 We're simulcasting SAP Sapphire on SiliconANGLE 2, so check out that coverage as well. My partner, John Furrier, is down there with David Floyer and Jeff Frick. You can tweet us at D-Valente, he's at Jeff Frick. Mark Toludo is here, he's the CEO of fruition partners, a company that is a systems integrator and service provider that has essentially super glued itself to the ServiceNow platform at precisely the right time. Mark, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So, you got to be excited, we're a big sponsor of this event. A lot of customers here, I'm told about 30% of the end customers are actually not currently ServiceNow users, so big opportunity there. So, how's it going? Yeah, it's going great, fantastic. I think this is our fifth year, fifth year at ServiceNow, just tremendous, it's tremendous to see the growth, right, that we're seeing here. I think we are now the size as a company of the entire user conference in 2009. You know, we were walking around last night and we were struck by the number of partners in the exhibit hall. You can always judge a company by the strength of its ecosystem, it seems to be growing. So, talk a little bit about fruition, what you guys do, what your specialty is, and we'll get into it. Sure, so we actually are a, our primary focus is ServiceNow, so we're a system integrator with ServiceNow. We actually started as a process consulting company that when we saw ServiceNow, we realized there's a tremendous value of being able to deploy ServiceNow solutions really faster than anything else in the market at the time, and this is back in 2008. So we not only focus on the system integration side, but also the process definition. And I think, you know, a third element, which what you mentioned is all the other vendors that are here, we actually create a lot of the connectors between ServiceNow and these other vendors. So we're starting to create kind of a broader mesh of solutions, integrating those other third parties with ServiceNow. So when you think about, you know, process, right, you think about the big consulting firms, the deep industry expertise, IBM, Deloitte, PWC, Accenture, and so what point did you say I, you know, rather than take those guys head on in their wheelhouse, we see this trend toward IT service management in the cloud and ServiceNow. How did you make that decision? Take us through that a little bit. Sure, actually, my background was with those larger firms. So I kind of knew how they operated. We kind of found ourselves, when I till years ago, a decade ago, really seeing that that's the discipline that IT really needed to manage itself, but we saw the softwares lagging so far behind in the ability to actually deliver what customers needed. So what we try to do is be very iterative. So when we do process definition, we don't think about it for a year. We actually think about it for a couple months. We have some proven solutions, but we really leverage ServiceNow to kind of help iterate that organizational change much faster than we could with any other tool. So I'm by no means an ITIL expert, but I've certainly worked with a lot of clients that are passionate about ITIL and what they say is it's a great framework, but to actually implement it, you've got to do some heavy lifting, you've got to have the right tool sets. So how does ServiceNow sort of bring that to life and what role does fruition play in making that real great name, by the way, fruition? How do you bring that all to fruition? Yeah, I actually do fruition. Yeah, sure, so there's really two approaches. We always go into a customer and say, ITIL, it can be complicated, but at the same time, you're already doing ITIL in many different ways. You just don't call it that. You might not have the rigor of the discipline, so what we're able to do is kind of define those processes lightly and kind of use what a customer is already doing to actually translate that into ServiceNow, and then we do kind of multiple releases on the same process so that customer kind of grows in the maturity of adopting the process with the technology. So let's go through an example of that, Mark. You're saying that many customers most are already doing ITIL, they just don't know it or they don't call it that. Let's go through a simple example. So a lot of people would say they, change management is a good example where people know that it's good to talk to other people about the changes they're about to make, but the level of formality and rigor within change management, it varies widely. So you may have some customers that, maybe within five or 10 people, they might understand what they're about to change and they just kind of talk to each other randomly as that gets larger and more complicated. They need more formal approvals. When that gets even larger and more complicated, they need to know what systems they're about to change, what business cycles, a month-end close for payroll. They need to understand much more than just the technology side. They need to understand the business side, but customers can't iterate through that maturity and they're not always ready to go and think about it for a year until they get to that other layer because they're doing this week by week. So that's kind of an example of how we mature, eventually mature the process, then that process gets integrated with another process. So that was change integrated with asset and eventually we integrate it with incident. So we kind of take what they have today, we refine it and then we use ServiceNow to automate it and provide some visibility and metrics to it and then integrate it with other process. So I imagine our customers, oh, okay, Mark, I hear you, but I'm kind of skeptical. We're a really complicated organization. Like, maybe if we're just talking about our IT infrastructure at headquarters, I can believe you, but we've got a big complex application portfolio and it connects to these business processes and we want to go global with this. How are you going to help me scale to that level and actually succeed so that I don't fall flat on my face two years down the road? I think a lot of customers, they've actually been trying to solve these problems over the years. So you'll find just a good example on one customer, global, I should say, North America. They're managing 60,000 desktops and they were doing it on a hundred different spreadsheets. So the data existed, they already knew the pain point they were having. They just didn't have a way to consolidate the information. They weren't even using tabs in the spreadsheets. No, no, just the spreadsheets, that's it, yeah. Okay, so take me through that. So how do we mature an organization like that? So we're actually