 ServiceNow Knowledge 14 is sponsored by ServiceNow. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. Buddy, this is theCUBE and we're here at ServiceNow Knowledge 14 at Moscone. Matt French is here as the Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Cloud Platform and Infrastructure for ServiceNow. Welcome, Matt. Well, it looks like I got a promotion. Actually, the VP of Strategy at ServiceNow. I focus more on the corporate messaging and working on where we're taking this company. Good, that helps. Okay, so because we were talking to Alan, who I think has that title as well. He's a little more intelligent than I am. We were pretty people. Good guy, nevertheless. So good, let's talk strategy. I mean, you guys were, I think, pretty clear in the financial analyst meeting and the industry analyst meeting about sort of the target markets that you're going after. You know, how you're expanding, obviously beyond help desk, we got that and then ITSM. And then the enterprise service management piece is not new, but your focus is sharpening. So I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. And I think what's interesting when you look at the software market and automation in general, you have ERP on one end, which is managing the suppliers. On the other end, you have customer relationship management or CRM and that's managing the relationships with your customers. What we tend to forget about is this middle ground where the enterprise operates within themselves to drive automation across what we call service delivery. And it's our belief that with enterprise service management, we're trying to drive automation into every service provider that lives within the enterprise. And what I mean by that, there's organizations like HR and facilities, even IT. At the end of the day, they're all service providers back to the enterprise. What we want to do is try to automate that process between these different providers so we can make it easier for people to get work done at the end of the day. Yeah, I mean, who's not a service provider? Everybody is. I mean, you guys are providing the service right here and I'm a big fan of what you guys do. Thank you. But everybody in the enterprise is a service provider in the end of the day. So do you see, the question that comes up a lot about you guys is, okay, beyond IT, where's the sweet spot? And it sounds like the sweet spot is either everywhere or a sort of company dependent. How do you answer that question? I look at this concept of beyond IT and I don't think there really is that concept that exists. I think that IT is a shared service because I think that HR is a shared service. I think that legal and finance and payroll, they're all shared services. And those are all enterprise service management and when you look within that, IT falls within that. We also look at as IT becoming the backbone of the modern enterprise now that everything that we do to deliver service and deliver products is all about technology. And so we don't see this concept of beyond IT. There really is one in the same and IT is the backbone to make that happen and drive those service automation activities. So when you think about going into a client or prospect who's got pain around service management within their enterprise, what do they tell you? Where are their headaches? Now we start off in IT and I think that IT's trying to make a transition themselves to become more of a service provider back to the enterprise and become more strategic to them. And you look at these points of engagement between IT and the business to enable the business and it's becoming more of this really interactive point so they can deliver that better, that service back to them. When it comes to other organizations like HR and facilities and legal and payroll, I think they don't know what they don't know yet. We're still defining what this market looks like on their behalf because right now it's they're inundated with email, they're overstaffing the front lines to capture email requests and be able to process requests through email. So, talk about email as the service request platform. Is it, it's actually probably growing because the volume of information is growing. I mean, I'm not getting less emails. What do you see there? Well, that's what I was gonna ask you guys, is your email inbox growing or is it shrinking? Yeah, it's not shrinking. And mine is definitely growing as well. And I think the other question I might throw and turn the interview around here is that when you look at your inbox, what are the types of emails that are coming in? Are they requests or are they just information? What's the mixture for you? Lot of requests, plenty of information, but that's easy. I can filter through that very quickly. It's the requests for service essentially that are really hard to deal with, right? That's right. Because they require an action so you can sort of file it somewhere, but then there's not a workflow associated with it. That's right. And that's the problem, right? That is the problem. And I think when you look at the inbox for most of these service providers within the enterprise, most of it is they're all based on request. And you look at when you're dealing with HR, if I submit an open enrollment request or some sort of request for information from HR, I don't know if anybody's following up on it. And not only that, on the back end, the service provider being the HR department or IT has a very difficult time in tracking information that they're being requested for. So their ability to execute and deliver that service at a high quality becomes very difficult. The other thing too is that it gets to a point where you can't identify what types of requests they're coming in. And so when you can't do that, you can't start to automate those processes that are unstructured. Plus you can't be more proactive in providing people information up front so you don't receive those requests. So we see email kind of going by the wayside. And I think when you look at the change in the marketplace, email's not that old. What is it, 20 years old? And at some point we switch from inter-office mail to email. And social media is fairly new and people have already adopted social