 Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante. I'm with Wikibon.org and this is SiliconAngle.com's continuous coverage of ServiceNow's Knowledge Conference. We're here in Vegas. This is day three, day two and a half. We're winding up. We've been bringing customer stories all week. I know it's probably getting repetitive. We sound like a broken record here. The ServiceNow customers seem so happy. We've been probing for, okay, what don't you like and maybe little things here and there. But generally speaking, we're talking about an elated customer base, thrilled to be transforming not only IT, but their businesses. Tickets.com is here. Greg Crowder is the Vice President of Application Delivery and Kim Redding runs the PMO for Tickets.com. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. I appreciate you guys coming on and sharing your story. We've had a number of customer stories, as I was saying. Greg, let me start with you. Tell us a little bit about Tickets.com. If you want Justin Timberlake tickets, go to tickets.com instead of, I think most people know about it, but tell us about your business. Tickets.com provides leading, best in industry technology for ticketing venues, major sports clients, major venues across, really internationally, domestically. So when you go online to buy tickets for a major event like a Paul McCartney at Fenway, you're going through services that we provide to the venue. So we control the entire software as a service platform around that. So talk about what's driving your business. It's obviously competitive business. You compete with other large firms like yours. You compete with the guy in the street. You compete with eBay. So you've got to have availability. You've got to have great seats. You've got to have great prices. You've got to be able to service the customer. You can't make mistakes or it kills your brand. Talk about some of those things that are driving your business and how you're responding from a technology perspective. I would say the technology drives our business. So we are looking to separate ourselves from our competition through our technology. And I think we've done a tremendous job in doing that. Our technology is truly best in breed. We've proven, we've thought outside the box. We've innovated new ways to perform ticketing solutions. And our customer base has been extremely excited about what we've provided. Can you add a little color to that? I mean, what really excites you about the technology to the extent that you can share it? What are you most proud of there? My personal favorite is we worked with one of our partners to build a FIFO first in, first out waiting room that had never been done in the industry before at the request of one of our large customers. So, when you go to a major tickets come on sale and you go to a URL to purchase a ticket, you're generally put into a queue. And this product or this configuration allows you to get a token and be in line. So it's kind of a virtual line instead of a little bit more of a lottery system which most of our competition uses. Okay, so from a customer standpoint, I know if I'm, it's really first come first served. Exactly. Now, do I know that as a customer? Do you guys advertise that? Or is that just something that's part of the experience? That really depends on our partners, how they want to market that if they go with that configuration. Do you have the technology allows them to expose that if in fact they want to do that? Correct. Okay, so that's kind of cool. Yeah. All right, Kim, talk a little bit about your role in the PMO at tickets.com. Well, through the PMO, we run basically all projects throughout tickets.com, whether it be infrastructure changes or client implementations, new client implementations or custom work as well as the releases of our applications that we are developing. So managing the SDLC life cycle as well. So it's full life cycle from, is it from business case all the way through implementation? We work with the teams who do the actual implementation of the pieces. Are you guys like really rigorous about business cases up front? Or is it just a pen? Is it the line of business is really doing well? Can they sort of drive projects through or do you have sort of a standardized process that you do to get into the sort of PMO? Well, we're building the processes. Certain things we have rigorous processes for and other things have not necessarily followed a process. So it's some growing pains that we're going through and making sure that we have the appropriate processes and working through them. And you mentioned Kim off camera that you're just starting to use service now for the PMO, right? So Greg, you've had experience with service now for a number of years, right? Correct. Okay, so can you talk about that a little bit? Let's start with the beginning. What was the catalyst to bring service now in? What did the environment look like before service now? And then why did you bring service now in? I think before service now, and even in some aspects of our business today, we have disjointed process, different repositories for project artifacts, for knowledge-based articles, for, you know, we use spreadsheets in one area, we share point another to do data housing. So there was a real siloed approach. You know, each business unit had its own repository and its own way of doing things. And that didn't have a lot of transparency. And what we found is to be truly innovative, you need to break down the siloed walls and you need to allow people to understand the process as a whole. So where's, what's my role in the system, you know, in the total ecosystem of our work? What's coming in to me? How do I need that to look so I can focus on doing my work? And then what do I need to provide to the teams downstream for me so that they can focus on doing their work and not on the actual communication? And that's where service now really has helped us, is we break down the silos, we define these automated processes that allow each team to focus on the work itself and not on the communication of the work to the next group. We let the tool or the platform handle that communication and that really, it's done a lot of disintermediation of resources which allows the labor force to focus on greater innovation and creativity. So talk a little bit more about your role as the head of application delivery. I got excited when I heard you were the head of application delivery. It seems to me that the application folks at this conference are not the starting point for service now, but was that not the case with tickets.com? Were you heavily involved in the initial idea to bring in service now? And if so, is that unique? I