 Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante, I'm with Wikibon.org, and this is Silicon Angles theCUBE. theCUBE is this live mobile studio. We drop into events. We extract the signal from the noise, and we try to bring you the flavor of the event. We're here at Knowledge, which is ServiceNow's big customer event. There's about 4,000 attendees here. The majority of the content at Knowledge is delivered by customers. We've got a ton of customers coming on theCUBE this week. We're going to hear their stories, extract them, share it with you, our audience. You can tweet us, I'm at Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Jeff Frick. Jeff is at Jeff Frick, and you can tweet us, tweet us your questions, your comments. Love to hear from you, and thanks for watching. Matt Schrimmer is here. He's the Vice President of Product Management at ServiceNow. ServiceNow has obviously focused on the incident management, the problem management, change management, but they do much more. They've essentially got a platform on which to develop applications. We're going to talk to Matt about that. Matt, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. It's great to be here. Yeah, so tell us about the news. Why don't we start there? So the news today is we announced a new capability we call the App Creator. And as you mentioned at the beginning, that a lot of our customers have historically taken our platform, and one of the real special things about our platform is that customers start with this IT service management journey of incident problem, change, release, all these different applications. But what's unique to us is that customers take this in all kinds of directions that complete out their own individual journeys. So they build on our platform lots of unique applications. And what we've done now is made it a lot simpler and prescriptive for them to build their applications through this new tool we call the App Creator. So how hard or difficult is it to create new apps on your platform? And maybe you can give us a reference point. I'm going to say I'm an Excel user. I'm a moderate to power level Excel user. Am I going to be able to build apps? Do I have to go to classes to learn? Do I have to learn a programming language? Yeah, you need to know the language of business. That's what you need to learn. You need to speak wallet and you can write apps. No, yeah, I didn't mean in terms of that, but that's a good way to look at it too. No, if you know Excel, if you know how to create tables, you know how to create, you create a list in Excel, you've created a table essentially. That's the depth of skills you need to know. I mean, I'm not a developer. It's been years since I touched, it was cobalt back when I was touching keyboards. I know how to build on this and it's no, it's really, we call it point click publish. Because it's the point click, name your tables, name your access controls, layout your form, publish it, it's ready to go. So what are your thoughts on sort of how to extend? What are you guys doing to extend that base? I think of, Jeff, I think of Node.js, right? Development language. It dramatically simplifies development and opens the world to a whole new set of developers, but you still have to be a developer. Matt, just listening to what you just described, I still got to be somewhat of a power user, but I'm a business person. I want to get in, how do I get in and actually access some of these tools? I just dive right in and sort of is it self, is it auto-didactic self-learning or can I take training? How does that all work? So, you know, as I mentioned, you don't have to be a developer to use this tool. So a lot of what, if you think about the organization, there are all these different parts of the group that are doing these kind of request-fulfill, forms-based workflow-type activities. And those are, you know, when I think of a non-developer, I think of those types of things. Think of, like, if you remember just a few years ago, you'd go into the office, there'd be all these forms to fill out, all these paper-based tools. Those are workflow things that are easily designed through our tool without developer skills. Now, you mentioned, if you do have developer skills, a lot of our customers do much more advanced things. And so we do allow you to use JavaScripting to extend and really make it a much more, you know, kind of, much more furthest, much more advanced applications that you want to design. And, you know, the other point I would say, I think you mentioned, you know, accessibility and how do I, you know, kind of publish out this application? You know, whenever you build on our product, it's always immediately available on every device. So it's immediately available on every mobile device, any phone, any tablet, any web UI browser. It's one platform. It's a built-in internally. It's like, for an organization, it's a built-in app store, right? And then you just control it by access control rights of saying, you know, this is what Dave should be getting. This is his access controls, make it available to him. That's an amazing little side benefit because every IT organization I know of is using the, you know, the app store paradigm and saying, we need one, but then how do they get one? So you're saying, inherently, if you're on service now, you publish an app, it's available to everybody. So the app store for us is what we call the service catalog. The service catalog, you can think of it as like the front door in IT. It's the way IT organizations publish all the goods and services that are available to them. So a lot of times, you'll use the app creator, you'll build an application, and then the way you publish that application is, you make it available through the app creator for people to access and interact with. So talk about a couple of depth. One is, I'm curious, the most simple app that you've ever heard of, who is the guy that's never, never done any kind of app development. What did he build in this thing to be more productive and help the company? And then on the other extreme, what are some of your more favorite and more really productive and insightful breakthrough apps that you've seen created? Yeah, so you know, the most popular application we build today is incident management. Incident management probably is, about 90% of our customers use incident today. There's very little workflow designed in that, right? It's a way to write down and describe a problem to someone or make a specific request. There are tons of those examples where those are simple request documents, request forms that customers have built where it could be just, I need legal, I need to open a new ticket with HR and be able to request access to a specific system or onboard a new employee. It could be a simple form like that. Now I've seen much more advanced things where we've had customers that have built whole hotel reservation systems on top of our platform. So it really spans the gamut of depth. So you can go fairly deep or for these non-developers, you can build that request system in hours. We actually, one of the things I loved, we had our annual sales training in January. And one of the things we did is to show the power of the app creator. We had a competition with our sales engineers around the world. We gave them 10 minutes to build a front desk reception application. So they had to build it in 10 minutes and we gave them a common set of things it had to do and then said go create it from there. And we have those all on YouTube. We have YouTube videos