 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Knowledge 16, brought to you by ServiceNow. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. Welcome back to Knowledge 16 everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. And we're here live at the Mandalay Bay Hotel. This is our fourth knowledge. Hashtag no16, check out crowdchat.net slash no16, Bert Latimore is in there documenting the conversations on theCUBE. Chris Orr is here, he's the Vice President of Support Strategy at Epicor Software. Chris, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. Thank you. So, Knowledge 16, what's your quick take on what's going on here? Oh, it's definitely a lot of excitement going on. Lots of people, you know, it's, I always hear of Knowledge 15, you know, you can just tell that there's a lot more people here, a lot more activity, hustle, bustle. It's been a great experience so far. So, tell us about Epicor Software. What do you guys do, what's your role there? Yeah, absolutely. Epicor is an ERP software manufacturer. We're the sixth largest in the world. We focus on industry specialized companies that are doing things like lumber, electrical plumbing, retail services, those types of vertical industries that are looking for essentially business management software. We've grown over acquisition over the last 25 years. We have collected about 83 different market offerings that customers have purchased with about a 20 something thousand customer base. So, a fairly sizable number of clients that we provide services for. 83 different offerings. So, those are all different kind of vertical solutions or different applications that we do. Yeah, that's exactly right. Those are all different market offerings. There's all kinds of modules and add-ons and capabilities, both with Epicor Software as well as our partner network, you know, that will go on to those things. But over the years, you know, the different software has evolved and changed. I would say it's a much smaller number in terms of our true sales for new clients. We have five leading products that are well-known in the marketplace. But if you look at all the various products that we deliver, it's 83 different software products. And as a support organization, my role, I own the strategy for our customer service or our external-facing support. We're supporting all those clients that continue to use our products throughout the years. So, while sales may be focused on the new stuff, you know, we're still very much engaged with customers that are using all of our products. So, Frank, in his keynote this morning, was talking about the great estates of the software business. I guess you guys are in the first estate, the ERP estate, and he talked about the CRM estate and then, of course, ServiceNow being the service management estate. But so it's interesting because you obviously consume ServiceNow, you have an affinity for ServiceNow, and you're in that first estate. So, talk about how service management touches the ERP space that you're in and how you see service management evolving. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of different aspects of it. You know, what it means for Epicore is they just have a billion-dollar software company versus our customer base, which tends to be more that mid-market space. So, you know, they're a bit smaller. You know, it does mean different things. Our ERP solutions is everything that one would imagine, you know, is used by manufacturers, distributors, and retail services, which is the markets that we serve, running everything, you know, from your quote-to-cash cycles, you know, to your specific GL, E-P-A-R, all of those elements. CRM is obviously a component of that. They're serving customers and they're managing customers. They're managing everything from pipeline all the way through delivery and customer service. And our ERP solutions deliver a lot of those capabilities within it. But when you get to a certain size, like we are, you know, we're starting to look for something a little bit different, a little bit more advanced. And so, you know, as most companies of our size do, we have a strategy around our ERP solution. We happen to use our own software for that. We have a strategy around our front office. We happen to be Salesforce customers. We use Marketo in the marketing space. And as we began to look at what do we want to do in the customer service space, we wanted to do something that was very wholly different and frankly leading in the market. And so, we've been looking at and in fact have deployed a service management-based solution, the ServiceNow Customer Service Management module, as our external facing component, right? So that third leg of the stool has really become something very different than what our heritage has been, which is using CRM-type technology to do that. Okay, so did you feel as though CRM technology kind of hit its limits and you needed something that had more legs? Can you talk about the sort of journey that you're on with regard to service management and where are you today and where do you see it going? Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of that depends on what you as a company are actually delivering when you talk about your customer support experience. If it's simple questions, say B2C-type stuff where it's, I have a particular product and I have one question and I'm going away, the CRM approach I think continues to work. We deliver a technology-based service. It's a complex service. There are lots of elements to it. There's lots of people that are engaged from one particular customer of ours. And so we really looked at the space. We said we want to do more than just answer a question. We want to deliver a customer service experience that's well beyond what I think we can accomplish with CRM-based technology. And it's everything from how do we optimize service, which is better for our customers. We're delivering service faster. We're getting the right answer the first time to what the engagement experience is, what our portal looks like, to