personally was not heavily involved in the initial decision. I was running a different part of the business. I think the teams that were initially involved identified those gaps, realized that we needed a platform to facilitate that. So what we found is after we got deep into the product and really started to understand the value that it can bring and working with service now as partners is that there was a tremendous opportunity to build great things. So custom workflows, custom applications, we were a finalist this year for Innovation of the Year Award for something that we did there. So there's great opportunity. I wouldn't say the application guys are brought in last. Certainly, Kim running the PMO makes it a priority to include as many things as possible when we break new ground in a different area of the platform. We try to get people in and define the requirements, make sure we're building a process that everybody will use and adopt moving forward. So I mean, most customers that we talk to start with incident and change and problem, I presume the same was true with you guys. Correct, yes. And then you start sort of thinking about the application portfolio in a broader sense. Is that true? Is that what's happening with you guys? Yeah, we started out very small and we're really, as we learn the application and as we get smarter within the application, we can work smarter as a company. So whether it's the department across functional area, workflows that we implement that allow for even the project management team actually to take a step back because we don't need to do that coordination of those resources. All the steps are lined out in the workflow with the predecessors and such. So when you start out with service now, you have to start out small and keep it simple because if you try to give too many people too many things, make it over complicated, they will never really adapt it because it's too much to grasp at once. So we really had to start out small and then make our way to the point where we're at today where people are starting to come to us and look for us to solve their process and their everyday work day issues and to help them potentially reduce their costs and time doing various tasks. Now do you have everything in a single CMDB today or is that still evolving? Well, one of the mistakes I would say that we made when we implemented service now initially is that we did not implement the CMDB. So now we're at the point where we are moving forward and implementing the CMDB so that we can have the interconnection between the incident changes. Well, and so you pose that as a, you would have loved to be able to have done that but I've talked to a lot of customers at this event and said, you know, we want to do that but it's hard because the politics involved and the processes and so while you say, you call it a mistake, maybe it wasn't because you know, you might've got your head chopped off if you tried. It's going to be careful. Yeah, I would say it benefited us in the sense that we could focus on the incidents and workflows and streamline those processes. From a technology standpoint, we now have to go back and fill in that gap and there's some real benefit to having a CMDB in terms of automation and pulling in fields and removing some of the manual aspects of human involvement, you know, like form entry and things like that. So I think when Kim says it's a mistake, it's more, well, there's a pain there that it would have been great if we could remediate it out the front door. Well, so this is where, you know, I think if you have a top down edict, if somebody comes in from the senior managers and says, look, we have to do this, but you know, let's face it, most guys in the corner office aren't thinking about CMDB every day, all day. And so as a result, they're going to say, look, let's let the team decide and you've got other people sort of, whatever, hanging on to processes, people don't want to make changes. And that's a big step. So, you know, maybe that's something that we need to do further research on reporting at Wikibon. I'm interested also, because the other benefit of the CMDB is, I see, let me put forth the premise. You guys are the experts, help me confirm or deny this. You know, most organizations have hundreds if not thousands of applications. And you develop these new systems, you deploy these systems, and then you pay for them and they never die. Now that may or may not be representative of the organization, but it is, I know of many, many of the companies that I've worked with and studied. It seems like if you've got a system like ServiceNow and you've got the CMDB, you can actually tear down systems that aren't driving ROI to the organization. In IT, we have a tough time sometimes getting rid of stuff. So, first of all, is that true? Is that indicative of IT in general and specifically tickets.com situation? And do you see ServiceNow and this notion of a CMDB as being able to help you actually manage that portfolio over time? You want to take that one? It's a long question that nobody wants to take. I'll hold it. I would say yes, in IT in general, people like to hang to legacy systems or involvements or processes. I mean, maybe it's a little more prevalent in IT by nature of IT, but I think that's a problem in every aspect of business. You go with what you know and what you're comfortable with doing. So, this is where implementing any new change, whether it be ServiceNow or any kind of technology or platform or whatever, requires significant change management tactics. You need to work with people and get them to see the value and build the value and to get the adoption rates. So, I do think that there is legacy processes that have to be overcome and that's just a challenge that everyone has to go through. What we've done to address that is we would build based off of observation what we thought people would best suit various teams and then we would show it to them. So, it removed it from the abstract and it made it real. And then what we saw is instead of we can't do this because it violates our legacy, now we see, wow, that's really great, can we change it? And that, right there, now we've made that fundamental shift from rejection to adoption. And then it's on the development teams to go in and really make those modifications quickly to capitalize on the adoption. Yeah, okay, that's a great example. I mean, you hear the marketing messages from ServiceNow know to now, know to now, but that's the example. Correct. Okay, so now, tell me, are there things that, or what are the things that you can do today because of ServiceNow that say you couldn't do before? I would have to say, as we started out