 Hey everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante. I'm with, and this is theCUBE, where we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, and we bring you the best guests that we can find. I'm here with my co-host, Jeff Frick. Craig McDonough is here. He's the director of product marketing for service now. Craig, welcome to theCUBE. How much? So, great event for you guys. You have this thing called the innovation of the year of award winners. It's a big award that you guys give every year. Tell us more about innovation of the year. What's that all about? Yeah, innovation of the year is an opportunity to showcase some of the great work that our customers do on the service now platform. And every year, we invite people to send us their artwork. It's kind of like when the kids come home with the artwork and you stick it on the fridge. This is our version of the artwork on the fridge. The kids, or in this case, the customers, come in, they show us what they've presented, what they've created, and nine times out of 10, these are real business applications that have been built to solve real business problems. And solving problems that aren't solved by any other technology out there, and they've sat down and just by themselves created these unbelievable applications from scratch. So, how do you guys judge the winner? So that's an interesting process. I mean, quite frankly, this year we were overwhelmed. We had about 45 entries, and when you got 45, completely separate, completely different applications, and you're going through them, it's really hard to pick winners. And so what we ended up doing was a very scientific method. Fred and I printed out all of the screenshots that we were given, laid them all out on the floor, and literally crawled around on our hands and knees, looking at the screenshots and holding them up when we saw good ones that we thought would tell a good story. So you sort of narrowed them down? Very scientific, yeah. So kind of a top 10 or something? We narrowed them down to a top five, and then in the keynote presentation this morning, we presented those five to the audience, and we asked them to, just using a text poll, similar to American Idol, asked them to text in their favorite, and we got our winner. So tell us, who won? The winner for the Innovation of the Year Award for 2013 was Target. Okay, great. Who's that Target cruising around last night? Yeah, it's great. I mean Target is, again, it's like Walmart, a lot of these companies that people don't think of as technology companies, really under the covers, are a lot more of a technology company than anyone realizes. So what was their app? So they'd built an application to allow their service management professionals to be able to handle walk-up appointments and to be able to actually get mobile. So instead of sitting in a call center somewhere, these guys are wandering around the enterprise, helping people out as they're encountering problems, and they're doing it all with a mobile application. People can set up appointments, engineers can enter in the work that they're doing in like an iPad, using an iPad device or a laptop, and it was all presented in this beautiful user interface, which I think probably went a long way to why they did so well. Yeah, beautiful works and words like that. So what are some of the other cool apps that you saw, ones that you sort of had a hard time going out? Yeah, I mean look, there were some great ones. We had companies that had built entire CIO dashboard, dashboarding systems to give their CIOs visibility into what was happening in IT, like you would never have before. I mean, I'm sure you've spoken to a lot of people this week that have talked about IT being kind of the cobbler's children, and they're usually trying to do their job with a collection of technology. Bringing all of that together into a consolidated dashboard is what the folks at Equinex did, and they were one of, they actually weren't even a finalist this year, but they were definitely an honorable mention. The other finalists that we had this year were MetroPCS, we also had GE, Asset Management, Sephora, and Tickets.com, and every single one of those companies has created an application that really solves a business, a business problem they were having, and they've had a real measurable impact on their business. Now what's interesting is you've got this really active community going on, right? You've got people contributing these apps. We visited the Hackathon yesterday. That was cool. You know, they're working away. It begs the question, are they sharing this amongst themselves? Is there an app store? It's got to be an app store on the horizon. I know you guys can't talk about it. It's got to be both for company-built apps, because a lot of people are building little businesses on the ecosystem that you guys are creating, but also these internal guys, who are kind of internal service now champions building neat things that I'm sure other people would like to leverage. So how's that working in this community? Well, actually in the latest release of ServiceNow, the Calibri release, which was announced on Monday, we introduced some new capability for exactly that purpose. That helps their customers when they create an application like this, to be able to package it up so that they can take it and share it with other customers. I think that the idea of an app store is probably complete with the commerce and the validation and those sort of things. That's probably a little way off, but certainly the idea of a community where people can exchange ideas and exchange applications with one another, we'd love to see that happening. Funny, we had Derek Roston from E-Protects yesterday and a few of those guys, and he was making us laugh. He said, oh, I went out, I developed this application, and then two months later, there it was. And then he did it a couple of times. So there was clearly an interest amongst customers in terms of collaborating on that type of thing. Yeah, most definitely. We had, I think it was last year in the Innovation of the Year Awards, Verisign showed off an amazing data center power and space management application they built. In service now, and after that event, we had a couple of other large customers. I think it was Google and I can't remember who the other customer was, but two very large customers came to us and said, can you put us in contact with those guys because we want to talk to them about how they did it and see if there's a way that we can use that as well. Because these are real business problems that people face. And in a lot of cases, there isn't a packaged application that solves the problem. Right, right, and yeah, so the opportunity for, let's say collaboration, who knows, maybe even a marketplace at some point in time. What surprises you about how