 Okay, we're back, this is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. We're here at ServiceNow Knowledge at the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas. We've been going wall-to-wall coverage for the last two days. This is theCUBE, where we bring you the best guests that we can find. We go into the events like this, and we try to give you a sense as to what's happening at the shows, what the themes are, what the main messages are, and then we try to test those against what customers are actually saying. Some of the innovations that we're hearing today are all about transforming IT, about allowing people that want to, that don't necessarily have programming experience, build new applications, things like application builders that are more intuitive than what you might find if you tried to sit down and do a Python programming or program even Heroku, but so some great automation tools and discussions that we've been having today. Jim Pitts is here. We're going to talk about cloud automation. He's with ServiceNow. He's involved in the whole cloud automation piece of the business, and it's a very exciting and fast-growing field. Jim, thanks for coming on. Oh, thank you so much for the opportunity to speak here today. So cloud is the real deal, right? For a while, it's like cloud was just Google Cloud and so much stuff would come up. It was all kind of noise, and people were sort of debating what cloud was, and is cloud just a buzzword, and now it's pretty much accepted business as usual. So it feels like now the discussion is, okay, how can we get the most out of cloud? We got our private clouds, and what makes clouds, what makes private clouds cloud is things like orchestration and automation. So we're going to talk about that a little bit. So you guys have made some announcements today, I believe, right? Yeah, that's right. Well, let's start with the news. What did you announce? We introduced our cloud provisioning application. It's our first automation based on our orchestration product line. Cloud provisioning makes it easy for our customers to extend their service catalog, to offer their internal customers virtual resources in a self-service fashion. Very easy to order and have delivered virtual resources when you want them from the ServiceNow service catalog. We've been doing the number of cloud shows. We were at the OpenStack show, we were at the AWS Summit, we were at EMC World last week, which is kind of cloud. You know, VMware certainly is cloud. I feel like we're entering a new phase of cloud. So the first was, well, beyond introduction, you know, the Amazon cloud, obviously you guys and Salesforce have your version of cloud. But in 2009, 2008, 2009 with the economic downturn, you saw a lot of people just try to get to variable expense as fast as possible. And then 2010, 2011, you kind of had, you came out of the economic downturn and you had this shadow IT trend kind of into even last year. And now you're starting to see just greater levels of exploitation, deeper business integration. So how does ServiceNow, what role do you play in terms of that cloud orchestration? I presume you're cloud agnostic. If I want to provision the Amazon cloud or an OpenStack cloud or the IBM cloud, you don't care, right? So talk about a little bit more about what value you provide there and what role you play. You know, with the ease at which virtual resources can be provisioned, they tend to proliferate very rapidly. But with that proliferation comes the regular management overhead you would have with a physical server. Those resources still need to be tracked. You need to know who owns them, what they're being used for, how long they need to be used. They still consume resources. And over time, that rapid proliferation ultimately creates a management debt that brings the people in IT to their knees as a phenomenon of VM sprawl that's been plaguing the market for a very long time. And that isn't as much a problem as it is a symptom of IT being very infrastructure focused as opposed to being very service focused. Really understanding what the services are that their customers want, the terms under which they should be delivered. And then ultimately providing full life cycle management for those virtual assets. And that's where service now really has its strength, helping our customers build out their front door to IT, understanding the services their customers want to consume and then making them available in a self-service fashion so they can easily come and request those resources but do it in a way that doesn't accrue this pile of management debt that will overwhelm IT. So I'm going to put you in the spot. We're going to play analyst here. Oh no. If you had a gut feel it, no seriously, if you had a gut feel it, you're going to love this question. Just punch him in the shoulder if he gets on. You're a cloud guy, I can ask you this. So if you had a gut feel it, what percent of IT practitioners worldwide are what you would consider IT organizations or would you consider to be truly delivering IT as a service? I would say it's a very few truly. Single digit? That would be pure speculation. It wouldn't surprise me. All right, less than 50%. I would say certainly less than 20%, right? Was that fair? And we're making up numbers here so none of this really matters but relatively low numbers. You're making up numbers, yeah. But it's clear if you're listening to the voice of our customers at this conference, the tone is consistent. They're trying to understand how to become the front door to IT. They want to have a consistent user experience where people know where they can go to to get virtual resources but also business cards, request changes, order new software, onboarded new employees. The management of that front door, the management of that user experience, understanding what your customers want, becoming service centric is a challenge that IT is addressing now and it's not just for cloud. We've made that easy with our cloud provisioning application but with our orchestration offering we're making it easy to reduce the friction for all the other services that IT wants to deliver to their customers. Okay, so now let's just talk about just the 1600 and whatever, 48 service now customers. If you had us narrow the scope to that data point, would you say that a larger proportion of your customer base has achieved IT as a service? I think they're far closer to achieving it than they were several years ago. They