 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at ServiceNow Knowledge 18, 2018. Been here for six years, it's amazing. It's like 18,000 people all over the sans convention center, huge ecosystem and we're excited to be back as usual. And our next guest, Greg Dietrich, he's a VP of Operations and Engineering at DXC, joined by Tim Henderson, Director of Automation Engineering at DXC. So gentlemen, welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having us here. Yeah, absolutely. So first off, just kind of impressions of the show that's amazing. This thing grows like four or 5,000 people, I think, every single year. Yeah, it's amazing to see 18,000 people here at a ServiceNow conference. I actually attended back in October of 2007 before they had knowledge. I attended a first user group session in New York where there was about 70 people around the table. It's for you and Fred and a couple other people, right? Fred, his brother who ran operations at the time and a few more. That's right. And then obviously you guys interviewed fruition partners way back in the day, who got bought by CSC and you guys have rebranded into DXC. So you guys have a long history and really making a bet on the ServiceNow value proposition. Yeah, that's right. CSC and now DXC has had a long history of partnership with ServiceNow. And as you said, as evidenced by some of these acquisitions that we did with fruition and logic Alice, the guys with the green suits around here. And that continues to be a very strong part of our business. Good bet. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And what's interesting and I'm sure back of the day, we used to talk to Fred, he had this great platform, but nobody's got line item budget for a new platform, right? So you have to build the application. Obviously the story is well known. He built the service management application, but he still has that great platform underneath. And now we're seeing all these different kind of applications built on this platform beyond what the original applications are. I think that's what you see is the pivot to more focus on business and less about IT, right? And that's what we're doing with Bionics and Platform DXC is taking a completely different angle that we're trying to orchestrate business within an ecosystem, which ServiceNow is a key construct of. And it resonates with clients. We've showed what we've done to several major clients and it's really trying to achieve, like John said, business outcomes and less about the IT. But how can you quickly bundle, sequence workflows and capability to get efficiency and automation into the workplace? Right. So let's dig down a little deeper on that application. So what a problem did you approach? Why was this the right tool to go after this problem? Sure. The big thing that Tim and I are driving across DXC is our DXC-Bionics approach, which is really centered on how can we transform and digitally transform our delivery engine, right? So we're applying data and analytics and leaning out our people and processes and applying technology and automation tools to really drive intelligent automation across everything we do to get better, faster, cheaper, more automated, scalable, repeatable. In doing that, it was really important that we took a platform approach and ServiceNow has been a cornerstone in that platform and we call that platform, platform DXC. And why do you call it Bionics? So Bionics for us is that combination of data, people and technology. So it's not just automation as the silver bullet and just the technology. It has to be that combination of the data with the people and the technology and automation coming together to make people work smarter, work more intelligently. Right. And I think some of that too is the muscle part of it, right? You think Bionics, but as Greg said, you really got to understand the root business problem or what's occurring. And a lot of people we've seen in the industry are applying just automation without really understanding the underlying problem. And a lot of companies have had IT implemented in a diversified portfolio for 20 years and these disparate systems are very siloed and there's a lot of waste in the value stream of their company. And if you really don't break that apart and look at that, you're really not helping them lead in their marketplace. Right. It's just fascinating how we just continue to find these big, giant buckets of inefficiency all the way back to the original ERP days and just keep finding so many giant buckets that where things are just not working as smoothly as they could. And it's not just, you know, people look at this somewhat, they'll say, well, automation is to get heads out. Well, actually it's to free up heads, right, Greg? To where you can actually empower these people to go do other value added things for that company and not sit here in this toil or managing technical debt or inefficient waste. It's really liberating. But it does take a good champion within a company to go pull that off. And clearly the people part's probably the hardest part, right? In the keynote yesterday, John touched on kind of best practices and one of them, I think, number three was, you know, a commitment to change process. And that's obviously a big part of your guys' business, helping people to get through that piece of it because I laugh, I have Alexa and I have a Google Home and they send me emails on how I should interact with this thing, right? To try to help me change my behavior, to take advantage of this new technology, like, oh, okay, so it's hard to change people's behavior. Yeah, so the people component comes down to a couple of things. One, it comes down to skills, right? And there's been a lot of discussion here this