 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. theCUBE is SiliconANGLE's flagship product. We go out to the events. Last year we did almost 80 events, probably do a hundred this year, Jeff, I don't know. Michael Hubbard is here. He's the Vice President of ServiceNow, Inspire. Michael, welcome to theCUBE, Inspire us. Thank you. That's what I get to do every day to some of our amazing, amazing customers and prospects. What is Inspire? I hear a lot about it, but I'm not really sure. So for the last year or two, we've been receiving invitations to truly step into some of our customers and prospects business transformations and we're getting inspired by what they're trying to do and changing the way they operate fundamentally as a company. And when we see an opportunity for our role to inspire the rest of the market, to inspire the rest of the customers we haven't touched yet and actually change the understanding of why we exist as a company, I get the honor of leading a team that just focuses on those invitations and goes and does what it takes to make those customers successful, mostly through strategy, insights, advice, as well as giving them tangible sort of Super Bowl commercials that let them explain to their organization what they're trying to do because we're a cloud company. We can simply spin that up, build it, give it to them, let them go shop it around so that they get momentum to achieve that outcome in their business. So it's essentially a consultative service that is not a four-pay service. Correct. It's something that you offer for your top customers, is that right? Correct, correct. It's an investment, right? And it is about finding the roughly 1% of customers that are really trying to do something inspiring and helping them be as successful as possible. Really, so how does one qualify to be an inspire recipient? Inviting me on theCUBE is a good start. So, but that's the right question, right? Because we're burdened with too many, the blessing of too many opportunities, too many adjacencies as a platform that could do so many things in the world. So how do we prioritize? The first thing is about finding leaders that truly have a passion and a commitment and the authority to drive a big change because no change is easy. You will have to change career paths for some of the employees, processes for some of the employees, maybe governance and compliance and attestation expectations of how business gets done, that's hard. So we're looking for a person who has both the power and the vision to change the way they go to market. And then secondly, we want to make sure that if that change happened, it would be considered meaningful if we were a part of it. That's all we need. So strong stomach, right? And obviously a substantial investment in service now so they could leverage some of the changes that you want to bring forward. It would be unwise for someone to gain our advice if they didn't think our platform was the right way to achieve at least a meaningful portion of it, right? Because our expertise is rooted obviously in where we come from and where we spend a lot of our time and the insights of where our company's going. So if you think our vision as a company is relevant, then we might be a good person to help you with your vision. You're biased and you're not shy about saying that. I would say we definitely aren't atheists. We have religion, right? We have a religion and we're going to apply that religion to what you're trying to achieve. So if you think there's synergy there, then maybe we're a good fit to help you with that. And the big difference between worrying about whether we're biased or not is think about how accountable we are because when we give you this advice, we're the ones who have to deliver on it, right? And that's always been the big challenge between the folks whose feet don't touch the ground in terms of telling you what you should do, then the folks who pick up that vision and try to execute it but they weren't there for the inception of it. We want to break that cycle and bring it together. So how much of the advice that you're providing your customers is specific to leveraging the platform versus sort of business process changes and other types of initiatives that are transformational? So we start with an outcome and we tend to start with an experience. So an outcome might be faster time to acquire knowledge, reducing rate of churning the employee base by improving net promoter score of employee satisfaction. It might be margin expansion, it might be revenue growth, who knows? Once we know what that outcome is, then let's try to think about the moments where it's most tangible that the outcome of this transformation is going to deliver a better version of that moment. And that's what I talked about with those Super Bowl commercials, the two-minute sort of experience that lives on your mobile device that makes you want to drink that beer or be that guy or buy that product, be in that environment. So we create that environment with our labs team, we confirm that that's aligned to the future state they want, and then we back into all the things that's going to take people process technology, architecture, governance to achieve that. So a lot of business strategy stuff that you're doing as well. I wouldn't say we're helping customers define their business strategy, but if they have a compelling before and after statement, we want to be an enabler of that. Yes, that's a hard job because almost everyone we've had on, at some