 Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. Welcome back to ServiceNow Knowledge 18, theCUBE's live coverage. We are theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Jason Scott-Tagger. He is the head of business technology support at World Pay. He's direct from London. So welcome, Jason, to the show. Good to be here. Good to see you again. So first lay the scene for our viewers. Tell us a little bit about what World Pay is and what you do. So World Pay is the largest payments company in the world. So it's a hidden gem that not a lot of people know about. So recently we merged with Vantiv, which is a huge in domestic US, and World Pay is very large in the rest of the world. So it was a marriage made in heaven. We're what's technically known as a merchant acquirer, which is a fancy way of saying we take credit card payments. And we do that for both online or in the store, putting your card in a machine. So billions of transactions a year. And what's your relationship with the banking infrastructure around the world? How does that work? So the banks issue credit cards and your relationship as an individual is with the bank. So you pay your bills to the bank and have that transaction. We look after the merchants. So we're the ones that do the services we quaintly call the merchants still. So for the shops and the traders, we have that relationship. And basically the transactions then go between the two. So individuals to the bank, bank to us, us to the merchants. And we just aggregate that. Because even if you're a large company like Costco or Google, you don't want to have to have a relationship with every one of the credit cards, let alone every one of the banks. So we aggregate that. So tell us about your service now journey. When did you start using the platform? So service now, we're on our third year now, I think with service now. And it's been explosive. It was a quite seamless transition. We were really pleased with the previous platform we were on, how we moved over. And we slowly added to it. We slowly turned on other modules, other functionality. And it's just become ingrained in our day to day IT operations. It was simpler because you had had other processes in place. You didn't have to rip and replace those processes and skill sets. We took it as an opportunity to do best of breed. So there were some things that we carried over, but we took the opportunity for a clean start as well. You know, even before, you know, a lot of the buzz here is, you know, back to basics and staying out of the box. We did that for a lot of it. And that was quite refreshing. And you know, it was quite cathartic in a way that we could make that change. But then there were some bits that worked really well and were ingrained in our business process. So we had to carry those over. But we found it easy to do a mixture of both. And you carried those over in the form of custom modifications? Some, not a lot. We tried to stay as much out of the box as possible. So how does that having some custom mods affect your ability to go to subsequent releases? I think it's fair to say that ServiceNow is one of the easier platforms to upgrade. I probably shouldn't say that. They should be doing more work to make it easier for me. They're a bit of a giant upgrade. But compared to some other platforms we have, even cloud ones, it's not the hardest. It's not the worst. However, we've tried to stay close to the box to make it even easier. We want to stay, you know, N plus one and no more. And when you're coming out with a major upgrade twice a year, that means we've got to factor that into our roadmap. But we do. We make sure that we try and stay up to date. So where are you now? You're in Jakarta. Jakarta, okay. Yeah, pretty current. Yeah, only just like, sorry. Okay, but we heard a lot about Madrid today. Yeah. Which is Q119. And a lot about DevOps. So talk about, it was very good that the DevOps 101 that Pat Casey gave. I'll give my version of DevOps 101, if I can. Back in the day, the developers would write some code maybe on their laptop or whatever. They'd throw it over the fence to the ops guys and say, here, deploy this. And the ops guys would go to deploy and they say, this thing doesn't meet up to our enterprise standards. It doesn't have the security and the governance. So they go in and they hack the code and variably break it. And then they go to deploy it and it doesn't work. And they go back to the developers and say, your code doesn't work. Then the developers say, it won't work when I gave it to you. And you get this back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. So DevOps consolidates that into a single programming environment. That's good. I appreciate this. Infrastructure is code. So that's my version. Casey gave a much more eloquent description, but what is DevOps to you guys and how are you applying it? So we've got two major competitive drivers in the market. One is scale. So we're the largest payments company in the world. So we need to leverage that. We can operate in most countries of the world, take most currencies. So that's a scale thing that we try and leverage. Scale tends to lend itself more to waterfall kind of traditional projects. The other competitive