 Brian Lilly is here. He's the CIO of Equinix. Brian, thanks for coming on. Thanks, I'm happy to be here. Yeah, so you've heard the keynote this morning. Yes. And you heard the excellent messaging. Frank Slugman was just on. Very crisp. It seems like there's a passionate audience here. So first of all, let's start with Equinix. You guys are an interesting company. You're sort of at the heart of a lot of this cloud action. Tell us more about Equinix. Well, Equinix is a global data center provider. We have 97 data centers around the world in 15 countries. And we have over 500 cloud providers that host with us around the world. And we're network neutral, which is really, besides sort of being high-end operational reliability, et cetera, we have 900 carriers in our facilities. So if you're a cloud provider, a content provider, and you want to provide information, access in the lowest latency, highest reliability way to eyeballs all over the world, Equinix is the place to be. You have a mega global footprint. In fact, we were at the AWS summit a few weeks ago at the Moscone. Equinix kept coming up. We had a number of companies, we had NetApp on. They talked about their partnership with you and another number of other companies that are working with you to get, for instance, close to some of the Amazon data centers and provide that presence and that low latency. And so you guys are really crushing it in the cloud. Talk a little bit about what you're doing with service now. This whole notion that IT is all these disparate processes and running on spreadsheets, was that kind of what your operation was like, free service now, or described that a little bit? Yeah, I'd be happy to. It was exactly like that. So I've been at Equinix four and a half years and when I came, we had, really, we had done some significant organic growth. We'd acquired some companies in Europe and Asia and really hadn't pulled that all together. And so we had six or seven disparate systems. Everybody was on their own process. And actually, ServiceNow had this great marketing program that was called Cloud for Clunkers. And the clunker, I think, was Remedy, they were specifically talking about. But it was Cloud for Clunkers. And I thought that was kind of catchy. And my colleague, I have a goal that everybody that reports to me directly becomes a CIO. And the CIO of JDS Uniface, Chris Beatty, he had implemented ServiceNow at Verisign after I had left. And he said, Brian, whatever you've put into, whatever you're doing, stop. Go with ServiceNow, you'll never regret it. And it was the best advice I ever got. So I got to give props to Chris, implemented it, and now we have one global instance that we're running all around the world. All of our information, I have a CIO dashboard where now all demand, all demand coming into IT comes in through ServiceNow. We have a Google-like interface. I can track projects, incidents, events, problems, requests, our entire change management process is run through there. So we're actually 100% compliant with that. So how did you do it before? You said you had six or seven different systems. That's right. You do all this stuff. That's right. And we had manual effort, right? So the IT help desk, sort of your classical break fix, I need help was done on one system. The server team was done on a different system. The network team on a third system. Email was, you know, so when it came time, sometimes your guys come to you and say, hey, I need some heads. I'm dying here. I'm like, show me the data, baby, show me the data. And they couldn't do it. Or they stopped work for five, six days to gather the data to prove to me that they needed more headcount. Well now we have metrics that are actually amazing. We know exactly what our SLAs are against each incident, problem, request, whatever, by group. We know it by region. We know where we have hotspots. We know where we should automate to address things. I mean, we actually are running it like a business now, which we couldn't do before. So how about visibility to things like the application portfolio or the project portfolio? Does ServiceNow help you, you know, give you line of sight into those sort of critical initiatives? Yeah, so we started with infrastructure. I think most companies start with infrastructure. It's maybe a little more straightforward. And so we started there. But then the Apps guys, it was kind of nice to see. The Apps guys saw the infrastructure guys starting to manage their business like a business. And often, I don't know if you know, but in the IT organization, the Apps guys are closer to the business. The infrastructure guys are sort of the guys under the hood or behind the curtain, don't pay attention to them. Mechanics? Mechanics, they were mechanics. Well, they actually were running their business, like the head of infrastructure for me who's acting like the CIO. I mean, he had command of the business, we call it an equinix. You have to have command of whatever business you're running. And the Apps guys said, you know, I want that. So we actually did a couple of things. We changed our interface to the business, to us, to be through ServiceNow. It used to be for projects, for application projects, it had a different mechanism. We move that now to a very clean form in ServiceNow that we built. And so now all application demand comes in. All of our business systems analysis for both support and projects manage now their business and ServiceNow. So now they both come to me with their dashboards, with the demand coming into the teams, by functional area, if it's Apps, we can see that finance is heavily asking for Apps versus operations or sales or marketing. So we actually now, I go to the E-staff meeting, I report to the CEO and I go in with data that says, look, here's the portfolio of applications we have. Here's the request you're asking me to do. Let's prioritize these together. I have a recommendation based on what I think is impact and business value. But at the end of the day, I'm the steward of the company's money. It's not my money. So, you know, but now we have the visibility we can have the conversation. We couldn't have the conversation before. There really is a business value conversation. Absolutely. That's impressive. So Jeff, you got a question. Yeah, so Brian is a CIO. There's so many transformative things happening right now. There's cloud, there's computing power as a service. You guys were probably dialed in with that since you've provided a lot of that infrastructure. But as a CIO with all the transformative opportunities that you have, how are you prioritizing thing and how does this fall within those priorities when you're making the changes to your business and implementing new technologies? That's a great question because the CIOs that I talk to and it's pretty interesting. They're pulling their hair out, but yeah, hey, I was six foot two with a full head of hair before I joined IT. A CIO colleague of mine, we had this exact conversation because he goes, you know, he came over, actually he came over to see our implementation. Wanted to