level, qualifies for what you're describing. And I would also imagine you definitely want to be a client, push every religion, but there's always that problem if people don't have skin in the game, when it comes time to get hard work done, usually it may be a little more motivated if they have skin in the game. So where that skin comes through, they already made a big investment in service now, how do I get more out of that investment? How do I leverage that investment across broader ecosystem or get those benefits that I realized here, you know, there, there and there? I'd imagine those are pretty important things to consider. Absolutely, so commitment is a crucial word, right? And I'd say we spend half our time with customers that they're not customers, they're prospects, that are considering going on a journey with us, a journey to everything as a service, enterprise service management, the service revolution, all the catchphrases I'm sure you've seen throughout this week. The other half are customers that have started on the journey. They're CIO, they're CFO, they already have this asset in their software estate and we're helping them sweat that asset more. In both cases, it comes back to finding the person that I shake hands with and look in the eye and we have that social contract that frankly means more than a commercial contract that if I help you and I make you successful and I show you that I truly understand what you're trying to achieve, why wouldn't you want me to help you with it? So we really don't have challenges around conversion and follow through on the advice that we give. And the role is the CIO, is you dealing with CIO, CXOs? So yes, primarily today we're dealing with CIOs and CTOs in mega organizations with six to $10 billion IT spends. We may be in a division, right, a divisional CIO. But we're also starting to get the CROs, right? Because what if we could take the IT practices that help an employee engage in services and apply them to the way a customer consumes services. So I sat with a CRO shortly after the recent Salesforce outage, talking about how he can better quantify the work of his 2000 application engineers. It's a software company. Because when he goes to the CFO and wants to talk about needing 50 more engineers to help capture more revenue, the CFO says, well, what are all the 2000 doing? He says, I have no idea, right? So can we be the system of record that answers what those people are doing for their customers? What does an engagement look like? Take us through the anatomy, start to finish. Yeah, so obviously there's a lot of work up front to make sure we're in the right place with the right person, solving a well understood problem. So qualifying is huge for us because there's only 40 or 50 of us and we've got a blessed amount of opportunity in the market of people we could work with. So qualifying is important. Once we get to the point that we have that social contract, that handshake agreement that says, I understand your outcome, I'm going to give you a plan to achieve it. And then together we're going to go get that outcome. The next step is really bringing the rest of the team that that leader depends upon, right? The inclusive doing it with his organization, bring that team together through workshops, strategy, tactics, operating model. Make sure that they understand it. Have a rough draft of a plan, socialize that plan. Once it's understood among the leadership team, let's help with the organizational change management by pushing that out to the larger audience. In parallel, let's prove it, right? We're a cloud platform. I should not deliver you a PowerPoint presentation of your future. I should give you a glimpse of it, right? And it should be on your mobile device. And that experience is that, is one of those deliverables. Now let's give you a business case that says we believe it's going to make money, save money, reduce risk in this quantity and these time frames as follows. So one of the deliverables actually code some capability. Correct, correct. We tend to be a low-code company, right? Being a Paz platform as well as a SaaS company. But absolutely, we're delivering experiences that allow that visionaries, CIO, to show his or her stakeholders why all this change is worth it. Because on the other end, something good's going to come out of it. What is the typical length of an engagement? I'd say on the average, they're about six to eight weeks. It just takes that much time to manage all of the mutual understanding of us learning than us advising, than them accepting. And at the end, it really is their plan. It's not ours. I don't think that's much time. I wrote down six to eight weeks and I said that, that's maybe too aggressive, but you're saying on average, you can complete that. So that presumes that the client is putting forth the resources necessary to get it done, the meetings, et cetera. And you're picking a time when everybody can put it together. And so these are not free. They actually consume the most valuable resources these organizations have, which is probably their strongest leaders and the people who understand their current state and their customers and their problems the best. So it's by no means free to these CIOs and they understand that. Yeah, they're not writing a check, but they're spending their time, which is more valuable. You can always make more money. You can't make more time from these precious resources and they get that. And when did Inspire, when did it start? So it actually