 Rock and roll. I think it's probably five or six times I've been on the cube now. Right, you know, at first the guys are just fun to work with. Pat, welcome back. Hey, always a pleasure to be in the cube. Hey, I'm about to go on the cube. You never know what's going to happen. I'm a three-time veteran of being on the cube. I hope many, many more. Chad Sackets, Chad, welcome to the cube. Dave, John, it's great to be here, man. I keep coming back because great, insightful questions from John and from Dave. What face-melting action have you seen here at the event? And I know there's a lot of it. It's a great vehicle to communicate with a broad audience. A lot of folks watch. Great to have you back. Good job. All right, Craig Nunez, VP of Marketing at HP Storch. Thanks very much for coming on the cube. When people mention the cube, they're like, oh my god, I saw you on the cube. And they're all excited about it. It's an experience. It's not just information. They experience kind of what's going on there. It's like real time. It's like they were there. That was like going to the gym. My pleasure. Boom, boom, boom. Legendary IBMer, CEO of Symantec, and now CEO of Virtual Instru- Jeff Frick. This is the cube, Silicon Angles flagship product where we go to events. We take our mobile studio, lights, cameras, action, techs, hosts, and we extract the signal from the noise at these events. We try to share with you our audience what's happening at the event, give you a flavor for the event. We also, one of the things we try to do is we try to understand the alignment or the dissonance between a vendor's messaging and their customer's absorption of that messaging. And so what we're hearing from ServiceNow this week is a lot of messaging around going from IT as the organization of no to the organization of now. We've heard analogies and metaphors of Cobbler's children, the registry of motor vehicles and the like. And Brad Pavel is here. He is an IT practitioner with Maritz and really appreciate, Brad, you spending some time with us on the cube. Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here. So this is a great conference. We've been testing that little premise that I had up front and the resonance is pretty high, but we have you here in front of our audience and tell us, well, let's start with Maritz. Tell us about the organization and what you do there. Sure. At Maritz, we're a travel company. We're big into motivation, research are kind of our key components of our company. We're a smaller company. We have about 4,000 employees. Primarily an IT shop, if you will. IT is really what powers our organization. So at the organization, I manage many of the end user management. So I deal primarily with that IT touch point to the business. Okay, so what traditionally people would call helpdesk would be kind of your domain? Yeah, I have both the service desk, the knock, user administration, PC deployment, tool development, the whole ITIL, basically ITSM suite. Okay, and let's get into it. Tell us how you're using service now and tell us what life was like before and after. What we needed was basically IT is going through this evolution. It's a completely different animal than what it was before. Everybody's really wanting that weekend experience during the week. They want to be able to just zero touch, go in and do something. And we needed a product and a tool that would allow us to take that to our customers, to keep up with it, to make sure that IT became viable still in the future. So really we were looking at a product that would allow us to do that. And that's where we went down with the service now path. So to paint a picture of your IT operation, what's it like, the infrastructure, the apps, and give us as much or little detail as you're comfortable doing. Sure, so our IT infrastructure, I mean basically we provide the PCs, the hosting, all of our business services that you can see out, messaging, hosting, security, all of those things for our end users, which are basically our customers of IT. We went through this massive cultural shift just like the world is, our IT customers are demanding real value from us at a cost point that they can afford, because IT now charges for their services. It's a different game than what we've been into before. When did that happen? Was that a carrot or a stick that motivated that change? I'm going to say it was both. It was both. Really I think our owner really looked at it as we need a way to drive that cultural shift in our organization. So we allowed our businesses, basically the customers of IT, to be able to say, hey, you don't have to use your internal IT. You can go out and outsource that if you will. IT internally, if you want to compete, you need to be able to market yourself. You need to become one with the business. You need to align yourself with the business and really sell to them. Of course at a zero price point, so we have an advantage over the outside. We don't have to be profitable, but that really motivates you to really drive to make sure that you're delivering value, the services that they expect at the price they want. And was there a tipping point event? Was it Shadow IT? Or did he just decide someday the IT group as an entity needs to be competitive? It really comes back to what I was saying before, that cultural shift in IT. People want, when you're at home, your printer breaks, what do you do? You Google it, you figure it out, and you fix it yourself. Amazon, you go into Amazon, you go through it, you touch it. It's very easy to use. IT needs to move in that direction. And that's really where we need to take IT. So that's where he was driving us in our innovation. So that's really your weekend to the in week statement. It's your experience with other applications in the way they work and flow. Absolutely. And you have to become one with the business. That is so critical. It's so important. So let's talk about that a little bit. So you said earlier at zero cost, if I understand, you're doing chargebacks now. Absolutely. Everything we do is charged. That's new, right? Yes, that's great. So it's not zero cost, it's at cost. At cost. Okay, so you're not marking it up, whereas your quote, quote, competitors would be. Okay, so you have that inherent advantage, but it sounds like the business lines have the latitude to go outside. Absolutely. It'll hit their P&L, but if they feel like they're going to get better service, they can do that. Right. Okay, so