 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Knowledge 16, brought to you by ServiceNow. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. Everybody, welcome back to Knowledge 16. This is theCUBE. theCUBE is SiliconANGLE's flagship product. We go out to the events. We try to find that signal and extract it from the noise. Jason Wohan is here. He's a longtime CUBE guest, formerly of Cloud Sherpas, now with Accenture. Jason, it's great to see you again. Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here. So you got a little spring in your step. You know it. New chapter, like you said, same story though. Yep, so our story began really back in 2009 with a company called Navigus, a very boutique ServiceNow consulting company. Really focused on helping customers adopt that initial implementation of ServiceNow. We ended that journey with 30 people getting acquired by Cloud Sherpas, 1-1-20-13, and moving that to a couple hundred people. And now moving to November of last year being acquired by Accenture, and now over 1,100 people dedicated to the service now practice globally. And the single largest concentration of ServiceNow certifications across the globe, over 800. So Accenture is going for a serious integration. We've been talking this week about you guys aren't messing around, taking Cloud Sherpas, going hard, aligning with the industries. Can you talk about the integration? How's it going? What's that been like? Yeah, so we started our integration in November of 2015. We completed our integration April of this year, April 1st, actually. It's gone very well. We're continuing to hold a lot of the core tenants that allowed us to be very successful from a Cloud Sherpas perspective. Our regionalized selling teams, our demand management teams, et cetera. They're going to be and are a part of our Go Forward ServiceNow practice and Accenture. But on top of that, obviously aligning by industry, aligning to those client account teams that Accenture's so known for. And then bringing forward the first industry offerings in the ServiceNow space. We're starting with retail, higher ed, financial services, media and telecom. And I'll just say that that's going to be a massive opportunity for us. It lines squarely up with the way that Accenture does business. And it allows us to take and distill that intellectual property that we've been building in the ServiceNow platform since 2009. And to aggregate that by industry so that customers can get a much better context from start to middle to finish of their journey of ServiceNow. Can you talk a little bit more about the sort of value that you're adding on top of the ServiceNow platform? Can you maybe give us some examples? Yeah, so there's a number of different spaces, but we try to line it up the same way ServiceNow does. So there's the IT service management component and of course in our retail industry framework, for example, we've taken pre-configured, you know, routinely covered aspects of working in IT within a retail organization, things like in a franchise model, obviously territory management's very important. Being able to have some transparency into those territories when you have a point of sale down or some sort of technology in the store is very important. But once you get that employee self-service portal in a store manager's hands, now you can connect to corporate risk, you can connect to the legal, you connect to HR, you give them a single pane of glass to do those things in. We're finding a lot of traction in things like the foodborne illness workflows and the accident injury, theft prevention in stores. And if you think about that, that sounds really neat. In fact, there was a restaurant that we were working with where we helped them increase their foodborne illness by 147% their first month of implementation. And the reason it was is an artificial number. The stores weren't faxing the forms in, but they were willing to submit a digital workflow. And while that's just simply an expansion of a service catalog, it's really meaningful to the store and it actually helps that store managers a day and it helps them be much more efficient. So these are customizations that you're creating that wouldn't come out of the box with service now? Is that right? No, they're all part of the service now platform. I mean, that's the great thing about a platform is it can be near anything you want it to be. What we're really trying to do in the frameworks is offer a context. So here's your ITSM component, here's your IT operations management component and here's your services management component or your business service management component and here's that journey kind of cradle to grave. Okay, so you're accelerating the adoption essentially is really what that's all about. Is that right? Now you're really coming at it from the two axes too because essentially if I recall from prior life you've got the horizontals by type of discipline then you got the verticals by industry. You got it. You guys come in at a retail ITSM overlap but then now you've got a path to go to other verticals and other horizontal. You got it. Of course the values right across those intersection points and our real value as an organization back with an Accenture is that platform focus that lens being applied to that two axis model for the