 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. Hello everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18 here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. And we are theCUBE, we are the leader in live tech coverage. We're joined by Sean Caron, he is the principal architect of Linium, at Linium, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. And again, you're welcome back. My second time, and thank you very much for the opportunity. I've really been looking forward to it all week. Awesome. We'd love to hear that. So tell us about Linium and what you do as principal architect. Sure, so we are a gold services and sales partner of ServiceNow, been in the ServiceNow space for about nine years total. And we specialize in helping organizations do digital transformation. So they want to take the platform and really get maximum value from that. And that's both a technology discussion, but it's also an organizational change discussion and can be a process discussion. All those kind of things are things that we help our customers with. We've been talking a lot about the technology, but the organizational change is really what fascinates me. Can you tell, can you just talk about a lot of the organizational change challenges that customers are facing and they come to you? You bet, right? So we've been in this business for 18 years. We started out as a Peregrine partner and also HP, when HP acquired Peregrine. And we noticed that we would get specs from customers and we would nail it. It'd be a perfect technical delivery. And then six months later, when you talk to the customer, they weren't using the product. They didn't get any value from the investment that they made. So we started to engineer a process and we do that around, we look at the structure. Where is this project going to land? What's the structure around it? Who supports it? What's your culture? Do you have a culture of dedication to accuracy or customer service? If you don't have those kind of things, we can help build those in your organization. Then of course, that also gets to helping you find talent, right? So if you need the right people, we can help with that process, helping you define business best practice process for your organization. Those are all things we work with customers every day. And frankly, we don't do technology projects. We only do a project where we know when we deliver the technology that that structure will be there to catch it and get value from it. So you were recently acquired by Nest Digital Engineering. Correct. Which is really an interesting name for the company. Tell us more about the motivation for that acquisition and how things have changed and what the future looks like. So for the first 17 years of our business, we were a privately held company and we grew organically and we did a great job at that. I mean, we became several hundred employees across the US and a couple in, I mean, a couple in Canada. But to really take the next step, right? We had a vision of what we wanted to do to take that next step was going to require an equity investment of some type. So we started probably about this time last year talking to organizations. Nest was one of the first ones that we met and it became immediately apparent that they were a great fit for us. So they have about, well with us about 4,000 people across the world, they're not a billion dollar company, right? So their culture is very similar to our culture. They do digital engineering projects, industrial scale, you know, hardcore grade digital engineering projects. And they tend to focus on platforms that are front of the business. So customer touching, they own the platform under standard and pours, right? So they built that. So standard pours ratings, all that information flows in, they do the ratings based on that. That's something they built. PayPal, they do a lot of work in the payments industry. But they didn't really do much on the back end, right? The operations that keep all the lights on. And obviously that's a great fit for Linium, where we would come in with the ServiceNow platform and help them with that process. So that really worked out well. It was a great fit for us. So how do you guys compete? What's your difference relative to, I mean, you've been here a while. I mean, in this ecosystem, it's starting to get crowded. What's your secret sauce? How do you guys compete? So our goal is always to try and stay 12 months ahead of where ServiceNow is going. In the past couple of years, that really has been around user experience. Really designing experiences with the platform that are intuitive, that don't require a lot of training, that allow people to approach the platform and get value from it very quickly. Whether that's end users or our customers' customers, those kind of things. Really, and that's in our DNA. That's a big part of what we do, is design these experiences and do them in a way that really help our customers get value. I would say, looking forward, so the buzzword that we've heard around here this week is DevOps, right? And we see, and one of the things that Nest does very well is DevOps engineering. I think next year will be the knowledge of DevOps. It will be what everybody's talking about. ServiceNow will have a lot more throw weight in that space. So really, that's where we're going. We're helping people get that continuous integration, continuous deployment process, using ServiceNow as a foundation. CJ Desai laid out the roadmap in more detail than I had seen publicly, anyway. And we were talking to him and he said, look, the motivation really came from the ecosystem. Obviously the customers as well, but the ecosystem as well wanted better visibility on what was coming because you guys have to plan for that. You're trying to fill white space. You're trying to fill a vacuum. So I wonder if we could talk about that. It's a two-edge coin, though, right? But having that visibility has to be a godsend. Right, and we found that when we are, some number of months ahead of ServiceNow, we work very well with them. We, obviously, like any large ServiceNow partner we're very plugged into where they're going. Their roadmap sets our direction in the kind of things that we can do. But enables conversations, especially DevOps and user experience too, enable conversations at new levels within the organization. And that's a big differentiator for us. What I'm trying to understand is you guys have to make a call on where to put your investments and your resources. That's right. And you don't want to, you've said it a couple of times, you're ahead of ServiceNow by, let's say, end months. Six months, 12 months, nine months, whatever it is. You don't want to develop something and put too much into something that they're just going to replace in a few months. So you want to, how do you keep that innovation engine going on your end? That's right. So it takes a lot of research. We have a person who's dedicated job at our organization is Chief Innovation Officer. She spends her entire day talking to customers, hearing what buzzwords are in the industry, looking and talking to ServiceNow, looking at where they're going. So how can we be positioned when ServiceNow gets there? Because to deliver services, that's not an instant on, right? If the technology shows up tomorrow in the next release, to be able to deliver services for that, you have to start well in advance to actually be able to do that, to understand the process and the structure and what's required. Okay, so by being ahead of ServiceNow, what you mean is you're going to develop capabilities that plug in to their release when it hits. So that we can deliver to what they have. Not things that are duplicative, but things that add value when it hits. Yeah, I mean, ServiceNow comes out with, so let's say