 This is Dave Vellante, I'm with Wikibon.org and I'm here with my co-host Jeff Frick. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE where we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, we're bringing the best guests that we can find. Marina Levinson is here. She's a former CIO and she's the founder and CEO of the CIO advisory group, a strategic consultancy that advises CIOs. She's here helping out with the CIO decisions sub-conference, which is at the Knowledge event. Marina, welcome to theCUBE. Well, thank you. Thank you for having me. Yes, this is a great event. We understand there's sort of an event within the event. We haven't really talked about that much today. So first of all, tell us a little bit about your organization. You're a longtime CIO, former CIO of NetApp. And Palm before that. And Palm before that. And so you've worked at some very large companies, large growing companies. And so tell us about yourself and about your organization. Sure. So I've been in the IT industry not to age myself over 25 years. And as you mentioned, worked in a fairly large technology companies. 3Com, Palm, NetApp was a CIO for more than 12 years. And then at the end of 2011, I left corporate world and started my own company called CIO Advisory Group. And really the objective is to work with corporate clients as well as private equity and venture capital and help them understand how to properly position their product offerings in the enterprise IT space, specifically how to effectively sell to CIOs and senior IT decision makers. So taking all the experience that I had when I was in the captain's seat and actually coaching and teaching how to do it properly and kind of the reverse role that I'm playing right now. This is going to be an excellent segment. So we're going to get some free advice here, if you're willing to at least, you know, share with the audience. I give my advice freely. Because there's no shortage of demand. But if you really want to... You can teach free advice, but give it freely. If you really want to get behind the velvet curtain, you're going to have to, you know, check out Marina's website. But so before we get into some of the things that you're doing with ServiceNow and some of your clients, let's talk about the CIO Decisions Conference. What's that all about here? I know you were hosting a panel, but can you share with our audience what went on there today? Absolutely. It's really more of an executive track within the Knowledge 13 event. And we invited senior leaders, senior directors, VP, CIOs to attend that decision, CIO Decisions 13 track. Very much focused on not just ServiceNow, but what's happening in the industry as a whole. What are the trends? What are the opportunities to innovate for ITC? We had a great representation from VCs, Sequoia Capital Partners were here, they did a great job talking about what they're investing in, generated a lot of interest in the part of CIOs and other senior IT decision makers. I personally facilitated a panel on IT innovation and how the role of IT and CIOs changing right now. And what CIOs need to be successful in this new world of mobile, social, cloud, SaaS, big data. Yeah, so as a long time CIO, you've seen the technologies, technologies come, technologies go. That's right. There's always going to be a new technology around the corner. CIOs always tell me it's about people, the process, yeah, and the technology. And the technology. But the people in the process are the hardest part. Having said that, technology is the fun part, the part that gets the headlines. And I think it's different right now. There are two big differences I see. First of all, the rate of technology, new technologies that are being delivered in the marketplace is just unprecedented and Sequoia Capital talked about that. The barrier to entry for startups to deliver product to the marketplace has been reduced by 90%. So we get a lot of technology moving in our direction. Secondly, if you look at CIO profile, let's say even five years ago, CIOs tend to be the only buyers of information technology, maybe with an exception of engineering, but they were key decision makers in all matters related to selecting, purchasing, implementing technology. That has drastically changed in the last five years, thanks to SaaS, thanks to cloud, you see executives from line of business, whether it's sales, whether it's marketing, whether it's HR, actually venturing into the new brave world of technology and buying that technology and bringing it into the organization. It is unsettling for some CIOs, but I think it's actually a positive trend because it really brings into the technology umbrella not just the IT folks, but a lot of people from the business are very interested in the new capabilities that this technology can deliver. So what I advise CIOs that this is really an opportunity, it's really not bad news for CIOs that they lost that type of control in terms of the purse strings and enterprises will win if the line of business and CIOs will partner very tightly together and start delivering capabilities with agility of SaaS and cloud, but also with some overseeing from CIOs to ensure that security, privacy, integration, architecture is taking care of. So you are seeing a lot of disruption, I mean probably as much as we've ever seen in this business. Absolutely. You've got the hyperscale guys, Amazon is completely changing retail, financial services is getting overturned, it's very exciting. So what are some of the big mega trends that you're tracking for your clients? So SaaS and cloud is really no longer emerging trends as far as I'm concerned. They're here, I was actually very impressed to see how many people attended ServiceNow conference. A little bit trivia in my linkage to ServiceNow when I was at NetApp, CIO of NetApp, I selected ServiceNow in 2010. We implemented ServiceNow in early 2011, very successful implementation, short, sweet, it's being used right now not just in IT but it's being used in HR and real estate at NetApp, so very successful implementation. And I see that SaaS is no longer emerging, it's almost like if you are not investing in Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday and other emerging SaaS products and solutions, you're kind of falling behind from the strategy perspective. So cloud and SaaS are here to stay, mobile with consumerization of IT with everyone carrying their own devices, bring your own device to work is no longer an option. Mobility