 Everybody we're back, this is Dave Vellante, I'm with Wikibon.org, this is theCUBE, Silicon Angles flagship product, I'm here with Jeff Frick, my co-host for the week. Our colleagues, John Furrier, David Floyer, and Jeff Kelly are down at Sapphire now. Our other colleagues, Kenny, who was here earlier and Mark Risen Hopkins, are at Google I.O., so we're getting reports from the field at Google I.O. It's a big week. It's a big theCUBE. It's a big week here. It's a busy week for theCUBE. It's not Hell Week quite yet, that's coming in June, we love it, and we really appreciate the tweets, I'm at Dave Vellante. He is at Jeff Frick, so you can tweet us, we can get your questions on it. We're here at Knowledge, ServiceNow's big customer event, and we are double clicking on the practitioners. I'm very impressed, Jeff, with the enthusiasm with which IT practitioners come on our show and the degree to which there's alignment between what ServiceNow is telling us and their marketing messages and what the customers are actually doing with the product. Neil Laffenberg is here. He's the Senior Manager of IT Service Management at FICO. Neil, thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing your story. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so you heard my little intro and it's been consistent. We're seeing this pattern emerge. Happy customers, transforming IT, going from no to now, is that your story? It really is. The one thing I've been telling everybody all week is the thing I love most about the ServiceNow platform is I no longer have to tell people I can't do something. And I know that's right up the line with their marketing material, so I feel kind of cheesy saying it. But I no longer have to say now, now I have to say, when can we do it? Is this the right way to do it? Can we afford to do it? But I know that I can do it. Right, so tell us more about FICO. Let's actually start there and move into it. Sure, FICO is a company. We're a located, our IT organization at least is located in the Midwest, but where our corporate offices are out in San Jose. We're primarily known for our financial services work, our credit scoring is what most people know us for, MyFICO.com, if you originate alone in the US, you're most likely gonna have our scores used to vet you. But at our core, we're a software design and analytics company. So we design software for fraud detection, asset recovery actions, decision making, retail, the best next decisions, that kind of stuff. So you're in the data business. We are in the data business, absolutely. So tell us what are the big things that are driving that business? I mean, obviously you've got data growth, you've got tons of data, other sources, you've got the financial crisis, which sort of weighed heavily on your industry. Absolutely. You've got technology, sort of big data and cloud mashing together, all kinds of really. It's an exciting time. It is, it is. And we're facing all the same challenges that everybody else has big data. Big data, everybody's trying to figure out what that means and how we do that and how we deal with it. But I think the biggest thing we're seeing right now is there's a major push in the industry for trying to figure out what platform and as a service really means. Because we've got a number of vendors that we're working with internally that all are doing platform in their own kind of way. ServiceNow being one of them. ServiceNow's platform is a service as it pertains to having a framework that you can develop workflow based applications on. Let's summarize it that way. But there's other vendors out there who are doing a version of it with infrastructure as a service that's more subscriptive where you say I need this kind of a MySQL server or I need a web server. And then you have others that have like a middleware stack around software development. So platform as a service is this, I think it's the next cloud personally. It's where everybody's trying to figure out what it means but it's kind of the next thing that everybody wants to get to. We were talking to earlier at the start of the show today. We were talking about how these distinct clouds, infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, software as a service, they're starting to blend together. Absolutely. You see things like the Pivotal Initiative come out. Yep. Everybody wants to be the next big data platform. You're seeing service now as sort of a version of platform as a service. They do. It's not as intense as, let's say, maybe a Heroku or a Python. No. In the development environment, I can use Java, but it's really the thrusters, business users, app creator, things like that. So these lines are blurring. It's interesting to hear you as a practitioner talk about that. So how do you see that all shaped? First of all, if I understand it correctly, you would consider service now, not just a SaaS, but also a platform as a service. Increasingly, that's their future. I personally do. And I think it's interesting. The platform as a service model we're seeing is really, it's almost aligned against three verticals. You have the one that service now fits into, which is more around providing you a platform to develop things to make your job easier or to make your company more productive and a workflow, ticketing, tracking, approval, emailing, reporting kind of sense. There's another one that's kind of, how do we take these diverse infrastructures and provision them more quickly at the level above the actual platform? Because nobody really cares about the platform. You've been seeing it all week. It's around, it's going to become a commodity. It's that next level that everybody's trying to figure out. How do we be dynamic there? And then the other piece is the software development piece coming up with a middleware stack that sits, or sorry, a stack that sits on top of your core things that run your app and making application design easier. So I kind of think about it as three separate columns that everybody's kind of going against and bleeding into. Yeah, and then we, so we were at the AWS summit and clearly big developer community there. Jeff, I wasn't there, but Jeff and John Furrier were at the OpenStack summit. Huge push for developers. We're talking to them as well. I