 Cube SiliconANGLE's continuous production. We're here at Knowledge Service Now's big customer event. I'm here with my co-host, Jeff Frick. This morning we were broadcasting live from SAP Sapphire. My colleagues, John Furrier, Jeff Kelly and David Fleuer were down here. But we're here in Las Vegas at the Aria Hotel. We're here with Dave Schneider, who's the Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Services at Service Now. Dave, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having me. A lot of good energy here. Talking to customers, said Brian Lillian from Equinix. Great case study, great story. Jeff and I were at the customer event last night, just cruising around, talking to customers, talking to prospects. Everybody's really excited. What are they telling you? I think what they're telling us is that what we're all about, which is making customers successful on their journey, both to IT service management and allowing IT to be helpful to the entire organization is actually working. And that the value that they're getting from the investment around our technology is yielding really good results for their customers. So when you go to meet customers, describe, paint a picture for us of new customers, new prospects, what's the environment like? You know, I think it ranges a lot between customer experiences. So as people are becoming more and more comfortable with the cloud idea of different service, we're seeing people really just rotate naturally to that. Wanting to get away from fixed offerings and traditional hosted systems internal to their networks. So we're seeing a lot of excitement about that. And then there's some disbelief. There's some disbelief that actually after all these years of trying, that they can actually make IT an effective part of an organization. And our tools and our solutions really help them do that. So when you say all these years of trying, what have they tried that's not worked? It seems like they've tried everything. Well, I mean you're just, they've tried Remedy, they've tried Peregrine, they've tried Homegrown, Lotus Tools, right? Absolutely. So I think what happens in IT is, you know, they've been the forgotten ones. They've been the ones that didn't have the opportunity to invest as the other lines of business were able to invest to keep themselves competitive in the marketplace. Now we're giving them best in class tools so that they are no longer hindered by the lack of sophistication that they once had. So you're getting penalized in a sense by the past failures of other initiatives, right? That's the big barrier that you have to come over, right? Is that inertia, the existing disbelief? Is that right or? I think there's some disbelief also. I think IT is often starved for resources. IT is a cost to an organization, not necessarily seen as a benefit by the financial parts of the organization. Whoever, if used correctly, they can be turned into an asset class and make the whole organization more competitive. This morning we had GE talking on stage and they were able to do a massive transformation using the tool to generate millions of dollars of cost savings and additional revenue streams. Yeah, I mean, I've been saying to me, this is all about global scale and demonstrating IT value and excellence throughout the organization. Are you finding that you're, so we talked about sort of your prospects when you go in, when you go in after customers implemented, let's say for a year or so, what's different? What's changed? And particularly I'm interested in that notion of IT value, is there a heightened awareness of IT value throughout the organization? Well, so I think part of what happens is IT changes, or the perception of IT in the organization gets changed through the transformation with our tool. They go from, as we often say, the department of know to the department of now, that's a real thing. And that kind of confidence, the swagger that the people have in IT for IT kind of gets reestablished and you see people really proud of doing what they're doing and knowing that they're bringing a real value to their customer is really an important part of what we do. So the new confidence that these organizations have on delivering value to their customer, the ability to support and integrate hundreds of tools potentially into a single platform record, that's transformative to a CIO or to an IT executive who didn't know where things were and when bad things would happen, they couldn't tell what was causing the event and know how to fix it. So what questions do you ask prospective customers? What's your sort of list of top two or three questions that you start with? I think first of all is, why would you continue down the path that you are? If there was something better, what would keep you from doing that? And then we also look for other initiatives that are important to the business. Where, what's driving them? So if they've done a lot of integrations through acquisitions, that's a huge opportunity for cost savings and aggregation into one set of tools. Okay, let's talk a little bit about your sort of sales organization. You guys I think have, do you show your, let's let me back up a little bit. So you start with, I presume, incident management, problem management, maybe even change management, is that right? Is that