 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering Knowledge 15, brought to you by ServiceNow. Okay, welcome back everyone. You're watching theCUBE SiliconANGLE, Wikibon's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. Get all the data, share it with you. I'm John Furrier, Michael's Dave Vellante. We live in Las Vegas for ServiceNow, Knowledge 15. Hashtag No15, our next guest, Brian Clark, former executive director of ITS, RMIT University. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, John. So we're going to get down and dirty, get nerdy, get, talk about the tech. ServiceNow and all the executives and all the messagings. So, bottom line, the platform's solid. What's your take on the platform? What's going on under the covers? Give us a take on what's on the platform. What makes it unique? Why is all this traction happening? Why are everyone so happy? Why is everyone partying on the beach last night? What's going on with ServiceNow? Give us the take. I think the reasons for partying on the beach and why the platform's so solid may well be different. But I'm a software engineer by background. So I spent 10 years being paid to write code, so I am a nerd. And that's the term of endearment for me. And one of the things that, as we were going through the selection process at the university, that really impressed me was the strength of the platform. I think it's been really well-architected. As a software engineer, I'm typically pretty skeptical of applications. In fact, I think most applications suck. And I was really impressed as we went through the evaluation with the strength of the platform and the amount of capability and functionality that ServiceNow is adding, because we had looked at the platform 18 months before and seeing it 18 months later and how much it actually developed and changed was quite impressive. The software's damn good. It really is impressive. What are the parameters of software that doesn't suck? It's a good question. I think first and foremost, it actually needs to be pretty easy to use. So I'm a big fan of user experience. And that's very trendy now, thanks to all the work that Apple has done, quite honestly in the last decade. But if I go back to my first experiences as a developer, I designed an application from the inside out. My first sort of real application build started with the data model and sort of worked out all the dynamics of how it should operate from my perspective as an engineer. I took it out and showcased it with a set of users and showed them the screens and I was really proud of this work. I was quite happy as 23, 24 years old. And they started asking questions about could you change it to work like this and could it do that? And none of that made sense to me because it wasn't the data model, but it was actually how they worked. And so I sat down with them after that and said, tell me what you guys actually do and how you actually do it. And actually on the flight back from that trip, redesign the entire application from their perspective back in. And so that's for me, the start of software that doesn't suck is you start with the user. And it's one of the things that I think ServiceNow has gotten right in terms of the way people work. A lot of application platforms in this space come out of the BPM heritage. They're sort of talking to services as opposed to humans working with humans. And I think that's a big differentiator. Design constraints are interesting. In the old days it was, okay, here's the methodology, waterfall, whatever it was. And here's the criteria it's bandwidth could be limited. It could be screen. All that stuff has got to be built off in scratch. Now you have completely connected networks and people with phones. So now you have now an agile mindset. This is the cloud, right? So give us your take on that whole cloud native born in the cloud and the benefits to a developer, this DevOps mindset. And as an engineer, software engineer, what are the table stakes going forward in the future? Does DevOps become easy to use? Easy ops, easy DevOps? Yeah, look, there's a couple of questions in there. I mean, if I go back to sort of the evolution of we've gotten to a point where bandwidth is pretty inexpensive. I won't say it's free yet, but it's pretty inexpensive. The proliferation of mobile devices, mobility is ubiquitous. So you've got a new environment, you've got a new playing field. And I think that the opportunity that affords us is the ability to quickly roll out capability to the end users. So we're talking about development in terms of weeks and months instead of what used to be months and months and years. And so I think that really changes the game for organizations. In terms of DevOps, I mean, I think that is the new frontier for, you know, software engineer. So if I look at software engineering, it's moved to managing large scale environments and writing code to do that, as opposed to necessarily writing a lot of code to provide end user functionality. And platforms like ServiceNow allow you to flip that. So I got to ask you the large scale question, because we love these conversations. Large scale is about scale up, but now you got scale up. All this goodness is going on in the cloud. So it's large scale, computer science comes into play, distributed computing theory, et cetera. Then you got other new real time needs, right? So you've got large scale combined with real time. You saw some of the stuff, Angular, the writing stuff in Angular, you got Node, you have the synchronous stuff. And this is the new normal, right? You know, waiting versus polling and WebSoc, or say they use, but take us through your mindset of that environment where you got large scale, which is good, you always turn up the cloud, but like real time is also not trivial. So what's your take on that as a developer and looking at the ServiceNow platform, this notion of real time? What does it mean? How hard is it to do? What are some of the benefits? I guess being a bit of an old school software engineer, it always surprises me. Some of the younger kids, I'll call them, they're coming through that don't necessarily understand all the complexity that sits behind that. I mean, you know, I was talking to a developer the other day about sockets and they had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. And you know, we were in one of the labs, I was nerding out this week at the conference in one of the labs they were describing the idea of synchronous and asynchronous. And as a software engineer, I was really quite surprised that we're having that kind of conversation. But the reality is, they don't have to worry about that stuff anymore. And the reason they don't have to worry about that is because that's all been built into the platform. So not just ServiceNow, this isn't a, you know, we love ServiceNow commercial. In the cloud in general, engineers of my generation have been solving those problems saying you don't have to worry about that anymore. And I think that allows them to focus on the real time. And again, back to that user experience. Yeah, back to the problem, user problem, inside out kind of thing. Yeah, so and I think it also allows us to specialize. So you don't have to know 32 different technologies to bring functionality to market. So what's going on at RMIT? Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. You have a title of transformation projects. That's kind of interesting. And we always, I always like to look at run the business, grow the business, transform the business. You're in that sort of third category, which means that you've got a small budget. But take us through the organization, kind of what your role is, what's happening in your business, if you will. Yeah, so if we go back a little bit, I spent about almost four years as the CIO at RMIT. And one of the projects that I picked up outside of technology was transforming the admissions process. And so when we looked at it, it was quite surprised. I come out of banking. I'd spent 10 years in financial services. And I was quite surprised at how manual the university was. And it's not just RMIT, universities in general. I've spent a lot of time in the last four or five months looking at other universities who have exactly the same problem. There's a lot of paper that moves around these organizations. As a student, the experience to apply to RMIT only four years ago was that you needed to fill out a paper-based application. And still many universities today, all of their administrative processes are literally fill out a form, a paper form, sign it and bring it in. You can't even scan it in some cases and email it. You actually physically bring it in. And so we looked at that as a fairly big problem. One, it's an operational problem. It creates a lot of costs that you don't necessarily need in your organization. But it's also a brand problem. If you're a RMIT university and you're a global university of technology and design, and the way you interact with your customers is on paper, that's not really delivering the brand promise. And so we realized that we need to solve that problem from both perspectives. Okay, so you went from CIO role to this transformation role and what are you working on? Yeah, so one of the things that I saw at the beginning of last year, a real opportunity in the higher ed sector. Like I said, most of the universities, if not all the universities in Australia, have this same problem. There's a deregulation going on in the Australian market. It's been a heavily regulated education environment and that has been loosening quite a lot over the last few years. Price deregulation is coming through. And so I looked out and said, I can help these organizations. So I just had a conversation with my boss and said, look, I really want to set up a business that's focused on helping universities improve the student life cycle, helping them improve the student experience and take costs out of the back office, right? And so I made that transition out of the CIO role and consult back to RMIT as the project director for this global admissions project. And so that takes up a few days of my week, really sort of seeing that through. And to be honest, it's a real personal thing for me because I started that journey about a year and a half ago with the university and I really want to see it through for them. But the other half of my week is spent looking at other universities and helping them solve the same problem. Well, it's not unique to Australia, I can tell you, my daughter's a freshman in college and boy, what a complex matrix. I don't know if it's like that in California, but I mean, just even pay a bill. Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. So many portals that I have to go through and passwords and it's really a frustrating experience. Now it's really funny, I funny say that because we spent time when I was at RMIT really looking at how students pay bills. And we first of all looked at the invoice that we gave these students and no one could understand. No, none of us in this side of the university could understand what the actual fee was and how much they needed to pay in by win. And so we completely redesigned that. We took a really commercial sort of mindset to it. If you looked at it, it looked just like any bill that you would get from a commercial provider, which is pretty clear, here are the services you got. Here's how much you owe. Here's when you need to pay. Easy to understand, transparent, doesn't take up 40 minutes for me to figure out. I actually know the CIO on Twitter and I've had some interactions with her. Should I tell her to call service now? I mean, what role does service now play in that transformation? Look, I think there's an opportunity for service now. At RMIT, we didn't start our student management system which is another product. But definitely, I've been talking to a couple of other universities who have exactly this problem and I think service now could play a good role in that. So where should people start in solving this problem? That's an interesting point. I mean, probably not with the technology. No, definitely not with the technology. My view is always start with the student experience. I've been doing quite a bit of reading in the last few months about customer effort. So there's a lot of work coming out of corporate executive board about, if you look back four or five years ago, we talked about delighting our customers. If you delight your customers, they'll stay. You get this great sort of loyalty effect. The reality is, A, it's really hard to know how to delight them and B, the research is now showing they may not be so loyal even if you do delight them. But if you stuff them around and you make it really hard for them to pay a bill or really hard for them to do some interaction, they will leave. And you and I have