is here and IT will have to respond. Some of the leaders responding and creating a structure for bring your own device to work, others just basically ignoring it and thinking it doesn't exist but mobility is a huge avalanche of technology that's coming our way. And let me tell you, I was an early adopter of mobile technologies, I was the first CIO at Palm in early days, late 90s, early 2000s and we clearly were ahead of our time but we did a lot of very innovative work with mobile technologies that now being deployed as a mainstream because of iOS and Android really penetrating the market. So having spent so much time in the heart of Silicon Valley and just seeing all these disruptions and innovation, what do you think CIOs can learn from say these web giants like what I call the hyperscale guys, Google, Facebook, Amazon, so what can they learn from them and what should they be careful about trying to mimic them? That's a very interesting question. So if you look at the business model of Google's and Facebook's and Yahoo's, these guys invest a lot in engineering. Very few companies can invest in engineer solutions that they did either at Amazon or at Google so your typical enterprise probably will not have the capabilities to develop the technology. They will have to select a third party provider whether it's Amazon, whether it's Google or someone else to actually deliver those services to them. What they can learn is clearly that innovation is endless. It's amazing what Google is doing and some of it might not even be applicable to enterprise IT but when I look at this Google Glass or self-driving car, I get excited just because it's so innovative and we're fortunate in the United States to have a company like that that has the resources to invest in those type of innovations but this is kind of 30 feet view and IT people usually are more down to earth but for them again looking into investing in cloud and SaaS, investing in mobile is definitely something that they need to be looking at. Big data, very appropriate for some industries but I think it's still there is a lot of hype around big data that's still very much of an emerging trend. So it's interesting what you're saying about and you're right on I think that the large enterprises except maybe some of the largest financial services companies really just don't have the engineering resources to mimic what the Googles and the Facebooks are doing and maybe even those guys don't. So you've got to rely on an ecosystem of partners and I see service now as playing that type of role, Frank talks about automation as opposed to just sort of managing humans and so it seems like that's a new wave within enterprise IT whether it's companies like your former company or IBM, HP, ServiceNow, bringing in a layer that can deliver those engineering resources and help you drive new efficiencies and automation in your business. What's exciting is IT could actually focus on business capabilities. They don't need to worry anymore about infrastructure and designing, architecting and running infrastructure within their four walls. They can actually by leveraging SaaS and cloud have that done by third party providers and IT can really focus on building relationships with the business partners, understanding what their business clients want from business capabilities and focus on delivering that. And actually the cycle time is dramatically shorter. When I was growing up as a CIO, we always said, well, projects shouldn't take more than a year. And then we said projects shouldn't take more than six. Seriously, yeah, I know I'm showing my age. You've worked with Wurman-Hoban, right, didn't you? No. George's. No, Tom. Short ROI. Short ROI. And now I mean three months is kind of a long time because with this DevOps new trend of DevOps, you can actually deliver capabilities on a daily basis and that's what Facebook is doing. Clearly, I think IT people need to be smart about how they deliver innovation. What I said during my panel with CIOs when they asked me how do you drive innovation into the organization, I told them, please don't select your most mission critical revenue generating system and try to experiment with that, otherwise you will be probably looking for a different type of badge very, very soon. But select something that is meaningful to your customers, but it's not going to kill the company and start small, deliver fast, succeed fast or fail fast and then move on. So talk a little bit about how kind of the shadow IT and these alternate IT resources that are available with a credit card and a login have really impacted the CIO and their teams kind of shift the focus that we really need to serve our customers as customers because we actually are competing with other companies that treat them as customers, they're not a cat of audience anymore and they will not wait for six months to provision a server for development. Absolutely. And I think if you look at what are the reasons why shadow IT organizations have been created, they were born out of frustration that IT couldn't deliver what the business wanted to implement from the business capabilities perspective. And now that shadow IT is there, I think it's a smart thing for CIOs to do and IT to do to partner with them and again help them, enable them versus saying no. The marketing message of service now, the end of no and the beginning of now is actually a fantastic line and it can be applied to much more than just service now. It's truly an ability, SaaS and Cloud gives IT an ability to deliver faster and say yes to many more things than historically they were able to do. So what are your thoughts on, you're here at the conference, you're helping out with their panel at the decisions conference, what do you tell CIOs, do you sort of, you've got a strong personality and you're forceful and yeah, it's good. If I were CIO at the end of the table, I'd say, I'm going to listen to this, she knows what she's talking about. Or else. Or else. So what's your advice, are you telling them, look, stop with the non-differentiated heavy lifting, this is a no brainer, put this in and move on, or are you more selective with your advice? I am pretty strong when it comes to giving advice to CIOs because I truly believe that we are in the time of change and there are two types of CIOs. First type is really very comfortable in running everything on premise, being in total control, just basically running the business and kind of holding on for their