week around getting the right skills, the digital types of skills that are needed in this new economy. But the other piece that's more important, I think, around people is this cultural pivot, right? So a big piece of our digital transformation has not been about technology, but it has been about a cultural change, thinking differently, challenging the status quo, working differently, right? That agile DevOps, eliminating that fear of failure, let's fail fast, let's learn from it in that continual incremental way of driving improvement. Right, right. And something we did when Greg and I experimented with this, we actually didn't know how it was going to work out. To put the platform itself together, we created this concept called a buildathon. And it sounds like a buildathon. A buildathon. Not a hackathon, but a buildathon. So we have our team, we have ServiceNow, we have AWS, Microsoft, Dell, other partners in there, and we write code together. It's no PowerPoint, you know, you're doing scrum sessions, sprints, and we basically created the platform in 230 days, which is phenomenal when you think about it. From inception to briefing Greg and the CTO of our company, Dan Hushin, to saying it's open for business. And it's, like Greg said, empowering people, getting them to work. But one thing we're doing is getting our partners to build with us. We call it co-creation. I know that's a little dicey term, but you can take that the wrong way. But they're having fun with it because instead of getting all caught up in contractuals and, you know, what am I going to make on this? It's like, let's go try some things and build together and then go, oh, well I made that water glass and I can go price this in here and everybody understands what they're going to make in it, right, is a business. And it's huge, it transforms the workforce. Our partner network loves it. They're lined up to get into the framework. And like Greg says, it's re-energized our workforce. It's been huge. It's so interesting, the whole DevOps conversation. So all these terms, Moore's Law, et cetera, have a very specific application, but I think it's much more interesting, the more general purpose application of that method. You know, whether it's Moore's Law and just presumption that we're just going to keep getting better, faster, cheaper and driving forward, or really DevOps, which is, no, we're not going to do a big ol' MRD and we're not going to do a big giant PRD and spec this thing out and start our build and someday down the road, hope to deliver something. It's like, let's start delivering now. Right, gone are the days of those big requirements and then go away and the big reveal and oh no, it missed all this, right? It's got to be that more interactive, collaborative, gradual way. And the thing about the people, you know, we go to a ton of shows, right? Everyone's automation's going to take people away, but I've never heard anyone say we're overstaffed. That we have more people qualified in these new areas than we need. I mean, there's still such a demand for people across the board or whether it's truck driving or anything else, right? It's unlocking the power of those people. And just to kind of share, you know, an example, when we went through the pilot for this to go get the funding, we took basically a womb to tomb situation where we would go do infrastructure as a service, a platform and have it in the client's hands for business. In the past that would take us like 2,100 hours and eight teams and, you know, 53 handoffs. In seven weeks, we proved we could orchestrate that all the way through the last mile, getting to the client's network in two hours and 14 minutes to where the client could log in. Wow, that's game changer. It is a game changer, but you free up those resources then to help that customer understand how to leverage that application and change their business versus all this toil of trying to figure out, well, did I get the network connected? Right, right. Well, who knows how to do the firewalls and all that's, everything is code, right? And that's really, I said it earlier, we're really going towards business as code, right? Because that's what John's talking about is getting business processes as code and then empowering people to have that situational awareness. And then hopefully opening up their minds to, oh my goodness, if I can do this that easily, you know, what else can I do, right? Exactly, exactly. You know, what else can I do? So Tim, you've got an interesting background. You, not that service now is not exciting, but you were involved in a very exciting business for years and years at Cape Canaveral. So what did you do there? And what lessons did you learn there that you can apply to now? That's a great question. So it was actually an honor to support our country in that way, but I was the IT director at Cape Canaveral for 12 years and supported Atlas, Titan, and Delta rocket launches for commercial and military purposes. But what I learned there a lot was two key things, systems engineering, that's almost like DevOps for aerospace and defense is people really building a system together and understanding what they have to achieve. The other thing is command and control and that sounds a little rigid in today's world of agile. But when Greg and I talked about platform DXC, what we felt is we need a command and control system for business, right? That has a complete loop. And we're going to talk about this Thursday at 1.30. So we took a lot of those constructs and we didn't even select service now when we put the platform together. We've been a good partner with them. But then we said, you know what? They have a market leading solution. They're going to fit into the orchestration of business. And