 Welcome back to Boston everybody, this is theCUBE. We're live at a special presentation at BMC Day, at top of 60 State Street in Boston, Massachusetts. Beautiful view of Boston Harbor. Evelyn Ehrlich is here, she's the vice president and research director for service delivery at Forrester. We're going to talk about job control language and cobalt, no I'm just kidding. We're going to talk about service delivery. Who, Evelyn, so you have a really deep background in IT and I know what JCL stands for so I had to make that joke. So anyway, welcome to theCUBE. It's great to see you gave a fantastic presentation today. Who doesn't need better service delivery? I mean it's an imperative for the digital transformation. So again, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So tell us a little bit about what you do at Forrester, what your area is and I want to get into your presentation today. Sure, so service delivery basically when the application development team is ready to hand us something, whatever that is, a web service, an application, a service, we actually make sure that that gets to the workforce or to the customer. So anything from a release management, service management at the front end relative to the service desk, ITSM, anything around management of the performance, of the applications, the operations, anything like that is all about service delivery. And there were two pieces of your talk that really struck out to me and I know George for a long time. So two things, two pejoratives that you don't like to use. One is users, end users, and then the other really was IT. So talk about why those terms don't make sense in this digital economy and what does make sense. Yeah, so users, it almost seems like to me it is something where people are putting folks into a box that they can like addicts. User, like I said in the drug industry, we have users because they're addicts. We have to somehow keep them at bay. We have to somehow keep them low and our engagement with them is no, it's not going to be enjoyable. It's not going to be fun and it's not going to be actually effective. Unfortunately, these users today, those are our workforce, those are our employees, those are our partners and customers. They have other places to go. They don't need us in technology. So if we don't shift that thinking into that they are customers so that we can actually enable them, we might be able to lose our jobs because there's outsourcers and service providers to workplace services for example. As many companies out there who provide a service desk, who provide VDI, who provide these services, cheaper, faster and better. But what we have then lost or what if that's going to happen, we are losing the understanding of the business. We're losing the connection to the business and is that there could be a strategic conversation, right? It should be a strategic conversation. It's not just a cost conversation and when we think about user, it's all about cost. If we think about customer, it's value and relevancy. Okay, and of course that leads to not IT, it's business, there's no such thing as an IT project. No, there isn't because anything we do, if we think of information technology, it's anything almost like in the back room. It's something which is hidden in a data center, somewhere in a storage or in a server or in a device and it doesn't really add any value. The boiler room. The boiler room, exactly. And we have done, we have massaged it with whatever, we measure the heck out of it, we measure mean time to repair. Well, who cares? It's time to business impact, this is what we need to think about. So if we start thinking about customers, the MTTR becomes time to business impact. We're now thinking outside in and the same is true with IT. If we just use IT for technology sake to drive information, we're not connected to the business because it is about business. The technology is there to win, retain and sustain our customers. If we don't do that, we become borders. We become the companies who all have not focused on the winning technology to make them successful. Yeah, you had a real nice graph, simple sort of digital failing, digital masters and everywhere in between, talked a little about things like ITIL and DevOps. And they feel sometimes like counter to each other. One's fast, one feels... How, as you talk to customers, you talk to customers, what can they expect? How long might these transformations take? Or what are those key stepping stones? You talked about it being a journey. How do people think about all this change? That's a good question. It's a very difficult question to have an answer to. And I think it has to be a little bit more compartmentalized. We have to start thinking a little bit more in smaller boxes of influences or areas where we can make some progress. So let's take, for example, DevOps and ITIL and connect the process release, which is an ITIL process into this notion. If we combine DevOps and ITIL release, we are starting to see that the release management process is now a process which is done very agile. Very much there's a lot more things behind that process and a lot more collaboration between AD&D and INO to make the process a faster process. So we've now married ITIL release management with the journey of DevOps as we are starting to see release cycles of one day. Look at Amazon, what they do. I mean, again, Amazon is a very extreme. Not everybody needs a release process as Amazon has because it's just not every business is in the Amazon business. Maybe in 10 years, who knows, maybe in five. But those kinds of things that marriage happens through more of a design thinking. And I think that's the practical way. Let's not adopt ITIL blandly and say, all right, we're gonna just redo our entire 26 processes. Let's look at where's the problem, where's the pain? What is the 90-day journey to solve that pain? Where's the six months, nine months, 12 months, 24 months, and if 24 months is too far out, which I believe, let's stay in a 12-month roadmap and start adjusting it that way. And measure it. Measure where you are, measure where you want to go, and prove that you have done the delta. Because if I don't measure that, I won't get funding for support. I think that's key. Evelyn, you talked about being a prey or a predator. That's kind of a common theme that you hear in conferences like this. Is it a zero-sum game? It is, are the taxi drivers, the taxi companies screwed? The hotel's in big trouble. I mean, can companies who are sort of caught flat-footed transform and begin to grow again? Talk about that