of each of them being created. And now we're rolling that out at all of our front desks at all of our service now locations. So let's talk a little bit more about app creator because your customers have always been creating apps. So specifically what's different now? You're obviously simplifying it, but how so, give us some details there. Yeah, so before it really, you had to be a fairly well-trained administrator because there wasn't one place to go to create an application. You had to know this is where I define a form. This is where I create my tables. This is the way I define my rules. Here's where I have my access controls. And then where do I put it all together and publish it? Now it's a step-by-step process. It's one location, it says create application and it takes you through very explicitly what steps I need to do to get an app published. Now how about I was struck last night just walking around the reception and the exhibitor area and how many partners you have. You have this burgeoning ecosystem. So how does the ecosystem take advantage of app creators? They're an API and how does that all work? Yeah, it's an amazing growth when you look from year to year at the number of partners that are here and it really shows the power of the platform and the opportunity that people see in this ERP for IT kind of transformation people are going through. So we have a couple things. So the first thing we've done and this is not totally tied to the app creator is for our partners, well we've begun doing a certifying integrations into our platform. And this is a way to standardize and make sure that integrations that are built match a common set of performance application security requirements so that when customers take them in, they understand that these things have been vetted and approved integration points from their app store platform. Also what you have now is we have a number of partners that have begun building their own applications on top of the platform. We don't have a public facing app store if you will but what we do have is the ability for a partner to be able to build their application and then distribute it multiple times through their own instances. So that's been quite common. It sounds like maybe the app store is coming though because we were amazed at the number of people with really cool what it looked like. Obviously apps have been built on your platform for all types of... It lends itself to creativity and yet I'm not going to confirm nor deny the existence of that store. But that would be a logical extension of the mojo you got going with the first place. That would be a good mojo extension. So talk a little bit about some of the best practices that you see out there. What kind of advice would you give to people that want to tinker with the app creator or really dig into it? What are some of the more advanced folks doing and what are some of the best practices? I think the biggest piece when you think about best practices is you need to manage your development teams and make sure they're not overriding each other. So some of the things are you've defined a common set of things that are in production today. You talked about incident problem change. There's the prescriptive set of applications we deliver and what you want to make sure is as a development team you're not affecting what's in production already. So it's common development best practices because it's easy to just go wild and start building things and publishing applications. So making sure you have a quality control process in place to really manage who's publishing applications and that there's some good boundaries between what's in production, what's driving your ITSM environment versus what's maybe addressing these other parts of the organization. So can I use service now to do that? Absolutely. So how would I do that? I mean talk about that a little bit. Well, you use user privileges to really, that's the biggest thing is you use access control rights to define what tables I have access to, who has administrative control to the product, who has rights to promote this thing into production. Those are things, those are access control rights that we've built into the product to help you with that. Okay, and so app creators available today? It's immediately available. Every customer has it, it's in their instance. You don't have to pay anything else for it. It's just part of your platform. So it's part of the monthly fee or annual fee. It's part of your subscription. Yeah, okay. All right, fantastic. What's next? What's next for you? For me? Yeah. So we have, there's lots of exciting things coming. You know, we release things every six months. So we're a pretty fast agile shop and you're going to see a lot of new capabilities coming in our next release. That'll be later this fall. You're going to see things around application creation about publishing, about communities, how companies can share applications between themselves, not only best practices, but whole applications. Yeah, so customers obviously were hitting you up, say, hey, make this easier, make developing apps simpler. Now they're saying, okay, how can we share? They want to share with each other. I actually had a government, a large government customer yesterday say that they wanted to build and publish applications and share them with other commercial accounts, which blew me away. Because you think about government, you think very locked down, very security conscious. They see the value of sharing their applications and their best practice with the community. But it's really, it's an extension of the whole open source that we see in terms of the rise of the developer and developers helping developers and people like to help each other and there's, you know, it's kind of back to that. It's not competing directly, you know. You're absolutely right. Yeah, and it's great. So what's the model like? I mean, it's not the App Store because you're not, you know, the ruling hand. You know, when somebody develops an app, it doesn't have to go through service now like Apple, maybe it's more like Android. It's a little bit more open. So did you look at similar models or other models or other models out there that you sort of patterned after? So, you know, I like the Apple model. I like the Apple model a lot. I mean, we're at a stage where we are now, we're focused on the individual customer and making them successful, right? So we focus on the organization and empowering them to build applications, empowering partners to build for that customer. It's, you know, the next stage would be to the community more of the sharing across customers in more of a holistic manner. That's kind of step two. You're a little ahead of me. Well, we try to be ahead of everybody in the queue, but not always, but all right, Matt, listen, thanks very much for coming on. Congratulations on getting the product out. There's a lot of excitement here. I can't wait to get my hands on it to see what I can actually develop because I hate forms. I'm going to hook you up. I'm going to hook you up. I've got connections. Good. All right, match member, thanks very much for coming on. Keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante, Wikibon. I'm here with my colleague, Jeff Frick. We'll be back with KPMG and Eli Lilly. We're going to dig into, we've got tons of customer experiences this week in case study. So we're going to be right back with our next guest. Keep it right there. This is theCUBE. We're at Knowledge in Las Vegas. We'll be right back after this word.