 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering Knowledge 15, brought to you by ServiceNow. Okay, welcome back everyone. You are watching SiliconANGLE, looking for the theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and they extract a signal of noise. We are live in Las Vegas for ServiceNow's Knowledge 15. Hashtag is no 15. Join the conversation, go to crowdchat.net slash no 15 and leave a comment, join the threads. We're happy to answer any questions if you post them there. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, our next guest, Robert Fedorek, CEO, co-founder of Wolfpack Cloud Services. Welcome back to theCUBE. Good to be back. Founder CEO, you won a bunch of hackathons. I heard from your website mentions you've done a lot of hacking. Now you're running your own service company for ServiceNow. Correct, we need to work on the name a little bit. We're actually trying to not compete on services so much as really get into the app development ecosystem. It's not Glidesoft, like Fred Luddy's initial name of the company. We couldn't come up with that clever name. Wolfpack's good name. Wolfs and Sheeps Close, that's your developers these days. Very appropriate for Vegas, don't you think? What's going on with you guys? Tell us what's happening. Obviously, ServiceNow's exploding. People are happy. Great developer community, young, modern, vibe, transformative, disruptive, and valuable to companies with the points. Give us a taste of your view of what they're doing, your experience with ServiceNow. What's your take? So for myself and for my peers at my company, this is really just, everything is coming into bloom. So we've always known all along that ServiceNow was about enterprise service management. It was about a platform for development. It wasn't about IT and ITSM. It's just, that's just where the seed was planted. And so we've always known that it was going to be this. And people are finally there and realizing it. The market is caught up to the messaging. The other thing that we're super excited about is that ServiceNow just announced their App Store, which is something that we've been waiting for for years. And now the flood gates are ready to open and we just want to crest that wave and go. Yeah, and so give us your take on the App Store. You're looking forward to selling through that or integrating through what, any products there, apps you guys going to be loading? Yeah, so we've certified an app already. It's on the App Store. It's all about super ultra rapid deployment of self-service experiences in a way that's richer than what you get out of box, but also orders of magnitude faster. A lot of the new generation guys out there past good five, seven years have really been trained on Amazon, right? Get some compute, get some storage, agile. That's now going to the enterprise of seeing Amazon certainly winning in the enterprise. ServiceNow has that feel, right? Stand up, stuff quickly, iterate fast, deploy valuable apps that's quickly. Do you think that is the beginning of it? That wave? Is it more kind of early days? What's your take? Would you peg an inning if you could peg an inning on first inning, third inning? What was your take on that? Because it seems to get, the traction's huge. 1600 developers coming to create con. I think the best is yet to come. So I don't know where it would fit into the baseball metaphor precisely, but the best is yet to come. So up until this point, you've seen ServiceNow kind of say, oh, well, we see that a lot of our customers are doing HR management. Let's make it easier to structure license agreements. Let's make an HR management module, right? But I think what you're going to find now is that they step away from the actual process application development, and they move more into just like raw platform to development to empower people like my team and I and all the other developers out there who will have the kind of the vertical experience to say, well, we know all there is to know about this particular thing, and it would take ServiceNow far too long to develop a mature process in that area. But us working in our basement, we can build that, we can put it on the app store. And Fred Lutty's always told the story of when he first developed the platform. He said, here we go. And you know, customers and VCs like, well, what do you do with it? Everything, right? Anything. What's anything? Yeah, it's an app. Okay, great. Are you comfortable that you're not going to be competing with ServiceNow for app development? Or not? Is there an overlap there? There's always a little bit of an overlap. You've got to be careful about what kind of problems you want to solve. So if you, like for example, if you had spent the last couple of months certifying an app that fixed an interface problem, you just got crushed. Okay, because they solved everybody's interface problem in one swoop, right? If you're thinking, let's figure out how to get ServiceNow on an iWatch. We're already too late. So if you're trying to solve, like, interface and interactivity problems, you might be in a little bit trouble. So you always have to make sure that you're solving some kind of like... Process. Business process. Yeah, a business process or some kind of function that's just not done right at all. So good developer programs have the ability for a lot of