 ServiceNow Knowledge 14 is sponsored by ServiceNow. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. We're back, this is Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. This is SiliconANGLE Wikibon's theCUBE. theCUBE goes out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. We're here live at Knowledge 14. ServiceNow is a big event. There are about 6,600 people here. ServiceNow, Smokin' Hot Company. Another Smokin' Hot Company is Red Hat. Mike Caraway is here. He's with the IT group inside of Red Hat. Mike, welcome. Glad to be here. Yeah, so we were at the Red Hat Summit a couple of weeks ago here at Moscone. I was back in Boston watching live, you know, jealous. I hate giving up the mic, but it was really a great event. I presume you were there. Yeah, I was here. It was a great show. I was really excited to hear some of the stuff we're doing with the advancing Linux, but also a lot of exciting things with our cloud tools. We talk about Red Hat a lot because everybody wants to be the Red Hat of something. That's like, the VCs always say, oh, I get 100 business plans a week. We're going to be the Red Hat of X, big data, cloud, or whatever it is. That's great. But we always joke, well, Red Hat's going to be the Red Hat of that. You guys are transforming. You're growing very rapidly. You got people's attention, you know? All of a sudden, you know, 10, 12 years ago, everybody sort of let you do your thing. You had competition, but it was, you know, this kind of eclectic little bunch of folks, and now you're really going after some big prizes. So congratulations on actually being in a position to do that, being a billion dollar plus open source software company. It's so exciting. No, it's a lot of fun. I mean, it's, you know, the IT side of that. RCO calls them high class problems, right? It's all the problems that come from growth and your product set and pretty extensive growth in our customer base, our customers, our associates. And so that's created some challenges and that's what we in IT, spent a lot of our time working on. So as an IT practitioner within a technology company, is that different than being, say, an IT practitioner at, you know, a manufacturer or financial services? There's largely IT, you know, technology companies, but are there differences? Are there similarities? And what are they? So do you mean what is it like being the IT guy when all of your customers know more about technology than you do? Or at least they think they do. Well, I told somebody the other day, my entire career, I'd had customers that thought they knew more than me and for the first time, since coming to Red Hat, I've got some of that to actually do. So, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it is an interesting challenge. It's a challenge for us because, you know, we endeavor to, we call it our customer one program. We try to use a lot of our own tools in the beta stage and so that creates some interesting and fun challenges but also just trying to enable a dynamic organization creates a lot of challenges. Okay, so they used to call it the dog fooding, you know, but now it's drink your own champagne. Yeah, I've been told to use that term now. So the first time I heard it was Oliver Busman, the CIO at SAP, we're at SAP Sapphire. He said, no, no, no, we don't eat dog food here. We drink champagne. Like, of course, it's SAP. Right. So, okay, so you are sort of a proving ground for a lot of the technology guys, so that carries a lot of weight, right? I mean, you know, you're given feedback and it's direct, hey, this doesn't work the way it's supposed to. Yeah, no, it is, I mean, in the places where, you know, our IT job overlaps with Red Hat products. We aspire to do that. We use our own middleware, Linux, obviously, and over the last year or now, we've been using a lot of our own cloud tools like OpenShift to deploy our applications and this year, we're making moves with our OpenStack platform. And how's it working for you? It's all working really well, I mean, we're really excited with the things we're seeing and, you know, excited to see sort of what's going to happen as some of these tools get out there a little more probably. Yeah, I mean, while you guys are early adopters, you have to be the proving ground, right? Yeah, yeah. It doesn't work in your shop. You know, that's a problem. No, it's interesting, I mean, we try to prove out our own tools, but one of the things that, you know, led us to sort of serve us now is we also are trying to be improving ground just around cloud in general. As Red Hat looks to go to the cloud as an organization, we as an IT shop are making a big push into the cloud. So that extends all the way up from our own infrastructure as a service, platform as a service tools that we offer, but also into being an early and heavy adopter of software as a service tool. So you're extensively using cloud for infrastructure as a service? Is that what I'm doing for her? We're doing some things there and this year we're looking to do more, you know, with our own OpenStack product. Yeah, okay. So let's talk a little bit about service now and what you're doing. I think you said you've been a service now customer for a couple of years. Yeah, it's been a couple of years now. What was the impetus to bring it in? What was life like before and how did it change? Yeah, we had a system that I believe was referred to in one of our IT town halls by an associate as Soulcrushing. That sucked the life right out of you. That was our impetus for change. Somebody called it the dementors. I saw that somewhere. Yeah, and it was a legacy IT service management tool. As a growing organization, we felt like we need a lot more flexibility. We need to be able to move faster. And we had the vision then at a very early stage of what you've heard, talked about from service now as it relates to enterprise service management. Tools that would not just work for IT but something we could take across the enterprise. And we just weren't finding that within our existing tools. So we looked at some different options and showed service now. So talk a little bit about how it's actually worked. We just had Atticus on from Intuit. He's just getting started on this journey. You've been at it for a couple of years. Are people executing the vision that Frank and Fred have laid out in terms of building these applications, getting the productivity gains, changing the way that they look about their work in value add people? I think that's absolutely true. And I'd also like to think to some extent that what Frank and Fred are talking about is to some extent driven by what we as customers have begun to do with the tool. I think a