 ServiceNow Knowledge 14 is sponsored by ServiceNow. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. Welcome back, Jeff Frick here at Knowledge 14, ServiceNow's big annual show or at Moscone Center in a hot San Francisco day. We are here with day two wall-to-wall coverage. You're with theCUBE. I'm Jeff Frick, we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, we get the smartest people we can find in the room, we invite them on theCUBE and we ask them the questions that you'd like to ask. And we invite you to jump on our crowd chat at crowdchat.net slash no14. Join the conversation, send us a tweet. So we're joining our next segment by John Becker, the operational excellence from DeNovo. Welcome, John. And the returning to theCUBE is Jason Wong from Cloud Sherpas. Welcome back. Thank you. So let's jump into it. So John, tell us a little bit about DeNovo. What do you do? What's your guys business? Sure, DeNovo's an enterprise class of provider of VRP systems right in the cloud. So we allow small to mid-sized companies to go ahead and interact with us, order ERP services, and we provide those in a SaaS model or pay-as-you-go service, things like that. So it's an ERP application? Yeah, we usually focus on Oracle Enterprise One, which is the old JD Everett suite. We also do some SAP services as well. Okay, so you're the service provider offering those up as a cloud service, not you're not building the core ERP systems? No, no, no, no. We provide those and manage them for our customers so they don't have to. Okay, great, and then who's your customer set? Customer set is anywhere from a small startup, five to 10 users, on up to a billion dollar company. Awesome. We're all over the map as far as that goes. And how many do you have? How many customers? Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands? We actually have a relatively small set. We manage about 30 to 35 customers in our cloud. However, we have a number of other customers we manage, either professional service engagements, as well as it just managed services where we actually take care of ERP on a customer site. Okay, great. So obviously you're a service now customer, I take it? Yep. So tell us a little bit about how long you've been a service now customer? We've been a service now customer for about a year. About a year? What we really wanted to do with that is to consolidate a number of ticketing systems and bring that under one roof with a platform that we can grow with. What did you have before? And we had a number of things. We had NIMSOFT as well as BFC, even pre-remedy. Now why did you have a number of things? Is that legacy situation? Did you add things to try to take care of specific functional requirements that you didn't have covered or? Yeah, that was legacy as we brought in IT services for other companies. Sometimes we brought in their ticketing systems as well. So when we brought on new customers, sometimes they wanted to use their systems that they were already familiar with. However, that wasn't gonna scale long term. We needed to start to consolidate. Okay. So talk a little bit about what you saw in service now and so you brought it in. How was the implementation? Oh, the implementation actually was fabulous. We worked with Cloudera, who is our implementation partner to do that. We actually had a two month implementation. Two months. Two months using their accelerator package. So we were basically pulling in best practices right out of the box, trying to keep a very simple vanilla system that we could basically keep simple and yet grow with as we started to evolve our service application. Did you bake a cake? I didn't bake a cake. You didn't bake a cake? Oh, we didn't have a cake. Oh, yeah, I was gonna say, of course. Everybody has a cake. Everybody has a cake. I forgot about the cake. Everybody bakes a cake when they put in service now. But nobody's baking cakes for Larry else in as far as they know. I'm waiting for the tweet to tell me who's baking a cake for Larry. He's hungry. So that's great. So talk a little bit about, so you guys are managing these ERP systems for your clients. They obviously have people that wanna help manage those systems as well. How does that work? We actually interface with their IT systems. If they have it or their IT personnel, the reality is we try to actually take care of as much of that as possible because we wanna be able to control that. And frankly, we wanna eliminate some of the requirements on our customer size to have to manage those in-house. That's one of the value that we bring to this table is really managing for them so they don't have to or they don't have to go after the expensive staff, things like that. Okay. So one thing we haven't talked a lot about with customers is kind of the replacement model and the integration and kind of the rip and replace. How did that go? Did you kind of take advantage of an opportunity to start natively from the bottom? How much stuff did you pull over from those old systems? Actually, for many of our clients, we do pull in their current environments. We pull in their data, their business rules and things like that and bring those into our systems. For small startup companies, we basically have almost an accelerated like package where we pull in best practices for certain verticals and just bring those live for clients as quickly as they possibly can if they don't have something already in place. Okay. So now you're a year into it approximately. How's it been working on? We've actually grown with service now quite a bit. Past the initial implementation, we had a number of probably a handful of clients, maybe five to seven clients that came on there right away. We're now close to 30. We allow them to access us whether it's email, phone or lately the web portal through the content management system that has been basically a game changer in how we provide services to our clients. It allows us to get into their