 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante, the biggest conference of ServiceNow, 18,000 people here at the Venetian. We're joined now by Mark Toludo. He is the DXC fruition global practice lead at DXC. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. So let's start up by telling our viewers a little bit about what you do in your role within the organization. Sure, just brief history. So I was one of the co-founders and CEO of fruition partners. So we were acquired by CSC, now DXC, about almost three years ago. And within DXC, DXC made a very conscious decision to use ServiceNow as kind of a pivot point to digital transformations for the customers. So by acquiring fruition, and then further investments, so we've done acquisitions in Australia, mainland Europe, the Netherlands. We've really consolidated a lot of the best regional partners inside one DXC fruition practice. So within this practice, that's where we do a lot of our transformation work with customers that are starting or continuing there, their ServiceNow journey. And Mark, you and I met in the early, early part of this decade, when this show was a lot smaller. I mean, it was well under, I mean, maybe around 5,000, probably even a little bit smaller than that. And it was companies like fruition that got in early. You didn't see the CSC slash DXCs and the other big systems integrators. And this thing has just exploded. What's your perspective on the last five, six years? Oh boy. Well, I will say, you know, it's, a lot of this is driven, a lot of the growth, not just from ServiceNow, but from the GSIs, the global system integrators, that really sees ServiceNow how it can really be applied to their customer base. And so in the last five years, you went from people that were interested, but really didn't understand what it could mean. Cause you know, if it's perceived only as a ticketing tool, it's like, well, that's not important, but as it's now seen as a, really a service management platform, that getting in and servicing IT is just a way to go help HR, to go help SecOps, all these other venues. So what we're seeing is really an explosion in the GSI community, either trying to do acquisitions like we've done. So there's been about in the last five years, 17 different acquisitions of all those regional players into those various global SIs. But then those global SIs themselves, as we've seen in some of the presentations here, and DXC ourselves, we're now using ServiceNow internally as a way to automate a lot of our internal processes, to be what we call customer zero, or the lighthouse account, is now the GSI themselves. So I think they've really embraced the message we've been kind of saying all along, which is, yes, it's good for IT, but it's really good for how you operate all your shared services businesses. So that's been, and it's been just accelerating every year. Now remind me, so when you started fruition, did you start with ServiceNow? Did you have, had you had experience with other platforms before that? Oh yeah, so we actually started in 2003, so about five years before we ever met ServiceNow. There was no ServiceNow, really. No, yeah, so we were used to using the remedies of the world, I mean the other kind of various tools that were out there, but we also weren't a system integrator when we started. We were, it's funny, because you hear the messaging now, organizational change is more important, customer success is more important. Those are really the roots of our company. We were like, listen, the process needs to be better. You know, reporting, governance, all these things. We could use remedy, we could use other tools, but we need to really figure out why people are choosing to engage to do service management, or they just kind of go off and do their own thing. So for those five years, that's all we did, was talk to organizations about crawl, walk, run. How are you maturing from fragmented service offerings, fragmented support to really kind of being able to centralize those operations, and then extend outside of IT. And when we met ServiceNow, it was like, it's like they were telling us what we've been telling customers for years. It sounds like that's great. And the lack of a tool, a platform, and it really does what ServiceNow does, you know, in a way, it might have been a tailwind for your business, because complexity, but on the other hand, you had to respond and you jumped on it early. I mean, I would think a lot of SIs might have said, oh no, that takes complexity out. Complexity is cash for us. You guys had a different philosophy. You said we're going to get in early. Talk about that journey, that decision. You know, well, we first met ServiceNow, like I said, 2008, when they were about 40 people, total, you know, the entire company. And I think we were 10. So we were almost, you know, similar sizes. But you know what we were able to provide ServiceNow was explaining the customer journey that the technology was very important and it was very lightweight and nimble, but that customer journey, the customer need to understand, well, what should I do first? What should I do next? What should my one year, two year, three year look like? And that's something that we've always kind of held that we saw ServiceNow also as being this platform, we believed in the GlideFast story, which was ServiceNow before ServiceNow. And we were, maybe we were one of the first ones to say, there's IT service management, but let's just talk about cloud service management, enterprise service management. So I feel like their story and our story, we've kind of been maturing together as we've seen customers really adopt the platform. And some of the great case studies that we've seen over the years, those have been our customers that we've helped encourage to say, what's the difference between an asset that's in IT and an asset that's in manufacturing, right? These are the same disciplines. So let's help them go out there and do that. So it's been, it's obviously been a tidal wave of work. It's been very interesting expanding globally. And you know, this is just a result of a lot of hard work on everybody's parts, too. We're sort of, at this conference, we're hearing that this is a real moment in time. And you were describing talking to companies, trying to understand those who