how we operate internally so that when you look at the service management pillars, things like incident problems, service catalog, knowledge, we're using all those principles to engineer a different customer service experience the way we operate and thus what we actually deliver externally. It's interesting, before we came on here, you talked about the very differences though between kind of an SLA-based relationship with a client versus kind of your own internal people, right? Where basically you're trying to support them in whatever they need. So how are you kind of executing that with your client base, with this external-facing version of service now? Yeah, it's a great question. If you're high enough, if you're at 100,000 feet, everything kind of looks the same. Something's wrong, I need a solution, we closed the ticket, right? The reality is when you start to get down and you start to look at the differences between internal execution and external execution, internal execution, typically a business is making decisions about what that service experience is going to be, and it's more or less the same. Yes, you have a VIP class and you use it a little bit extra, but it's more or less the same. In a business like ours with 83 different products, people are buying different types of support. They're buying bronze support, silver support, gold support, and those things have different attributes associated to them, when they can call us, if they can call us, how fast we respond. So in other words, what are those service targets? All those dynamics change based upon the relationship and the fee that we charge our customers to maintain their different products. So as a consequence, when we're entitling customers, when they contact us and look to engage us, we're having to understand, what is the contractual relationship? What products have they purchased from us? Are they covered under maintenance? What are the entitlements to those things that then define that service experience? So I would translate it to a dynamic experience versus a more static or homogeneous experience that one might have if it's internal. So take that through one step further to your end customers. Can you describe sort of the then and now for them in terms of that customer experience? Yeah, you know, here's another way to kind of look through this. I don't know how many of you guys have gray hairs that are listening to this, but I've sort of been through the turnstile here a few times. And I think back to the days when, as an IT individual, we ran, everything is an incident. An incident was an incident was an incident. Through the years in Idle, V1, V2, V3, it started to define the concepts. It says, well, wait a minute, you have things that break it apart. There's something that's wrong, fix it, a business disruption. You have a root cause, you know, figure out what went wrong, right? The root cause of your incidents and eliminated, right? Causality. You have knowledge as a whole discipline. You have a catalog, which is requested items that have workflows and automation that can exist underneath that. Our business, our software support business are in particular, our customer support organization has been in that an incident is an incident is an incident model for a long time. And so, you know, the notion that we can divide this into the different types of work is effective for everybody that's involved. And so that experience begins to change. You know, we start to disassociate, you know, what a support issue is from what a root cause is, a software defect, typically in our use case for Epicor, and what that looks like and how we're going to action that. You know, versus a catalog item or a requestable service. You know, the fact that I can do automated fulfillment against that is something that we don't have today. We don't have a workflow engine that exists around that. And so, you know, the experience begins to change. Well, let me net it out for you, right? I don't think the external experience is overly different than the internal experience from one aspect. It's how quickly can you deal with my issue, right? Respond fast, get it solved fast, make it never happen if you can, right? It's the same sort of basics. What you need a layer on those basics then is what the engagement model is and what your customers, you know, view as, you know, your ability as a company to execute on their service needs. And that's where you start to, you know, create some of the, you know, the differentiation. So that engagement model, what are they touching? I mean, are they touching Epicor software? Are they touching ServiceNow software? Yes, I mean. Yes, so we saw on-prem solutions. We also have cloud services. So, you know, you can buy a subscription model. The reality is we don't manufacture every, you know, specific functionality anyone could ever want. You can walk the expo hall here at ServiceNow and you would say ServiceNow is not in that business either and so we have a vast partner network of add-ons and in many cases we provide frontline support, you know, for our software, for our companion products which are our product bolt-ons or third party bolt-ons. And then we do other services which are true services such as managing those environments, right? You know, such as in a cloud environment. And then other services like backup services to help, you know, with data protection and things of that nature. So, it really is, it kind of runs the gamut depending on the type of customer that we're serving as to whether or not their IT organization has the capabilities to execute on behalf of themselves or whether we're providing more of a turnkey solution for them, right? And so, it is a wide variety of different things that we wind up doing for customers, right? It's no one answer. So, you mentioned backup services. It strikes my security question. I want to sort of get your take on this. We've seen service now enter into this domain. How is the security conversation changing within your organization at the board level? Is it shifting