going to go in and basically find what data they're actually capturing. We're going to find all the one-off tools and the tools are abundant. IT people are great at just making up their own solutions, right? Access data by SharePoint site notes, spreadsheet, whatever it is. A fool with a tool, as they say. Yeah, exactly, so we keep finding all of these. But in the end, they're all trying to solve the same problem. So what we're able to do is come in, kind of do that discovery and see how big this problem is. But in the end, we then consolidate it into one framework, really consolidating it back into ServiceNow. So some of the challenges really just letting people, they'll let go of that spreadsheet, right? Or that access database that they had built over time when they finally let go of it. We can finally consolidate the data, then they see why it's much more relevant to have it in a single place than in 60 separate spreadsheets. So in that area, I think you're right, you get this collection of tools and I've always felt like the value that the software delivers is a function of its usage and also the productivity of the individual as they're using it. So you can sometimes get a tool that's not very good and people have to use it and it's hard to use. But so talk about the usage profile and how it permeates through the organization. And that's one thing we've seen as with ServiceNow because the user interface is so simple and lightweight and is built on essentially web technologies. And people are, you never got trained on the internet, right? I mean it's intuitive from how you look at it and therefore the adoption is much simpler. It's the right clicking, the views, the reports. Because it's easier to use, they then want to use it more rather than the resistance of using a tool that they don't quite understand, they don't know how to navigate so then they create 60 spreadsheets. But if it's easy to use and they enjoy using it, the adoption really grows much faster. So kind of we go back 10 years or so, there was a big discussion and big meme in the industry around business value. CIOs were sort of struggling to sort of describe and quantify the value that IT brought to the business, budgets were getting cut. And so in many ways I think you're in the value business. Can you talk about IT value, how it flows to the organization, how you're helping customers realize the value that they bring to the business? And there's a lot of reasons why people do an IT service management initiative. Some of it, and that value, it's not always the hard dollars. You can't always naturally equate, because we did this, we saved this much money. You can sometimes if you're saving on hardware, if you're saving on software, but there's other elements of efficiency within IT, the customer interface between a business buyer and IT itself, what that relationship is like. So a lot of different things drive it. It could be cost, it could be internal efficiency, it could be the relationship that the IT has with the business units. All of these are actually very valuable for the relationship that IT has with the business. But it doesn't always necessarily equate to hard or soft dollars. Yeah, so I think, I kind of look at it as I agree, and value definitely can come from hard dollars. And that's kind of the easy one. Okay, I'm going to do this, I'm going to save some money. The harder pieces to articulate and quantify are actually the much more valuable ones. That particularly, we heard Frank talk about the degree to which IT is embedded within the IT-ness of the business. So if you think about things like agility, the speed to which you can deploy new applications or fixed problems, and the other is, the stuff's got to be up. If it goes down, I lose productivity. And I guess there's a risk element of that too. Talk about metrics, how are metrics evolving and what do you see when you actually have a successful implementation of service now within an organization? What happens to the metrics side? How do they get shared? What are the metrics? How do they get shared? What are the KPIs people are focusing on? I think the first thing that we see is that once we start to consolidate these different systems, they can actually see and aggregate what's happening. So 60 different spreadsheets, it's hard to create a metric or a dashboard from 60 disparate spreadsheets, right? So once it's finally within one system, they can actually see what sometimes the metrics are, what do we actually own? We've surprised CIOs by saying you have 12,000 employees, but you have 16,000 desktops. And they just never knew before. So that's one element. The other element, so operational efficiency, once in tracking changes, for example, now that there's this transparency, we call it the fog of IT. When everyone's kind of working in their own silos and their own workflow, without any real SLAs, you don't really know what's working well or not. But now when you're in a platform like ServiceNow and everyone's entering the work that they're doing, well now we can see, well how long did it take me to do that? How much lead time did a particular department give me to make that change? How many changes actually caused system outages? They didn't have that information before. Maybe they had it in 10 different systems. We've been at clients that actually hired people full time just to consolidate data from eight different systems to try to make something of it. But now that it's actually in one system, we can see, like I mentioned, SLA for service level, improvements, performance. We can see how many people are working on particular issues, how many changes, how many assets, how they all relate to each other. So I think the massive benefit really is being in one system and being able to see in aggregate what is everyone's doing. So I feel like we're still in the early days of realizing the potential for this type of platform because to me this is basic blocking and tackling that you're talking about. So let's say we get that down. What gets more exciting to me is okay now, as a business person, how can I leverage this information to make decisions about where I should prioritize my investments? I want to look at my investments as a portfolio. I got limited resources and I can look at these metrics and say, okay, if I invest over here, I can drive some other metric and it's going to add business value. Are you starting to have those conversations with customers and talk about that a little bit? The evolution of even with ServiceNow, kind of beyond the help desk, is you start to talk about the services that IT is actually providing the business. Although services are actually a combination of, there's of course the