 From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. Welcome back to ServiceNow Knowledge 17, 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. Dan Rogers is here, the CMO of ServiceNow. Dan, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, great to be here with you both. Yeah, it's an awesome show. We were just talking about the numbers. Well, let's run it down. Give us the top line. Yeah, so we'll have about 15,000 attendees with us here, and of course a lot more on the live stream. And that's customers, prospects, that's new customers, that's prospects, that's existing customers. Some of our customers have been here with us 10, 11 years. So, you know, truly a show for all of our customers. You know what struck me is when John Donahoe asked first-timers like himself, it was impressive how many hands went up. I was surprised, actually. Did it surprise you? You know, I mean, obviously I have the registration data, so I had a little advantage on you guys. But no, it didn't surprise me, and of course we've had such phenomenal growth, that's going to be the case. When you grow 39, 40% year on year, every two years you have as many new customers as you had existing customers. So, not only that, you know, we broadened our aperture in the last 12 months from just IT to customer service, security, HR, and more generally, business applications. That attracts a net new set of audiences. So, we were kind of hoping for that, really. You know what else is interesting? I love sharing cabs with the practitioners so I can pick their brains, and I think this week I've shared a cab with a hardcore ITSM guy, an HR person, a CIO, and some other person in the line of business that I'm not even really sure what the role was, but it was, you know, very clearly not IT. So you really get a diverse set of folks here, and you have events within the event. So talk about that and how you're programming to those multiple channels. Yeah, so, you know, in John's keynote, he really talked about our heritage, that we started in ITSM. And we've got to keep to our heritage, so we're keeping on doing a lot of innovation around ITSM. But then more broadly in IT, we've done a lot of transformation around operations management, around business management, so truly end-to-end IT transformation. And then we said, this service management thing, this cutting across the enterprise to drive work, that's applicable to lots of other departments. So you saw that for HI, you saw that for security, you saw that for customer service. Those things got launched last year. This year was really the year when we were going to come out big without message around that. So in terms of how the conference is organized, it's pretty simple. You know, when I first started here, 10 months ago as the CMO, I met with a bunch of customers, and I said, hey, what does marketing need to do? And they said, you've got lots of products now. Your pace of innovation is really fast. Help us make sense of that. What are your solutions? What are the conversations I should be having with you? And then we said, there are nine conversations, nine customer conversations, we've codified what those are. And then we said, why don't we use those nine customer conversations as the rails for all of our marketing? So earlier this year, we had a sales kickoff. Guess what? There were nine tracks, that knowledge, there were nine tracks. Our website has nine solutions. So those things become the rails upon which we're having those conversations. So how is knowledge organized? It's organized across those nine conversations, and you can easily select a track and just follow that journey. So we probably don't have time to go into all nine, but any stand out, any ones that really excite you? Well, of course, we've got our five cloud services. So there's a conversation there, many conversations around IT, around service management, around operations management, around being able to measure and optimize and improve. But then also our newer conversations. How do you deliver customer service at Lightspeed? How do you help employees have a great experience in HR? How do you resolve security issues at Lightspeed? And then how do you build business applications that have this contextual workflow that cut across? It's an interesting twist to go to your existing customers as marketing and say, what do you need from us? And for them to come back and say, help us buy more from you because you have so much stuff I don't understand. I usually think of marketing as much more kind of external focus. Give us the messaging that we can go out and get new customers. But that's a very different tact that really speaks to the flexibility of the platform as well as people's desire to do more with it. I think the other thing is really a cultural thing. Our product teams are very customer centric. They are led by our customers. You heard that kind of history from Fred Luddy. That's kind of how he started. We listen, we build, we learn. And that mentality happens in the product team. In the sales team, of course, they're very dialed into the customer. And so my thought is, that should really happen in the marketing team too. We shouldn't be driven by what the product team are developing. We should be driven by what are the conversations that our customers want to have with us. So us staying dialed into that is really important. Now there's nine conversations that I talked about. Every year they'll change it a little bit, what they want to talk to us about. But the idea that we're going to have rails upon which we run all the marketing, those rails are going to be decided by our customers. I think there's a big breakthrough in how to do B2B marketing. So talk about light