the starting point? So we get brought in to solve a lot of different problems now in an IT organization. So it's not uncommon that someone would think about replacing their old help desk or incident management system. We always say help desk is sort of like two four letter words. We should really try to make the desk go away because our customers don't want us sitting behind desks. They want us to be out talking to them or they want to self help themselves. And so we start maybe with looking at the historical systems, but very quickly we try to get into a much broader conversation. Okay, and then my understanding is your sales organization has evolved where you will both look at existing customers helping them utilize the platform further beyond maybe just the core help desk and incident management, problem management, and utilize ServiceNow as a platform for other areas. Can you talk about that a little bit? So once, when we get involved with a customer, the customer is a customer for life. So we kind of have a mantra inside of ServiceNow which is love thy customer. And if you love the customer and you do things for and on behalf of them, teaching them about the technology and how they can benefit from it, we get additional businesses that are more and more successful. So every time we interface with a customer, it's an opportunity to throw them an opportunity to make them more successful. Every time they do something to aggregate technology around us, they're saving money and probably growing their licensed business with us, but having a pretty good impact. So it's interesting when we were at the event last night for the people that weren't here, there were pictures of cakes all over the place. There was cakes on the table and there was a slide show with cakes. And I said, so what is the story with the cakes? What's this, and I kind of know what the story is, but I think it's good to follow up to what you said about it. You had an attitude about customers. What's with the cakes? Well, a lot of it's like sugar. So there is that. There's this common desire to celebrate. So actually, Common desire to celebrate, not common in IT. Well, it's not common IT, but it actually started with one customer or a couple different customers. Well, when we went go live, the customer actually themselves, they didn't go buy a store-bought cake. They baked their own cake and they would decorate the cake in various ways. And most of them had service now or thank you service now as part of it. They really viewed this as a setting free element. And so they were celebrating, like a birth or a wedding, like anything else that we celebrate in life. They were celebrating with a cake. And so it became a tradition. I can't tell you how many hundreds of cakes I've now eaten, but it's really a fun thing to do. And it kind of keeps on a life of its own. And sometimes they'll do interim cakes when they do go live with a new module or other aspects. We call those cupcakes. It's interesting, as they said, we were down at the event last night talking to a lot of customers, potential customers. And the vibe is very good. And the other vibe that's that picked them this morning, I mean, the keynote started at 8 a.m., right? This is not a sleep in group of people. These are people that are up and ready to go. Everyone was waiting to eat at 6.30. They're on the ground. And so these are people that are working. You know, they're getting stuff done. This is not kind of a hangout tech crowd. Well, I mean, there was some hanging out last night. So there was a little hanging out last night. However, I will say this event is all about the customer. More than 80% of the content is taught by customers to customers. They come up with the content. They're here because they want to learn. And so they don't want to miss a thing. They're going to bring the ideas back to their companies and implement change. And so they view themselves through ServiceNow as an opportunity to make a massive impact in their organization. It's obviously a pretty darn good career move for a lot of the customers as well who get successful with us. But most importantly, they want to be here and we're thrilled to have them because quite honestly, I get energy. I sat in that keynote presentation and I got so much energy listening to the panel. I was fired up and ready to go. Awesome. David, you guys have a 96% renewal rate, which is, that's insane. How is it that you've been able to achieve that? What's the secret sauce behind that? What do customers tell you? So it fluctuates a little bit, but it's been a 95 plus for 13 quarters in a row. I think really the issue is if you do right by the customers, why would they go somewhere else? The alternatives just aren't that good. But most importantly, if you're delivering value every day through an engagement, if you're bringing technology to bear to solve a problem, once you solve the problem, you don't need to try something else. You look to ways to leverage what you've already built and move forward. So the 4% or 5% of customers that disappear, many of those are through acquisitions. Companies got acquired and went out of business. Very rarely is it they made a choice to go with a different technology. You guys don't, and maybe you used to in the early days, but you don't sort of overwhelm