 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Knowledge 16, brought to you by ServiceNow. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. Welcome back to Knowledge 16 everybody. This is theCUBE, we go wall to wall coverage, we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, this is day one for us, we'll be going three days of knowledge extraction from Knowledge 16. Ray Wong is here, he's the founder and principal analyst and chairman of Constellation Research, up and coming, smoking hot research company, Ray, always a pleasure to see you, thanks for coming on. Hey, excited to be here, man, it's been a world-win week of events, so. I'll say, so you were down at Sapphire, right? You were over at Tampa at Amplify, and. I'm off the N suite after this, I mean, this is crazy. Normal week for you, right? It's a normal week for all of us, I mean. So you were telling us off camera that you were at one of the earlier knowledge events down in San Diego, so you got a lot of experience with this company. You know, it was in a tent, it was outside, they had decked it out, I think it was like a park, I'm not even sure what it was, I just, but I remember there was once it was 150 people, next it was like 500 people, three years later, it was pretty wild. So they've come out of the blue, and really escalated a lot of momentum, the latest billion dollar software company with a plan to get to four billion, so stepping back a second, just looking at the software landscape, one has to be impressed with the progress that ServiceNow has made, what's your take on the industry and ServiceNow in particular? Well, I think what people don't understand is ServiceNow is a platform, right? There's a business model platform, or the way that we used to look at PEGA, or the way we used to look at a lot of those companies that were actually sitting in the middle of that orchestration. What's changed is because everything's in the cloud, what we now have the ability to do is abstract, orchestrate and do it in a way that we've never seen before, right? So you can take specific business problems, take the heart of what's actually happening on the idol piece, use it to not just manage the process, but also do the analytics and the monitoring. So when we get to things like IoT, IoT is really about having a set of smart services and being able to put that in a construct is a lot of the opportunity that we see going forward. So I said three years ago in theCUBE that after I saw the platform capabilities, I said, wow, this is a collision course with Salesforce. Investors Business Daily wrote an article today, a collision course with Salesforce, so I'm glad they caught up. They did the research, they did the research. But, I mean, you can kind of see it coming together. Now, Frank lays out this vision this morning of you got the ERP estate, the CRM estate, and IoT or service management rather, kind of bridging those two. How do you see it? No, we definitely see this as a platform play. Now, here's what's interesting is that lots of the developments, and you see this all the time, it's been happening in the app dev side of the house. Package apps have kind of been at a standstill for innovation compared to what's going on on the custom side. And so every so often we see that flip on platforms. This is the beginning of that flip. Yeah, more than one person said IoT is going to be the end of the app era, right? Because we're going to put all the intelligence into the interaction, you won't have to go to the specific app. No, and the fact is what becomes important is the ability to orchestration, the intelligence, the recommendation. And what you want to be able to get to is the part where I'm making the right set of recommendations to augment the next set of processes. That's what gets really powerful. And these platforms that are emerging on what's in the next set of clouds, that's going to be where we're going to see a lot of this advancement. So the API essentially becomes the product? Is that kind of? It's the orchestration of the APIs, the way the context is delivered against those APIs. And more importantly, how we actually pull together those journeys. Like a couple of things that we talk about all the time, mass personalization and scale, you need lots of context, right? So roles, relationship, identity, weather, location, time, all important, then choose your own adventure journeys, the ability to actually abstract different processes from different places and bring them together. And then more importantly, what we call intention-driven design, which is I'm going to give you three or four choices, learn over time, take that machine learning and then apply that to next set of recommendations and then start building against that. And that power sits in the network, that power sits in these new platforms. So you're here speaking to the service now, customers about customer experience, right? It's something we hear a lot about, you're an expert in that space. What did you say? What was the reaction? What was the feedback? Well, I think the important thing is we're seeing new business models. I mean, you've heard me say this before. It's we're in a post-sale, on-demand attention economy. And what that means is everything after the sale is what's happening right now. That's the service, that's the experience piece. The on-demand pieces, we're accessing smaller and smaller slices maybe not even a