automated testing. That's something they want to really, they want to get into the automated testing market. That's a discipline. You can't be instant on with that. And if you want to have credibility with customers, you have to have trained people. You've got to be six months ahead to be able to step into that world and get value from the platform. So take the DevOps example that we heard Pat Casey talk about yesterday. So you guys are preparing for that now, obviously. And how will you go about it? How will that change your customer's world, if you can take us through an example? I mean, so obviously DevOps is, it's the big accelerator. It's the idea of we're going to do what we've always done, and we're going to do it in timeframes that are minutes or hours, as opposed to weeks or months or even years, right? So it's a big ramp up. So understanding how to put that in play is a big deal. If you're a startup, right? So one of the themes in DevOps is the two pizza team, right? You should never have teams bigger than you can feed with a couple of pizzas. If you're a startup and you already got a two pizza team, it's easy to do DevOps. You build it into your culture and away you go. But our customers, many of our customers, one we were talking about here, we were talking to here at the show, 130-year-old firm and they want to do DevOps. So what's that on ramp? How do you figure that out? One of our new colleagues from NAS, who has been in the DevOps world for a while, says, you know, it's all about unlearning stuff, right? Because in order to move into this world, you got to unlearn that old world. Well, right, it is a mindset. It is. It's a culture. So how, and one that will be very tricky for a 130-year-old firm, that maybe doesn't order pizzas that often, or it's deep. So how do you do that? I mean, that's a challenge. We're working diligently on having a roadmap to onboard DevOps into existing organizations. The secret really tends to be, start with a net new project and introduce DevOps into those kind of projects. Build one, build two, build three. Now you've got a culture of DevOps and you can start then to do some of the unlearning and the retrofitting, right? But it's very difficult. You can't really take an existing project and transform how they do their work, which is what DevOps is all about. No, but in a lot of the companies that I've talked to that have 100-plus-year-old companies that want to do DevOps, right? A lot of times, and I wonder if this has been your experience, it's the ops guys learning dev, as opposed to the dev guys learning ops. I mean, the dev guys, like, yeah, yeah, we can do infrastructure as code, that's fine. But then you got all these ops guys running around. So it's an urgency to retrain the ops guys who are eager to learn, most of them, the ones that aren't are probably in trouble. We'll do something else. So I often joke about ops dev versus DevOps. What's your experience? Well, so I think the big difference is, ops guys are trained from the day they take that job to shun failure, right? Failure of a system is a big problem. In DevOps, it's going to happen. Not only is it going to happen, but the best DevOps practitioners create failure. Break stuff. Yeah, you know, Netflix kind of has this famous program called Chaos Monkey. Yeah, Chaos Monkey. When it runs around and turns stuff off, right? And how do you respond to that, right? And that's a big leap culturally and structurally for the ops guys to get over that. The idea is we break stuff, but we learn from that. And not only do I learn from that, but I spread that knowledge across the organization. And that's where service now steps in, right? Because they know when things are broken, because they're tied to monitoring, and they got this great knowledge capability to hook up the information we learned from how that broke. So what better testing could we have done so that we could have avoided that break? Or if it's, you know, an enforced break, what could we have learned about how to respond to that more quickly? You know, the classic example is when AWS lost their East Availability Center and Netflix kept ticking. Because they had lost their East Availability Center through Chaos Monkey half a dozen times. It was old hat. And everybody else kind of went dark, right? So that idea and enabling that with the service now platform is a great opportunity. We really see service now as the context, the engine with all the knowledge about when things happen, how to fix them, and how to record the knowledge that you learn. Give us an example of a company. I mean, you're talking about simple, streamlined, intuitive, no training required. Give us some examples of some of the most creative uses. I'll give you a great example. So we have a center in Atlanta. We have some folks in Atlanta. And of course, if you're in Atlanta, you love Chick-fil-A. And maybe if you're anywhere else, you love Chick-fil-A. And they had an issue, which was they have franchisees. And their franchises are different than McDonald's, where you might have one franchisee at McDonald's that owns 200 restaurants. They have a lot of power, market power, and they don't share information with any other franchisee because that's differentiating for them. Chick-fil-A doesn't do that. The maximum number of restaurants you can own as a Chick-fil-A franchisee, I believe, is three. It's a number like that. So their franchisees are incented to talk to each other and share information. Hey, I found a better way to clean the ice cream machine or something like that, or to fix a problem. So they were looking to build a portal that they could use to both answer questions from the organization to the franchisees but allow the franchisees to talk to each other. That kind of a thing has to be zero training, right? Because the people who are on that might be store managers, but it could be, you know, the teenager who runs the point of sale terminal is having a problem with that, right? So it's really got to be intuitive. So we spent a lot of time with them. We actually, we brought one of our designers. So we have UI UX designers, experienced designers. And we're in the sales meeting and we're having a discussion about what they need. And he's kind of heads down typing on his computer. And they're kind of looking at him like, what's up with this guy, right? He's not paying attention. He's designing the interface. These guys pay attention to everything. He's looking at the logo as we're walking in, the colors that are on the wall, the way they talk about themselves. So about an hour into the meeting, we got a pause and he just kind of picks his head up and he goes, you mean like this? He turned his computer around and he had a prototype that he built in the meeting of this really easy use process. That was our intro to check for us. Your sales guy must have hated that. No, no, I'll tell you what. So there were, it was competitive. We had multiple competitors who were going for that business. When he turned that computer around, the sale was done. We were done, right? They looked at that and said, this is, it's not perfect clearly, but this is what we need. It's the kind of company we want to work with. Exactly. Well, part of that is there are partners in the ecosystem who come in and say, we can do anything. Tell us what you want. We are much more consultative and we'll come in and be prescriptive and say, this is what you should do. And it's a differentiator for us. It's something we do differently. Well, Sean, that's a great note to end on. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE again. It's been great. I really enjoyed my time. Well, look forward to having you back at Knowledge19. Terrific. I will certainly be here. Great. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18 in just a little bit.