 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow, Knowledge 17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. Welcome back to sunny Orlando, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host, Jeff Frick, wall-to-wall coverage of ServiceNow, Knowledge 17. Jason Wojian is here. He is a longtime CUBE alum, he's a managing director at Accenture. Jason, great to see you again. Thanks so much, appreciate it. So when Jeff and I did our first ServiceNow Knowledge in 2013, we walked around the floor, we saw a company called Cloud Sherpas, and we said, you know, for this company to become a billion-dollar company, they really have to evolve the ecosystem. And that's exactly what's happened. But before we get into that, take us through how you got to Accenture. Yeah, so let's see, I had an 11-year career at IBM, decided to leave that for no good reason other than to go try something new. And we were responsible for a small company called Navigus. Navigus was one of the first ServiceNow partners in the ecosystem. We thought maybe if we had a few good years there, we might pick up some BC funding or something like that. Things moved a lot faster than we had expected. And 11-2013, we were acquired by Cloud Sherpas. I became the president of the ServiceNow Business Unit. It was a new line of business in Cloud Sherpas, which was really aspiring and was a Cloud Services brokerage across Salesforce, Google, and ServiceNow. And then of course, good news here at the end of 2015, we move on to Accenture and then I get the opportunity to lead the global platform team for ServiceNow at Accenture. So before we get into that, when you were at Navigus, did you ever do a raise or did you not have to? We didn't have to, we bootstrapped it all the way through. With sort of, people in our audience are always interested in that, fascinated how the entrepreneur gets started. That was with sort of customer funding and sort of getting projects. You know, it started like a lot of partners did at that point in time. I mean, really the ecosystem was served by partners nobody had ever heard of, right? Right. And so they all started kind of one deployment at a time and you see some companies that might have been doing implementations for other ITSM tools or something of that nature, starting to gravitate to this thing called service-now.com at the time, right? And a couple logo changes, elimination of a hyphen later, here we are over a billion dollars in the ServiceNow ecosystem and on their way to four billion by 2020. And you guys were there early. So what advantages did that give you? So I think what it taught us early on is kind of how to build and create ServiceNow consultants, which was something that the very little of the ecosystem had at that point in time. It wasn't as quite as straightforward as just saying, let's take somebody who did PlatformX or application Y and go work on ServiceNow. The first people that were rolling through while they had big company logos, they did tend to be early adopters and those types of folks that would be kind of earlier in line. So there's kind of a whole different requirement, a whole different necessity. At the time, I would say 2008, 2009, it was really kind of the anti-other platforms or other tools kind of crowd. And then we move into where we are today, which is market-leading ITSM tool, moving rapidly into other spaces, HR, CSM, et cetera. Do you find there's still an expertise shortage in the marketplace? And how are you feeling that? So I consider us foundationally a learning organization. We were back then and we are now. We have over 100 certified trainers on ServiceNow. We had 50 of them here at the event, training on behalf of ServiceNow, largest of any partner. And we've turned that internally. So while we've very publicly recently made several acquisitions, one in Europe, one in Germany, UK, Germany, and of course Canada, we also organically in the last 14 months grew Accenture certifications more than 130%. So we have that training capability and we can use that to incubate our next consultants and our next certified resources on the platform. As you guys know, platforms are so broad, you really have to be broad and deep to be successful at the kind of scale we're at right now. And so it's important that we're kind of climbing down as deep as we can in the platform as quickly as possible. As you say, did Accenture buy Clutch Service as an accelerator or really was that their first kind of big play with ServiceNow? This is quite a big business case around it because at the time it was a Salesforce company, a Google company, and a ServiceNow company. So I think the answer is a little different for each of the platforms, but I'll give you the ServiceNow platform. So what we did is we took a practice in Cloud Sherpas that was about the same size as Accenture's practice and we brought them together, right? We unified the organization, which is kind of a different model for Accenture, having a global platform lead on a global platform team where there's a direct line management relationship versus managing across the axes. But what that gives us an ability to kind of globally incubate skills, globally move to where the center of gravity needs to be now versus where it needed to be then. And so it came together quite nicely. On top of that, you see us making these few acquisitions. We used to be three in the last six months and it's kind of round out our global presence and capabilities. So we saw as we brought the organizations together, there were a few geographies where we needed to accelerate. I mentioned we were accelerating our certifications 130%, we more than doubled