 from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18 here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Dave Vellante. We're joined by Michael DePolito. He is the VP of Run Services at Nationwide Insurance. He's coming to us straight from Columbus, Ohio. So thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me, appreciate it. So tell our viewers a little bit about what you do. What is Run Services? What do you do at Nationwide? Sure, yes. We are a part of what we call our Infrastructure and Operations Group, and we're really an enterprise services group. Basically in my responsibility, I have responsibility over our data centers, over what we call our enterprise command centers. Pretty much the eyes on glass, 24 by seven operations that kind of keeps everything running. Also have responsibility for all our run processes. So our ITSM processes, both from a process ownership and process management. So that's where ServiceNow really comes in. So we've talked about this before, Mike. It's just in terms of the insurance business, some of the things that are driving that business. I mean, we always talk about digital disruption, but it's really insurance business hasn't really been digitally disrupted. Maybe it's coming, not maybe, I'm sure it's coming. But what's driving your business today and how important, important is the wrong word, how much of a factor is digital in terms of the decisions that you make on a day-to-day basis? Well, it's huge. You know, as you probably heard, we're really at a big inflection point in the world today. And we're going to be disrupted and we actually focus on how can we disrupt ourselves because somebody else is going to. You know, it's just a matter of time until Amazon wants to get into the insurance business, right? And so now we laugh, but you know. They're planning it. Selling groceries. So you're not really competing with other insurance carriers anymore. You're competing with Amazon and Google for that experience, you know, that user experience, that ease of use, that direct interaction and you know, when you think about it, home and auto insurance, it's kind of a commodity. It's like buying your gas and electric. So you've got to be able to create that direct experience to our members, to our consumers, just like an Amazon would. I wonder, we hear so much of these buzz words at this conference, but also just in general in the technology industry, automation, streamlining, this emphasis on customer experience. How did these play in to your digital transformation in terms of what you're thinking about it nationwide? Yeah, right now, one of our big drivers is what we call the need for speed. Speed is everything right now, in terms of staying competitive, coming out with features as fast as possible. And when you think about it, the only way to really get fast is you have to be automated, right? You can't be manual and fast. So really now we have to look at how can we automate everything and how do we treat infrastructure like software, basically, like code, and we can roll out changes any time, any day, any hour, versus the old days when you have these big releases, like once a month of your applications. Those days are kind of gone. So I got to ask you about, one of the things that Cloud brought was this notion of self-service. And there's certainly pressure for customers to do self-service. You see that. They're going to comparison shop. They're going to pick their package, et cetera. So that's a part of the disruption. Another part is potentially on the actuarial side, the actuarial robots. So what do you see happening there and how is that affecting your business? That actually is an interesting use case. That's probably where big data is really coming into play. So for example, in auto insurance, your rates change every six months, right? And what we do is we look backwards and say, how did you drive over those last six months? Did you have accidents? Did you have tickets? You know, et cetera. And then we price you accordingly. Well, now with the information, the data we can get out of your vehicle 24 by seven, we can price you every day. So we can look at basically what's called metered insurance or insurance by the mile that we use the technology to enable that kind of a pricing model. And I would imagine you're at the point where you can begin to predict riskier situations and anticipate it. Just kind of like they do in healthcare, right? So, you know, not much different, but yeah, that's definitely a new thing coming, right? Go ahead. You're collecting all of this data. I mean, and this is the thing about the collection of the data is the easy part really. But it's really knowing what the data is telling you and then how to act on the data in the right way. So is it a lot of trial and error? How are you determining what insights are the actionable ones? Well, as you know, a very popular skill out there are data scientists, data and analytics. That's huge right now. So getting people who have that skill to understand the so what from the data and to be able to make good decisions on it and then how do you even automate that? So that's a big field right now, actually. We're obviously ways away, but you see it in the news pretty much every day. You