talk through how we had gotten there and sort of our journey with ServiceNow. And he said, you know, I really wanna be where you guys are. And he says, we just haven't bubbled up in the priority yet, because they're so busy either fixing or dealing with just organic growth or whatever. So it's a really good question. We try and have a balance. We have, you know, clearly operations of our data centers comes first. So that consumes, so anything we can do there to, and we're doing some really interesting innovation there with big data. We've built some reference architectures with Accenture, specifically around helping us manage that data center platform. Then sales and marketing. I mean, clearly gotta bring revenue in the door. And so the last but not least is finance, legal, HR, and IT. But at the end of the day, I try and do, I call it the CIO Sprinkle, where even if you put large clumps of money or resources here, you gotta sprinkle a little bit everywhere. And ServiceNow was sort of our sprinkle where I said, we have to do this to run efficiently as a global organization. And it was really the best decision I ever made. And what's interesting is now the business sort of looks over our shoulder and says, hey, hey, what is that? And we've now implemented ServiceNow for our HR function, for our finance, shared services center, for facilities. Now several different business functions want what we have. So yeah, we implemented it for us, but we're spreading it through the company. The other thing is because you're a data center, Frank talked about the lights out aspect of as many processes as you can without people. Clearly running a big data center, the less people you have running around those machines, the better. So with that as a reference within your own business, how effective have you been using this platform to kind of take people out of all these processes? Well, I think we have, so we have a program called Equinix on Equinix. And what it is is it's how we use our own global platform to run our own business. And we've got distributed, because you can get real economies of scale if you distribute, as opposed to just clumping into large data centers, you can actually, even if you have one of those, you can have small footprints all over the world and increase performance and network hubbing and all that. So we've done that for us. Well, we don't necessarily have IT people in all those locations. So we've implemented a couple of things. One is a monitoring tool called ScienceLogic, very, very good, very good tool that we've integrated with ServiceNow. So all of our incident event monitoring is done on ScienceLogic, but it integrates into ServiceNow. So we have, and I'll show this later today, we have a incident P1 scroller where right into ServiceNow, these tickets are automatically open, they scroll in front of everybody, we have them on the wall, absolutely. So, and it goes into our knock and everybody is aware of them. And that's a part of our sort of hands off in these remote locations in particular, but it just helped us manage our business. Again, command of the business, a CIO has to have it. So is that how it works with, you mentioned HR, right? Obviously you have some other HR system, whether it's PeopleSoft or Workday, whatever it is that you use. Workday. Workday, we love Workday. I do too. Awesome company there, it's just smoking hot and getting it right, I think. So it's okay, so you use Workday, so how does, just like that example, how does the ServiceNow integrate with the Workday? How does that all work? So I think in most, we're not a huge enterprise, we're over 3,000 employees now, and we are global, but I think as you start to get of any scale, you start to centralize into shared services. So in a previous company of mine, it was called HR Frontline. At Equinix called HR Direct. And what this is, it's a, think of it as a small help desk for HR questions. So if you have a question about benefits or pay or whatever, you can call this number or you can submit an email to HRDirect at Equinix.com. And we've taken those mail aliases and put that right into ServiceNow, so they see and can track all the requests. And what they've used, so it's in that sense a standalone. How it's integrated is, they do a couple of things with the data. The first thing they do is, is they say, wow, this question keeps getting asked. How do we improve our FAQs, improve our communications to the employees? Because actually the data's there, the information's there, but they're not getting it. So it helps them with their FAQs. Second is, is sometimes it could be related to a workday piece of data that is wrong about the employee or whatever. And so then they can go and actually update workday. So today we don't, I don't believe we've got it integrated other than workdays are a source of truth for employees. And so it with Active Directory actually is integrated with ServiceNow. So we have all of our employees who can submit requests or who can act as technicians in the system. Hi Brian, so we're running low on time but the last question I have is, what advice would you give to your CIO peers that are thinking about automating their service management and kind of struggling with all these disparate systems? People that are in a similar situation as you, what advice would you give them? Maybe things that you would have done differently. Help your peers out here. Sure. I would say this is something that is sort of table stakes. You have to do this. And if you have to do this, start with something you know you can get your arms around. So in our case, I think why we're successful is we started with number one, sort of a service catalog. Like what are the services that you offer as a CIO that you're going to offer to the business and mask the complexity of who provides those services to the end user. Don't make them choose. They know they want a computer. They don't know which group. So mask that. You can marry that together. I think the other thing is, is as a CIO, you've got to be a leader. It's just like the sales exec who says to the rep, you must put the data into salesforce.com but then they never use it, right? So if you're the CIO, I mean, I've told my guys, if it's not in ServiceNow, don't even come talk to me. Don't even talk to me. So now we run our project meetings out of it. We run our metrics meetings out of it. You got to be a leader. And number one is demand that the data's in there. Number two, demand that we have one process. One system, one set of processes consistent. You're going to get people say, well, it's different in Germany. It's different in Singapore. Baloney, delivering IT is delivering IT. That's my advice. Right, fantastic. Listen, thanks for stopping by theCUBE. Really appreciate the advice, the insights, the energy. All right, Jeff Frick and I will be right back. We're live at Las Vegas, the Knowledge Conference. This is ServiceNow's big event, big customer event. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's flagship telecast. Keep it right there. We'll be right back with our next guest.