processes through the service catalog as well as being able for them to request services from us electronically versus a high touch interface such as the phone. So game change and how have you been able to leverage that game change within your business? We're starting to integrate more closely with clients in their processes. So when we talk about integrating, we're looking at like move out change or onboarding and offboarding employees and bringing folks into our ERP systems automatically. And that's just starting to happen but service now provides that platform that we can grow with. Awesome. So Jason, what would you say? Is this a pretty typical kind of engagement that you guys see? How does it kind of map based on the range of engagements around service now? I would say it's kind of two parts. It is very typical in that it's a relatively rapid result on the platform. It is atypical in that actually DeNovo was using some techniques in service now that are a little bit more complex, the domain separation and the ability to actually logically provision, if you will, instances and workflows and capabilities for separate customers. As well, we got the opportunity with DeNovo to really push the CMS portal to a new level. So what hasn't been mentioned is actually when you log in as one of those 30 customers, you actually get a branded experience centric to your brand. And the portals look different for each one of those. So they have 30 different views, they have 30 different experiences that they're managing across 30 different customers. And we're doing that in a single instance of service now. So that piece is a little unique but is actually the game changing portion of their implementation. And we haven't talked a lot about customers using it with kind of dual companies, using the same system. Most of the conversations that we've had about people using service now inside their own organization and within departments and stuff within the organization but not necessarily with multiple parties managing through the same system. So that sounds pretty unique. It's that managed services provider approach as it's centric to your IT support and of course all of the associated workflows with that. And that's really the bigger power here. Those are very challenging to do with other platforms and actually end up being relatively straightforward in service now. And then I assume that the kind of sass nature of service now mapping to your business, John, it must have helped significantly. Absolutely, we can bring new clients on without worrying about exactly if we're in license compliance and things like that. We can kind of do the pay as you go, just bring people on, use it, true up. It's an excellent model for us. And frankly it's very similar to what we do in our business so we're very comfortable with that. So you map as well. So talk a little bit about some of the older systems that you use, not necessarily specifically, but people have what they had. The company's been around for a long time. Now they've moved to the cloud and sass. A lot of people are trying to sassify, I don't know if it's even a word, kind of put a sass wrapper around the legacy application. Do you see that out there? Does it work? Are they just too encumbered by what's under the covers? And what are your thoughts on that? Right from the ERP standpoint, bringing in the very old legacy systems is a challenge. You're not necessarily built for the cloud. Things don't necessarily work quite as well as the cloud. With our business, we ended up pulling some of the older systems and older suites and doing frankly a lot of work to try to make them available for the cloud. It's one of the things we do versus some of the newer applications that are already built for the cloud like ServiceNow and some other other cloud providers. Yeah. The other thing we've talked quite a bit here at the show is how ServiceNow kind of lands and expands, not necessarily on purpose, maybe on purpose to talk to sales guys. But you know, the functional footprint really spreads out in the organization. I wonder if you could speak to that. Has that happened at your company at DeNovo? You know, kind of if so, where did it go and how did it get there? You know, one of the really smart things we did was start simple. We started with just a very small core application set that we wanted to use. However, as we've grown, we're starting to do additional modules. We started with just incident change, knowledge base, very limited service catalog. Our service catalog is definitely expanding. We've just implemented the project module and it is growing with our business. That was one of the value drivers frankly from ServiceNow is it was gonna be a platform that we could expand, not only for what was there, but to do some other things around custom applications so we could actually integrate into what wasn't there into the rest of our business. That was very powerful for us. Yeah, so Jason, one thing we don't talk a lot about which is certainly a big part of legacy applications is training, right? And so Fred's very big on the citizen developer and kind of assembly language versus development language and people are building applications and services. Out in the field, how much is that happening? How much of these services are you guys building for customers and how much of it is kind of teaching them how to fish so that they can start to build some of their own services and programs? How does that actually kind of happen on the ground? We find the overwhelming majority is teaching them how to fish. In fact, most of our implementations follow what we call a co-deployment type of approach where you may get an administrator that is just learning how to become a ServiceNow system administrator, working with our consultants and getting the point where they can self-administer the platform by the time they go live. Now, of course, there are always gonna be times where