 wikibond.org, this is theCUBE, Silicon Angles, continuous production, we're here at Knowledge, ServiceNow's big user conference, and we've been going, this is day three for us, we've got a half day today, but we've been meeting with a number of customers, CIOs, IT practitioners. Folks from KPN are here. Petra Zelstra is the CIO of KPN, and Martin Lenobla is the person in charge of ServiceNow and manages that implementation at KPN. Petra, Martin, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Thanks for having us, good morning. Yeah, so it's our pleasure, really. Appreciate you guys spending some time here. Let's start with KPN. Tell us more about KPN. You are the dominant telecommunications provider in the Netherlands, but tell us a little bit more about KPN. So KPN is actually quite important on the market of the Netherlands. We focus mainly on fixed and wireless communication, but also on IT solutions. So customers, we have over 45 million customers within the Netherlands, and within the KPN, we are serving around 26,000 employees. So, talk a little bit about what's happening in your business. I mean, here you've got tremendous disruption and lots of competition, but you still get a couple of big, giant whales in the industry. What's it like in your region? So within our region, what you see is as we are dominating the market quite heavily, is the government is focusing on to get the monopoly down. So we are struggling a lot getting other partners on the market, and we have to serve them as well. So it is a little bit of a harsh field to work into. Yeah, so there's a big hand at sort of dictating some of the requirements that you have to comply to. So what does that mean for your IT infrastructure? What kind of pressures does that put on you? So as we are dominating the infrastructure, we need to allow our competitors to use our infrastructure. So, yeah, we do that at the best service as we can, but it feels a little bit awkward. Yeah, so I remember when we went to that United States and you have to bite your tongue and do what's necessary. Okay, so let's get into the whole service now implementation. Well, first of all, have you been to more multiple knowledge conferences or is this your first one? So this is my first one for service now. Although I was two weeks ago, I was also at the CA Technology Event, both in Las Vegas as well, but I'm enjoying it a lot. Oh, you spent a lot of time in Las Vegas. I do, too, with theCUBE. So give me your impressions of the conference. What do you think? What I noticed, and I'm not sure what Martha thinks of it, but I taste a lot of fun, and I really enjoy that. Service Now is really liking what they do. They're really enthusiastic, and that gives me also a lot of energy and ideas what we could utilize in the Netherlands. I'm also really impressed with the way it was organized. Incredible, you have 4,000 people who all can drink and eat and be in a conference room at the same time, it's incredible. Yeah, the logistics were very good here. The combinations are very nice. And it's also a good mix of informal meetings, meeting people in the hallways and having good conversations and good speeches as well. And it's a good mix of CIOs and IT practitioners. And they all get along as well. It is, it's a heat for a small company like this. All right, so let's get into the service. How long have you guys been working with Service Now? What was sort of the catalyst to bring Service Now into your organization? Yeah, so three years ago, we started to work with Service Now. So we have quite some experience at these states. And a year ago, we started to work with the self-service portal as well. And I must say, we started to become innovative using that kind of services. Okay, so what was the catalyst to bring it in, and how did you justify bringing it in? So what we had in the previous time, we had several systems that meant every time we had to onboard a customer, it took several systems to work with. So what we did is we decided within the company that we didn't want to develop our own software anymore. So we were looking for the best breed of applications suppliers that could help us to bring value to our business. So one of the things what we notified with Service Now is that they are first the best breed with this application area, but also the relationship with Service Now is quite good because if you want a strategic partnership, you need to focus both on also development and new functionalities. And that's actually what we find in Service Now. So how did it occur that you were able to bring in Service Now, Petrude? Was it something that you had a vision of? Was it someone like Martin brought it to your attention? Was it the CFO driving it? How did that all come about? As I'm quite recently in the role, but I know a little bit of history, it was actually on the strategic level, the VP level where they decided that we need to go into another direction. So together with the CEO, CFOs, et cetera, the decision has been made to go into a new direction. And they finally select the Service Now for this part of business. Do you feel like your executive management are IT savvy? I mean, it's somewhat uncommon to have, we keep hearing about the cobbler's children, but here you had a situation where the senior executives were pushing for something like this. Is that unique in your view? I think because our company is focusing both on telecommunication and IT, they know sometimes much more than we do. So I think that is also part of that job. It's a bit of a blessing and a curse, actually. Precisely. They know what they're talking about, but that's also the downside. Sometimes they know even better. So there's no hiding. We have to be focused every time. They know enough to be dangerous. Precisely, and we need to make sure that we keep focused what we need to do and not interfering, them interfering us too much. So that is quite of a juggle. All right, let's talk about the self-service capability that you've built. Describe what that