go to Silicon Valley, you can't miss it. What's the conversation like around autonomous vehicles? Because everybody says, well, the problem is who's liable if something goes wrong and then you see that big accident, the Uber situation. What's the conversation like internally around that? It's going to be here sooner than you think. It's already here. You're seeing it more and more. You're seeing every car getting smarter now. It's getting closer and closer. And it's an inevitable future. We are going to have those. And so now we have to look at what is going to be the actual model around that? We'll figure that out. But as you know, in a lot of these industries, the technology has really been ahead of the regulation. So when Uber came out, there were basically discussions about coverage and liability and all those kinds of things. So normally in any fast-paced technology, usually it leads and then the rest follows. But it'll get figured out. And I think you will figure it out because you guys are good with numbers. Insurance companies can always figure out the cost of insuring something. But should we envision kind of a hybrid shared risk model between the consumer and the technology supplier? Or do you think it's all going to be in the consumer? Can you? Well, it's hard to say exactly. But we know there will be some compression in insurance because of it. And really, you might get to the point where the software is what gets insured and not the person. Right, right. You know, we're already talking to automakers about how do you insure the actual vehicle versus the person driving it because they're not driving it anymore. That's got to, that's the shock to the 100-year-plus-year-old system, isn't it? Absolutely. That's why, you know, again, it was a shock when people said, you mean we're not going to use horses anymore? Yeah. You know, so. Good point. You know, you go through time and there's these big revolutions that happen and I think we're approaching one. Talk about the service now situation. We've talked about your journey before, but maybe remind us of that, where you are, what you thought of the new announcements today. Maybe give us an update. Yeah, we're excited. You know, we've been on service now for almost three years. Over the last year, we've made tremendous progress in terms of, we have a program now called IT Simplification. And it'll shout out to my partner, Rick Schneer, who is my AVP who runs the platform for us. They do a great job. I'm kind of like the business partner to them. Right now, what we're doing is, it's a focus on configuration management and we're slowly retiring legacy systems and repositories across the company into the one single source which is in service now. We're also really focused on hardware and software asset management, getting an understanding of all the assets we own and constantly scanning the network to understand who's connecting in and if it's a threat, if it's a good guy or a bad guy, that's important, very important right now. And then lastly, like I said, the need for speed, how can our operation side support this need for increased pace of development, right? Because once you put it in, it's got to operate, right? And it's got to run. So where are you at today? Mostly, so ITSM, doing sec ops? Or did I infer that or no? Yeah, we have all the ITSM in. Actually, we're moving to Kingston this weekend. We're doing that upgrade. We are involved with the HR module. We're bringing in Workday as our platform in July and ServiceNow will integrate with that. We're looking at the portfolio management. So now that we have the ITSM under control, we're slowly looking at where else can ServiceNow play for us? Cloud's a big play for us. So we're right now working with a cloud provider and then there's a lot of APIs and interfacing back into ServiceNow. So that's going to be important for us. You're saying for infrastructure? Cloud for infrastructure or infrastructure as a service? Correct. Right now, well, we focus on SaaS first. Anything that can be SaaS, we want to go SaaS. ServiceNow is a perfect example. Salesforce.com, all those kinds of SaaS solutions. Then IaaS and PAS are also important, right? So right now, by the end of 2018, we'll only be about probably 10% external cloud and 90% on-prem. But three years from now, it'll be the other way around. We'll probably be 90% cloud. Awesome. What keeps you coming back to knowledge? You know, it's just the look at this crowd. I mean, the networking, the peers you meet and you know, it's been so great because you have that time of year where you can share ideas, share stories and all that. You know, where ServiceNow is going with the platform is always, you know, so interesting and appealing. We're really interested in hearing and getting to that agent workspace, which I think would be great for internal, like our help desk services. So more automation, you know, just in line with where we're going. We, you know, I think it's a great platform for that. Great. Well, Michael, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It's been great talking to you. Thanks, enjoyed it. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from theCUBE's coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18 just after this.