were sort of happy to operate in this fragmented way, versus those that were truly committed to technological change and bringing things together. Do we, is that true in your mind? That there really is a recognition on the part of companies and employers. That this is, we need to get better at this. You know what we're hearing? We're hearing from very large enterprises, some of them in even aerospace and defense that are like, we have to recruit younger talent. You know, they do have aging populations that will be exiting their workforce. I've seen this from universities that recruit obviously students, but then it's then the workforce. The expectation is now so much higher that their experience with IT inside their employer is much closer to their experience as a consumer. We've been saying it for years, but now it's really become a business imperative. As customers, I should say as our customers, but they are trying to make their workforce happier, not only just more productive, more engaged, but also, you know, retention. It's, I feel like it's the moment of the worker themselves and look at other economic factors. Unemployments at a historic level, finding people. You're competing for your own workforce to come work for you. They can't show up and you give them a Windows 95 machine and like an Office 2001 product suite, it's a reflection of how you as a company actually operate. So all of those are kind of coming together into this consumer-like experience for the employees of our customers. And a lot of talk about new ways to work, the future of work. So what's your expectation going forward for how that affects business, affects your business, organizations. It sounds like they're closing the gap between consumer experiences and enterprise experiences. What's next? So you know, a big word, friction and frictionless, right? Like where's the efficiency? What is the friction in the different departments working together? I think as people really do adopt this, called the service management platform, that system of engagement, once those silos start to come down, once they start to share that data, we see it in like individual customers, they kind of go through this aha moment, they've cleaned up their data sources, they realize everything's on one platform, and then they're like, well, couldn't I build this? Can I build that? Yeah, you can, and it really starts to accelerate. So I think we'll see the barriers of these business units really fall. I think IT's role is going to shift to be almost a, you know, we talk about a service management office, not a project management office. So the service management office is, how well are all of my services, that whether it's HR, whether it's finance, how are those services being consumed by my employees? So I think we'll see that pivot. It gets away from IT being more T, the technology and more the I, like what information services am I providing? But I think really we are at that catalyst, that as people start to adopt that, it moves much more quickly from here. What's next? What is, going forward, what do you see as the DXC Service Now strategy? Boy. So, you know, this is something that, you know, we've been working, so DXC's only been in existence for one year, right? But it came from HPES, came from CSC, right, 26 billion dollar company, 180,000 people. DXC is putting all of their investment strategy around digital transformation behind Service Now. So we have another team here that focuses completely on building Service Now offerings that are behind all of the other DXC offerings. So what do I mean by that? The difference is, whereas fruition will go into a customer and say, we'll help you do Service Now work, the platform DXC team says, we want to deliver cloud orchestration. We want to deliver desktop and mobility, workforce, you know, call centers, but all of those are empowered, powered by Service Now in the backend, all of our analytics. So we do a lot of other things as DXC, obviously billions of dollars worth, but we're switching that all to be standardized on Service Now. So we're actually breaking down the silos in our own company of how our different departments work together. So if a customer buys a cloud orchestration platform, and they're also a workplace and mobility customer, and they also have maybe HR, BPO, that's all on Service Now, the DXC platform DXC built on Service Now. So that's, I mean, that's everything DXC is throwing at it, is to be that player. And do you see Service Now as that platform of platforms? Yes. And I mean, you guys really are technology agnostic, but if it fits, you'll use it. Well, we say we're an independent software provider. We don't create our own products like an IBM might or somebody else might and basically put those products in front of a customer when they're really not the right fit. So, I mean, we had John Donahoe on earlier, he said, look, this work day and there's Salesforce and there's SAP, et cetera, et cetera, we want to be the connective tissue to those platforms. Software companies are funny though. They all want to be the connective tissue, but this is what Service Now does. So, do you feel like they are in a unique position to be that platform of platforms? I really do. And we've worked with a lot of other software companies that want to connect into that Service Now ecosystem, because what we find is other software products are like, listen, I might be really good at security, intrusion detection, but do I want to create a workflow and I want to create the CMDB? That means that I have to go build an entire almost secondary product to my core competency. So, if I'm really good at antivirus, if I'm really good at intrusion detection, even if I'm really good at reporting, I still need people to act on the information I'm providing them. But I don't want to build that action engine, so that's what they're almost setting up their own boundaries, saying, let Service Now be the action engine for me and we'll just plug into them. They're becoming the standard for how customers work between silos. Great. Well, Mark, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been really fun talking to you. It's been a pleasure, thank you. Great to see you again. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from Service Now Knowledge 18 just after this.