folks to be enabled to build businesses. You're building a business on top of ServiceNow. And there's always that fear of, you know, which side of the street am I on? Will they eat me up? We've seen examples of Twitter, for instance, having challenges in their developer community by essentially putting people out of business by rolling out new features. So that's the challenge. So what's your take on that? You've built a business, you're building a business. You're able to get value out of that. What's your take on your roadmap and for other developers? What's your advice to them? Be really careful around developing for interface issues. Just let ServiceNow handle that. Let ServiceNow handle the platform. Go and solve a... So pick a workflow process. Yeah. Go and solve a business problem. It's interesting. Fred was, I asked him the question. I said, what are you most excited about in terms of, you know, cutting edge use cases? He actually brought up internet of things and talked about new capabilities that are being developed that weren't around because of connectedness. We're mostly an IT problem. In IT, it's all the IT SM, you can see that. But like outside of IT, internet of things is a connected network interface. So there's whole new workflow opportunities coming out of things like that, the onboarding app at KPMG. So he's always laying down these examples of this is the opportunity to disrupt an existing monolithic enterprise software app. Do you view it that way? And how do you look at your growth for your business? Let me take the first question first because for me, there are completely different realms for answers. In terms of disrupting, we're just at that first stage. So now, via the app store, they've empowered developers to actually go after some of the incumbent large solutions. So right now, service now isn't really replacing large-scale, like incumbent HR applications, HR silo applications, large-scale facilities applications. They're kind of building a way for people to interface with the facility service via the kind of talks about the system of engagement, right? So they got to get that engagement side, but they're not cracking the serious enterprise software there, but with the app store, now people are going to be able to make a Viva play in the Salesforce space where they could say, like, I got all the space knowledge and I have a platform that lets me develop. And with the introduction of the app store, I have the ability to scope an app so that I'm not just writing open code that anybody can copy and paste into their own institution. So you would expect the ecosystem to pick up a lot of that white space and even get into systems of record? Well, making service now the system of record, because service now is really just a collection of interfaces and functions and tools for you to build this stuff off of. It's just a development platform. And so, I mean, there's... See, go ahead, please. So it's really just getting the people with the industry experience everywhere. The service now would never be able to collect and accumulate and build off of quickly. And now these people are finally motivated and they have the tools enough to do the job themselves. So on your website, you have an app called Focal Point. Yes, sir. And that's in the store, right? Tell us about Focal Point. Focal Point is about rapidly deploying self-service experiences. So the one critical, the big, long, expensive piece of any service now implementation is building a catalog for your customers to engage with. And so Focal Point just makes that really, orders of magnitude easier. So I'm spending 1,000 times less money, 1,000 times less time to deploy this. And then we have a package of other things you can do within the self-service experience. And then we wrap it all around this concept of a point of interest. So the normal catalog is just a gigantic haystack for which we expect you to find your needle. And we have things like search, and search is really just medicine for a problem that we shouldn't have, which is I'm only interested in certain things. I don't want your everything. I want my certain things. The blunt instruments. Yeah, and so the Focal Point says, look, if you're working in finance, we're gonna give you everything you need to know about SAP. It's in the SAP Focal Point. And then we draw in all the rest of the data from the platform, right? The catalog items, the knowledge articles, different team members that are important to that service that we offer, external links and attachments. So we can really just pool a ton of different resources in a richer way than service now is out of the box. You automate that? No, we don't automate it. We just make it very, very, like, so what's something that you're interested in at theCUBE? Right, probably AV technology. So if we had Focal Point deployed at your company, we would have an AV technology Focal Point. And as fast as I can type AV technology, that Focal Point is deployed and you can now interface with your customers in a self-service manner, like literally as fast as I can spell it. And so Fred talked this morning about three sort of personas, the portal admin, the service designer and the professional developer. You're going after the second, is that right? The catalog designer or am I? First and the second. So we roll out, we