you're literally in competition with the outside world. You're fighting for market share. That's right. Not your market share. That's right. Well, it really puts us in a tough spot, but it really drives innovation. I have to admit. It's a scary situation to be in because my customer base is limited to my internal company. I can't go to market to millions of people. Yeah, your team is limited. Right, right. You're even thinking that way. The fact that you even bring that up shows kind of a transformational thinking. Now, we're doing such a good job. We want to go sell these IT services outside. Absolutely, and that would be the next logical step. Right. You nail that down and you'll be able to sell to the outside. So that's what it was on DIT and worked pretty well for them. Absolutely. It's a life-changing experience. It really is. It's a hard cultural shift, but one that is so important in this industry. And that cultural shift, am I understanding it right? Did it coincide with ServiceNow or was ServiceNow sort of an enabler? You know, this sort of happened before ServiceNow, but we looked at ServiceNow as an enabler to allow us to become closer to our business. Because with ServiceNow, you're not limited to IT. You can go into other areas such as facilities, HR. It's an open platform that allows you to give you the flexibility to sit down with your business, your customers, and really develop with them instead of this kind of black box where they ask, you perform, you give it to them, and they're not sure, did you do it right? Did you not? Where did it come from? Now we're one with our business. We can sit down and really become that consultant with them, that partner. So, Brett, I'm interested in the business case, how you guys justified that. Did you go to your owner and say, okay, we embrace this new culture, but we need help. We need to bring in something like ServiceNow, or did you have to do some other kind of detailed business case, or was it something that you guys just did under the covers, the radar? It was more of a company-wide, directional, strategic decision that we made. So it was from the top down, but we met on it. We determined that this was the approach we wanted to go. And to be honest with you, when it comes down to it, everybody wants to cut costs where they can, right? Right? We want to be innovative. We want to cut costs. You want it all at the same time. IT needs to realize that and start performing in that direction. How can I cut costs? How can I innovate? How can I automate? Do all these things at the same time. You need tools that you're able to do that. You have to speed up your internal processes so you can free up internal resources to innovate and do those type of things. So how far are you down the path from kind of the start of this transformation, and then, you know, the, okay, go, ready, set, go. Now you're competing versus where you are today. How has the group changed? How has the... Oh, well, the mindset completely has changed. And, you know, even from a, you had mentioned earlier about from a pricing perspective, we do all of our pricing out of the tools well. So we have our business services. We have our IT services. They're all related. We go as far as saying, you know, your individual does hosting. You have a desktop. You have software on your desktop. You have, you know, maintenance on that stuff. We add up those prices. We figure those price points. We pass that on to our customers. You know, not profitable, of course, but we pass that information. So everything that they buy, they know what they're purchasing, how much it costs, and how much it's going to hit their book. It really drives our business to make better business decisions. Think about this before. If what you would do is, I'd have a customer, you're the business, and, you know, you'd acquire my business. You'd say, I need this much infrastructure. IT would just do it, right? How do you know if you're really profitable at that? How much did that IT really cost you? You don't know. Well, now you know. Now you can make better business decisions and say, I'm just not profitable with you, or I'm profitable, or do I need to reduce my service levels in order to be profitable with you? It helps you make better business decisions. And you're charging back the capex and the op-ex, right? That's correct. Because that's the other big black box, is people sometimes, you know, they'll show back the capex and then the op-ex IT eats, right? And so that becomes problematic. We're even going as far as issuing rebates throughout the year because what we do is we charge for a set period of time. If they don't utilize those products, we rebate them. I mean, how happy is a customer that you sent them a rebate check, huh? Well, and it's got to really help in terms of just the CIO budgeting to really know where these dollars break down because you've really broken it down. Exactly. It's kind of a transactional basis as opposed to just it's all going in the pool. That's right. That's right. So you can make really good business decisions, not just from the business, but from an IT perspective too. Right. You can see where you're automating, where you're gaining productivity. You know, all of those things are available to you now. Why don't more companies do charge backs? It's just too political. You know, I think they're scared of the magnitude of figuring out the approach. And actually, I'm speaking later today on that very topic to kind of get people in that mindset. But I think they're scared of it. It's the same with the CMDB. Many people are scared of a CMDB. They fail at it several times. It's a big monster. And we need some clear rules on how to establish that and how to build that. And I think they would move down that route because that's how we got there. It all started with our CMDB. We have everything in there from our financial information, you know, all of our servers, router, switch. Everything is in that CMDB. People, everything related to everything else. So powerful information. When you say financial information, you're talking about the IT finance, right? The assets. Right. How much did it cost to lease it? How much was that maintenance? How much was that software? Who supports that? Yeah, the people, all of the, you know, people information, personal, you know, all of that is in there. So give the plug. When are you speaking? Just so people are watching. Oh, I'm speaking later today. Actually, I'm