 from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Knowledge 16, brought to you by ServiceNow. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. Welcome back to the day three coverage of the ServiceNow Knowledge Now conference with theCUBE. This is our third day, the conference, I believe fourth day of the event. Fred Lutty is here, chief product officer, founder of ServiceNow, The Man. Welcome back, Fred, it's great to see you. It's always good to be here. So, you know, one of the people that inspires me, the great Earl Nightingale said, you become what you think about. You must be thinking really great thoughts in the last 10 years. Could you imagine 12,000 people at an event like this? Well, it's a wonderful thing and at the same time, you know, it comes with a great responsibility. The, and I'm very sincere about this, you know, the most precious resource we have that we can't buy more of is time. And so when people give us their time, it's very, very meaningful. And it's a wonderful event to see all these folks come together and I'm always overwhelmed. You know, another great speaker, Simon Sinek said, people don't buy what you do. They buy why you do it. So why'd you do it? Why did you start this company? Well, that's probably a pretty long story and we don't have that much time allocated, but suffice to say that I think many developers do things to actually have people say, you've done a nice job, to have people say, thank you, that's made my task easier. And I'm no, I fall right into that, right? I'm in that boat, right? So my whole objective getting up every morning is to do something that when I show it to someone, it will put a smile on their face because it will liberate them and empower them in ways that they hadn't thought of. And there's nothing, nothing more rewarding than that to me. So you, go ahead. Just say, what the guys tell people, you know, focus, execute and delight the customer. That's the key to success. And the fact that you use the word delightful, I think it's a really special word. You don't hear that much in tech keynotes and it's not about, you're talking about single systems and developed fast and all this other stuff, but the word delight and the purposefully have that as part of the mission really shows a different point of view of how you expect the user of the application to feel when they're actually doing work. You touched on the key word there. And so if you look at, you know, I've been doing this since 1972 and the objective that you had with the machine from 72 to today has changed significantly. And so you use the word feeling, right? And so what constitutes something that's elegant? What constitutes something that's simple? And simple is a feeling that you get because it appeals to your senses. You look at it and you're happy with the way it looks. It makes you feel empowered. It makes you feel and it feels a certain way and it behaves a certain way and it looks a certain way. And so this has been the major focus now for the past couple of years. You know, in 2012 we started building the mobile app that looked very, very different from what we built in 2003. And this continues on now with the service portal. And it's all about user expectations, right? That we were all happy when we got our first motor roll of flip phone and could send a text by hitting the three key three times to get a certain letter. That was very liberating. Well now we don't have to do that. And so as technology marches on, the capabilities become more and more powerful. So you think about it, we live our lives, as human beings we live our lives in four dimensions. On that machine in front of you, you live in two. You're missing two whole dimensions there. So if you'd start to think about down the road, what are we going to do? It's ever so much more exciting than it has been for the last 40 years. I remember the fax machine was a breakthrough, you know, just imagine going forward, right? But the other part that you said I thought was really interesting in the keynote was about the real world. We've had a lot of conversations about our, you know, kind of what we do at home versus what we do at work. And you kind of up leveled it a whole nother level. This is just the real world. And as you said, it's how we interact with the devices. And the scary thing I'm sure from a development point of view is best practices become expected, minimums really, really fast. As soon as we get that experience, of course we expect it. But as you said, it's the real world and getting that real world experience into what we do for eight, nine, 10, 11 hours a day. Right. And if you think about most business applications, so juxtapose real world with business applications, why do I do things in the real world? Because it's easier to use technology than not. In other words, my Uber app is so much more delightful than calling a cab company which I used to do and maybe they would send somebody. So that's my real life. And I used that technology because it made my life easier. In enterprise apps, largely people are compelled to use them. They have to fill out a form. They have to track their time. They have to fill out these required fields in order to get something started or approved. But that doesn't make their job easier. That's just something they have to do. That's where they start to equate their career to a job versus something of achievement. And I think over time that will erode. Certainly there's processes that must be followed. There's policy that must be followed. There's all sorts of compliance that must be followed. However, the vast majority of our time is spent communicating with others and solving problems and moving tasks along. And so you want that communication to be very, very natural going forward. And that's really been the thrust of this whole notion of connect, of VTB, of mobile, and now the service portal. Those four things have come together to create a completely new experience and environment with ServiceNow. So I took the nicest survey ever took this morning in the keynote. It was beautiful. And