 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering Knowledge 15, brought to you by ServiceNow. We're back at Knowledge. Hi everybody, I'm Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick, my co-host for this segment. We're pleased to have Shane Jackson on. Shane, welcome to theCUBE. It's good to see you again. Yeah, you guys too. So we're talking partners, products, platforms, platforms, beat products. We've been talking about that for quite some time on theCUBE, and a big part of the platform is the ecosystem. You see that in successful companies, successful software companies especially, have to have an ecosystem. And it's a big part of an initiative that you're driving at ServiceNow to build that partner ecosystem. So first of all, congratulations for having that role. This is a really important one. It's a lever that can really drive momentum forward. But give us the update on where you guys are at with that whole initiative. Yeah, I mean you hit it right exactly where we're at. We started out the week on Monday morning with 700 partners at our partner summit, partner reps in the summit. And that's exactly the message we had for them is that if you look at the software companies that have done really well over the years, the Oracles, the SAPs, they needed a big healthy ecosystem around them to have the growth that they did. And we're turning to them and talking about like here's your opportunity, it's not too late. Cause people have seen how Fast Service Now have grown and they feel like, oh maybe I missed the opportunity. I'm not in the ecosystem and I missed that opportunity for myself, but there's still so much ahead that we can do together. We're getting them on board and trying to get them to see where the opportunities are. And that can be anywhere from development on the platform, implementation, there's seven, eight different things that we need in that ecosystem, roles that those partners can play. Well it's interesting when Jeff and I first did Knowledge 13 and Fred told us the story of I developed this platform and went to customers and said, what can you do with it? Do anything, that didn't really resonate that much. It wasn't a budget for anything. We talked to Doug Neone about that and Doug was like, yeah, well that was kind of iffy. But then really the focus became the product and you saw the app creator and that whole thing and you said, wow, this thing has so much potential. So what kind of partners are you attracting? How do you sort of envision that portfolio of partners? Yeah, we can use a couple of different examples, right? So you look at the start on the higher end with the GSIs, the global systems integrators, the KPMGs, the Accentures of the world. They have entire businesses built around markets like oil and gas or legal, HR, and so they can build a whole product offer of which ServiceNow becomes just a part of it, right? And so they're out doing what they do to enter those markets and that's good for us because it gets us into that market as a platform play but they've got the expertise in that particular area that we would never be able to build out on our own, right? Deep, deep, deep, deep, expertise, right? And they don't make that bet unless they've got the confidence that that investment will pay off in building a really big practice for them. That's right, yeah, so it takes time to build those up and we're seeing things like KPMG had announced an HR own board this week so that's a perfect example of that play. And then you kind of go to the other end of the spectrum and it could be a single person developer or a small shop who is looking for a platform to build the next great application on, right? So Nivola is a good example of that and we just talked about them at the CreatorCon keynote about a year ago, they didn't know who ServiceNow was but they had this expertise in clinical management, clinical asset management where they understand how hospitals work, how clinics and all the assets that need to get tracked very expensive medical equipment that cost $30,000 and you order them in boxes of six and five of them go missing, that's a big problem. They understand that those processes and they said, we can build a solution for this but what do we build it on? And then they found ServiceNow and the workflow processes that we have on our platform and that this is it and now they've got that product on the ServiceNow store and they're out in market selling that in less than a year. And what about like managed service providers? Where do they fit? Can you give us some examples there? Sure, sure, so we have a vibrant group of MSP partners and so there's a couple of things there. Sometimes there's partners or customers that may be too small or not ready to engage with ServiceNow and so they can go to an MSP that can provide a whole managed service of which ServiceNow is a part and then there's larger MSPs that have entire practices around service management, sometimes in IT, sometimes in other disciplines and they can use the ServiceNow platform as part of delivering that service and those might be customers that we would never be able to access on our own because they either get everything managed by another vendor or we just don't have a connection with them yet and that gives us an opportunity to go there as well. Yeah, there's an interesting partner that now we've been to is our third knowledge which is it's great to come back and see a lot of familiar faces and reconnect with people and there's one