 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow, Knowledge 17, brought to you by ServiceNow. We're back in Orlando, everybody, Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. Michael Hovert is here, he's the Vice President of the Inspire program at ServiceNow, a program launched last year. Michael, good to see you again. Great to be back. Thank you gentlemen. It's been an awesome week. I saw you early. You and I were at the financial analyst meeting, which is always one of my favorites. You get the Kool-Aid injection, perhaps for what we're doing theCUBE. And you know, I love it because we go from the numbers, you know, you guys spice it up with a lot of the details in the business units, but then you get to talk to the customers that you really learned. So what's the, give us a summary of the week for you. Sure, it's been a fantastic week. So last year was my first experience with knowledge. Wow, what a difference a year makes in terms of scale, right? In terms of maturity of message and really the maturity of outcomes that our customers are talking about. So if you think about what Scott Mason from Novartis spoke about on day one of transforming everything about the way work is done and work moves through the enterprise to serve their patient and health outcomes and how we're enabling that across not just IT, but finance, HR facilities, or right after that's how Ashley Gaspard drove a great message around the end customer experience and taking potentially the creation of a trillion dollar market space of increased productivity that could be unleashed across their industrial customers by better enabling the way they do work and that we're helping GE Digital achieve that. Those are the types of outcomes that, we were not talking about at this event a few years ago and now it's not that we're talking about them, it's that our customers are talking about them. So Inspire, when you announced it, like about a year ago, right? You go all in when you do something like this so it's impressive to see how far you've come in a year, particularly the types of people you've been able to attract both inside the Inspire program but also the way in which you've been able to get customers to engage, which is not always easy. So maybe talk about sort of the talent that you've been able to attract and sort of how you've applied that talent. Sure, so one of the common questions I get is how much of the Inspire organization comes from existing portions of ServiceNow? Not very much, we've got a few folks that were already here at ServiceNow already with the type of mindset that we were looking for and with the history of skills and capabilities we were looking for. But mostly it is new hires, right? And they come from the customer, they come from a career of serving C-level executives or they come from other platform transformational companies that maybe have lost their edge a bit and they want to get back to a place that's really going all in, driving top line, driving customer experience versus maybe optimizing. And so that's where they've come from. And then we just have to find that 1% of customers that's up against either a great opportunity or a great crisis with the will and the power to say, I'm going to fix it, I'm going to get there, folks like Ashley, wow. And then we are a part of that, right? And it'll change their market cap value and through our role in it, it'll change our market cap value. And that's what we talked about at the financial realm this day together. Yeah, well, so some of the numbers were like mind boggling. ServiceNow is a very transparent company. It's something that Frank has always believed in. Scarpelli, I think, shared, it's about a $15 million investment. You guys hope to drive hundreds of millions of dollars in pipeline, but you were saying off camera that that's good, that's easy value to measure. Anybody can understand that, but there's other intangible value, which is perhaps even greater, right? I mean, like you said, if you have GE a senior person at GE up on stage and advocating, as the old saying, customer satisfaction is one thing, customer loyalty is everything. It seems like you've been able to engender that. Right, there's a phrase, and I don't know who to attribute it to, that says if you do a really good job, you'll tell everyone about it. If you do an excellent, amazing job, everyone will tell the world. Everyone else will tell the world. Everyone else will tell you about the job you did. And I feel like while we're making humble, we're just starting to bridge to that point where we're here in the feedback from the customers, from the coverage analysts that go and talk to our customers, that we're doing a pretty good job. We're doing a good to great job. I'm a sort of tongue-in-cheek this week. It's like, it inspires one of the best freebies in the business, but how do you manage demand? I mean, people must be lining up to get to tap the expertise that you guys have. Absolutely, so the psychology of this is pretty easy. First, you have to establish that this is something of value, then you have to state the fact that it has a certain amount of scarcity to it. And then when you couple that with the fact that, but for you, because of your special circumstance, your brand, your insight, your value, you are one of the few, one of the 1% that I'm going to give it to you for free. Demand is incalculable, right? So we are supply constrained in terms of cost to serve and capability from a talent perspective to serve. We're not demand constrained. We are supply constrained, which means we have to really bet on the right 1% of customers. Yeah, and you have to bet on those customers because they don't have any financial skin in the game other than the fact that, of course, they've invested in service now, but it's not like an incremental project that they're paying for. They have to be willing to participate at senior levels of their organization. Correct, and it does remove a whole bunch of things that slow down time to value by saying, we don't have statements of work. We don't have terms of conditions. We don't have scopes. We have a social contract, like you and I would. That says, success would be measured as this. Your role will be measured this way. Our role will be measured this way, and we're going to go all in. However, it has a huge, massive cost to you as a customer, and the more the senior you are in an organization, the larger the organization, the more they immediately see this, and often preempt me talking about it. They say it to me, which is I'm asking for the one resource you do not have the ability to create or procure more of, which is time from your most talented leaders and resources who know the current and future state of your business direction. And you give me that time from them. You're never getting that time back. So I better give you something hugely valuable in return for you sharing that scarcity of that resource with me. I remember I was reading an HBR article years ago, and it was how Gutfeel beats data-oriented analysis, and sort of Jack Welch was the poster child for that. My question is, when you present a customer with that value proposition that you just laid out, I mean, intuitively they might say, wow, okay, I'm all in, or do they go back and make a business case or sometimes both? I