toward responding as opposed to trying to keep the bad guys out because you know you can't keep them out or is it a mix? I'm sure it is a mix, but maybe you could add some color to that. Yeah, man, I think it depends on whether you're asking me how do we handle security internal with inside Epicor or whether you're asking me how do we act as good data storage and service storage for our customers? There really are kind of two different answers. Certainly there's a commonality between the two. I'll kind of give you a sense of each. We do look at the fact that we're in a cloud with ServiceNow and we are maintaining customer data and customers sometimes can give us sensitive information that we have a responsibility to manage and protect that. And so, what our portal experience looks like and what our registration process is and our password management policies is one element of it. We're also using some of the embedded capabilities within ServiceNow to do data encryption and using role-based authentication will actually elevate roles to allow certain users inside our organization access customer-sensitive data which is stored encrypted inside of the environment. That's particularly important for regulated industries which some of our customers are in. And then we've got one other dimension which has to do with who can see and touch my data. So, typically if you're in the government space you've got regulations, we do some firearm work and so ITAR is one of the regulatory bodies that covers that that covers who can actually access and touch data. All of those are involved in that external facing customer service delivery. We have internal issues as well. If you look at our cloud business and how we actually manage that cloud environment and so what do we do for border security? What do we do for borderless security? How does that all work and play? And so, we use a lot of techniques in order to make sure that we're being good storage of the service in that context both with Epicore data and our financial systems and other back office systems as well as those systems that customers directly interact with for their consumption of service. So, what's the regime? What's the right regime, if you will, of the security? Who's in charge? Is it a bunch of technical guys? Is it the entire business? How does Epicore handle that? Yeah, so we do have a security officer that's in place. They manage compliance. They do all the things that a typical CSO would do inside an organization to set policies and then you, of course, execute against policy and audit against that execution. All of those things are in play and those things, of course, play into what it is we do in terms of delivery of service. So, I can tell you, we take very seriously our customer experience, our customer satisfaction levels. We talk about NPS, Net Promoter Score. It's really one of our primary metrics as to whether or not customers are satisfied with service. And security is a key element of that. Every CIO that's out there, to some level or another, is thinking about are my partners serving my security interests well? And we take that responsibility quite seriously and so we've built an organizational practice around that. Okay, lay out the vision for us. Knowledge 16, let's look out. Five years, let's say. Where do you want to take your organization and your role? What do you see as the future? You know, at the risk of overflattering the executives at ServiceNow, I do align with the vision that ServiceNow has. I do think that workflow management is an untapped area. I think companies do struggle with how to do that properly. In the context of Epicor, we started as a very product-centric company and if you think of the center of gravity, being around one of those 83 products, we run professional services and finance and customer support and sales around that center of gravity. As we've changed our center of gravity for the organization, get onto a common platform for customer support, it begs the question of, well, what is the workflow environment now for the other corporate entities that participate in the delivery of some customer service, right? Invoicing, I have a question of my invoice. An invoice is wrong. There's a finance role that has played there. Professional services has a role and there's rules of engagement that they have. So what does that look like? The reality is there's workflow that lives underneath all of that and today we run against many disparate systems, as many organizations do. We're using Microsoft Project to deal with our professional service project planning or we're doing email throughout the organization, all of those things I think exist in order for us to excel what customers want, which is that single point of contact that get me my answer quickly, get it right the first time. You have to have people that participate inside of the same ecosystem and that means changing the way IT delivers services and solutions, right? Or at least the way IT is consumed and I think service management, as a platform, as a technology, as a process discipline, as workflow definitions start to give us a framework of what needs to be different and how do we do that and how do we play in the same ball field? I could say is it service now, is it some other product? I think service now absolutely has the leader position in this market to make that happen. It is an interesting question though. It's an untapped market and as service now becomes a bigger market maker, you will see the other two environments start to encroach on that space. So what happens in five years? I think it's a little bit up for grabs in some of that, right? The swim lanes are shifting so that's going to be really interesting. All right, well theCUBE is here managing to serve your content needs around service management. Chris Orr, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insights. Absolutely, thanks for having me. All right, keep it right there. Everybody will be back right after this short break. This is theCUBE, we're live from Knowledge 16.