customers are using service now? You know, I've tried to stop being surprised because I think everything surprises me quite frankly. What you see when customers come up with their innovations, or last night you mentioned the hackathon. You know, we have customers come up with works that they did at the hackathon. It surprises isn't a strong enough word. It absolutely blows me and pretty much every other service now employee that sees it, they just get blown away. Because it really, even Fred, you know, when we were going through these innovations, Fred was like leafing through the pages just completely blown away with what customers have done with service now. It's incredibly inspirational to us. All of the work that these guys did around the innovations and the hackathon is absolutely going to go viral within the developer team at service now. They're going to be looking through this thing and learning and just being inspired. It's incredible to be inspired by customers. It's awesome because there's all these things. You constantly read about how do you get innovation out of big companies? How do you teach innovation? How do you teach creativity? Is it even possible? But what it sounds like is with this tool that you guys have created, you are really kind of unlocking this pent up creativity and ingenuity and imagination in a group of people who here to four we're chasing down trouble tickets and answering calls and some of you've automated enough the processes that they can now free up their brain to think of higher value problems and have a tool they can actually go out and execute against it. Well, and not only that, it's a tool that they can then take this to the rest of the business and say, we understand HR department, you've got some issues as well. We can help you with that. Facilities department, we can help you with that. And they're actually automating processes beyond the walls of IT. Which is, yeah, I mean Carolyn was here from Linux. She said, she's not going out there but they're coming over to her place tapping her on the shoulder. Can you come do one of those for us? Yeah, we hear that story all the time. It's actually, it's surprisingly common. And it's again, incredibly inspirational. That's great. So we're talking to a lot of customers this week and I ask them, it's amazing the consistency that you hear, they're really enthusiastic. Well, first of all, why do you think they're so enthusiastic? Let's start there. I mean, it's kind of an obvious question but I want to hear your answer. I don't know if it is an obvious question. I think they're so enthusiastic because these, in most cases, these are IT professionals. And if you think in most organizations the IT professional is kind of the downtrodden person within many organizations. I mean, the CIO in many cases is the most replaced executive in an executive team. People, the IT departments generally and historically have had bad reputations. Not through any fault of their own but just because they really haven't had the tools to manage the service that they provide to the business. People don't like IT. The business people don't like IT. Well, it really is the no, right? It is, it's the department of no. Right, and I think it's not just a marketing slogan. I think we honestly are able to take people, we give them a tool that they can use within IT just to lift themselves out of that and they can then take that same tool and use it to actually promote themselves to the business and solve real business problems for the business. I think the reason why people get so excited about service now is because it's taken them from being that downtrodden, despised part of the business and turned them into heroes in their own organizations. Yeah, you guys use that term IT heroes a lot. Yeah. Now, the other thing is, so I've talked to a lot of customers this week and just asking them, why do you love it so much? And they basically say what you just said. I mean, it's really helping us solve our problem. It's making us much more respected within our organization. It's making our clients happy. And it's facing IT people, they're client driven. I mean, they do, they have to service their customers. They care a lot about them. This problem is that just the planes are backing up for the quest. So they want to do a good job and now you're giving them the tools to do that. But so the second question I asked them is, okay, well, what's on service now is to do list. What aren't you happy with? What could they do to make your life even better? And I get blank stares. I've asked that question dozens of times this week. And I get answers like, well, we're really happy. Or, well, we're kind of just still absorbing all the great stuff. I've not found somebody to say, okay, I need this, this, this, and this. Now, maybe before the iPad, maybe somebody says, I want Android support or something like that. Okay, fine, great. But there's got to be something. So what's on your to-do list from a product marketing standpoint? It's where do we go next? You know, I think we need to, one thing that we're going to be very definite about is that our focus is on the IT organization. So what you're not going to see us doing next is starting to go out to other units within the business. We're not going to go out to the sales organization and say, hey, you should use service now for automating your sales process. We're not going to go out to HR and say you should do stuff there. Help, I work to A, but it's not going to happen. Yeah, that's not what we'll do. But what we will do is say to our IT customers, here's a tool that you can use to maybe front end some of your typical HR request processes. I think the next big growth area for service now is going to be on the platform side. It's, you know, the platform enables the IT professionals to not only take the applications that we provide out of the box and customize them so that they're doing exactly what they need them to do, but it also gives them the ability to automate processes for which there isn't an application in the IT world. And then thirdly, they can take those applications and offer them to the rest of the business. So I think there's probably a lot that we can do around the platform piece to help strengthen that, to help, to help, quite frankly, make people more aware of the goal that they already have in their hands. Excellent. All right, Craig, well listen, thanks very much for coming by and sharing the Innovation Award winners. Congratulations on that process and on a great conference and having so much success. I really appreciate it. Great, thanks very much. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. We're going to start the customer segment. We've got Maritz coming on and a number of other customers, so keep it right there, but right back, this is theCUBE. We're live. Knowledge.