our staff in that time. We now have more than 1500 certified resources and 2,000 ServiceNow resources in Accenture. And that was largely through organic efforts post-Cloud Sherpas acquisition. Now we layer in these additional acquisitions on top, really gives us that full global capability. And obviously Accenture had a Salesforce business sort of folded that, did it have a Google business as well? Yeah, so platforms and of course, apps and email, et cetera. So they're on their way and kind of readjusting or kind of swizzling for that practice as well. But obviously my interest in my focus is ServiceNow. Okay, and then you said 2,000 trained now professionals. Just over 2,000 ServiceNow resources in our platform team, over 1,500 ServiceNow certifications. Okay, and that's obviously global. And then the other thing, the other big theme we're hearing is that ServiceNow is starting to penetrate different industries and that's where you guys come in. I mean, you have deep, deep industry knowledge and expertise. I wonder if you could talk about how the adoption of ServiceNow is moving beyond sort of horizontal IT into specific industry. So that's our big pivot and that's the future of ServiceNow as a platform, not an ITSM tool. And in my opinion, and I think one of the foundational pinnets behind the acquisitions you see with like DXC and of course, Cloud Service to Accenture. One of the things ServiceNow has to do to reach their market capitalization is become more than just an ITSM tool, become a platform. When you start having those platform conversations, you start having conversations that are well outside of IT, they become business conversations. I'm sure you made the keynotes this morning and heard about going horizontal across that full, very often, silo-sized departments in business. That's the way work gets done and that's where the opportunity is. We find that most commonly when we're talking to prospects and customers, they want to talk about others in their sector, in their domain. What have you done with customers like me somewhere else? And you end up having a conversation that says, well, we did this here, we did that there, we did this over here, right? Across that whole platform. We're going deep into ServiceNow's Catalyst model, which they just released here at Knowledge 17. The reason for that is because that's where we're moving. We're creating an entire conversation across the platform, so we're certainly going to have an industry lens to the ITSM conversation, but we're going to bring more to that. We're going to bring the integration stack to that. We're going to bring the custom app stack to that. We're going to be the configured app stack to that, and of course we're going to bring those outside of IT apps to that as well. And the Catalyst is what, the gold standard of partners? Yeah, it really is. The ServiceNow just released a program to the partners just a few days ago. There are three partners that have Catalyst today. There'll be more of course in time. Ours is focused on the financial sector, which we have really found to be a high growth area for us in the platform. And we also had a significant amount of domain and intellectual property in that space that was easy for us to aggregate and really hit the market running with that one. But we'll have more in time retail and a few others coming very quickly. And so that's where you're building a solution on top of ServiceNow that you guys sell as a solution. Across the platform. It's important not to think of it as just an individual app or just an individual integration, but it's important to think of it as something much bigger than that. And then, you know, we're obviously, it feels like we're on the steep part of the S-curve. I mean, you predicted this a couple of years ago, that the future of ServiceNow is beyond IT. But you were there doing the heavy lifting with getting people to buy into a single CMDB, adopt the service catalog, do all those things that were necessary to really take leverage. And in the early days, there was some friction in order to get people to do that. It was political. I didn't really see the long-term benefits so they would maybe do it in a little pocket of opportunity. Has that changed as it changed dramatically? And how has that affected your ability to get leverage with customers? Specifically, the customers themselves getting leverage in other areas. You know, customers are all trying to digitize, right? Everyone's trying to digitize. And it's a digitize or die moment. It really has been digitize or die moments for the last several years. There's only so many places that you're going to be able to do that. And what's so important about ServiceNow is the ability to actually bring that across workflows and across organizations and kind of relate to people in a user interface and a design that they're familiar with. And, you know, ServiceNow does a fantastic job of that. That's why we've been here in this sector so, or this software so long. But, you know, it's imperative anymore. It's not something that I'm seeing our clients have an option to accept or reject. It's a demand. Yes, I want to stay on this point for just a minute. And as I've said several times today, and Jeff, you and I have talked about this, that in the early days, the names that you saw in the ecosystem, you know, no offense, but like Cloud Sherpa's, you know, was not a widely known brand. And now you've got the big guy, I mean, Accenture's, you know, not number one, number one or number two, and what you do. And so that lends in air of credibility to the customers. They feel a comfort level. You've got global capabilities. You've