definitely recognize that they need to ultimately move to a state of being more of a service provider to the business rather than just the owner of the debt that the infrastructure carries with it. If you're, so let's define IT as a service a little bit. What is that vision of IT as a service in your mind? We see IT as a service as a consistent experience for the services that IT offers as customers. We view it as a service catalog but if you look at samples of what customers present from their IT departments, they all have a different way of presenting that present. Some of the customers here have chosen to present IT self-service as a physical human being. I talked to a customer here just recently who went and hired an employee from an Apple genius bar and they set up appointments. Literally, they've taken service desk away from the desk and you set up appointments through the service, now service catalog, where people go to get one-on-one help from IT. Other customers have created their own customized interface that aligns with their branding that makes it attractive for customers. They're internal customers to go to. They know IT is accountable. They know that everything that they need is kind of going to be there. If it's not an automated self-service, then the contact information is going to be there to drive and fulfill their request. Are you an Apple customer? I have three teenagers and I own many versions. You ever had to use the genius bar? I'm actually a customer. Maybe watch out when demand starts to get really high for that genius bar. But it is funny how this whole theme of kind of what you do on the weekend now I want during the week in terms of my IT experiences that I'm used to. I want to go to the genius bar. I want the same kind of thing. But think about how bold the customer is to reinvent IT like that. I feel confident that they can deliver on that. That's the key. I mean, that really is your point, is the fact that they can actually set up a genius bar, whether or not you like the genius bar model, which obviously you can tell. I'm not a huge fan of, but the fact that you can actually deliver that, it's a brilliant, it's great for Apple, right? Because they can just identify, you don't even have to talk to a human, you go online, you can't talk to a human. So that's driving automation to the maximum level. But Jim, what I wanted to ask you is the cloud automation is great. Now IT can help be more effective. But clearly that's not the only piece that's causing people to drop their credit card and dial up AWS. What other things do they have to do transformationally for people and process and kind of attitude that will enable them to get that order, if you will, from the customer rather than them going to set up IT? Once you set up this storefront for IT, you have to, just like any online presence, you need to study it and tune it. So the way that an online vendor does it is they look at the data coming back from orders that are being fulfilled. They understand what's popular on Monday, what's popular on Tuesday, which things are people ordering and they tune that online experience. In the cloud provisioning application that we've introduced, we have this concept of a service operations portal that allows you to look at your provisioning service for public or private cloud, understand which departments are requesting virtual resources, understanding what types of resources they're pulling down so you can look and say, I was asked to put this Red Hat Linux test system up on my service catalog, but for some reason, people have stopped ordering it. Do I need to keep that around? Or do I need to contact the customers I think need it and ask them, could I do a better job provisioning that image for you? So it really allows our customers to be more service centric, think of the front door to IT as the front door to their business and manage it very much like you would kind of a commercial offering. Yeah, and there were some great examples of that. I think in Frank's keynote the first day with people using store icons and a store looking field to do that branding. Yeah, they definitely see themselves, and UL, you'll see the actual company branding make it into the service catalog. They're really trying to align themselves closer to the business by thinking more as a service speaking in business terminology, not just tech talk. Right, tech fulfillment, right, right. What are you seeing in terms of, we love this concept of shadow IT, everybody's unrunning the organization, then you come to service now knowledge and you hear, oh, they're not running around IT, they're actually, you guys are serving IT. So it's kind of an interesting trend. I talked about shadow IT before, you see Amazon, a lot of customers are really afraid of Amazon early on, talking about SLA issues and security issues. And now here you have Amazon going after the enterprise. You obviously, we talked before, but you guys are agnostic to that. Are you seeing a big adoption in your customer base of Amazon and how is that fitting into your service catalog, your customers? Kind of non, it used to be like non shadow Amazon, front door Amazon. Yeah, that's really the point. Is it front door or US? Are you seeing your customers embrace Amazon as kind of a bulwark against the shadow IT? What do you expect of that? Well, we do see a lot of customers using Amazon. That's why we support it in cloud provisioning in our first release. And so cloud provisioning will discover the machine images that you have access to, allow you to promote those to service catalog items very easily and make them orderable. But we'll also find which VMs are not being managed by the catalog, by the solution as well. So you can kind of get a sense of which resources have been requested through the service catalog, our under management policy, and maybe perhaps which ones are not. And that's again, a cause for a conversation with your customer. Can we bring these unmanaged VMs that we have into our service catalog as standardized offerings? What can we do to better serve you? Right, yeah. All right, we're out of time. I'm sorry, Jim. We got to roll. We got Mike Scarfield this year. We're going to get into it with the CFO service now. Next, so Jim, thanks for coming by, sharing the news, good luck with the announcement and thanks for coming to theCUBE. Oh, thank you very much. All right, keep it right there. Everybody will be right back with our next guest and this is theCUBE.