hardware layer, right? What's my total cost of assets? There's a software layer and the licensing that goes on top of it, but let's not forget the operational layer that surrounds it. So how many people did it take to implement that change? How many people does it take to support that? How many end users are there that are actually working on this? So with a platform like ServiceNow, you can actually see the total cost because it's actually all wrapped around the service. Okay, so you see the total cost. What about the value piece? I want to keep coming back to that discussion because I really do think you're in the value business. And being able to realize that value is a function of getting the cost right, making sure that that's efficient, but actually placing my bets in a way that's going to drive the objectives of my organization. Now that's not necessarily, it's not really the main focus of IT, but it is the main focus of business. And you're talking about forging a partnership with the business. So how are those conversations, how do you see those evolving over time? Sure, well now we can actually go to the business owner. So once we've defined those services and we've defined the hardware, the software, the operational costs, and this is something IT never had. So what we're now able to do is go to the business service owners because that service isn't something that IT just thought up. It was actually for a business unit for a particular business owner. So we see those conversations where we finally go to the business service owner and they'd never seen any data from IT before about this because they really didn't know the cost. Oh, that's what you do. Yeah, but how about that, how many assets? I didn't know that cost. Well, this project that I'm suggesting is going to cost this much more. So finally, there is a conversation around metrics to be able to say, well, this is the cost, this is the operational efficiency, this is your impact on our IT department. Those conversations never happened before. It was kind of a gut reaction and they kind of felt like something was working or not working, but now we're actually going with those operational metrics. Well too, it must arm the IT organization to basically say, okay, look, yeah, there's the CapEx, but then there's this ongoing cost that we're going to eat over the next five to seven years. What's the value of that, that that's bringing to the business versus maybe putting that resource elsewhere? A lot of times IT just ends up owning that. And that's part of the reason why we're in this, I always talk about the 70, 30. 70% is keeping the lights on, 30% is new innovation. And that's why, and that's why you get all this sort of complaints about IT, just sucking all the resources out. So how has that dynamic changed in successful implementations of service now? Are you seeing that 70, 30 flip? Are you seeing sort of a different mindset within the organizations? You know what I've seen is that as organizations mature, as we go through those layers, as I was mentioning, once they can see the data, now they're actually working on the right problems. I think before they were just working on maybe the biggest outage, maybe a department or division that seemed to complain a lot. Squeaky wheel. Exactly, so it was management by squeaky wheel and a little gut reaction. And now that they see the metrics, they can see where the issue actually is. So now they're targeting their effort. Well it's interesting, it's still, for some customers we've been with, we've been with some customers for nine, 10 years, it still feels like a state of chaos, but they're fixing the right problems. Whereas before they were kind of fixing squeaky wheels without realizing the engine was completely broke. So they're using those metrics to really target their efforts versus just kind of manage complaints. Now do you guys actually develop apps on top of service now? Can you talk about that a little bit? Sure, extensively. So we have an entire platform as a service group that actually a lot of customers are understanding that service now as a platform. If it already has the database, it already has the workflow engine, it has the reporting engine, it has security. But more importantly, it has all the data about your business. I have all my business services, potentially I know all my buildings, I know all my users, I know all my organizational structure. So when that data is there and the tool sets there, and IT is very familiar with how to use this platform, as the business says, hey, I'd like to have another HR case management tool. I'd like you to maybe we'll get a different field services tool. IT says, wait a second, let's not get another tool. We already have all this data, and we can already manage it with a team we already have. The beauty of service now being on one platform is to add another application, your system administrators don't have to learn anything new because it's the same rules, it's the same scripting, it's the same platform. So we've built HR case management tools. We've built actually this morning, Coca-Cola went through their third party access vendor management. We built that globally for them. We built logistics applications for armored truck management. It's kind of all over the board. It's the creativity within IT, finally being unleashed with an actual platform that they're familiar with, and not just a series of spreadsheets. So I'll give you the last word we got to go, but just on fruition, what's your vision for the company? Where do you want to take it? Sure, so really our vision is around cloud service management. I think we've seen with IT service management helping an IT department mature to a steadier state, but the disciplines around ITIL, how we manage workflow, planned workflow, unplanned workflow on assets, the disciplines of service management are broadly applicable to an HR department, to a call center. There are a lot of other areas within the business that actually need that process discipline. So we're actually taking cloud service management, the disciplines we learned within IT on ServiceNow, taking them to the rest of the business units and actually automating within the ServiceNow platform. Well, I think you guys got a lot of runway ahead of you, Mark Toludo, CEO of fruition partners, and congratulations on your success to date and good choice hitching your wagon to ServiceNow and good luck in the future. Thank you very much. All right, keep it right there, buddy. This is theCUBE, this is Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with our next guest. We're live at Knowledge here in Las Vegas, the ServiceNow user conference. We'll be right back after this word.