right. If you look across the industry, there really is a tremendous focus on what I would call the professional developer. Those people that work with PHP and Java and Ruby on Rails and they're delivering onto cloud infrastructure and just delivering on cloud infrastructure, not having to worry about that aspect has accelerated the delivery of applications. But then there's this other class of developer that I don't think is really addressed in the market right now. And that's what's called the citizen developer. Those business analysts, those power users within the enterprise that understand their business, they want application capabilities, they want to get that integrated with other aspects of their business, other applications within their business, but they don't really have tools to do that. And so- And the citizen things are, you're talking about knowledge workers, like basically normal people in the organization. That's right, absolutely. And of course there's a spectrum, you have knowledge workers that are a little more technical and you have knowledge workers that really do their job. And so we're talking about- Knowledge workers that can do Python. And maybe not even that much, but JavaScript, those types of people, maybe Excel gurus out there, people that know their business and maybe want to do a little more technical things. And those are the people that I think are undisturbed and are really an ideal target for our type of application platform. Because we make things very declarative, this is what I want to do. We more and more are requiring less and less script to be written to achieve the goals of those types of developers. So that's the type of person that we think is underserved and the type of person that we want to serve better with our application platform because they're the ones that we believe really will drive the most application development in the enterprise. So there's a lot going on with service now. So let's do a little drill down. So you've got the consumerization of IT trend going on. So you guys have solved a lot of problems for your customers with your current IT service management capabilities. You know, moving to HR and other areas. The consumerization IT brings mobile. That's an area that everyone's working on. A lot going on. But talk specifically about this orchestration concept. I mean, this is a, orchestration has always been talked about certainly in IT, orchestrating resources, orchestrating making things efficient and certainly automating and drill down into that platform for orchestration. And what should people know about it? What are the technical things? What's the secret sauce on the platform? Sure. And when you say orchestration, for me, that means two things. One, there's the technical orchestration of IT activities where you're really driving changes to the infrastructure through workflow, through scripted activities, things like Puppet and Chef and those types of orchestration activities. And we have tremendous support built into our platform and our applications to support that type of orchestration. The other type of orchestration that I think of is process orchestration. Just making sure that people doing knowledge work within the enterprise are coordinated with each other, are sharing resources when available, sharing knowledge, and we do that incredibly well. Not only with the core platform capabilities that we have, but also through taking our existing IT applications like the service desk, like incident and problem, knowledge management, service catalog, being able to take that and go to any service within the enterprise and allow them to take advantage of the best practices that we've built into those applications. A lot of the IT conversations have always been around the infrastructure, converged infrastructure, certainly cloud has changed in the game there, you've got Flash, all this new technology, virtualizations enabling that, but at the end of the day, there's an operational layer, right? So at the end of the operating, the OPEX side of the budget is huge, right? That's a big, big area. And then you've got these new levels of management issues, like the big day that you get visualization. So the service catalog and that notion, I get the top of the stack there, management, I want to see reports. It's that operational piece that's interesting, right? Because you have multiple vendors, you guys talk about vendor performance management, single version of the truth. Take me through the vision of how that works and how does that work with the infrastructure? I understand how you get the infrastructure, but tell me about that operational piece. It's a big chunk of the budget in some of the people we're talking about. And obviously the management piece is like, you know, how the vendor's doing, the reports I need, but that operational piece, that's where the stuff's happening. I think where you're going has to do with being able to capture all of those operational costs and understand them better so you can drive either a reduction in those operational costs or make them more optimized with what you're trying to do and from a growth perspective. Is that? Well, for instance, the password thing comes up. People spend a lot of time basically managing passwords. So there's operational, which is like people management. We talk about this with the big data all the time about hospital efficiencies where, hey, that's just like business issues that are operational. Get the people out of the beds by a certain time is a lot of churn. So in IT, it's the same thing. An incident's going on. You got stuff happening. I got to deploy resources. That operational machinery is interesting. So you guys have a great platform for that. So I'm trying to get at what you guys are focused on there. That's the key. It's really for me about making sure that you fully understand all the requests that are coming in. What is driving those operational costs? And once you start understanding that, it's what gets measured, gets managed, right? So if you have a single source of the truth and a comprehensive database that understands what are the demands on the business, what is driving costs, then you can take steps to actually drive those costs, automate them, lower the costs. And again, this is about getting more and more of the business of the enterprise into a single view and by allowing custom application development along with the IT part, then you not only understand what the demands are on the business, but then you have an opportunity to