so, well, first of all, you said in 40 years of programming you've never been so excited about what you showed this morning. Correct. And it was awesome. I have to ask you, were you coding during the day one keynote? I was sitting across and I said, I think Fred's coding right now. Yes. I knew it. That's very simple. I did the calculation this morning. I was asked by the marketing people to dress like a developer for the keynote. And I thought, I have no idea what that means. So I calculated it is I've been, I've coded now for more than 15,000 days of my life, right? And I never once thought about what I was going to put on as a developer. So yes, I was probably coding then. And by the way, I don't know if you noticed, but in the demo, two things didn't work. I actually broke those this morning myself, right? So yes, I was coding and I shouldn't have been. I have to go, I have to now fire and reprimand myself. You're just the man to do it. So now let's talk about that survey. It was gorgeous, beautiful. It was fun. And you wrote that in record time, right? Correct. And again, so here's the deal. I know of a company that when a person joins, they're given an employee onboarding survey. That survey is eight pages long with 12 questions per survey. I, 12 questions per page. I can't think of anything that could be more effective in having a person say, what did I just do with my career if they expect me to answer all these questions, you know, on a scale of one to 10. Surveys, if I want somebody's opinion, ask them a meaningful question. Have them give me a meaningful answer. And to build something that is like that, people will be anxious to take your survey, right? Cause hey, that thing's pretty cool. It's gonna have a little funny graphic and it's gonna take me one touch of my thumb to answer the question. And so I'm going to take it. I'm gonna give you meaningful results. And this is the thing that, again, this is an interaction that you would anticipate. Oh cool, let's see what this week's question is from the HR department, right? I'm gonna answer that, not please fill in this 15 line survey. So it was delightful to build, but I think more importantly is, what did it actually show us? Well, people enjoy doing this. I took it three times. Wait, and you get the answers back. I will tell you that in Jerry's presentation where they're asking people to tweet, which is another way of taking a survey, we actually expected the results to be quite different. But now, in two minutes, we had meaningful results from our actual customers on what we should do. Talk about, you know, market guidance, it's awesome. It was awesome. And seeing the ticker in real time was phenomenal. And you said you spend most of your time now building widgets. Yes. Talk about that a little bit. Well, there've been a lot of attempts over the last 25 years by companies like Apple and like Next and like Microsoft to create these user interface environments that can be blended together. So in the case of Microsoft, you had Olay and for Apple and Next, you had WebObjects. Both of those, and there was something called OpenDoc as well that Apple was a part of. All of those died because they were too heavyweight and too bloated. But the concept of being able to mix things and to have that aggregate be a very beautiful UI is it's a great concept. And so with these widgets, we're really, I think, done a much better job than those that came before us at building an extremely powerful environment that can also be affected by what context that it's in. So for example, one of the widgets we had was check in. It's a very simple widget, press a button and what the button does is it does a geolocate on your machine and then it broadcasts this event saying, this person is in Las Vegas. Well, if there's a form also on that page that's listening for that broadcast event, it can now populate the address right into the ticket. So you don't have to integrate the capabilities together. They're in fact, they're decoupled but they're still, you know, they're very loosely coupled but they're very tightly integrated at the same time. And it means you can enhance this without breaking that and you can change this without affecting that. Is that similar to the way you've built the kind of the automated responsive design? Because I thought that's, you know, before, like you said, everyone was building mobile. This was a web browser on a smaller device and then we're purposely building responsive design but you showed in the keynote where, you know, you make your changes and then you just can quickly see kind of what's the responsive design output look like. So take that off of me. I don't have to worry about what it looks like on all the different devices. Yes, that was one of our primary objectives or primary reasons for selecting Bootstrap as the underlying CSS is that it takes care of so much of that responsive area. One of the things that we want, in 2003, the ecosystem for open source was almost non-existent. And so from 2003 till September of 2005, when we started selling, we really had to do everything ourselves. Now, the ecosystem of open source that is truly free, that is so phenomenally powerful. You look at what the people have done, Twitter Bootstrap, you look at the AngularJS stuff which is probably the most phenomenal technology I've seen for building user interfaces in my entire life. Why would we do anything like that when we can actually take advantage of those technologies? And when we take advantage of them, we're saying to everybody like me who develops widgets, you need documentation, good. There's 400,000 questions that have been answered on Stack Overflow regarding Bootstrap, regarding AngularJS, regarding jQuery. So there's just this wealth of information that people can tap into so quickly. And that's why we selected those three technologies which are really the winning three as far as low level DOM manipulation, formatting and to build Angular capabilities which really means you're working with a data model rather than even knowing what the user interface looks like. Yeah, and