probably had that same experience as a customer. Yeah, credit goes to hell in a handbasket, really, instantly. So let's talk about use cases. One of the things Fred Letty was talking about on theCUBE here yesterday was, it was kind of around the Internet of Things question, but that's not really the question I want to ask, which is the old processes that are being, the workflows that are being automated and disrupted by ServiceNow customers are old and cobweb. They're all like old. And they were designed around capabilities back then. I kind of alluded to that earlier. But with Internet of Things and now mobile, new use cases are emerging where you could actually reconstruct workflows in that. So can you give it and share some insight into new capabilities that have emerged in your world where you can jump on it and where that innovation is? Because there's two things, there's the let's reboot and re-orchestrate workflows and then there's actual innovation on top, right? So talk about those new capabilities where the ServiceNow developer could jump on. Well, and I think, unfortunately, if you look at higher ed, the problems that most commercial organizations had 10 or 15 years ago are the problems they're facing today. So you don't have to be particularly innovative to solve those. But you're spot on about workflow and there's an opportunity to completely redesign it. And we have a couple of people working for us that are lean Six Sigma experts. And so we start with what bits of this can we completely do away with and let's actually redesign from the ground up. And I do think that ServiceNow as a strong workflow engine in particular can allow you to automate that pretty quickly. If I looked outside, and I think it's kind of for higher education, it's a bit of walk before you run sort of stuff. In terms of innovation, look, I think that idea of internet of things and devices being able to log information and kick off, automatically kick off workflows without human intervention. I think at the end of the day, any workflow's got to start with some human doing something. But when you start connecting devices, the devices can start doing that for you. So that's disrupting other workflows. That had no connections. Absolutely. Okay, I got to ask the nerd question for you. What's the coolest thing you've seen here at the event? Obviously a lot of labs, a lot of people talking in the hallways, a lot of sessions. What's the coolest thing you've seen? Yeah, I guess so far the move to AngularJS as a nerd really, really makes a difference. I mean, we've done a lot of work in the web front, and because of user experience, user experience is so important to us. And so I can tell you all the web dev guys that are working with us are very excited about it. Let me jump in here. So you've talked about Angular all the time. We've got this CrowdChat application, and John's really excited about AngularJS. You've mentioned it, Fred Lutty. Back it up. Why is AngularJS so cool? What is it? Why is it so important? Yeah, well, this is gonna, you're gonna stretch the limit of my nerddom here. Well, John can jump in. Look, at the end of the day, there's a couple of things, right? So if you look at Jelly, which has sort of been the sort of driving force behind CMS, it is an older technology, and we're not seeing people come out of university who've got a lot of jelly. Jelly XML. So as a manager, I go, well, I can pick up AngularJS web dev guys right off the street. There's a little bit of debate raging between Angular and some other one, but to be honest, there's always been those over the last 20 years that I've been involved in technology, but it also is about, it does get a little bit into the design pattern that you can apply, and so the ability to, I guess make a better sort of user interface design that sits on top of service now and it's CMS is one of the things. The bootstrap thing was, I'll see. Sorry, bootstrap would have been, yeah, we see it, bootstrap for us, we've done a lot of work with bootstrap over the last two or three years, so I was very pleased to hear that the bootstrap was coming in as well. Responsive design, literally had arguments about this for a year inside RMIT before the people were linted and we put our responsive design into the web and it's gotten great. Yeah, we're Angular, Dave. I was showing, when Pat Casey came off the keynote, I showed him our product, I was showing some of the service now, our new product we're going to release called Crowdpages, and it's all written in Angular, and it's so real-time, it's so great, it's so easy, and he's like, he goes, that's good software, I go, you did this? Yeah, our team, we have a great engineering team, all DevOps guys, this is the new culture, the younger generation, this is what they want, they don't want to deal with caching and polling in a real-time environment, and certainly with notifications and things going on in service now's world, this is a beautiful step in that direction. To me, I think Angular speaks to Fred's and team's vision of, hey, this is the right environment that people want because the user experience has to be real-time. And we talk about responsive design, you talk about the website that's going to work well on any side screen, versus a native app, or is it? More so, versus just one of the things that if you go back sort of five years ago. Versus a crappy website. Versus a website that you end up with too, so you end up with the desktop version and you end up with the mobile version, and then you end up managing content between the two. Which is so common today. And that's kind of the design pattern that was before responsive design came along, before things like Bootstrap came on, that's what people did. They built one for the web, for desktop, and they built one for mobile, and then you had to manage the... So when should you develop a mobile app? Because there are use cases for that. You mean native mobile. Yeah, native mobile. Yeah, look, I mean, I don't have particularly strong views on this, other than, I mean, I think the industry's kind of spoken on this. If you need a lot of the device functionality and some of the things we saw yesterday in the keynote around the sort of coming version of the ServiceNow app, being able to use the device, being able to use a lot of the location information, and again, it comes back to me to driving that user experience. Camera. You know, native. Exactly, and