mentioned the whole pivotal initiative. You've got Paul Moritz now running, essentially trying to attract developers. You've got Cloudera, you've got Hortonworks, you've got all of these trends emerging and it's, as I say, it's a very exciting time. And then there's ServiceNow. So it strikes me, so we all know that if Microsoft, Azure is throwing those guys Google, I mean everybody, you know, he who owns the developer is going to, you know, make a lot of money and build a big ecosystem. But ServiceNow seems to have a different philosophy. Yes, they want to attract, they can track developers, like to say Java, JavaScript or whatever, but it's more the business user and those people that may not be hardcore programmers. Absolutely, and it's true. I mean we, my team and myself even, I'm in the tool day to day and I don't consider myself a developer by any means, but we can all, everybody on the team, look at a chunk of JavaScript and understand what it does and probably make some modifications to it. And we were able to start doing that very, very quickly. Our implementation, we went and started our implementation October 1st of last year and that we did a week of discovery and we went live on December 4th. And that was what the core platform, incident change, problem config, and a good number of customizations that we needed for our business, enterprise monitoring, LDAP integration, inbound email and a few other things. So we were able to very rapidly move from our previous platform to ServiceNow and gain all of the future direction that ServiceNow gives us. In fact, since then we've gone live with our project initiation, which is some people call that demand management. We've gone live with project management. We've gone live with our initial service catalog and we're starting asset management right now and that's since October 1st start. By the way, I'd love that you call the project initiation as opposed to demand management. I've always hated the term demand management. I know. I was like, okay, you have demand. Demand's a good thing. Yeah, that's where innovation occurs. We kind of split our demand, right? So the project piece is one thing, everything else we turn into catalog items, just separate that realm out. So I really like the way you phrased that. What was the catalyst to bring in ServiceNow? The biggest catalyst for us really was we needed to get out of the business of running a tool and we needed to get into the business of providing value to the business. So we spent so much of our time just keeping our previous platform running that we were never able to make serious time investments to make it better, to make the business better. And now I purchase ServiceNow and I have all these things that I can do that I don't have to pay anything extra for or I don't have to put an extra platform out there or an extra environment or it just, it lends itself very well to dynamic growth, small successful forward steps. I like that you're talking about value. I think there actually needs to be more of a discussion of IT value. You actually don't hear a lot of that from ServiceNow and I think it's an opportunity for them. I see ServiceNow as a platform to be able to scale the business and deliver IT value, actually track the value flow that IT is bringing to the organization so that the organization can exploit IT in new ways. Are you seeing that within Europe? We are, I mean we've already started to reach out into other things which I mean, are outside of IT or adjacent to IT and bring them into the fold and make it a better organization in the whole. We're integrating better with finance, we're integrating better with accounting, we're integrating better with HR and facilities. Everybody kind of wants in on this thing and it's not just IT, yes, IT is the core, but we've really been able to reach out into other areas where people need this kind of help. They need workflow help, they need approval help, they need small application help. It's a great platform for that, really is. What were your concerns prior to bringing in ServiceNow about ServiceNow about the platform? I think the general concerns that a lot of people have around data security, if there ever was a need to leave the platform what would that be like? That's always a concern, can I take my data with me? But we, the community in our area, the Twin Cities area is really, really strong around ServiceNow and we had a lot of people that kind of gave us their experiences and gave us a lot of feedback so we didn't have a lot of initial fears. We knew what other people were doing, we knew how they were having success and we just kind of took it on faith. Here, peer-based feedback. Exactly, it was huge and you can see that here. The community is such a driver for this organization. How about self-service? We hear a lot of talk about self-service. Are you able to achieve that? How has that transformed your operation? So our initial self-service portal, we might lie with it early in April. We have about, depending on how you divide it out, about 20 different catalog items and I actually was talking to our IT director when he was out in our office and I had him come over and I just showed him a quick report and I was able to show him that since we had went live, there's been an estimated $200,000 of catalog items that have gone through the system that he had no idea about because we at least did a basic cost tracking on our catalog items. Instantly, I was able to give him feedback and he was amazed, he was floored. He didn't have any of that data before. No, nobody done. I mean, it was total of the catalog items. This is what, since we went live. It's amazing. So if you didn't buy him a Blackberry 11. That's right, Fred Lutty's talk this morning. That was awesome. Talk more about the metrics. That's sort of one example. Metrics, key performance indicators, whatever you want to call them, balanced scorecards. How have you been able to bring metrics into the equation or did you always have them? Has it changed sort of the way in which you approach metrics that are you bringing in service now? For us, the reporting out of service now is better in general. We're still kind of in our infancy around metrics, we're a very reactive organization. So the metrics are