you said you're working on the world's best stack. You talked about Angular, Bootstrap, jQuery, Front Awesome was in there. Yes. Talk about the stack a little bit. So the stack is just a wonderful thing of beauty in that you have almost every tool you can imagine is A, right there. And if it's not there, adding it is simple. Why? Because the vast percentage of things that you see on the internet that are cool things that you're going to see in like a map, for example, or like the odometer that we showed, or like the flapping board, or even that slideshow that I showed at the end that you can swipe from side to side. All of that has either been built on Angular, Bootstrap, or jQuery. And so as a customer, as a user of this environment, you want your stuff to look good, well, I'm going to find somebody else who's already done the work. They've already published the work. They already documented the work. And what we've done as a platform provider is we make it drop dead simple to import that into your page and then have it work without causing any other harm to anything else in the environment. Right. And then the other thing you mentioned, and to take advantage of the device capabilities in that application. So if it is on a phone and you want to take advantage of the camera or the geolocation, which you may or may not have on your laptop, and then I would imagine then when you show something as cool as the watch like they did the first day, it won't be long before the little watch icon is up there next to the other two. And now you can write the code to develop the UI and the interface for the different form factor. That's correct. And again, so that's absolutely right. When we, our environment that we run, when you took that survey, you were running in a web browser. But if we had put that survey inside of our mobile app, which we can do because it's just another URL inside mobile, we have a layer called Cabrio. And Cabrio allows you to access the native phone capabilities that you can't from HTML. So you can get barcode scanning. You can get easier geolocation, easy access to the camera so you can take pictures. And this is really a great thing. And so we've added another layer that said, OK, you can now deploy this in the ServiceNow app in our mobile app. And you have the capabilities of the phone. And you've integrated GitHub. We saw that earlier today. That's pretty exciting. That's really exciting. I love to, when you come into the CUBE, I always like to pick your brain about futures, your true visionary. At Google IO yesterday, they opened up the conference talking about mobile, a mobile and cloud world. And then they went on and spent the vast majority of their time talking about AI. Yes. But people are just hot now. AI, cognitive, machine intelligence. What are your thoughts on that? You certainly see Apple with Siri and Facebook, Google working on it, IBM with Watson. What are your thoughts about that technology? You know, it's a new frontier. And for me, it's not a frightening one at all. It's a very exciting one. It's a frontier that started in 1949 with a book called Cybernetics, made up word about something that didn't exist. In fact, the person that wrote the book said, whenever you talk about machine intelligence, you should always start with the word cybernetics. And that is because you will put the other person at a disadvantage because that's not a word. We won't know what it is. And then, you know, they were all talking about neural nets back in the 90s. And the neural net was a great idea, and that, well, we're going to teach a machine to work like the human brain. There was only one flaw in that. We don't know how the human brain works. So machine learning and that kind of intelligence, which can be developed, I think, is staggering the capabilities you can get. So a lot of people don't realize when they're using an AI-based device, right? Well, certainly with Siri, Cortana, they're using, there's AI, lots of learning that's happened to understand voice. Another thing, if you've ever used a camera in a phone and it draws the little rectangle, there's a phenomenal amount of compute power that goes into an algorithm to find a face, right? I want to find a human face, not a dog's face, et cetera. And so what do I think about it? It's, let me just finish the story about the photographs. The way machines learn is pretty much by brute strength and they have to be taught. Machines don't arbitrarily learn things. You know, they have to be told, they have to be guided as to whether they're doing something right or not. So the way the algorithm was developed, the machine learning algorithm was developed and recognized faces was they, the machine was given millions and millions of photos and told which one a face was and which one it wasn't. So as it tried and tried, it kept refining this algorithm. Well, they did one of the initial algorithms in Japan. So what difference does that make? Well, when they brought it here, it didn't work. Why? Because the machine had learned that people have black eyebrows. That's simple, right? So it's a brute strength thing. When Google taught, when Google taught, did Google translate? Which is phenomenal right now. The way they did that was again, was brute strength. They had first tried to develop algorithms for learning languages and translating and they said, let's give up. Let's figure out how the machine can learn. How are we going to do that? Well, we need to feed it millions of documents that are translated into many, many languages. What did they do? They went to the UN where things have been translated. The same document is available in 60, 70 languages. Then they went to the EU where the same document is available in 20 languages and they fed these machines all of this information and they learned these languages. So AI is not something I think to be afraid of. It's not how like, right? I mean, it's nowhere near that. I mean, the embarrassing things that Siri types out for me as a text message just really, that's the thing that tells you this is not that far advanced, but