platform through the platform. And then the other thing we keep hearing time and time again is Accenture is happy to take on the higher value activities around change management and transformation and the processes and the people aspects and not necessarily run the IT for some of these things. Right, so what's unique about Accenture is it's not just the better practices and the transformation of the process consulting but it's also the as a service offerings and the practitioners offering those services. And in fact we've been very successful with utilizing service now within Accenture. That's also part of my responsibility is to help Accenture acquire service now as the platform for their business services. All right, so what about this notion of the third estate? You've seen Frank talk about all the processes around ERP, you got all the processes around CRM and you got service management sort of encompassing them and reaching its tentacles in. How is that resonating with clients? You guys sort of should be agnostic to the technology you are. I mean, you're maybe not so much but the company is. I'm not at all agnostic. But your firm is and that's part of your promise to customers is that we'll get the outcome right. That's right. We'll figure out the technology. So how is that resonating with customers bringing that service management capability across the enterprise? Is that real yet? Is it still? It really is. It helps customers set a context. I mean, context is everything, especially when you're dealing with a cloud platform because those cloud platforms can be very austere in what they're capable of, right? I mean, take the whiteboard and let's start drawing something on it. Giving a customer context of what they can achieve, helping them understand that there's three legs to the journey or those types of things are really important. But at the end of the day, when you're getting down into service management or business service management, you care about workflows. And workflows, I kind of look at that as a kind of a ground and pound kind of thing, right? Every workflow is unique. There are many to one relationships within workflows and departments and otherwise. And you really have to be a student of how work gets done for a company to modernize those. So how about the ITOM action? What's going on with IT operations management? Yeah, so obviously ServiceNow made several acquisitions in that space. They're investing in the platform in that space. Across Accenture, we have a much broader cloud strategy and we're aligning and have aligned the ServiceNow platform in the ITOM space to our overall cloud strategy and are going to market in that way to make sure that we're really being complimentary to ServiceNow's story. So we sometimes call it inter-clouding, right? It's like, put in the cloud, we put everything in the cloud. So they got a zillion clouds, SaaS and all infrastructure clouds and so forth. How do you see that playing out with customers in terms of how they're orchestrating? Are they going to use ServiceNow to do that? I mean, today they're using things like Chef and Puppet. How does that shake out in your client base? So actually, we talked about this a couple of years ago. It's this notion of there's many clients that we're working with and I'm thinking of one in particular where they have 35 different cloud applications in their environment. So you kind of look at it and you say, gosh, you know, I understand the value of cloud here but you're still very silo-sized in what you're doing. 35 clouds seems like a very distributed cloud environment. It seemed like we could kind of pull that together in a much more integrated way. We're starting to see that. We're starting to see customers looking to consolidate, to get to a much more seamless version. You know, that enthusiasm to go bring all the clouds in is starting to wane a bit and they're looking to consolidate and make sure they're getting the value of cost, their investments. And more importantly, to make sure they don't have a lot of overlaps. Many of the tools do. And if you have 35 clouds, you probably have 35 overlaps. So thinking about, okay, you talked about the acquisition and the sort of integration, just April. So now what? What should we be looking for in terms of signs of progress with regard to where you guys are taking this? So for us, it's all about keeping our customer satisfaction stable at its very high rate. It's about adding many more certifications. In fact, first quarter to second quarter, we added 130 more certifications alone across our practice. It's pushing our resource pools up above 1500 across the globe. It's investing in new regions and new territories and it's doubling down on our accelerators and our industry frameworks. So talk more about the certifications. Add some color to that. Yeah, so we've invested heavily in our training practice over the years. We actually have the highest concentration of certified trainers that exist outside of ServiceNow. And so they've used that as a factory model to help our resources get better and help us scale and add more depth within the regions. Many of our resources carry three and four certifications per person across different aspects of ServiceNow. Everything from implementation specialist to system administrator certifications to discovery, service watch, PA, so on and so forth. But you're doing your own certifications, but you're also building the training practice to get certifications into the customers as well. You got it. What was the head count at Cloud Sherpas at the time? So the total head count was about 1200 at Cloud Sherpas and our ServiceNow practice, we were about 150. 