got the ability to go deeper. So where do you see? Well, I was going to say too, and it's also validation. I mean, when you're a startup company, that is a tremendous validation that a company like Accenture, they don't make small bets. You know, they're not going to come and try to build a practice around your solution, unless they feel like they can make some serious coin. So it feels, Jason, like we're on the cusp of a, you know, decade plus, you know, opportunity here. Do you feel that way? I think there are other platforms that kind of paved the way of what you should expect to see out of the service now. But in my opinion, service now does it better. You know, I'm envisioning a place where as service now is moving towards, you know, this four billion mark that we're moving, we're adding commas to our stack too, right, in that process and the type of industrialization and ruggedization that you would expect to see in a digital kind of movement in a digital world. You know, the single platform of record, the single place of record, it becomes so important for so many reasons. People adopted service now because it's the best at what it did and it's an extremely capable platform. But as you start layering things like AI and chat bots and some of these things as well, especially AI, it needs a single source of record to make its best decisions. And if you don't have that someplace, you're not going to get the value out of AI. So not only does service now help you automate now very tactically, kind of down your Pareto chart, but it sets you up for the future because it gives you that context, that place where you can warehouse the information and let your automated solutions get in there and kind of rip and release the best of those solutions that they have already available. I wonder if we can riff on the sort of structure of the software business for a minute. I mean, you know, it's much different today. Like you said, everybody's going digital. You've got this whole big data trend going on and AI is now seems to be real. But if you look at some previous examples, I mean, Salesforce is an obvious example. You used to have a Salesforce practice. I mean, you still do, but it was in your company, in your smaller company. And then I guess Oracle is the other one I look at. They had the system of record with the database. You probably go back to IBM DB2, but it was sort of that database was the main spring. And then Salesforce has sort of came from CRM. But Salesforce, it seems like there, it's not the greatest workflow engine in the world. It seems like there's a lot of cul-de-sacs whereas ServiceNow seems to have the potential to really permeate throughout the organization. I wonder if you could give us your perspectives from your experience in these businesses. How do you compare ServiceNow to other software companies? Well, you know, a lot of software companies, there's a lot of room, right? So it's very regular that we see success factors or workday or Salesforce and ServiceNow and Office and Azure and all kind of, kind of sitting in the same place as AWS, et cetera. You know, those are just going to be natural. There's going to be those that grow and scale and those that do not. But one of the things that I think is most powerful about a ServiceNow is it's, in my opinion, it's got the best workflow capability to span across those different stacks and that gives you your Swiss Army knife, right? That gives you your ability to almost integrate with anything you want to in a meaningful way, bi-directionally, unidirectionally, et cetera, to bring that data in an enriched way into a single repository and then to layer these other things like AI and chatbots on top of that so you get that console experience. A lot of the executives I'm talking to right now are wrestling things with things like universal cues or a single approval queue or things of that nature. ServiceNow does that really easy. That's an easy thing to do. What isn't easy, right, is making sure you aggregate all those things up in a meaningful way to a single source and then putting in somebody's hand that they can actually do something with context. But it's interesting that John Dono in the keynote talked about what's cool about it, IT centric entry is you cross all those different silos where if you're coming in as a CRN map or you're coming in as a marketing automation app or you're coming in as a pick-your-favorite silo SaaS app, you don't have the benefit of being involved in so many kind of cross silo processes where ServiceNow kind of came in, as Chuck you said, IT is our homies. Frank, you still like to say, so you're already kind of touching which gives you a better footprint from which to now go up into those silos. There aren't many organizations in a business that understand their underlying technology better than IT, right? Well, that's a whole nother thing. It's that they kind of understand the blueprint, but I've seen a lot of articles about the rise of the Chief Digital Officer or anything like that. Reality is the CIO is a digital officer now. If they're not, they're not going to be that CIO very long and they need to be able to work within the context of digitizing everything. Well, this gives them a platform to actually deliver that value across the enterprise. All right, Jason, hey, it's great to see you again. Thanks so much for coming on and sharing your perspectives and congratulations on all the great success and continued. Appreciate it, thank you very much. See you next year. You're welcome. Hi everybody, Jeff and I'll be back with our next guest right after this. We're live from Service Now Knowledge 17. This is theCUBE.