speed. It's a good marketing term. What does it mean? Put some meat on the bone for us. Yeah, so in a way I think of it as it's a way of describing three different concepts. The first concept is you need to streamline and automate. And again, that's what our customers are saying that they want to do with their processes. The second is drive great end user and customer experiences. And you saw John kind of point out this idea that a lot of work today is trapped inside an organization, inside silos. Customer just doesn't care. They just want a great experience that cuts through that. And then the third thing is this idea of innovation. We're going to innovate so that you can stay ahead. Those three concepts come together to be work at light speed. A smarter, faster way to get work done. So that big epiphany was this idea that those are the three things customers are trying to do. We need to give that a label. And the label we know has got something to do with work and something to do with the way work's getting done across the enterprise. And that work is going to happen in a different way. It's going to be a combination of machines and people that are doing that work. So we kind of said, look, let's call that work at light speed. So I think it's a nice holder for us to make that description of those three things our customers are asking us to do. Yeah, so you really built it up from the ground up. It wasn't kind of a top down, hey, this would be a cool term. Let's try to force fit it into what we're doing. You started with what the customers are saying and then said, all right, how do we describe that? That's right. No customer is saying, light speed. Hey, light speed. So there's a little bit of marketing in there. The things that are underneath that as we unpack it is exactly what they're trying to do. Excellent. Tell us a little bit more about some of the events within the events at Knowledge. That's always been something that's fascinating to us. See how that's blossoming. Yeah, so would you believe this thing is 29 work streams and I had the good fortune of last week every one of those work streams turned green. And, you know, right until, exactly. And so up until really last week, we were all crossing our fingers that those things would go green, exactly. I wish it all were automated, but unfortunately there's some real hard graph that goes on underneath. But a few of the highlights I'll maybe kind of point out. The first thing you'll see is that this year, of course we have more keynotes. So last year we just had, you know, three general session keynotes. So now underneath that we have topic keynotes. We have a topic keynote for IT. Because we just felt like we're doing so much innovation in IT. We need to tell that story. So on the main stage, Farrell's going to be going through all of those. We've got a bunch of innovations we're doing in security. So security has its own topic keynote. That's going to be a lot of fun. It's going to be a live talk show. They're going to do, I won't give too much away, but they're going to do a little bit of a bake-off. The give-a-plug. Yeah, they're going to do a little bit of a, I don't remember the time, they're going to do a bake-off of the old way of resolving security incidents versus the service now where. And they'll do a little bit of a timed competition between the two. It'll be fun. I'll give you a little clue. One of the people might not be finished by the time the conference finishes. That's all I'm going to say. And then, you know, we have a customer service keynote. Again, actually that just happened this morning and we made a big announcement around communities there. And we have an HR keynote. And then, of course, day three is still our celebration of developers. We've still got Create Economy, 5,000 developers here. And in fact, the labs are packed upstairs of people that are really, you know, building code and building applications real-time. So lots of things going on from the keynote perspective, which is really around what is our story? How does this all come together? And then, of course, we've got the CIO Decisions program where we invite 100, 120 leading CIOs from around the world. You know, they have their own conference within their conference. And they're spending a lot more time on full leadership. Where does this thing end? This kind of interaction between machines and humans. What does that world look like? We talk about this idea of the role of IT changing. You kind of heard that in the keynote today, that IT knows the most about business process transformation, it turns out. IT knows the most about service delivery. So it's IT that needs to kind of step into the HR world, into the customer service world, and make sure they're delivering those great transformative experiences. I spent time with some customers at dinner last night at the CIO Decisions event. And I asked them to describe their role. And three of the four people basically said, we're actually chief transformation officers. And in fact, two of them had that in their title. And this is the idea that they'd started their lives in IT. But increasingly, they were driving these service projects across the organization. So I think that is, if anything, that's the big epiphany for us this year, is this idea of transformation and that IT needs to have a different role in that than they've had before. No longer just about infrastructure management, but really around that end-to-end business transformation. So as chief transformation officers, are they reporting kind of back up through the CIO within the house that they probably were originally? Or are they now jumping into the CIO? So I had CIOs reporting into them. It's really fascinating, you