really small partner Dave in the Bay Area who's a one man shop but he manages, I think he's had 130 or 140 seats across a number of customers and he's built a business really just doing that as a one guy shop where again the customers are big enough to really engage directly with you guys but let's talk about the goal. The goal that everyone talks about at every show we go to is developers. Everyone wants developers. How do you get the attention to developers and you guys seem to really be doing a terrific job there. I wonder if you could talk specifically about that ecosystem. Yeah, it's easy for us because they're already here. So we had 9,000 people at the show and there's all kinds of people who are already developing on our platform. A lot of times they're professional developers. They spend their entire day doing that for their companies. Other times they're just service now administrators that is their job to maintain service now but the platform is so easy for them to extend certain applications or build new applications where they see that there's a problem that they can solve. They develop those skills and all of a sudden they're developers too and so we're not looking at just one part of the developer community. We're looking at all of it, right? Anything from a professional developer to what we call a low-code developer to a no-code developer, right? Which I'm a perfect example of a no-code developer, right? We have Service Creator, which you could have someone in marketing who has a request-fulfill process that is getting done in email and spreadsheets could create a service within Service Now not understanding how to do any code whatsoever and that's a great opportunity for to get service now used by almost everybody in the organization. We're talking to Shane Jackson, Vice President of Marketing at Service Now. Shane, what about certification? How do you approach that with the partner community? Yeah, that's something we're putting a lot of effort into. We've had a couple of certifications available so far, an implementation specialist certification and a certified administrator. The one we just announced this week is certified application developer. So that's really, again, going back after that theme of the development community and so we have at CreatorCon 400 seats available for people to take the certification exam and I'm already seeing the tweets come out of people with their certificate walking out of the room. So we're minting new certified application developers as we speak and we'll do more of that. As we look at, you've probably heard a lot about the business units and you've met all the business unit leaders come through the CUBE this week. There's opportunities to do specialization and certification in all those areas as well. Yeah, I want to talk more about the ecosystem. You have experience in infrastructure, part of that VMware community years past and I'm sure you remember well, guys like Todd Nielsen who at the time was the president of VMware, he used to give a stat for every dollar spent on VMware license, X number of dollars is spent on ecosystem partners and the number would keep growing. It was 10 and it was 15 and it was 18. I'm not talking about that so much anymore but regardless, that is a great ecosystem there. Do you think of it in those terms of the total available market and sort of enriching that ecosystem? Is that something that you could have conceptualized or even tracked maybe more specifically? Yeah, I wouldn't say it's on any math in terms of dollars for dollars. It is just the opportunity for the ecosystem to be around us to help make us a better solution overall. So if you've got a chance to walk around the expo here at the show, there's 115 sponsoring partners. All of them had each their own unique thing to offer to the customers that are attending here. Exploded, I mean, that's maybe not talking dollar terms, maybe we could talk in value terms. Think about the value that's created in the ServiceNow ecosystem. You got the platform and yeah, ServiceNow a great company, growing revenues, got nice, great market value, whatever. But the value that's being added on top of the platform, it feels like it's starting to dwarf the value that ServiceNow is creating. I mean, just intuitively, oh, is it like crazy? No, I mean, we always feel like we should be the minority developer and application provider on the platform, right? It's the partner ecosystem that should be developing and building the majority of the applications because they've got more expertise than we do in any given area, right? And you're starting to see that specialization of partners in HR, in legal, in finance to go and be able to consult with customers on what they need to do any process re-engineering needed to then do the automation with ServiceNow. And the market's so large, and I talked to a number of people, you know, are you comfortable with the white space? Are you kidding me? There's so much white space in this ecosystem. Yes. So where do you see that going? What are your goals for the partner, for the program initiatives? How do you see it of all? You know, our message for them at the partner summit was be creative. You know, there is so much green field, you're literally pulling the bullets off of our summary slide, right? The last two were green field. There's so much opportunity, right? Even though we have an HR application that's available as part of our service management, we have a marketing application that's available