product, a service, maybe not even a service, an insight, maybe not even an insight, an experience. And then more importantly, it's an attention economy. If you're not capturing my time and attention, which is mind share, or if you're not saving me time and money, I don't care. And that's what we're in. We're in these business models that are built around this. Is it interesting, came out of the Oracle Marketing Cloud shows, well, same thing, just smaller and smaller slices of attention based on the way you interact with all the other applications you have. You don't have time to give somebody the big story. You've got to get them when you can. They could be standing in line, they look at their phone, they're in the middle of their kids switching in into the baseball game and you've got to get in that little tiny window. That in-between time is so important because if you don't close there, you lose them, right? And it's not for something really big, it's to move them along the needle down the journey. Correct. What do you make of this, Dave Wright was just talking about the new state of work. IBM has been talking about a new way to work in he is kind of running the collaboration group now. You talk about millennials and how they work. What are you seeing in state of work? Well, a lot of the research we're looking on the future of work is by one of my colleagues, Alan Lepofsky. And what he's been really looking at is this shift in terms of conversations as a service. He's been looking at the shift in terms of intelligent collaboration, right? And all this stuff is actually leading to the point where we're actually using technology to augment our ability to do decisions, handle a lot more automation than we had in before, but then cognitive assistance pop up, right? And they help make us smarter and they learn from our different interactions and all that's starting to come into the workplace which is exciting and a little bit creepy and scary at the same time. So what's new with Constellation? You guys are growing, bringing on new analysts, cranking out a bunch of research, your event keeps growing. Give us the update on Constellation. You know, I think the big thing is this digital transformation story we've been talking about for the last five to six years is huge. The next set is really not about transformation. It's about finding growth in times where there is no growth. That's where we're going to talk about the next five years at our conference, really talking about what are those factors, right? We've got to jumpstart growth. Global GDP is growing two to 3% at best. Every company has a target of like five to 10. Someone's going to lose and it's going to be very interesting. So you think that growth is going to come through productivity improvements or investments in technology that actually drive sort of new productivity levels? Or taking it away from someone else? I think we're taking it away from someone else. That's what I'm really scared about that. There's smart growth that's sustainable and it helps people with the jobs and the job transitions. And there's what we've been doing which is a lot of destructive growth which is actually limiting a lot of the jobs and actually making it harder to grow in the long run. Well, so yeah, we've talked about this in theCUBE a lot and machines replacing humans which they've always replaced humans but it seems to be now happening at the cognitive level. And that's scary. I know you guys do valleywags. VCs are a little nervous right now. You guys, are you more sanguine than the VCs? Well, we have these three big areas where we see a lot of investment. Deep learning happens to be one of them, right? We see a lot of medicine going on. Some of the smartest people I know are all focused in on deep learning. Very interesting thing. If you look at that University of California Irvine, there's a whole department around this artificial intelligence that just lifted itself up and became a private corporation, right? So there's very interesting things there. There's nanotech, which is also some very interesting things on the material science piece that's also playing a big role. And then of course there's stem cells on the biotech piece. Those three things are converging and it's more than just building out the Star Trek roadmap that Apple's been doing. It's a lot bigger than that. There's some big societal shifts that are happening. What's next for you? You say you're heading to NetSuite. Where can we find Ray Wong? I'm off to Sweet World next. There's a monotate next week. There's a whole bunch of other events picking up in June as well as you're going to be at them. But I think we do our retreat every year. At the end of the year, May, June, we're going to be at Stanford, the faculty club, all the constellation folks get together. And then we go back out into the field and it's a crazy summer as well. I mean, I don't even know when this stops. It doesn't, it's professional. You can always find them on Twitter though, that's for sure. But I look for you guys. Where you're at is where the events are. Well, hopefully our paths will continue to cross. We love having you on theCUBE. Always a great guest. Really appreciate your time. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me. Have a great conference. Safe travels. Keep right there, everybody. We'll be back after this short break. This is theCUBE, we're live from Knowledge 16. Right back.