know. Oh, but. Yeah. And you know, sometimes this, you saw Scott today, Scott Mason from Novartis. He's a COO and chief transformation officer for a bunch of processes across. And he's really parallel to the CIO. So lots of different ways that we're seeing this play out. You know, when Jeff and I did our first knowledge, I remember the close and we were talking about one of the things to watch, many things, but one was the ecosystem. At the time, you had, you know, didn't have any really big name SIs. You do today and the ecosystem is just exploded. There are some epic ecosystem examples in our industry, obviously Microsoft, I think VMware, I love the stat VMware gets for every dollar spent on a VMware license, 15 at the peak anyway, is spent in the ecosystem. Those are the kinds of things that we look for. And it appears that you aspire to build similar epic ecosystem. I wonder if you could affirm that and talk about how you're going to do it. Well, you know, I don't know if the viewers can see at home, but the backdrop here is the partner expo. At the partner expo, we have about 160 partners on demonstration today. And you know, really people were clawing to be in that space because they know this is a community that's driving transformation and they want to be part of that. So I'd say we have all kind of partners here. You know, we have systems integrators, you see that in some of our diamond and platinum sponsors, but ISVs are the building applications on the platform. As I say, day three is going to be a lot more about people that are building great applications, but there's really no end to these workflow driven applications that people can build. It's about creating those great experiences. So yeah, the core of what we've done and you probably saw what I call a family portrait today. Family portrait basically says at the middle layer of all of this is the now platform. The way that we've architected it, I don't know if you're having CJ on here later, way we've architected ourselves is our cloud services use that common platform for IT, for customer service, for HR, but anyone that's building applications can also take advantage of all of those platform elements. We announced intelligent automation today. That's in the now platform. That means anyone that's building applications can take advantage of it. Anyone could take advantage of the services for requesters, for providers, for the service owners as they build business applications. So we've really architected with that in mind, that idea that there are going to be many different ways to express what you're trying to do, some of which will build cloud services around, many of which our partners will build on top. So Dan, I want to shift gears a little bit. You've been in the industry for a long time. You were for a lot of leading companies. What did you see 11 months ago and probably a little bit more that brought you here? Because you've worked for some successful cloud companies. A lot of people can look up your LinkedIn. What did you see that brought you here? Oh, obviously a couple of things. The phenomenal growth is just, you know, that's an obvious one, right? This is a rocket ship and being part of a rocket ship is a fun place to be for your career because you just don't know where it's going to go. But, you know, there's going to be more and more opportunities. So that's one, but specific to service now, this customer mentality, this customer mindset was really the secret source. I spoke to a bunch of customers. My former employee, employer, was a customer. And I said, you know, of all the software products that you guys are using, which one is growing the fastest and why do you like it the most? And they said service now. And the reason they said service now is because they love the engagement with the sales team. But also they could see the extensibility of a platform. And they realized it was going to be in the core of the infrastructure. There'll probably be is this kind of all shakes out in the next, you know, 10 years, five or six enjoying technology companies, technology platforms. And my bet is that service now is going to be one of them. And when you talk to customers that mean our retention rates are, you know, 98, 99% because we're delivering a lot of value. That's something very special there. And we take that seriously. We don't take that for granted. You heard John start out by saying, we're going to give us the feedback and we're going to improve it. He loves getting the feedback. We love getting the feedback. That is a part of our culture. So I think that's part of the magic. That's something I enjoy, that customer centricity. It changes the way you do marketing. It keeps it very fresh. It's nothing, nothing can happen in an ivory tower. You're constantly out, outward facing, outward connecting. I want to talk about that a little bit. Specifically the role of the CMO. Personally, I find marketing very difficult. I don't have the marketing gene. So I think your role is quite challenging, especially given what we talked about as the different personas that you have to target. Now you're a billion dollar company. You're starting to act more like a billion dollar company. You aspire to be a four billion dollar company. And then you have this developer ecosystem as well. You mentioned CreatorCon. So how do you think about, from a marketing standpoint, addressing all those different personalities? First of all, I do think you guys do a great job of marketing yourself. So I don't know. I wouldn't say this. I wouldn't say this. I'm sure on that one. Yeah, it's just content. The queue precedes itself. Like you, we focus on our guests. It's a very similar type of story. That's how you build your