roll out who can create a Focal Point, but we don't expect the Focal Point is going to be a developer. We're going to expect the Focal Point creator to be kind of more administrative. And so all they have to do is be able to spell whatever the topic of interest is and then be able to collect the other pieces of data and relate it to you. Is that like Slack? I mean, it's in a way Slack kind of has that functionality. Slack is more about team collaboration. This is more about communities of consumers that are interested in specific things. They're not interested in everything. They're interested in specific things and just giving them the fastest way to get to everything that has to do with that in one shot. But there's all kinds of opportunities for automation on that. Like scan my catalog, scan my knowledge base, then relate that stuff automatically. We're just, that's like a V2 thing. But I'm envisioning a curation capability. Absolutely. Yeah, okay, that's really where you're headed. So I can dramatically accelerate and lower my cost for the time that it takes to set up a focal point, a catalog, a portal. It's also deployable via friendly URL. So when you create a focal point, I can now send my community. Look, whenever you have a problem with this area of interest, go to this link and we've got everything you need there. Even people that are exceptionally disciplined and good with service now, when they get to that point in the process, like we don't have knowledge articles set up or we don't have catalog items set up. If they need people to interact with the teams that support it, it's still create a distribution list, email that. Are there internal tool, external or both? No, this is actually entirely built on the service now platform. We have no external tools or integrations. It's a native app for service now, which is actually something we're pretty proud of. There's a lot of like integrations on the space and there's value to those certainly, but we don't, we're not playing outside. This is like everything you need in the service now platform. How do you guys make money charged for the download? That's what we do. No, it's a subscription service. Okay, got it. Is it a freemium model or no? I mean, I tried one before. So we have a, we're kind of limited there in terms of what the store offers us. So the store's still ramping up its capabilities as well. But one thing we do offer is a 30 day free trial. All right, you turn on the meter after 30 days. So how would we use it? Let's just say that we had service now for theCUBE and all of our fans out there. Could we deploy this? That would be for our internal or external? Yep, no, you can deploy it externally. Some of the features won't be as rich as we intend, mostly because we kind of anticipate that service now is going to expand in that. Like a lot of their customers want truly external internet facing service catalog, right? But they're not quite there yet. They got the pricing model, they just don't have the mechanics, but we're already ahead of them and we have it ready for that. But if you could deploy FocalPoint to people who are interested in your area. We'd love it for our chat app. Right, and you could show the people who are in charge of certain areas of interest. You could have several knowledge articles. Hey, how do you get in touch with us? How do you schedule us for that kind of thing? So you said earlier, the market finally caught up to the marketing and I have to say, I think it actually occurred quicker than I've observed in most organizations, most vendor companies. Would you agree with that or have you been chomping at the bit because you're business opportunity around? It's kind of hard to see past my own bias there because eight or nine years ago when I first peered into it and started playing with the capabilities, I was like, why does this have to be about IT? And I was kind of simultaneously, I was in the middle of an onboarding project and we were just filling out all the tasks that you have to do to get somebody onboard. It's really shocking when you list them all out. But everybody was talking IT, IT, IT and I'm like, well, how's this person gonna get badge access? Well, we don't really care, we're IT. Shouldn't we? I mean, don't they care? Because now the person who's ordering that onboarding request, they still have to like, okay, I did my IT bit, let me just swivel my chair over to my other computer with the HR engagement system and then engage there. And that's what really, it was the combination of onboarding and the service now capability that made me realize... The potential. Yeah, by the way KPMG, you're welcome. It made me realize that it wasn't just about us anymore, it was about something much, much bigger. So why'd you say you're welcome to KPMG? Oh, they're onboarding app. Every time I say onboarding at the conference, that's KPMG getting up, ding, ding. Get a little favorite on that. So the future for service now, were you looking at investing in your business? Obviously, you got some customer traction, are the apps going? What's next for you guys? More apps. So we're certainly not going to say no to services and there's certainly a lot of space for that, but really what motivates us is solving those business problems and bringing new and exciting things. But you guys aren't like an app factory