with, we had disparate systems and you're really, we're really starting to be able to get a 360 view of the happenings in the company cross-departmentally, as well as for, from the beginning of a customer coming onto tickets.com and all that has happened with that customer, whether it be finance, whether it be resources, whether it be systems. So we're now able to see what is going on with the customers and be able to find out exactly what's happening with the customer at any particular time, which is something that's very fundamental that we were really never able to do before. Has the user-based notice, the change pre and post, and you had five years now, you've got quite a bit of experience with ServiceNow, has it affected the user perception of IT and the client satisfaction? I mean, your IT users, I mean. I would say yes. We went, again, as you see the adoption rate, what we've gone from is just, it'll never work to, wow, I see the value, let's change it, to now we are being hit daily with requests from parts of our organization saying, I was thinking, could we try something? And that is just fabulous. I mean, I can't really quantify how great that is when you see people now challenging their own processes, their own assumptions, and trying to involve other teams around the company to build a process that benefits the organization as a whole. I think that Arna Joseph-Ragana, he's the CTO of ServiceNow, you probably know. And he was talking about this whole notion of the platform, platform as a service and developing application, Fred talks about all the time, developing applications, allowing more business-oriented people to develop applications. You guys are going to take, do you, or are you going to take advantage of that capability? Do you, or will you develop your own apps on top of the platform? Yeah, I mean, we already have, to a certain degree, we built, That's right, you mentioned the, yeah, the innovations, yeah, so we'll talk about that too. We, well, I'll segue right into it if that's okay. We built a module that allows us to manage major events. So for example, I talked about the on sales and when tickets go public and the sheer volume of traffic, and you mentioned if we make mistakes, that really diminishes our brand. So we identified that as a very crucial component of our business, and we wanted to make sure that our processes were solid, that we could go into every one of those events. And we're, at times in our peak, we're doing maybe 20, 30 of those a week. So with the same staff, so we need to make sure that we have really dialed in at those tough times and we have checklists that are perfect and spot on. So we built a module within service now that tracks all of that, and we have seen tremendous adoption and tremendous increase in improvement in our service, and we've seen client responses back to us about how pleased they are with the service that they've gotten through those on sales, that we can tie back both to our great people because we have great staff in that process. So that's even a better, because I was probing before about, okay, are your IT customers, your internal clients, you know, happier and you said yes, you know, clearly. But now that's an example of your end customers. You know, frankly, far more important. I have two final questions and either of you can take this first one. So like I said, we've been hearing these effusive stories of service now and how great they are a week. And it's good. It's very impressive. What is on their to-do list? What would make your life easier if service now did X? What is X? I think the quick and simple answer is the mobile application we saw demonstrated yesterday is exactly what we need. All of our users are, or many of our users are remote. 90% of them, if not more, have smartphones. And the majority of them aren't sitting around in front of their computers anymore. They're out in the field. They're out at conferences. They're out doing things, but yet they still need to manage their incidents, their requests, whatever's coming into them and their work. So having the mobile app quickly be able to update an incident or whatever's going on is the number one thing that we need right now. So more mobile support, more platforms, and just go hard at the mobile. Correctly, service now. Gotta do mobile. I mean, that's why everybody's doing mobile right now. That's why it's happening. Now how about advice to fellow practitioners? Maybe Greg, start with you. What would you advise some of your peers out there? You're talking to them and they're thinking about maybe going this direction. What would you tell them, maybe things that you do differently? We talked about the CMDB and the politics involved in that, but what else would you advise them? I think the first thing you need to look at is if you want to go with something in a cloud. And that was a no brainer for us. To Kim's point about disparate workforce, we had to have something that was available in the cloud. So once you make that decision, they start looking at vendors, which ties best to your business strategy. You go with the service now, for example, because of the breadth and depth of the platform. And then from there, Kim made a great point earlier about you need to start small. Go find where the biggest ROI is. The low hanging fruit is at work and focus on that. Where can you get that initial adoption and then let it spread through the organization somewhat organically? It's the biggest challenge is managing that adoption and change. You mentioned, I lied, I got one more question. You mentioned the cloud service levels. Are you happy with the service levels? I mean, is it on the scale of one to 10? Are you off the charts happy, way better than you could have done yourselves, or maybe there's some room for improvement or a total disaster? I think the value for, you asked if we could do it better ourselves. It's a hard question because we work with some of the best people in the industry. I love our technology folks. I'd go to bat form any day. Whether it's worth our time to go build that or to go with a partner, I think it's clear to go with the partner. They have economies of scale that we're not going to achieve so that the ROI is better by partnering up. Great. All right, Greg and Kim, thank you very much for coming on and sharing the tickets.com story. Want some tickets, go online, get your token. You won't get cut in line by some toad. Great stuff. Really appreciate you guys coming on. All right, keep it right there. Everybody will be back to wrap up. We're live from knowledge. 13, this is Dave Vellante, wikibon.org. This is Silicon Angle. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back.