 ServiceNow Knowledge 14 is sponsored by ServiceNow. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. Welcome back. We are here live at Moscone South, the ServiceNow Knowledge Conference. Three days, a lot of innovation, a lot of talk about business value. Really just amazing things going on here. And one of the big pieces of news today was the announcement of the Innovation of the Year Award winner. About 50 plus, about 51 submissions came into ServiceNow. They had a filtering process. We heard Fred Luddy this morning talking about how, you know, he had to look at every one of these and they had to make the cuts. We're very difficult, I'm sure. I said it was like cutting kids out of Little League. Very, very difficult. But, and then the audience ultimately votes on the winner. And we have the winner here. Elma Duvalk is a managing consultant at Platformation. This year's winner of the Innovation Award. So, well, first of all, welcome to theCUBE and congratulations on your winning. Thank you very much. We were super excited. Yeah, you know, I could tell you guys are up on stage and it was a big deal, right? I mean, it's very competitive. I mean, it's awesome. Maybe it had Verisign up there. It had Yahoo and really some great, you know, innovations and applications. So, let's start with Platformation. Tell us a little bit about the firm. So, actually, we are a small startup. So, we consider today's award like a David and a Goliath kind of a match up. So, we are basically a company that consists of, if you count very broadly, maybe nine people. And we've been founded with two of my partners, Bas Taks and Ruhl Schoenmarkers and myself. We founded this company seven months ago. Awesome. So, we are still new. So, Verisign, wow. We're very fresh. So, we are taking up that competition. Nine people, including your wife and your kid. Almost. So, what do you guys do? So, the company is called Platformation. And we are mainly focused on consultancy service around platform as a service technology. So, we strongly believe in that platforms can really transform the way that businesses operate and that IT can be used to deliver value. So, that's what we saw. It was also in today's speech of Fred Luddier that IT can truly become an enabler for the innovative ways of the future companies. And we basically also a little bit saw that same vision and we thought we need to create a company that does consultancy services specifically on platforms. And we have basically just chosen service now as our platform of choice because we see a great value and it's simply just a very powerful platform. So, what kind of services do you provide? You're talking about consulting and implementation, management? Yeah, exactly. We have three offerings. We do strategic advice. So, we do package selection processes. We do implementation projects. But our key focus is also that we want to build apps based on specific customer demands. But also, if we see that there's a generic trend in the market for a specific type of app, we don't wait for the customer to come to us. We just proactively try to create such an app. So, that's basically what we did for this competition as well. Okay, so tell us about the competition. So, you're doing your job. You get the startup going. You started just seven months ago, right? So, then you get what? You get an email saying the call for innovation award submissions. Is that right? It starts actually a little bit earlier than that. We were in conversations with our partner manager, Dominique, at ServiceNow. And she basically also gave us the hint about at ServiceNow is running into situations where facility management is asked for by clients. But there was, let's say, some room in that market space and we basically decided to just pick up that challenge. And we wanted to build apps. We were confident about ourselves. So, that's what we did. So, when did you start building the app? I think it was about November or December last year. We decided, okay, we're going to build this app. So, what we need to do is we need to basically create our own mini hackathon event. So, we went on a plane with three of us. We went over to the Middle East, to Bahrain. We invited some of our friends from that region over and we basically sat in a hotel for five days. And actually, the initial idea was to sit there and to just do a little bit of app building and on the side, look at the country. But the reality was that it was just five days of hacking away at the system. And basically, after five days, we had the... You didn't leave the room for five days. We didn't leave the room. I had my swimming shorts and everything packed, but it never actually... Now, why Bahrain? You have development resources there? Yeah, exactly. We had development resources from the Middle East that we also wanted to train in the system. So, it can be quite difficult to get into Saudi Arabia. That's why we chose to go to Bahrain instead. So, that's a unique approach. You decided to lead with platform. Most people are the lead of the application. So, I'm curious how you came to that conclusion and that's a really hard thing to go sell people platforms because most people only have an open light item in a budget for a platform. Usually, it's an application. My second question is, once you made that decision, why did you pick service now and what other platforms did you consider and what land did you with service now? Yeah, so you're totally right. So, a platform is basically... The problem of a platform is that it's basically everything to everyone. And that's very difficult to sell because you're not diving into a niche. However, what we see is that there is typically a very big gap between what IT organizations can provide and what the business is actually demanding. That's definitely not aligned. And we totally see that if you implement a platform, a solid application development platform in your company, then that actually allows IT organizations to bridge that gap because of the fact that you can so much more quickly get your development cycles, your turnaround cycles just a lot quicker basically. So, you're almost embracing the gap as opposed to trying to find a fit. You're like happy for the gap. Let's put the platform in and start filling the gap with applications. That's it. So, in typical development cycles of custom applications that you build for months or sometimes even years and then only to find out that the stuff that you've created is not matching the demands of the business. Whereas, with an application development platform, you actually allow companies to... Basically, you allow companies to develop so much more quickly by using prototyping and stuff like that. So, you can expose your application so much more quickly to