 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering Knowledge 15, brought to you by ServiceNow. We're back, this is Dave Vellante, this is theCUBE, we're here at Knowledge. Each year at Knowledge at the conference, we celebrate the winners of the Hackathon competition. ServiceNow hosts this Hackathon, people come in, drop them in and go, they team up. It's a great little dynamic and we're really pleased to have the winners of this year's Hackathon on for the customer side. There's a couple, there's one's customer, one's partner. These are the customer winners. Ken Pruitt's with, he's the IT services administrator at LKQ Keystone, and Scott Wyatt's the founder and CEO of Advantage Integrated Solutions, who's a service provider, interestingly, but you guys teamed up and then they declared you the winners of the customer. So Scott, I want to start with you. So describe that, how'd that happen? You're a service provider, you're a partner, but you ended up on the customer side. Yeah, Dave, this is our first, Knowledge 15 is our first event with ServiceNow and it's huge and we wanted to sign up for the Hackathon and Tripes, we're developing in ServiceNow, and both the customers and the partners are welcome to there and very popular and you can combine. And so we were looking for team members to add, to build up a stronger team. And we found that in Ken and his colleague and we went from there. So how'd they find you? I think he actually met up with my colleague, Chris Murphy. He's another one of our developers out in Nashville and I actually met up with Chris and just got involved with him and pretty much, it was like, how can I help? And so we took it from there. So in the Hackathon comprises, it's all developers, low code, no code, heavy code. What are you guys, which bucket do you fit in? It varies from different backgrounds. I come from a background of very little code and then after getting into ServiceNow, I've learned that it's very extensible. So I've definitely learned a lot from the Knowledge Conference and this is my second one. So I've definitely learned a lot. I didn't have much code prior to, but I've learned a lot here as well as the last one. And Scott, what about yourself? What's your background? Yeah, I'm low code myself. Really? And we had a couple of our other team members that are heavy code and Ken did some heavy lifting as well in the platform. He's very skilled in the platform. We had some full stack developers complementing you guys. All right, tell me about what you guys did, what did you develop? So this is based on something that the idea we brought because we've been developing, been building a cloud-based business apps for over a decade now in other platforms. And so one of them, we did a FEMA project for Hurricane Katrina, Victim Relief, in another platform. This is pre-ServiceNow days. But this, so the idea, this is the app that we wish we'd had for Hurricane Katrina. So this is a big humanitarian app. It's disaster victim relief for use by agencies like FEMA, Red Cross, Fire Police, other authorities, state agencies to provide immediate large-scale information and support from one smart, intelligent place. And that's a ServiceNow app. And on the ServiceNow platform, rather than having a big call center with trying to spin up a big call center with hundreds and hundreds of people to support an earthquake, fires, storms, something like that, instead, you send them to this portal. And whether they go on their phone or they get to a computer somewhere that they can get, they go to the portal, the information's there for them, the services are there for them. It's all kept current, they go to one place and it makes so much sense. This is out-of-the-box response system. Yes. How does it work in a disaster without this app? So you're saying that, like I'm reminded of that House of Cards episode, I don't know if you guys watch House of Cards, but there's a big disaster coming. They got the best guy and he knows everything to do so. What would happen in that situation? They would set up a call center in anticipation. They know the event's coming. Depends. Sometimes they do. And sometimes they don't. Hurricane Katrina, right? Fires, earthquakes, some floods. They're very little. So let's assume they don't know it's coming. That's the worst-case scenario. So they don't know it's coming. And now it's like, okay, who's available? Where are we going to put this thing? What resources do we need there? So it's got to be a mess. It's all the king's horses and all the king's men, right? They just, they scramble. And so you're scrambling. It's all hands on deck. Yeah. Let's go just get there. And you're just grabbing people from different, from different, both agencies and companies to come together that don't even normally work together. And we lived through this in Hurricane Katrina, right? I was there and I worked there for months down in Louisiana on this. So I saw it firsthand. And that's it. It's just a huge fire drill. And it has to happen if you're going to do it manually, but it's insanely difficult, complex, inefficient. And then when you have people's lives and their health and safety and their property at risk in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, tremendous risk there, right? And tremendous damage if you don't do it right. This is a way to do it right. Ken, I'm going to bring you into discussion soon, but we need to set it up a little bit further. So there's the processes around that. And then there's obviously equipment and other things. So what, from a process standpoint, okay, great. You understood that process because you went through it. And then how did that knowledge get transferred to you guys? Has Scott and his team sort of described it or did you have prior knowledge and awareness of this? No, okay, so you had no... I had no prior knowledge of it. Response, expertise. No, I got the pitch from Scott and