150? Yeah. Oh, that's right, because you guys did other stuff with, what, was it Salesforce and Google? Salesforce, Google and ServiceNow. Those are big three. Yep, three lines of business. So it was 150 in the ServiceNow. So how many people roughly in order of magnitude in Accenture sort of, as you sort of transfer that knowledge, will care about ServiceNow? There are over 1,100 people today globally that have ServiceNow skills and certifications. So in order of magnitude greater than what you had. Exactly. And I bet you're spending a lot of time flying to partner meetings around specific verticals and really kind of bringing the religion to all those different groups. So for us it's about educating and getting a common understanding on what the platform is capable of across the body of Accenture, so that when somebody finds or is discussing a problem that can be solved or improve with ServiceNow, they know what that opportunity looks like, they know what our capabilities are and they can make that intersection on our behalf. What goes off? So it's interesting, and we've been talking about swim lanes a week, three years ago I said Salesforce and ServiceNow on a collision course because there's a platform and there's just so many problems that can solve. How do you guys work with your colleagues on the Salesforce side and do you see what we're seeing? Do you agree with that? That just seems to be getting a little fuzzier in terms of where one picks up and the other leaves off. You know what's interesting is where I live and it's not as fuzzy as I think it looks from an analyst perspective. Yeah, so explain that. What we're finding is more often it's a case of integration. If you're working with a large enterprise, they probably have Salesforce and they probably have ServiceNow as well and they probably need those to work together in a seamless way. We are finding in those customers that we do, it is important for us to push up a little higher in our approaches and get to that advisory layer so that we can help them understand where to best rationalize the different features and functionalities and that ends up looking a lot like management consulting actually. So we should think about this the same way we thought about Workday, is that right? Yeah. I mean, but for a while it looked kind of fuzzy. Well Workday's a little different for us. So our play with Workday would be more of a wraparound of Workday from a portal perspective, from a workflow perspective, et cetera. So we'd be working in more of a complimentary way that way and more of a wrapper approach. From a Salesforce to ServiceNow perspective, it would be more of a bi-directional communication between instances or between tools approach. And how about the Google play? I mean, people running their businesses on Google Docs. Now maybe that's more SMB, but is there a play, a wraparound play, or an integration play there? We've done a lot of integrations with Google, both from a calendar perspective, from a drive perspective, also in some of the Google for apps, Google for business types of, Google for work types of offerings as well. It's use case driven. So I wouldn't say that it's something that we're finding that we're just wrapping around or there's a standard play there for us. Every customer has a slightly different unique need in that space, but we have done those integrations much more common for us to be working with, integrating with a Workday or a Salesforce than a Google. Awesome. Give us the bumper sticker on Knowledge 16 from your perspective, Jason. It's been a great event for us. We had a single largest presence of trainers here for the pre-conference. One of the highest presences at the CreatorCon event here towards the end. We've gotten new MVPs added to the ServiceNow community while we're here, and they've had a chance to be a part of that community of practice. And we're announcing our industry framework. So that's our big push right now from an IP perspective. We think that's gonna be really important to clients. It's gonna immediately establish a lowest common denominator of where they should go in the platform and help them see around a lot of corners that others have before them have solved or seen themselves. You had the customer event last night? Is that right? I was, yeah. Yeah, how was that? It was great. We had over 700 customers attend and a beautiful view of Las Vegas, so. Nice. Saw some of the pictures coming out on social. That's a beautiful view. Sorry I forgot to invite you, I apologize. No, we usually make it over. It's all right. We were all the way in, but we were. Next time. We got caught in another one. All right, Jason, thanks very much for coming back at theCUBE. It was great to see you again. Thank you. Congratulations again. All right, keep it right here, everybody. Day two of Knowledge 16. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE. We'll be back right after this. Three once in a while. A true.