 Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. Welcome back to sunny Orlando, everybody. This is ServiceNow Knowledge 17, hashtag no17. I'm Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. John Donahoe is here. He's the newly minted CEO and president of ServiceNow. Fresh off the keynote, fresh off 49 days in. John, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thank you very much. It's great to be here. So how'd you feel up there? The theater in the round. You were working in the audience. I loved how you walked down the stage and really got into it. How's you feel? Well, what I love about ServiceNow is it's a community-based business and a community-based company. And so we had 15,000 members of our community out there. And that community feeling is, I think, one of the real powers of the movement that's called ServiceNow and of the ethos of this company. So I loved it. I fed off that energy. So at the risk of some repetition, a little bit of background about yourself. Former Bain, former eBay CEO. You shared that with the audience. What is relevant about your background to the ServiceNow experience that you expect to have? Well, you know, it's funny, Dave. I spent the first 20 years of my career at Bain doing business transformation. And a lot of what I talked about today was digital transformation. That is, every company is trying to transform. And I spent the first 20 years of my career focused on that. And then we talked a lot about great customer experiences. Well, the consumer world and consumer-based applications like eBay or PayPal or many other consumer applications are defining the new standards of what kind of easy, simple, intuitive experiences are possible. And employees are consumers at home and they're increasingly expecting the same kind of great experiences they have at home at work and as customers of enterprises. And so I think you're going to see the world of consumer and enterprise converging. And so that's why I'm very excited about being part of ServiceNow. So you talk to the audience, as I say, about your background. You're a family man. You've got four children. Pictures on stage, which I love, you know, really kind of goes with kind of the folksy history of this company and the community base. Not too many people put their family photo up on the keynote. I thought it was great. Yeah, well, they're my bosses, so. Well, like you said, they make you humble. You learn a lot from them. So I appreciated you starting there. I got four kids. Jeff's got kids. That's great. And you're hosting a women in tech breakfast tomorrow. Real passion of ours. So maybe talk about that a little bit. Well, I just think it's really, really important. And people ask me, why do you think that way? I think it's good business, right? At the end of the day, the ultimate thing we do to succeed in business is we need to attract, develop, and retain the very best people. And by definition, 50% of the workforce is female. And so to not be aggressively trying to cultivate that part of our team is to miss an opportunity. And doing it well is hard, but if you do it well, it can be a source of competitive advantage. So I care deeply about it professionally, and then also personally, as a father of a daughter, the question I ask men that have daughters that say, do you want your daughter to grow up and be part of a work environment that's even better than the one they would have been if they come at your time? And almost all of us say yes. So it's a responsibility we all share. So I want to ask you about your management philosophy. You know, I've heard the term, of course you have to a benevolent dictator. You use the term servant leadership, which starts at the customer on top, explain your philosophy there. Well, it's a way I learned to lead early in my career, which is that it's the opposite of a classic pyramid, right, where the CEO is on top and everything's underneath. Now this is an upside down triangle, where the reason we're here is to serve our customers, to serve our employees as they serve our customers, to serve the purpose, and to the extent you can, serve the communities in which we're part of. And my experience is that building that deeply into the culture of a company breeds a level of commitment and a level of long-term orientation that's really important. And ServiceNow has had that from the beginning. Think about Fred Letty embodied that. He was a brilliant technologist and he said, you know what? I'm going to recruit a CEO before the company goes public who has those skills, so we recruited Frank, right? And Fred stayed involved. Frank embodied servant leadership. Frank could have stayed forever. Frank said, I was the right CEO to serve this purpose from 75 million to a billion four. And then he started looking for someone that's the right person to serve for the next generation, which is me. And so this notion of stewardship, we're all here to serve our customers and try to make our purpose come alive over a long period of time. And I think it's the most enduring motivation and inspiration we can have. And it keeps the customer front and center. Well, so one of the first things you did in your first 100 days, you said you wanted to see 100 customers, you actually accomplished that in 45 days. So first of all, congratulations. That's how'd you, first of all, how'd you do that? Well, I went on a road show to 10 cities across the US and just packed my days full of meetings with customers. And there were individual meetings and we had some group meetings, some lunches and dinner. Those are some of the best because you get a conversation going. I had four or five, six customers around a breakfast table, dinner table, and we start talking about their issues. And the dynamic in every situation was they would start sharing with each other. They'd say, well, how are you addressing this? They start saying they have similar issues, similar challenges, similar ideas of how they can address it so that power, that community power I was seeing firsthand in smaller settings. And for me, it was just so energizing because we can only, our limitation of how quickly we can get better is how well we understand our customers' needs and also understand their feedback about where we can get better. Well, it's interesting, you said you were a customer when you ran eBay of ServiceNow. So that's kind of some of your background knowledge of the company. When you went out on your tour, what were some of the things that surprised you that you didn't know even though you had been kind of a ServiceNow customer in the past? Well, I think what I hadn't fully understood was the power of the ServiceNow platform and how it's getting pulled into new areas across the company. So it's getting pulled to customer-facing applications, customer-facing processes like Ashley at GE is talking about. And it makes sense, right? I know at