then there's an intelligence pillar and an automation pillar, but we're seeing huge gains. Every client we get in front of is like, wow, we didn't think about that. And we also have, our partners are actually wanting to put their IP into our platform so people can just consume it and we could wrap a managed service wrapper around it. So it kind of turns into an IT marketplace in a way. So we're pretty excited about it. I'd love to just kind of drill down on the command and control. It's interesting. I talked to a company a couple of weeks ago and they're in aviation. Right. And the guy's like, you know, in aviation, if they want to innovate around ticketing or AV systems in the planes or that, you know, they can innovate all day long. It doesn't really matter if somebody can't print their ticket or it doesn't come up on their phone. But in terms of the safety, it's not the same in terms of the regs and the maintenance of the aircraft. It's super rigid. You can't take risk. It's a great point. And I would imagine a Cape Canaveral, although some missions have people, some people, some don't. It's still big, expensive missions and you really aren't like failing fast in kind of a developed culture. Well, you actually move pretty quick, believe it or not. You can build a rocket in six months and they'll fly it in. You can erect it and test it in 30 days in launch, which is pretty crazy when you think about it. And a rocket's a lot of hardware and software, right? What they have is that value stream of through systems engineering is situational awareness. So, for example, they know every time a torque wrench was used, who used it, so if it went out of calibration, they can immediately go back and say it was used on this guidance system, on that rocket, we need to go back and check it before it launches. And it's really a pedigree. You know who was the tech, were they assigned? Did they have the right skills? Did they capture the data for the test? And you really have a pedigree and we've actually built some of that into the platform DXC. We call it the digital thread, which is something we had worked on with the Air Force. And it's having, so if you take compliance, right, and you have this thread of everything that's occurred, whether it's a people, an asset, an application, you have a thread, so you look at compliance radically different. So we capture a lot of telemetry, whether it's technical business or security. And that's where the intelligence pillar has this whole AI engine and machine learning and things to just start pivoting radically. So it's really a closed loop system, which is what a rocket has. The airplane that probably everybody in this room flew here in, right? It's always sensing itself and adjusting. And if it has a failure potentially coming up, it notifies Boeing before that plane lands that they need something to go look at, right? That's what we're trying to do here for business. It's funny that another interviewer, Gal came, she was a lawyer, she was a homicide detective, and talked really about kind of chain of possession. And what an important concept chain of possession is but I'm just curious about how cumbersome was that before when you started versus with the tools that we have now in terms of sensors and networks and basically unlimited compute, unlimited networking and unlimited store. You know, kind of what percentage of your effort was chain of command versus actually doing things and that kind of followed along. You know, I think you asked the question how cumbersome was it? I think it was so difficult that in many cases it was not there, right? So you had these big gaps and you didn't know what happened and you didn't have the integration of the data. And now in today's world with these more real-time, cloud-based, integrated systems where you're able to get that at more and more a commoditized price, right? It's no longer as expensive and difficult to get that. It's being commoditized where in the past, in some cases you didn't have it because it was too hard or too expensive to get it. So you didn't have that closed loop kind of feedback mechanism to make sure that things go well. You know, with people and paper. Yeah. All right. So we're, I can't believe we're like May 9th, year's halfway gone. So kind of what's next steps in the balance of 2018 on this journey? If we talk a year from now, what are we going to be talking about? Yeah, so our strategy for this year ahead of us is really to continue driving Bionics or intelligent automation across our whole business unit, right? So DXC, the world's leading, largest independent services company across infrastructure, apps and BPS. So we're transforming how we deliver and deploying that at scale. So intelligent automation at scale across our business. The second key piece for us this year is to work across all of our offerings and our industry solutions to ensure that they're built for operations and built on platform DXC. So all of that efficiency, effectiveness, and automation is built into the offerings. So that's what we have ahead of us for this year. All right. Should be fun. Yeah. Yeah. And a couple of rock. Yeah. And we'll watch along Musk car, keep going through the space because that's very entertaining. It is pretty cool. Well, what's cool too is now everyone's excited to watch launches. You don't get up at six in the morning and just like count it down. And it is very cool. All right, with Tim, Greg, thanks again for taking a few minutes and stopping by. Thanks, Jeff. All right, Tim and Greg, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from Service Down Knowledge 2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada. We'll be right back after this short break. Thanks for watching.