 Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante, wikibon.org. I'm here with Jeff Frick. We're here at Knowledge. ServiceNow's big customer event. We're at the Aria Hotel. A lot of enthusiasm, a lot of great stories. We're seeing a pattern emerge. IT is essentially this collection of disparate processes. We have a lot of activity going on in spreadsheets, people using email to really keep track of what's going on. Many, many systems trying to keep track of inventory assets, processes, problems, incidents, changes, et cetera, et cetera. And it's just this big web of mess. Here comes ServiceNow, a single system of record, a CMDB that allows you to essentially tailor your processes to your business as opposed to some kind of technology module or some other kind of software system. Jason Wojan is here. He's the Vice President of Operations for Cloud Sherpas, works within the ServiceNow business unit at Cloud Sherpas, who's a big sponsor of the show. Jason, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. So, you heard my little intro. You guys must be excited, big sponsor. A lot of action going on in this event. How do you feel? We feel outstanding. We're happy to be a part of the event. This is my third Knowledge conference. And of course, as the Director of Training in ServiceNow, I like to say there are more people in training at this conference than attend to the entire Knowledge 11 conference. So it's a pretty phenomenal event. So how has it progressed over the years? This is my first Knowledge, and so I don't have that history. I'd say that we've got a long legacy with ServiceNow all the way back to some of the very first Knowledge conferences that occurred. And first Knowledge conference, we probably could have had the entire conference in this table, right? And of course today with almost 4,000 attendees, it's certainly grown tremendously. We've got somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,200 people that have gone through training at this event alone. We did a big part of providing that training for on behalf of ServiceNow with other partners as well. And it's an exciting event. There's a large buzz here as I'm sure you've seen. Yeah, it really is. Yeah, so Cloud Sherpa's other than a great name. Tell us about the company. It's a great story to tell. Gartner likes to coin a term of Cloud Services Brokerage. And so first and foremost, we're a Cloud Services Brokerage. We have three strategic partnerships. We are a Salesforce partner. We are one of the largest Salesforce partners in the world, actually top five from a certification standpoint. We're the largest Google Enterprise integrator in the world. We are actually Google's partner of the year 2011 and 2012. Of course, we like to think we're pretty good at ServiceNow as well. A little background on us in the ServiceNow business unit. We were the first partner in the United States for ServiceNow. We were the first partner to achieve preferred status at ServiceNow. And the only partner to achieve that status globally today. So how's it work? So a customer wants to implement ServiceNow or Google Enterprise or Salesforce. You basically are that brokerage layer in between. So talk about how that works. Well, we help customers adopt, manage and enhance their cloud solutions. Of course, focusing on this particular context ServiceNow. And we're there from day one. We're there to help them bring the platform into their environment. We're there to help them refine their processes and practices. And of course, ultimately align that to the ServiceNow tool and help them manage that through their lifecycle. So how do you get ready for this? What do you tell customers they need to do? I tell customers commonly it's best to start where you're at with any improvement activity and ultimately in an enterprise deployment of software you're going to take that as an opportunity to improve. I say start where you're at. Take the time to understand how you do things today. You'd be surprised to see how often customers aren't all on the same page as to how they perform incident or what the key processes are underneath that or even what the key performance objectives are for that. Of course, we recommend starting where you're at. Of course, we have requirements workshops, opportunities. We have a number of ITEL practices and other types of areas where we can help elaborate those requirements and better align them to their business needs. But first and foremost, you need to understand what you want your environment to look like from a requirement standpoint. The workflows are key. So what are the big obstacles that you see people running into when they try to do implementations like this? I would say in general, taking too big of a bite. You know, there are over 22 applications as an example in ServiceNow. You don't want to start day one with 22 applications. It's not because ServiceNow wouldn't be able to handle it. ServiceNow can deploy very rapidly. No, you wouldn't be able to handle it. Customers can't handle it, right? Start simple, start where you're mature or start where you have the most profound opportunity to improve and align to better practices. Get the foundation of the platform in place, stabilize that, and then move on to your next phase and progressively adopt more and more of the application. So it's the pattern that's emerging here. We're hearing from