started in January of this year. So I've been with ServiceNow about eight months. Recently we, ServiceNow and our leadership team got really serious about being able to do this for customers. And I was fortunate enough to join the company to help build out that program. And so we're in our freshman year, right? We're learning a lot and we're taking those learnings and we're putting them into what we call the customer journey. So if I've got these insights about what some of our most ambitious customers are doing, how can I translate those insights into a scalable knowledge base by which every customer could learn these lessons the easy way versus the hard way. And that's what the customer journey is, which we shared a lot of here at Knowledge This Week. How many of these have you done? So we've done about 30 so far. We'll do about another 20 this year. I don't think we'll ever get to more than that a year. That's a lot, 30 and five months, just getting started. We are a very surgical consulting team, meaning that we want to get in, do the job right and then transition to the team that's ultimately going to do the actual implementation. Then we stay on just in a governance and oversight sort of capacity, doing QBRs quarterly, helping out if something does go awry and learning what was wrong about the assumptions we made up front so that we correct that the next 20 customers. Really go back and look at the business case and say, okay, is we got it wrong? Is we got it right? Absolutely, value realization. Nobody ever does that. I know, I know. Like the weatherman checking the paper from last week. Exactly, value realization is so important as an industry, we're not good at it. And the beauty of our platform is if you turn on all the functionality, we could actually have that done for you real time just because the work you're doing is captured. The value hypothesis is going to be proven out for you or refuted for you right in the platform. So then we come in, make sure that that's set up, pull that data out and then we educate the market about that. Roughly what percentage, Michael of those 30 said, okay, the business case looks good. We're going to move forward? All of them. It's a matter of how quickly they move forward and with how much urgency. Because if we take a three year plan that has six or seven components in terms of work streams and outcomes, they might say, I'm going to do all seven eventually, but I'm going to start with this one. And this one is the burning bridge that I have to fix. But every single one of them has moved forward with taking a subset of our recommendations and implementing them on our platform. So obviously part of the qualification process is some kind of back in napkin business case where you have a high probability of success, right? Absolutely, because our most precious resource is the same as our customers, it's our time. You got it, you got to rig it. I say that, I don't mean it as a pejorative, but you better make sure that you're going to have a high business impact. Absolutely, qualification is super important, but we're blessed with an incredible number of customers that are coming and giving us these invitations and we've gotten pretty good already at getting right to the heart of, is this team able to solve the problem they have or are we the wrong team inside of service now to help that? Do they really need the product team, the business units? Do they really need our professional services to get in there and turn some of the wrenches? Do they just need education, right? Do they need third-party help from a partner to scale their staff? So you're coming to theCUBE, obviously you're not trying to stay stealth, but have you been presenting this week? Is demand now going through the roof? Are you sorry that you're doing that? So I get the pleasure of spending my time in two areas, one, this high touch, high cost of delivery motion that we've been talking about today, but the other half of my time is taking those learnings that are harvested and putting that into sort of a canonical framework that we call the customer journey, which is programmatically how do most people consume our platform, attain value from our platform? What are the major inhibitors to progress? What are the accelerants that help them go faster? And that's what we've been talking about this week at Knowledge, is helping people understand the journey. We've got some self-service tools that are available through our field organization for any of our customers to sit down and rather than having to come to me and my team, working with your local ServiceNow partner or representative, use some of these tools and say, this is where I am, these are the things I'm trying to achieve, this is what I should do next, how's that compared to other people? And then ServiceNow based upon your understanding of my plan, what benefits do most people get as a result, so some basic benchmarking in? So we've got that tool and that's really what we've been talking about this week at Knowledge. Ah, sounds like a fantastic program, really. Congratulations on getting it off the ground and really appreciate you coming on theCUBE and sharing that with us. A long time watch, your first time participant, so I'm very happy to be here. You're now a CUBE alone. Awesome, fantastic. Thank you, Michael. Thank you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Jeff and I will be back with our next guest, we're live, from Knowledge 16. This is theCUBE. Right back. This is a tale of...