automate. You can apply workflow. You can apply changes to the infrastructure. Whatever is needed, you can both understand what is needed and then take action. One of the things I love about having platform conversations with product guys like yourself is that you get to see both sides of the world. You've got to go out and talk to customers, talk to the field teams, but also working with engineering. So I got to ask you, what's the big ah-ha for the enterprises? What's this whole transformation measures is obviously marketing, but they are transforming. What are you seeing as the transformation sequence or areas that are most hot right now are for enterprises that they're working on? What is the key, what are the key things that you productize? What do you, as you build the requirements in? I think part of it is this idea of IT becoming more and more service oriented and enabling other parts of the organization to become more service oriented. So it's not just about changing the knobs in the data center. It's about truly being a partner to the business saying what technology do you need to drive efficiency in your business? How can you serve your customers better? And by providing a platform like we provide with service now where they don't have to think about necessarily the core plumbing on providing that service, they can concentrate more on providing the service to the business and allowing IT to accelerate that delivery of better service. Yeah, one of the common themes is integration, having an integrated approach. It platforms enables things to grow and develop seamlessly. We've talked about mobile in the past. You don't want to bolt mobile or a new trend's going to come around. Some new software capability comes in. The goal is to plug it into the platform and then have it just seamlessly integrate and automate functions. What are some of those things that you see out there that are coming around the corner? I mean, now you're a public company, now you know the one great detail, but talk of use cases. Like you got to put the roadmap together. At the top of the platform, you're going to have apps, more apps. Are they third party apps? And are they going to be built by the customers themselves? Big date is a big part of it. What are some of the things that you're seeing and evolving over the next few months to years? Certainly the idea of our customers, our partners creating more applications, sharing those applications, making them instantly integrated with someone's instance at kind of a pluggable application ecosystem enables tremendous acceleration of the capabilities of an organization. And that's certainly a trend. The idea of getting more advanced understanding of the performance of the organization. We have our performance analytics product that we're integrating with the platform that allows you to look at data over time and make decisions to improve your performance. Those types of trends, the idea of using more and more data from a big data perspective and how you're going to incorporate that into your business understanding, those are huge trends for us. You know, I got to give you guys props. We talked to a lot of folks out there on theCUBE interviews, that are all the major events in the enterprise area. And you guys have a lot of traction because you make it easier for folks. And I think that's an interesting point. So props to you guys. Congratulations, great benefit of our platform. And certainly the service catalog conversation has been around for a decade. Finally getting service catalogs. Finally coming at massive scale. So I got to ask you the CIO question. We were, it was just another CUBE interview and I saw into a big time CIO on theCUBE and he says he's now on a P and L. So you're seeing that trend of the guys who run the business or the IT business, CIOs, profit, they're on their profit and loss. They're moving to profit and loss. So this kind of talks about the top of the platform for you guys, at the top of the quote platform stack is applications. Dashboarding, reporting. So if I'm the CIO and I'm on a P and L, I got to drive business value. That's the number one thing, or profit. No, we always debate. Like if they can just get rid of the day, the facility's budget, then they're going to be very profitable. Someone else can take that. But you know, put that aside, with that mindset involved, what are some of the mindset and conversations that you're having with CIOs or CXOs in the market? Have you seen the same thing or, and what is that, what do you guys do at the product platform side that enables that to happen? There's certainly this enormous trend to use the catalog as the focal point for interaction, whether it's with IT or another part of the business that's providing services. It's to consolidate that and make it very easy for someone to approach the organization and say, I need to do X, whether it's there's a squeaky door or I need more capacity on my SAP system. Whatever it is to be able to approach a very consumer-like interface with the catalog and say, I need X. It makes it very clear what services are available. It makes it easy to request those services, understand where it is in the fulfillment cycle. That kind of exposure forces not only a better user experience, but it also forces the business to think more critically about what value they're providing. And by being able to capture that in a catalog item is a tremendous mind shift in a lot of cases. It's not just about doing your job day to day. It's about saying, okay, well, what is the job that we're doing? How can we provide more value? What does that look like to our consumers and the requesters within the service catalog? I think there's a lot going on. Certainly, look at your service now portfolio and the complexity in the customer's environment. I mean, you get everything from vendor performance, incident reports, password reset, HR automation, all this stuff's going on. You guys have built a platform, congratulations. It's hard to do. I know that's why you guys are so successful. And the founder was on the queue talking about the original vision of having a platform. But again, it's only going to get more complex. I mean, it's going to get more complex as more apps come in, big data, virtualization continues. You're seeing software-defined data center becoming a huge trend. You guys are really in a nice vector on that trend line. So congratulations, Todd Basher. This is a CUBE conversation with Todd Basher from ServiceNow, director of platform product management.