customers, people starting with incident problem management, change management, you know, why there? Why do we see that pattern emerging? I think more across the industry, that tends to be a place where customers have focused on over time. So that tends to be where they're more mature. They tend to have a better understanding of maybe what their shortcomings are today in those spaces so they tend to be an easier place to start. What percentage of them are displacing some other legacy software versus we've heard about, I'm not counting Excel in that list or Lotus Notes? Because we hear a lot about that, but I would presume there's other software out there that they're displacing. We see a lot of software that gets displaced. There are, of course, point solutions where there's a lot of databases and homegrown applications handling change or change approvals or cab boards or those types of things. So of course, it's a good opportunity to consolidate that. And of course, you know, service now is known within the industry as being a pretty proficient solution, but there are other solutions and we are often seeing that we're offsetting those as well. You have, we have this theme of no to now. Do you have any, you know, favorite examples that you can share with us or what are some of your customers doing? We've got a lot of good examples. I would say probably most recently we just helped a very large clothing manufacturer, an American, good American company that had nine support environments globally and they had nine different ways of doing everything. And they used this as an opportunity to consolidate those and get to a single source of record, get to a single workflow globally. And in that, they also transformed and improved their processes. And that was something that they couldn't have accomplished with really any other project or really any other tool in the market. They of course chose to go down the path with service now and, you know, a short few months later they're implemented across incident problem change, service request service catalog, a very profound service catalog spanning literally hundreds of request items, employee self-service portal that's been branded to their corporate brand. So there's been a lot of excitement in their end user community because they look like their company when they're asking for support and they get a much more automated and much more efficient process. And what was the genesis of that? Was it, again, something that was breaking they had to change it? Was it, let's just take a step back and there's opportunity that we wanted to do this? Or were they using service now in some other minor role and said, wow, you know, we can actually use this tool to take advantage and do something transformational. And generally what we see as service now is really the enabler. It's the enabler to transition and transform. Now we've seen global SIs do this forever. That's their big thing. We're going to help you consolidate and get your hands around it. I think service now really gives you the ability to do that neutral of a partner or neutral of an outsourcing provider. You can get your arms around it on your own. And again, many customers are relatively mature and incident problem and change. And so it's a good opportunity for them to find those areas where they can aspire to better practice, better process and to implement that in the service now tool. How has your business evolved? I mean, it's sort of interesting. Of course, the poster child of SAS and Salesforce, you guys obviously chose well. That was 1999. Here we are in 2013. It's really taken a long time. Google Enterprise, okay, that makes sense but Google, you know, Big Whale. Now you see guys like Workday, Service Now Come Out. Why do you think it's taken such a long time for these applications to catch on and how has Cloud Sherpers progressed over that timeframe? Well, what I would say is the notion of a Cloud Services brokerage didn't exist eight to 10 years ago, right? That aggregation point didn't really exist. It was those point solutions were always provided by those point providers or they're tightly coupled partners in that space. Of course, with the emergence of this notion of a brokerage that's helping aggregate and manage and enhance those solutions, we're seeing a lot of degrees of freedom. So where we started, we started as a firm that was focused on Google that emerged in the Salesforce and now is through acquisition of a company called Navigus a few earlier or late last year. Now the service now practices well. And moreover, it's where things are going, right? The truth is that in-jewsers and corporations whether it's you on your iPhone for personal use or business use, you want those applications available. You want to have a solid user experience. Service Now was really first in this space to be able to offer that in a way that was truly platform neutral, that just worked whether it was a smartphone or an iPad or a desktop or laptop or what happened. So talk about your strategy, Cloud Sherpers and talk a little bit about how you differentiate. Well, we differentiate in a number of ways, but specific in the Service Now business unit and I don't think it could be said enough that Cloud Services Brokerage is a huge differentiating point for us, right? Having the scale that we do globally, having several key strategic partners enables us to see