brand. It's interesting, the quality of your questions. I can't guarantee the quality of the response. So anyway, you guys do a great job with that. Now I think it's this idea that I'd say it's all about getting the aperture right. So two years ago, three years ago, the aperture for us was really around IT and IT service management. It was very important that we showed the roadmap around service management and where we were going. As we broaden the aperture to include those other cloud services, you have to do so in a way that stays true to your core. It's no surprise that we're going to spend a lot of time on the IT keynote talking about the innovation that we're doing there. That's a big part of our show. Most of the attendees of this show are in IT and they're in service management. And staying true to that and what we're doing there we're never going to lose that kind of backbone of our relationship with those customers. But then we need to have a more expansive way of describing ourselves so that when you look at our website, now, yes, IT's in the center. We have a new kind of cloud image that shows all these five cloud services. This work at Lightspeed idea, it kind of transcends work as it's getting done across the enterprise. So I think it's being alive to the idea of staying true to those bits, allowing ourselves to expand, and then allowing that, maybe that kind of far right of that to extend even further with the possibility of all kind of great business applications, all kind of great ecosystem partners, some of the partners in the App Store, just absolutely incredible things that they're building that we can't possibly imagine or try and constrain. So I'd say that's kind of part of the, you know, it's maybe part of the mission for marketing. The other thing I wanted to ask you is about this gauntlet of four billion. In fact, John Donahoe actually at the financial analyst meeting yesterday, even throughout, hey, you know, we can, we aspire to even greater, I think throughout 10 billion. Why not? Why not? Why not think big, you've got the platform, that certainly the TAM is there to support it. How do you get there? Yeah, it's funny, someone actually, I can't remember who it was, I was meeting yesterday, said to me, the way that they think about it, it's not TAM, but TAM, Total Addressable Payne. And you know, it's really interesting because you've got these specifically defined areas that maybe analysts are looking at, and you've got this other thing, which is called service management, which cuts across all of those other pre-described things. And so that doesn't have a TAM, because it's not a, it's a pain, it's absolutely the biggest pain that our customers have, but no one's put a number on that thing. They'll find it by emails, maybe. Right, exactly, right, the pain, everyone knows the pain, everyone knows when they see this back and forward of stuff trapped in emails, stuff trapped in phone calls, stuff trapped in messengers, that back and forward on any process that really deserves to be streamlined, simplified, automated to deliver great experiences. Everyone knows the pain. I don't think anyone's sized that thing up, and couldn't possibly, because those are all in the future. This is all going to, this is going to be a new market space. So I think that's probably an interesting answer to your question is this idea that as we move towards that, those kind of lofty numbers, we're somewhat, we're going to be recategorizing what needs to happen inside an enterprise. And maybe that traditional view of how an enterprise works is somewhat, you know, antiquated and broken today. You know, it relates to this question. Jeff and I, when we first heard about ServiceNow, when we were a small company, we were like, oh my God, I want this. And there's always talk about how small companies can now access the cloud and they get access to the same tooling as large companies. And I read an article the other day where that is coming to the question that the rich are getting richer, the large companies are driving productivity faster. And to the extent that they adopt ServiceNow, it seems like they'll have an advantage over small companies. I guess two part question. One is, do you buy that? And two, is there ever going to be a day where little guys like us can get ServiceNow? I mean, I'd say part of the things we've articulated to the financial analysts is decided that around 50% of our 2020 number is going to come from large enterprise. And 50% is going to come from commercial smaller companies. So that's still going to be our bread and butter. And the reason that's our bread and butter is that's who's kind of leading us on our development. You remember 2004, the stories of Fred when he was found in the company. There were a couple of marquee customers. He's actually on vacation with them now. And this is absolutely no joke. He goes on vacation with our early customers because they were such a tight family. And they led him to where the company goes. And we've kept that family relationship with some of our largest enterprise customers. And they're going to pull us and they're going to lead us. And that will extend those advantages and benefits to extend to commercial. So we haven't codified a specific SMB strategy, but I'd say that partnership with our large companies is how we're innovating on their behalf. Well, Dan, thanks so much for taking some time out and coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. Thank you, really enjoyed the time. Excellent, congratulations to all the success and looking for more. I can see you. All right, keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest. Right after this, we're live from Knowledge 17. We'll be right back.