is. You seem very proud of it, so I want to learn more about that. Yeah, so we're quite proud on the self-service portal. What we actually started one year ago, we started to build the self-service portal in which the customer has the possibility to find answers on their issues, problem, incidents, et cetera. And what makes it so unique is that actually customers who enter the self-service portal can find their answers directly. They can do that 24 by seven. So as you know, if you're at home and you work on your iPad, you want a solution now and not tomorrow. And what is also quite unique is that the users from this community help each other. And what does that mean is if you have a question and you go to the self-service portal and you don't find an answer, you can actually write your own knowledge article, goes to the service desk, who make it qualified that it can enter into the system. So the next time another user has this question, they can find the right answer into this knowledge database. So there's a social component of it. Now where did that come from? Was that part of the service now capability? Did you guys build that? No, it is part of the service now capability. But it was specifically thought up for this, just to bring the cost down and to keep it interactive. Okay. It's always strange to have people work with you and not being able to help each other. At night, in the evening, they go home and write Wikipedia about other things. So why not bring that action to the workplace? So talk about the clients that are on this, using this self-service portal. It's mostly internal clients, but you also have external clients. Can you describe that a bit? Yeah, so we have the customers who internally are using are of course the people who have the office automation, the workspace, so they can use it for that one. And actually this year, we're going to bring also business application to the Knowledge article, so our 600 applications will be served by the self-service portal as well. So that is mainly internal focus. We have also external customers, over a thousand customers who also have the possibility to enter the self-service portal and find the answers on their questions. And by the way, we have reached this year that over 10% of the incidents are actually solved by the users themselves and 41% of customers who have a question solve that answers on the self-service portal. Versus what, calling up or sending an email? Precisely, so that is amazing. So it means the service desk can focus on the more complicated stuff. Where do you see those metrics going over time? The idea of the self-service desk is that it will go up even beyond the 50, 60%. That's what we anticipate on. So when it gets to that level, what happens to your business from a cost standpoint? How does that benefit? Can you quantify that in any way? That is a little bit hard because we are in the way to find it out, but for me as an IT responsibility, we always have to drive on cost. So I'm really looking forward to the cost is going down. So what we did is we made an agreement with the service desk. They promised us that the cost would go dramatically downsized. And let's see what we will accomplish. So maybe next year you can ask me what the end result was. So we hear a lot of customers saying, okay, we start with incident and change and problem we start building the CMDB. Is that where you started and where are you on that journey? That's where we started and that's where we're at now. We use the knowledge portal as well. But we're always exploring other options. ServiceNow is always expanding, always searching for new ways to please their customers. And our vision on this is that we already paid for all those modules, so why not use them? So we're always exploring, at the moment we're exploring the asset management module and we're exploring the vendor management module as well. So you have existing tools to do things like vendor management and asset management. How does that transition go? How do you sort of bring on the new and tear down the old and how do you manage the disruption associated with that? Well it's of course always a life cycle and cost driven. Sometimes certain things are just end of life cycle. You have to replace them. Are you going to buy something new or are you going to use something that is in SAP or in ServiceNow? So that's always a choice you have to make. Can you go ahead? So I think what is also quite important as I mentioned before, we are always looking of the best of breed solutions. What we do see is the suites into ServiceNow. We always look at them, are they indeed the best of breed for that kind of specific services? If not, we will go for another solution. If yes, we will go for the ServiceNow. And the second hand, we're trying to influence ServiceNow as much as possible so they can actually change the modules into the way our customers are looking for. So this brings up a very interesting discussion, this whole best of breed versus integrated suite. Now you mentioned you use SAP, did I hear that correctly? Yes, we do. There's a classic example, I mean SAP, the beauty of it is it's sort of big and you can do so many things with it but the problem is it's big and so many things you can do with it. It's complex, so for instance, if you want to do HR, there might be some other packages. So your philosophy, Petra, is you guys want to be best of breed? That's the primary objective and then maybe secondarily is sort of the integrated suite. Is that right? That's correct. And so what we do is for every process, we are looking into applications so no development on our side anymore. We're looking for most of the time SAR solutions who are really best of breed in that kind of fair field. So that is the idea. Now doesn't that somewhat defeat the purpose of sort of a single system of record or do you somehow integrate ServiceNow into maybe those other components? Yeah, so we have a platform of several systems and we integrate them heavily so the CA technology with