 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering Knowledge 15, brought to you by ServiceNow. We're back, this is Dave Vellante. Eric Lewis is here, he runs service management for Echo Entertainment down under, and Jason Wohjahn is back. He's with Cloud Sherpas, we had him on yesterday. Eric, Jason, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you. Jason, welcome, Eric. And you told me off camera that Australians don't drink fosters. That's a big myth, that's the thing for Americans. So, okay, thank you for clarifying that. But anyway, welcome to theCUBE, welcome to America, to ServiceNow Knowledge. This is your first knowledge, right? That's correct. What do you think? I think it's great. I've really seen a lot here in the last few days. The two keynote speakers in the morning, Fred and Frank, really out my eyes a bit. That's all the other sessions as well. It's been great. Fred's pretty good, isn't he? He's tweeted out that I'm a Fred Luddy groupie this morning, and you can see why he's such a humble individual but creating such innovation. And as a customer, you got to feel as though, wow, it's interesting, it's great to see people like that behind the product. I mean, talk about that a little bit. Yeah, so we used the product now for the last four years, and I haven't seen much of what goes behind the scene sometimes. Now seeing that in the last two days in terms of what makes that happen, and what they do in terms of innovation-wise and what they're thinking has really opened my eyes. So, and it will help me actually move forward in terms of what we're doing for Echo. Yes, so Jason, we were on yesterday, we're talking a lot about what you guys are doing at Cloud Sherpas. You guys have been here since the beginning. That's great. We're also talking about the global nature of your organization. You spent some time in Australia, you got offices in Dubai. How did you guys come about, you know, meeting each other? So actually, we opened up our office in Australia about 20 months ago, and so we were relatively new to the Australian market and our ServiceNow business unit. Of course, Echo and Eric had already deployed on ServiceNow, but they were looking for a partner to help them expand and further take that platform to the next level. I think Eric and Echo have some great case examples of how you can start in IT service management, but quickly expand those borders. And in fact, you know, they've got an HR implementation. And in fact, you're using ServiceNow in many other ways outside of that traditional IT service management space. So we're in Vegas. You've been here before, or is this your first time? This is my first time. Oh, interesting, given Echo Entertainment. So let's talk about Echo Entertainment. Tell us about the company and what you guys do. Echo is three casinos on the east coast of Australia, Sydney, Gold Coast and Treasury. We have obviously a casino each site plus hotels, food and beverage, and basically entertainment or hospitality across the sites. We have about 8,000 employees across the three sites, most of them being in New South Wales at the start. And how many are in sort of IT? We have about 110 in IT. Okay, and so, interesting. I mean, the gaming business has changed quite dramatically over the last decade or so. We're here in the heart of gaming. Macau, of course, has exploded in your part of the world. And laws have changed quite dramatically because people realize how lucrative gaming can be and tax revenues and other sources. So what's the state of gaming in Australia? Can you describe sort of the business climate? Well, I think we've been pretty well reasonably stable in that state for a while. It hasn't changed us too much. So, but we obviously have the regulators that watch over us and we obviously report back to them in terms of what we do on a daily and monthly basis. But basically the gaming there is, from what I've seen here, it's very similar in some ways. You know, the tables and the slots and obviously there's the VIP side as well, right? So, yeah, no, it's pretty good at the moment. I think we're doing okay. And the shows too? The show's really expensive to keep you in the casino or what's the scoop? Is that how the... Similar dynamic there? Yeah, I probably wouldn't know if they're really expensive or not, but because I don't go to too many, but I know there's some good shows that come along sometimes. Oh, those shows are awesome. Such a detainment. Okay, let's talk about service management. Why we're here, theme of the show. How did you get started in service management generally and specifically with ServiceNow? Okay, so I've been a service delivery manager for a while in various organizations. I've been with Echo since May 2011. And I got bought into Echo, new job there, and we were bringing on a new tool to replace the legacy tool and when we actually emerged from TabCorp. And that's when ServiceNow was bought on and we started in January, 2012. And basically straightforward, ITOOL, service management, and then from there we grew it into a bit more into the business and a bit more into IT. So you started with ITSM? Yep, correct. Helped task, change, problem, incident management, and then extended into IT. Where, beyond IT, where did you start? We started with accounts payable, HR and payroll. They were the first three business students off the rank. Basically just to automate their process a bit, make it more efficient, move it away from email and a bit more process-driven and capture the records and also give us some proper reporting and drive that efficiency. Oh, Jason, do you guys have an announcement that you're making this week? Yeah, so we actually put a press release out in a video case study on Eric and Echo's experience. I will say that, and I think that does a great job of kind of helping to distill the business value that they've gotten out of ServiceNow. I think what's more interesting for Eric is if you think about longitudinally, how long they've been on the platform for four years now, they weren't defining what they were doing in HR and payroll and