ideal life and trying to put their head in the sand and forget that things are happening around them. And I think these people will probably die out, like dinosaurs, exactly, exactly. And then there are some other CIOs that are actually embracing change and that are driving innovation into their respective companies. I work a lot with CIOs like that, I actually build and lead advisory, CIO advisory boards for companies and I try to attract CIOs that are thought leaders, that are not maintainers, people that actually are builders and they are not afraid to work with startups and then they are not afraid to take risks and as a result they demonstrate courage but they also deliver terrific benefits to their respective companies. Okay, so specifically as it relates to something like a service now platform, will you advise people to consider something like that or are you? No doubt. Absolutely. So you are very clear in your recommendations. I put my money where my mouth is because I selected service now in 2010. We deployed it in 2011, actually have my form on NetApp folks that I'm going to have drinks afterwards and it's been a very good experience for us. If I can just name names, or maybe I shouldn't be naming names, we had a legacy system. We had a legacy system, there are very few options so you can guess. We were forced with a decision of upgrading that legacy system and what I asked my team to do is to compare the cost of the upgrade of that legacy system with green field implementation of service now and when we purely looked at the numbers, forget about the capabilities that are significantly better, just purely looking at the numbers it was either a wash or a little bit better service now wins. So for us it was a no-brainer and my advice to CIOs, if you have this choice that you need to make in terms of upgrading your legacy, to me there is no choice. Service now is the only game in town for IT service management. What did you do with the old stuff is that we have to save the old stuff, we have to save the old stuff, we need to migrate the data, we need to migrate the processes. We didn't have an issue and maybe if you purchased something six months ago you are faced with writing off assets, we didn't have that issue, we had an asset that was fully depreciated and we needed to pay to upgrade so it was a very easy choice, clearly if you have to write off millions and millions of dollars you have to work with your accounting partners to make sure you don't screw this up. The data and the history, I was involved in a project where they were migrating from legacy to some of the stuff and it was religiously... Nobody ever wants to migrate, right? Religious rewards to migrate and it's like just keep it in read-only mode for a while and before you know it you won't be reading it anymore. That's what we did, we selectively converted, obviously all the open items were converted but we didn't take all the history because the company was growing so fast, some of the history was not really relevant and we were building new capabilities using service now so it was easy for us to say we're going to leave that behind as a read-only and I think that was a good decision. NetApp is a pretty forward-thinking company, a very open-minded company. Yeah, at NetApp 25-30% now probably even more of my assets were SaaS and Cloud because we believed in that approach and that architecture. Right. Marina, well listen, I really appreciate you coming on, great advice. Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me. If they want to get some, go deeper, it's CIO Advisory Group. Yes, send me a message Marina at CIOadvisoryGroup.com, CIO Advisory Group is one word and I check my email messages more often than I probably should so I still have my enterprise IT genes in me. And it's a great... Though I don't sleep with my mobile phone anymore. Yeah. The only reason I do is because it's my alarm, otherwise I wouldn't. And you've got a great list of stuff that you do here on your website, M&A, IT strategy, cloud strategy, SaaS deployment, CIO Advisory Board creation and that's a great benefit for a lot of the vendors. Technology companies. Oh, I have to ask you, before we go, talk to the vendor community out there for a minute. What drives you crazy about the vendor? What advice would you give to vendors if they want to market and sell to CIOs? What shouldn't they do and what should they do? Actually, I actually provide some coaching to sales organizations during their kickoffs because certainly you can imagine in 25 years and 12 being a CIO, I was sold to by absolutely everyone, big and small, and I have a list of funny stories that we're not going to tell today but believe me there are some shocking stories. Good seats at the Giants game anytime you want. But seriously, one thing that technology vendors should do better is to really understand what business problems they need to solve for that particular individual. If you get an audience with a CIO, you usually have 20 minutes to impress that person and if you're not prepared, if you come with a question, my favorite, asking a CIO, so tell us what is it that you need or what your problems are. Stupidest question in sales. One of the stupidest, probably not the stupidest, but pretty close. So being prepared, learning and making sure that the vendor solution fits the problem that the company has is just absolutely number one. The law that enterprise sales people need to learn very early on. Be prepared, really focus on making CIOs successful. So what I tell people, hopefully this is not too creepy, Google the company, Google the CIO, understand what the CIO is interested in. Is this person comfortable without sourcing or uncomfortable without sourcing? Do these people, is this person embracing new technologies or risk averse? And based on that, frankly, just have to manage and adopt your pitch to the style of the CIO. Do your homework, don't worry so much about your power points, worry more about your customer. And really try to figure out how to make the CIO successful with your solutions. Marina, great advice, really appreciate you coming on the Cube and spending so much time with us and good luck with your organization and your initiatives. Thank you very much. Pleasure to meet you. All right, everybody, keep it right there. We'll be right back to wrap today. Thank you everyone at ServiceNow Knowledge. We're here at the ARIA in Las Vegas. We'll be right back after this short break. All right.