pressure that we face is from small fintechs startups that are nibbling away at our ankles for niche products and new services or disrupting the whole way we do payments, you know. Will there be banks tomorrow? Who knows, you know, the whole way could be disruptive. That innovation lends itself more to a DevOps kind of or at least an agile form of development. You want rapid prototyping, kind of trying things, seeing what works. So one of the things we've been struggling with at WellPay is how can we foster more of the DevOps whilst not endangering the traditional kind of waterfall that we need to do. The vast majority of our development is done agile, but hardly any of it is DevOps. And a lot of people confuse agile for being DevOps. And agile is just the dev part of it. It isn't the ops bit of it. So where's the ops in DevOps? What we did, do you just outline, you know, classic reasons why people might want to do that and having a single team owning something all the way through the life cycle? What we've done is we've tried to separate out different layers and kinds of services to allow that to happen. So with scale, you have to have one level one. You have to have a front door for IT that everybody comes to, whether you're a squidgy resource, a human needing to phone someone or you're tin and wires that's got a problem and alerting an event. So you have one front door. What you need to do is you need to try and have a high first time fix. That's cheapest and that's most best experience for the end user. So we aim for 60, 70% of issues to just be killed at that front door. That's the aim. After that, we then put a lot of work and effort to make sure that we had a business oriented, service oriented CMDB. So we worked with the lines of business to describe well pay and what we do in a way that they understood and the IT understood. And then we translated that into a service management language in the CMDB. Once you go past that level one, the level one know they can't fix it. They know what's broken or they're pretty certain what's broken. They will put it into the right service line. That level two is still run only. So we split the dev and the run at that level two. You're aiming for like 25% of things to stop there. That leaves only about 5% of things that would ever go wrong needing to go to a third line. That third line we refer to as technical services. So you've got business services in the middle at that level two that the business would recognise and they consume or our merchants would. The technical services at the third line are the components. They're the building blocks that we use to make those business services. And those are where we start doing the DevOps. Another word for it is microservices. So microservices, we have components, centres of excellence in both infrastructure, so a virtualised platform or applications. So a fraud module or a billing module or authorisation module. And those teams, because they're only getting 5% of things coming through to them that are wrong, they can cope with being small teams that do both the dev and the ops. And that makes it feasible. And we're fostering that and we're starting to get live services that are being supplied in that DevOps manner. And that means that that can grow as it succeeds or fail as it doesn't. And it's not endangering the huge machine that is the rest of the organisation. So the huge machine, the core piece of your systems, you still apply waterfall. Is that right? And then kind of the new stuff, where you don't mind breaking things, you're applying agile and DevOps. Exactly, and that's what we're seeing is that that then what succeeds and what the ways of working or the particular needs that that microservices is addressing, if they're successful, it feeds it, it waters it and they do more. So the teams that are going live with some of these microservices, if they put enough effort into making it resilient, doing the non-functional as well as the functional requirements, which is a DevOps thing as well. So you make something and you get it right first time. So it's not breaking all the time. They can then have spare cycles to go and do other sprints where they're building the next thing. And what we hope to see over time is that we will have a larger and larger proportion of the components that make those business services being supplied in the DevOps way. And that is also complementary with going to cloud services because they're just other building blocks. They're just components that you use to put together something. You saw Pat Casey and CJ decide they showed a little leg today on Madrid. They basically developed DevOps capability for their own purposes and they're going to release it in Madrid. The problem they're trying to solve, if I understood it, was you've got 500 DevOps tools out there and there's complexity. Did that resonate with you? Is that something you'll adopt or are you comfortable with your DevOps tools? No, we're keen and eager to adopt. Well, I'm an IT ops guide by trade. That's what I've been doing for the last 20, 30 years. And, but I'm not afraid of DevOps. I love DevOps. DevOps means faster delivery with more control. It's automated ITIL. And what the ServiceNow roadmap