he pretty much explained to me what the idea was for the application. And I took it from there as far as how do we want to make it look? What content do we need to provide to them on the front end and then on the back end? What processes do we need to tackle? And we pretty much outlined those and we made it happen. And we fleshed it out there too. Because, and this is a simple version. This is the front end. This is the front line victim or affected citizen portal, right? There's a whole lot in the back end and what we built before was a lot of the back end operations and that's all needed too. That's not what we did. We did the front end. That was just, hey, there's an earthquake and 100,000 people are displaced. They need information, they need services, they need it now. Where do you get it? Well, you're going to come to this portal and you just send them to the portal and whether they get to it on their phone or by any other means on any device, they have it. And then they have what they need or they can ask for what they need directly. And yes, you have people behind that portal but it is so much more efficient and you can spin it up in hours. It's crazy. So there's a request there for the service. Hey, I need help. Yes. Okay, and it fires it into the service now system and now you've got that trapped and then you've got the ability to respond to it. You're managing that demand. It's going to be more demand than supply presumably but you can at least communicate and you can prioritize and triage. Everything's captured centrally. Everything is visible. Everything is workable. So you have the different agencies maybe. Red Cross is doing drinking water, food. FEMA is doing temporary living, police and fire, utilities, hospitals. They all have their different roles. Those can be fulfillers in the system. They can all, you can imagine taking that huge flow of requests. Number one, categorizing those requests. What specifically do you want? Not just calling in and saying I need help. Here are your options. Here's what these agencies can provide so that the user can go in. Number one, if they just need information, it's self-help. They don't have to talk to anybody. They just go in and it's all there for them because the providers are feeding it. If they need a service, they need help, then it's besides 911. 911 is make the phone call, right? But if it's not quite that bad, then you say here are the services. Apply for something and it will come in and it will be worked very quickly by the correct agency out of the box. So it's just so much cleaner. It's so much more advanced and so much more smart than the way things are typically handled. So Ken, take us through the timelines. When did you first hear about this? Monday or? The hackathon was, what's today, actually? Today's Thursday. Today's Thursday, there we go. The hackathon was what, Tuesday night? Tuesday night? Tuesday night, that was the first I'd heard of it. First heard of a Tuesday night at, I don't know, roughly what time? Was it six o'clock or? It was probably closer to seven. So, okay, so seven o'clock this night. We started in the afternoon. So Ken dialed in a couple of hours into rewarding this. Yes, right? So I'd thought about it a little bit, but in advance you don't prepare anything in advance. You're not supposed to design things in advance. That's not cool. I'd thought about it and actually wrote it. Think about the shower. Literally back of the napkin. In the previous sessions or two. And there was some preparation. I mean, if you go into hackathon without preparing at all, I mean, that's okay, right? Yeah, but you're just wasting a bunch of time up front. Well, you just say, yeah, you know, you just say, okay, if I spend the first three hours thinking about it, I could have thought about it before. And we were serious. We really wanted to do something that was meaningful and that was impressive and that could be impactful. And show something very different on the ServiceNow platform and with this product. And so this seemed to fit and then we fleshed it out. So I had the genesis of the idea and I was like, yeah, I could work like this. This is what we, God, we wish we had. This one would be amazing if you had it, right? And you can do it in ServiceNow. And so then we brought it. And, you know, Ken and Chris and our guys just brought it to life. So you started in the afternoon and you did like a Chris Pope whiteboard session on a TLEO, right? And then, Ken, you come in at seven o'clock and then what, start coding? Pretty much. I got the pitch from Scott and understood what we were doing. You saw the visual? You said, okay. Saw the visual that he had written out on the napkin and then we quit. And Chris and the others had, we'd been working on it for a little while and his colleague, Chris and our guys, Kit and Chase, were all, you know, working through it. So we rusted out and then, yeah, we had it. We had some structure when you came in. And he showed me that content that they had already and I started from there. How did you attack the problem? Initially, just starting with the layout. You know, I feel like presentation is everything and we want to make this as simple as possible for these people who might be in a panic or who might be flustered, you know, make it easy for them when they see this. It's inviting, but it's also easy to navigate so that they don't spend too much time trying to figure out how to get help. So you said, okay, what am I going to see as a user coming in? Exactly. What pages am I going to look at? What content am I going to see? How's it going to be laid out? Exactly. And the main point of that was to get them everything they need up front so they have to do as little clicking as possible to get through to everything else. Okay, so you started there and then said, what? Hey guys, what do you think? Yeah, pretty much. So they moved that over there. What about