your messaging with cloud. Where some of the SaaS companies do. Can you talk about sort of how you sell to organizations in a little bit more depth? It's almost like not a hardcore technology sell. It's really around business process and value. Can you talk more about it? So we sell to multiple levels in a company. So there are folks that are functionally responsible for different aspects of what we do. Let it be incident management or help desk. Let it be people that are trying to build knowledge management systems or trying to do employee self-service. Those are different constituents that we'll talk to in a sales campaign. And then we often will try to reach the CIO or an executive in IT. You give them the message of what we can really provide. Because people don't start off thinking, I want to replace my help desk and I'm going to end up with ERP for IT. We've got to convince them or give them the possibility that that's, or sorry, paint the picture that the possibilities are reality. So to customers, do they do, I mean so many projects today are not IT projects. They're business driven. And there's a business case around them and the whole IRR and ROI, et cetera, NPV, whatever it is. How do people conduct a business case for service now? It ranges dramatically depending on what problem they're trying to solve. Some of what we do is sort of like an oxygen water problem, right? You can't live today without breathing or drinking some water. You can't live in IT without solving some of these problems, so it's an oxygen issue. The nice to have things are quickly becoming oxygen issues, employee self-service. Are you kidding me? You're not going to have a system that lets employees help themselves. Why wouldn't you do that? Why wouldn't you have an automated password reset process to save money? Why wouldn't you do cloud provisioning to save money? These are oxygen issues. Can't live without them type of problems for IT organizations. And the reality is they're not getting the job done today. So being able to show them a way to make it transformed is great. We do intercede a lot of times during an upgrade process or during that consolidation phase where they realize we've got hundreds of tools and they're all in little islands and they're not talking to each other and they don't have any data that they can trust. So you strive for this consumer like experience. We're hearing that a lot. What are your customers telling you about how well you're doing in that regard? I think the exciting things we're going to see tomorrow with Fred's keynote presentation on the handheld and tablet device interfaces are really all about continuing that push towards consumerization. Nobody wants to use a green screen interface that was designed in the 80s anymore. Our customers are wanting the same kind of tools they had or they have when they go home, when they use Google or they use Amazon. They want the same kind of experience when they're at work. And so we provide them the ability to make that happen. And that's really transformative to how people perceive IT. Is it more the IT staff that wants that type of experience or their customers, their clients and their own company are telling them, this is our expectation? She said, I don't know why you use Google, I don't know why you use Amazon as it came up in the keynote. I mean, I'll go as far as to say is if I'm an old guard customer with old tools and I'm trying to recruit the generation that's coming into the workforce today and I'm showing user interfaces that look antiquated and old, that employee base isn't going to stay there very long. So if you want to be able to grow your business with today's talent on a global scale, you need tools that look familiar and that people want to use. I mean, looking at your screen over there, it looks pretty sexy. It doesn't look anything like it did 10 years ago. Yeah, you're right. So Dave, if you're working for Frank Slutman, you're hiring. I'm hiring. What are you hiring? What are you looking for? We're hiring athletes. We're hiring people that care. We love them. We love tech athletes. Thank you. I absolutely love tech athletes. I mean, if I could say it one way is if you want to love your customer and sell transformative technology and you want to be part of something that's bigger than you, because that's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for people that want to join us, create something special, make a difference, not just in our lives, which is nice and fun, but really focus on the customer. Because when you change your customer's experience and their perception, it has gifts beyond cakes, it has gifts beyond making a great company. These are lifelong relationships you'll have and you have an opportunity to do that at Service Center. Well, the enthusiasm here at Knowledge is palpable. You talk to the customers and they all have smiles on their faces. They want to be here. They want to, as you said, David, share their stories, most of the content coming from customers. And then, of course, theCUBE. So keep it right there. I'll be back with Jeff Frick. David, thank you very much for coming into theCUBE and sharing your story. This is theCUBE. This is Knowledge. We're here live in Vegas. We'll be right back with our next guest right after this. Great, thanks guys.