is giving me is a way that I can continue to be the air traffic control for IT. I want people to come to me and my team and say, where are we at? What's moving where? And if we get the hooks into ServiceNow, into all of those DevOps tools, the names are up there, the Jenkins, the Chef, the Puppets. If we get the hooks in, then it expands more of the kind of PMO work that we almost do as well. So instead of talking about just a single change ticket or a release that's happening here, we can go that train in the safe framework or that sprint over there that they've got to this point. They're in testing. They're about to release this. Actually, I can tell you the features that they're proposing will come with this because that's hooked in. So that's the dream, that's where we want to get. Because we want to facilitate more of this happening within our development community. So from a legacy talent standpoint, are you more DevOps or are you OpsDev? Me personally, me personally I'm OpsDev. But it means for your organization. Was it kind of retraining the Ops guys to think more like devs, or was it kind of jamming the Ops piece? We've got a challenge with both. The real success that we've had so far has mainly been Greenfield. We've set up teams from scratch with the purpose of testing out DevOps as a theory and it's worked brilliantly. Now though, the bigger struggle is how do you get existing teams? We've got hundreds of developers in squads. They work in an agile, but they do pure dev. They build it and they hand it over and then they're on to the next thing. How do we mix those teams? How do you get multidisciplinary teams that have both the operational knowledge as well as the development? And that's a cultural thing as well as the tooling. Tooling helps. If you get nice tooling that makes it easier for them to operate in a particular way, that's a big important thing, but it's only half the battle. You've got to get people thinking in a slightly different way. And that's true of the Ops people have got to think more of the life cycle. How do they feedback what's working and what's not into the next development cycle? And the development people have got to think about what happens once they let it go. They've got skin in the game now. It's going to come back and bite them. If they didn't do it well, if they didn't put the dashboards for the support people to see how well it's working, then the support people are going to be banging on their door to get it. So it's a cultural thing as well. It's a cultural thing. I'm going to ask you a business question. You referred a little bit to disruption before. You talked about banks and the future of banks. Do you think, and you're very tired into the banks, obviously, do you think, and I wonder if there's a discussion inside the organization that traditional banks will lose control of today's payment systems? Well, arguably they're not fully in control of it today anyway, and so that's not meaning that they're not in control of what they are to do, but they don't own the payment process end to end. But they own the consumer. They own the consumer relationship, yeah. And that's going to be disrupted in the same way that the way that we take payments at the other end of the life cycle is disrupted as well. Contactless, blockchain, these kind of things mean that it's not going to be the same. However, you're not going to get rid of large organizations overnight because what is also increasing day by day is regulation, security requirements. You want to know that your card's going to be safe. You don't want, if you're going to use Apple Pay or a new contactless technology, you're only going to do that if you know there's no danger of you losing money by doing it. So have that certainty and to meet the regulators' requirements, you need organizations like WellPay looking after the merchant's interests. You need organizations like banks looking after the individual's interests. So I think, unfortunately, it's not a sexy answer but I'm afraid that they're not going to disappear overnight, they're adding valuable service. A lot of barriers to entry to those Vintech startups that are nibbling at your coast. It's changed dramatically in the last five years, 10 years. So what on earth is going to look like in the next five or 10 years? Bringing it back, that's why I think innovation is so important. We need to be trying to stay ahead of the curve. We need to meet the needs of our merchants so that they can get as many transactions as possible successfully. And we need to do that at the lowest cost possible. So that's all about innovation. Innovation is hard to do top down. You've got to find ways of fostering it bottom up. We've got great leadership top down. This is where we're going, but actually the way that we're going to get there is down to the troops, it's down to the people on the coal face. So, when did you buy your first Bitcoin? My first Bitcoin, I bought Bitcoin about four years ago. So, yeah, I've done all right, it's paid for a holiday. There you go, that's good for you. Well, Jason, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you. It's great talking to you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge 18 just after this.