 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise. This is day three of ServiceNow Knowledge K18. The hashtag is no18. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Jeff Frick. Chris Anderson is here. She's the managing director of Deloitte, running the telecommunications media and technology practice. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. Thank you so much, glad to be here. So Deloitte, awesome company. We had some of your colleagues on earlier. You guys have deep industry expertise, global scale, leading digital transformations. First of all, what's your role and let's get into it. Sure, so I work in, as you mentioned, our TMT practice, full of acronyms, mostly focused in the telecom space. And I've been in the telecom space for about 20 years and really driving large scale transformation of the operations. How do we make the business more effective? How do we improve the overall customer experience? And how do we make sure that as new technology comes online in telcos that that's seamless to customers and they don't feel the disruption, if you will, right of the large leaps that telcos are making? Well, so help us understand the basics of telco. You've got cost per bit coming down. You got data growing like crazy. You have over the top providers which is bow guarding the network. Telco infrastructure is fossilized. Wow, what a, you must have a lot to do. Yes, that we all want to watch the basketball game as we walk from the floor to our car to the house, right? 24-7, right. So major, major challenges, which is a great opportunity for you and Deloitte, but give us your perspective on the state of the state and the industry. Sure, so I think it's funny you say the basics of telco because I think that's the hard part about telco is it's not really basic. Like everyone expects that communications are- It's just dial tone. Are there real time, right? And there's always going to be, I'll call it tone, right? But I think now it's at a whole new level. But I think the challenge now for telco is mobility, right? And meeting the pace of mobility, right? The massive proliferation of devices, right? And sensors that are all connected. And so I think that now, I think the basics of telco, the game has changed, right? Telco used to be its own vertical, right? And now it's really its own horizontal, right? Enabling smart health, smart cities, right? Many other industries. And I think that's the challenge for telco and it's become the new basic, if you will. It's not just a network for dial tone, right? It's about a true enabler for industry, right? And communications in real time, right? Across the board. So telco, that's really interesting how you positioned that. So telco has a dual agenda. The horizontal technology platform and maintaining the vertical, not getting disrupted. So can telco pull off that dual agenda? But I think it has to, right? Because to the point on vertical, it used to be that they were the straight line, right? They provided the service and they were directly linked to the end customer, right? And now there are lots of other content aggregators and providers in that space. And so it's getting harder and harder for telcos to really maintain connectivity to their end customer, right? So they've also got to be an important part of the value chain, right? And other businesses. So I think they have to do both in parallel to stay relevant. But I think that's what makes kind of part of our work with service now and how it comes in is the focus on customer service management, right? And really the part about the network, right? Is a critical underpinning for telco. But if you ask telco network people, they say that is the experience, right? That's how I get the experience, right? Is the speed of the network, right? I don't have, I can't have any latency. It's always available, right? For it to enable these mission critical things. Amazing. And then you have these little things coming up like 5G and industrial internet of things. And you know, we did a nice piece with a company that had a remote operation of autonomous vehicles. So you know, they're driving the car from the office while we're in the car. Business case being take care of edge cases on autonomous vehicles. So latency becomes a really important things with car brakes and these things. So the opportunity and the challenges are only going to grow with this kind of next big leap that we're going to see built up around the 5G capability. Yeah, I think the move to 5G will be transformational for the industry, right? And really, because now you expect your communications to work, but you just get frustrated. Like if your phone doesn't work or your internet's not working, you get frustrated, right? If your autonomous, you know, self-driving vehicle's not working, right? Or you've got a mission critical device, right? Helping your heartbeat, right? Those are different things, right? And kind of mission criticality that I think 5G introduces the potential for, right? It will really change the game, right? But it also makes it critical that you understand that full path, right? Of the network connectivity and the services to the customer, right? Because if you're not in control, right? Of that full path of delivery, there's no way to guarantee, right? The mission criticality that 5G can deliver on. So Chris, how does your work, what's your focus with the telcos? How does it intersect with what you're doing with ServiceNow and how does it ultimately benefit consumers? Sure. So my focus really in the telco space has been in what telcos call BSS, right? Which our business support systems are really the front office. So from helping customers from the time of quoting, right, or ordering services all the way through to fulfillment and delivery of them, right? And I think that's the intersection really that is important to us with ServiceNow, right? Our work with ServiceNow to date, like many organizations has been in the kind of IT service management space, HR, more on the enterprise, right? But not truly the heart of the business, right? And where we're really focused is, you know, working with ServiceNow to bring them into the heart of the business of telcos, right? And really change the game, right? I think one of the benefits is what I do, which is large scale transformation, most of these take years, right? Two to three years before customers see any benefit of transition