 Okay, welcome everyone to a CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, and this is a CUBE Conversation with Mike Nappy, Senior Director of Automation for ServiceNow. Welcome to this CUBE Conversation. Thanks, John, it's great to be here. ServiceNow is well-known for its IT service automation. What's the secret sauce of automating services? You're on the automation side, and it's very well-known in the technical circles and going back to the old days of networking, got to automate the configurations, and now it's more complex. What's the secret sauce of automating services? Sure, John. I mean, really the secret sauce in a lot of ways or a component of it is having an accurate model of what the IT infrastructure actually is, right? What's behind the actual business services and having the relationships between those business services and the enabling compute storage networking artifacts is essential before you can actually aspire to manage those things in an automated fashion. It's been fun to watch IT kind of grow up with all the elements of multi-vendor over the years, and now with cloud mobile and social, it's a huge challenge. We just talked about the complexity earlier. Tell us about the breakthroughs that you're solving with this announcement you've announced in configuration automation application. Tell us about the breakthrough. What are you solving? Sure, well, in a lot of our customers, we find that a common driver of service incidents, things that impact the service in a negative way, are misconfigured infrastructure, right? A patch is applied to a machine, for example, it wasn't authorized and it takes a system down. And so it's really impossible to manage IT services without having a comprehensive view and control over not just the business service itself and the application, but the enabling compute storage and networking behind it. And so with this new configuration automation application that we're introducing, for the first time we're connecting ServiceNow's change management capability and its rich processes around change management and the CMDB, to kind of the last mile of the infrastructure. Partnering with Puppet Labs and using their popular open source tool, we essentially get visibility and control all the way into the last mile of compute storage and networking infrastructure. Before we get to the Puppet, I want to drill down on how you work with Puppet. I got to talk about some other configuration challenges. I mean, we're seeing obviously virtualization changes to game on the infrastructure side. We've been covering that in space on SiliconANGLE, Wikibon, but on the business side, we're seeing the trend towards the lines of business driving everything these days in terms of accelerating the change, they're dialing up more investments for apps and with cloud, it's almost frictionless to get that stuff up and running. So a lot of stuff's happening on the business side. So how does that affect the policies of automating the infrastructure and the application environment? So I'll see if that's there, but how to tease that out, explain that to the folks. Well, in the past, there's been really kind of a wall between the business and the business service and the enabling infrastructure that's being managed by IT. What's happening now is we're seeing through the power of virtualization and the cloud, essentially more and more the infrastructure behind the service is becoming virtualized and programmable. It's manageable in a much more automated fashion than has been in the past. And so now for the first time, it's possible to connect in a much richer way the business policy with the actual policies and configuration that's behind the service to the business, right? And so really it's a continuum. And one of the great things we're excited about with this configuration automation application is that we can really connect that entire continuum through the ServiceNow CMDB and ServiceNow's processes. You have the ability to view the services being delivered to the business all the way from the way that the business requests that service to the actual CIs and machines on the back end that are providing the infrastructure for that service. And how seamless is it to do that? It's on the scale of one of the 1010 being really easy and one being difficult. Well, I think it's very close to a 10 now. I mean, there's more work to be done obviously at software, we're gonna continue to evolve it. But the ability using ServiceNow's orchestration engine to essentially define once you have an event or a request from the business, how that request is actually provisioned on the back end, all the way into the virtual machine that's being stood up and then using Puppet for example to define that virtual machine as let's say a web server that's gonna be part of a distributed application and apply the software and the configuration settings to that virtual machine and notify the business back that hey, your application service is now ready, click here and you're off to the rest. So that was my question on Puppet, so how does it work with Puppet? So you can just elaborate a little bit more about how does this work with Puppet? Sure, sure. Puppet's got this very powerful architecture for managing the configuration in a data center and essentially what it has is a model-based store that they call Puppet Master and that Puppet Master contains the configuration of record if you will for all the different server roles in the enterprise and by server role, I mean, you know, a database server, a web server, et cetera and obviously different isotopes of that types of, you know, you have Linux, you have Windows, et cetera. And so it manages those configurations at a very large scale in a very powerful way. ServiceNow connects to that and ServiceNow essentially replaces the Puppet Master in our integration as essentially the external node classifier and what it means is we become essentially the authority for configuration change in a Puppet environment and with that you can then connect ServiceNow's change management process to changes made in a Puppet-controlled environment and be essentially the single authority that authorizes those changes. So within the ServiceNow console, more specifically, we have the ability to manage nodes in the Puppet environment and we can also change or put change control over the server definitions themselves, the node definitions themselves so you can lock those down. Great, so the configuration automation is built on top of the orchestration application. Now you have other applications out there on orchestration, what are they, what are they? Well, you can think of orchestration as really an application of our workflow engine. What orchestration brings to the table in addition to kind of traditional human-centric workflow is the ability to connect to external systems like Puppet. We also have in the product today the ability to connect to VMware environments, to connect to Amazon, AWS environments and other types of fabrics like that. And so what orchestration allows you to do is to literally orchestrate change or flow that interacts with other systems and so we can essentially drive change into those systems through their own APIs and receive notifications back that update our CMV. Exciting times, configuration automation. Dave Vellante and I always talk about this the area under the hood that is most talked about by geeks but it's so important modernizing IT operations is about a lot of automation around configuration, a lot of dynamic stuff going on with virtualization and applications. So really, really great work, great announcement here. Looking forward to talking more about it. But for the folks out there, put the bumper sticker on the car for this announcement, it's complex but I'm riding down the street and I see the bumper sticker. What does it say about configuration automation announcement here? For me it would be rule IT. Rule IT, all right, configuration, very important and really important growth area for IT operations. This is a CUBE conversation with Mike Nappy here at ServiceNow, thanks for watching.