areas and aspects of the industry that I don't think other partners can. But from a Service Now business unit perspective, I think we have a couple differentiating points. One is we were one of the first adopters of the platform from a partner perspective. So obviously we have a lot of deep skills in this. We've done over 320 implementations of Service Now to date and of course, over 320 and through that history, we've seen a lot of heuristics. We've seen a lot of customer success stories. We've seen a lot of things in the platform that customers are asking for time and time again and we've been able to fit that need both by IT service management but also by industry as well. A great example of that is we've got a number of custom applications that we've developed. One of them is a document management, document processing application that a lot of legal firms are using. In fact, what we found is we built it for one company a few years ago, Morrison Forrester, better known as MoFo and now five or six legal firms later, they are all asking for that same application and so we're finding that there's also a real opportunity from an industry perspective to align to some of those point solutions, extend the platform and just to include those in the solution. You hear so much today about big data and it's all about this unstructured mass of information and it brings structure to unstructured data, maybe blending structure to unstructured. Some people don't even like those terms because it's all sort of blending. How does analytics play into this whole IT service management, IT automation? There's a lot of metrics, so they've got this, you know, automating this forms-based process. Is there a place for that or is there not right now because everybody's kind of doing their own thing? You know, 10 years ago, IT was all about the T in IT, right, it was all about the technology, now it's all about the guy, it's all about the information. A great example is we're seeing a lot of partner solutions emerge in the ServiceNow ecosystem that are trying to better rationalize data. There are tools like Mirror42, for example, which its whole purpose is to bolt onto ServiceNow and provide a more comprehensive analytic package. And there are many other examples of that as well. In truth, it's a services-led operation at this point. It's not a technology-led operation and the only way to really ensure that you're delivering any quality of services or support is the quality of data that you provide. And that starts with your requirements and those requirements need to bridge your performance measures and those performance measures need an easy way to be accessible, transparent, and manageable. And of course, that's a big part of what ServiceNow does. So how do you see this cloud brokerage, you know, space evolving over the next three to five years? What's going to change? You're going to hear a lot more from Cloud Sherpa's in the space in the next three to five years, that's for sure. You know, I think what we're going to find is that more and more you're going to see GSIs and other types of firms moving to this sort of model, right? I mean, we're going to take a lot of business away from them. And in that process, you know, it's going to get the right levels of attention. You know, what I really think of cloud services brokerage is, is that it's a firm that is extremely experienced in the platform and the products they sell, but more importantly, the underlying reason for selling that product in the first place, you know, services, IT services in this case. It's a company that's known for being a little bit more nimble than some of those GSIs, you know, getting the proposals out quickly and being effective and efficient and not looking to establish this enormous agreement, but a series of agreements that gets a customer to where they need to go. And I think what we're going to see is time and time again that the early adopters in the cloud services brokerage space are going to be growing at rates like our business unit, for example. Our business unit's currently growing at 150%. It's a tough job to keep up with, but tools like ServiceNow certainly help us manage that and keep us on track with our own projects or own time cards and our own tasks. Yeah, so you guys are on the rocket ship with ServiceNow. Pulling them along, are they pulling you along? A little bit of both, like biker's drafting. Yeah. So, excellent. All right, Jason, well listen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing the Cloud Sherpa story. We'll give you the last word here. What advice would you give to folks that are maybe kicking the tires? I mean, supposedly 30% of the audience here are not ServiceNow customers. They're thinking about it. What would you tell those guys? Have a good understanding of where you're at. Have a good vision of what you want to achieve and don't be afraid to go to the Cloud. It's not as hard as it sounds. It's Cloud's not scary. Just jump right in, the water's fine. All right, Jason, thanks very much for coming on. Really appreciate it. Good luck with managing that crazy growth and it was a pleasure meeting you. Thanks very much. All right, Jeff Frick and I will be back with our next guest. Keep right here, this is theCUBE. We drop into these events and we're covering wall to wall ServiceNow knowledge. We'll be right back from Las Vegas right after this.