ServiceNow is heavily inserted and also SAP we are looking into it how we can integrate that as well but that is quite a challenge. Yes, and ServiceNow is our core and other systems are integrated in ServiceNow via a bus. Now, given that you're looking, it sounds like you're really looking for SaaS and off the shelf commercial software, can I infer from that that you don't plan on developing a lot of your own applications? We're hearing a lot about app creator and things like that or will you take advantage of those things? So the app creation is definitely a field I'm interested in because what I want is technology infrastructure should be a commodity, everything seems working. My customers these days want services. They don't want technology. So what I'm looking for is how can I keep up with the speed of my customers and therefore I'm looking for solutions outside of the market. So we saw that presentation of threat with the application development. I'm quite interested in that part. That looks really promising. So let's go back to the self-service for a bit because it's something that you guys are, is somewhat unique in terms of what you're describing and it's quite a large scale. When you think of self-service, you think of things like Google and Facebook and Amazon. Do you feel like you're on the path to achieve that level of experience for your users? I definitely think so and it's not because I'm saying is my customer are actually saying that and that is key important to me. So we saw the satisfaction level of the customer went up and what we do also see is is the customer these days want 24 seven support. So example, you're coming home and your kid have problems with the iPad mini. I know 100% sure they go to my self-service port and it's fine. And if they don't find the answer, they can enter it into it. So for me, more open the better it is. We are here to serve each other. Yeah, and you get learning from that and then that knowledge permeates. So how about things like single sign-on? How do you handle that challenge? We already incorporated single sign-on. So that's not a problem for service now at the moment. Yeah, we started that last year because what we saw is people entering twice the system is not of their convenience. So we started to enter that last year and I must say people are quite happy with it. So tell me more about what the users are saying. I'm interested in your clients' experiences. What kind of feedback have you received? It is a good question you're asking. There are double reactions. First of all, they are not aware of it. So you need to make sure they get aware that that is a self-service portal. So what we did, we did a lot of communication and telling and broadcasting the world we have a new self-service portal. Once they get used to it, is they're quite happy with it. And what you also see is we're actually rewarding people to come to the self-service portal. So every time they go there or help someone, they deserve points. And in the Netherlands, they're quite keen on getting points. And I think based upon that, the reactions became quite positive. And they're quite upset if they can't find the answer into the system. So yeah, I think that's positive. I think users don't really care if they're using service now or something else. They just want it to work. And service now is just a means to an end. I think that's a good thing he said. It's actually not the tool. It's actually the service of delivering and service now is able to give us that possibility. You know, that's really, that's an interesting comment because you think about Salesforce. People, sales people know they're in Salesforce. It's a very sort of high degree of affinity there. Whereas service now, it's invisible. You're the service provider. And that comes with the shell we put over it as well, our self-service portal. It gives us our own look and feel. So people don't have an idea. They think they're on an internet side probably. Yeah, I love that philosophy. Service now seems to have it. They want to make you the heroes. They don't want to necessarily go. Yeah, and they do that excellent, yeah. That's good. Okay, we have time for, I have one more question for each of you. So Petra, let me start with you from a CIO perspective. What advice would you give your CIO peers in terms of thinking about bringing in capabilities such as service now, generally and specifically around self-service? So my comment is, what I do see is is technology is a given for the customers. The customer just want the service and they want the best service there is. So what I think you need to do is make sure your lights on is as it should be, but focus so much more on the self-service so people can have the perception that they get what they want and they get it now and they get it whenever and the best kind of answers they're looking for. So I think that's what you need to look for and with your own department you will not be able to do that anymore. So you need partners to help you to be quick, flexible and providing the service your customer wants. Now Martin, you're in the front lines, making it all happen, right? What advice would you give your fellow peers and practitioners? I would say invest heavily in communication as well. People process and especially the people part is very important. If you're replacing all tools with new tools people always get a bit homesick and they want the old functionality back and you have to force them to give it a chance and stay true to the out of the box, SaaS solution don't go changing too much in the beginning and really give people the time and the chance to get to know the new product. I'm going to communicate those benefits. All right, Petra and Martin, thank you very much for coming on and sharing the KPN service now story. It's really a pleasure meeting you both. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with the winner of the hackathon. Right after this, this is theCUBE. So like an angle, we'll be back right after this word.