in the sense of dreaming up new apps, you go talk to customers and that's how you get the engagement and then roll that in, or are you guys back there incubating apps and throwing them out there or both? A little bit of both. It's like, I kind of like I said last time on the show, you got to learn to have a fine appreciation for the smell of BS and you just got to go looking for it, right? What smells like garbage? What do people hate working with and fix that problem for them? And so we were lucky enough with this last time we had this idea. We have a bunch of ideas queued up and maybe some of them won't work, but. There's a lot of old processes out there, I mean, cobweb apps that have been hanging around, terminal based that evolved to web and now they're kind of hit their kind of end of life. Yeah, but it's still all about the app, right? The apps. Well, the business doesn't change, but the apps need to change. So when Apple first came up with the app story, all the enterprises, oh, we're going to have an Apple store for the enterprise, the app store for the enterprise. And some have, many haven't. What models do you see in the enterprise that are actually working? I mean, ServiceNow is just getting into it. Yeah. Well, I think the opposite. The opposite, I don't know a whole lot about Salesforce, so I spend my day working ServiceNow stuff when I see my kids for a little bit and then I go back to ServiceNow to help them with my company. So I don't have the time to do a Salesforce. But I think what the apps that you find on that you're going to be able to buy from ServiceNow have a lot more credibility because they're backed by an enterprise application. So people aren't going to think as much about getting an app for the ServiceNow platform as it would somebody saying, oh, I just got this app on my phone that I'm going to do onboarding with and they're going to be like, excuse me, what you're going to do with that phone? That being said, I think that the tiny little single function apps that are just ultra, ultra good with that single function are really the biggest existential threat to ServiceNow over the kind of the five to 10 year cycle is what's going to happen if we get these tiny apps that do one thing really, really well and what if we can get that to talk to a hundred other things really, really well? Well, you have the systems of record that you can control some of the data, the data fabric might be strategic. And that's the advantage that ServiceNow has is that they have that system of record thing and the governance component of it. So that's why I think apps that are developed on the ServiceNow platform right now have that credibility within the enterprise to get noticed and get through the CMDB. So if you have a single CMDB and you've got all these apps sort of revolving around it, you've got leverage that might have. Well the market validates that, I mean. Is that what you mean or? I'm not necessarily around the CMDB because there's a lot of stuff that don't interface with the CMDB. But it's just that. So when you say single system of record, what do you mean? Because ServiceNow talks about their system of engagement, right? Two different things, right? So the system is where are we storing the data once we've engaged the system of engagement? So that's going to be Oracle, that's going to be Workday. Salesforce, right? And ServiceNow. As the app creators capture that data. The app creators are, I mean, they're playing in both realms. So they have to be the, they're adding capability to the single system of record by saying we can now store these things because of this app. But they're also. Well APIs and connectors are going to be the vehicle, I think that's what we're seeing, Dave connectors. So if I have engagement data from ServiceNow, I bring the ServiceNow systems of record and then, okay, I'm going to just talk to another system, that's potentially an opportunity. But it's going to be stored on your app, your platform. Where's it going to be stored? That's what I'm missing, right? You were just saying it's going to be stored on. I feel like we just started talking different languages here, didn't we? Yeah. I'm not sure how I can answer your question. All right, let's go back. John will explain it to me later. So the Facebook developer platform conference, Facebook development conference, a couple of last month, Zuckerberg rolled out the portfolio of apps. So if you look at Facebook on the consumer side, it's interesting, right? They had poke and all these other apps, WhatsApp became the messaging app. On one side, they get there. They relaunched messaging as a separate app, but they put it as a portfolio. So that's interesting. So that's consumer play. But Facebook still is a system of records. So what I'm getting at is, so Facebook's the system of record in the same way that ServiceNow is going to be the system. That's the way I'm envisioning it. I see. It's an unknown scenario. We don't know yet. But ServiceNow is also going to be a system of engagement. Even though even as it's Facebook. Yeah, well, ServiceNow wants to be the preferred system of engagement and record for work. Yeah. Right? They might buy you guys. That's not part of the messaging. No, it's really not. No, yes it is. You talked to them about going into it. Did you see Lady's keynote? Sure, but