 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. So each year we have a tradition on theCUBE at Knowledge, Knowledge, whatever, 16 this year, but other knowledges, where the penultimate segment, we bring in the winners of the hackathon contest. And so what happens is, collaborators get together, they come up with an idea, they work on that idea, and they have about a 2.9% chance of winning. So we're very excited to have Sean Karen here as the principal solution architect at Linium and Mike Brannon, who's a senior program manager at National Gipson, a customer of Linium. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE and congratulations on your victory. Thank you very much. Thank you. So it's the app is happiness as a service, right? That's correct. So how did that come about? Tell us a story. So the United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS, is a customer of ours. And they're really, really great people. And one of the things that you notice when you go to their building is they have a lot of information posted all around signs and even memorial walls about their donors and their recipients. And you get the sense really quickly that kids who are in need of an organ transplant, they're sick kids. They're really kind of in dire straits. So we thought it'd be kind of neat to build an innovative app that would allow them to do almost a make-a-wish type of a scenario. Come in and say, hey, I'd like to swim with the dolphins or go to a baseball game or go to Disneyland and then match them up with donors who are willing to fund that and build a process whereby we could enable their smiles. So I put a smile on a sick kid. So that was the basic theory behind the app. That's awesome. How did you get involved in the team? Take us through that. We're working with Linium now on our deployment. We're not live yet. We're in sprint three of release one, going live the second week of June. They reached out and said, hey, we've got this hackathon role to come in, be a project manager, help us with scrum, which was something we're doing on our project. So I threw my hat in the ring and came to participate with the guys. It's been a fun ride. And what's the, Sean, what are the rules of engagement? You can get together a little bit beforehand and brainstorm, right? Describe that process. Yeah, we basically sat together, probably four or five times before we got here, talked about what were the function points we wanted to have in the application. We created a picture of what we wanted the app to look like, it's on Mike's shirt right there. That's the outcome. That's the outcome. The outcome back, beautiful. That's it, yeah, that's it, exactly. If you go to the YouTube pages that ServiceNow has put up, you can actually see it and see me demoing it. And we put that together. We thought about how are we gonna make sure that we hit all the function points we want to? That's really where we got Mike involved, because in a program manager role, he keeps us on point to say, hey, we spent maybe too much time on this one. Maybe we would consider not including that function point. Wanted to make sure we got everything built. We had one thing we tried to do, we didn't have time to complete, right? But we knew that because we kept track of it in ServiceNow. And the rules are you can't start coding until the clock goes? The only thing you can bring in is images, right? So we had these little pictures that you see on Mike's shirt, ready to go in a file, and that's the only thing you can bring to the table. Everything else. We had in our head what the tables were gonna look like and how they would relate to each other and how the function points should use those tables, but none of that came in. We built all that on site. And how large was the team? We had six folks for eight hours. So, yeah. So we did a sprint per hour. Right. And got together, kept focused, and kept after it, started at four o'clock, had to finish by midnight. They gave us some time after they gave out the golden tickets to make a few adjustments so that we could have a little bit better performance for the demos. But it was a lot of fun. So, okay, and your role was to sort of monitor the productivity and the velocity of each of those sprints and try to... I was also loading data. Someone had to do data entry. Two in the grunt work. Well, you know, somebody's gotta do it. That's awesome. Well, and testing, right? Yeah, I mean, he had his hands in almost every piece of it. No doubt. No doubt. But that's, we found, you know, to keep a project with this many different things that we wanted to make happen on track. ServiceNow's SDLC is a great tool to do that in the real world. That's what Mike does for his day job. So it was a perfect, perfect opportunity. We also brought in some folks from Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield, the customer of ours. So they had a developer here, a guy we've been working with for years. So he wrote a lot of code for us. We had a guy from Honda who unfortunately had to back out because he couldn't come to K16, but he helped us with a lot of the initial design and put a lot of those pieces together. So what was the makeup of the coders? You know, he had to draft the team, he had a wide receiver, he had a quarterback. Right. Center, what the profile of the team looked like? So project manager, that was Mike. We had a couple of people who were writing code pretty extensively, just, you know, kind of ServiceNow app code, standard kind of things. We