there are unique integrations or corner cases in the technology, but on balance, the UI is extremely friendly in ServiceNow and it's a matter of getting the right familiarity with it. If you can be part of the implementation, you obviously know what's been configured, you know what's been customized, you know what's been adjusted or enhanced and you can actually gather those skills during the initial implementation so that you're able to self-support and production beyond. The overwhelming majority of our clients do, if not all of their self-support posts go live, do the majority of their support by themselves post-go live. Is that right? Wow. And then so how about in terms of participating in the community? Do you guys do the hackathon? Are you contributing? I guess not to the share, because share just got announced today, but what does that mean to you as a business person to be part of a community where there's a different channel of innovation beyond just the guys that work for Fred? Honestly, we are a member of the community and we have had the unique experience of being taught how to fish. That was very important to us as we learn and grow. We basically look to the community for other ideas around things that maybe we don't know so it helps us understand kind of what's possible and what other people are doing. Frankly, the value of not only the electronic community but also the local ServiceNow user group in Colorado allows us to interact with other ServiceNow clients whether they were recent implementations in the past and share ideas and understand what other people are doing and basically just share together and see what we might be able to adapt or implement and bring value back to our instance and our company. So were you at Knowledge 13 last year? I was not at Knowledge 13 last year. That was, we were brand new in that implementation. So what's the biggest surprise since you've been here for the last couple of days or impression, impression surprise, your pick? The breadth of the application. It's honestly, it's very eye-opening right now about what's possible and how much there is that we can do. The trick for us honestly is to be able to kind of censor ourselves a little bit, figure out what's gonna be able to add value to our customers' processes because at the end of the day that's really what it's all about is how we map back there. But there is plenty, plenty to learn, plenty to do. And Jason, where do you go next with DeNovo? How does your engagement work? I mean, a two-month implementation, that's really fast. Just say they can do it themselves. You don't even need to train them anymore. Now where do you go as a partner, an integration partner with a customer relationship built around the ServiceNow platform? So our delivery structure, once we work with an initial client, we actually have service delivery management resources that stay with that customer over the long haul. Their job is really to do a number of things. One, ensure that that customer was very delighted with their project, with those two, to understand where some of those initial road mapping opportunities are, where the platform is heading. Obviously there's significant changes in the platform. You saw some of that in Fred Letty's keynote today. And then lastly, where are other customers in their space heading? And to help them rationalize that in a go-forward road map, our services products scale from everything from basic administration support, staff augmentation, all the way to things like the accelerators mentioned and other value adds. So what we attempt to do is obviously work with the customer at their right and pace and add the value that makes sense to them. We don't want to add a pound of prescription when an ounce of prevention will do. Conversely, there are times where customers need some additional capacity. And a good example with DeNovo is they are doing domain administration. That can be a more complicated administrative model than your basic provisioning of a ServiceNow instance. And so there's more to learn on that journey and we'll be involved in that journey with them. And you've got a nice broad view because you've got a lot of customers. There's been a lot of talk about kind of the migration of the application through the organization. Where do you see kind of the most typical path beyond kind of the standard IT management? Who's usually next? Is it facilities? I mean, there must be some patterns that you can see. Early patterns for us over the last several years have really been in the facilities and the HR space. We're seeing more and more customers moving down that path. As well as what I would call kind of one-off custom applications, the consolidation of that SharePoint site or consolidation of that Excel spreadsheet out on shared drive, those types of things. More and more, however, we're seeing customers asking for much more sophisticated things and it's really that immersion of that single source of record. That's something that ServiceNow speaks a lot about and it's quite valuable in this space. The challenge is, ServiceNow immediately offers a single source of record but customers don't necessarily have the immediate critical mass of data to really propagate that single source. And so we're seeing more and more customers getting more of that data in ServiceNow, opening up new opportunities for the platform. That's awesome. Well, John, good luck on the rest on your journey. I hope you pick up lots of helpful tips and tricks and a couple of laps while you're here. Absolutely, it's been an absolute pleasure to be here. And with you as well. Good, thank you. And thanks, Jason. Thanks for coming on again. I think we're going to see you a little bit later. So again, we are at ServiceNow Knowledge 14, Moscone, a hot of a very hot San Francisco day. We're at Knowledge, you're on theCUBE. I'm Jeff Frick. We'll be right back with our next segment in just a few short minutes.