media. And we think a better way of working is a more structured environment where we're capturing requests and assigning those requests to the right individuals to get work done. Yeah, it's interesting. It hasn't happened earlier, right? I mean, I remember the first time I saw email, when you used to have to go type up a memo and get an envelope. And you couldn't just automatically add a bunch of CCs. And then the first time I saw an email, I said, oh, this is way too easy. Way too easy to copy people. It's way too easy just to start inundating people with a whole bunch of flow. But on the development side of the house, they've started to go this way with workflow and basically community. And I'm thinking of like the Alasian Suite with Confluence as an enterprise wiki. And I don't know that, but it hasn't really made the jump over to the enterprise. There hasn't really jumped out of the development suite. And now you're trying to take the IT service management method, methodology, and get that kind of out of the IT area. It sounds like you're having some success, but I wonder if you can provide any insight as to why now is it starting to take off? Why are kind of people figuring it out? Is it a generational thing? Because 20 years ago, but now the new kids, they don't do email. So they kind of skipped it. Or is it just because we finally were so inundated with email that we just realized we've got to do something different? Why suddenly now can we effectively move to a different paradigm and get off the silly email? Yeah, I think people are tired of email, but even more than that, it's about creating that and taking advantage of that point of engagement between the provider and the requester. And part of that really comes down to the ability to, I lost my train of thought there. It's all right. Engagement between the requester. Why does that now work? Because the other part of it to me is the workflow and the closed loop nature. Because like you said, we have so many emails and if something falls to the second page, oh my goodness, will it ever come back to the first page? And there isn't this closed loop. I don't know if people have received my request. And if they have received the request, they acknowledge it. It just adds a bunch more back and forth to the thread. So then you finally get to the end of the thread. On a Google thread, you have 17 emails. Half of which are, can we schedule a Monday at 12 or Tuesday at two? And it just becomes overwhelming. So it is refreshing to think that we can move a lot of this process into something that is automated, does have closed loop, does have reporting, and not just the nightmare that can become our inboxes. Yeah, and if you look at a lot of these service providers, they have, maybe it's one email alias, and the email gets sent to an inbox and you have several people on the back end that are then going in and grabbing that request and trying to execute on that request and trying to fulfill that request. But we've seen is that that's more of a one-to-one like peer interaction point, but you have several other people that could be helping either in the office there or across the globe that could be contributing to supporting that. And there's some really interesting things we've seen that when IT is done really well, where you have a very clean interface between IT and the business, which we call the service catalog, is it makes it really easy for people to understand what types of services are available for them to consume. And when you look at the new hire process, is IT is the orchestrator of a lot of the new hire process. And at that point of interaction between HR and IT, the HR representatives are seeing the great things that ServiceNow customers are doing with our technology with the service catalog. And they're saying, I want that interface and I want the process you have in place because it's really not that much different than what I'm doing today with an IT. And it's an extension of their existing process, just one more loop within that onboarding process that they need to accommodate. So why don't I just use the same tool, it's an offshoot. That's right, absolutely. So this is a pretty big change that we're talking about, right? That today we do a lot of communication through we're talking about email. You know, maybe you got some threaded conversations if you use Gmail, maybe that's even worse sometimes. And you're talking about going into a more holistic system, which is a big shift in mindset for people. What are the challenges to that shift? Where are the headwinds? Yeah, the headwinds really come down to just what I said before is just tackling what you don't know. And I think there's a lot of different enterprises out there, service disciplines within the enterprises that haven't really seen the light of the day yet that what they're doing today is unstructured. It's any fish and it's just not working. But yet if you were to go pull the different people that are requesting services of that service provider, they're gonna find out that the service they're getting from them or that they're providing just isn't up to par. And that's what we're starting to see when a lot of these enterprises are starting to move to more of an automated system to where they create a more structured communication and fulfillment process. And so by doing that and showing quick wins, we have a customer that has just recently selected ServiceNow for HR service automation and they're going to reduce their HR headcount by 75%. And it's not reducing the headcount because people are filing papers and doing things in the back end. It's because they're simply staffing the front end to manage all the requests that are coming in. And so you just have people that are pushing paper when they don't need to be. When we can automate it, make sure it's a sign of the right people to make sure we get the work done on their behalf. Awesome. All right, Matt, we got to leave it there. Great having you on theCUBE. Thank you so much. Good luck with everything and we'll be watching. All right, keep it right there all. We will be right back with our next guest. This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick and this is theCUBE.