had one person doing integrations and one person who was responsible for the look and feel, the CMS work in ServiceNow. Of course, in the future, we'll use ServicePortal to do that in Helsinki, but, you know, for this app we stuck with what we knew, which is the older style CMS code. So what kind of integrations do you do in such a short period of time? I mean, I can see how you build the functionality in the front and look and feel, but what are you integrating too? So we had a map integrated to Bing Maps and so you could go in and say, show me a kid near me that I'm interested in supporting. The map pushpins, click a pushpin, there was an integration that brought up their picture and allowed you to click a button to connect to PayPal and make a donation as an example. Yeah, those are pretty much the key integrations that we had in place. And it looks beautiful. I mean, at least when you share it, I'm sure it looks even better on my mobile. We're very lucky to have a really talented graphic designer who works with us who helped us pick the images and she has a great eye for things that really pop on the screen. Really, color scheme, I mean, it's great. So what's next? I mean, what happens now? Well, so a couple of different things are going on. As we said, we're donating the application as it is to the folks at Unos. And actually, if you watch our demo video, we had three of the folks who were here at K16 from Unos in the demo video with us. So they'll be grabbing this application. The other thing we decided to do, we thought it'd be kind of a neat thing to do as a team, is to donate the money winnings for the first kid. So we're going to stand the thing up, find some kids, and then we're going to donate the money winnings that we had to allow those kids to start on whatever their wish is going to be. Fantastic. Then just, I just think it's such an interesting concept where they bring together this kind of dispar group of people. I mean, you kind of organize yourself ahead of time, which sometimes we've talked to hackathon learners that don't know each other from out of them. But just kind of the experience of, you know, four o'clock starts, you got drones flying over your head, your head's down, you got sprint after sprint after sprint. Just kind of the team building and what it does for you. And obviously you have not only a cool app, but a really meaningful app to kind of sit and work together on a project like this, kind of remove from your day job and email, and of course we don't do email at service now. But, you know, the other things that kind of distract you to have this kind of nice focus in on such a cool project. Yeah, I think a lot of folks who are serious about writing code have that ability to kind of turn off the world, take a function point and go get it, right? I think that's a thing that a lot of developers have. And we kind of all had that. Not that we didn't have some fun. I mean, there were some video games that kind of old-timey video games to play. There were some old-fashioned pinball machines, which I had for a little while. They kept us really well supplied with food. They even had a CAG for a while, so that was kind of neat. Pizza and all the stuff coders need to be successful. Were you peeking at the other guys? Yeah, you know, there were so many different things. If you look at just the nine golden ticket winners, the stuff people were doing were so different, you know? There was one team that had a button you could push that would automatically create an incident in service now. It's kind of cool. You know, there were people who used service portal to, you know, guide your life in terms of, am I getting enough exercise and enough nutrition? I'm just all different things that people had ideas to build. And those are just the ones with the golden tickets. You know, there were 25 other teams that were building things as well. You put that many creative people in a room that are talented and what an honor to win. I mean, guys, really, you must have been so stoked. Yeah, it sure is. We kind of, you know, I thought we had a good shot in the innovative category that we're about. I think maybe nine teams that competed in that. So, you know, we thought we had a good shot. We had a great story, right? I mean, half this is just having a great story to tell. And the folks at UNOS were so happy to have us building something for them. So that was a big help. How does that get announced? What's that experience like? They put it out for voting. And, of course, you know, you have to do a little publicity to up your vote count. Well, campaigning? Sean was our Donald Trump. But we got out there and sort of campaigned a bit and got some votes rolling in. It was a surprise announcement lunchtime today, which was kind of cool. You knew you were in the running, but you didn't know who won. And we were very surprised to be both the category and the grand prize winners. And as a rookie, this is my first knowledge. I felt really privileged to be a part of all this. And, you know, it can only go up from here. Well, Jose, hopefully it only goes up there. You can never come back again. I don't know. What are the two? That's right. Well, gentlemen, congratulations on such great work. And the cause is fantastic. And really a pleasure having you on theCUBE. Thank you. Well, thank you very much. It's a great experience. Absolutely. All right. Keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back to wrap Knowledge 16 from theCUBE right after this brief word.