eBay and PayPal, we really worried a lot about how do we handle inbound contacts from our users? And password reset was the number one inbound contact. Well, password reset is the perfect process that can be handled in an automated self-help way, which is ultimately what the customer wants, right? And ServiceNow can help enable that. And so as I was sort of surprised and delighted by how this platform is getting pulled into new use cases that in many ways are back to what Fred let me imagine when he founded the company. The interesting thing is Fred founded the company as a platform to serve all services, businesses, business processes across the enterprise. And then platforms don't generate revenue, they don't sell. So he found an application, ITSM, which was the first application, and it took off. And so ServiceNow began to be known as the IT company, but that was never what Fred envisioned. It was a company that enabled and empowered IT to simplify and automate and transform the entire company. It's interesting password reset because it seems like such a simple process. And it doesn't necessarily seem like a high-value process, but in fact, it's hugely high value for the customer. It's hugely cumbersome in terms of the time it takes. So to automate something that seems so simple as password reset has huge implications in terms of efficiency inside, and customer satisfaction on the outside. What a great example. Well, and here's what's so interesting about that example is it touches multiple parts of the company because people actually, your password is your security, and you could automate changing it in a way that was insecure. But you've got to do it in a way that gets the convenience that we want to be able to reset our passwords, but we want to know we're safe. And so that password reset flow has to touch security, it has to touch engineering, it has to touch operations and customer support, it has to touch the customer's record. And so it's a classic multi-function, multi-discipline flow, but you want to make that easy and simple for a user, and yet also have them feel safe. Simple and safe is hard to do. John, you mentioned Ashley from GE. I want to talk about digital transformation. It's one of those terms you hear a lot at these conferences, sometimes it's a morph, it's kind of like AI. We'll talk about that if we have time, but Jeff, I love your quote, we follow GE quite closely. And Jeffrey Emelt said I went to bed an industrial giant and I woke up a software company one day. And you see this everywhere. So what is digital transformation to you and the customers that you've been talking to? Well, here's technology and software in particular. On one hand, is disrupting every company in every industry. And I view that as a motivation. I view that as a wake up call for all of us, including a software company. And software is an opportunity. An opportunity to make changes and advancements at a pace and a magnitude that's been unparalleled in business history. So every company needs to define how they're going to use technology, how they're going to use software, how they're going to use digital capability to their advantage. To their advantage with their own consumers, their own customers, be it an industrial customer or a consumer in a consumer business, and how to use it to change the employees' experience and improve it. So employees are spending time not on manual tasks, which now can be done by technology but on higher value added activities. And then how you can operate a global enterprise in an effective and efficient manner. And so technology is an offensive weapon, if you will. An offensive tool is something that's on the mind of every CEO and every company. And that's where they're looking for, how do they have a few trusted partners? A few trusted technology partners that help them navigate their way through that, help them drive their way through. And that's ultimately what service now is. So these are big ideas and they involve a lot of different constituencies within your customer base. Obviously your IT peeps, as we like to say, but the CIO, whose role is changing and also the line of business folks. So these are big, heavy lifts that you can't do alone. You've got to have an ecosystem to do that. When we did our first knowledge in 2013, the SIs were a lot of companies, frankly, that we never heard of. And now you're seeing all the big SIs. I don't even want to name them because I'll forget some, but your partner strategy is critical to achieving that vision that you just laid out, isn't it? Absolutely, absolutely. Because it takes both of us. It takes our software and then their capabilities to help our shared customers, shared clients, implement the software. And do it increasingly in a way that is as configurable as possible, which means as minimum customization as possible and also as quickly as possible. And our partner ecosystems and essential partner in doing that. And there's the big SIs and then also some of the smaller ones. I spent some time with customers in some smaller cities where they're saying having local capabilities, local teams that were trained and certified on service now is really important to them. Often they end up being acquired by or joining the bigger SIs over time, but that sort of grassroots, that grassroots opportunity, because that's also job creation. That's job creation in communities. I got to see how talented, talented computer literate, software literate people in different cities around the world are seeing an opportunity to create a livelihood by helping customers integrate service now in the most effective way. So two years ago, Frank Slubin and his keynote said that the CIO's role is changing into becoming business people. Yes. And kind of challenge CIOs. If you don't speak wallet, you better start learning that language. The lingua franca of the business. So you obviously agree with that, but how is the CIO role changing? And how does it support other roles within the organization that you're trying to adhere or apply service now to? Well, I have a really, Jeff, really outside in, or Dave, really outside in. Sorry about that. Sorry. I've had a lot of names this morning. I'm sure you have. It's pretty good. Outside in view of this, which is through the eyes of the customer, right? The CEO is thinking about, all right, I got to serve our customers better. I got to retain our customers and serve our customers better. And then I got to attract and retain employees as we've been talking about. And I need the digital capability, any technology to help us do that. They're going to turn to the most technically literate person in the C-suite to help do that. That's the CIO, right? And so the CIO by very definition has to play a broader role of partnering with the business unit leaders, with the functional leaders to drive that end-to-end business transformation or