whatever we need at the time to answer the question. And that's something I'd like to get out of. I really do look forward to enhancements in the service now reporting platform though. The platform right now is good as a base but it needs some improvement. Also needs a little refresh on look and feel but it's still way, way, way better than what we have before. So we have some key performance metrics out there but generally speaking it's our help desk that maintains that. So things around agent call times and times of resolution, just the same kind of thing most people use. So talk a little bit more about what you want service now to do going forward to make your life better. I think for me personally I've been given a vision right now to try to come up with a single source of truth both for IT and for customers in a single pane of glass and that's what I need to try to figure out how to get to. That's what I want service now to help me do. Not just IT information but system performance information that I can present to the customer and say this is what your application looks like right now. Hey, you're having an issue here and give them a dashboard view into our environment so we can partner better with them and deliver better services to them. Okay, so today you're saying you've got that dashboard for IT. We got it for IT. Okay but the business guys don't have a prism into IT. And we need to bring in some metrics that aren't core in service now and make that work too. Things like those real time metrics about an environment and about the systems. We have to figure out how to make that happen and that's what I really need. So touching, if I understand it correctly, touching more of the application portfolio, is that right? You got it. Which is links to the business process which links to the business. And then understanding at the back end how's it actually performing. That's what, you know, give me a graph that says my environment is doing well. Give me a graph that says my environment's doing bad and oh look, you've got five incidents and a change don't fit on that right now. And one kind of easy to digest pane, put it on a tablet, stick it in front of them so they know what's going on. So still IT performance. Exactly. IT performance that business users are going to understand. Focused on the business users, focused on the customer, giving them direct access to know what's going on in that environment. Is that unique in terms of how service now is being used? Is that something that you're hearing from other practitioners that they're trying to get to? I think it's, there are a few vendors that are proposing that they can do it. It's always a question of which tools that you want to go with. And I would much rather service now just make that part of the portfolio. Yeah, because you're reluctant to bring in another tool, another system of record, another database. It was part of the benefit of why we went to service now is I get one vendor for all those things, or one tool for all those things. That sounds like they're all responsive, so I'm sure they're listening. We've been talking to them about it. Well, plus the other thing is, I think in class, you know what I've, we certainly, we do a lot of these events, and when you go to an event, for instance, like VMworld, and you see the ecosystem there, it's, one vendor just can't do it alone. No, absolutely not. No, you need ways to bring in other data sources in a reliable way, in a timely way. You know, you can't be stale data, otherwise it's worthless. So it has to be timely and it has to be on point. Yeah, so that seems to be happening organically within the service now ecosystem, and it seems to be more deliberate. It is, it is. But, you know, we always keep talking about Frank Slutman throwing gas on the business fire. Maybe we could see more of that on the ecosystem, because that will allow innovation to occur beyond just the sort of the bottleneck of one company. No, you got it, you got it. Great. How about advice for fellow practitioners that are thinking about making this transformation? What would you advise? Anything you do differently, if you had to do it over again? A few things that we went with our deployment were probably some bad decisions, the small things though, nothing that really delayed us too much. I would say my initial advice is, don't make the mistake of trying to make service now work in function like your old tool, or whatever you were using before. You left it for a reason, leave it behind. Take the new one, move forward. That's my biggest advice. Okay, and follow up on that. Any advice around how to, we always talk about Wikibon GRS, getting rid of stuff. Any advice on the best way to get rid of stuff? For me personally, it's been looking at what you want to do next and taking small chunks, right? So we did our initial go live, decorative our legacy IT product. We went to project management, we got rid of the product management product. We go into catalog, we got rid of half demand management, just small iterative steps. The days of the big forklift and drop it in, they're gone. Let's just get over that and realize that we're in a very dynamic software development environment, nothing's going to be perfect. Good practice is better than the best practice if you don't have any practice. There you go. That's a good line to close. Good Neil, thanks very much for coming on, sharing your story. Another great customer story, Jeff. We continue to hear articulate, smart, fun customers. There's no place for the old curmudgeon that just wants to push the buttons anymore. I'm sure there's got to be a couple of guys that are not happy in the... It's a fun group here, it really is. I just want to get people new PCs. I don't want to be a business leader. Those days are gone. Clearly, I mean, the enthusiasm and really the, seeing this kind of business transformational opportunity for you as a personal career growth. Absolutely. As a way to impact the business is pretty exciting and that's been consistent all along the board. Really fun to see. Absolutely. All right, Neil Loffenberg, thanks very much. Thank you. Fight go, great story. Keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest. We're here live at Knowledge in Vegas. Right back.