from one set of platforms to another, right? And we've already been able to do some work with ServiceNow and our partnership that gets you to benefit in months, right? With a lot less risk. So it's really kind of taking the long term experience that I've had with the traditional industry players, right? And creating agility, right? And transformation from taking that from years to months, right, reducing the risk profile, right? And really creating an amazing experience across the value chain. Great benefits, Dave. Less risk and faster. Well, yeah. Well, so I want to bring that back to sort of what we were talking about earlier. I mentioned the over top, the top providers. When I think about my experience with interacting with Netflix, for example, I don't talk to their sales department or their customer service department or their maintenance, I just interact with Netflix. Is that the vision for where you're trying to take telcos? I think it's part of it, right? Because to your point, if the service that I'm getting works like it should, I don't want to talk to anybody, right? Like I think that historically we think of customer service and customer service management is I call somebody and how do they help me, right? And I think the next generation, right? Of good services, how do I make sure they don't need to call me? No calls. No calls, right? How does this work and how do I stay on top of it and I understand anything that might be degrading the experience, right? And I get my arms around that. And so I think the new generation of customer service management is understanding, right? Those things and having a kind of a full and immediate view and being able to take action quickly. And I think the kind of customer service management solution is important. We've been building out what we're calling an end-to-end service assurance solution, right? With the ServiceNow team and that really lets us look at, from the time that an issue is detected, which could be customer degrading all the way through to resolution, right? To be able to own that path, right? To closure, right? And really have real-time visibility and the ability to act and the ability to see those metrics and really manage your business real-time. We hear that all the time, going from kind of a historical look at the date and reacting to being a little bit more predictive but then ultimately being more prescriptive. So you see the development of the problem before the problem becomes a big problem. And I think that is the future customer service and it's going to be critical, right? As we pivot to 5G and we've got mission critical services running on that network, that we really get this right. How about the event here? What are your takeaways? You're hearing a lot about what I call machine intelligence, AI, DevOps, I mean all kinds of cool tech going around. What's resonating with you, Chris? So probably say the opposite of what everyone's saying. So I hear that, but we spent a little bit of time with a client yesterday, right? And we were talking about machine learning and artificial intelligence and they say, okay, that's great. So I can, how do I take the emails that come from somebody written in a third language trying to write them in English and what's the challenge of how do I get artificial intelligence to figure out what that issue is and go act on it, right? And so I think these technologies are exciting but I think we also have to pay a lot of attention to the basics and not think that there's a shortcut to providing the service and the mission criticality. So to me, I still think in terms of really enabling the front office that their early days, I think it's certainly worth the investment but I think part of it is just looking critically at the business and remember that the service and the service levels are really driving and we keep pushing the technology to catch up but I would not, I haven't seen a lot of telcos in the front office where experience is concerned early adopters because that's the last risk that you want to take. Right, but that's a great example though because that's a very specific use case where you would like to see more intelligence applied. And I think that's really the key is where can we get the value as opposed to a generic dead smart person named thing that kind of exists, right? Here's a specific problem. Can we use AI and machine learning to help us solve that specific problem? Because what we, I think what we know is if I have a sensor on a device and it picks up an issue, I can start acting on that immediately. The ones that are much harder to act on are the ones that people will report and then have to be translated to figure out what the action that needs to be taken but guess what, there's still the same SLA attached to it. Right. So how do I really advance artificial intelligence to really be able to move that forward in a much faster and reliable way to the point where businesses will take a bet on it. All right, we'll give you the last word, Chris. What should we know about Deloitte, kind of a bumper sticker on your service now, practice and telco, what's your takeaways? So I think the magic of the partnership and where we're really trying to take it is the fusion of our truly deep industry experience and folks that have been in and around for 20 years and using the service now solution in new ways. And really again, bringing it to the core of the value chain and frankly disrupting a lot of the industry solutions that have been out there that have gotten quite set in their ways. I think we see so many of our clients that don't have good answers, right? And they're paralyzed, right? Trying to look at all the solutions that are there and not finding anything they like and I think that's the magic that we're trying to bring to the partnership and really disrupt the game. Awesome. Well, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to see you. Appreciate it, guys. Thank you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Listen, you want to go to a couple of resources I want to give you for some great free content. Go to thecube.net, you'll see all the videos here. Go to youtube.com slash SiliconANGLE, subscribe to that channel, you'll get notified of all the action. We're at all the shows of SiliconANGLE.com for all the news, wikibon.com is a research site, so check those out. Keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. Awesome.