lot of us began to see the enterprise opportunity there early on. And so we're really seeing that being lived out in the enterprise space. We have put a number of different departments on it. We've got others that we're looking at doing. We see the opportunity to move past that and move into more of a portals kind of a space where it's a solution. In other words, I'm a new hire. Here's my set of services. I'm a manager. Here's my set of services. And then we also are looking at things that we can do with respect to continue the automation that you heard talked about and the orchestration, interfacing that with what we're doing from a cloud perspective to be able to spin up cloud services. Does anybody broke it? Does anyone put in some ridiculous application that makes too many calls to something and just, you know, I love the citizen developer angle and I love that people are out there trying things and I book you around a little bit myself. But I always wonder if somebody, you know, I'm hitting the database a little bit too frequently and causing some angst. We haven't run into that. And where we're at in our journey is we've not really pushed heavily into the citizen developer space yet. So ask me again next year. I'm sure I'll have those stories to tell. But one of the things we're trying to do with it though is to take some of the things that we know as being a fairly disciplined IT execution shop and bring some of those same disciplines into this tool. So without breaking the agility of the tool, making sure we have good, you know, project management, agile and release kinds of practices around the tool. Well, you know, you're talking about the development side. So I'm always intrigued by the notion of, you know, pass. Right? Somebody said to me pass, the artist formerly known as middleware. And, but there's sort of interesting things bubbling up, right? You got, so the infrastructure as a service plus, you got the sort of SaaS minus, right? You guys are doing your thing. So I would imagine, given that you're drinking your own champagne, you're going to be pretty focused on your own development tools. But do you see something like service now potentially for certain service oriented applications? No, absolutely. Finding its way in. Absolutely. And we do that today with other types of tools like this, historically, where things that are really germane to the tool and the sets of services the tool provides, a lot of that development happens around that tool, both with workflows as a good example, also customizing the user interface. So we see a lot of opportunity there. And then behind all that or underneath it, we have a fairly robust set of middleware, based on our own products, obviously. Enterprise service plus and SOA services that sit behind that to support it. So service now, these events are interesting. Our first one was last year in Vegas at the Aria. And we saw these cakes, these pictures of cakes and people baking cakes. And we heard stories of cakes. We're like, what is that? And people are like, oh, we bake cakes because we're so happy. We make a cake, send it to service now. We love these guys. They've changed our lives and we're like, really? And they clapped our product demos, which is very rare. You see it at some other, you see it at Tableau, you see it at Splunk, you see it at ServiceNow, but it's very rare at some of the large three letter companies to see that, right? So my question is, have there been any of those sort of bake a cake moments for you and what were they? I'm feeling bad, I haven't sent anybody a cake. You didn't bake a cake? I didn't send a cake, I'm feeling a little guilty now. No, we definitely are seeing that. I mean, it excites us because as you mentioned at our Red Hat event, we see that same kind of right zealous nature and passion about the tools. And it's exciting to see that around this tool and we do feel some of that. I mean, we've seen it as we were able to go out outside of IT and start offering service management capabilities to other groups. Things that before would have, we'd have spent months and months trying to find the right tool, a function specific tool, or even worse, we'd have gone off and built something from scratch that we could just offer that capability out with a reasonable, I'd say modest amount of customization. That's pretty exciting. Perhaps I owe somebody a cake. How do you measure, do you measure productivity of the staff and the impact that these types of initiatives are having? I think we're a fairly foundational level with that right now. I mean, we think about it just relative and sort of anecdotally relative to what the past would have been. I've been on IT for longer than I'll mention here and give away my age, but we sort of historically have seen when you go out to automate workflows and anything that had a work process in it, you'd be spending months to a year plus to begin to do something to help our business customers with that. And the fact that we can turn that down to months and now even weeks sometimes is, that's pretty substantial. So we haven't measured that, but that's a time to value metrics. It's time to value and then it's also the opportunity cost. We as an IT shop, supporting a growing organization, there's a lot of things we're trying to do that invest time and energy in high value places to enable the Red Hat business. Process management is certainly important and an important piece of that, but time we spend there is time we can't spend as an IT shop doing things that help us get products to market, for example. So what's next with you guys? Either on service now or not, that's exciting you. Right. Well, associate productivity is something that we've begun to focus on. Because of our growth, I think the stat was our, we grew by about 20% over the last year, so 1,000 plus people walking around that were completely new. I tell people to imagine what their first year was like and trying to figure out how to be productive and multiply at times of 1,000, that's what we're dealing with. So productivity has become really important to us and so we're looking at a number of cloud-based type solutions to help with that and a lot of things around collaboration and communication that we think are important to us, but a critical layer of that is the knowledge, enablement and process enablement and we think service now, it already is and we think it can play a much, much larger role there, of course. Excellent. Mike, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It's a really pleasure seeing you. Happy to be here. Keep it right there, everybody. Pound No 14 is the hashtag. Jeff Frick and I will be right back. This is theCUBE.