some of those adjacent spaces at Service Management. They were defining it as just solving business problems they had with the platform. And you come back to today and to the Knowledge Conference and you see how there's a very nice bow on just solving business problems outside of IT and calling it Service Management. But again, I think at the end of the day, the power of a ServiceNow platform is being able to start from that bottom up and bring those solutions out. And whether or not they're IT centric or outside of IT centric, it's workflows, it's automation, it's solving that business problem. So let's talk about the project a little bit more. I'm interested in the role that Cloud Sherpa's played and I'm interested in the business results. So maybe Jason, you can, well no, actually Eric, tell us what Cloud Sherpa's did. Let's hear it from the customer. So we went through a process of re-licensing and Cloud Sherpa's was part of the RFP process. It turned out that the RFP was won by Cloud Sherpa's at the time to do some development work for us and obviously the licensing side. That started off with a few projects then after that when we finalized the contracts in August say last year to just to start to bring on a few more business units or a few little more developments into ServiceNow. And besides just the accounts payable payroll HR, we've now bought on a few others like the HR Star team that takes care of all the staff at the Star on a 24 by seven basis. Audiovisual use ServiceNow with us now in terms of the efficiencies and a few other business units as well. Anything you'd add Jason in terms of the approach that Cloud Sherpa's took with Echo Entertainment? Was there anything unique that you could describe or how did you approach it? So what I'll say is I wouldn't say there was a lot unique. I mean we're utilizing the platform the way the platforms intended to be utilized and Echo's done a great job of abstracting their value out of that platform. Of course they picked us to help them get to a place they couldn't get on their own. But the truth is what are they doing? They're evolving forward in the ecosystem and in the platform really just as ServiceNow is intending it to be done, right? You hear a few years ago all we were talking about was really IT service management. Now we're talking about facilities, HR, all these other discrete workflows. And that's exactly the reason is because customers like Eric and Echo are out there actually pushing it forward. Finding that single source of record, that ability to automate your workflow and get a more agile result to your end user is why they went to ServiceNow. Obviously the ServiceNow skills and experience is why they came to Cloud Service. I have to say I've been doing ServiceNow knowledge shows for this is my third year now. And the stories are just overwhelmingly compelling. So why doesn't everybody do this? Maybe it's just it takes time to adopt, but what are you seeing in the marketplace? Like what is the friction to transforming service management? And then Eric, I want to poke it so if you had to do it again, would you do anything differently? But Jason, I wonder if you could just address, I mean it's growing fast, so I guess it's how fast it's going to grow. But the stories are so overwhelmingly positive. And it's not fluff, it's like real business results. So if there is friction, what is it? Why wouldn't everybody do this? Well, I think you've got many different stove pipes or silos of how things are optimized in the company. If you're in a situation where you're optimizing a piece, you're probably in a situation where you're sub-optimizing the whole. And I think it's those perspectives that kind of get out of alignment and prevent customers from being able to expand. A good example here where that goes is if their HR department was not interested in listening to IT, they would have never gotten on board with HR management in IT service management to a service now. So in this case, you've got to be able to talk to the businesses in their own language. They don't want to talk to you about servers and databases and end user experiences and UIs. They really don't care about that. They just care about getting their results. And I saw, I think, at the end of the day, one of the things that I think really resonates with our clients is we don't try to come out here and say, this is going to be some kind of profound improvement over the next decade. You're going to completely transform the way you're going to approach everything because of this. That's all very true, but we actually just kind of start with where does the real improvement lie? It doesn't have to be profound. It just has to be done. So let's start with one or two. One or two becomes three or four. Three or four becomes eight to 12. And you get these snowball effects over four or five years, right? And then you back that up and you say, okay, well, that looks pretty profound. That looks forward thinking. But the truth is it was just real people trying to solve real problems and having an agile way to actually do it. You're a heat-sinking pain missile, I would say. Not so, Eric, my question to you is, knowing what you know now, things that you would do differently, things that you'd caution your peers, any gotchas that you can share with our audience? I'll just, I'll probably just add to a bit what Jason was saying about how it does snowball a bit. Yeah, please. When we do roll out a new part or a new module to a business unit, other business units actually who work closely with them see what they're using and they ask the question, well, what have you got there? That's pretty good. How are you doing that? And that starts the questions being asked. So it's not like we're out there fully all the time selling it in terms of pushing it, but the other business units start to come towards us and they say, we think you could help us. Do you think you could? And that's what starts the snowball effect a little bit here and there. So it's a soft sell. With proof points. That's right. And that's why I like to play it