you talked about what's going to be the system of record for HR? Is it going to be Workday or is it going to be ServiceNow? Well, I think with the app store, you're going to see people trying to make ServiceNow the system of record. Yes, this is what I was saying before. But that's useless in the case of engagement. Well, we're connecting the dots. No, no, hold on, we're connecting the dots. This was just a conversation. Yeah, this isn't just a conversation. What he's saying is that if you have the monolithic system of record today, say Workday, and that's a big app in the company, ServiceNow gets a beachhead in that for their piece, builds an app on top of it. With the app store, a customer could potentially cobble together and bays out Workday. That's essentially the connecting the dots. So I'm a customer, I have what? An agile platform. By picking off little pieces of Workday, right? Little pieces in function, right? I mean, that's a big app, right? It's not like. Yeah, exactly. But ServiceNow can't take that big app off. Right, so with micro apps can attack that. Yeah, or people that are just space experts, right? So maybe even a former Workday developer says, oh man, I just, you know, I know everything I need to know about Workday. All I need is the tools of this platform and the ability to scope it so it's mine and not everybody with a copy paste function. And they can take on those monsters. Yeah, so that's a great point with the Facebook. What Facebook's proven is that what's app beat their ass in the market on that one app? And they said, we'll buy it, brought it in. So in this case, if someone a Workday developer says, hey, here's the portfolio of Workday apps, but this is what everyone hates. I'm going to innovate and build a siloed app on ServiceNow. They'll still buy Workday and pay double the license. At some point they'll phase that out. If more people do that, then ServiceNow has enabled a collection of apps that could do Workday. All you have to do is look at what happened in Salesforce with the Viva model, right? That's a $2 billion company and it's really just an extension of Salesforce, right? So we already know what it's like when platforms give developers the opportunity. Are we out of time? Yeah, yeah, no, we're good. So we already know what happens when platforms kind of open it up to the broader ecosystem of the developers. So what ServiceNow has to do now is make sure that they win the war of developers against Salesforce. How do they do that? What's your take on that? Well, I think they're already coming a long way to do it. So now, first year we got private instances, yeah. Am I right? So developers like me can now say, like, I need to be able to experiment. I need to be able to do that on not my employer's instance. Or people like me, I have developer friends in the .NET ecosystem. They're just brilliant guys who've been developing 25, 30 years. And I'm like, you gotta get on the ServiceNow bandwagon. It's just like, it's so hot, it's so fresh. Okay, send me an SDK. Yeah. I can't access to a demo system, I can't. And now finally we got that. So now it opens up. Sandboxing is a beautiful thing. You have sandboxes out there, private instances. Really do the testing, push code, dev ops-like function. Yeah, so they've opened it up for that. So I think having the dev instances is a huge asset on the... But this is why we feel like there's so much room here for this company to grow. I mean, the platforms beat products in this economy. And the opportunity is just, you know, endless. Well, the tools need platforms too, right? So the opportunities, if you're an app and you're out there, you're an island and you need a platform, you can actually be part of a platform as a tool and be highly successful. The Salesforce example I mentioned. Yeah. So that's going to be very interesting. I mean, tools don't win by themselves. Yeah, two years ago we were saying this. I mean, you obviously were saying this, Robert, six or seven years ago. This is a past play, you know. This is an application development platform. Well, the big thing is looking at the valley is always like, okay, VC investment in a tool, not hot. But a tool can get a beachhead and become a platform. You can extend down into the platform. Well, it's essentially what service now does. If I could just pitch one more thing. That's one thing that we are very cognizant of is focal point is don't make it an app, make it a platform. So, you know, when we talk about rolling out these rich self-service features around a topic of interest, we actually made the features extensible so that you can actually add apps to our app. So, if you want to have a project management summarization engine at the top of every topic of interest, if your topic of interest are projects, for example, then you just build that widget and kind of clunk it into your focal point. Yeah, and that's the key. I mean, the mini platforms can exist. Awesome, well, Robert, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate your time. Congratulations. I did see your tweet about private instances out there. You know, it was awesome. It's following you on Twitter. So thanks for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. This is theCUBE here, live in Las Vegas for ServiceNow Knowledge 15. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.