it can be very, very assistive. And I think that the opportunity for AI to pick up the most mundane of tasks, I think that opportunity is just, it's beautiful. And you think about, well, what are some of the other things that are AI? Well, the self-driving car, right? I have an eight-year-old. The notion of a self-driving car means what? My son will never have to drive drunk, right? He won't be able to. The car won't let him. The car will drive him home. I don't have to worry about that as a parent. There's both those other things to worry about. But that's one thing that you think, God, how liberating is that to think that my son will never be intoxicated behind the wheel of a car? I mean, that's just staggering. And for those people that are afraid of AI, I'm not sure what they're afraid of other than they saw 2001, they saw it 50 years ago when it was created. Do you see it impacting a developer's life in the near to mid-term, where you're actually communicating in a way that? The answer to that is yes. And I think, again, over time, people's expectations about what technology can do for them is going to be predicated on things they see in the real world, right? So Waze is a great example, right? Waze is going to give you a route based on the conditions right at the moment. And that kind of AI is very important and people are gonna expect that from enterprise type applications as well. And so the ability to integrate in voice, cognitive capabilities, again, that's a two-dimension machine. We live in four dimensions and the ability to bring in those other dimensions, I think is very, very important and AI is gonna be a big driver of that. Cognitive relies on data and quality data. I wanted to ask you about data. You have a lot of data. So that's one of the, I think, the big secrets about why can AI emerge now? Why couldn't it work in 1949? And one of the reasons is, computation power not withstanding, one of the reasons is there's mountains and mountains and oceans and oceans of data to actually sort there. Again, Google went and got all those documents right from the UN and the EU. What about us? Well, we have customers that open up 100,000 incidents a month and they're trying to analyze those by taking strict categorization, subcategory, priority, thing affected. The real value is in that text in what did somebody write? But if you go to a doctor and describe an illness you have, one doctor's gonna write the symptoms one way, another doctor is going to write them another way, but it's the same thing. So AI comes in to start to do analysis of these oceans of text and develop sentiment and start to give you real insight about how people feel about things. Not about whether something is broken or not or if it breaks five times a month, but how frustrating this is to an individual. And in the areas of like we're in, which is service, the feedback, the actual words that people use when they give service feedback are very, very important to determining sentiment and to help. So this stuff is going to be, we saw the whole Cognos BI thing come out as a way of exploring data that is very, very structured and the structure has meaning. But what about the things that are, you can't put structure in? How people talk? How they communicate? What they write down? That frontier is just, it's phenomenal. And that's a tailwind for you, I think, because if you think about computing over the years, it's been unknown technology, but known process, accounting or HR, whatever it is, the great thing about the platform that you've developed, the technology's now pretty known, but the processes are infinite. Now, granted, you're codifying a lot of known processes, but I heard today your customers did some huge number of custom apps that you guys didn't even know about. Right. The process of knowledge is just changing so quickly and your platform is able to adapt to that. Is that a fair interpretation? Yeah, it's very fair. We do a lot of things with your processes, right? So my next process is I'm gonna go to my hotel and pack my stuff, right? That's a task that I have to do. And to automate something like that, to describe that to a machine and have somebody program that, is just it's economically unfeasible unless you have thousands of people that are gonna perform these tasks hundreds of thousands of times in a year. Well, the beauty of this platform and the objective from day one was that regular human beings who could describe a task and the data surrounding it could actually create something to help automate that task. So let me give an example. Let's say you need to make an airline reservation. What fields do I need? You know, I need what day you're leaving, where you're going, where you're leaving from, et cetera. It's very easy to create something like that in the ServiceNow platform. I would venture a guess that there are very large number like 30, 40,000 said applications build, right? I would venture a guess that probably 90% of those people wouldn't think they even built an application. They just said, well, I just, you know, I built this thing and it has these five fields and that's how I track this and then we make sure this is measured. No, you built an application. Oh yeah, it does. It has lists, it has forms, it has reports, it has notifications, it has assignment. Hey, yeah, I did build an application. Well, don't hate me for this, but we're out of time. I can go all day with you, Fred. Thanks so much. Kind of go to San Diego and do one of these on the beach, I think. Back to the roots. Back to the roots with Fred at ServiceNow. We'll give you the last word on knowledge, 16, just your feelings and your thoughts. Yeah, again, people's most precious resources, their time and I'm just very, very thankful that people come and spend time with us. It's a great feeling. Well, we're very thankful to you and ServiceNow for having theCUBE here for the last four years, so thanks again and hopefully we'll see you next year. I hope so. All right, keep it right there. Everybody will be back with our next guest right after this word. Thank you.