as part of that suite. There's all kinds of different flavors of that that you could still do, or do one just better and let the market will decide which one is the best. And if they go get one off, you know, customers are buying something off the store for marketing rather than ours, then that's great. So there's plenty of opportunity. And so it's, I think the message for the partners is be creative. And think about what is it that you want to go and do. And don't wait for us to try to give you some kind of signal that we're going to go over here so you better not go over there. They just need to go for it and get after it. Yeah, I don't know if it was Matt earlier in the show talking about if a partner's got an app and we've got an app, you know, that's okay. You know, they're two different apps, maybe slightly different, maybe slightly different go to market. At the end of the day, we're selling the platform and people are delivering value to a marketplace that needs to be served. I thought that was an interesting take. Yeah, I mean, made the best app way and it was kind of, right, right. Obviously it's not service now strategy to own the whole application ecosystem. That's right. Don't try to be oracle. All right, give it another 20 years, maybe. But that's what's so neat about when you talk to some of the partners that were on the floor, they're, some of them are fairly small. And the one that I haven't mind that I talked to them, 13 million dollars of annual revenue, right. And so you come into a show like this and they feel like, wow, they might just get overwhelmed and not notice, but they have a specific thing. They do around automation for call centers that's a perfect fit into the things that people use the service now platform for. So all of a sudden they're getting access into very large companies that they could use their solution. So it's a great play for them. Very wide spectrum. And obviously given the growth of the event, they get, I think I'm right, the most of the attendees this year for first time attendees, right? I don't know if I've heard that at all. No, I couldn't, no, I'm sorry. I'm doing the math wrong in my head. But the growth, yeah, because they probably attended previous sessions before, but the growth is just enormous. But I've talked to a lot of people that have, you know, less than, certainly less than two years, even many inside of 15 months experience on service now, which is phenomenal. Yeah, and what we're starting to see in addition, like the shift from, you know, go back a couple of years, it's exclusively an IT audience. You know, now we have HR titles walking around, marketing titles, legal, finance. So people who aren't in IT coming to the show to see, well, if everything's a service for any department, then what's here for me? And so we've built specific content at the show for them. In fact, 25% of the breakout sessions were about service management outside of the IT discipline. So when do I get started? If I'm a partner, I'm sort of new to service now, I'm interested, a lot of action here, looks good. I want in, where do I start, Shane? What would you advise me? There's a couple of things. We have the app showcase, which is kind of a collection of applications that our partners and customers have built. We introduced that at the show last year. There's 518 different applications in it now. It's different from the store, so you can't download anything, but you can just kind of scroll through it and see what's out there and kind of get inspired is about what's possible. So that's one place. You can go to the store to see what people have actually built and are selling, and then you can get engaged with the technology partner program. And through that, you can, you know, you really start with the developer program, I guess would be the better entry point, which kind of gives you the ideas of here's what it takes to develop on the service now platform. It's where you can get your free instance and you can start practicing and, you know, see you playing with your ideas. And then once you have something that you feel like, okay, I want to go post this on the store and then you can sign up for the technology partner program and off you go. So the big push on partners, I mean, you always had partners, but you're really starting to focus on it. What have you been hearing from the partners in terms of specifically the announcements that you've made this week and what kinds of things are they pushing you to do? Yeah, they're super excited because this isn't our idea to have a store for them to be able to sell applications on. They've been asking for this for quite some time. Last year we announced SHARE, which is a good way for customers to share things they had developed with each other, but it didn't really solve the monetization piece for the partners who were building something and they had something great, but how do they expose it to the entire service now ecosystem? They had one chance a year before and that was the knowledge show. And then what do they do for the other 360 days of the year? And so they're super excited about store, just the fact that we had over 80 applications and integrations on the store on day one, shows that they're ready to go and have been waiting on us to get that functionality for them and we're already seeing downloads and purchases. So what are they pushing you for there? They want to see the thing mature, they want to see, what do they want to see from service now in terms of support