digital transformation. And the CIOs that I met are ready to take on that challenge. They couldn't have done that before the cloud technologies that give them the ability to play offense. But these cloud technologies now cut across, they don't just sit in IT, they cut across all the enterprise. Right. And so I would say there's almost this gigantic sucking sound, if you will, to use an old Ross Perotism, that IT and the CIO are being asked to play this role be change agents, strategic change agents across the enterprise. And they're ready to do that, but they do need to speak in business terms and business value. And business value means, are we serving our customers better? What's our customer NPS? What's our customer response time? What's our customer retention? What's our need to speak employee value terms? What's our ability to retain our best employees with their satisfaction? And then of course they have to speak the business terms of efficiency, right? Are we bringing more productive and more efficient as we're serving our customers and as we're serving our employees? And so the CIOs I met and the IT professionals I met are asking for help to translate what they do into that business language. And the very best ones are doing it. And I think you'll see that trend continue more and more. And they've got to have automation and they've got to have efficiency because their budgets aren't going up commiserately with their increased responsibility to drive this digital transformation. So they've got to ring that extra value out of the tools and process of people that they have. And that's where you really help them quite a bit. I think I saw it quite the other day. Someone from 60 days to two days in a business process, amazing. Well and it's interesting because companies are investing more in technology than they ever have. If you take the broad technology spent, they're investing more in technology but they expect to get productivity and efficiency not just out of IT but across the entire enterprise. And that's the opportunity. More investment, greater productivity, greater value for customers and employees. You talked yesterday to the financial analyst about the sort of execution machine that you inherited. Personally I think you have a great CFO, one of the best if not the best in the business. So I presume you're not going to be spending a lot of your time trying to restructure reporting and counting beans, no pejorative intended there. So what do you bring to the organization and where are you going to spend your time and what are your main goals over the next midterm and long term? Well as you said I'm blessed. Mike Scarpelli I think is a world class CFO and the best in the industry and I'm honored and thrilled to work with him. Same with Dave Schneider and Kevin Haverty who run our sales force. And now CJ Desai, our Chief Product Officer, Dan Rogers we've got a really strong team. My focus is to have us continue our current momentum, continue the current execution that we're focusing on but then to begin to sort of chart a course for 2018, 2019, 2020 and beyond as we go from being a billion dollar company to a four to five billion dollar company to be onto a ten billion dollar company. And the nice news is that it's building on top of this very solid foundation as we evolve from being what has been an IT focused platform company to be more of a digital transformation platform and company and helping our clients, helping our customers achieve their aims and their goals in being one of the few trusted technology partners. Every company has a few trusted technology partners and we want service now to be one of those. And to do that, you've got to be viewed as mission critical and adding real value both of which I think we are. So I think you joked, don't mess it up. Yeah. So, okay, and then take it to another level which really is kind of what seems to be your expertise bringing it into the line of business is talking to the CEO and other C level executives and actually marrying the expertise of the CIO has cross organizational purview leveraging that capability and super powering that. Exactly, exactly. You know, it's interesting. I thought I were to look back in the last 15 years the C-suite role that has changed the most in the last 15 years has been that of the CFO. 15 years ago, CFOs were being counters, right? Today, as you said, as Mike Scarpelli and Bob Swan, my previous CFO at eBay and the best CFOs, they drive value across the enterprise, right? They're almost COOs in their mindset. They work with business units. And they add enormous value. So that job has become significantly more important and powerful. I see the same thing happening with the CIO over the next five to 10 years where the CIO's role will grow and expand and broaden. And that's exciting. Well, you know, one of the things actually, you know, we come to these conferences there's obviously a lot of messaging but we try to understand how that messaging actually fits with what customers are doing. One of the things that you guys are messaging this year is light speed. And so it brings, when you talk about this, the CFO and the changing role, it brings up, to my mind anyway, light speed requires a new set of metrics. And then listening to like Scarpelli talked yesterday, he's all over the metrics. And these aren't, you know, your typical, you know, EBIT, you know, metrics there and just a new set. Do you see that happening within, not only ServiceNow, but within your customer base where these so-called, I'll call them, light speed metrics are emerging? Absolutely. I mean, you saw the example, Dave Wright going through the machine learning and how the machine learning capability when applied in the ServiceNow platform applied to specific problems helps you fix problems before they happen in an automated fashion. Imagine that, right? That's light speed. Dave said it's so well on stage. That's even faster than light speed. And so you begin to see, all right, how do you measure in delivering a great customer experience, how do you measure the reductions of problems? How do you measure the prevention of problems that provides greater availability, greater reliability, greater consistency of a customer's experience? Now, ultimately, that measure will be in customer NPS or some other customer metric, but some of the subordinate metrics, I think you will see a growing number of, well, I would call L2, all three metrics. That is a dashboard of how to run a great company around customers, employees, and financials. All right, John, I know you're super busy. We got to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. And congratulations on the new role, great keynote, and best of luck. We'll be watching. Thanks very much, Dave. Thanks. You're welcome. All right. Our next guest, this is theCUBE. We're live from Service Now Knowledge 17. We'll be right back.