this? You missed that? And that's where the collaboration came in. And then you iterate. Right, that's where the collaboration came in and we made tweaks. We made adjustments on the fly and ultimately we came out with a pretty nice product in the end. How big was the team? Five guys. Five. Five guys. And what were the different roles? So you obviously were the catalyst. Yeah, I don't think I wrote anything. I was content. Yeah, so I get it. I've done this for a long time, right? And then I was there first hand for that, right? You're kind of a domain expert, if I could say. Okay, great. So I could see the problem. I'd been there and actually I'm familiar with, generally familiar with how it's handled typically and there's so much better way to do it, right? And then these guys just brought it together. And I gotta believe this is not the last time we're going to be collaborating. How did you divide the tasks up? I mean, who did what? It was kind of on the fly. One thing that if one of us couldn't figure out how to do it, we'd ask somebody else and they'd be like, yeah, I think I know how to do that. And they take that on. We're like, all right, while you're working on that, let me work on something else. And it just kept, it was hot potato. If you know how to fix it, let's work on it now. If you don't, ask somebody else. If they know how to fix it, they'll work on it and we'll move on to something else. So you knew what the end game was and there was plenty of stuff to do. So you just kept doing it and you saw it come together. It's amazing. We didn't know each other, right? But we just, you're gonna be together for eight hours and you're gonna produce something amazing. Do it. And that was it. And what time's the bell ring after the stop? Midnight, yeah. Clock stops at midnight. Straight through from about 3, about 3.45 in the afternoon until midnight, so. It's like that show where they give you some ingredients and you guys gotta make something. And then the clock stops. We just didn't have one pre-made in the oven already. But you got a working product out of it. And it did evolve, actually. So it wasn't that I had it completely formulated. It actually evolved and improved. And so Ken, Chris, everybody added to it and you said, oh my gosh, yes. Oh, that's brilliant, right? So one of the things we added, I'll just give you an idea, missing person's report. It was functionality. We didn't, I had no idea that it could be in scope. And they said, oh my gosh, people have, if they have loved ones that they're missing or friends, they have their pictures on their phones. They can email a report and include the picture and it goes directly into the system. They don't even talk to anybody, but it comes in and you have a picture and the information on who's missing and what the details are. So it was, there was some great ads to it. So what happens now? Well, actually, so you spun this up in one of these 40,000 AWS instances, right? And so now it lives. Next time we do this, we have to get a demo. Yeah? We got to do that. We got to just fire it up on a laptop. So I could see this somewhere. There's a URL somewhere that I can go to. Yeah, well, you know what? We're happy to continue to talk about it and see if there's a home for it. We even talked about it being different at different levels. You could do it at the corporate or organizational level as business continuity. Companies are big enough and we talked to some of the major companies here, the representatives and they said, ooh, we can see our plan. We can see that, absolutely. As opposed to the red book. Yeah, because what you say and they have their policies, they have their information. Somebody laughed. You know what I'm talking about, right? Yeah. Who's got the red book out there? But if headquarters goes dark, right? If you say, well, you've got some thousands of people that don't know what to do. Where do they go? Are they just supposed to start calling people or emailing? It's like, no, no, you go to the system that you're already on service now. Go to this service now app. This is going to tell you everything and help you with anything that you need. So you can centralize that at the organization, the corporate level. You could do it at the state level. State agencies could use it, certainly all the way up to Red Cross, FEMA and those groups. So we're happy to continue to talk and consider how it could be applied and even work with Service Now. It's something that Service Now could carry forward and actually participate at a big humanitarian level with something like this maybe further developed, right? We did it in a day. That's what I was going to say. So if you've got a couple more days. Yeah, a couple more days. It's twice as good. So are you going to continue to develop though? Definitely, I love the app. I definitely intend to make some tweaks and make some changes and flesh it out further. So you put it in the store or? If we get to that point, definitely. Yeah. So we'll talk to anybody who's interested in doing something with it because it was a great exercise and a great challenge but it didn't help anybody, but it could. As you say, well, where might it, right? Where might we employ this? How many, what was the competition like? How many teams were you up against? Oh, dozens of teams, right? And very, very strong, very good people. The five finalists, we saw all their apps. Very impressive, right? And didn't know, we really didn't know, you know, we really, we tried to win, right? But we didn't know because there's some really good apps there in the finalists. That's impressive. Got to be humbling. Congratulations. Thank you. I really appreciate you guys coming on theCUBE and sharing with us the process and I can't wait to hear more. We'll be watching. Thanks. All right, keep right there. We'll be back with our next guest right after this. This is theCUBE, we're live at Knowledge 15, right back.