for the store? Yeah, it's mainly just give us a place to showcase what we've done so that people can find us and we've done that with a store through filtering capabilities. You can search on different kinds of application types and we've given them a lot of flexibility to do their own marketing essentially, so they can go in and write their own descriptions and things as part of their store listing and then we're going to promote the store heavily, obviously, to attract as many customers to it as possible. How are you going to promote it? Through our community primarily, so we have a very vibrant community of our users and so that'll be the primary way, plus all the usual things on the website for the banner advertising and things. Back to the platform app story. Give these guys, give them a platform, give them a platform, give them a go to market opportunity, give them a cluster of customers that's pretty target rich environment for them to sell into. That's right. And then with the developer program, the community and the store, it's kind of all integrated together so they can promote their own success on the community where they're building an application, selling an application, get back on the community and talk about what you built and how did it solve a problem for a customer. Are you seeing any patterns developing in terms of, I mean, it's kind of a lame question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. There's so much, I said, white space before, but are you seeing any patterns developing in terms of where the most activity is or traction? Well, you've heard a lot about HR. I mean, you guys talk a lot about financial, HR marketing, but where do you see the hottest action right now? Where are the fish swimming? Yeah, I mean, that wasn't a lame question, but I'll answer it with your answer, which is HR. In that discipline, there's so much work that gets done through email and spreadsheets and people just not knowing where to go to get what they need and they're stressed because they have a benefits question or something about coming on board or they're going to be leaving the company. And so it's just a lot of opportunity to come in and make that process better and give an HR a way to manage that work and a system of engagement. Beyond that, then probably the next one that we see the most is facilities. So if you think about this kind of integration between IT and facilities, it's pretty close, right? There's a lot of overlap between those teams sometimes in having like a conference room that has IT equipment in it, right? And so there's having a single platform to build those applications on so that if you are booking a conference room and then you get in there and the projector light is out, being able to create the incident in the same application, pretty cool, right, on the same product. So we see a lot of affinity towards kind of facilities, management kinds of applications. Legal's a pretty hot one after that. And then it could go almost anywhere. And that's what's fascinating about going through the app showcase is you just, you find apps for one of our kind of favorites inside the company is pork life cycle management. It's just an application that a meat company built so that they can manage the process of how they did production for that. There's just infinite number of examples and it's all things that the customers are thinking of themselves because they have business problem to solve and they know that they've usually been able to solve it with other things and service now. So they naturally look to us to do it again. So you got the store, the CreatorCon, number of initiatives that you guys got going on, obviously knowledge itself. What other sort of organizational support are you providing? You guys staffing up, specifically dedicated to partners or are you more sort of sharing resources? Can you talk about any kind of human resource moves that you're making? Yeah, no, we have partner teams that are assigned to partner types basically. So you've got a GSI team, MSPs, we think of a little bit differently. So there are categories of partners that we have and structure built around that. The developer community itself is really a platform, business unit driven activity and it's more programmatic and less one-on-one interaction with those guys and more programmatic. Okay, and obviously it's not just the US centric initiative, right? No, definitely not. So what kind of differences do you see around the globe? It's kind of typical in your technology adoption lifecycle right in the US tends to be out ahead a little bit and then in the other regions, it's still more IT focused through the service management capabilities and the connection between managing services the way you do in IT, doing it in other domains is just starting to kind of get noticed in the other geos. Our last question, the bumper sticker question. So the trucks leaving the Mandalay Bay from Knowledge 15, what's the bumper sticker in the back of the trucks? The big one for the partner community is get certified and build a great app. All right, there you go. Shane Jackson, thanks very much for taking us through the partner ecosystem and the initiatives that you got going on there, congratulations on that. And we just see explosion coming and we're seeing it right before our eyes. So thanks again. Thanks for having me. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest right after this. We're live. 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