your clients and show them, okay, this is what you want, right? And if not, you can go through that cycle so much more quickly that you end up with a good system in the end, a lot quicker. And then why service now? And why service now? I think for two reasons. One is, of course, a personal reason we've got actually quite, let's say, almost a decade of experience in consulting around service now. So, we basically know the ins and outs of that system quite well. And in that, let's say, building up that experience, we also more or less fell in love. Sounds a little bit corny with the system. We all love Fred, that's okay. Okay, but that's what it is. It's such a powerful platform. And if you implement that system and you, normally, with the whole organization, it usually gets into some kind of a resistance, kind of a mode, that with service now, we really have experienced it ourselves that also end users also love to use that system. So, we are really confident about that product. We're confident about, let's say, our own capabilities in that area. And we also see vast potential in using that we call it the Lego blocks of service now, to also build applications outside of the IT domain. So, in this case, for us, facility management. So, Helmut, tell us more about the process. So, you're in this hotel room in Bahrain, right? Room, whatever it was. What problem were you trying to solve? How did you guys come up with the idea? Yeah, so, on one side, it has service now, basically, yeah, giving us the heads up from guys, this is really something that is in the market, is in need for, so what we see in the market is that IT organizations or that the leadership of IT organizations are in the Netherlands also broadening their responsibilities also to the facility management domain. And they just want to have a single tool to support both worlds. So, that's basically the problem that we saw and that's why we said, okay, we need to have a solid offering also in the facility management area in order to have position service now in the right way. Okay, so, you essentially got code up and running in five days, right? And then what, you had to do some cleanup afterwards or you worked on it for several months and then when did you submit it and how did you submit it? Yeah, so, basically, the process was about basically getting up the first version and then exposing it to the market and really getting all kinds of feedback in place. We also were able to contact ServiceNow and show the application to them to the facility manager of ServiceNow, DAFSA, NAE. And, yeah, basically by getting the feedback of a real, let's say, company helped us in, let's say, evolving the system and getting, let's say, more functionality in place, tweaking the system until the place where it is right now. So, okay, so now what? What are you going to do with the app? Are you going to sell it? Share it? Well, bundle it? Yeah, so, the objective is indeed to sell it off. So, yeah, we've created this intellectual, this piece of intellectual property and we're just hoping for that people, if they visit our website, facilitymanagementonservicenow.com, they can check out what it is and we just hope that people see what it is and understand that this could be of value to them. So, how will you actually go to market? Will you sell the application sort of separately? Will you bundle it as part of your services? I mean, can I swipe a credit card and buy it? Well, it is actually more or less that, indeed. It is a prepackaged thing. We can install it on a ServiceNow instance or we can host this instance for you. So, we have our partner network setup with Orange Business Services so that we also host that service for them. Yes, and then, of course, we also have the support models in place so that if people start using the system and they have questions and stuff like that, that we can also handle that and ensure that the system works. So, you said you had a decade of experience almost with ServiceNow or? With ServiceNow, yeah, combined, two of the three of us. Yeah, okay. So, yeah, combined, I guess, I was just saying. The other two thirds are over there, Dave. You must have started as toddlers. Six and two thirds over there. Now, how would one have, what would the experience be like to develop this application before ServiceNow? What would it describe what that would have been, or could you even done it? Did you have the skill sets to do it, or? I think it would have been a process that would have been far lengthier than what we have experienced right now. Look how much you've run for, right now. Months? Yeah, easily, because, like I said, for me, when I was growing up as a kid, I loved to play with Lego, and that's exactly what you can do with a good application development platform. You can build your tables easily by just dragging and dropping. You can build your workflows by dragging and dropping. So it's not a matter of coding and writing all those lines of code. It's just a matter of clicking it all together and making sure that it works. And the team was roughly five people who built this, so, not super small, but small. I mean, five is about right, isn't it? And how did you divide and conquer the effort? Who did what, and who decided who did what? Or did you just start hacking? I was, personally, primarily responsible for the supply of coffee. And cheerleading? And cheerleading, and cheering them up. Actually, asking them, can we please go out and grab a beer somewhere? Do they have pizza in Bahrain? I don't know. No, you go grab the beer, we'll stay here and code, is that it? Yeah, exactly, that was the whole mission. That was the whole battle plan, so my role is more in the PowerPoint domain and the other guys have really done all their, most of the work in actually building the system. So you helped define the requirement? Of, yes. And then, obviously, you got feedback from the others and the team, and then they primarily did the coding. Exactly, exactly. And testing. Yeah, exactly, yeah, that's what it was, indeed, yeah. That's great. So what's next for you? What's next? Yeah, so, yeah, we're very delighted that we are an innovation award finalist, so we hope that this will spin off, of course, a little bit, and that the companies will show their interest in the app, and we hope to, yeah, basically just... It's awesome, you get to come in the queue? It gets me in the queue, sit with you guys. Well, it's a pleasure having you, Elmer. Thanks very much, we got to move on, but congratulations. Thanks very much. And good luck, good luck to you guys. Thanks for your time. All right, keep it right there, everybody, we'll be right back. A lot of innovation going on here at Service Now Knowledge, and this is the queue, we'll be right back.