location services and things like that allow the device to start to do some of the stuff as well? Yeah, we have some data on this. One of the things we're arping on this is pretty clear. If you need the device, you go native. If you don't, go with WebResponsor because you have more feedback to get, you can be more agile, but here's the problem that companies have. So Waze, Uber, obvious example. No, but here's the problem, and here's the problem. Let's be able to VCs all the time in Silicon Valley, which is, if you misfire on the mobile app, on the native, you're done. No one's downloading updates really much. So if you don't land and succeed, you're, yeah. Because you can't iterate fast. So agile, the cloud is one of the benefits, and that's why we've done that. Now when you get back and you bake out your use case, we have a bona fide product market fit, then you go native. So it's device, yes, no brainer, and then market fit. So this just takes the risk out of the user because no one's, oh yeah, I downloaded that, but it didn't work. And then word gets, so which app did you, no one does which apps, not responsive. So we're seeing that heavily. Well, in your world, where's mobile fit? I mean, it's got to be pretty prominent, right? Yeah, I mean, I think for most of the things that students want from the university, revolve around some pretty basic functionality and a lot of information. And so that's really easily delivered via responsive web. And that was a decision that we took. There are, if there are specific use cases where we specifically, as you say, need the device and decide that a mobile app is the right solution, then they'll build mobile apps. I guess if you find yourself making too many trade-offs, then that's maybe the time that, as John said, so you got to have an Android version, you need an iOS version, and you go native, native. You got to build two sets of build bases, the development cycle. It's a big investment, and you really need to need it in order to make that investment. Right. All right, well, we appreciate you coming on theCUBE. Brian, awesome conversation, geeking out. Share with the folks out there, last question, give you the final word. What's the vibe of the show? What's your take as someone who's out in the field, a practitioner, customer of service now, but you look at everything else out there, evaluate software, your geek nerd, nerd, I should say. What's your, what's the vibe? People aren't in the moment here. What's the vibe? I've been to a few of these in my career, and I've got to say there's a lot of, there's definitely a lot of high energy. The really interesting mix, I think of people, there are definitely a very large number of nerds. I use that term as a term of endearment. One of my colleagues and I were discussing as we were walking through the corridors, what the collective bound for a group of nerds might be and sort of played around with a few network of nerds now, and we settled on a cloud of nerds. So I'd say it's very cloudy, but that's because there's just a lot of smart people doing a lot of really interesting things. And what's the phone of choice for nerds? Android or iPhone? Well, so, see, for my generation. And beer, I mean, that's a beer question too. I think genuinely, and this really pains me to say, the phone choice of nerds is an Android, I think just because it lets them nerd out as much as they want. So they get to do a deep, deep talk. My personal phone of choice is definitely Apple. So I think that the pseudo nerd used to be a nerd now in management, that's definitely an iPhone. Brian, one last question, I want to get one more in. We've got a couple seconds left. Advice to other colleagues out there around the world that we're looking at this interview and want to glean some insight around your experiences that you've learned in being on the cutting edge, certainly bold move, breaking out on your own, helping other universities. That's the prototype of this new developer model. I don't got to get venture funding, I just got to land and expand and create some solutions. So I won't say lifestyle businesses, that's passe, but literally be in business. Maybe even hit a lucky strike and get that Uber effect, but what's your advice to folks watching out there who really are like in the queue, I want to go out and do something with this? Look, one of the things I think the changing model of software has allowed is the ability to build really strong functional apps in quite a short period of time. And in my day when I was writing code for a living, you spent a lot of time doing the underlying stuff, right? And so whether it's ServiceNow or any number of platforms that are out there, you can build the icing on top pretty quickly and it doesn't take a huge investment. In fact, if you went to NEVC and said, I want to spend millions and millions of dollars building out this application and underlying stack, they would question your approach. And so I think the opportunity in general is to really look at some of these new generation platforms. Think about where you can, in some cases, totally rethink the way you're running IT and your organization and start from the beginning. And if you get lucky, you can maybe build a little bit of a platform-like feature into the icing, meaning you can come into the market as a tool. Yeah, absolutely. And win and then expand. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think there's a huge amount of opportunity. From a commercial perspective, I'm really excited about where ServiceNow is going with this application platform and the developer program and things like that because I see it as a perfect opportunity to build some of these functional applications and monetize them. Building and creating, creating value, time to beer is what we say in the developer community, time to value for the customers. What's your favorite beer? That's a very interesting question. There's a lot of really good micro brews that started up in the last sort of five or six years in Australia. I'd say at the moment, I do have to come back to an old-time home favorite, Anchorstein from San Fran, so we finally got it imported into Australia in the last six months and I'm a happy man. Brian Clark here inside the Cube. Sharon, Sharon, what's going on here at the event and going technical, going deep, going into the hood. This is the Cube. We'll be right back after this short break.