not sure the title of the trip. Maybe we get somebody to say it. Okay, so for Brad on the agenda. There you go. Business service in the UCMDB, I think is what it's called. All right, so I got to ask you. I've been asking every IT practitioner I've talked to. What's on service now to do this? Obviously customers are really happy. I'm trying to think of a customer base within IT that I've seen this happy. So that's kind of a given. We're hearing that. It's kind of getting boring, frankly. What's on there to do this? What could service now do to make your life better? Well, you know, one thing that I think a focus needs to be is they've really revolutionized the ITSM industry, especially even moving it into a platform perspective. But one area that we need some additional cloud area or partnership is with monitoring. I think monitoring would be a very positive direction for them to go into, to partner with somebody, to build themselves, whatever it may be. But that's one piece of the puzzle that they're just not into yet. And that needs to take the next step into a software as a service type solution, a cloud-based solution. That would be huge. She's talking monitoring infrastructure. Monitoring infrastructure. And you have to remember, it's not just monitoring infrastructure anymore. It's monitoring the end-user usage of the system. So when you log into a website, how long does it take to come up? When you click here, how long does it... So really mimicking those end-user interactions with systems, that is critical to understanding and collecting that big data, if you will, and bring it all in to understand where your customers are going, how can you serve them better? So that's an analytics play. Now, how would you use that information in your organization to make improvements? Well, we're a big, like I said, an IT shop. We do a lot of custom application development. That's huge for us. The end-user experience, if you can make our customers, which are the business, their customers happy, they're going to be happier with us, right? So we need to make sure that what we develop from a back-end and what they're developing from a front-end is up to par. It's speedy. It can compete with everybody else. That allows us to better partner because we're strategically aligning ourselves then with our own business and our business strategies and it makes a great partnership. How about metrics? You've got a background in metrics. This is a topic that you know something about. Did the metrics that you track change when you brought in service now? And if so, how? Well, yeah. You know what we're really looking at when we brought in service now is the ability for our customers to do things themselves speedy, right? In a quick manner. So that's a new metric that, you know, usually you count how many calls are coming into the service desk, things like that. Really, what we want to do is we want to empower the end users to be able to make their own decisions and allow them to fix their own pieces of equipment. You know, even the small things, Apple Resets, Service Restarts, things like this, you have to empower. So you start to measure those things and the productivity gains, not just from an IT organization, but from your customers as well because they were on the phone waiting, right? It's not just you answering it that's a productivity hit. It's them calling as well. So you got to measure those types of things. So those are some of the things that have changed. What gives you the most pride in terms of both professionally and personally with where you've come in this recent transformation? You know, I have to say, I've worked with lots of different systems. I'm very impressed with the product. The ability for a service now to go beyond IT is probably the best solution that we could have gone with because it just really opens up the door. It gets that cultural shift. So more and more people are asking to be on the product. It's a great situation to be in. Did you guys bake a cake? We got a cake. We did. We have a giant cake. Service now jumped out of the cake. No, we had the big, you know, service now symbol. No, we didn't joke. All right, so cool. So you got this talk this afternoon on charge backs, really the how-to. What's the one piece of advice? Actually, I'm going to ask you two questions. One piece of advice you'd give to those thinking about, you know, taking the leap into this IT service management automation service now type of approach. What would you advise them? Well, I definitely start small and make sure it's really, to be honest, from a tool perspective, right? We can talk about tools all day long. I know we're at a conference here. It really starts with culture and people. It really does. You have to win the hearts and minds of the people to really drive the products. I think that's where you start. Start small and then kind of grow from there based upon your needs and the business needs and make that partnership. That's so important. Same question on charge backs. Is this something we talk about a lot in the Wikibon community? Probably 15 to 18 percent of our IT practitioner members do charge backs. And that's kind of in flat for the last 100 years. What advice would you give to people about charge backs in general, particularly those thinking about implementing it? I think the advice that I'd give is start with your CMDB. That's the most important. It becomes, your charge backs become valuable because of the information in your CMDB. Because of those relationships, you're able to really, truly see and it makes it simpler to track. Example, you can have an employee desktop software, licensing costs for that software, all related and you can roll that up to understand the total cost of ownership. That's really where you need to be. So it's all about the CMDB. So build the proper CMDB, put the financials in your CMDB and then use the tools to roll it up. It gives you such powerful information to make business decisions on. It empowers you to make the right decisions. Brad Paola, awesome advice, great segment. You're a heck of a salesman by the way. So, I'll be in a keynote next year. Yeah, that's right. So keep it right there. So we are unpacking the service now messaging. We're testing that with IT practitioners. CareWorks is coming up next. This is theCUBE. This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. We'll be right back. This is Knowledge. We're here in Vegas. Right back after this work.