zero-sum game-ness, if you will. I think there is hope. So hope is what dies last, we say, right? But there is hope. Hope, if customers, if organizations, these enterprises see that there is a challenger out there and if they don't necessarily stand up to fight that challenge and start innovating in either copying or leveraging or tangentially do something else. Let me give you an example. When about two years ago we had an event in London and Trafalgar Square was completely blocked off by the taxi drivers because Uber was, they were striking against Uber or they were going on. It wasn't really a real strike because in London it's a little bit of a challenge with the unions, but anyway. Instead of going on a strike, why did they not embrace whatever they needed to? And example is, in a cab at that time you could not use American Express or Discover Credit Card. Uber, I never have to pull any money out of my pocket because that's a convenience. It's easy, it's enjoyable. We love it, simple. We love it, it's simple. So why don't these other companies, these companies, the taxi cab, why don't they equip the technology in such a way that can at least start adopting some of those innovations to make it an even part, right? Some of the other things, maybe they will never get there because there are whatever limitations are there. And so that's what I think needs to happen. These innovators will challenge all these other companies and those who want to stay alive, I mean, they want to because they have, Wall Street is forcing them to stay alive. They are the ones who will hopefully create the differentiation because of that force. And it's not really invention required. It's applying technology and process that's well established. Thinking outside in, thinking of you and him and me as customers. And it becomes, does the incumbent get innovation before the challenger gets distribution. So Uber, like lots of cars, I don't have to buy them, but somebody like Tesla isn't necessarily disrupting Ford because they can't distribute it fast enough. So it depends where you are in that distribution versus innovation curve. So in a brief time that we have, love to talk about the landscape. So, and that's particularly the transformation of VMC, public company to private, they were under a lot of fire, you know, kind of flattish revenues, Wall Street pounded them in that you got companies like ServiceNow picking away at the established ITSM players. We're talking off camera, you're saying that's begun to change. Give us the narrative on that sequence and where we are today and where we're going. Yeah, so if you go back maybe way back seven years ago or so, you know, at start of service now, they had a fairly easy game because VMC with a very old platform, it wasn't really, it wasn't, there was no fight. And I think they were, the enterprises were ready for something new. And there's always some new vendor out there. It's a new shiny object. And I have teenagers, so they always want the next and latest iPhone or whatever, right? Sort of what? We were. So, and it kept going. And the other vendors into space, HP, CA, IBM really had no challenge, didn't give ServiceNow a challenge either because the SaaS, the cloud, the adoption of the cloud in this space was absolutely important. And ServiceNow was the first one to be on the cloud. VMC was not really doing much with remedy force at the time. ITSM on demand was in an ASP model, not really in ITSM. And so ServiceNow just took names and numbers and that just grew and grew and steamrolled really all of them. And customers just were like, oh my God, this is easy. I love to, it looks, it looks beautiful. It's exciting. Uber. Uber. Yes, same thing. That innovation, right? That challenge. They served the customers. Then suddenly what happened is ServiceNow grew faster than they did. You experienced some growing pains. Customers saying, my account rep, I haven't seen him for a while. They changed the pricing model a little bit. They started to blow up their solution. They're now bought Nebula, which is an IT operations management solution. They're extending into financials and they're bolstering themselves into more of an enterprise solution, which is where BMC already has been, but they lost their connection to their customer. BMC did not love their customers at that time. Now, through some executive changes, through really starting to realize that the installed base, they need to hug them. They're back in the game and they're challenging ServiceNow. And they're going private as you were asking the question earlier. Going private, giving them the funding to invest in R&D necessarily. I wonder if you could give me your take on, I see ServiceNow as someone on the collision course with Salesforce in a way. Where does BMC go to expand their TAM and to grow? Yeah, I think so on the first comment, Salesforce and ServiceNow, absolutely. Now, the CEO of ServiceNow does not think that Salesforce is his target of competition. I think it has to. He has to because it is about business applications. Everything. It's everything, exactly. So Salesforce and ServiceNow in, I don't know, is it a year? You know, we have a question. Yeah, who knows? But they will collapse. They will crash or you'll see a fight. I think BMC should stay and really extend in this digital performance management, in this operational management and really make it intelligent decisions for operations to become automated. They have an 80DM solution, the application dependency mapping solution happening to be one of the best, really one of the best in the market and customers love it. Tying that into two-side intelligence, giving them the ability to understand before it happens, not when it happens or after and then drive intelligence into different organizations, the CMO, the COO, the CFO, because that's what business technology is all about. It's not about the IT journey anymore. They have that capability with products where ServiceNow does not have that. Great insight from a sharp analyst, Evelyn Ehrlich. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, Forrester Research. Where can we find more about the research that you do? Forrester.com, obviously, but anything new for you, any upcoming events that we should know about, where people should watch you? Go into Costa Rica and Nicaragua on vacation. Nice, all right, we'll leave you alone for a while. Great, Evelyn, great to meet you. Thanks very much for coming on. Thank you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest, it's theCUBE, we're live from BMC Day in Boston. Right back.