sometimes where they come to us and then they actually have a bit more passion in the game in terms of skin in the game as well to get the job done versus being pushed all the time. If I was to do it a little bit differently next time it would be probably around utilizing the vendor a little bit more at the beginning versus maybe trying to do too much myself. That's one thing I could do. To vendor in this case being Cloud Sherpas? Was a different vendor at the time. Okay. Yeah. But I bought in some people to do the work for me in my team and that worked. But what it led to was, okay, we could have done it a bit differently with a bit more experience in that space with the right people. And that's part of it. But other than that, I think the soft sell works. But when we do see a case for, we think we can do a lot of work here and build it up, the projects that come on board, the bigger projects, basically look at service now and say this is the right platform, we could use this. And that works well. I don't think there's anything that we could do differently there, I like that approach. Okay, so you start with the IT and then you've got the soft sell methodology and you've evolved the way in which you deploy. So you're saying that in this example, Cloud Sherpas is more involved in those deployments to the business? Correct. Then your partner was with the IT piece. That's the big difference. That's right. And the result is what, faster time to deployment, reduce risk, just higher quality. Higher quality as well. Definitely the quality has to be looked at in that space. Can you quantify that in any way or is it sort of gut feel? You just know when you see it. Well, there's a bit of, I can quantify a little bit probably to the point where there's less rework later on in terms of what happens with that module. If it's done professionally and by the right people. There's less effects on other parts of the service now modules as well. That's hot. So that's the quantifiable part I see. How has the attitude toward the IT group changed since you've made this transformation? Yeah, so that's always an important part. The way my CIO describes it is that the business is a fast-moving business to run the part of the business that we do. And it has to be agile and quick and we have to move with them as best we can and support them in every way possible. We've got a lot of people working 24 by 7, 364 days a year and they'll have incidents and we need to respond to those incidents quickly. The type of modules we're providing out there to them now and our normal ITIL processes that we provide, I think they're happy with what we do in some ways. So, and there has been a change in attitude from what they've had in the past with us to what they have now in terms of utilizing IT for either the IT side or even their business function side, so for sure. And that's that soft sell again where they come back to us for other things. So we've learned from this little baby that it's all about the apps, right? And we're hearing from ServiceNow about this. It's really a platform, we're developing applications. We've talked about this yesterday. So let's talk about it again. So Jason, maybe you can start the conversation off in terms of just extending beyond IT, extending into sort of the application space. What are you seeing there generally and then specifically, what are you doing if anything for echo entertainment in that regard? And then we can ask Eric a similar question. So what you heard from Fred today was that they're obviously big play in improving that mobile experience. And in truth, if I think about my own personal experience, we utilize ServiceNow extensively in our operation. I think I've probably logged into a ServiceNow instance on a computer a half dozen times in the last three weeks, but I've used it hundreds of times on my phone, right? And so I think more and more of what we're going to find is the consumption patterns of our customers slightly changing, management wanting the approved button on their phone and not having to necessarily always drive back to the laptop or those types of things. So I think we're going to see a lot of that in the next, especially the next release, but as the customers kind of catch up to those new features and functions, that'll abstract a lot of business value. But some of the things that Eric was saying, and I think this is really important, is IT is kind of having to change their direction on how they have the conversation. They're needed to change their thoughts on how they partner, what they would value out of a partner. You see, IT really becoming a broker of skills, a broker of technology and a broker of capabilities. And that's foundationally a different discussion than a bunch of people locked up maintaining databases or keeping networks on. Yes, of course, all those things need to happen, but that's really intangible from a business standpoint. I mean, how do you put a value on the network work the way it was supposed to? Alternatively, you can put a pretty significant value on, you actually saw my workflows, you helped me automate, you aligned with legal, you aligned with risk, you aligned with safety, you aligned with HR, and you brought something to us that actually made our day jobs a little easier. That's just a much different conversation. So Eric, how do you approach application development in general? Do you have a big application development group? Do you more go for commercial off the shelf applications? And what are you doing with regard to ServiceNow apps? So we have about, I think about four or five cot systems that are used for our gaming and hotel and just our food outlets. We do a little bit of application development in-house. We have an application development team that take care of some of the applications and help with the gaming side as well. So there is that team in-house. From a service management side, obviously I use both teams when we have things like incidents and from a change perspective as well, the vendors are involved. So, but yeah, they're there and they help us and support us. On ServiceNow side, we're doing a little bit there, but that's obviously done with Cloud Sherpas. And I think that that model is working well, so yeah. Are the apps predominantly internal at this point or do you envision doing more sort of customer facing apps? There is some work in the customer facing apps, yes. But the apps that run the major part of the business are basically the cot apps. They're the ones off the shelf. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You mentioned the gaming, the hotel, when they might touch customers at some point. So how, I guess, same question asked differently. How important is mobile to you guys and how are you driving mobile? Yeah, I think mobile is definitely part of the strategy, the IT strategy, going forward in a lot of ways, depending on what device it is. But I definitely am using it in the ServiceNow space as best I can. Two business students are using it now in terms of through ServiceNow, whether it be approvals or just incident management, and we're trying to look at bringing more on in terms of the mobile space. Especially now that Eureka is on with ServiceNow, and it's helping in that space. You heard Frank yesterday talk about the email hell. You're nodding. I was going to ask, is that described situation in your organization? And do you see ServiceNow being able to lessen some of that admin task? That's part of the process with the efficiency gains. So if they're using email to do some of the, part of a lot of the process, we try to drive that efficiency, still use email in the process, but it's more driven through ServiceNow. So what do you do with all that freed up productivity? Where does that go? Well, I think it's probably more, you see things resolved quicker, less time to, for instance, whether it be in the business space or in the IT space, as best as possible. Yeah, but at the macro level, it has to free up resource, right? Now, you're not going to lay people off, presumably, but maybe you'll redeploy people over time or maybe not hire as many people or hire people for different type of tasks. Has that discussion occurred? Have you thought about that? Yeah, there is that thought process, which is at that higher level at the leadership team, but I think it's more, when I think about it, it's like we can start doing a bit more innovation and we can focus on those type of things to help the business out, versus worrying about the incident management side or the problem management side, if we can actually reduce the amount of work that's happening in those spaces. And that's where the efficiency comes. So yes, it's probably more on the innovation side and helping out with what systems they have, giving them more stuff a bit quicker. So Jason Mohan, what's your take on that? You've worked with a lot of clients and you're hearing all about this sort of productivity opportunity. What are customers going to do with that added head room? At the micro level, you don't feel it, but at the macro economic level, there's no question that organizations are getting more productive because of technology. So where does all that extra productivity go? It goes toward innovation, as Eric was saying. Absolutely. You know, where does it go? I think it changes where people focus. So maybe today you've got, at a macro level, you've got all these people checking emails and pushing paper from one desk to another and you can structure that in a service now and automate that workflow, but it doesn't change the fact that the core function is still required, right? You can't lose the fact that the business value is not abstracted from automating the workflow. Efficiency is abstracted from automating the workflow. Somebody's still going to be delivering the product or the service at the other end of it. It's going to change what they focus on, right? So maybe an average person's day looks something like, I spend 80% of my time servicing my customers and 20% of my time trying to service the system to servicing the customers and they'll spend 100% of their time servicing the customers as opposed to worrying about the systems underneath them. The workflow automation just structures. It puts it in a more clear way and of course you're going to build efficiencies out of that, but you also have to realize that from a service management perspective, you may be abstracting as efficiencies out of many different departments. And so at the higher level, yeah, are you going to get an aggregate efficiency out of that? Sure. At the lower level, are you going to see, improved services, higher quality of services, better transparency of services you are. I don't think we're at a point though, we're going to see people just massively dropping out of the system. Because again, we're talking largely from groups that are starting in IT and we all know IT's never going to surplus the funding, right? So it's always do more with less. And as you look at digitization and more things moving through these types of systems, this will free up capacity and time for the conversation to be focused more on those aspects, as opposed to actually, how do I mechanically get this work done? All right, we're out of time gentlemen, but Eric, I wanted to close with you. I see the speaker button on. So you're speaking at the conference? I did, I spoke today. You spoke already or you do speak later? I'm speaking today. Okay, so what are you talking, what did you speak about? I spoke about availability management, one of the processes, and obviously other business functions we use service now for. So that was the focus today. And that is my focus obviously. Oh yeah, well it was a little bit faster start off actually versus take it easy, but once I got into it, it was fine and the crowd went too hard on me. Well hopefully the cube wasn't too hard on you either. Eric and Jason, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate the insights and the stories and good to see you again. Thank you. All right, keep it right there buddy, we'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Service Now Knowledge 15, right back.