wouldn't say they make a decision as formal as a business case, but we do have a very open and transparent conversation, because you said that's a big part of who we are as our culture is a lot of transparency that says based upon that, that transfer of value, we're investing, you're investing, not directly monetarily, but through applying some of the scarcity of resources that we both have. What's the right level of investment for the desired return, right? And so when we team with customers, it can be anywhere from an hour-long conversation to shore up perspective and identify key risks where it can be through to three or four months. So depending upon really the type of return they're looking for, if they think they've got it mostly settled, they're mostly on a good path, they simply want one more external perspective to give them confidence and to instill us with a bit of accountability for our role in that, then it's not that big a cost and it's not that big a decision. It's that three to four month one that sitting with Ashley, sitting with Scott Mason, those folks, those are bigger decisions. And it ultimately comes down to how much do I trust you and how much do I respect your ability to deliver on what we're talking about. And it's very simple. How much do I trust you? How much do I respect you? So I'm just curious, how much of that goes into your selection criteria when you're deciding amongst the plethora of customers you could work with in projects within those customers, the kind of assessments that you're taking into account before you decide I'm going with option A versus option B, C, D, E all the way to Z? So we definitely have the combination of science and then gut feel, right? So we definitely have criteria by which we look at how important is this customer's problem to create innovation around? If we innovated for you and your manifestation of this problem, could we, would it help the other 99% of customers that we will not have the chance to meet with? That's a big indicator, right? The repeatability and scale of innovating in the area that you're asking us to innovate. That's science, right? The second being you and your personal brand as a leader, but also the company which you lead. How credible are you? And if you achieve an outcome, are you going from okay to good or are you going from good to great? And we want to be helping people always get to great, right? The bigger the transformation from where they are, the better, right? And if so, that has that kind of brand impact, that gets to be more of the gut feel. So it's kind of a combination of those two things. Okay, well, and you know, again, we were talking earlier about there's a lot of different ways to measure success. But at the end of the day, the numbers matter. And what I love about what's happening at service now is that customers can start small. I mean, I won't name names, but I've talked to many customers who have started on relatively small deals under, well under $100,000, you know? And now they're customers that are very large deals, well over a million, you've done a lot of deals over five million. And there's a long way to go. I feel like this company is just barely scratching the surface. I mean, it sounds kind of crazy for a billion dollar plus company, but you've got aspirations to get to four billion. John Donahoe the other day even said, well, you know, hey, why stop there? You know, we can see the potential for 10 billion. The market size is potentially there. You guys always couch that with safe harbor statements, et cetera. But the fundamentals are very good. A lot of tailwinds and the Inspire program is a catalyst for that type of deeper activity into these organizations. So I'll give you the sort of last word on Knowledge 17, you know, one year in and Inspire. Where do you want to go from here? Fantastic setup. Three thoughts. First, I've had no conversations in the last month with John Donahoe that were about getting to four billion dollars, right? So while it's a publicly traded company, we all are focused on consistent overachievement of the financial targets every 90 days. That is in every single part of our DNA and that's absolutely in John's DNA. However, we get the luxury and Inspire of being a part of that organism, a part of that entity that's also looking at the long game, also looking at the long-term outcome. And I can tell you it's much bigger numbers than that that we're working on. So I'll confirm that. The second thought is I'm so proud of what our customers, our internal stakeholders, and our team have done in the last year together as sort of our freshman class of customers, our freshman class of Inspire team members to create outcomes from delivering revenue to improving NPS to taking out costs to improving employee experience. I mean, these are board level issues that we are working on with some of the best brands in the world, right? And so I'm very, very happy and proud of what that is and very humbled to be a person who's in the chair to help drive that forward. And then the third question which is, so where does it all go next, right? It's absolutely keep doing more of the same, but continue maturing in two dimensions. One, let's make it an even lower investment from customers to figure this stuff out, right? So if you think about optimizing, can we get to just as good an answer in half as much time because we are doing a better job of understanding where the crucial decisions lie. So that's one next step is, could we talk about a year from now that what used to take two months of collaboration now takes a month? How valuable is that? Not just from the cost offset of the time we spend together, but you get to start executing on that idea and executing on that transformation one month closer. You never get that month back if it takes two months. So that's huge value to the customer. And so that's one area that we will go forward with is more efficiency, more optimization in how much effort it takes to get to the right questions and the optimal answers for those questions. And the second thing is, I consider those kind of silver bullets, silver bullets that let us go shoot transformation werewolves, right? Once we find those silver bullets and we've used them a couple times and we have killed the werewolves getting in the way of big, big transformation, our entire company and our entire partner ecosystem and even our practitioner community in the customer base, they all are hungry for learning how to to put those bullets in their arsenal as well. And so we're starting to do more and more of that this year, which allows us to move our entire company forward, move the 99% forward based upon what works for the 1%. Very service now, like answer Mike like I said. And to the numbers, success is not a function of the revenue in the market cap or a function of the success. And the success comes from the customers and the value that they're getting from the platform. Absolutely, you've got the service now, DNA in you. No, I mean, that's been very clear. And there are actually very few companies today that sort of live and breed that culture. So thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was always great to see you. It was fantastic, thank you. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. What's the biggest disruption that you're?